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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is consistent. His philosophy is philosophy under the sign of rhetoric, as he himself speaks quite emphatically about it through the mouth of Crassus in the third book of his dialogue "On the Orator":

"Philosophy is not like other sciences. In geometry, for example, or in music, what can a person who has not studied these sciences do? Only to keep silent, so that he would not be considered crazy. And philosophical questions are open to every shrewd and sharp mind, which knows how to find plausible answers to everything and expound them in skilful and smooth speech. And then the most ordinary orator, even if he is not very educated, but who has experience in speeches, will beat the philosophers with this simple experience of his and will not allow himself to be offended and despised. And if there ever be someone who can either speak for and against any subject according to the model of Aristotle, and compose two opposite speeches according to his prescriptions for every matter, or argue against any proposed topic according to the model of Arcesilaus and Carneades, and if with this scientific training he combines oratorical experience and training, then this man will be a true orator, a perfect orator, the only orator worthy of the name."23

Cicero decisively annexed philosophy for rhetoric, subordinating it not so much to the professional needs of rhetoric as to the fundamental rhetorical attitude of the mind.

That is why it is so important that Petrarch, and after him the humanists, chose Cicero as their "leader", patron and idol; that the question of Lactantius to Cicero was generally removed for them.24 They are inside Cicero's position.

What does this position look like in a broad historical perspective, with an eye to the very antiquity that humanists thought so much about?

The Greeks created not only their own culture - concrete, historically unique, with its own specific characteristics and local limitations; At the same time, in a twofold creative process, they created a paradigm of culture in general. This paradigm, having renounced the Greek "soil" as early as the Hellenistic era, and the obligatory connection with the Greek language in Rome, remained significant

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