The search for Truth necessarily takes the form of a depiction of error. Vincent Descombes, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, 4 Theophrastus’ Characters, a series of 30 short sketches of vice written around 319 bc is, as Jeffrey Rusten puts it: ‘a pleasant little book for the casual reader, but an enormously difficult one for the scholar’.1 Its pleasantness lies in how it chooses to depict vices as ordinary as ‘bad timing’, ‘idle chatter’, and ‘superstition’, by providing a brief example of the daily habits of a man who embodies the quality in question.2 ‘The man with bad timing’ for example, is ‘the sort who goes up to someone who is busy and asks his advice. He sings love songs to his girlfriend when she has a fever. (…) If he’s a guest at a wedding, he launches into a tirade against women’.3 Its difficulty, on the other hand, lies in part in what Robin Lane Fox calls the ‘misreadings’ of its reception-history: in how it has not always been read as a pleasant book for entertainment, but for a range of other purposes instead.4 One of these ‘misreadings’ was the notion that the Characters offered a kind of moral instruction, an understanding inspired by a moralizing Proem that was appended to the sketches in the late Roman empire, or early Byzantine period, promising a comparison between vice and virtue, absent in Theophrastus’ own text.5 As the medieval manuscript tradition preserved this spurious Proem, this was how a series of Latin editors approached Theophrastus’ work, a reading instrumental in explaining why, across sixteenth-century Europe, it became so extraordinarily popular to edit or translate. ‘The printing presses’, so declares the preface to the sixteenth edition of the Characters that had been published that century, ‘became feverishly interested in this little work by Theophrastus’, designed as it was ‘for the correction of bad behaviour’ and ‘the removal of malice’.6 These early editors had a difficult task on their hands: how to make sense of the Proem’s moralizing claims, given that the Characters only contained a set of vices without corresponding virtues? And how to give these ordinary vices, each outlined in what seem like figures from observational comedy, the solemn dignity the Proem conferred on them? Turning to the prefaces, dedication letters and other paratexts of the editions of the Characters published in the sixteenth century, we find a number of surprising solutions to these problems. When taken together, they present us with three arguments for why bad examples might be instrumental in the instruction of good behaviour: an interpretive tradition that begins in 1517 and that ends with Isaac Casaubon’s celebrated editions of 1592 and 1599. The first argument is made by Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger, for whom the Characters shows us how to discern other people’s natures, in order to better manipulate them. Willibald Pirckheimer makes the second, positioning the Characters as a novel means of social control and a vehicle for corrective self-reflection. The third is elaborated by both Leonhard Lycius and Frédéric Morel, who frame Theophrastus' text as a pedagogical device used to prevent children adopting bad habits. This tradition has not before been studied in detail, with both literary historians and classicists preferring to focus on Casaubon’s later editions, rather than on those that preceded them.7 From these early editors’ ‘misreading’, or this error, we then gain a curious aesthetic justifying how bad examples of ordinary vices could teach readers how to behave. While the Characters has recently emerged in discussions about the cognitive value of literature – with arguments being made that its descriptions of types offer moral or practical knowledge – these claims have hinged on Casaubon’s later editions.8 By recovering this earlier approach, this article points to an alternative way in which Theophrastus’ sketches can shed light on the relationship between ethics and literature: one which would not contribute to current debates about literature and knowledge, but to discussions about the literary representation of bad behaviour. The Proem introduces the Characters as providing the answer to a problem. It opens with Theophrastus telling his interlocutor Polycles that he has long wondered why ‘even though Greece lies under the same sky, and all Greeks are educated in the same way, it happens that we do not have the same composition of character’.9 After long observation, the answer that Theophrastus has found to this question, it continues, is that there are men who are ‘good and bad’, two ‘classes of character’ that separate and distinguish individuals who share the same education and climate.10 Having come to this conclusion, Theophrastus states that he feels he ‘ought to write’ about how these two categories of men ‘normally behave in their lives’.11 The Proem’s explanation of the Characters’ ambition does not however end on this note. Rather it