Jacques Barzun: Teacher in America. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1945.

 

“We have latterly had too much educational discussion,” Barzun remarks, and it must be said that the situation has not improved. (He says the same thing about political theory and, given the level of political theory in the first half of the twentieth century, who can blame him?) “A lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life” and “synonymous with civilization,” education may come “because of the teaching [a person] has had, sometimes in spite of it,” as Henry Adams shows in own somewhat wayward way. Parents and teachers (much less school administrators) don’t educate; they teach, and usually the administrators don’t even do that. The grand ambitions of self-styled ‘educators’ therefore have “practical limits.” You can’t become a civilized person just by learning stuff, even true stuff. Citizen virtues and other features of the cultivated soul “occur as by-products” of teaching. They are “connected with good teaching,” to be sure, but not the same as it.

Teaching consists of the art of showing a pupil how to do things for himself. A pupil has his own moral and intellectual structure, which must be attended to. Souls can be induced to learn so long teachers relate the facts they convey to principles and persons—Washington, D.C. to George Washington. “All valuable learning hangs together and works by associations which make sense.” At the same time, this intellectual side of the thing requires moral supplement, habituation. “There are only two such habits”: thinking and attention. Both can be fostered by example, whether the teacher lectures, leads a discussion, or tutors; “the effective agent is the living person,” teacher and pupil alike. In this, the live person has an advantage over a book, although Barzun does not of course scant books, recommending that they be read by oneself, away from those sections of libraries that buzz with whispers. (“Reading, true reading, is the solitary vice par excellence.”) And avoid the sort of books given to pupils in teachers’ colleges, written in the “ghoulish Desperanto” of people who miscall themselves educators. It may be worth noting that John Dewey, master of clunky Germanish English, was Barzun’s older contemporary at Columbia. Columbia Teachers’ College, at that.

As to reading itself, “the child who is a born reader will of course go through phases of continuous reading, which has a way of getting on the nerves of family and friends.” Reading is nonetheless good, rereading even better, as it fosters thought. Teachers can help by concentrating their pupils’ attention on select passages from the books assigned—the “French explication de texte.” This will enable, if not guarantee, that the pupil becomes a student, “gaining an idea of what can be done by applying one’s mind and using others’ ideas,” by “begin[ning] to discover the need for interpreting, the ways of testing a preference for one interpretation over another, and the desirability of checking doctrinaire inclinations in an uncertain world.” And he will learn, not so much from the teacher as from the writers they study together, that “in the realm of mind as represented by great men, there is no such thing as separate, isolated ‘subjects,'” that Shakespeare knows a thing or two about medicine, psychology, history, and can integrate what he knows into a comprehensive understanding of the whole. Only such integration can come to ‘make sense’ to a person. And so the one who attempts to teach algebra shouldn’t neglect to say what algebra is for, “what exponents mean apart from their handling.” Indeed, “being part of the logical sciences, it should be taught in conjunction with informal elementary logic,” as that can engage the students in “the fascination of the mind’s ability to test its own inward workings.” There is a moral dimension to such a fascination, as “the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.” 

Moving through the academic ‘disciplines’ from reading and mathematics to the sciences, Barzun recalls that at the turn of his century science replaced Latin and Greek in the curricula of American schools. This happened because classicists attempted to imitate science, reducing “their field to a wasteland of verbal criticism, grammar, and philology” and neglecting the substance of the Latin and Greek writers, the wisdom they offer, which modern science cannot match. “Naturally the classics were exterminated, for science could beat them at their own game,” which had exchanged theoretical and practical wisdom for ‘pragmatism.’ Young man, do you want to be practical? Very well, chemistry can offer you a better-paying job than any of the schools still offering Latin classes. “That is what invariably comes of trying to put belles-lettres into utilitarian envelopes.” Better to treat the sciences “as humanities.” Making them fields for specialists alone “made possible the present folly in Germany” (that would be Nazism) by splitting its people into “three groups: the technicians, the citizens, and the irresponsible rabble,” a regime in which “the rabble together with the technicians can cow the citizenry.” “Such principles will hardly give long life and happiness to a democracy,” the regime that must “have more citizens than anything else.” Without that preponderance, citizens “will find not only that representative government has slipped out of their fingers, but that have also lost their commanding position,” enslaved to their new masters.

“All this clearly depends on teaching our easygoing, rather credulous college boys and girls what science is. If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they thin scientists are the only honest, patient and careful workers in the world”; that “theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible”; and that, accordingly, “science steadily and automatically makes for a better world”; then “they have wasted their time in the science lecture rule” and have become “a menace,” believing either that their mastery of science bestows authority upon them or that their failure to master science disqualifies them from positions of authority altogether. To avoid this, Barzun recommends not a ‘survey course’ in science but an “intelligent introduction” to “the principles of physical science,” demarcating science’s powers and limitations.

What’s now called science was once a part of philosophy. But by the 1880s in America, scientists had convinced many academic philosophers that science could bring certain answers to their ponderings—rather in in the manner that Paul the Apostle ridiculed the philosophers (or perhaps sophists) of his own time that Christianity showed the straight way that obviated the zetetic practice of always searching, never finding. Against this, Barzun urges that “the classics, philosophy, and science are at once overlapping and complementary disciplines,” and their history ought not to be neglected. He knows that ‘history’ means not the course of events but a narrative of a course of events, that “history as such does not exist,” as it’s “always the history—the story—of something,” an “account of man in society.” Its intrinsic interest lies in being about ourselves, “men being by definition interested in themselves.” Action, thought, chance: history consists of an account of these; good history should not however “be treated as a moral tale until the student knows a fair quantity of facts,” ballast against the errant sailing that comes from airy moralizing. The art of teaching history “consists in making the student see” that the actions and thoughts of men, and in particular their motives for acting, “resemble his own, at the same time as they are subtly modified by conditions and ideas and hopes now beyond recall.” Absence of teaching means that an American who knows what the Monroe Doctrine is, very much including its original purpose, will better understand, and perhaps better respond to, today’s Latin American who objects to it. The student who possesses this “historical sense” will understand “his neighbors, his government, and the limitations of mankind much better,” less inclined to “being taken in…by panicky fears [or] by second-rate Utopias.” The historical sense, so understood, becomes “a moderator which insists on knowing conditions before passing judgments”; in this, “the historical sense is above all political-minded,” tending “to make men tolerant, without on that account weakening their determination to follow the right,” inasmuch as “they know too well the odds against it.”

As to the fine arts, Barzun cautions against “trying to approach the professional standard of performance,” which makes it “necessary to concentrate on doing at the expense of thinking,” to musically illiterate specialists. “A knowledge of the history of art is ultimately necessary for the best kind of enjoyment and performance—even and especially by the master.” “The very reason why art is worth teaching at all is that it gives men the best sense of how rich, how diverse, how miraculous are the expressions of the human spirit through the ages”—the theme of André Malraux’s writing at that time, as well. In this, again, “the college does not pretend to ‘educate,'” as “it can only furnish the means of later self-education” by having students see pictures and sculptures, listen to music, and by giving them a sense of the history of what they are looking at and hearing. “The aim is not to make picture dealers or musical stenographers, but to teach to future ‘educated’ citizens two new and special languages—visual and auditory,” thereby “mak[ing] sensations more accurate and inward reflection richer by associations with these concrete experiences.” This “break[s] down self-will for the sake of finding out what life and its objects may really be like,” as “most esthetic matters turn out to be moral ones in the end”—great art offering “a choice” of “preferring strength to weakness, truth to softness, life to lotus-eating.” Barzun’s identification of fine arts with languages points to the benefit of learning foreign languages, which “lets you into the workings of other human minds, like and unlike your own,” introducing you to “real things [that] are untranslatable: gemütlich, raison d’être, dolce far niente, high life, and so on.” 

Having addressed each of the subject areas of teaching, drawing out the relations among them, Barzun returns to a consideration of the great books whose authors show that they have done that better than he can claim to do. “A great book is in effect a view of the universe, complete for the time being. You must get inside it to look out upon the old familiar world with the author’s unfamiliar eyes.” For his part, a teacher must remember that his pupils are reading the book “for the first time,” that “the discussion of any classic” in the classroom “must be superficial” for that reason. “Fortunately there are connections between one great book and another, which enable us to capitalize on our reading experience,” enabling readers to learn not only from each book itself but from what one book says about the others. Interest in reading the great books revived in the 1920s, in the wake of the scientistic takeover of higher education, with the publication of John Erskine’s The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent. St. Johns College and the University of Chicago then attempted to ‘institutionalize’ such study with their great-books curricula. Barzun demurs. “St. Johns tries to do in college what the educated man should be expected to do for himself ten or fifteen years after his graduation.” And institutionalization inclines to methodization, which will not do when inquiring into works that resist methodical treatment. Rather, “a teacher who wants to read a series of books with his students will be well advised to show a kind of willing discipleship shifting ground from book to book. He must be a Christian moralist with Dante a skeptic with Lucretius, and a pantheist with Goethe” since, “if he wants the reader to lend their minds, he must himself be able to do it.” Above all, “Don’t talk to me about the Greeks: read them!”

