Patrician sages and the humanist cynic: Francesco Filelfo and the ethics of world citizenship.

1. INTRODUCTION

In the Laudatio Florentine urbis of 1404, the humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) speaks of Florence as the most cosmopolitan of cities, using terms that glorify and idealize a city that was an adopted home for him and many other fifteenth-century Italian intellectuals. Of course, the social and political realities of the Florentine patria were far more complex than his oration acknowledges, but nevertheless his praise suggests an unmistakably cosmopolitan conception of the city: "All those who are driven into exile, whether they have been forced out by civil discord or expelled because of envy, restore their lives in Florence, which uniquely serves as a sanctuary and place of safety for all. There is now no man in all of Italy who would not think of himself as belonging to two countries: as a private man, to his native homeland, but as a public man, to the city of Florence. So it follows from this that Florence is a homeland for all and the safest of harbors in all of Italy, a place to which everyone, everywhere, takes refuge when it is necessary, and where they are greeted with the greatest goodwill of her inhabitants and with tremendous kindness ... no one should think themselves lacking a homeland while the city of the Florentines remains standing." (1) More than twenty years later, Bruni echoes these sentiments in his funeral oration for the Florentine patriot Nanni Strozzi, but the terms of praise for the city have become centrifugal rather than centripetal. If in the earlier paean to the city Florence was conceived of as a refuge for all the world's people, now Florence exports its influence to the far corners of the globe in a fashion that, if not quite imperialistic, is certainly expansionist: "Our city has a population of citizens that is truly so large that, in addition to the great abundance living just in the city, an almost infinite cohort of citizens is to be observed spread out through the whole globe.... There is no place so remote, none so unfrequented, in which some Florentine citizen does not dwell.... Hence if the whole mass of our citizens who reside elsewhere, spread out variously over the whole globe, were joined to the great number of them residing here in Florence, a nearly infinite, innumerable mass of people would create a great, resounding presence that would not compare to any other Italian city." (2) Bruni's conception of the city of Florence is in both cases a flattering one, even though each passage emphasizes different qualities. If in the first passage Florence is a compassionate commonwealth welcoming the abject and the exiled, and if in the second Florence's citizens have mastered the art of expanding the city's influence, in both passages the city resonates with power. But is there also a cosmopolitan gesture that lurks beneath this portrait of the civic ideology of Florence, a gesture that transcends the chauvinism and pride that Bruni had for Florentine libertas? Is there an opportunity here for Florentines to think of themselves as citizens of the world and to transcend their local spheres of interest, to rise above the factionalism that was an increasingly difficult political problem by the time of the Strozzi oration?

The filiations and affiliations of both Florentines and non-Florentine residents of Florence created, in practice, a far more tangled web of classes, factions, interest groups, neighborhoods, and families than Bruni's simple dyad of public and private identities implies, and historians of the past several decades have carefully analyzed the way in which social relations were strongly marked by codes of behavior that acknowledged the many ties that bound individuals to one another in relationships of dependency and interdependency. (3) Imagining Florence as a modern Athens, Bruni's remarks are valid insofar as they indicate an amelioration of the Florentine polity and an expansion of its political power impossible in Dante's time, when the world of civic politics was more likely to render one an exile than a stakeholder, and where factionalism prevented Florence from having the sort of cosmopolitan status toward which Bruni aspires; they neglect, however, the vigorous play of competing interests that characterized a society still closely bound by feudal loyalties, even if we are careful to distinguish a more modern culture of patronage and interest groups from its feudal antecedents. (4) Put simply, Bruni's emergent public sphere--a place in which both native and nonnative Florentines could pursue their public identities as distinct from their private interests--was more a product of his literary imagination than a reflection of Florentine realities, where the interests of intransigently private sensibilities continued to determine much of the political life of the period, even as a public commitment to civic values dominated the official rhetoric of Florentine leaders. (5)

The extent to which these passages represent Bruni's genuine sentiments or merely rhetorical claims devoid of any personal commitment does not in this instance really matter: what matters is that Bruni's idealistic claims echoed in the minds of other humanists. For there were others who, like Bruni, came to Florence as outsiders and shared a progressive, classicizing outlook, who were eager to participate in the kind of civic definition that Bruni's image of Florence, however quixotic, represents. An alternative politics and an alternative conception of citizenship--less glowing than Bruni's, perhaps, but no less energetically pursued in the interests of a still incipient public sphere--were not unthinkable, even if they were only imaginable within a cultural and social context of patronage, sponsored by a class of aristocrat oligarchs (the ottimati) that only in hindsight can be characterized as residual and whose value system had been challenged by that of the emergent class of novi cives so frequently mentioned in the period of the late Trecento and early Quattrocento. In the crisis of political legitimacy that emerged in Florence in the 1430s, Leonardo Bruni managed to remain, at least officially, sufficiently detached from the competing interests of the ottimati and the more popular Medicean party to weather the political storm; recent evidence, however, suggests that his ideological leanings were with the aristocrats, and it is not surprising to find that his friendship with Francesco Filelfo, the leading intellectual of the patrician oligarchs, remained strong throughout the 1430s and '40s. (6)

When Francesco Filelfo arrived in Florence in 1429 as a well-paid teacher at the Florentine studio, he did so under the auspices of several of the leading patrons of the Florentine Republic, including both Palla Strozzi (1372-1462) and Cosimo de' Medici (1389-1464). (7) His Florentine experiences, which find expression in his letters, satires, epigrams, orations, and his important dialogue on exile, the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, left a mark on his thought no less indelible than the scar that he received in 1432 at the hands of Medici partisans, and they were a catalyst that helped to shape his remarkable investigation of the ethical consequences that, to his mind, followed from the social and political transformations wrought in Florence in the 1430s by the rise of Cosimo de' Medici and his regime. In Filelfo's work we can detect not only the recovery of the ancient philosophical concept of the sage's cosmopolitan identity as a putatively unaffiliated citizen of the world, expressed in far greater detail than in Bruni's merely suggestive remarks on Florentine citizenship; more importantly, we encounter an analysis of the consequences for civil society of the ethical choices that are made when private interests are superimposed upon the public good, and when local networks of power and influence determine a society's direction and values, rather than a more universally construed--and, ideally, disinterested--human community. In Filelfo's work the forces of a historical dialectic whose long-range outcome would shape the ethical direction of modern life, a dialectic in which the classical terms honestas and utilitas waged a final and decisive battle, were recorded in an extensive, even prolific, manner. (8) Filelfo may not be the most profound thinker of the fifteenth century, but he observed widely and for an extensive period of time the conflicts and structural tensions of Florentine society. Attention to the moral dimensions of his work is therefore rewarding for the intellectual historian eager both to define cultural values and their vicissitudes and to determine the extent of opposition to the values that came to dominate Florentine society under Medicean leadership.

Filelfo's capacity to sift through the events of his time in order to evaluate their moral dimensions was not unique among fifteenth-century intellectuals, but his ability to interpret these experiences through the ethical categories of Stoicism and Cynicism makes his work especially valuable. Aided by his reading of classical texts, and further galvanized by his use of satire and invective, Filelfo's ethical sensibility evolved during a crisis of political legitimacy in Florence that allowed him to witness and then expose, well before Machiavelli, the methods of what would later be called instrumental reason, a philosophical construct that has been posited by a number of thinkers to explain the distinctive and, by now, normative ethics of the modern world. (9) Filelfo's moral imagination envisioned Florence's political life in the 1430s and '40s as undergoing a dramatic psychomachia whose chief actors--Cosimo de' Medici and Palla Strozzi--respectively embodied the mutually antagonistic values of utilitas and honestas, and he expressed no doubt that the outcome of the struggle favored the former. That he anachronistically, and perhaps naively, imagined the force of such a shift in ethical orientation could be curbed simply by recalling his world to the aristocratic values of the past, informed by appropriate classical exempla, should in no way diminish the force of his analysis. Casting himself in the role of an ancient Cynic challenging the emergent values of Medicean Florence, Filelfo provides the intellectual historian with a special challenge, because although the personal choices that he made in order to survive as a humanist intellectual may sometimes contradict the opinions that he framed, he nevertheless wrote with an uncanny prescience and foresaw the consequences that would attend the defeat of what Alasdair MacIntyre has termed virtue ethics. In so doing he fulfilled a cultural function analogous to the disaffected Cynic philosopher of antiquity, whose rebellious calling to "deface the currency" finds an analogue in Filelfo's excoriation of the Florentine social milieu and his championing of the exiles who departed Florence in 1434 in the wake of Cosimo's return to Florence and rise to undisputed power. Despite the distracting presence of the many personal vendettas that Filelfo waged along the way, his career as an author in the 1430s and '40s is arguably the single greatest example of the practice of political dissent in the Quattrocento, certainly equalling the disruptive scholarly interventions of Lorenzo Valla (1405-57), whose works generally challenged institutional dogma more than specific political regimes.

Moreover, the case of Filelfo is especially interesting because, despite literary history's portrayal of him as among the most sycophantic of humanists, a careful review of many of his engagements with his patrons and audiences reveals a personality that was far from compliant or obsequious on many occasions: indeed, for every stroke of flattery and deference that Filelfo used in his dealings with powerful elites, we can find in equal measure counterstrokes of defiance, instances of obstreperous reaction, and, occasionally, even unguarded utterances that we have come to speak of in the idiom of the modern world as moments of speaking truth to power. Filelfo used these freedoms of speech, and spoke quite often of Cynic axioms concerning freedom of speech (or parrhesia) in his relationships both with patrons to whom he remained loyal and powerful figures whom he wished to attack and disparage. There may even have been a pathological streak of self-destructiveness in his personality, and during his Florentine period he certainly experienced the immediate dangers that uncensored speech could bring to an author in the early fifteenth century: this was a man, after all, who in 1436 faced the punishment of having his tongue cut out should he ever have been found in the environs of Florence. (10) And this threatened punishment was only the last stage of a six-year struggle with Medici partisans that included a temporary dismissal from his teaching post, as well as many other humiliations suffered because of his outspoken and caustic relations with other humanist competitors.