proposes that these sketches have a further moralizing purpose: that they will make Theophrastus and Polycles’ sons ‘better’.12 Theophrastus outlines two ways in which this will work. Their sons should first use this text, as ‘a guide’ to navigate which kind of people they should solicit and which they should avoid, so that they can learn ‘to associate with and become close to the finest men’.13 By mixing with these people, their sons will secondly develop an understanding of how ‘not to fall short’ of their standards: they will learn from others how to be excellent themselves.14 With this, the Proem introduces a morally instructive as well as an empirically clarifying purpose: Theophrastus will not only reveal the two distinct classes of men he has observed but will do so in order to teach readers how to better navigate the social world, and in doing so, how to give themselves a chance to become good. Both of these announced purposes, however, rely on the text of the Characters containing its missing virtues. This leaves the reader with the problem of trying to make sense both of how people can be separated into two classes of character, when only one class is depicted; and of how to use this text to learn to associate with ‘the finest men’ from portraits of their opposites. This disjunction between text and paratext did not, however, deter the Latin translators from attempting to show how the Characters could in some way fulfil the Proem’s moral pledge. If the Proem ignited its readers to approach the Characters with these particular moralizing intentions in mind – to encourage them to mine portraits of men with bad timing for signs of instruction and revelation – several other factors helped fan the flames. These readers were aware that Theophrastus was Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum – ‘prince after Aristotle of the Peripatetics’ as one title proudly claims – and, in several cases, that he was an important botanist, metaphysician and philosopher of the senses in his own right.15 They were often further familiar with the study of character as a crucial part of ancient philosophy, with Aristotle’s Ethics having made its way into Latin translation long before.16 Armed with these elements of context, these Latin editors and translators retained additional grounds on which to base a reading of the Characters as providing moral guidance, despite the striking absence of the promised virtues. This did mean, however, that they needed to justify how exactly these bad examples might serve the end of helping to transform a reader’s actions for the better, and it is as a result of this obligation that we find our aesthetic. The first Latin translator to rise to this challenge was the fifteenth-century humanist, Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger, whose c.1434/5 manuscript translation of the Characters was printed in Vienna in July 1517, edited by the humanist Johannes Gremper.17 This Vienna edition is the text’s editio princeps – whether we argue it in terms of primacy or influence18 – not Willibald Pirckheimer’s 1527 edition, as has often been claimed.19 Lapo’s translation of 15 sketches is prefaced by a detailed dedication letter in which we find the first argument for how these examples of vice were thought to hold the potential to change their reader’s behaviour. Lapo’s dedication seems to be addressed to Francesco dal Legname, a fifteenth-century Papal chamberlain.20 In it Lapo sets up the Characters as having a number of fundamental qualities. He declares it to be a text which collects only ‘vices’, he associates it with moral philosophy through a methodological connection with Aristotle, and he indicates that it is a work from which ‘much utility’ can be derived.21 Its utility lies in how it exposes ‘certain images and characteristics’ through which its reader can learn to ‘judge’ others, understand their natures and thus ‘master them with intelligence and wisdom’. Lapo clarifies that this will have particular interest for those who, in his elusive phrase, are ‘in charge of very various cases’, those who, presumably like dal Legname, encounter people of all different types, whose qualities they are entrusted to discern. The Characters, Lapo hopes, is then a text that will not only help its readers to recognize the vices of others, but on the basis of this recognition, learn how to better engage with them. In this way, Lapo’s reading extends an aspect of the moralizing purpose of the Characters that we found in the Proem, where the Characters serves as a guide to the social world.22 Rather than suggesting that by using this guide, the reader will be able to get close to men of the finest sort – a reading that would depend on the representation of virtue – Lapo here inverts the power dynamic, positioning the Characters as advice to a man of the finest sort about how to best deal with those around him who are not good. If in both readings, the Characters is imagined to be a text that helps its