Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud

as Petrarch’s friend and disciple, found a small but appreciative and impressed audience for their stilus rhetoricus. Varying his style according to his audience, Salutati’s missives were at times written in a medieval ars dictaminis, at times even in the vernacular when his political business required him to write to smaller Italian communes, but at other times in a grand oratorical Latin, drawing on classical literature and history. Legitimized by his office as chancellor, Salutati’s letters, whether sent to allies or foes like the Visconti in Milan, also held a powerful place in the public discourse by expressing the juridical persona of the Florentine republic itself. Leonardo Bruni, his successor as chancellor of Florence, continued on the same path but had a greater command over Cicero’s stylistic teachings and found a much larger audience capable of appreciating it. By the end of the quattrocento Ciceronian imitation had become almost a defining initiatory rite for humanists. Most collected and circulated their letters, as Petrarch had done, on the model of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares. The humanists were consumed by attaining new heights in rhetoric and eloquence, and none seemed higher than Cicero.³⁴ Now the dominant form of the burgeoning Respublica literaria, Ciceronianism (as it came to be called) would later become the style of public discourse throughout early modern Europe, but at the same time it also lost its appeal for those humanists wishing to test the boundaries of stylistic canons. These later humanists explored a variety of styles to imitate and emulate, including but not limited to models based on the writings of Sallust, Apuleius, Pliny, and the church fathers, or, returning to one of Petrarch’s old favorites, Seneca.

      Cicero’s Persona: Angelo Poliziano and Paolo Cortesi

      Nowhere is the criticism of Ciceronianism in the late quattrocento more evidently and more powerfully expressed than in the short-lived exchange of letters between Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) and Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510).³⁵ Cortesi, a scriptor at the Holy See, prompted the debate when he sent his collected letters to the poet and sharpest of Florentine philologists, who subsequently returned them with a brief letter. Having conceded that he did appreciate a few of Cortesi’s letters, Poliziano dismissed the rest as a waste of his time, admonishing his junior of nine years: “Still, there is a point regarding style that I disagree with you on. For you generally do not approve of anyone, as I understand it, unless he copies the features of Cicero (liniamenta Ciceronis). To me the face of a bull or a lion seems far more honourable than that of an ape, which nonetheless is more like a man than they are. The men who are believed to have held the pinnacle of eloquence are not similar to one another, as Seneca demonstrated. Quintilian laughs at those who considered themselves brothers of Cicero because they closed a period with the phrase, ‘it would seem so.’ ”³⁶ Poliziano’s critique is directed at the fabrication of an imitative Ciceronian persona. The rhetorical mask of Cicero that Cortesi wears publicly, he tells him, resembles more the face of an ape. “Nothing there is true, nothing solid, nothing effective.”³⁷ Poliziano in turn speaks of himself: “ ‘You do not write like Cicero,’ someone says. So what? I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think.”³⁸ Poliziano’s brusque statement implies that for many of his contemporaries Cicero’s oratorical persona became confused with the person of the author.

      This becomes especially clear when one notices that in this short letter Poliziano twice uses the Ciceronian term liniamentum (used by Cicero for geometric outlines, facial features, and stylistic form) to recall a specific passage from Cicero. In the dialogue Brutus, the character Cicero portrays the various traits of Roman orators for two other interlocutors, the work’s namesake and Atticus. The latter introduces the topic of rhetoric’s ability to mislead and accuses Cicero of irony in comparing the Roman Cato to the Attic Lysias. Cato might have been a great and extraordinary man, Atticus concedes, but not an orator and certainly not of the same caliber as Lysias, “with all his incomparable finish (pictius).”³⁹ Virtue is not the same as eloquence. Atticus is even willing to praise the speeches of the virtuous citizen, senator, and general, but with one fatal qualification, stating that they were good “for their day.” Cato does not stand alone in this respect; the Brutus produces the examples of Galba, Lepidus, Africanus, Laelius, Carbo, and the Gracchi as ancient orators who should be praised as exemplary men who conducted their lives admirably but whose unpolished speeches lacked eloquence.⁴⁰ Surely, Atticus reasons, Cicero does not want to compare these crude Tusculi to the Greek masters, nor does he think that Brutus ought to speak in their manner. Cicero responds that Latin models have changed since his youth: “We should have to turn over many books, especially of Cato as well as of others; you would see that his drawing (liniamentis) was sharp and that it lacked only some brightness and colours which had not yet been discovered.”⁴¹ As in Cicero’s example, in Poliziano’s day Latin had undergone historical changes, also in part due to the influence of Greek studies. Cicero’s point, however, is not that Brutus should imitate the features of one specific group of early orators, let alone one individual among them, but rather that he ought to read many books to learn from different styles. So Poliziano tells Cortesi, “Shift your eyes away from Cicero,” as though Cortesi were looking at Cicero as his only mirror to study his own features.⁴² In short, Poliziano draws on Cicero to critique a Ciceronian, in effect telling him that he does not understand the relationship between an authorial person and the discursive persona of the rhetorician.

      Cortesi, however, is no fool when it comes to Cicero. He immediately picks up on Poliziano’s reference and replies with a letter of his own: “You write that you have understood me to approve of none but those who seem to follow and imitate the features of Cicero (liniamenta Ciceronis).”⁴³ Cortesi denies this. He is not Cicero’s ape, he insists, since he believes himself to have a rightful claim to the Roman’s inheritance: “The son, however, reproduces appearances, walk, posture, motion, form, voices and finally the shape of his father’s body, but still has something of his own in this likeness, something natural, something different. So when compared, they still seem dissimilar from each other.”⁴⁴ Cortesi seeks a family resemblance to Cicero as a son, not as a brother of Cicero, as Poliziano had also mockingly described Ciceronians. Cortesi understands his rhetorical features (liniamenta) not on an equal footing with Cicero’s but as though he were a Roman orator displaying his imagines maiorum during the performance of his public persona. He calls on the notion of decorum to make his case and to criticize Poliziano’s own style—which is often characterized as docta varietas or eclectic—claiming that a discourse can only incorporate another’s stylistic features when it is suitable to do so. Otherwise, “one makes a sort of monstrosity when the adjacent parts of one’s discourse are badly integrated.”⁴⁵ To Poliziano’s forceful “I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think,”⁴⁶ Cortesi retorts: “But when a man wants to look as if he is imitating no one and pursuing praise without similarity to anyone, believe me, he demonstrates no strength or force in his writing, and someone who says that he depends on the support and power of his own talent cannot but pluck sentences from the writings of others and stuff them into his own.”⁴⁷ Cortesi stands his ground on the claim that imitation cannot be avoided in language and rhetoric, nor can it be avoided in any of the arts, nor even in nature.

      Since one cannot flee to a nonimitative or prediscursive authorial person it is best to follow the finest guides. To do otherwise is to imitate not no one but in a sense everyone, taking words, expressions, style, wherever and however without any discriminating taste or elegantia; such a method risks breaking decorum and resulting in poor oratory. It is thus Poliziano, Cortesi argues, who does not understand the relationship between the authorial person and the oratorical persona. If Poliziano claims only to express himself and not to imitate anyone in particular, according to Cortesi’s logic, he denies the imitative nature of the rhetorical personae that he adopts. In effect Cortesi concludes that Poliziano’s position if he were to understand its implications would equate artifice with nature and create a world of masks in which there would be no chance at delineating a prediscursive persona. Poliziano’s brilliantly varied self-expression would be simply another act.

      To be sure, if one spends time reading Poliziano one finds that there is no one quite like him, yet there is nothing stable about him either. Instead, one finds him in constant flux, varying his style, stringing together the most erudite philological or carefully