What will, I hope, seem clear from the evidence given below is that if Filelfo ever learned the art of being a good courtier, he learned it father late in his career. While in the case of much humanist discourse it is difficult to penetrate beneath the official, public transcript of authors, in Filelfo's case (and also in many instances in the work of Lorenzo Valla) his emotional incontinence and lability can assist us by disclosing much of the hidden transcript of his experiences (11)--experiences that were no doubt shared by many other humanists as they negotiated careers that balanced, on the one hand, the sort of bracing intellectual autonomy that any substantial reading of classical literature and philosophy would have inculcated in them, with, on the other hand, dutiful and compliant service in their roles as stylistic arbiters and composers of the discourses of their patrons. We need also to grant Filelfo a degree of credibility somewhat greater than that awarded to other humanists, insofar as his status as a noncitizen granted him, at least initially, a degree of objectivity that other witnesses to the events of the 1430s did not possess. He could, after all, measure his Florentine experiences against his time spent in Bologna, or in Venice, or even in Constantinople. Filelfo's status as an outsider was one of which he was acutely conscious, for shortly after his arrival in Florence he commented to Georgio Scholarius that he felt like a "learned stranger" who had nothing in common with the "difficult" Florentines. (12) On another level, his experiences of itinerancy as a cultural outsider allowed him to entertain, if only as a shaping fantasy, a conception of himself as a public intellectual, or citizen of the world belonging to no specific polity, a xenos without a home. (13) Cosmopolitanism as a concept could only reach Filelfo through a handful of classical texts, and it remained in classical antiquity an undertheorized notion. Generally speaking, Stoic cosmopolitanism--itself rooted in ancient Cynicism--espoused the recognition of a rationality and morality shared in common by all humankind, a commitment of philosophers and statesmen to public rather than private interests, and a preference for political structures that would mitigate the tendency for power to become local aggregations of an ethnocentric or factional nature. For a host of reasons it represented an appealing set of principles to both Filelfo and his patrons in the years following the 1434 exile of the anti-Medici oligarchs. (14)

The works in which Filelfo responded to the Florentine crisis of the 1430s and simultaneously began the process of his self-invention as an intellectual have been usefully analyzed by previous scholars in a number of ways. There is certainly a propagandistic element to many of them, especially the oration composed in 1437 that attacks Cosimo de' Medici and urges the exiled Florentine aristocrats to take heart by placing their hopes in the assistance of Filippo Maria Visconti (1392-1447), who would in a short space of time become Filelfo's patron in Milan. (15) The Commentationes Florentinae de exilio, a somewhat later work begun in 1440 and never finished, has been examined as a treatise of philosophical consolation that urges an attitude of resignation in the wake of the defeat of the aristocratic partisans--whose leader, Rinaldo degli Albizzi (1370-1442), had been among Filelfo's correspondents and the subject of one of his satires--at the Battle of Anghiari in June of 1440. (16) More difficult to categorize simply from an ideological or political viewpoint are Filelfo's Satyrae, composed over a much longer period of time and, as we shall see, containing opinions and counsels that are at times contradictory. (17) What has not been fully appreciated, however, is the degree to which all of these works rely on several of the classical accounts of Cynic philosophy, texts that at the time were in the earliest stages of their recovery, as well as with one of the Skeptical works of Sextus Empiricus. (18) Attention to this context of Filelfo's ethical discourse will allow us to reexamine the struggle of values that occurred in Florentine history with the emergence of the Medici party, and to suggest that Filelfo's alternative politics went far beyond a simple taking of sides with his aristocratic patrons. There is no disputing that Filelfo was an active and strident critic of the Medici party and its leader, but this should not prevent us from discovering messages in his work that transcend the factional struggle that formed the immediate context of his writings from 1430 to 1450. Filelfo's project, fanciful as it may seem, was nothing less than a provocation to his patrons--and eventually even to Cosimo himself when Filelfo composed a satiric palinode to him--to set aside their partisan pursuit of a politics of interest groups and private affiliations in favor of a concept of citizenship and political identity based on the Cynic notion of world citizenship and on Stoic theories of virtue. Filelfo of course believed that his aristocratic champions would be most capable of giving shape to this political fantasy, though this did not prevent him from occasional criticisms of those he supported. The practical shape of this challenge to his audience is not wholly clear, but it most likely took the form of a more unified Italy presided over by the (wishfully) benevolent regimes of Filippo Maria Visconti and, somewhat later (and even more wishfully), Cosimo himself. Once the fates of Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi had become clear and the impossibility of their repatriation had been accepted, Filelfo continued to pursue his political vision for Northern Italy despite his distancing of himself from his original political champions. Regardless of the details of Filelfo's political vision for Florence and its neighbors, he attempted to underwrite his idealistic conception of cosmopolitan identity with an ethical system that defined the summum bonum of human life as grounded in the pursuit of a disinterested approach to political and social relations: a virtue politics, so to speak, that he ascribed to the patrician oligarchs and that had been among the key components of the civic humanism of the first decades of the fifteenth century. (19)

Throughout the works examined below, several themes will demand our attention: Filelfo's refusal to silence his forceful critiques of Cosimo and his followers; his insistence on publicizing information and opinions, sometimes slanderous and often fancifully scurrilous, that might--and eventually did--imperil his own person; his analysis of the struggle over values in Florence as a conflict between public and private spheres of interest, an analysis that is confirmed by later historiographical treatments of Florentine history; (20) and his adoption of classical terminology for the purpose of clarifying the moral issues at stake in the struggle of the patrician oligarchs against Cosimo. What emerges, I hope, is a portrait of a humanist that begins to look far more like that of an engaged public intellectual than a hired pen manipulated by powerful elites, or a sycophantic humanist in search of a salary (though Filelfo's career did at different times exhibit more grovelling than that of most humanists). Filelfo's presentation of himself as an autonomous intellectual, often buttressed by references to the assertion of free speech and to political defiance in the ancient world, needs, of course, to be balanced by our recognition of the tendency of many humanists to speak what their audiences wished to hear. Nevertheless, despite some necessary qualifications, Filelfo's moral discourse at times penetrates the veil of official, deferential advice to his patrons to advocate for positions that may have been nearly unthinkable in his historical moment, and to imagine an alternative politics that moved far beyond the either/or choices that contemporary events provided, and that modern historiography has insisted on using as an explanatory paradigm for the Florentine crisis of the 1430s. Beneath Filelfo's vituperation, exaggeration, and obvious partisanship of the anti-Medicean party lies a powerful, even aggressive, assertion of authorial legitimacy, a claim by the humanist-poet of the right to make value-laden political judgments about his world and to thereby assume a position of moral leadership. (21)

2. SATIRIC DISCOURSE TO SUPERIORS: PRAISE, BLAME, AND EXPOSURE

Soon after his arrival in Florence in 1429, Filelfo began composing his Satires (Satyrae), which he collectively referred to as his "cynic verse." (22) Early in his Florentine sojourn he noted in one of his letters that the city was a hotbed of factional strife. (23) The satire that opens up his large collection--100 poems arranged in ten decades, each containing ten poems, or hecatostichs, of 100 lines each--lays out in the manner of Juvenal's "program" satire (Satire 1) his major themes; more importantly, it makes the case for his commitment to an unvarnished and uncensored portrayal of his experiences. Dedicating the satires many years later to King Alfonso of Naples (1396-1458), Filelfo opens with a lament that he must write "for other purposes" than those of epic literature, echoing Juvenal's lament that heroism and the epic style appropriate to it no longer found a home in first-century Rome. (24) But where Juvenal's positive values remain inaccessible in a distant, republican Rome that had long since given way to the decadence of empire, Filelfo's indictment of Florentine morality will hold specific individuals accountable for the city's shift in values, while also looking to the anti-Medicean patricians for a restoration of Florentine virtue and libertas. In his opening satire Filelfo displays more compassion than vituperation for the city that had expelled him, even as he prepares to assault its leading intellectuals and their patron, Cosimo de' Medici.

Filelfo's satires serve to memorialize pivotal historical moments, especially in recent Florentine history, when to his mind central political figures stand poised between ethical alternatives, or where figures stand as ethical abstractions personified. One such figure is the crafty, calculating Cosimo--to whom words like callidus (shrewd), versutus (sly), and acutus (sharp) refer constantly in Filelfo's descriptions, echoing Cicero's portrayal of the "unprincipled man" who only looks to his own interests (25)--framed in juxtaposition to his virtuous patrician enemies; another is the indecisive and somewhat feckless character of Rinaldo degli Albizzi, framed in opposition to Filippo Visconti; a third, the virtuous Palla Strozzi, shining as an example of true patriotism and civic dedication. In this sense Filelfo has a Dantesque capacity to isolate specific moments when his subjects' moral choices and dispositions achieve a historic dimension. The traditional use of satire to praise or blame has been fitted to Filelfo's historical context and to the clash of value systems that he felt was its defining cultural issue, and there is little doubt in most cases concerning those whom Filelfo wishes to vilify and those he wishes to praise.