reader to better judge others, in Lapo’s version, it only requires bad examples to be able to do so. While Lapo’s reading shares with the Proem a similar scaffold and structure, it further differs in the aim it wishes to bring about: substituting a transformation in the reader’s virtue, for a transformation in the reader’s ability to best handle other people’s vice. The second and rather different approach to the transformative effects of the Characters emerges in the succeeding translation of 1527 published by Pirckheimer in the newly Lutheran Nuremberg. Pirckheimer had received the original Greek manuscript when it was sent to him by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola in September 1515.23 Gianfrancesco wrote to Pirckheimer explaining that he hoped to use the Characters to redeem ‘the debt’ he owed him: a debt which possibly refers to advice that Pirckheimer gave Gianfrancesco the year before on a draft of his De reformandis moribus oratio, a discourse Gianfrancesco intended to address to Pope Leo X on the need for ecclesiastical reform.24 Gianfrancesco was not aware of just how apt his gift of thanks was for the action it seems to be thanking, but several years later, the connection between the Characters and the reforming of mores became very clear to Pirckheimer, when he decided to send his edition of Theophrastus’ text to Albrecht Dürer, explaining how it could help to improve people’s corrupt customs. While the exchange of goods was common between these two friends – with Pirckheimer asking Dürer to pick him up precious stones, Greek manuscripts and birds’ feathers while the artist was in Venice – this seems to have been the only occasion on which Pirckheimer gave Dürer a book.25 Why it was this Greek text that he decided to dedicate to Dürer, what purpose he wanted his new Latin translation to serve and why he chose to do so at this moment in time – so many years after he had received the Characters as a gift from Gianfrancesco – are all questions that remain unanswered.26 Tentative responses, however, are not hard to find, and lie embedded within the text of the dedication. It is by recovering them that we find an alternative orientation to how Theophrastus’ sketches of vice might have moral import. Pirckheimer’s dedication begins by describing Theophrastus as having depicted ‘human feelings’.27 Despite the fact that the ‘feelings’ that Theophrastus represents do not correspond, as we know, to the more glamorous capital vices – the vices that make tragedies, and which present clear problems like Envy or Lust – Pirckheimer insists on taking them very seriously. These feelings, according to Pickheimer, are held in ‘the deepest recesses of the heart’, and are kept there, ‘most of the time’, through law and education.28 They only ‘erupt’ from their concealment if they have ‘occasion to do so’, and this occasion is when ‘the fear of lawgivers and pedagogues, by which they have long been constrained and suppressed has been removed’. At this point, vices burst out into the light of day, ‘and show themselves openly’. If this sentence contains within it an argument of political philosophy – that the fear of the law and educators is needed to keep vices at bay – it is also a contemporary political comment, as for Pirckheimer, ‘the age we live in makes clear beyond all others’ that this principle is ‘wholly true’.29 The problem of ‘the age we live in’, Pirckheimer clarifies, is that ‘an excess of freedom’ has produced ‘an excess of contempt’, that people are no longer afraid of ‘lawgivers and pedagogues’ and are now therefore contemptuously showing their vices ‘openly’.30 This new lack of submission to authority means, as Pirckheimer’s dedication continues, that when lawgivers and pedagogues preach the truth, they are ignored rather than obeyed. The result is that ‘everywhere the truth is preached, yet (…) least performed, just as if the kingdom of God were better brought about by mere words than by works’.31 The preference that this comparison betrays for salvation by ‘works’ rather than by ‘mere words’ exposes Pirckheimer’s ‘disillusionment’, as Jeffrey Ashcroft describes, ‘with the failure (…) of the Lutheran reformation to improve personal and social morality’.32 Pirckheimer had hosted Luther at his house in 1518, and had even been included in the excommunication bull against Luther in 1521, but by the time he wrote this, he had begun to disavow the Reform.33 While for Luther, salvation is ‘instilled in us without our works by grace alone’, Pirckheimer reveals in this phrase that he thought that ‘works’ were still needed to achieve salvation; and that preaching was not enough to bring it about.34 Pirckheimer’s dissatisfaction with Reform meant that he was looking for an alternative approach to moral education to those on offer, and one which would transform people’s actions, not only their beliefs. His options for what this alternative could be were, however, limited. He did not think that the swarm of vices