BOOK: Giovanni Pontano, "The Virtues and Vices of Speech"

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: The Virtues and Vices of Speech. Edited and translated by G. W. Pigman III. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 87. Harvard University Press, 2019. 9780674987500. xxxvii + 497 pp.

When I saw the title of this book, I wasn't quite sure what to expect; and now, having read it, I'm still not quite sure what (or whom) exactly it's supposed to be good for. I guess I was naive in hoping for something a little more practical, good rhetorical techniques or something like that. Instead, Pontano mostly stays on the level of vague generalizations and spends a great deal of time saying things which, in retrospect at least, seem blindingly obvious and (therefore) quite useless.

On the subject of virtues and vices, he is keen on the idea famously promoted by Aristotle, namely that a virtue is a mean between two extremes, which are vices. For example, if you always (pretend to) agree with your interlocutor, that makes you a yes-man and a sycophant, which is a vice; if you never agree with your interlocutor, you're being contentious and trying to pick a quarrel, which is also a vice; what is virtuous is to be at the mean between these two extremes, and agree or disagree with your interlocutor as appropriate.

You can of course apply this same line of thinking along many different axes and always come up with a virtue and two opposing vices. Another example: speaking too little is a vice (taciturnity), speaking too much is also a vice (loquaciousness), somewhere between them is a virtuous mean. Pontano spends about half of the present volume (books 1 and 2) doing this sort of things with all the zeal of a 19th-century entomologist, giving names to all the resulting virtues and vices (the rich vocabulary of Latin serves him well here, occasionally he ventures to coin a new (neo-)Latin word, and once or twice he has to admit that the virtue he's talking about has no suitable name, which however doesn't stop him from continuing to talk about it), sometimes subdividing one of them into several sub-types, and then writing a page or two about each of them: this is what liars are like, this is what dissimulators are like, this is what flatterers are like, etc., etc., et-bloody-neverending-c. (“Book two, chapter eight: on the four classes of ostentatious men.”)

You might say that speaking to excess is bad, period, but Pontano treats us to separate chapters on the verbose (1.19), the loquacious (1.20) and the triflers (1.21), as if describing these fine differences and giving them names really helps anyone in any way. I wonder if any trifler was ever cured of his vice after reading the section dedicated to it in Pontano's book. I did, however, learn one or two useful things from all this entomologizing; for example, he makes an interesting distinction between simulation and dissimulation: “we simulate things that are in no way true, that we ourselves have neither done nor said [. . .] we dissimulate things that have in fact been said or done, just as if they were not said or done” (2.7.5).

Pontano's ideal in describing these various virtues and vices is the sort of conversation that one imagines in connection with educated, urbane and presumably rather well-off people (Pontano himself moved in some pretty high circles while working for the king of Naples, after all); elegant, charming, and careful not to offend. Pleasant and affable conversation, he believes, restores a person's spirits after a day full of cares and labours. Cheap jokes and rustic buffoonery get no praise from him. He summarizes his ideal in one word: wittiness (facetitas;* 1.12.8–10), and this is what the second half of the work (books 3–6) is mostly about.

[*This was also new and interesting to me: in English, facetious usually means flippant, treating serious things with inappropriate levity, but it seems that in Latin its sense was wider and not so negative.]

I suppose his ideal type of witty conversation has its uses, but it mostly just leaves me bored. Occasionally (e.g. 4.3, 4.11, 5.2, 6.2 — a few long chapters) he quotes examples of what he regards as witty remarks and anecdotes, some about his own contemporaries (a few from his own family: 5.2.41, 5.2.45–48, 5.4, 6.4.15), many taken from ancient literature (especially Plautus' comedies), but they hardly ever moved me to smile, and never to laugh. I guess I need stronger stuff than that — but then who wouldn't, after a couple decades of wallowing in all the vilest muck that the internet has to offer?

But I shouldn't sound too critical of Pontano. He chose a difficult subject. I don't think you can simply teach someone to be witty; there must be some kind of talent involved — though perhaps Pontano would disagree with that: after all, it is or was generally believed that the art of rhetoric, unlike that of poetry, can be taught and learned, and he might say that his ideal of wit is much closer to rhetoric than to poetry in terms of what it requires from the person who practices it. In any case, he makes a very decent effort; after stating some (supposedly) witty anecdote, he usually tries to give a brief explanation of what makes it work — or, to use his phrasing, what “place” it comes from (apparently “place” — Greek topos, Latin locus — was a technical term in rhetoric); and I am not one of those people who think that analyzing a joke stops it from being funny; but still, after reading his explanations, I generally felt none the wiser as to how I would go about using them to come up with witty remarks in my own life. But then, that is more likely due to my own lack of wit than due to his explanations being bad.

Miscellaneous

I was interested to see that the original Latin title of this work is De sermone, meaning “on conversation” or “on speech” (n. 11 on p. xxiv). Clearly this word is the source of the English word sermon, but its meaning must have been narrowed down at some point during the borrowing.

Some good news on a semi-related note: we've had a volume of Pontano's dialogues in the ITRL a while ago, in 2012 (see my post about it), and I was wondering when the next volumes would finally appear; well, it appears that they will be ready soon (“in press”, n. 11 on p. xxiv). In fact I now see that they are now also mentioned on the HUP website as due to appear in September this year (vol. 2, 3).

There's a funny anecdote about a man who was addicted to lawsuits; upon being asked how they were going, “he replied that they were going well [. . .] but that he was dragging out two or three because otherwise he would waste away in leisure” (1.18.4) :))

The famous line about man being wolf to man is apparently from Plautus; Pontano quotes it in 2.12.3 here, in the form “Man is a wolf and not a man to man”. According to the translator's note, it is from the Asinaria, line 495.

Pontano mentions the well-known observation that truth hides at the bottom of a well (2.14.4) and attributes it to Democritus. (According to translator's note 35 on pp. 442–3, Democritus said that “truth is in the depths” and the well only appears in later authors, such as Lactantius and Isidore of Seville.) I was mostly familiar with this observation because of Gérôme's beautiful painting, Truth Coming Out of Her Well (and see also what happens next).

A nice pun from 3.17.15: Alfonso, king of Naples, who was very fond of dogs and hunting, asked Antonio Panormita whether someone in Naples had “published something on the nature of dogs”; Panormita recommended to him a certain gentleman as an expert on dogs, since “for over forty years he has kept such company with this kind of animal that even at night he has slept with a little bitch [canicula]” :)))