Wisdom Up in Flames

Abstract

In his encyclopedic masterwork Li livres dou Tresor (The Books of Treasure), the mid-thirteenth-century Florentine civil servant and rhetorician Brunetto Latini proclaimed “the very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero” to be “the finest orator in the world and the master of rhetoric.”1 How might this remark by a medieval professional civic administrator (even one with pronounced Ciceronian proclivities) pertain to Goodman's book? I take as my inspiration for the ensuing comments Latini's phrase in Tresor—“The very wise Marcus Tullius Cicero”—in relation to the final word of Goodman's subtitle: “Conditions.” As I began to peruse Words on Fire, I expected to encounter discussion of “wisdom” and of related ideas such as “reason,” “natural law,” and “justice” rather often. After all, these factors constitute indispensable features of Cicero's political theory. I was thus greatly surprised to discover that Goodman mentions them only belatedly and briefly (65–66).