In a previous section it was noted that after the discovery of the Brutus in 1421, which included Cicero’s superlative praise of the commentarii, the status of Caesar’s historical works rose even higher (Billanovich 1990). The 1430s were a high point of scholarship on Caesar: shortly after the dispute involving Poggio and Guarino, in 1438 Pier Candido Decembrio, the Milanese humanist and brother of Angelo, even translated the Gallic War and Civil War into Italian, dedicating it to the ruler of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti. This was one of very few Latin texts to be translated into the vernacular in a century when humanists wrote almost exclusively in Latin. Decembrio’s dedication to his prince points out that not just Julius but also Augustus, Tiberius, Germanicus, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero combined military expertise with knowledge of literature. The mention of some of the ‘‘darker’’ emperors in this context shows how keen Decembrio was to praise all single rulers, when dedicating his translation to a Visconti. This is confirmed by his criticism of Lucan’s ‘‘more poetical than truthful accounts’’ (‘‘piii poeticamente che vere’’; Frati 1921: 77). Decembrio also wrote a comparison of Julius and Alexander, and a Vita Caesaris for his series of biographies of famous men, Vitae Aliquot Virorum Illustrium (Viti 1987). Clearly this cult of Caesar fits in with northern Italian courtly cultures where cities like Milan, Mantua, and Ferrara were governed by a single ruler, but elsewhere in the peninsula there was similar enthusiasm. Other famous humanists, such as the two Barzizzas and Pius II, owned their own copies of Caesar’s Commentaries, and the works were much read by the Aragonese kings of Naples: Bartolomeo Facio tells us that Alfonso the Magnanimous, a great reader of Livy, also took a copy of the Commentaries with him on expeditions and read from them every day (Billanovich 1990). In fact the one surviving Quattrocento commentary on Caesar’s works comes from Naples: Parrasio’s unpublished 1499-1500 commentary on the Gallic and Civil War (Brown 1976).
Also in this Neapolitan ambience, Lorenzo Valla, in his Antidotum in Facium (1447), regularly quotes from Caesar to justify lexical and syntactic choices in his own historical works (Valla 1981: 90, 233-4, 238, etc.), especially as he says Caesar wrote ‘‘latinissime’’ (Valla 1981: 90), and agrees even with his opponent Bartolomeo Facio that Livy, Caesar, and Sallust constitute a supreme triad of historians (Valla 1981: 128). In particular he appreciates the wit and unadorned brevity of Caesar’s works, and his use of sententiae (Valla 1981: 233, 241-2). However, by the end of the century an occasional critical note emerges: even though in Pontano’s dialogue Antonius (1491) Caesar is repeatedly cited for good Latin usage (Pontano 1944: 89-91), in his major dialogue on historiography, the Actius (c. 1498), Caesar is considered not as valid a model as Livy and Sallust since he only wrote commentarii, which were merely shorthand historical notes for others to write up as a full-blown history (Pontano 1944: 231;seeon the genre, Kraus, pp. 160-1 andRaaflaub, pp. 179-80, in this volume). On the other hand, the popularity of the Gallic War as a school text is illustrated by the fact that at the start of Pontano’s humorous dialogue, Charon (1491), a pedant grammarian in the underworld claims he would like to know from Caesar himself whether Gaul is divided ‘‘in tris’’ or ‘‘in tres partes’’ (Pontano 1944: 34)!
Even if Caesar is not considered as canonical a historian as Livy and Sallust, his style is much admired, especially by the most expert Latin critics. The ‘‘purity’’ of Caesar’s Latin was the key quality ascribed to it in Cicero’s Brutus, and this finds several echoes around this time. In 1484 the great scholar, Pico della Mirandola, praised Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Italian prose in his Commentary on his Sonnets as the equivalent of Caesar’s pure Latin, an apposite comparison since Lorenzo too was a political ruler who was at the same time a first-rate writer (Garin 1952: 804). Also within the Medici circle, the great Florentine humanist and stylist, Poliziano, has strong words of praise for Caesar’s Latin. In his second Miscellanea (1493-4), he disputes St. Ambrose’s claim in his Hexameron that elephants sleep on their feet, and suggests that the Church father had been influenced by the similar claim made regarding elks in the Gallic War (6.27); at this point Poliziano reproduces verbatim the full passage on elks from Caesar just so that his readers can sample the purity (‘‘verba mundissima’’) and elegance of Caesar’s Latin (Poliziano 1978: 83). Even in vernacular circles in the 1520s, in Castiglione’s influential Book of the Courtier (1528), Caesar is considered to be as valid a model of style as Sallust, Varro, and ‘‘the other good writers,’’ even though their usage differs from Cicero’s (Book of the Courtier 1.39; Castiglione 1967: 85), and a few chapters later Caesar is portrayed as a model of how to combine the active and scholarly lives (1.43).
In the first decades of the sixteenth century Caesar remains a by-word for pure Latin writing: in a famous debate on literary imitation in 1512, both the Ciceronian Pietro Bembo and his more eclectic opponent, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, agree in praising Caesar as a writer who is a highly suitable model for imitation (Santangelo 1954: 46, 48, 68, 69), especially for his candor, his pure Latinity, though Bembo worries that the danger of this style is that it can slip into sermo rudis (Santangelo 1954: 46). Bembo finds in Caesar the greatest candor and puritas, and claims his comparative neglect of eloquence was caused by the fact of his living such an active life (Santangelo 1954: 48). Bembo’s theoretical praise here of Caesar was later put into practice: he sees Julius and Augustus as epitomizing the Golden Age of Latin literature (against the republican viewpoint of Bruni and Poggio), and since in his own History of Venice (begun 1530) he uses only words from that age, Caesar becomes an indispensable model: in his description of a cannon, he solves the problem of technical nomenclature by closely imitating a passage from the Bellum Gallicum (5.43.1) (McLaughlin 1995: 271-2).
From Milan and Venice to Florence and Naples, Caesar is revered in humanist circles for his pure and elegant Latin.
World History
