Laudator Temporis Acti

James Hankins, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), p. xviii, with notes on p. 532:

Moreover, learning to read difficult texts and write and speak in Latin was a foundation, or as the humanists would say, a doorway.⁹ Once you passed through the doorway you would find Livy and Sallust, Cicero and Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle waiting to engage you in conversation.¹⁰ It was the lifelong companionship of the ancients that was supposed to do you good, not the mastery of irregular verbs. Real education did not end with grammar school. It was supposed to go on for your entire life. As Cicero wrote in the Pro Archia—a speech which became a kind of manifesto for humanists—it was supposed to enrich and inform your entire life.¹¹ The concept of institutio for the humanists did not only mean learning to read old books in school. It meant absorbing the moral and intellectual formation human beings needed to live successfully in civilized societies.

9 Platina writes of grammar in his oration De laudibus bonarum artium, ed. Vairani, 110, "for it contains the stone, the wood and the cement for building the edifice of the humanities." The wider point was already made by Seneca in Epistulae Morales 88.20.

10 A metaphor used by Marsilio Ficino when describing the riches of the Platonic corpus; see Hankins 2003–2004a, 201–202.

11 Cicero, Pro Archia 16: "These studies nurture adolescence, delight old age, embellish good times, offer refuge and solace in bad, are delightful at home and no obstacle in public life, they accompany us through the night-time, when travelling and in the country." For the importance of the Pro Archia in the humanist conception of education, see Chapter 2, page 46.