Riscrivere il classico nel Rinascimento: la pseudo-ciceroniana Oratio adversus Valerium,

This paper examines the Oratio adversus Valerium, a speech falsely attributed to Cicero, actually a rhetorical exercise composed in Bononia’s academic environment in the second half of the fifteenth century. The speech was discovered (and presumably penned) by Giovanni Garzoni, a learned intellectual fascinated by Cicero’s style. It assembles well-known topoi from Cicero’s speeches, especially the Catilinarians, and depicts Valerius, Cicero’s opponent, as a ‘new’ Catiline. The paper demonstrates that, through imitation of Cicero’s invectives against Catiline, the forger addresses issues crucial to the civic Humanism in 15th century and meditates over the moral values embodied by the ideal politician, modelled after the image of the ‘historical’ Cicero as the defender of the aristocratic and republican virtues. Within this context, the Oratio testifies to the renewal of interest in Cicero as a politician during the Humanism and the Renaissance. It also shows that Cicero’s political history was of the greatest significance to the moral formation of the ‘modern’ man in the bourgeois society.