Several themes emerge already in this opening satire that can be traced throughout the collection. There is the insistence on Filelfo's truth-telling function as satirist, a point that will be reinforced powerfully elsewhere in the collection, and on his refusal to behave with the discretion that appears to characterize so many Florentines: "Whatever of truth I shall have discovered, I will spare no one, relying on justice and my conscience: I will speak it all boldly." (26) In contrast to his own audacity, he asks rhetorically of his audience: "Do they [the Florentines] consider silence something safe?" (27) As an author of satires, Filelfo will eschew the discretion that for the most part characterizes Juvenal's work by providing portrayals of living individuals: Juvenal, of course, specifically chose to focus on the dead. Another consistent theme is Filelfo's invocation of a broad, pan-Italian audience for his work, and of the satirist's insistence that he measures Florence's corruption against a nonlocal, cosmopolitan moral standard that finds its most perfect theoretical form in the literary and philosophical models of antiquity: "The Italians know, and the whole world knows, that I declare war on all these wrongs." As an author and intellectual, Filelfo is also a vatic poet asserting that his special gifts of inspiration have authorized him to speak on behalf of Florence's moral regeneration: "Virtue, whether informed by judgment or indignation [Nemesis], provides strong weapons." (28) More consistently than Juvenal, Filelfo will appeal to the terminology of ancient Stoicism--virtus versus Fortuna, honestum versus utile--to legitimate many of his ethical positions; later in the satires and elsewhere in his work, this philosophical emphasis develops into an explicit, quite radical Cynicism.

But the Juvenalian indignatio that is expressed in the opening satire is counterbalanced by the very different messages that occur elsewhere in the satires, where lavish praise of certain figures cumulatively offers an important countercultural message about alternative values and an alternative politics. The satires have too often been passed over as simply a poetic form of personal invective, a popular genre of Quattrocento Latin literature; while there is plenty of this in the first two decades, especially invective directed against Filelfo's humanist rivals, the satires contain visionary elements that, however wishful and idealistic, are nevertheless worth attention. Many of Filelfo's satires emphasize the values at stake in the Medicean rise to power and give voice to the frustrated yet committed responses of a humanist who desired to play a role in political events and to shape cultural values.

The first exemplary character that we encounter in the satires turns out to be one for whom Filelfo has unqualified praise, a man who establishes a standard for the personal values and ethical orientation that the satires endorse: Niccolo da Uzzano (1359-1431), the leading patrician and vir probatus of the pre-Medicean oligarchic regime, who had survived an assassination attempt in November of 1429, and who died in 1431. (29) For Filelfo, Niccolo's death appears to be a harbinger of the decline of Florentine moral rectitude. After invoking his memory, Filelfo admonishes the Florentines to reverse the course toward which their republic is tending under the growing influence of the Medici: "If in every way of life you govern your people with fair measure, if you keep faith in both word and deed, striving day and night to set morality ahead of expediency, civil discord will never disturb your state." (30) Filelfo is absolutely certain that political stability is a matter of ethical choice, and that the pursuit of honesta--defined by Cicero as behaviors that are not self-interested, as against the interested pursuit of one's own benefit, or utilitas--will bring about Florence's moral regeneration. (31) The Florentines need to recognize that their commitment to justice is yielding to raw, instrumental power under Cosimo's leadership, a pairing of ethical categories (ius/vis) that will echo in a later, less politically sanguine satire written to Lorenzo Valla. (32) The terminology employed here reflects many of the standard antinomies of ancient moral philosophy, but rather than connoting abstract moral conceptions Filelfo has inserted them into a discourse that is neither fictional nor hypothetical. Florence has witnessed, quite recently, concrete instances of these values and concepts, and Filelfo is insistent in giving to this morality play its characters and its script.

The clearest model for Filelfo's project of Florentine ethical reform is the figure of Palla Strozzi. In an elegy composed for him after his death in 1462, Filelfo memorialized Strozzi as "the glory of the Tuscan people, the father of his country," thereby endowing him with the sobriquet pater patriae, which had long been associated with Cosimo de' Medici, and that ironically may have even been first applied to Cosimo by Filelfo himself. (33) A fairly consistent theme of Filelfo's treatments of Palla is his emphasis on the latter's irenic temperament, his liberality, his prudence, and his Stoic ability to detach himself from immediate events. In the posthumous poem Palla is praised for his restraint even upon provocation, a characteristic, as we shall see, that his fellow patrician leader Rinaldo degli Albizzi apparently did not possess: "He never allowed his temper to pursue a hostile matter, or to pursue anyone, even someone deserving cruel punishment, to the point of armed combat." (34) Palla's gentle nature and nonviolent temperament are a major theme in the satires, and Filelfo would even contrast Palla's temperament with his own, more volatile character in a 1447 letter to Strozzi. (35) Palla appears as the subject of two satires (6.4 and 3.1) and is treated substantially in another (4.1), where he is praised as a "most gentle man." (36)

Satire 4.1 examines the contrasting figures of Palla and Cosimo from an imagined point in time when Cosimo, after a brief incarceration in Florence, had just left the city to spend his eleven months in exile in Venice and Padua. Beginning as a poem addressed to Cosimo--who is addressed as "Mundus," punning by way of Latin on the Greek term kosmos--the satire takes up the Stoic theme of the wise man who rules himself and his passions, in contrast to the foolish man whose impulses are unconstrained. Despite Cosimo's use of money to win friends and influence people, the poem notes that during his time of greatest need Cosimo's friends have deserted him. Filelfo makes many of the same points in a taunting letter to Cosimo composed in 1440 on the eve of the battle of Anghiari, a letter that mocks Cosimo's "egalitarianism," that is, his demagoguery in seeking the "people's" support, even as he refuses to allow himself to be constrained by the same laws that bind the citizens of Florence. (37) Most importantly, the satire suggests that it was Palla Strozzi who secured the more lenient sentence of exile for Cosimo, rather than seeking his death, as others had apparently wished. (38) Ironically, Filelfo argues that Palla should have followed his instincts and allowed outrage at Cosimo's aggrandizement of power to shape the position he took on the fates of Cosimo and other exiled Medici family members; Filelfo even suggests that Cosimo manipulated what the latter knew to be Palla's forgiving nature. This criticism of Palla serves, of course, to reinforce his portrayal as a man of great virtue, clemency, and restraint, even as it succeeds in casting Filelfo, as author, as an individual who will allow himself to indulge in vindictive passions: "You [Cosimo] know that you are held universally in contempt by everyone; both the senate and the people would have decreed, in a fair judgment, your death, were it not for that most gentle man, Palla Strozzi, alone among them all, prohibiting it, the same man whom you so frequently wronged. While condemning your crimes, he nevertheless did not fail to come to your aid." (39)

Filelfo's praise of Palla's restraint and clemency are confirmed by the historical record. While Palla did receive a lengthy sentence of exile that was renewed by the Signorla ten years after its promulgation, he did not suffer from the imposition of a sentence of infamy pronounced against the other exiles who conspired with the Milanese forces at Anghiari in 1440, and there is evidence that he was treated differently than other members of the ottimati at their arrest in October of 1434. (40) Even more significant is Filelfo's insistence that Cosimo does not possess the "popular" support that so often was ascribed to him: it is both the Florentine leadership (the "senate") and the popolo who wish for his execution, at least in Filelfo's depiction of events. Yet despite the lavish praise that Filelfo heaps on Palla here and elsewhere, he nevertheless feels the need, in hindsight, to strongly reprove Palla for pursuing an ill-considered and hasty course of leniency toward Cosimo, a strategy that represents to Filelfo's mind the paradox of a man so fairminded as Palla actually committing a crime by not applying the laws more severely: "What are you doing, Palla? Are you being driven by clemency to pardon his crimes too quickly? Did you, the finest of the patricians, mean to be deceived by Mundus? Didn't you foresee the future troubles that lay hidden in the mind of this gigantic thief? Didn't he consider only too well how favorable you would be? Wouldn't he be extremely desirous of showing his gratitude, he who has thoroughly learned to consider in that sad place [prison] the unlawful action of a good and fair man? Now cease preventing that decree of death, Palla, allow your injured country to apply its laws.... O that your noble nature had never encouraged you to repress your fierce anger!" (41)

Cosimo is represented here as he is elsewhere in the many satires devoted to impugning his character. He is a man who is calculating and manipulative, ready to take advantage of Palla's virtuous nature for his own vicious ends; he is a man who uses his reason instrumentally for his own ends. The verb phrases that describe with clarity and psychological realism the calculating nature of his mind are emphatic: Cosimo "consider[s] only too well" and "has thoroughly learned to consider." We see Cosimo here in prison just prior to his exile to Venice and Padua, pondering the delicious paradox of Palla Strozzi's "crime" in showing leniency towards him--a crime that will, of course, enable Cosimo's future crimes. And he is of course selfish, unlike Palla: Filelfo is careful to show the contrast between the monstrous riches and thefts of Cosimo, his "plunderings of the state" and his pursuit of "personal wealth," and Palla's more disinterested use of his wealth. (42) In a later satire directed to Agnolo Acciaiuoli (1395?-1467?) that pleads for the restoration of the exiles to their city, Filelfo makes clear Cosimo's choices: he can act like a good citizen, or persist in behavior that gives him the reputation of a tyrant. His exile of the ottimati has struck fear not only in the entire city of Florence, but in all the nobility of Europe. (43) On such a world stage, Filelfo makes it clear that Palla's model of citizenship provides for better stewardship of the public good.

