Castiglione vs. Cicero: Political Engagement, or Effeminate Chatter?

Abstract

The political message of Castiglione's Cortegiano, first published in 1528, seems to bear little resemblance to that of its formal model, Cicero's De Oratore. While Cicero's ideal republican orator is actively engaged in political debate, Castiglione's courtier is in many respects an entertainer: removed from the possibility of civic engagement, the courtier's most obvious attributes are aesthetic. Despite these differences, Castiglione opens the final book of his dialogue with two strong Ciceronian echoes: he first laments the deaths of three key speakers, and then compares all of the dialogue's interlocutors with the Greek leaders who emerged from the Trojan horse. The result of the double reprise is that Cicero's focus — the silencing and displacement of the ideal orator in the context of political crisis, and his ambivalence toward a new cultural model — forms the backdrop for Castiglione's Book Four. This essay focuses on the political significance of these motifs to show that the Cortegiano both critiques the wistful idealism of Cicero's De Oratore and offers a solution to the paradoxes inherent in the Ciceronian dialogue. While Cicero's best speakers adhere to their principles, they are ineffectual in a political crisis. In addition, although Cicero's text is heavily indebted to Greek culture, it offers at best an ambiguous view of Greek oratory, stigmatizing it as "effeminate" and divorced from political reality. Castiglione's reconsideration of these contradictions seeks not only to justify the new profession of courtiership but also to establish its superiority to the Ciceronian model. Implicitly critiquing Cicero's nostalgic republican idealism, the Cortegiano validates both side-switching as necessary for political survival, and the "effeminate" arts of courtiership as a tool for empire-building.