How, then, shall teaching, if not education, be institutionalized? Barzun is rather partial to the approach taken by his own institution, Columbia College. During the First World War, Columbia teachers and administrators understood the conflict to involve a challenge not only to the American regime but to Western civilization. They introduced a compulsory course for freshmen titled “An Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West,” eventually extended to two years, then supplemented by courses in the Humanities and the Sciences. With those (again, necessarily superficial) courses completed, the Columbia student “not only fills his head with fair pictures of reality, but…begins to think with tolerable good sense about what he himself wishes to do, both in his next two college years and later on.” To accomplish this, the College needs “a good staff, willing to work like dogs with small discussion groups,” teachers supported by administrators who can “make the three required courses fit into the time available.” Ultimately, “either the basic, required collegiate preparation will be seriously breached, or the basic required vocational preparation will have to yield.” Barzun is inclined to insist on the collegiate preparation, as it gives students the chance to become whole men and real citizens.

What about those administrators? “Nothing so strikes the foreign observer with surprise as the size and power of American collegiate administration”—and bear in mind that Barzun writes this in 1945, innocent of subsequent elaborations, many imposed by the overarching administrative states, federal and ‘state,’ which regulate and subsidize colleges and universities at the price of requiring teaching institutions to imitate the institutions of modern statism. Even then, administrators had organized themselves into a “planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun.”  Despite occasional eclipses within such systems, “usually more sympathy obtains among fellow administrators than between them and the teaching personnel,” and “if it came to a pitched battle, I feel sure that the ore compact executive troops, animated by a single purpose, besides being better fed and self-disciplined, could rout the more numerous but disorderly rabble that teaches.” Disorderly, because faculty meetings prove stages of contention; “it would take a philosopher-king to rule over such a roost.” Therefore, the best practicable regime is the one “laid out so as to guarantee a reasonable freedom” to teach, research, write. When lost, “the battle for academic freedom” takes on “the grimness of an execution by the secret police,” as “a teacher is dropped, silently, callously, with the clear intent of an unfrocking and of an attainder against his dependents” against which “there is no redress, for it occurs usually too low in the world of educational institutions, it concerns too small a post, and it can command no publicity.”

Barzun suggests a remedy. Faculty members and administrators should ask themselves three questions about the accused: “Has the teacher the right to express his opinion on the mooted subject in the classroom” Has he the right to express it outside? And finally, “has he the right to use class time to convert students to his opinion?” The answer to the last question should be a firm ‘no,’ as students, “who are perhaps compelled to listen to him, have every right to complain if they are preached at instead of instructed.” With respect to the first question, the teacher has the right to express his opinion on topics within his sphere of authority, “no matter who disapproves and for what reason.” Admittedly, “the cost of this freedom may be a good deal of crackpot error, but nothing good goes unpaid for: this is the price.” As to topics beyond his sphere, the teacher properly enjoys “not academic freedom, but academic responsibility,” observing “the same tact that he would in good society.” Similarly, his students “have no right to publish what is said in class, or they kill its informality.” As to opinions expressed outside the university, he has a citizen’s freedom to speak freely, so long as he “make[s] it clear to his hearers or readers when he is speaking as a citizen and when as a University expert on some special branch.” If his reader would think about these matters further, Barzun recommends “the classic and definitive” statements on academic freedom made by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell during the First World War, in defense of the socialist Harold Laski. [1] And finally, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: “The important thing is to be sure you are hiring a teacher and not a wolf wrapped in a sheepskin.” Once hired, a teacher’s popularity or lack of same should have no bearing on his treatment. “Let those who dislike him drop his course.”

As to the institutional qualifications of faculty members, Barzun deems the doctoral degree to have become an “initiation into the most expensive and least luxurious club in the world.” It “shows nothing about teaching ability” and, “as a ritual, it is one of those unlucky importations from Europe—largely due to the influence of Daniel Coit Gilman of Johns Hopkins,” the first American university modeled on German academic institutions. Barzun concedes that the Ph.D in science makes some sense, “represent[ing] good sound experimental work.” Doctorates in education, on the other hand, “cover such a wide range of indefinite subject matter that they have been repeatedly and deservedly ridiculed.” Their bearers have learned teaching “methods”; “by racking his wits and the dictionary, an educator,” as he is called, “can devise methods for subjects he does not know and for subjects that have no matter in them,” producing textbooks “almost as large and medical and law books” which “seldom do more than pad out statistical matters of fact ” in “the educators” lingo” Barzun had scored earlier. More generally, he deplores the conflict between teaching and scholarship seen when candidates for advanced degrees are required to research and write while meeting students. “Writing a first book and learning to teach are almost always incompatible occupations; and attempting both under a superior’s eye adds to the strain.” “The octopus has him in its grip and does not let him go.” 

By 1945, American schools had begun the now-familiar practice of standardized testing for ‘aptitudes.’ But if “every college should…be dedicated to Intellect”—that is, to “Mind, free and restless in its desire to experience, comprehend, and use reality,” such tests “should go.” “Unless we recognize Intelligence as the general quality I tried to define, we shall all bow down in a morass of ill-defined virtues, aptitudes, and accomplishments,” inasmuch as “the only yardstick fit to measure an Intelligence with is another Intelligence.” Is this objective, scientific? Well, no. “Objectivity applies, as its name suggests, to objects,” and “science cannot help us classify the things we care about when we enter the realm of mind.” Intelligence belongs to persons, not objects. (And, one now must add, objects that are artifacts; there is no such thing as artificial intelligence, although there is intelligent artfulness).

Teaching is by and for persons. A teacher with any sense of this reality at all will know that “students are in college solely to pass courses, and that they are moved exclusively by zest for learning.” This reality has implications for conduct. “Friendship between an instructor and a student is impossible” because “friendship has strict prerequisites, among them, freedom of choice and equality of status,” neither of which “can exist in thee teacher-student relation.” That goes especially for teacher-student romances, as it’s “bad for love-making to combine it with a desire to improve and be improved.”

Nor should colleges worry too much about what students want. It will always be something. “The customer is always right, perhaps, but not so the student,” and with students “reproof and encouragement must be administered together.” Don’t pay too much attention to student demands for special treatment. “The blind boys tend to think their achievement so remarkable that they should earn Phi Beta Kappa with B’s when others need A’s.” Their achievement is remarkable, but it is not a Phi Beta Kappa-worthy achievement. These are two separate kinds of achievement. In dealing with students, “partiality and pity are fatal.” If you bend the rules for a student laboring under difficult circumstances, bend them only with regard to “practical details—an extension of time, a special examination, extra hours of tutoring missed—anything of this kind and nothing that damages the prize worked for.” Moreover, “the meaning of this hard leniency must be pointed out as a lesson in itself.” 

When he turns to women in college, Barzun misses something, namely, the parenting he’d initially mentioned. With women, he laments, five years after graduation, “where has all the philosophy and English literature and mathematics gone to?” In the 1940s, to be sure, most of it went into the nursery, where it lent no expertise in the tasks of comforting infants and changing their diapers. College-educated women “are probably handicapped by four years of leisure and learning for the battle of life over crib and stove.” This would be true if crib and stove were the only tasks mothers undertake. But if, as Barzun has stipulated, parents are the first teachers of children, do they not also engage them in conversation? Even absent the careers essayed by women inspired two decades later by Second Wave Feminism, surely a devoted ‘stay-at-home’ mother has always had more to do than shop for food, clean the house, prepare meals, and wash dishes. Contra Barzun, “their imagination about the distant or the abstract” need not be “completely atrophied.” And even he relents, maintaining that qualified women should be in college but need a somewhat different type of pedagogy than the men. Most women are less prone to abstract thinking (for better or for worse), “less interested than boys in theory, in ideas, in the logic of things and events.” College teachers should go against that grain, indirectly. “If the teacher takes pains to show repeatedly that concrete harm, good, suffering, pleasure or profit follows from some belief or truth in question, a beginning can be made of substituting reason for memory.” With women, “every event or proposition must be related to human motives, lest it be automatically discounted as one of those wild things that men do or say and that count for nothing.” The reward goes beyond the parenting that Barzun scants. “The highest form of sociability is the conversation of educated men and women.”

“The right to education must remain on an equal footing with every other right, namely, the footing of being available insofar as the claimant shows the power to deserve it.” Barzun insists that this in no way contradicts democracy, as “the existence of superior brains does not touch in the slightest the theoretical bases of democratic government,” as “the true notion of equality is not identity but equivalence of treatment”—equal things to equals, as Aristotle puts it. In any classroom there will be some students better at the work than others, and this can be made good if “the more gifted learn to appreciate other men’s difficulties” and the less gifted “to gauge other men’s powers.” “No tampering with either [the college’s] ingredients or its standards of quality” should be countenanced.