The contrast between public and private interests is especially strong in those satires that develop a more extensive analysis of Palla's ethical orientation. Satire 3.1 opens with an address to the patrician leader during a period when Filippo Maria Visconti threatened Florentine dominance in Tuscany and when Florence pursued costly wars with Lucca. The satire serves to both praise Strozzi and also console him: Palla is a figure who, Filelfo claims, has never pursued political ends for his own interest, and during the financial crises of the 1430s grieved only for the "public wounds" of Florence rather than for the harm done to him as a private citizen. (44) The first fifty lines portray him as a citizen loved by the people of Florence yet also as the object of rumors among the populace that he personally suffers under the burdens of his financial obligations, implicitly casting doubt on his tenacity as a political leader of the ottimati. Filelfo insists on Strozzi's merits and on his unquestionable morality and fortitude. While the fickle people of Florence allow themselves to be swayed by the varying winds of political fortune, Palla remains a figure of Stoic detachment and calm who is reticent to seek public approval: "Do you [the popolo] even now think so little of Palla that you suppose him to be anxious about Fortune, whether fair or foul? The wise man never depends on any assurances from Fortune, seeing her as swaying back and forth in equal measure; he knows that all circumstances that are unpredictable are disturbing to men's lives, and he fortifies himself against every chance turn of events.... Would anyone ever consider Palla too arrogant, with his countenance calm toward Fortune and with the approbation that befits him, or would anyone ever consider him as inclined to promote his public image?" (45) Palla's modesty quite obviously contrasts with Cosimo's tendency to pander to the public and even to purchase their support. Here it is the people who arrogantly think that they can control events and limit the sway of Fortune in their lives; Palla, as a Stoic sage, simply strengthens himself to endure her unpredictable blows. With the introduction of the figure of Filippo Maria Visconti, Filelfo now corrects the perception of the Florentine populace: Palla grieves not for the depletion of his weath but out of concern for Florence's future in the face of Visconti warmongering. The poem closes with Stoic counsels for Filelfo's patron, encouraging Strozzi to trust in his own virtue, and not to concern himself with the loss of wealth he has had to suffer in supporting his homeland: "the mind to you is richer than any gold, you who are loved by divine, distinguished, and all-powerful virtue, and whom virtue renders greater in every way for your ancestors." (46) Filelfo's final advice is for Palla to banish fear and seek a Stoic self-sufficiency by "conquering himself." (47) This observation foreshadows a judgment that Filelfo will pass on Cosimo in Satire 4.1.2-4, where Filelfo laments Cosimo's inability to rule himself, since he blindly has consigned himself to being ruled by a capricious Fortune that has now seen to his incarceration.

By far the most important satire that treats of Palla Strozzi appears in the sixth decade. Satire 6.4 is the most comprehensive portrayal of Palla's character and suggests the degree to which Filelfo considered his subject the most exemplary representative of the vir honestus. The poem considers Palla at a point in time when his status as an exile seemed permanent, that is, after the decisive loss of the exiles' cause at Anghiari in 1440. Nevertheless, the term patria reverberates throughout this satire, reminding us that in his poetic eulogy Filelfo would consider Palla (and not Cosimo) the genuine pater patriae. But the term is also one that Filelfo seeks to redefine in both Stoic terms--for the Stoic can make any place his homeland--and in the familiar Christian terms of "my father's mansions." (48) The crucial lines of the poem therefore define Palla's civic identity in the context of both his status as an exile and as a citizen of the world: "But surely you are reflecting seriously with yourself, Palla: as one who is strengthened by so much honesty, you would disparage the notion that a single city should be a fatherland for you, for whom a whole world of virtue is too small. Behold how you harbor the entire world in your overflowing heart.... We are tossed about the seas and the land, exiled by a law not of any citizen or enemy, but by the assent and command of a God who governs all things with careful guidance, who is pleased not by fortune nor any chance occurrence coming out of the uncertain competition of interests, but by virtue and the right reason of a chaste mind bearing glory into the heavenly light." (49) The condition of exile confers upon Palla Strozzi a cosmopolitan status, provided that he considers his condition not as dictated by any conventional political constraint but as characteristic of all human life. Enjoying a status that is at once ambiguous--Were those who exiled him enemies or fellow citizens? Does it matter?--and enabling, Palla is answerable only to the higher authority of a God who, in contrast to a human world that is characterized as a "competition of interests," rules all things with a steady hand. The first passage quoted above is the clearest statement of the ethical opening that exile has granted to Palla: he enjoys a freedom in part because he has nothing to lose, but more importantly he has the freedom to imagine a value system in which the claims made by one or another local sovereignty no longer can carry any weight. The language of this passage, contrasting the "single city" of Florence with repeated invocations of his more global allegiances, makes clear Palla's new political identity, but rather than consoling him for the loss of his Florentine civic identity, Filelfo would appear to be celebrating this new, openended identity and its cosmopolitan character. (50) As a Stoic world citizen, Palla's sole allegiance is to the principle of ratio recta, or "right reason," the only safe guide in a turbulent and contested world.

A subsequent passage of the poem indicates that Palla's new identity is a virtual one, but no less human or value-laden. His life will be lived through books, and therein he will enjoy the intellectual "sustenance" and "resources" that have replaced the more material resources of his former life (where he was, according to the 1427 catasto, the richest man in Florence); (51) he will acquire new citizenship in a patria in which citizenship is acquired through "glory and intellect": "These [authors] are the beautiful sustenance of your old age, you who alone are well-furnished in all the needs that are useful for a wholesome life. Crates the Theban, the mentor of Zeno, acknowledged that his shipwreck, however inimical it might have been to his wishes, was something that ought to have been hoped for--a fortunate crisis, so to speak. You, who are eager to ascend to the homeland on the wings of glory and intellect, ought not therefore spend your many years as an exile sadly: you will possess divine honors." (52) The ending of the poem reinforces Filelfo's point about world citizenship: rather than console Palla for his losses and for his condition as an exile, Filelfo insists that this is an opportunity for a new, ascetic conception of the world to emerge, one that is informed by the teachings of the Stoics, whose founder, Zeno, was himself a disciple of the Cynic Crates. It was Zeno who was thankful for a shipwreck that stripped him of all his possessions, because it secured for him a life that could then be devoted to philosophy rather than the pursuit of wealth. (53) The ending of the poem blends these Stoic messages with a Christian message of meditation and prayer: "And so happy is he, most righteous Palla, whose just mind meditates on God day and night, and who prays, but not as one dejected because of anything to do with exile." (54) Filelfo never wavered in the respect and admiration he showed to Palla as a pater patriae. While we need always when interpreting humanistic writings to discount the author's sincerity when social superiors are being addressed, I think it needs to be emphasized that Filelfo consistently affirmed--in these satires, in other poems, and in the funeral oration he composed for Strozzi and dedicated to his two sons--that the context in which the ethical dimension of Palla's character unfolded was one that was always global and cosmopolitan: Palla's character was to be measured against other historical figures who in their lives had embodied values that were both patriotic yet broadly informed by wide experience, resistant to the sway of local interests and the persuasions of situational ethics. (55) In this poem especially we have some unique evidence for a conception of citizenship that transcends the local city, the specific patria that figured so prominently in the mentality of virtually all Renaissance men and women.

Filelfo was not nearly so prone to utter obsequiousness toward his patrons as many other humanists. If he seems at times excessive in the praise he affords Palla Strozzi, he certainly had little trouble in finding fault with the ostensible leader of the oligarchic party in Florence, Rinaldo degli Albizzi. In one of his satires and also in an important letter written on the eve of the Battle of Anghiari, Filelfo alternately encourages and reproves this aristocratic leader, evidence that suggests that Filelfo preserved a measure of intellectual autonomy even in relationships with social superiors that conventionally required extreme deference. In Satire 5.8, Rinaldo is invoked in the opening line as a potential pater patriae, just as Palla Strozzi would be in the elegy for him written after 1464. Rinaldo is asked to take up the reins of war on behalf of republican Florence, inasmuch as "love of liberty grips everyone." (56) He is addressed a line later as a pater optime, the leading patrician who can create an alliance between his forces and those of Filippo Maria Visconti to vanquish the Medicean enemies and restore the exiles to their city. Filelfo reminds Rinaldo of the duke's victory at Lucca and of the honorable behavior shown there toward those who were defeated, in contrast to the shameless plundering that characterized the forces supplied by the Medici, the so-called "Puccini": Filelfo even suggests that the war with Lucca, which he claims was begun by Cosimo, was largely motivated by greed. (57) The satire focuses on a contrast between military engagements that preserve integrity and honor, where leaders restrain their soldiers from rampant violence and vandalism, and those led by leaders who possess only selfish values. Filelfo provides another example in the duke's treatment of Alfonso: when the former conquered Gaeta in 1435, he still preserved "the reputation of an honest man and the nobility of justice." Once again, Stoic values inhabit these examples of good leadership: "It is beautiful to conquer others, but far more beautiful, far more wonderful, I think, to conquer oneself." (58)

The praise of leaders who have shown integrity sets up an opportunity for Filelfo to force Rinaldo to look at himself. While his criticisms are not harsh, they are certainly not flattering to the putative leader of the exiles, who is invoked as the "last hope" in the opening lines of the poem: "Florence is subject to Mundus, but O gods above, Florence serves a monster!... Will you, great man, allow this plague to reign unpunished for so long? What sluggish 'patience' delays you, the hope for all, so long? Arise! Why do you delay? Are you blocking the way to a fortune that is opening her sails to favorable winds, that is willing to give her all for you? Scorn not the goddess Fortune, for often she has held back the spiteful motives hidden in her breast and has checked her blasts. If beastly Hannibal had known how to enjoy her inspiration, Carthage never would have been conquered nor experienced any defeats, nor the retaliations of the followers of Scipio." (59) What is unusual about this passage is the backhanded way in which it encourages Rinaldo to act more decisively by using a quite negative exemplum. Filelfo suggests that if Rinaldo does not act with dispatch, he will become another of history's losers, a Hannibal who did not seize the right opportunity to fight. With somewhat blunt irony, Filelfo chides Rinaldo for showing patience, when what he means of course is that Rinaldo has been procrastinating. Filelfo distinguishes, with Machiavellian clarity, between the correct behavior of a military leader, who must seize the opportunities that Fortune provides and gamble on her favorable disposition, and the resigned behavior of the Stoic sage, who is counseled to rely only on his own virtus: the latter treatment of Fortune is the one found most often elsewhere in the satires, where she is a force that must simply be endured. The passage clearly criticizes Rinaldo for his inaction, given the rapid development of events. The closing line of the satire makes it clear that Rinaldo should seize the opportunity to join up with Filippo Maria Visconti, who "hastens to furnish aid to us [the exiles]." (60) Mixing both praise of Rinaldo as Florence's last hope with pointed criticisms of his behavior, Filelfo asserts himself as both a strategic and moral voice on behalf of the exiles.