which concerned him could be stopped by lawgivers preaching ‘the truth’, as these lawgivers no longer commanded any authority or inspired any fear. Nor did he think that these vices could be tempered by personal criticism of particular behaviour, as ‘we are all now so sensitive that no one can bear to hear his vices reproved’.35 This is where Theophrastus’ Characters comes in. ‘Nothing’, Pirckheimer says, would be ‘more useful’ for a person who is too sensitive to criticism than reading the kinds of book of which the Characters is the ‘most excellent’ example.36 The Characters, he thought, could get round the problem of being able to reform morals where preaching and critique could not, by virtue of two of its qualities. Firstly, how it delights rather than admonishes its reader, overcoming the need to rely on the now absent political emotion of fear. Secondly, how it encourages a process of corrective self-reflection that indirectly takes place while reading, avoiding any pointed reproach or critique. The Characters is a book, as Pirckheimer continues, ‘in which each of us can contemplate the condition of his own soul as if in a mirror, and by contemplating improve it’.37 These sketches of vice depict characters who you can, tellingly in our contemporary expression, ‘see yourself in’, inviting readers to identify with the vices, and then by a process of contemplation, to rid themselves of the vices that they feel they share. Just as you correct aspects of your body when contemplating your reflection in a mirror, Pirckheimer hopes that the reader will correct aspects of their soul when reading and contemplating a text that is like a mirror. This introduces an unusual aesthetic process for what happens when a reader encounters images of vice. For Pirckheimer, it is not that a reader sees the embodiment of these vices as giving them license to carry them out, as someone like Plato feared. It is rather a process of moral instruction by a written text that works by a mechanism of what we might call negative imitation: where a reader identifies with a character and then decides to avoid the very behaviour that made them similar to this character in the first place. This inverses an aesthetic that was ubiquitous across the newly Lutheran cities: seeing art as the provision of good moral examples to imitate. As Gerald Strauss puts it, in the newly reformed towns, moral indoctrination by good example was not only common but a ‘matter of urgency’.38 If Luther did not think that ‘works’ would achieve salvation, he did think that man was free to choose to follow the righteousness of the civil and moral law, and it was often to these precepts that this indoctrination tended.39 Texts of all genres were published with characters that showed ‘exemplary qualities in every life situation’, civil, moral and familial.40 Pirckheimer’s approach to the Characters then seems to have emerged from this Lutheran reformer tradition, even if it daringly reversed its central tenet, by highlighting the moral use of characters of ordinary vice rather than virtue. If this goes some way to explain what Pirckheimer saw in printing an edition of this Greek text in 1527, we are still left with unravelling why he thought to send it to Dürer. A sense of Pirckheimer’s aims here can be found in two moments of the dedication, where he hints at how far the sketches in the Characters are like written images, and where he intimates that Dürer will be tempted to draw versions of them himself, ending by telling Dürer that ‘if you are not able to imitate it with your own brush, then at least turn it over diligently in your mind’.41 This implicit invitation for Dürer to make images of this text – perhaps to accompany Pirckheimer’s translation – furnishes a possible explanation of the link between the dedication’s argument about the ethical value of the Characters with its addressee.42 If Dürer were to create these images, they would not only hold the same ethically-improving potential as the text by appealing to a public who had otherwise been left unconvinced by admonishing preachers, but given the low literacy rate in Nuremberg, they could have bigger reach.43 This was a power that Nuremberg understood well, having banned all images of Luther in 1524, in the knowledge that political persuasiveness on a large scale lay as much in printed pictures as it did in words.44 Having received the Characters seven months before he died, Dürer has sadly not left any trace of an attempt at sketching a Theophrastan vice, preventing Pirckheimer from achieving this ambition. It is perhaps in part this failure to secure his alternative approach to moral reform that explains why, by 1530, Pirckheimer decided to return to a politics of fear. Writing to Johann Tschertte in the autumn, he concludes that when dealing with ‘the common man’, who has been led astray by preachers, now ‘nothing will avail but fear and tight defence’.45 If Pirckheimer does not achieve his own intentions for his translation