So, yes, do require students to read great books, not only to listen to the teacher’s summaries and comments. “For a man to find his way through to the real Nietzsche or Darwin is a laborious task. He must forget what he ‘knows'”—that is, what he’s heard about the author—and “read Nietzsche himself, not one book merely but perhaps as many as three, lending his mind to each, while comparing and assimilating.”

That is the real business of the college, but since the business of America is business money will be needed to support it, and money talks. It seldom speaks intelligently, preferring to subsidize athletic scholarships, projects designed to ameliorate social and medical ills, and grand buildings instead of college business. As things then stood, the ratio of donations was “two to one in favor of serving animal needs—and the distribution of cash makes it more like one hundred and fifty to one.” Scholarships should go to students who show evidence of “talent, achievement, and promise,” not poverty or alumni connections. Barzun offers a compromise: “If the alumni must have invincible teams, let them continue to send promising athletes to their alma mater, but since this often requires stead ‘co-operation’ on the part of the admitting authorities as well as the teaching staff, let the alumni clubs be told that every second recipient of their support be a genuine student.”

This is to acknowledge what politic philosophers have understood for millennia, that “the teacher and thinker must constantly bear in mind special conditions that define his craft,” as Barzun delicately puts it. “He has on his side only mankind’s desire for light—the light that gives all other things their shape; and this, though a strong motive, is easily obscured by more immediate demands. The teacher must consequently sustain it most steadfastly in the very persons who neglect or forget it easily.” The example of Socrates, and of thinkers and teachers in the contemporary regimes of fascism and communism, have made that point more starkly, but as a teacher in America Barzun can concentrate on the need for decent salaries. “If the Field Marshall is not ashamed to admit that money is the sinews of war, the teacher should feel no qualms in proclaiming that alma mater means first of all the nourishing mother.” That is a form of motherhood Barzun does indeed esteem.

This brings Barzun to his final topics, family and polity. In a display of his excellent judgment, he begins with the chapter on marriage in Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s The Intellectual Life. As Hamerton sees, “the world is not organized for the life of the mind” but for “business and domesticity.” In marriage, “people who are not systematically broken in to living with a professional thinker cannot overcome their ingrained disbelief in the reasonableness of so irregular an existence.” Most “brain workers” do not “know how to protect their vigils,” how to ignore telephone calls and ringing doorbells in order to preserve “the will-o’-the-wisp of mental effort,” a thought which, “if postponed may be lost forever.” Hamerton’s recommendation, marrying a nice peasant girl, was already a fading prospect in the 1880s when he wrote his book, “the afterglow of a golden age.” “There are no peasant girls,” anymore; “the man of thought must face the educated woman of the twentieth century—if he finds one to his taste—and work out his intellectual salvation with her or against her.” That “thinking is inwardly a haphazard, fitful, incoherent activity” is “perhaps the least suspected fact of the intellectual life,” and its vulnerability to persecution intended or unintended has proven itself a perennial dilemma.

Moving from the household to the city, Barzun discommends any overall ‘ideological’ or religious orientation of intellectual life. The old universities of the West organized themselves around Christianity, an organizing principle Barzun deems to be unavailable in practice today. He firmly refuses its contemporary substitutes, fascism and communism, whose advocates imagine that they “know what learning is for.” He is reduced to hoping that “our intellectual life” will somehow muddle itself together under the auspices of “the great architect,” “History.” Reading him decades later, we can doubt even that wan hope.

Recurring to Barzun’s esteem for A. Lawrence Lowell and his defense of Laski’s presence on the Columbia campus, there is a danger that neither Barzun nor Lowell distinctly foresaw. The Marxist claim to have in its possession the first and only scientific socialism, a science not only of physical nature but of human life tout court, will claim for its devotees a title to rule the university, along with all other social institutions. It is one thing to extend tolerance to a Marxist lecturer, quite another to offer him tenure in a liberal arts institution, with full voting rights respecting educational policies. Such a teacher will not only seek to indoctrinate his students but will incline to either rule or ruin, neither of which will enhance the liberality of the liberal arts. In the years since Barzun wrote and Lowell ruled, progressives and their fellow-travelers have proven susceptible to ignoring that.

 

Note

1. A. Lawrence Lowell: At War with Academic Tradition in America (1934) and What a University President Has Learned (1938). Lowell was a political scientist and a leading Progressive, in these respects similar to his contemporary, Princeton College president Woodrow Wilson. Laski became a Marxist in the 1930s, guest lecturing at Columbia under the auspices of the Institute for Social Research, drawing criticism for his suggestion that the establishment of socialism might require violent revolution.

 

Joseph Addison: Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, eds. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004.

 

Legend has it that General George Washington had Addison’s Cato performed for his soldiers at Valley Forge. This should be true, whether it is or not. Addison’s portrayal of Cato depicts the soul of a great Stoic with all its austere nobility but also its limitations and the errors that follow from them. Cato’s gravest error is his suicide when his cause seems hopeless. By presenting the play to his men at the nadir of America’s hopes in the War for Independence, Washington was telling them, ‘I shall not desert you.’ And, by implication, ‘Do not desert me, or your country.’ The play’s epigraph, from Seneca’s On Divine Providence, suggests as much: “A brave man, standing erect amid the ruins of the res publica.” British troops under the command George III and his generals seemed likely to ruin the American republics, to bring the rebellious ‘Whigs’ to heel. Souls steeled for Stoic self-rule informed by a sense of divine providence, which seldom announces its moves in advance, can yet emerge victorious from trials of fire.

Addison wrote the Cato in 1712, and it enjoyed immediate success on the London stage. In Britain’s North American colonies, it had been performed frequently since 1730s and it would remain popular for another generation after the Revolution. Addison was a Whig, a partisan of the Hanoverian succession seen in the person of Queen Anne and her great general, the Duke of Marlborough, whom the Whigs compared to Cato. The Tories, loyal to the Hanoverian line of English monarchs, regarded Marlborough as a usurping Julius Caesar. By asking the great Tory poet, Alexander Pope, to write the Prologue, Addison made an overture across the parties, asking both sides in Britain’s factitious politics to consider human greatness in a Christian light.

Cato is Cato the Younger, grandson of the eminent Cato the Elder—both courageous opponents of tyranny and defenders of the Roman republic. The younger Cato had allied with Pompey against Julius Caesar. The republican forces lost the Battle of Pharsalus and fled to north Africa, where Pompey was assassinated. Cato now heads the Roman forces, along with the remnant of the Senate. Now exiled in Utica, he has formed an alliance with King Juba I of Numidia. Pope, too, admires Cato, finding in him a fit hero for the tragic stage, which from the first has been intended “To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, / To raise the genius and to mend the heart, / To make mankind in conscious virtue bold, / Live oe’er each scene and be what they behold.” Not only in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans but “through every age,” even “tyrants no more their savage nature kept, / And foes to virtue wonder’d how they wept” at such dramas. Neither weak and pitying love nor “wild ambition” finds favor in the tragedies: “Here tears shall flow from a more gen’rous cause, / Such tears as patriots shed for dying laws,” as “ancient ardor” rises in modern, British hearts. “What Plato thought” “godlike Cato was,” namely “a brave man struggling in the storms of fate, / And greatly falling with a falling state!”  but finally honored more than triumphant Caesar. 

Pope would never overlook the literary dimension of the struggle, concluding with an evocation not only of Cato the Younger but of his grandfather. “Britons, attend”: “With honest scorn the first fam’d Cato view’d / Rome learning arts from Greece, whom she subdu’ed; / Our scene precariously subsists too long / On French translation and Italian song.” Have we not defeated the French and their absolute monarch, Louis XIV? Instead, “Dare to have sense yourselves; assert the stage, / Be justly warm’d with your own native rage. / Such plays alone should please a British ear, / As Cato’s self had not disdain’d to hear.” Not Racine or Petrarch so much as Shakespeare and Marlowe. And surely Mr. Addison’s Roman Cato, seen through English eyes for English men.

At the Governor’s Palace at Utica, Cato’s sons, Portius and Marcus, deplore Caesar’s military triumphs. “Ye Gods, what havoc does ambition make / Among your works!” Portius exclaims (I.11-12). Yet Marcus finds him too calm, too ‘Stoic’: “Thy steady temper, Portius, / Can look on guilt, rebellion, fraud, and Caesar, / In the calm lights of mild philosophy,” but “I’m tortured” by the image of “Th’insulting tyrant prancing o’er the field” at Pharsalia, “his horse’s hoofs wet with patrician blood,” the blood of Roman senators hurled from their positions of rightful authority (I.12-19). To Marcus’ hope that Heaven will punish the insolent victor, Portius points instead to their father—a man “greatly unfortunate” but still fighting for “the cause / Of honor, virtue, liberty, and Rome” with a sword unstained with any but the blood of the guilty, of tyrannical usurpers (I.30-31). The thumotic brother relies on the gods; the philosophic brother relies on a man who embodies the best of Rome and of human nature understood as ethical and political nature.