This is not the only satire to convey double-edged messages. In another satire from decade five, Filelfo appeals directly to Filippo Maria Visconti to assist the exiles. Satire 5.1 opens with elaborate praise of Filippo as a "great prince, gentle and capable," whom Filelfo asks to show magnanimity as a response to the unjust treatment of the exiles. (61) But the satire then turns to criticize Filippo for the savagery that his forces have recently shown in military engagements with the Genoese, who had revolted against Milanese control of their city in 1436. Furthermore, Filelfo reminds him that though "a thousand men have died" who once "raised you and your name up to the stars," his words will not die and can be detrimental to Filippo's reputation. (62) Filelfo insists--in a striking formulation of anti-Machiavellianism avant la lettre--that it is better for Filippo to be loved than feared, so he needs to show clemency to the Genoese: "Make yourself merciful to all. Offer yourself as an example, whence they will show you respect and love you, not fear you, seeing that whosoever is feared is also hated." (63) Urging Filippo to "free those from exile ... who cherish learning and devoted love," Filelfo ends the poem with a moment of staged self-containment. (64) After suggesting that Filippo has in mind the subjection of the whole of Italy, he checks himself from a final reproof that most certainly would have criticized Filippo's failure to play a more virtuous role as savior of the exiles and vanquisher of the tyrannical Cosimo: "If you should neglect ... but let me restrain myself. A poet's mind is a harbinger of future events. You are not unaware of what the tyrant is stirring up in Florence, what sort of monster is flying about there, or where his bow is aimed. Be mindful of virtue, or else look out for your own interests." (65) The imperatives of line 97 are deeply ambivalent: Filelfo suggests (in part because he claims prophetic powers as a poet) that Filippo has a choice between pursuing the virtuous path of helping the exiles, or else simply looking out for his own self-interest. The advice that he claims to have "contained" in lines 94-95 has, so to speak, come out sideways in another form as a more mild threat that suggests that should Filippo not follow virtue's path, he will end up in a desperate scramble to maintain his power. The satire is an excellent example of Filelfo's transformation of the dyadic function of satire to praise or blame into a function of praising and blaming simultaneously. And it shows Filelfo manipulating his own emotional incontinence--or at least the fiction of his difficulty in restraining his emotions--for rhetorical effect. Furor poeticus has been enlisted in the service of an assertive political critique of one of the most powerful figures on the Italian peninsula.

Perhaps most baffling of all the satires, at least for readers expecting consistency in their authors, and similar in its bivalent message to 5.1, is the so-called palinode that Filelfo wrote to Cosimo, probably in about 1444. Satire 7.7 is an attempt by Filelfo to heal the rift between himself and the leader of the Florentine regime. While it is hard to imagine Filelfo befriending a man who was probably responsible for both his slashing in 1432 and for a later attempt on his life when he was in Siena, and who was quoted after his death as considering Filelfo to have been among his unforgiveable "persecutors," Cosimo was nevertheless appealed to by Filelfo in the latter's role as an advocate for the restoration of the exiles to Florence. (66)

Filelfo approaches Cosimo directly in Satire 7.7 and acknowledges that he has been until now engaged in "reckless song." (67) He claims to want to "let go of false dissimulation," by which he surely means the dissimulation that comes from practicing false modesty, and, in a comically grandiose attempt at captatio benevolentiae, asks Cosimo to acknowledge that the two of them are splendid, talented individuals, Cosimo only more so than Filelfo: "Let our hearts be restored and let us join right hand with right hand ... we should let go of false dissimulation. Let praise for me be renowned, and for you only more so, on whose face and countenance Fortune plays more visibly." (68) Filelfo's argument becomes more powerful, however, as he takes up his vatic responsibilities and imagines for Cosimo a future that is far beyond this leader's capacity to envision, amounting to nothing less than a pax Italica. Filelfo surveys the contemporary political scene, where Italian city-states (here imaged as Saturn and Neptune) harm each other in internecine conflicts, and then suggests to Cosimo that there is now an excellent opportunity for Florence to take the lead in the cause of peace for all of "Italia": "Seeing these things, can't you carry the Italian gods forward into the most solemn era of peace? Aren't you aware, Florence, of how urgent such a great task is?" (69) As the satire comes to a close, there are clearly moments when Filelfo shifts into a poetic mode that is closer to blame than praise, as when he reminds Cosimo that victors can only be unjust when they turn the spoils of their victims into their own possessions--a return to the ethical concerns over the conduct of warfare expressed in 5.8--or when he threateningly suggests that if Cosimo does not follow the path of peace and reconciliation with his exiles, a far more "fierce regime" will place its yoke on Cosimo's Florence. The closing lines of the poem caution Cosimo about seeing himself as a god, concluding an ethical evaluation that has moved from the shameless egoism accorded both poet and subject early in the poem to a far more troubling, and even tragic, arrogance displayed by Cosimo.

The satire that follows this palinode, Satire 7.8, composed for Agnolo Acciaiuoli, a Florentine ambassador resident in Milan during the 1440s, indicates that Filelfo was working as many channels as he could to secure the exiles' return. (70) We know that Bruni, among others, was engaged in discussions of this sort well into the early 1440s, and we furthermore know from two of Filelfo's letters that by 1444 Filelfo had resigned himself to the exiles' cause being lost. (71) The satire may in fact describe Filelfo's state of mind at a point in time just prior to his abandonment of their cause. In this satire--and in an epigram in the De iocis et seriis (72)--Filelfo appeals to Acciaiuoli's sense of class loyalty to the Florentine patriciate for his assistance in securing the exiles' return. Filelfo makes it clear in the satire's opening lines that a negotiated settlement is desirable, and he uses arguments that rely on both the republican traditions of Florence and broader, European traditions of aristocratic privilege. Cosimo, he suggests, can acquire the status of a good citizen or the sad reputation of a tyrant, depending on his actions. (73) Filelfo suggests that not approaching Cosimo would be for Acciaiuoli to deprive his leader of a chance to act magnanimously. Filelfo swears that he has himself forgiven Cosimo for the harms done to him and is now acting on behalf of a larger cause--indeed, a cause that stretches beyond the confines of Italy: "Doesn't the whole of Florence fear for all the peoples of noble Europe?" (74) Filelfo ends the poem by suggesting that Florence has the capacity to become "another Troy," a city that had a second, better life as the Roman civilization founded by the exile Aeneas. (75)

When weighed with the large number of satires that attack Cosimo and his humanist followers with extreme vituperation and even slander, Satire 7.7 would appear to be utterly disingenuous. But when examined with the satire that follows it in mind, it becomes clear that Filelfo was simply pursuing the interests of the exiles--and of what he took to be the values they embodied--by making the best possible case for their return, and for the future condition of Florence in a geopolitical context that is now imagined to be not just pan-Italic but European. Filelfo's satires to his social superiors display him as an author highly conscious of his officium, his obligation to fulfill his role as a moral arbiter of Florentine culture and even as a political broker for his aristocratic patrons. As such, he could not preserve with any degree of consistency his persona as a Cynic poet, whose carmen cynicum should ideally serve no master. While his ethical discourse was certainly pointed in its criticisms of the Medici regime, Filelfo nevertheless retained more attachment to specific interests than an ideally disinterested ethical position truly committed to the principles of Cynic freedom would allow; his discourse retains, in other words, enough of its official, local character to make a wholly authentic reading of it problematic. In turning to look at satires from later in the collection, we will discover a greater degree of candor in Filelfo's words that reflects better his actual sentiments as he continued to struggle to define his vocation as a humanist intellectual committed to the Cynic ideals of resistance, nonconformity, and freedom of speech.

3. DISCOURSE AMONG EQUALS: AMBIVALENCE AND RESTRAINT

When we turn to examine satires that Filelfo composed to those who shared his professional status--that is, to fellow humanists or court secretaries--an important shift of emphasis occurs, revealing much more of the hidden transcript of Filelfo's experiences as a humanist intellectual, sentiments not nearly so apparent from his more official works addressed to social superiors, where the choice of deference or rebuke was determined in most cases along factional lines. For here there is an interesting element of ambivalence that enters into play, an elevation in the awareness of the dangers that attend uncensored speech and a greater concern for discretion in the voicing of opinions. Interestingly, Filelfo often cautioned others to use the very discretion that he himself so often refused to practice. The courtly ethos of dissimulation figures as a burdensome reality in his epigram collection, the De iocis et seriis, and it is taxed as a vice of the times in the Satyrae as well, even though by the time of the later satires Filelfo was still not ready to surrender his autonomy as an intellectual. Filelfo would seem to resist that historical inevitability so pronounced in the sociology of fifteenth-century humanist intellectuals: the metamorphosis of humanist vocations from politically engaged publicists to court functionaries and contemplative scholars, from public intellectuals to cynical courtiers. (76)

