Waxing literary
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European humanists became drunk on Ciceronian wine.
Metaphorically drunk, maybe, but also genuinely intoxicated, philologically and rhetorically, by the rediscovery of classical Latin prose. Prose in itself and for itself.
The effect was electrifying. New ways of thinking about words and clauses unlocked new ways of thinking about art, science, nature, ideas. The Renaissance, with all its innovations and forward impetus, was powered by an elaborate act of looking back.
The paradox is delicious and a little embarrassing. Progress arrived disguised as reenactment.
But read the Ciceronian Latin of that era today and something deflates. The prose is almost impenetrable, not because it is complex but because it is performed.
The “Ciceronian period”, that long, architecturally balanced sentence, clause piled upon clause, suspended until its satisfying rhetorical resolution, becomes the point itself, swallowing content whole. Occam’s razor is in the bin, blunt and broken. Elegance curdles into ornament. Baroque arrives centuries early, wearing a garish toga, speaking fake Latin.
Imitation stops being a means and becomes an end. Form colonises content completely. At least for a while.
What survives, paradoxically, is the opening. By enacting the past, reaching back into it with genuine hunger, the Ciceronian humanists cleared a path none of them could see. The kitsch and the generative came bundled together. It’s so embarrassing to our post-Enlightenment sensibility.
The illusion persists. That embellishment signals value. That length implies depth. That baroque vocabulary is a proxy for intelligence.
It is usually the opposite. Big words shrink ideas. Elaborate structures hide the absence of thought. Size is frequently the most reliable indicator of fakery. AI does it best.
We are magpies against our will.