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In our concluding lecture, Dr. Fleming illustrates Cicero’s inspiration of Renaissance Humanism. Petrarch’s reintroduction of Cicero into the lives of literate Italians helped spawn the cultural movement, frequently ill-defined or misrepresented in our own day, that we call the Renaissance. Cicero’s works and biography were a central mediation for Petrarch, who spent years contemplating the great Roman’s life and reinterpreting the great Pagan’s public virtues with a Christian sensibility, eager to incorporate the outstanding virtues of the Roman world in a medieval, Christian context. The Renaissance, our speaker emphasizes, was not an individualist revolt against medieval Christianity, but a strengthening of the Christian world through the rediscovery of the treasures of the Rome and Greece.
Cicero’s record of confronting corruption and conspiracy in the Roman Republic translated well into the cunning necessary in the city-states of Renaissance Italy. Dante, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, St. Thomas More, and other men of the period used Cicero’s teachings and rhetorical style in their public lives, and also found a melancholy kinship with him in their times of disfavor, persecution, and exile. Cicero’s influence with these men made his Latin works the key texts of instruction in Latin in the West, which gave every classically educated student a fellowship with the Renaissance and ancient Rome.
Dr. Fleming’s gallery of Cicero’s best students ends with the great Edmund Burke, whom the great Dr. Johnson compared to the Roman. Burke’s frequent quotations and references to the ancient teacher show Cicero’s enduring influence over the West into the modern age. Although Cicero’s own life ended in execution and ignominy, his legacy was reborn and found new life in Christian Europe.
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