DR May-5

The Renaissance scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam commences his incisive treatise The Ciceronian (1528) with a depiction of the paralyzed linguistic toil of one Nosoponus, whose tormenting perfectionism leads to an almost complete breakdown in productivity. Within the framework of a Socratic dialogue, two seasoned rhetoricians—Bulephorus and Hypologus—endeavour to rescue Nosoponus from his obsessive allegiance to Ciceronian purity. The man is portrayed as laboring for interminable hours, revising endlessly, just to pen a mundane note requesting the return of borrowed books. So consuming is his ideal of linguistic perfection that he relegates his writing to the solitary silence of night, believing only then can he escape distraction. Yet even in these ideal conditions, a single sentence demands an entire night, and ultimately he abandons the endeavor, suffocated by his own impossible standards.

In an amusing juxtaposition to our present age, such a dilemma finds an almost instant solution in large language models (LLMs), which now generate fluent, socially optimized communication in mere seconds. When Nosoponus's anguished message is transcribed into GPT-4, the result is immediate and almost disconcertingly casual: “Hey [Friend’s Name], Hope you’re doing well! I just realised I never got those books back that I lent you a while ago…” The message is affable, polite, and utterly devoid of torment—almost banal in its breeziness. However, the 16th century had its own solution: the Erasmian model of humanist education, a regime of intellectual conditioning so rigorous and effective that it could train its disciples to extemporize letters of any length, on any subject, with both elegance and speed.

Rabelais, Erasmus’s contemporary and intellectual foil, understood this method as a kind of proto-automation—an art of fluent textual generation. His satirical characters, endowed with humanist training, exhibit prodigious linguistic competence but often communicate little more than the brilliance of their education. The language becomes an emblem of training, not meaning. Consider Rabelais’s ornate sentence: “No more just cause for pain can arise among men than if, from where they should in all fairness expect gracious benevolence, they receive travail and injury,” or its AI equivalent: “It is profoundly disheartening when those entrusted with our care instead subject us to mistreatment.” Both strike us more for their verbal finesse than moral force.

Latin, the lingua franca of Renaissance intellectuals, was acquired not through organic fluency but through painstaking imitation of antiquity. The emulation of Cicero—undisputed paragon of classical prose—became a dogmatic enterprise. Ciceronians insisted on a monolithic reverence, imitating Cicero exclusively, while eclectics, such as Erasmus, drew from a broader corpus. In The Ciceronian, Bulephorus gradually coaxes Nosoponus toward eclecticism, arguing even Cicero would not have rigidly imitated Cicero were he alive today.

Central to this stylistic training was the commonplace book—a curated anthology of eloquent turns of phrase, organized thematically, functioning simultaneously as thesaurus and generative aid. While the eclectic drew upon diverse sources to enrich composition, the Ciceronian transformed the tool into a doctrinal checkpoint: every phrase, every verb conjugation had to be textually validated by Cicero himself. For Nosoponus, the creative act collapses beneath the weight of orthodoxy.

Erasmus, in contrast, fostered fluency by immersing students in imaginative exercises. He tasked them with composing letters and speeches “in character,” as historical or mythological figures. A student might write as Agamemnon rallying troops, or Menelaus forgiving Helen. This pedagogical method—deeply analogous to the prompting techniques used today with LLMs—trained students not just to write, but to simulate voice, motive, and rhetorical posture.

Word Count: 598
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: ~17

Meanings of Difficult Words:

  • Polemical – involving strongly critical or controversial writing or speech.

  • Paralysing – rendering one incapable of movement or action.

  • Breeziness – casual or relaxed attitude.

  • Lingua franca – a common language used among speakers of different native tongues.

  • Emulation – effort to match or surpass, often through imitation.

  • Corpus – a body or collection of written texts.

  • Orthodoxy – authorized or generally accepted theory or practice.

  • Doctrine – a belief or set of beliefs held and taught by a group.

  • Vituperating – blaming or insulting in strong language.

  • Rhetorician – someone skilled in the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing.

 

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