Marcus is having none of it. “What can Cato do / Against a world, a base, degenerate world / That courts the yoke and bows the neck to Caesar?” (I.i.36-38). Trapped at Utica, guarded by Numidians, his own army feeble and the Senate ruined, he presents “a poor epitome of Roman greatness”—so much so that my soul is distracted, tempted “to renounce his precepts” (I.i.40-45). Portius adjures him to “remember what our father oft has told us,” that “the ways of heav’n are dark and intricate” and “our understanding traces ’em in vain” (I.i.46-49). Marcus admits that more than their father’s circumstance torments him. He is in love with Lucia, the daughter of one of the exiled Roman senators, but his passion is “unpity’d” by her, his love “successless” (I.i.56). He does not know that Portius shares his passion for the girl but, knowing his temper, dares not reveal himself as a rival, contenting himself with advising his brother to “call up all thy father in thy soul: / to quell the tyrant love”—the soul’s equivalent to political injustice—and “guard thy heart / On this weak side, where most our nature fails” ((I.74-77). [1] Such Stoic self-rule is not for the impassioned soul of Marcus, who determines instead to throw himself into the quest for honor in war, “to rush on certain death” (I.i.81); “Love is not to be reason’d down, or lost / In high ambition and a thirst of greatness” (I.i.84). Not thought but action can redirect his thumoerotic nature from despair. 

Prince Juba appears, and Portius reflects on “how much he forms himself to glory / And breaks the fierceness of his native temper / To copy my father’s bright example” (I.i.79-82). He too is an exile, his father having been killed by Caesar at the Battle of Thepsur. The prince, in contrast to the Roman usurper, exhibits a virtue that is Roman but not merely Roman, a virtue unconfined to any particular nation, the virtue of human nature itself. And he stands as an example for brother Marcus in another way: He loves Cato’s daughter, Marcia, but, “no sport of passions,” his “sense of honor and desire for fame” bridle his love for the sake of the nobler aim of political liberty (I.i.86). 

Juba too has a rival in love, the Roman senator Sempronius, a traitor in their midst. Before Portius heads for the meeting of the Senate-in-exile, he promises to “animate the soldiers’ drooping courage, / With love of freedom and contempt of life,” telling Sempronius that although we cannot “command success,” “we’ll do more, we’ll deserve it.” Sempronius fumes, “Curse on the stripling! how he apes his sire! / Ambitiously sententious!” (I.ii.40-47). Sempronius plans to betray Cato and seize his daughter after Caesar rewards him for handing Cato over.

There is a traitor among the Numidians, too: Syphax, who is preparing a revolt among his people—who, he claims, “Complain aloud of Cato’s discipline” (I.iii.4). Sempronius wishes that he could turn Juba against Cato, as well, at which urging Syphax laments that the young man is “lost,” his thoughts “full of Cato’s virtues” (I.iii.22). “Of faith, of honor, and I know not what, / That have corrupted his Numidian temper, / And struck th’ infection into all his soul” (I.iii.25-27). Nonetheless, Syphax promises to make another attempt. As for Sempronius, he heads for the Senate as well, scheming to “conceal my thoughts in passion” by “bellow[ing] out for Rome and my country” even as he schemes to ruin the men he will address.

True to his word, Syphax tries Juba again, appealing to his national pride, his Numidian patriotism, which might be turned to rebellion against Roman rule. Juba will have none of it. He esteems the “Roman soul,” which aims to civilize the world, “lay it under the restraint of laws,” and “make man mild and sociable to man” by means of “wisdom, discipline, and lib’ral arts” (I.iv.30-35). Only “virtues like these” will “make human nature shine, reform the soul, / And break our fierce barbarians into men” (I.iv.37-38). No, Juba, Syphax counters, “this Roman polish” only “render[s] man…tractable and time,” covering over natural passion, “set[ting] our looks at variance with our thoughts” and thereby “chang[ing] us into other creatures / Than the Gods design’d us” (I.iv.41-43, 46-47). Any Numidian better practices Cato’s “boasted virtues” (I.iv.62). Juba has his answer ready: the Numidian hunter’s virtues do not grow from choice, as Cato’s do, from “steadiness of mind,” not ignorance and necessity (I.iv.77). This is why Cato can endure suffering without resentment and even “thank the Gods that throw the weight upon him” (I.iv.80). The foundation of Roman civility is the rule of reason, innate to human beings as such, the right criterion for judging national customs and laws.

Syphax insists that Cato’s “rank pride” and “haughtiness of soul” mesmerized Juba’s father, leading him to an inglorious death at the hands of a slave (I.iv.81-85). You should “abandon Cato” (I.iv.89). You don’t really esteem him at all, nor do you honor your father; you merely wish to marry his daughter. You are not man of honor, only a boy in love. Yes, I do love her, the young man admits, but for honorable reasons and indeed for her honorableness: “The virtuous Marcia towers above her sex” in her “inward greatness,” her “unaffected wisdom,” and her “sanctity of manners” (I.iv.150-151). That is, he loves her for her natural virtues, as these have been cultivated by her family and her country.

We soon see Marcia and Lucia for ourselves. Of her two suitors, Lucia prefers Portius, the philosophic brother, to Marcus. As for Marcia, she of course prefers Juba to Semponius, but she remains very much Cato’s worthy daughter, telling her beloved Juba to go off to the war in support of her father and advising Lucia to wait until after the war to confer her love on Portius, lest she spread disarray in Cato’s household by openly favoring one brother over the other. “Let us not, Lucia, aggravate our sorrows, / But to the Gods permit th’ event of things,” as “the pure limpid stream, when foul with stains / Of rushing torrents and descending rains, / Works itself clear, and as it runs, refines” (I.vi.78-79, 82-84). 

Act II begins with Cato before the Utican Senate, warning of Caesar’s advancing army. Sempronius makes his calculatedly fiery speech, only to have Cato reprove him. “Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal / Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason,” as “true fortitude is seen in great exploits, / That justice warrants, and that wisdom guides; / All else is tow’ring frenzy and distraction” (II.i.43-47). Lucius then makes a pacific speech, claiming that the gods oppose us, that Caesar is only their chosen scourge, than no more Roman blood should be shed. Cato positions himself as the virtuous mean between the extremes of Sempronius’ apparent “immodest valor” and Lucius’ “fear” (II.81-82). His moderation should not be mistaken for mediocrity, however. “A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty / Is worth a whole eternity in bondage” (II.i.100)—a judgment said to have inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.” And in answer to a peace overture from Caesar himself, Cato replies to his ambassador, “My life is grafted on the fate of Rome”; if Caesar would save Cato, “bid him spare his country” (II.ii.8-9). As for himself, I “disdain a life” that “your dictator” “has pow’r to offer” me (II.ii.8-10). Asked what terms he will accept, Cato accordingly replies, “Bid him disband his legions, / Restore the commonwealth to liberty, / submit his actions to the public censure, / And stand the judgment of a Roman senate. Bid him do this, and Cato is his friend.” (II.ii.29-33). But for now, I am no friend of Caesar but “a friend to virtue”—the truly Roman characteristic that Romans share with human nature itself, bringing their civilizing empire of liberty to those they conquer (II.ii.41). Caesar’s conquests have only “made Rome’s senate little”—the Senate, lynchpin and moderating balance wheel of the republic (II.ii.47). “By the Gods I swear, millions of worlds / Should never buy me to be like that Caesar” (II.ii.57).

To Juba, Cato confides his understanding of divine providence. The “misfortune and affliction” the gods impose “are not ills; else would they never fall / On heav’n’s first fav’rites, and the best of men” II.iv.51-53). No, “The Gods, in bounty, work up storms about us, / That give mankind occasion to exert / Their hidden strength, and throw out into practice / Virtues that shun the day, and lie conceal’d / In the smooth seasons and the calms of life” (II.iv.54-58). He disappoints his young ally by refusing his daughter’s hand in marriage; Roman, all-too-Roman, he does not think a Numidian a worthy suitor, despite Juba’s evident ‘Romanness,’ which is really humanitas. Syphax swoops in, attempting once again to turn the prince against Cato, urging him to eschew honor as a “fine imaginary notion” and to kidnap the girl, even as the early Romans seized the Sabine women (II.v. 89). But Juba calls him “a false old traitor,” intending to redeem the Carthaginians’ reputation for faithlessness and to vindicate his honor in the eyes of Cato (II.v.61). Furious at the insult, perhaps because it is true, Syphax returns to Sempronius, who assures his that factious Roman troops “will bear no more / This medley of philosophy and war,” Stoicism and Achilles, from Cato. Syphax vows to rally his Numidian troops to aid the revolt.

