I know and love for their literary works, whom we honor because of their eloquence and wisdom"; it is true that he nevertheless considered it rash to answer this question (from a theological point of view much bolder than the modus irrealis of Petrarch and the Mantuan sequence). And another parallel to Petrarch's "if" is the words of Lactantius about Seneca the Younger: "He could have become a true worshipper of God if someone had shown him the way."8 "Seneca is often ours," said Tertullian,9 and the need to transform the unreal conditional period of Lactantius into a report of fact gave rise to, as is well known, the fictitious correspondence between the Roman Stoic and the Apostle Paul,10 already known to Jerome,11 and popular in the Middle Ages.

What is new in Petrarch's words? Perhaps it is worth paying attention not to the statement itself, but to whom this statement refers?

In fact, Plato and Plutarch, for whom Mavropod prayed, are philosophers, and philosophers who are strictly idealistic, with a strong mystical pathos. Plato taught the contemplation of spiritual reality and, as it were, anticipated many features of medieval sacred authoritarianism, beginning with the utopia of the theocratic rule of "philosophers" who resemble either Western doctors or Orthodox "elders" to whom they were likened by A. F. Losev.12 Plutarch developed a mystical ontology in the dialogue "O ? in Delphi" and demonology, which greatly influenced medieval ideas, in the dialogue "On the Demon of Socrates", and in his moral doctrine13 he really "approached the laws of Christ". Seneca, of whom Tertullian and Lactantius spoke, is a moralist, like Plutarch; restless and divided in himself, he was clearly looking for some new foundations of morality. Finally, Virgil, who proclaimed in the Fourth Eclogue the birth of a universal Saviour and the beginning of a new cycle of time, is the most mystical of the Roman poets. But Petrarch did not speak of a philosopher, not of a moralist, not of a poet, but of an orator, a politician, a lawyer - a lawyer above all ("ortimus omnium patronus", "the most excellent universal lawyer" - this is how Cicero was called by his contemporary Catullus). In comparison with Plato and Plutarch, Seneca and Virgil, Cicero appears as a man completely "of this world", without mystical depths, which can evoke the greatest

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Theft, but not reverence - ???? and there is no reverence in him.

This is how he was judged in quite different times. "As for Cicero," remarks Montaigne,14 "I am of the opinion that, apart from learning, his spirit was not distinguished by his loftiness." And Lactantius, who owed much to Cicero in literary terms and himself earned the nickname of "Christian Cicero" among humanists, wrote:

"In his work on duties, Cicero says that you should not harm anyone, unless you yourself are offended... Just as he himself practiced the dog's biting eloquence, so he demanded that man imitate dogs and snap back in response to offense."15

Cicero's lawyer's, judicial eloquence is a "dog" for Lactantius, because he is eager to bite his opponent; The pragmatic and worldly mediocrity of the Roman orator's moral position, contrasted with Christian ethical maximalism, is expressively connected precisely with the fact that he is an orator and a lawyer. What else can you expect from a solicitor if not a down-to-earth way of thinking!

To this it may be objected that for the epoch of Petrarch, in contrast to the epoch of Montaigne, partly also of Lactantius, and even more so of ours, Cicero was not so much a solicitor, not so much a lawyer and a politician, in general not so much himself, Cicero, as a mirror in which they contemplated the as yet inaccessible, but so attractive Plato. Already in Lactantius Cicero is called "our first imitator of Plato"16; But this still sounds not without irony. Less than a century after Lactantius, Augustine, for all his brilliant erudition, was not inclined to read Greek and thus anticipated the linguistic isolation of medieval Latin culture, turned to philosophical, and through them to religious interests under the influence of Cicero's dialogue Hortensius; recalling this in his Confessions, he reproaches ordinary connoisseurs who praise Cicero's language and do not notice his mind (pectus).17 "Plato is praised by the best authorities, Aristotle by the majority," Petrarch observes,18 and in this context the "best authorities" (maiores) are above all Cicero and Augustine. The cult of Cicero is taken from Petrarch in the same brackets with the cult of Plato and together with it opposed to the cult of Aristotle - a combination so characteristic of the Renaissance as a whole and

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universal in its historical and cultural significance. Thus, let us assume that Petrarch's Cicero is "the first imitator of Plato", the sage who led the young Augustine to Neoplatonism, and ultimately to Christianity. Behind Petrarch are the authorities of Augustine and (with a reservation) of Lactantius - again, characteristic of the Renaissance, an appeal to patristicism, i.e. to Christian antiquity, against scholasticism. Everything seems to fall into place.

However, with Cicero - the sage as a fact of Petrarch's consciousness - the situation is not so simple. To begin with, it was Petrarch who, in 1345, i.e., 22 years before he wrote the pamphlet On His Own Ignorance and Many Others, opened Cicero's correspondence in Verona, and was astonished to see before him not a sage at all, but, as he himself put it, "an eternally restless and anxious old man" who "chose as his lot a constant struggle and useless enmity"19. As for the authority of patristicism, Lactantius, as Petrarch was well aware, not only exposed Cicero for an insufficiently elevated approach to the problem of revenge and forgiveness. He, Lactantius, posed a question that was quite consonant with the criticism of Cicero as a thinker in modern and modern times: the question of the seriousness or non-seriousness of Cicero's attitude to philosophy as such. Lactantius' criticism starts from a comparison of two statements of the Roman orator. In the Tusculan Discourses, Cicero exclaims: "O philosophy, the guide of life!" ("O vitaephilosophiadux!") 20- But in one of his lost works it was said: "The dictates of philosophy must be known, but one should live according to civil custom (civiliter)"21. This transformation of the precepts of the "guide of life" into an object of purely theoretical, purely intellectual knowledge, which does not bind to anything, does not interfere with living the same life as all other Roman citizens who are not philosophers, evokes in Lactantius an energetic protest. "What, then, do you think philosophy is exposed in ignorance and futility?" 22 If philosophy does not transform our way of living, it is not a matter of life, but of literature, and there is no reason to call it "the guide of life."

But the position of Cicero denounced by Lactantius is not the product of thoughtlessness, but precisely a position that is thought out and consistent; its very inconsistency (inconstantia, as Lactantius puts it)

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