The Ciceronian

A comic dialogue about a scholar who reads only Cicero, which brought Erasmus angry replies from scholars in France for years.

by Desiderius Erasmus253 passages held

Latin, the original language

Original title: Dialogus cui titulus Ciceronianus
First published: 1528(aged 62)
Original language: Latin

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Overview

Some humanists, Erasmus complained in a letter of October 1527, thought it a worse disgrace to be no Ciceronian than to be no Christian, and liked the sound of Jupiter Best and Greatest better than Jesus Christ, Redeemer of the World. The next year he answered them with a dialogue. Its patient is Nosoponus, whose name means "sick with toil": for seven years he has read nothing but Cicero, abstaining from every other author as strictly as Carthusian monks abstain from meat, and he keeps vast indexes of every word and turn of phrase Cicero used so that he never writes one Cicero did not. Two friends, Bulephorus and Hypologus, gently talk him round: imitating one man's style word for word, they argue, is not eloquence at all. Cicero spoke well because his words fitted his Rome, its senate, its courts and its gods; the Rome of the 1520s has none of these, and a Christian writing about Christian things in borrowed pagan words is being false to his subject, which Cicero himself would never have been. Along the way the speakers review the Latin writers of Europe, ancient and modern, deciding who deserves the name Ciceronian. That review caused the trouble. In passing, Nosoponus ranks Guillaume Budé, the most celebrated French scholar of the day, as a lesser Ciceronian than the printer Josse Bade, and Budé's admirers were enraged. In a second letter, printed with the 1529 edition, Erasmus wrote that he believed those who had been angry about Budé were now sorry for it. In 1531 Julius Caesar Scaliger, an Italian-born physician and scholar living in France, published a speech in defence of Cicero against Erasmus, and in 1535 Étienne Dolet, a French printer and scholar, issued a dialogue of his own in reply.

Key concepts

What is a “Ciceronian” in Erasmus's dialogue?

A Ciceronian is a Latin writer who allows himself only words, forms and turns of phrase that can be found in Cicero. In Erasmus's day some humanists treated this as a creed. The dialogue's patient, Nosoponus, whose name means 'sick with toil', has spent seven years reading nothing else and compiling indexes of Cicero's vocabulary so that he never writes a word Cicero did not use.

What does decorum mean in The Ciceronian?

Decorum is fitness: speech suited to its subject, its time, its audience and its speaker. It is the principle that made Cicero eloquent, and Erasmus turns it against his imitators. A magnificent thing earns no praise if it does not fit, like purple on an ape or Hercules' lion skin on Bacchus, and a Christian sermon dressed in pagan Roman vocabulary fails the same test.

What kind of imitation does The Ciceronian recommend?

Imitation that takes from many good authors, digests what it takes and turns it into something of one's own, rather than copying one author word for word. The aim is to imitate what made Cicero great, saying what the matter and the moment require, not the surface of his sentences. A writer formed this way sounds like himself and still writes well.

Why must a writer's style express his own mind, according to The Ciceronian?

Because speech is meant to show the speaker's mind, and a borrowed style hides it. A writer who assembles sentences from another man's words may be correct, but nobody hears him in them, and he cannot say anything Cicero had no words for. Whoever tries to express Cicero entire, Bulephorus warns, cannot express himself, and his speech becomes a lying mirror, as absurd as painting one's face to pass for someone else.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Copying Cicero, Losing the Point

Can anyone write well by using only the words of the best writer who ever lived? The dialogue's answer is no, and that the attempt is a disease with a comic patient.

Nosoponus has read nothing but Cicero for seven years and keeps indexes of every word and turn of phrase Cicero used. His friends Bulephorus and Hypologus cure him with Cicero's own principle: a speech must fit its subject, time and audience. Cicero's Rome of senate, augurs and consuls is gone, so a Christian who calls God the Father 'Jupiter Best and Greatest' and the Virgin 'Diana' is being false to his matter. A splendid robe on an ape earns no praise. True imitation digests many models and speaks with one's own mind.

rhetoric
imitation
eloquence
style
decorum
christian humanism
authenticity
individuality
literary imitation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 253
distinct concepts: 282
by passages held, corpus-wide: #295