The third Act begins where the play began, with the sons of Cato in dialogue. Portius knows that Marcus loves his beloved, Lucia, but Marcus does not know of Portius’ love for her. He asks Portius to plead his cause to her, “With all the strength and heats of eloquence / Fraternal love and friendship can inspire” (III.i.34-35). When he leaves and Lucia arrives, he does just that (“Oh, Lucia, language is to faint to show / His rage of love; it preys upon his life; / He pines, he sickens, he despairs, he dies,” his “noble soul” ravaged (III.ii.3-5, 10). Kind Lucia, who knows of Portius’ love for her, and who requites it, worries that if Marcus knew of their love it “might perhaps destroy” him (III.29). For his part, Portius counsels her not to reject Marcus’ suit outright but “hold him up in life, and cheer his soul / With the faint glimm’ring of a doubtful hope” (III.ii.24-25). Lucia refuses. She vows to the gods to refuse them both, denying her own love to prevent “thy sister’s tears, / Thy father’s anguish, and thy brother’s death” (III.ii.28-29). She offers him the faint glimmering of a doubtful hope, saying that she will hold fast in her decision “while such a cloud of mischiefs hangs about us” (III.ii.34). Understandably “thunderstruck” at first, philosophic Portius then sees her virtue, her prudential foresight of the evils his suit would have incurred, had it succeeded (III.ii.37). That does little to console him, but Lucia holds firm in her vow. When she leaves and Marcus returns, Portius tells him that she “compassionates your pains, and pities you”—no comfort to the passionate brother, who regrets what a “fool that I was to choose so cold a friend / To urge my cause!” (III.iii.13-17). 

The noise of Sempronius’ mutiny interrupt them. He has decided to carry Marcia off and join Caesar, frustrated at the continued loyalty of Juba and his Numidians—Romans in the core of their nature, after all. But Cato overawes the Roman rebels, shaming them, reminding them of his virtue, and telling to go join Caesar, if that is what they desire. [2] Ever-perfidious Sempronius recommends the death penalty for the rebels, which Cato, changing his mind, mistakenly agrees to inflict, never suspecting his colleague’s treachery. Sempronius immediately has them executed, irate at their uselessness to his scheme. He continues to desire Sempronius, and when Syphax cannot understand how he could “turn a woman’s slave” (III.vii. 11), he assures her that he only intends to kidnap and rape her (“bend her stubborn virtue to my passion”), then “cast her off” (III.vii.15-16). This reassures his henchman: “Well said! that’s spoken like thyself, Sempronius.” (III.vii.17). Syphax recommends that he dress himself as Juba to get past the Numidians who guard her. In his own way, Sempronius emulates the gods—specifically, Pluto, who seized Proserpine and carried “to hell’s tremendous gloom the affrighted maid, / There grimly smiled, pleas’d with the beauteous prize, / Nor envy’d Jove his sunshine and his skies” (III.vii.31-34).

Not suspecting this vile scheme, Marcia fears rather that her father will give her in marriage to Sempronius. She too is a Stoic, however: “While Cato lives, his daughter has no right / To love or hate, but as his choice directs” (IV.i.20-21). She refuses to trust her passions, telling Lucia, “When love once pleads admission to our hearts, / (In spite of all the virtue we can boast) / The woman who deliberates is lost” (IV.i.29-31). Her own reason will not suffice in that circumstance, so her father’s reason ought to prevail. When Sempronius arrives, deceiving the guards, and prepares to play out his sinister version of the rape of the Sabine women, a deus ex machina in the person of Juba discovers him and kills the “proud, barbarous man” (IV.ii.19), who dies in fury “by a boy’s hand,” attired in “a vile / Numidian dress, and for a worthless woman,” one he desired chiefly to spite Cato and Juba (IV.ii.21-22). He is the real barbarian, the false Roman, Juba the true one. 

Marcia remains steadfast in her civic Stoicism. When she and Juba discover their love for one another, she nonetheless continues to insist that Juba “prosper in the paths of honor” (IViii.88)—go off to fight Caesar at her father’s side. But Cato himself has begun to despair, telling Lucius, “The torrent bears too hard upon me: / Justice gives way to force: the conquer’d world / Is Caesar’s: Cato has no business in it.” (IV.iv.22-24). On the contrary, his friend insists, “While pride, oppression, and injustice reign, / The world will still demand her Cato’s presence” (IV.25-26). To Cato’s objection, that he will never submit to be ruled by a tyrant, however, Lucius can only respond that Caesar will not impose “ungen’rous terms” upon the defeated rival, as “the virtues of humanity are Caesar’s” (IV.33-34). This earns him the riposte, “Such popular humanity is treason” (IV.iv.33-36). Cato’s Stoic willingness to suffer draws the line at submission to tyranny. That is, the clementia of Caesar, whether sincere or feigned, bespeaks the superiority of a man who acts like a god toward a fellow man and citizen. Cato is, finally, a citizen-Stoic, not a philosopher-Stoic. The problem will turn out to be not so much Cato’s morality but his misunderstanding of providence. He expects defeat because precisely because he does not foresee the providential plan. He does not foresee the providential plan because it is given to no one to see that.

Juba arrives, confessing his shame at being a Numidian—that is, a prince of a nation whose soldiers were ready to desert their ally. No matter, Cato assures him: “Thou hast a Roman soul” (IV.iv.43). What is more, “Falsehood and fraud shoot up in every soil, / The produce of all climes–Rome has its Caesars” (IV.iv.45-46). Juba “has stood the test of fortune” (IV.iv.49).

Learning next that his son Marcus has died in battle, though not before killing Syphax, Cato pronounces himself “satisfied,” as “my boy has done his duty” (IV.iv.70). Upon seeing the corpse, he simply remarks, “How beautiful is death, when earn’d by virtue” and “what pity is it / That we can die but once to serve our country!” (IV.iv.80-83). The first aphorism is Stoic, the second Roman. He turns to his surviving son, the philosophic one, telling him to remember that “thy life is not thy own, when Rome demands it” (IV.iv.87). It is Rome, “not a private loss,” that “requires our tears” (IV.iv.89-90). Rome had subdued the world thanks to her virtue, but with her virtue gone, having submitted tamely to its rapist, Caesar—who has reversed one of the original founding acts of Rome, the so-called rape which in fact brought wives to young Roman men—the Empire has fallen, “fall’n into Caesar’s hands” (IV.iv.105). He calmly grants Lucius the right to sue for peace from ‘humane’ Julius and advises his son to retire to “thy paternal seat, the Sabine field,” where he may live virtuously in a private life, which is “the post of honor” under a tyrannical regime (IV.iv.135, 142). If the kidnapping of the Sabine women enabled the earliest Romans to sustain themselves as a civil society, perhaps a retreat to the family, a retreat to the Sabine field, will form the foundation of a new Rome, if such can be restored after the barbarous tyrant, the criminal rapist, has had his day.

But Cato has a different plan for himself. Having satisfied himself that he foresees the intention of Providence, he reads the Phaedo, what Addison in his stage direction calls “Plato’s book on the immortality of the soul”; “Plato,” Cato says, “thou reason’st well!” (V.i.1). Plato’s Socrates had reasoned that the prospect of the soul’s immortal life on the Isles of the Blessed removes the sting of death. Given what he takes to be the equally certain prospect of Caesar’s tyranny in this world, a “world made for Caesar,” Cato pronounces himself “weary of conjecture,” weary of philosophizing, ready to the action of suicide, which will end conjecture (V.i.19-20). “Let guilt or fear / Disturb man’s rest. Cato knows neither of ’em, / Indifferent in his choice to sleep or die,” given Plato’s proof that we awaken from death as surely as we awaken from sleep (V.i.38-40). Addison’s Christian audience might well think the same thing, under similar circumstances. If God’s Providence ordains life in Paradise after death, why prolong life in this world, known to be a vail of tears? This would become Nietzsche’s charge against Christianity, that it loves an imagined life and therefore real death more than real life. By Addison’s time, Machiavelli had already anticipated that thought.

Portius joins his father, who assures him that all is well, as “I’m master of myself,” never to be mastered by Caesar (V.ii.13). Having convinced his son that he won’t commit suicide, having allowed Portius, Lucia, and Lucius that he retires to sleep—what he must regard as an instance of the noble lie—Cato prepares to execute himself, even as Lucius assures the women, “While Cato lives—his presence will protect us” (V.iv.38). His presence is needed, as Juba brings news of an impending battle with Caesar’s forces. Portius joins them with the news that Pompey’s son has unexpectedly brought reinforcements from Spain. “Call[ing] out for vengeance on his father’s death”—the very filial piety that Cato understands to be the foundation of Roman civil order—he “rouses the whole nation up to arms” (V.iv.55-57). “Were Cato at their head, once more might Rome / Assert her rights and claim her liberty” (V.iv.58-59). 

