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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for the Middle Ages, and for the Renaissance, and further, up to the era of the Industrial Revolution.25

Significant is not the same as unchanging. However, until the paradigm was abolished as a principle, all changes proceeded from it, correlated, and measured against it. We must see the constant clearly precisely in order to see the novelty of the Renaissance.

The Greek paradigm has a very definite structure, and this structure does not resemble the image that arises behind the usual rubrication of our expositions of the general history of culture, including the Greek, where "literature", "art", "philosophy" and "science" indifferently follow each other as items of a single questionnaire offered to different epochs to fill out.

What we call "culture" was called by the Greeks ???????, "education" proper, (that which is transmitted and instilled in the child) ????. In the center of ??????? - two forces that are in constant conflict, but also in contact, in confrontation, but also in mutual correlation: the education of thought and the education of the word - philosophy, which seeks truth, and rhetoric, which seeks persuasiveness. They are closer to each other than we imagine: they have a common root in an archaic culture of thought and words, and even in the phenomenon of sophistry they showed an inseparable unity.26 That was why they were constantly quarrelling. Each of them strove to restore the inseparability of thought and word, truth and persuasiveness on its own basis, i.e., to absorb its rival and absorb it into itself. Philosophy claimed to be, along with all the others, "true" rhetoric: hence the rhetorical studies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists. Rhetoric claimed to be "true" philosophy: we have already seen that for Cicero a true orator and a true philosopher are one and the same, and in the representatives of the Greek "second sophistry" of the second and fourth centuries we find many similar declarations. In other words, philosophy and rhetoric are not parts of the culture of the ancient type, not its "provinces" and "domains" that could demarcate and quietly exist each within its own boundaries, entering only into light border disputes. No, the ancient type of culture gives both philosophy and rhetoric the opportunity to simply identify themselves with culture as a whole, to declare themselves the principle of culture. Face kul

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There are two tours: these are "paideia" under the sign of philosophy and "paideia" under the | a sign of rhetoric. Duality is inherent in the very basis of the cultural structure created by the Greeks and is reproduced together with this warehouse itself. The victory of the "arts" over the "authors" in the transition from the twelfth to the thirteenth century, the revenge of the "authors" in the action of the humanists against scholasticism, the dispute between Pico della Mirandola and Ermolao Barbaro - all these complex events in the history of ideas, each of which has its own ideological content, fit into the framework of the old conflict between philosophy and rhetoric, although, of course, they cannot be reduced to this dispute.

Thus, philosophy and rhetoric are the very heart of the culture of the ancient type, and in this heart lives a reviving contradiction. But the Greeks would have hesitated to include the visual arts, which for us undoubtedly enter into the concept of "spiritual culture," in the concept of their ???????. As Plutarch famously remarked, not a single "capable" young man ("capable" of what? - of course, for activity in the sphere of intellectual and verbal culture or in the sphere of civil life), admiring the masterpieces of Phidias and Polycleitus, would himself want to be either Phidias or Polycleitus.28 It is curious that in Lucian's autobiographical work "On Dreaming, or the Life of Lucian" it is precisely the personification of ??????????? ????? ("Sculptor's Craft") - and ???????. The first refers in her speech to the names of Phidias and Polycleitus, Myron and Praxiteles29; but only the second is "culture" (according to Lucian's context, rhetorical culture).