From Self-Effacement to Sprezzatura: Modesty and Manipulation

Abstract

In the fourth book of the anonymous Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90s BC) — formerly attributed to Cicero and the most popular Latin rhetorical treatise of the early modern period — the author attempts to justify the unusual procedure of including excerpts of his own poetry as exempla of the rhetorical stratagems he describes. Unlike George Puttenham, who was to use this technique unabashedly in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), he must defend this decision because the authors of the Greek rhetorical handbooks that precede him typically employed conventional literary examples rather than proffering their own creative efforts: ‘And their first ground is that in doing so they are prompted by modesty, because it seems a kind of ostentation not to be content to teach the art, but to appear desirous themselves of creating examples artificially.’¹ To this argument the author of the Ad Herennium provides a complex and vigorous rejoinder:

First, then, let us beware lest the Greeks offer us too childish an argument in their talk about modesty. For if modesty consists in saying nothing or writing nothing, why do they write or speak at all?… It is as if some one should come to the Olympic games to run, and having taken a position for the start, should accuse of impudence those who have begun the race — should himself stand within the barrier and recount to others how Ladas used to run, or Boiscus in the Isthmian games. These Greek rhetoricians do likewise. When they have descended into the race-course of our art, they accuse of immodesty those who put in practice the essence of the art; they praise some ancient orator, poet, or literary work, but without themselves daring to come forth into the stadium of rhetoric. I should not venture to say so, yet I fear that in their very pursuit of praise for modesty they are impudent.

(IV.ii.3)

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

Francis Bacon, ‘Of Vain-glory’ from Essays (1597)