There will be no human version of a deus ex machina, this time. They hear the death-cry of Cato in the next room. Mortally wounded, he blesses his friend, Lucius, his son and his son’s future wife, Marcus and Lucia, and his daughter and her future husband, Marcia and Juba. Of Juba, he says, “A senator of Rome, while Rome surviv’d, / Would not have match’d his daughter with a king,” were the king a foreigner, “but Caesar’s arms have thrown down all distinction,” all conventional distinction: “Whoe’er is brave and virtuous, is a Roman.” (V.iv.88-91). In his civic despair, he has made two philosophic discoveries, the first a distinction, the distinction between convention and nature, the second the uncovering of a just filial and political order in light of a criterion set by nature, the criterion of virtue, of human nature undisfigured by passion. “Methinks a beam of light breaks in / On my departing soul” (V.iv.94-95). Dying, what he cannot do is to act in accordance with that beam of light. His ascent from the cave of convention isn’t comic, as it is in Plato’s Republic, but tragic. “Alas, I fear / I’ve been too hasty” (V.iv.95-96), he admits, with Stoic understatement. He can only ask forgiveness. Forgiveness, above all, for his failure to do what he wanted most to do, to save Rome from a regime of tyranny. Forgiveness also, perhaps, for his failure to heed his own advice to his sons, which Portius had remarked in the play’s first scene: We do not know what heaven has traced out for us; the ways of heaven are dark and intricate.

It is left to the ranking surviving Roman in his camp, his friend Lucius, to set the new policy. With Cato, they might have won. Without him, no one believes they can. 

“Let us bear this awful corpse to Caesar,

And lay it in his sight, that it may stand

A fence betwixt us and the victor’s wrath; 

Cato, though dead, shall still protect his friends.” (V.iv.103-106).

And Lucius adds a properly Stoic, sententious final thought, saying that these events show the malign effects of “civil discord” not only to Romans but “to all nations,” namely, “fraud, and cruelty, and strife,” along with what is not the least evil, “rob[bing] the guilty world of Cato’s life,” the life of one of the best in the world, one of the best examples of human nature his countrymen had ever seen (V.iv.108, 111-112). 

 

Notes

1. George Washington will counsel his niece in exactly the same way. See his letter to letter to Eleanor Parke Custis, January 1, 1795.
2. In facing down the rebellious officers at Newburgh, New York, Washington was enacting a similar scene in real life, supremely imitating Addison’s art in his life. See his Speech to the Officers of the Army, March 15, 1783.

 

Brunetto Latini: The Book of the Treasure.  Volume III. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin translation. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993.

 

Politics is “the third science which teaches man how to govern the city,” after natural science and ethics. By “city,” Latini means a political community, “one people gathered together to live under one law and one governor.” He is thinking most immediately of his own native city-state, Florence, but his definition also holds for France, his country of exile. He concurs with Cicero’s judgment, “that the most important science relative to governing the city is rhetoric, that is to say, the science of speaking, for if there were no speech, there would be no city, nor would there be any establishment of justice or of human company, and although speech is given to all men, Cato says wisdom is given to few.” Latini has already identified speech and reason as the distinctively human characteristics, so political life follows from human nature; as Aristotle holds, man is a political animal. At the same time, he immediately reminds his readers of the aristocratic claim to rule, that while all human beings have speech, to be well-spoken is to be wise, and wisdom is not the province of ‘the many.’ Florence’s Machiavelli will attack some of these contentions and modify others, redirecting Latini’s valorization of words, his relative downplaying of force. Machiavelli’s reconception of the political community as lo stato will put the axe to the old aristocracy, whose claim to rule centered on its possession of wisdom garnered from Aristotle and Cicero and on Church sanction.

Latini’s treatment of rhetoric in this, his “book of good speaking,” follows that of Cicero in De Interpretatione, which he had translated. That is, Cicero’s book enjoys the same status in Book III as the Nicomachean Ethics enjoyed in Book II. Unlike the Ethics, however, the Interpretatione delves into technical details of its subject, which, unlike ethics, is as much an art as a science. I shall select elements of Latini’s summary that especially illuminate his understanding of politics, recognizing that the details might prove highly instructive to a speaker, who can consult Cicero’s original work to find them.

Latini classifies speakers into four types: those “endowed with great sense and eloquence”; those “devoid of both eloquence and sense”; those “devoid of sense, but they speak too well” (“and this is a very great peril”); and those “full of sense” who nonetheless “remain silent because of the poverty of their speech” (“and so they need help”). 

Rhetoric’s purpose “is to say words in such a way that those who hear the words will believe them”; it “comes under the science of governing a city.” Rhetoric’s “material” cause is its subject, “what the speaker speaks about, just as sick people are the material of the doctor.” Rhetorical material divides into three parts: demonstration, counsel, and judgment. 

Rhetoric itself has five parts: invention, order, wording, memory, and delivery. Rhetoric can be delivered in two ways, by speech or by writing. Rhetoric is disputatious speech, and political disputes arise from four things: a fact; the name of a fact; the quality of a fact—how it is characterized, e.g., “cruel,” “reasonable,” “legal”; and the relevance of a fact to the issue or case disputed. If Aristotle’s ethics holds up the spoudaios or “serious man” as the good man, Cicero’s rhetoric would have that man speak in a serious tone, with “sense and sententious statements.” If Aristotle understands goodness as a form of beauty, of harmony, Cicero and Latini urge that a speaker’s rhetoric “contain nothing ugly.” With regard to rhetorical invention, then, “Let there be beautiful color within and without. Use the science of rhetoric as a painter uses paint, that is, to put color in verse and prose; but be careful not to color excessively, for sometimes one is colorful by avoiding color.” That painter, Winston Churchill, would surely agree.

Regarding order, there are two types: natural and artful. Natural order “goes straight down the great road and does not stray to either, side, that is, it relates and tells things the way they were from the beginning to the end,” in chronological order. “This way of speaking is without great mastery of the art; for this reason, this book does not concern itself with it at all.” The artful order of speech “does not stay on the great road; rather it goes along paths and shortcuts which take it more quickly to the place it wants to go,” rearranging the order of the events related “not in an inappropriate way, but very wisely, to strengthen its intention,” its persuasive impact. The artful speaker puts “the strongest things” at the beginning and the end, “the weakest in the middle,” where they will be obscured in the memory of the listener or reader. 

Regarding wording, “you must look at four things”: “if the material is long and obscure, you must shorten it with brief and understandable words”; if brief and obscure, “you must amplify it somewhat and make it clear in a pleasant fashion”; if long and clear, “you must shorten and strengthen it and fortify it with good words”; if brief and easy, “you must lengthen it a bit and decorate it in pleasant fashion.” He goes on to enumerate various means of elaboration, on which I shall not elaborate, along with recommendations on how to structure a narrative in speaking and in writing.

Regarding memory, he emphasizes the importance of the prologue, “the lord and prince of the whole narrative.” In it, you must “say things which will put you into the good graces of the listeners,” as “its purpose is nothing other than to prepare the heart of the person addressed to listen diligently to your words, and believe them, and in the end do what you tell them.” To make a favorable impression on the minds of listeners and readers, the rhetorician must be “well-tailored to the subject matter.” For example, when speaking on an “unpleasant topic,” conceal your intention in the prologue, as Julius Caesar does in his speech favoring leniency for Catiline and his co-conspirators, and indeed as Catiline himself did in his own defense. This will diminish the anger of your audience, soften its hardness of heart, acquire its benevolence—make it receptive and therefore more willing to retain and concur with what you have to say. Your audience will listen only if you “make him wish to listen”; for example, by arousing his curiosity, making “him want to hear what we have to say, or know it.” If the topic is “doubtful,” “adorn your prologue to capture the love and benevolence of the listeners in such a way that it seems to them that the whole matter is honest.” 

In teaching rhetoric through Cicero, Latini thus softens his usual attitude of moral rectitude. He becomes more of the fox he had earlier disparaged. In his kind of politics, rhetoric takes the place of war, as much as possible. Whereas the ‘moderns’ often substituted commercial competition and the overall project of the conquest of fortune and of nature as a substitute for warfare, particularly religious warfare, by rechanneling warlike impulses into economic and scientific pursuits, Latini would rechannel princely war-making into wars of words, consistent with the idea that man is a rational animal. Rhetorical tricks such as concealment become the equivalent of battlefield camouflage and feints.  

He gives similar advice when he comes to the other parts of the rhetorician’s narratives. The “principal matter” of the narrative, the story itself, should be told clearly, briefly, and above all plausibly, “show[ing] the reason for the matter, that is, why or how” (for example) an accused criminal could have committed the crime, how “he was of such a nature that he was able and knew well how to do it.” However, don’t state a fact when “it causes [you] harm to state the fact,” or when “there is no advantage in stating it.” In dealing with “the partition” of the narrative, by which he means your statement of the point you intend to prove, do as Cato did in his speech against Catiline, exaggerating the alleged intentions of the accused; in the second part of the partition, you can then draw a strictly logical conclusion from your dubious premise. (Like Latini, Cato had a reputation for moral rectitude, which Latini evidently regards as compromisable when rhetorical exigency made compromise useful.) 

