Ramus Reading: The Commentaries on Cicero's Consular Orations and Vergil's Eclogues and Georgics

Abstract

Commentaries on classical texts by Peter Ramus, a 16th-century author of textbooks, show him as more open to different structures and goals than his textbooks and his controversial works would lead one to expect. Historically, Ramus's clear reductionist manuals had much greater success than his commentaries on Cicero's Pro Rabirio, De lege agraria, and In Catilinam, and Virgil's Ecologues and Georgics. However, his manuals gave him a perspective from which to write the largely admirable commentaries on classical texts that, to some extent, show the weaknesses of his own theory of overall structure, replacing it in the practice of reading with something more complex and flexible, more akin to the work of Agricola. In his discussion of Cicero's orations, for example, he finds that rhetorical ideas of disposition are more useful than he had allowed previously. In the area of method, he often has to concede that particular speeches and poems, while remaining effective, cannot be said to obey the rules of method that he sees as obligatory.