Few works could be more important for understanding the history of intellectual freedom than Filelfo's Satire 2.4 on the career of Lorenzo Valla, a work that provides an excellent perspective on the status of the humanist intellectual in the mid-fifteenth century. Written some time after Valla's trial by the Inquisition in Naples in 1444, Filelfo's work is revealing literary evidence of the struggle between two conceptions of the function of humanism, the former rooted in the communal traditions of Trecento civic life and the civic humanism of the early Quattrocento, the latter anticipating the court humanism of the later fifteenth century. (77) Filelfo opens the satire with cautious and stern advice: "Watch out, Valla, lest while you seek to engage everyone in battle, you recklessly die and so become a conversation piece for the mob." (78) Valla's behavior has ironically--indeed, comically--placed him in the peculiar position of an orator claiming to protect "ancient rights" while he himself now stands before the papal inquisitor of a pope that has been refuted by Valla's very arguments. (79) The satire's counsel of prudence is not without its criticisms of Valla's character, particularly his tendency to exacerbate conflict and to stir up the cultural and political waters, characteristics that no other humanist shared to such a degree (though Filelfo himself probably would take a close second to Valla). (80) At the same time, Filelfo shows undeniable respect for Valla's innovations in method and for his powers of critical analysis. Nevertheless, the ultimate counsel is clear: become a co-opted intellectual, and thereby save your skin. Filelfo's advice to Valla is blunt: "Flee a nasty fight, my friend, and flee the pestilence of envy, lest while you ready yourself to fight with words, you suffer woeful actions and crimes. When the judge is corrupt, lies prevail over the truth, and rights are trampled on by power. It is foolish to struggle in vain: a destructive victory does no good. Live, Valla, for your own sake, remaining quiet and being wary of the threats and the rumors of the people." (81) Prudence dictates that Valla allow his investigative program to take second place to the dogmas of a faith that is more powerful than his voice of truth, a faith that Valla has boldly asserted to be corrupt and that has pursued an unfair inquisition against him. Filelfo queries whether Valla had in fact been encouraged by his patron, King Alfonso, in his task of discrediting the papacy's pursuit of a more worldly role for itself through its reliance on the donation of Constantine as a historical precedent. (82) Despite the protection of his patron, Filelfo nevertheless warns Valla that his irreverence and nonconformism amount to a self-destructive deathwish: "But I can't keep silent about the truth. If life itself cannot hold any pleasure for you, and if fame and renown urge you on, then you are making haste to die." (83) Filelfo's voice here is deeply ironic: he must tell Valla the truth about the dangers that the latter has provoked by telling the truth. As a truth-telling satir ist he is obligated to do so, and also to point out that Valla, the endorser of Epicurean philosophical positions, ironically would seem not to be a pleasure-seeker, given the potentially harmful and even mortal outcome of his scholarly inquiries. Filelfo's counsels of expedience and discretion are therefore ambivalent, inasmuch as he is otherwise deeply respectful of Valla's position among humanist intellectuals. Filelfo can have it both ways here: his criticisms of ecclesiastical power stand alongside prudent advice to shape one's personality to the times, which demand skills beyond those of the scholar. (84)

In a letter of this period Filelfo had warned Valla about the environment of the Roman Curia--by which he probably meant the presence of Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), Filelfo's longtime nemesis and a man soon to be Valla's enemy as well--and appeared puzzled by Valla's decision to leave Naples, an environment that seemed to Filelfo to be conducive to intellectual freedom. (85) Filelfo would idealize Alfonso's court as a haven of intellectual freedom in the closing satire of his collection, appealing to King Alfonso as a patron who would not turn him into a mere court functionary or secretary, which seemed to be the case under Filippo Visconti as Filelfo's career developed in the 1440s. So Filelfo was keenly aware of the various arrangements under which humanists were patronized, and apparently approved of conditions that are most protective of intellectual freedom, or what he terms in the closing satire "cynic liberty." (86) But the advice he gives to Valla is far less idealizing of the humanist project, especially when scholarly inquiry creates ideological friction.

It is the closing verses of the satire to Valla that make clear the degree to which Filelfo's advice runs counter to his own desire for intellectual freedom as expressed elsewhere in the satires: Valla should focus his attention on composing works that praise Alfonso. Insofar as Filelfo recognizes Valla's brilliant new science of scholarship, Filelfo encourages its pursuit but in a more prudent manner, without Valla's attacks on authorities like Aristotle and Cicero, attacks that speak more to Valla's ambition and superiority complex than anything else. In comparison to Filelfo's own claims about the truth-seeking function of his own collection of satires and their support, in many places, of a detached role for the humanist intellectual, the satire written to Valla shows a remarkable shift in Filelfo's position. On the one hand, there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Filelfo's opening satire, directed at the city of Florence, with its promise of the poet's claim to unmask truth and to practice intellectual freedom, to "discover ... [and] speak the truth boldly." (87) Yet writing to Valla more than fifteen years later while he was undergoing an inquisitorial process for his exercise of intellectual freedom and scholarly innovation, Filelfo makes it clear that Valla should censor himself, and he even suggests that he should shift his vocation solely to that of a chronicler or panegyrist for his patron. (88)

Yet if discretion is urged on Valla here, Filelfo seems less willing to heed his own messages when evaluating his own career as it had been developing in Milan under the Visconti. In three satires, one written to King Alfonso's secretary, Inigo d'Avalos (d. 1484; Satyrae 7.3), another directed to the Milanese intellectual Rinaldo Varidaeo (7.4), a functionary at the Visconti court, and the final satire of the volume directed to King Alfonso himself (10.10), Filelfo speaks at length about the optimal conditions for the practicing humanist intellectual and about his commitment to freedom of speech. (89) In Satire 7.4, Filelfo responds to a Milanese colleague's criticism of his outspokenness with an uncompromised assertion of his authorial freedoms and power: "You warn me to be discreet, Rinaldo, and to repress my overwhelming anger, until fortune will at the right time present herself more favorably to me than in the past. But Filelfo can't deceive and doesn't know how, nor does he wish to. Varidaeo, it is not in the nature of an honest man to conceal the truth. Dissimulation has never pleased me. Let's not allow ourselves to speak pretences, Rinaldo." (90) Here the roles that Valla and Filelfo assumed in Satire 2.4 have been reversed: it is Varidaeo who has urged discretion on Filelfo. We would be hard pressed to find a stronger claim for the power of the author in humanist works of this period. The traditional (and banal) humanist claim that words are important for the reputation and immortality of their (elite) subjects is turned on its head: the emphasis here is on Filelfo's capacity to use the genre of satire for his own self-legitimation of authority, especially as one who can expose "whatever things now lie hidden." (91) If Varidaeo has warned Filelfo to repudiate his persona as satirist, Filelfo insists not only on his need to finish what he has begun on behalf of the righteous cause of the Florentine exiles, but also on his right to use satire in the new context of his Milanese environment should he find it necessary, despite the way such a poetic genre qua genre may be received. This satire makes for an astonishing comparison with the satire written to Valla, in which Filelfo had in effect played the role that Filelfo's colleague plays here.

Two satires that relate to Filelfo's dealings with the regime in Naples warrant attention for their observations concerning the ethical dimensions of the humanist's discourse and his commitment to freedom of speech. Satire 7.3 is a verse letter to Inigo d'Avalos, chief secretary to King Alfonso of Naples, and in this poem Filelfo shares some of his experiences as a court secretary while expressing a great deal of praise for his subject. In two places in the poem Filelfo uses a key term, secreta, that resonates with a variety of meanings and that condenses many of the experiences that he must have shared with his fellow secretary, as it also puns on the profession of both of them as "secretaries," that is, as individuals charged with keeping secret much of the business of their princely masters. (92) After singing the praises of d'Avalos and his prince, King Alfonso, Filelfo complains that his job brings him far too much otium, or leisure. It also requires that he show habits of discretion that do not come naturally to him. In fact, he cannot keep his mouth shut and is therefore quite desirous of new employment:

  He who said, "I carry all my belongings with me," carried no gold or
  gems, but carried with himself a mind aware of the truth, a solitary
  mind that enjoys its own inner goodness, condemning every blow of
  fate, a mind free to depart from home in Priene without any baggage
  and with head held high.... I cannot lead an inactive life; leisure is
  hard on me. Either let Filippo summon me to dangerous endeavors,
  howsoever audacious they may be, making use of my faith and zeal, or
  let him free me from any obedience that I find undesirable.... I do
  not wish to acquire leisure by means of people pleasing, or through
  laziness, and I would prefer to lose my "light," whom I love more than
  life itself, divine Filippo, than to endure this night beneath the
  "light." By the stars above, I swear, and by the divine head of my
  prince, Mariangela, that unless he should call me as soon as possible
  to endeavors greater than to the obedience that befits him as a
  prince, I shall secretly withdraw, pushing on wherever fate takes me,
  following only myself.... Aren't you listening? I don't want, I don't,
  to live in this manner, I don't want to be given words for myself; it
  is shameful to deceive myself. (93)

In the first of these passages Filelfo begins by citing the classical exemplum of the philosopher Bias of Priene, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece: this particular apothegm on the topic of self-sufficiency had been related by Cicero in a discussion of Stoicism. (94) In a series of adjectival modifiers that describe the ideal conditions of his mind, Filelfo unfolds the values that he endorses and that ironically run counter to the very tasks of a secretary charged to keep secrets--that is, to be a (dissimulating) court secretary or courtier. It is absolutely clear from the context of his remarks that Filelfo propounds these values precisely because he feels trapped in his position at the Visconti court: he is "given words" to write by his employers, and the conditions under which he must work directly contradict his personal value system as expressed in the terms conscia ("mindful"), secreta ("solitary"), and libera ("free"). Elsewhere in the poem he repeats the term secreta but uses it as a substantive to define the nature of his unsatisfying labor as one who must "pursue the secrets and legal proofs of affairs of state" with his well-trained mind while remaining incapable of taking any action that might make his knowledge have some worldly effect. (95) Filelfo has become, in effect, the very opposite of a public intellectual, a court functionary powerless to shape public opinion or influence events, an alienated intellectual leading an administered life; he lives sub luce in Milan, and in writing to Alfonso hopes to secure a better place. (96)

Filelfo can only utter multiple negations as he experiences the shrinking of what we might call the social imaginary of the humanist intellectual, alternatively projecting his desires for studia maiora--endeavors not tied to his patronage (and subject) relationship of obedience to his prince--into a future that is uncertain enough for him to wish to change his working milieu from Milan to Naples. While he is careful to show his obligatory flatteries to Filippo ("whom I love more than life itself"), the frustration and defiance in the multiple negations of line 96 ("I don't want, I don't") are a powerful reminder of his practical limitations. Indeed, it would take Filelfo more than two years of repeated efforts to receive permission to leave Milan for his brief visit to Naples, whereupon he was required to return to continue to serve under the new regime of Francesco Sforza. (97) The cosmopolitan ideal ascribed to the sage Bias, who was free to "depart from home ... without any baggage and with head held high," is only here an exemplum that can generate nostalgia or fantasy.