Latini carefully unpacks the fourth part of narrative, “confirmation” or proof. “No science in the world teaches the source for proving what one says except dialectic and rhetoric”—the latter being a subdivision of the former. Proofs may pertain either to the “body” addressed by the speaker—”that person whose words or deeds give rise to the question”—or to the “thing” addressed by the speaker—that “word or deed from which the question arises.” Proofs pertaining to a person concern those “properties” or characteristics “which the speaker can use to prove that this person is disposed to do or not to do a certain thing.” Although “it is very difficult to describe the essence of nature,” a speaker can bring out the likely nature of a person by identifying the person’s sex, country, city, family, age, and “the good and the evil which one has by nature in one’s body or one’s heart”—whether the person is healthy or sick, big or small, handsome or ugly, quick or slow, inventive or unimaginative, endowed with good memory or bad, mild or harsh, patient or irascible. Along with the person’s nature, the speaker may identify the manner of his “nurture,” “how and with respect to what people and by what man a person was brought up and instructed, that is, who was his teacher, who were his friends and companions, what art he practices, what he occupies himself with, how he governs his things and his household and his friends, and how he conducts his life.” The speaker can also describe the person’s good or bad fortune, his habits (which fulfill “a permanent thing in our hearts and our bodies”), and his “study,” that is, the character of what he has learned, his philosophic leanings. And finally, the speaker can point to the person’s counselors, his habits of speech, and the circumstances surrounding, for example, an alleged crime (e.g., “you must certainly believe that this man killed this other man, because he held a bloody knife in his hand”).

Proofs pertaining to a thing, to the word or deed itself that is in dispute, should be presented with the intention of showing what the person’s intentions were. These reinforce the proofs concerning the person, such as probable cause and circumstances (that bloody knife, again). 

Logical arguments that pull these proofs together are either “necessary”—showing that the thing “cannot be otherwise,” as for example, “this argument is giving birth to a child, so she has lain with a man”—or “verisimilar” or probabilistic—as for example, “if this man is a philosopher, then he does not believe in the gods”—an argument deployed against Socrates during his trial. Whether necessary or verisimilar, all arguments come in two types: those “from far away” or “from close up.” By an argument from far away, he means an argument—typically, when interrogating a witness—which operates by analogy, “lead[ing] one’s adversary to agree and acknowledge that thing which the speaker wants to demonstrate.” For example, if you want to prove that a man doesn’t love his wife, or a wife her husband, begin with asking, “if your neighbor had a better horse than you do, which would you prefer, yours or his?” And take it from there. “Socrates used many arguments of this type”; “every time he wanted to prove something, he would put forward reasons such as these which one could not deny, and then he would make his conclusion from what was in his proposition.” To make logically necessary arguments successfully, the speaker must be careful to ensure that his initial proposition or propositions are “certain without any doubt,” that the analogies he draws really are “completely similar to what he wants to prove,” and that “the listener not know what he is leading up to,” for if he did know, “he would either remain silent or deny it or reply by its opposite.”

As for the argument from “close up,” the task is easier. The speaker need only show the verisimilitude of the claim he makes.

Speakers must master not only ‘positive’ proofs such as these but ‘negative’ ones—refutations. “You should know that refutation comes out of the same source as confirmation, for just as a thing can be confirmed by the properties of the body and of the thing it can be refuted in the same way,” by logical argument. There are four ways to refute an argument: by denying the premise; by denying the conclusion; by “say[ing] that his argument is vicious”; by “com[ing] up with another [argument] as strong or stronger than his.” The first three ways are simply matters of logic. The fourth way can be taken if you concede the truth of the adversary’s argument as far as it goes but “give an even stronger reason” for denying the conclusion, or if, when the adversary says “that a certain thing is profitable,” you concede that it is, but not an honest or honorable thing. Latini draws his example of a stronger reason again from the debate between Caesar and Cato on the Catiline conspiracy. Caesar argued for forgiving the conspirators because they were Roman citizens; Cato agreed that indeed they were, but they threatened to destroy Rome, a more cogent point than mere the sentiment of fellow-feeling aroused by shared citizenship. 

A speaker’s concluding statement should have three parts: recapitulation, disdain, and/or pity. After summarizing all the arguments you have made, especially the reasons justifying them, you should move to an expression of disdain for the character of the crimes of the one you are accusing or of your adversary in the debate. “What the speaker says through disdain, he must say with as much gravity as possible, in order to move the hearts of the listeners against his adversary; for this is a matter which is very advantageous to his cause, when the listeners are moved to anger against his adversary.” If, however, he defends an accused man, himself or another, he should appeal to pity, more specifically, to mercy. Latini’s Cicero recommends that a speaker not lean too long on his audience’s tender sentiments, however. “The speaker must be very much on his guard so that when he observes that hearts are moved to pity, then he should not tarry any longer in his complaint, but rather proceed forthwith to the end of his presentation before the listeners lose their pity; for Apollonius says: nothing dries up so quickly as tears.”

With that piece of unsentimental counsel, Latini concludes his discussion of political rhetoric and turns to “the government of cities” proper, “the highest science and the most noble office there is on earth”—evidently including Church offices. In this, he follows Aristotle. “Although politics includes generally all the arts necessary to the community of men”—as Aristotle teaches, it is the architectonic art, ruling all the other arts and artisans within the city—Latini will limit himself to the science and art of politics insofar as it “pertain[s] to the lord and his right office.” And he will consider only that kind of lordship prevailing in Florence and in cities with the same kind of regime. While it is necessary that many different kinds of regimes prevail throughout the world, given that peoples, their “dwellings,” their customs and their rights differ widely, and this is why some lords “were rightfully elected and others took power by force,” Latini will only consider “the lordship of those who govern the cities for terms of a year.” Still further, such term-limited lords or monarchs might obtain their offices by purchase, as in France, or by election, as in Italy. Latini concentrates the young gentleman’s attention on the latter type.

“All lordships and all high positions are given to us by the Sovereign Father who among the holy establishments of the world wanted the government of the cities to be founded on three pillars, that is justice, reverence, and love.” Justice in a lord means “giv[ing] each person his right,” and for that to happen it must be “firmly established in [his] heart.” If justice is the virtue most characteristic of the true lord, the ruler, reverence for the lord is most characteristic of the true subject, the ruled. “For it is the only thing in the world which seeks out the merit of faith and overcomes all sacrifices; for this reason, the Apostle says: honor, says he, your lords.” Finally, “love must exist in both lord and subject”—in the lord, “with all his heart and with a clear faith,” so that he “be concerned day and night for the common profit of the city and of all men,” and in the subjects, “with a just heart and with a true intention of giving counsel and aid for the maintaining of his office, for because he is one single person among them, he could not do anything without them.”

The election of the city’s lord should proceed not democratically, by lot, but aristocratically, by deliberation and choice. Latini lists twelve qualifications for the office: prudence and experience (“a young man cannot be wise, although he can have a good capacity for knowledge”); a noble heart, honorable habits, and virtuous work, not family connections; love of justice; a good mind, so that he can “pursue the reason of things,” learn the truth of what’s occurring in the city; courage and steadfastness, not vanity and the concomitant susceptibility to flattery (“a wise man prefers being a lord to seeming one”); self-rule, neither loving money nor high office; rhetorical skills (including verbal self-restraint, being “careful not to speak too much” and thereby falling into error and losing honor); neither prodigal nor miserly; not irascible (“ire which dwells too long in a government is like lightning, which does not let the truth be known or a just judgment rendered”); possessing independent wealth and power, thus less easily corruptible; having no political responsibilities elsewhere and therefore capable of attending to the public business undistracted; and, finally, “the right faith in God and in all men.” “These virtues and others must be considered by good citizens before they elect a lord,” although, regrettably, “most people do not consider habits or virtues as much as they do strength or family or inclinations or love for the city in which he is born.” Such people are “mistaken” because “war and hatred have so increased among Italians nowadays”—leading to the exile of a man like Latini, to give an example near to hand—and “throughout the world in many lands, there is division in all the cities and enmity between the two factions of the citizens,” leading “the person who acquires the love of one group” to acquire “automatically the malevolence of the other,” regardless of his virtues. Further, “if the magistrate is not very wise, he falls into the scorn and the bad graces of the very ones who elected him.” Accordingly, the electors should be “the wise men of the city.” To protect both themselves and the prospective lord, they should specify all the duties of the office in writing. The prospective lord should not be a citizen of the city, residing in it only for his one-year term. The electors may ask the Holy Roman Emperor or the pope to send a lord to them, since the emperor and the pope may not be affiliated with any faction or family in the city. 