of this text, he does leave us with a legacy of a particular reading of the Characters that introduces a new way of finding ethical purchase in these sketches of vice. He also initiates a connection between a moral reading of the Characters and the context of Lutheranism which will reappear again and again across the sixteenth century, with all but three of the century’s subsequent editions being published in Protestant cities or by editors affiliated with the Reformation.46 This may only betray the well-understood connection between Lutheranism and the currents of German classical scholarship, as exemplified by figures such as Philipp Melanchthon, Andreas Osiander, Wolfgang Capito and Jacob Wimpfeling.47 But with this connection presenting a pattern, it is certainly possible that a part of the Characters’ appeal lay in something close to Pirckheimer’s sense that this text embodied a reversed version of the Lutheran aesthetic of moral exemplarity. While the prefaces of these editions are often too brief (or non-existent) to confirm a reading of the Characters that is directly similar to Pirckheimer’s, what we can see is how far these editors also took the Characters to have moral import, by virtue of the choice of texts with which they chose to publish it. In these editions, the Characters is often either encased with texts of moral philosophy or anthologized within volumes that are clearly designed to this effect. We find the former in the 1582 edition by the Protestant exile Claude Auberi published in reformed Basel, where the Characters is sandwiched between Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and selections of Pythagoras collected under the title Fragmenta Ethica. Auberi’s edition draws the Nicomachean Ethics and the Characters close together, by respectively titling the works De Moribus and Morum characteres.48 This connection with Aristotle is something that the 1584 Frankfurt edition follows, by placing the Characters in a Greek volume of Aristotle’s Opera. We find an example of the anthologizing approach in an edition published in 1589 in reformed Geneva, in which the Characters becomes one of four works extracted in the Thesaurus philosophiae moralis, alongside Cebes’ Table, Epictetus’ Enchiridion and the Fragmenta Ethica. In this volume, the reader was invited to search for a moral quality and then follow the pagination to find it elaborated or exemplified, sometimes through the means of a character. This is a structure that the Thesaurus’ editors might have borrowed from the reformer Conrad Gessner’s translations of Books 3 and 4 of Stobaeus’ Anthology which incorporates the Characters as examples of vices described via distinguishing ‘signs’ for the reader to look up in the index, in order to learn how to ‘live according to virtue’.49 While this account furnishes a sense of the scope and scale of this moral reading of the Characters as a text of practical philosophy, as well as a sense that it may have had a particular appeal to a Protestant sensibility, it skates over two editions which expose a third approach to explaining how this set of vices might instruct and inform a reader's behaviour. These are the editions of Leonhard Lycius and Frédéric Morel, respectively published in Leipzig in 1561 and Paris in 1583. These two editions, far apart in time and location, are placed together by virtue of their mutual reliance on a story taken from Spartan history to explain their understanding of the intention underlying Theophrastus’ text. uses a very famous example of the Spartans, who, renowned for the great attention that they used to pay to the education of children, wished that one part of this would be as follows: they used to take their children to see young slaves who were obliged by their masters to get drunk on wine, so that – on seeing the disorderly behaviour brought on by their drunkenness – children would be educated to hate this vice and thereafter live with more moderation and sobriety.51 The educative notion here is that if free Spartan boys are introduced to wine through the sight of the ‘disorderly behaviour’ to which it can lead, they will avoid being tempted by alcohol in the future, associating this vice with shame and slavery rather than freedom and pleasure. The valence given to the representation of this behaviour is of crucial importance, as if the helots seem to be enjoying themselves when they are drunk, the moral instruction that the sight of them is supposed to furnish would be lost. For this educative process to work, it does not only seem crucial that the helots’ drunken behaviour is ‘disorderly’, but that the young boys observing it are completely sober; that they watch this spectacle unfold without sharing in any aspect of the vice by which it has been produced. The moral instruction of the Characters is imagined by both Lycius and Morel to work in a similar way. Young readers, like Gottfried, will perceive vices through their embodiment in Theophrastus’ text. They will then