The final poem of the collection addresses King Alfonso of Naples directly as Filelfo appeals for respite from his secretarial obligations in Milan, where he complains of being kept on a very tight leash. Filelfo closes the volume with a reiterated commitment to satirical (and Cynical) honesty and with sharp criticisms of courtly cultures that produce flatterers: of course, Filelfo may well have been aware that his statements could have been construed as paradoxes, since he condemns flattery by flattering Alfonso for resisting the cultivation of flattery at his court. Filelfo's handling of Alfonso repeats statements concerning the latter's ingenuousness that had appeared earlier in the collection in Satire 3.8: "The jester with his crafty games does not mock you, nor does the disaffected flatterer give you advice for his own purposes. Your ear does not lie open to the foolish man; you interact with the kind of people whose behavior and lifestyle you recognize to be like your own. All the shadows are pushed back by the light, virtue does not allow itself to grow alongside vice; reason always scorns folly." (98) In this closing satire, Filelfo observes that he has been writing mainly of Florentine matters but has composed a few satires that take up events from the perspective of his Milanese environment. He apologizes for the nature of the satiric genre, suggesting that a life lived under Alfonso's regime would never require poems of this sort. In essence, Filelfo suggests, like Juvenal before him, that it is difficult not to be writing satire when the times virtually demand it: "We have pronounced in your presence on those subjects which either fortune or opportunity has thrust upon [us], and if in the meantime perchance it has happened that anything obscene had to be read or purged more than was fair, you should owe it to the vice in those whose disgusting life must be rendered in their own words, and who must be condemned in every period of history with the Cynic's freedom of speaking sharply. I am not being a flatterer. Flattery never agreed with me. It is fraudulent to hide the truth in one's heart." (99)

Like many another idealist and intellectual, Filelfo seems always intent on discovering possibilities for his own happiness elsewhere. Significantly, within two generations of Filelfo's career European humanism would develop from within the genre of satire a utopian strain of literature, a development that suggests the completion of a process of displacement whereby the desired involvement of humanist intellectuals in substantive matters of state--what has traditionally been called "civic humanism"--is projected innocuously (and frustratingly) into an imagined sphere. (100) In this satire, Alfonso's kingdom is imagined as a place where truth can be spoken. Filelfo's itinerary--from a Florence that had declined from its golden age under leaders like Niccolo da Uzzano, to a Milan where he insisted he could no longer pursue literary greatness and had to speak according to an official script--has persuaded him to imagine Naples as a utopia for intellectuals: "But if it's alright to speak the truth with you, King Alfonso, and not barter lies, Filippo Maria, that ruler of mine, considers you alone of all rulers as shining with every praise, since he has sown and planted incentives in me for your love. It is not fortune, nor any outward excellence of the body, but the distinguished and noble splendor of your mind that is the force that has been spread through all ranks and that makes men eternal and revered by all." (101) Knowing as we do from the satire to Inigo d'Avalos that Filelfo was far from happy in his role at the Visconti court, we must read as ironic the lines that describe the impetus behind Filelfo's great affection for Alfonso and his court as deriving from Filippo Maria, even as we recognize that this last satire in the collection is clearly an official one, cautious in its understanding of what the truth might here mean and deferential to both a current and a potential patron that Filelfo only visited on one fairly brief occasion. Just as in modern civilization we hear of individuals resigning when they have in fact been fired, so here we discover that Filippo's decorous recommendation of Alfonso's court and person are coded language by which Filelfo can express his desire for better circumstances: it is Filippo's stick, not Alfonso's carrot, that is the true motivation (stimulos) for Filelfo's desired relocation, and Filippo Maria (meus ille) is only a hair's breadth away from becoming meus iste. Praise and blame, it would appear, cannot only coexist in the same poem, but can even become condensed in a single phrase.

In closing we might suggest that Filelfo's Satyrae inaugurate an anti-courtier literature at the very beginnings of this phenomenon in the sociology of intellectuals, registering both the co-option of humanists and their resistance to that co-option. While Filelfo's claims of intellectual freedom must, of course, be discounted by the very social realities his work documents, nevertheless, in closing an extensive body of poetic work in the genre of satire with an appeal to his audience for the "Cynic's freedom to speak sharply," and with further assertions of his attachment to cosmopolitan moral principles, we need to respect the degree to which Filelfo has exposed the compromised conditions of intellectuals under princely regimes and the extent to which he has allowed his readers to become privy to the hidden record of his experiences as a public intellectual. Hopeful that his education and training might grant him some sort of recognition or privilege as a member of a class of individuals who were "learned and eloquent," Filelfo propounded a doctrine of intellectual freedom whose roots he traced to the ancient Cynics, a principle that he felt was worth pursuing in whatever milieux would acknowledge that identity and vocation. (102)

4. EXILE AND WORLD CITIZENSHIP: THE ORATIO AD EXULES OF 1437 AND THE COMMENTATIONES FLORENTINAE DE EXILIO

The satires we have examined contain an ethical discourse that lacks a substantial theoretical grounding and that has been adapted to the various political and cultural circumstances isolated by Filelfo's satiric technique of capturing pivotal historical moments. But the satires show Filelfo writing for the purposes of judgment rather than reflection. While Filelfo's allusions to key Stoic concepts and Cynic doctrines are unmistakable, his appeal to classical philosophical sources and traditions is sporadic rather than systematic. (103) The Stoic-Cynic notion of world citizenship, while clearly apparent in Satire 6.4 to Palla Strozzi, is elsewhere frustratingly vague, as is the solution that Filelfo proposes to the problem of the exiles: clearly he asks that they be restored to their homeland, but a political solution that might resolve the issue of Florentine factionalism remains obscure. The two prose works that provoke more philosophical responses to the condition of exile display Filelfo in a more engaged role as an assertive moralist, propagandist, and, in the case of the oration, political broker. The Oratio ad exules and the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio make substantial use of classical sources, and the latter treatise is a witness to the most wide-ranging use of Greek literature by a humanist in the first half of the Quattrocento. (104) The Oratio, an invective oration composed in 1437 prior to the Battle of Anghiari, is clear in its aims of energizing the patrician exiles, but the outcome of the desired Medicean defeat remains ambiguous, other than to hope for Filippo Maria Visconti's benevolent despotism in dealing with a hypothetical victory of Milan (and its putatively numerous allies) over Florence. The alignment of the patrician oligarchs in solidarity with Guelf allies, an arrangement that had been a longstanding feature of traditional Florentine politics, is a policy that Filelfo endorses as he tries to persuade his audience that in the coup of 1434 Eugenius IV (1383-1447; r. 1431-47) had not betrayed Rinaldo degli Albizzi and his followers when he counseled them to avoid taking up arms, but had rather been betrayed by dissimulating Medici politicians. (105)

The Oratio's interest for us lies in its reassertion of the moral dimensions of the conflict between Cosimo and the exiles. It is clearly a piece of propaganda containing a great deal of unpleasant slander of Cosimo's character and of Filelfo's archenemy, Poggio Bracciolini. Filelfo alleges that Cosimo poisoned the antipope John XXIII (1360?-1419) and supplies a detailed, almost journalistic, discussion of Cosimo's embezzlement of papal funds during the papacy of Martin V. (106) No stranger to scandalmongering, Filelfo invents multiple forms of sexual flagitia engaged in by Cosimo, and makes the further charge that he was behind the attempted assassination of Niccolo da Uzzano. More important than such outright slander is the contrast between the aristocratic values of noblesse oblige and public service, which characterize the ethical universe of the exiles, and Cosimo's selfish behavior, especially his use of money to purchase political influence, if we are to believe Filelfo's discussion of Cosimo's shameless methods of acquiring power. Filelfo complains that Cosimo does not practice hospitality toward the community, as is customary for aristocrats, nor has he protected the city or given her aid, "except when he hoped that some greater benefit for himself would arise" or when he wished to satisfy his indecent desires. (107) Filelfo warns the exiles that Cosimo's popular base of "swineherds, taverners, colliers, workmen, and pimps" is extensive and will likely remain faithful for a long time, but Filelfo argues nevertheless that the exiles should make war upon his regime as soon as possible, a war that he insists is not a perilous undertaking. (108) Far from being a pater patriae, Cosimo is a "parricide, an assassin, and a fraud": his regime is not legitimated by auctoritas but rather by "power and presumption." (109) The contrast between a morality based on the principle of striving for actions that are honesta over those that are utilia--a major theme in the Commentationes--appears here as a defining moral antinomy. (110) Filelfo also repeats the gentle chastisement of the ottimati for allowing lenient punishment of the Mediceans in September of 1433, just as he had complained about this clemency to Palla Strozzi in Satire 4.1. In recounting the fateful day in October 1434 when Rinaldo degli Albizzi and his followers were dissuaded by Giovanni Vitelleschi, the representative of Eugenius IV, from using force to seize the Signoria, Filelfo brings in a classical parallel derived from Plutarch's Life of Phocion in which the counsel of an impetuous Greek leader, Leosthenes, is compared to trees that bore no fruit: so also Eugenius's counsel may have seemed correct at the time--a strategy for avoiding upheaval or revolution in Florence--but it proved harmful to the aristocrats and hence brought no advantage. In this oration, apparently written in haste, Filelfo's tone is aggressive, hortatory, and even boastful: he wants to provoke the exiles to war and has yet to fall back upon Stoic counsels of resignation, as he will in the later treatise on exile.

