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The journey of the first day was performed with very little sense of fatigue; the second day brought me to Lichfield, without much lassitude; but I am afraid that I could not have borne such violent agitation for many days together. Tell Dr. Heberden, that in the coach I read Ciceronianus which I concluded as I entered Lichfield.
In a letter of 13 October 1527, to a professor at Toledo, we find the ébauche of the Ciceronianus. In addition to the haters of classic studies for the sake of orthodox belief, writes Erasmus, 'lately another and new sort of enemies has broken from their ambush. These are troubled that the bonae literae speak of Christ, as though nothing can be elegant but what is pagan.
The literary manners of the age certainly lacked urbanity, and of all living controversialists there was none more truculent than Julius Cæsar Scaliger, who had begun his career as a man of letters by a fierce assault upon Erasmus with regard to his Ciceronianus, a leading case amongst the quarrels of authors.
The keen sensitiveness to opposition was seated very deeply with Erasmus. And he could never forbear irritating others into opposing him. Erasmus turns against the excesses of humanism: its paganism and pedantic classicism Ciceronianus: 1528 It brings him new enemies The Reformation carried through at Basle He emigrates to Freiburg: 1529 His view concerning the results of the Reformation
As that idiom was no longer in any country the vulgar speech, they all stood on a level with each other; yet a citizen of old Rome might have smiled at the best Latinity of the Germans and Britons; and we may learn from the Ciceronianus of Erasmus, how difficult it was found to steer a middle course between pedantry and barbarism.
The Ciceronianus is a masterpiece of ready, many-sided knowledge, of convincing eloquence, and of easy handling of a wealth of arguments.
But six years after the publication of the Ciceronianus of Erasmus, the edition of Cicero's Opera published in Basel in 1534 still incorporates the Ad Herennium, and Thomas Wilson in England owes most of his first book and part of the second of his Arte of Rhetorique to its anonymous author, whom he believed to be Cicero.
The Ciceronianus of Erasmus testifies that by the next century the scholarship of the renaissance had discovered that the Ad Herennium was not from the pen of Cicero, and that the De inventione was considered apologetically by its famous author, who wrote his De oratore to supersede the more youthful treatise.
Erasmus in drawing Nosoponus had evidently, in the main, alluded to one who could no longer reply: Christopher Longolius, who had died in 1522. The core of the Ciceronianus is where Erasmus points out the danger to Christian faith of a too zealous classicism. He exclaims urgently: 'It is paganism, believe me, Nosoponus, it is paganism that charms our ear and our soul in such things.
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