observe that if they possessed these vices themselves, they would be ripe for ridicule, and so will try to avoid adopting them in the future. In the words of Morel, Theophrastus’ ‘characters of vice can help young people’, precisely the same way that ‘it was useful for the Spartan children to see the Helots often drunk on wine’.52 Morel’s insistence on the Characters’ capacity to instruct the young follows the indication in the Proem that the Characters is designed for Theophrastus and Polycles’ sons, and here clearly coheres with Lycius’ decision of to whom to dedicate his translation. This is one of several new aspects that Lycius and Morel introduce in their approach to understanding the moral instruction of the Characters. Not only do they newly emphasize the way in which the Characters is designed to instruct the young; but outline the importance of making the vices seem unattractive, ridiculous or shameful, and furnish a sense that this is a text designed to correct vices that you might have in the future, rather than those which you already share. For Morel, all this justifies printing a book of vices that some might think will provoke more danger than it promises to heal. It is conversely, he argues, by showing these vices that, in his words, readers will learn ‘to avoid whatever crime’.53 It is with Casaubon’s influential translation published in Lyons in 1592 that we start to see a fundamental break with several of the lines we have been tracing in the Latin editions. For the first time in the century, we find an editor hazarding two moral approaches to the text that newly rely on the representation of both vice and virtue. Casaubon, just like the earlier Latin translators, maintains that the Characters is a work that is interested in improving behaviour. Character-writing, he begins in his dedication to Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery and Henri IV of France, is the third and ‘most elegant’ way that the ancients had of instructing mores, along with dogmatic philosophy and exhortatory paraenesis.54 What is special about character-writing as a method of moral instruction is how it proposes to teach ethics through ‘a description of the way men behave, “such as they are”, (…) inclined to this or that virtue or vice’.55 By providing these descriptions of behaviour, Casaubon argues in the Prolegomena, ‘Theophrastus wanted to incite us [proeire] (…) to lead a straight and honest life’, a goal which could not be ‘more worthy of a philosopher’.56 This verb praeire, in its primary sense means, ‘to dictate a formula to someone who must repeat it’, providing a striking image, as Marc Escola notes, for how Casaubon thinks the Characters works on its reader.57 If Theophrastus is providing the reader with characters in the same way a tutor gives a student formulas to be repeated, he is in some way intending the reader to copy what they see, making these sketches ‘veritable models of behaviour’.58 Casaubon makes clear how this mechanism of readerly imitation is to work when he discusses the relationship between the Characters and the genres of poetry, philosophy and history. What is unique about the Characters, in Casaubon’s view, is how far it stands as an ‘intermediate genre between the writings of philosophers and poets’.59 For Casaubon, the philosopher ‘argues between virtue and vice, tells us to follow one and avoid the other’.60 The poet’s approach, on the other hand – similar to the historian’s – does not treat virtues and vices in the abstract, but instead unfolds 'before us the actions’ of ‘those to be followed and those to be avoided’, implicitly inviting us, ‘to examine the lives of other men and to draw from them, for our own account, an example’.61 Being ‘an intermediate genre’ between philosophy and poetry is therefore being between one genre concerned with promoting virtue and dismissing vice; and another concerned with displaying good and bad moral examples, for readers to follow or avoid. If the former accounts for the Characters’ intention, and the latter adds its method, together they work to refer to a text with a collection of good and bad examples which aim, through encouraging imitation or avoidance, to shape a reader’s actions. This is the first moralizing approach to the Characters that Casaubon outlines. He then continues, through a discussion of mimesis, to elaborate a second way in which the Characters is aligned with moral philosophy. Casaubon argues that it is the text’s relationship with mimesis that accounts for why the Characters is a mixed genre between philosophy and poetry rather than philosophy and history. The ‘great and profound difference between the historian and the poet’, he explains, following Book 9 of Aristotle's Poetics, is that ‘the former simply tells the facts as they happened’ whereas the latter can narrate things that ‘may have taken place’.62 The relationship here with mimesis is that the poet’s freedom from the past brings with it one new constraint: by virtue of