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “imitation” and “rhetoric”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 78 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
imitation	rhetoric	60
education	rhetoric	28
rhetoric	style	26
eloquence	rhetoric	21
imitation	literary style	20
literary imitation	rhetoric	19
imitation	style	18
literary style	rhetoric	17
classical imitation	rhetoric	15
education	imitation	15
classical imitation	eloquence	9
education	eloquence	9
eloquence	literary imitation	9
eloquence	imitation	8
classical imitation	literary style	7
education	literary imitation	6
classical imitation	style	3
education	literary style	3
education	style	3
eloquence	literary style	3
eloquence	style	3
literary imitation	style	3
classical imitation	education	2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1500 Adages (Adagia)
The work that first made Erasmus famous and the one he revised for longest, from 1500 until the year he died; Erasmus Against War began as one of its entries.
LA
1503 The Manual of the Christian Knight (Enchiridion militis Christiani)
The earnest twin of In Praise of Folly: when critics attacked the satire, Erasmus answered that it treats the same subject as this manual, only in a playful spirit.
EN
1504 Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria (Panegyricus ad Philippum Austriae ducem)
Erasmus's advice to a ruler, delivered as a speech of welcome; The Complaint of Peace and the essay on war later make its case for peace without the obligatory flattery.
LA
1511 In Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium)
A mock oration in Folly's own voice and Erasmus's most famous book; The Tongue of 1525 has been read as an attempt at a companion piece.
LAEN
1511 On the Method of Study (De ratione studii)
Part of the same English years' work as De copia, with which it was later printed; Erasmus's later The Education of Children moves the same programme back to infancy.
LA
1515 Erasmus Against War (Dulce bellum inexpertis)
The fullest essay on war in the Adages and the core of Erasmus's writings for peace; The Complaint of Peace restates its case two years later in Peace's own voice.
EN
1516 The Education of a Christian Prince (Institutio principis christiani)
Erasmus's one full treatise on government, in the old genre of advice books for rulers; The Complaint of Peace followed a year later.
LA
1517 The Complaint of Peace (Querela pacis)
A declamation in the voice of Peace, the device of In Praise of Folly turned to a serious purpose, and the most direct of Erasmus's several writings against war.
LAEN
1518 Familiar Colloquies (Colloquia familiaria)
The book that carried Erasmus's views on fasting, pilgrimage and monks to far more readers than his devotional treatises ever reached.
LAEN
1518 In Praise of Marriage (De laude matrimonii)
A schoolroom piece that turned into a controversy: the first of three works on marriage, followed by The Institution of Christian Matrimony in 1526 and On the Christian Widow in 1529.
LA
1520 The Antibarbarians (Antibarbari)
The first statement of the cause Erasmus served all his life, classical learning as the ally of Christian faith, written before any of the books that made his name.
LA
1521 On Disdaining the World (De contemptu mundi)
The counterweight to everything Erasmus later wrote about monks, from The Manual of the Christian Knight to the Familiar Colloquies, and probably the earliest of his surviving prose works.
LA
1524 On Praying to God (Modus orandi Deum)
Pastoral rather than polemical, though written in the same year as On Free Will, his challenge to Luther; the first of the late handbooks on Christian practice that end with An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed.
LA
1525 The Tongue (Lingua)
Erasmus's fullest treatment of a theme that runs through all his writing, speech as the mirror of the soul, written in Basel in the middle of the polemics of the 1520s.
LA
1526 The Institution of Christian Matrimony (Christiani matrimonii institutio)
Commissioned through the English court and dedicated to its queen, it is Erasmus's main statement on the law and practice of marriage, where In Praise of Marriage had been a single persuasive letter.
LA
1528 The Ciceronian (Dialogus cui titulus Ciceronianus) you are here LA
1529 On the Christian Widow (Vidua christiana)
The last of Erasmus's writings on women's lives, after In Praise of Marriage and The Institution of Christian Matrimony, and like the second of those dedicated to a queen.
LA
1529 The Education of Children (De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis)
Dedicated to a prince's heir, like The Education of a Christian Prince, but concerned with every child's first years rather than with government; the most personal of Erasmus's books on schooling.
LAEN
1533 An Explanation of the Apostles' Creed (Explanatio symboli)
Erasmus's catechism, written for lay readers rather than theologians three years before his death.
LA

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