Having made their selection, the electors should then compose a letter offering the lordship to the nominee. Latin helpfully offers a model, which not incidentally offers a compact explanation of the reasons for all government. By nature, human beings “desire the freedom which nature first gave them” and “avoid the yoke of servitude.” But they quickly learn that “the pursuit of evil desires and the opportunity for evil deeds which went unpunished” endanger their lives and destroy “human association.” “Justice took heed of these people and a governor was chosen for the people with several duties, to promote the reputation of the good people and to confound the malice of the bad.” Nature was rightly subjected to justice, freedom made obedient to judgment. This is truer now than ever, since “people’s desires…now are more corrupt” and “perversions” are “increasing these days.” This being the case, we, the electoral college of the city of Rome have “deliberated together about a man who would lead us next year, who would come and watch over the common good, and who would maintain both outsiders and insiders, and who would respect the property and the persons of all people in such a way that justice would not decrease in our city.” We are convinced “that you have the knowledge and the desire to impose judgment in peace, justice, and moderation, and to strike with the sword of righteousness to take vengeance against evildoers.” You will receive a salary for provisions; “bring with you tend judges and twelve good and praiseworthy notaries, and come, stay, and depart with the whole company at our expense and at the risk of yourself and your property.” 

The lordship offered is primarily a judgeship; the lord will be the supreme judges among the judges he brings. This explains the emphasis on forensic rhetoric in the previous chapters. If he refuses, he should do so graciously, citing duties in his own country or city. If he accepts, he should reply in the spirit of the invitation letter: “It is true that nature has made all men equal, but, it has happened, not through a defect of nature but through the maliciousness of men, that to restrain iniquity men should have rulers, not because of their nature, but their vices,” and, “because the capability of Jesus Christ alone makes a man capable of these duties, we, through the faith we have only in Him, not through the goodness we might have in us, in the name of the Sovereign Father and through the counsel of all our friends, take and receive the honor and the post of governor according to the descriptions in your letters,” confident that “the wisdom and knowledge of the knights and the people, and the faith and the loyalty of all the citizens, will help us to bear a part of our burden and lighten it through good obedience.” In unmistakable contrast, Machiavelli will emphasize the role of the prince not as judge but as ‘executive.’

Having chosen his retinue, the lord should observe the city and “the nature of the people” as he makes his way to his office. In the city, he should have someone ride between himself and his predecessor, “to remove all suspicion” of collusion between the two of them, “go straight to the principal church,” and “pray to God humbly with all his heart and with all his faith,” not failing to “put some money on the altar in honorable fashion.” His oath of office should restate the principles set down in the letter of invitation and in his reply. Throughout his tenure, he “must be very careful not to incur the hatred or suspicion of his people.”

His inaugural address should include a promise to abide by local customs, reference to the circumstances of the city (specifically, whether it at peace or at war), compliments to his predecessor, the city’s “noble leaders,” and its people, and invocations of Jesus, the pope, the Church, and the Empire. He should assure the citizens that “I have not come out of desire for financial gain, but to win praise and esteem and honor for myself and my people.” The path to praise, esteem, and honor is “the course of law and justice.” If the city is at war, say “I shall say little about it here, for it requires more deeds than words, but if there is anything in this world of ours in which one can display one’s force and power and acquire high esteem for one’s virtue, I say that war surmounts all enterprises, for it makes a man brave with weapons and noble of heart, vigorous and full of virtue, strong in physical difficulties and watchful in traps, clever and enterprising in all things.” Express confidence that the justice of the city’s cause will be rewarded with victory. 

Meanwhile, he should admonish his judges and notaries to “watch over and maintain his and the common honor,” and “not become angry at the people or go to taverns or to any man’s house to eat or to drink,” taking care “not to be corrupted by money, or by women, or by anything else,” on pain of punish meted out by himself. He also needs to select and assemble a council of the city to advise him, and then “listen to what they have to say.” When proposing a policy, resolve to “be brief,” for “a large number of things gives rise to obstacles and confusion in the hearts, and weakens the best minds, for the mind which thinks of many things is less effective in each one.” He should be especially attentive to the Council when deliberating on foreign policy, both with respect to requests and demands from foreign ambassadors and to ambassadorial appointments to foreign states. 

These preliminaries concluded, he can now settle down to his principal duties as a judge, always “hold[ing] his subjects within the bounds of the law” of the city. “It is a beautiful and honest thing for the lord, when he sits at court, to listen willingly and quietly to all, especially the lawyers and the sponsors of the cases, for they reveal the strength of the complaint and point out the substance of the questions.” That is why Latini esteems lawyers. “Their profession is extremely good and necessary to the life of men, as much as or more than if they fought with sword and knife for their parents or their country.” As always, Latini seeks to lead men away from depending on force alone in their dealings. “For this reason, the lord must use his office to make sure that if some poor person or other is involved in a case before him, and is not able to procure the services of a lawyer, either through his weakness or through the strength of his adversary, a good lawyer will be appointed for his aid, to give him counsel and instruct him concerning his rights.”

Justice isn’t only a matter of words, however. In cases involving “great crimes” when “the matter cannot be known or proven with certainty” but “strong arguments for suspicion” have been adduced, the defendant “can certainly be tortured to make him confess his guilt; otherwise not.” Latini adds, “during the torture the question must not be if John committed the murder, but in a general way he must be asked who did it.” Latini does not address the question of what to do if the accused answers, ‘I don’t know.’ Such readily begged questions may have contributed to the unpopularity of torture in civilized countries, later on. Once guilt has been determined, the lord’s sentence should hit the Aristotelian mean between harshness and pity, as befits “the nature of the matter.” It isn’t clear if torture counts towards measuring the penalty he hands down.

Dependent as he is upon the good conduct of his subordinates, “the wise magistrate must often and carefully, especially on feast days and at night and in the wintertime, gather them together in his chamber or elsewhere, and speak to them about things which pertain to their duties, and learn what they are doing and what disputes have come before them, and inquire concerning the nature of their complaints, and take counsel about the things they must do. “He must love and honor all the members of his household, and laugh and have fun with them sometimes.”

Latini recurs to Cicero’s theme of “the discord between those who want to be feared and those who want to be loved,” taken up by his fellow Florentine, Machiavelli, several generations later. Latini repeats his argument from Part II: It is better to be loved than feared because the one who is feared without being loved provokes hatred, and “the person who is hated by all the people will perish, for no wealth can stand up to the hatred of many.” Therefore, “long fear is a poor guardian; cruelty is the enemy of nature,” consisting of “nothing more than pride in great punishments.” Machiavelli, too, will caution against inducing popular hatred, but will advise the prince to use religion, by which he means the show, but only the show, of piety. Latini follows Cicero’s preventative for cruelty and the hatred toward the one whose cruelty makes him feared but not loved. “Be careful not to do anything for which you cannot give a reason.” “What is the difference between a king and a tyrant?” ‘None,’ Machiavelli and Hobbes will answer, tyrants being but monarchs misliked. Latini disagrees, in advance: “They are similar in good fortune and in power, but the tyrant performs works of cruelty gladly, a king only by necessity,” out of “love of one’s citizens,” a love that “gives you the most beautiful thing in the world, which is that each person wants you to live.” The king understands that “it is just as cruel to forgive all as it is not to forgive anybody, but it is a work of the greatest clemency to confound evil deeds by forgiving them.” “Behave in such a way that you seem terrible to evil people and pleasant to good ones.”

To achieve this, follow the law, God, and the saints, honor the priests, protect widows and orphans, observe justice, and maintain the city’s infrastructure. Additionally, “let him avoid entertainers who praise him to his face.” He should exercise caution when considering any alliances, acting only in consultation with the Council and “the common assent of the people,” and only “if it is necessary” to find foreign allies. Internally, “let him avoid levying during his term a tax, or making a bill of sale or debt, or any binding commitment for the commune unless it is for the manifest profit of the city and by the common consent of the council.”

If, having enjoyed the success likely after following Latini’s advice, the citizens “want to keep you as lord for the following year, I suggest that you not accept it, for the second term can be brought to a successful close only with difficulty”—a precept the truth of which American presidents have had occasion to illustrate. At the end of your term, review your conduct in office before you leave it, making any corrections before removing yourself from the city. Answer any complaints against your conduct. “Then, if it please God, you will be honorably absolved, and you will take leave of the council and of the commune of the city, and you will go home in glory and in honor”—your aim in taking the office in the first place.

To read Latini’s Book of the Treasure is to see with unmatched clarity the abrupt departure Machiavelli, Bacon, and the rest of the ‘moderns’ made from the philosophy and the religion of their predecessors. The natural philosophy of Book I will be dismissed not only in its content but in its approach to philosophizing, as the new natural philosophers undertake the task of torturing Nature (now reconceived as non-teleological) to compel her to reveal her secrets. The moral philosophy of Book II, combining Aristotelian ethics with Christian precepts, an ethics emphasizing the ‘middle way’ of moderation and, more the understanding of all virtues as ‘middles’ between extremes, will give way to calls for attending to, and amending, physical necessities, and to calls for moral ‘extremism,’ the choice between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism.’ The political philosophy of Book III, which understands the mode of politics to be speech primarily, and the role of the statesman to be that of a judge, and the best regime to be aristocratic, will give way to a mode of politics in which force takes the prominent role, the prince takes the place of the judge, and the aristocratic regime question reduces to the question of principality versus republic. ‘Moderns’ who want the center still to hold—Locke, Montesquieu—must now recalibrate what ‘the center’ is, and what it will take to hold it.