At the oration's close, the aristocrats are persuaded to ally themselves with Filippo Maria Visconti, a man who shares their values and who, according to Filelfo's sources, has put together a coalition that surrounds Florence: "Though it is true that for the time being we are contained within the borders of Italy, we do not appear to lack outside forces from those cities and powers that surround Florence.... Certainly Filippo will willingly accept you as colleagues. He loves the nobility, feels compassion for sufferers, loves justice, and hates irreverence. (111) The opening expression in this passage would seem to suggest a grandiose claim that the exiles' cause may eventually find support even in transalpine governments. Filelfo follows his threat of Florentine isolation from both immediate and farflung states with a cautionary note indicating that he has solid information that Cosimo has been plotting to poison Filippo. Written at a time when the political events around him were unfolding rapidly, Filelfo's oration does not take time to analyze the key antinomies that are represented in it-honestas/utilitas, auctoritas/potestas, and publicum/privatum--but the central observation concerning Cosimo's ethical commitment to an instrumental rationality has been made. It is an especially dominant theme in the longer treatise on exile begun perhaps three years later, where the profile of Cosimo's character contrasts sharply with the portrait of the work's presiding philosophical sage, Palla Strozzi, whose more cosmopolitan value system is advanced with greater philosophical precision and literary reflection.

The first book of the Commentationes, the De incommodis exilii, rehearses numerous classical responses to the experience of exile, a favorite Senecan theme to which Filelfo adds a wealth of other sources, primarily from Greek literature. The fictional dialogues of the Commentationes are set in Florence at a time subsequent to Cosimo's return from exile and to the passing of sentences of exile upon the ottimati, and they serve to console both the vanquished patricians and the city of Florence itself, which had lived in a "golden age" under the rule of the patrician oligarchs. (112) While the treatise was dedicated to a Milanese patron, Vitaliano Borromeo (1391?-1449), Filelfo's use of Greek literature and the central place of Palla Strozzi in all three dialogues effectively make the work a tribute to his friendship with Strozzi, and secondarily a tribute to Leonardo Bruni, who appears in the third book. One of the first passages of extended translation from Greek helps to remove the ambience of the dialogue from the shock of the recent political experiences of betrayal--where Cosimo's seizure of power has been blamed on the machinations of Pope Eugenius IV, who used the "schemes and lies" of his agent Vitelleschi to assist Cosimo (113)--to an impassioned investigation of the proper forms of knowledge necessary for determining the appropriate use of wealth in a city. The passage, translated from Dio Chrysostom and spoken by Palla, is a Socratic speech that contrasts the archaic educational emphases of Greek paideia--whose central components were music and gymnastics--with more relevant and engaged philosophical deliberation over matters of governance and public welfare: "You never learned to live lawfully, justly, and harmoniously in your social and political relations without wronging or plotting against one another." (114) Filelfo goes on to echo Plato's well-known criticisms of the nonanalytical form of education that had characterized archaic Greek paideia and that Plato believed was perpetuated by the teaching methods of the Sophists. (115) Palla's quotation of this source in the dialogue reinforces Filelfo's portrayal of him as a deeply reflective man who at the same time remains committed to the welfare of his city: the implication is that the more frivolous attentions of the majority of citizens to entertainment, and their adherence to the commercial values disparaged by Socrates in the work by Dio Chrysostom, have compromised the Florentine people's capacity for responsible self-governance. And it is, of course, Cosimo who has provided the bread and circuses.

The second major translation from a Greek work adduced by Palla is meant to console his son Onofrio, whose distressing experiences have prevented him from being as attentive as he ought to be during the discussion. Palla renders a speech delivered by Polynices in lines 357-405 of Euripides' Phoenician Women that includes some stichomythic dialogue with Jocasta. While Jocasta argues that "Hope nourishes exiles," Polynices' despairing experiences of exile include, significantly, constraints on his freedom of speech (parrhesia). (116) When Onofrio argues that the exile's fate is to become a social outcast and to be distrusted by his fellow citizens, as well as to lose his freedom of speech so as to be forced to "feel one thing and say another," Palla is quick to respond, repudiating these arguments while employing the same terms of Polynices' complaints: "I am not one to sport with words--my speech will correspond to my thought. I don't want you to be controlled in any way different from me." (117) The assertion is repeated later and should remind us of the similar pronouncements made by Filelfo concerning his truth-telling obligations as a satirist in several of the Satyrae.

But even more forceful than this impressive use of Greek literature by Palla Strozzi is a series of short translations from pseudepigraphic texts that were associated with the Cynical tradition. The authenticity of the Letters of Phalaris would be doubted by Poliziano in the next generation, but to Filelfo these texts, along with the so-called Cynic Epistles of Diogenes and Crates and other letters purported to be written by Apollonius of Tyana--whose ascetic demeanor and confrontational behavior likened him to a Cynic philosopher--must have appeared to represent a discrete literary tradition underwritten by Cynic principles; certainly they appeared this way to Filelfo's contemporary, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). (118) Filelfo's use of these texts, many of which have a sharply confrontational character in their challenges to convention and authority, reinforces a posture of dissent that, rather than energizing the exiles to further military action, as the Oratio had intended to do, would console the exiles with the realization that others in the ancient world had spoken truth to power and thereby retained their moral integrity, whatever the actual worldly conditions of their existence may have been at the time. While modern scholars have collected the letters of Diogenes, Crates, and Phalaris in a collection known as Epistolographi Graeci, finding them likely to be works of a much later date than they purport to be, two of these texts represented an important source of Cynical teachings for Renaissance humanists--indeed, the only significant source beyond the doxographical information found in Diogenes Laertius and the occasional mention of Cynic figures in Plutarch. The Letters of Phalaris and the Cynic Epistles would appear later in the fifteenth century in a more complete translation (datable to 1464) by the Aretine Hellenist Francesco Griffolini (1420-?). (119) Filelfo's translations contain eight full letters and a portion of a ninth by Diogenes, and three by Crates (all twelve from the Cynic Epistles); additionally, Filelfo translated briefer passages from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana and the Letters of Phalaris.

Filelfo uses these Cynic (or, in the case of Apollonius's biography, Cyrenaic) texts in part to console the exiles for their loss of worldly possessions, but more importantly to challenge implicitly the regime that now governs Florence by what he insists is a form of tyranny. Many of the Cynic letters contain sharp responses to powerful figures, a technique of verbal response known as the chreia, or illustrative anecdote, a way of speaking truth in an incisive and disarming manner. The message of many of these texts centers on the inevitable corruptibility of power, making a clear connection between wealth and corruption: moral integrity cannot coexist with power and wealth. Filelfo has Palla suggest to his son Onofrio that "Surely this wise man [Diogenes] knew that whosoever devotes himself to wealth can never possess a free mind, for man was born for freedom, not slavery. As you see, although he did so in the manner of a cynic--but still frankly and truthfully--Diogenes showed that wealth and virtue cannot both be present at the same time." (120) When Onofrio resists this line of reasoning, suggesting that wealth and virtue can coexist, Palla counters his argument with an allusion to Pindar: "Virtue alone is sufficient by itself to endow us with happiness; she is sufficiently protected against every blow of fortune and every upheaval; she requires no one's wealth, no one's assistance ... as Pindar says, 'It is rare to discover wealth alongside virtue in a man.'" (121) To illustrate the incompatibility of wealth and virtue in contemporary Florence, Palla accuses Cosimo of allowing the "power of money" to bring "so many disasters, so many fires, so many plagues upon the republic" of Florence. (122) Later in the work Filelfo will assail Cosimo's extravagant expenditures in the refurbishing of San Lorenzo, contrasting the vanity and luxury of these expenditures with wealth employed for the public good. Elaborate hardware for the doors of the Medici chapel have taken precedence over funds to establish dowries for young women, a clear example of misplaced values. In the hands of Cosimo, at least, wealth produces the opposite of virtue by making it necessary for young Florentine women to become prostitutes. (123)

Filelfo's arguments as delivered by Palla range over a wide canvas of exemplary figures drawn from other texts as well. Perhaps the most stunning use of a classical exemplum comes from Plutarch's Life of Phocion. Filelfo's emphasis falls on the Plutarchan hero's isolation and courage in confronting a public that was hostile to his stubborn insistence on the rightness of his position. It is his inability, that is, to be swayed by popular consensus--as no doubt many Florentines had allowed themselves to be swayed in succumbing to Cosimo's manipulation of public opinion--that marks him as a nonconformist hero. Phocion was the one man who disagreed with his countrymen about an Athenian decision to go to war, and who thereby fulfilled the oracle that had predicted such a unique example of dissent emerging from the Athenian polis. This example of absolute commitment to integrity in the face of overwhelming popular disagreement serves as a political analogue to the philosophical singularity and autonomy that the Cynic philosophers demonstrated in resisting social conventions. Palla is firm in his commitment to the antinomian--or, in our terms, countercultural--values of the Cynics. A host of other classical exempla, such as Scipio Africanus, Paulus Aemilius, Brutus, and Hannibal, provide instances of acts of moral integrity, many of which involve a choice of exile over ethical compromise or negotiation. What is finally most astonishing about the dialogue in these early pages is the degree to which Filelfo, through his spokesman Palla, is willing to endorse nonconformity and dissent from within a culture that virtually every social history of the Italian Renaissance would insist on being so profoundly conformist and so rigid in its mores and attitudes. In the context in which Filelfo frames these gestures of repudiation, he chooses exempla that reflect an aristocratic ethos, an elitism that celebrates heroic figures who resisted the judgments and inclinations of the crowd, even when that would entail loss of public esteem or necessitate a choice of living in exile.

This emphasis on nonconformity serves as a prelude for two of Filelfo's boldest endorsements of an ethical commitment to the Stoic notion of the cosmopolitan world citizen. While the concept originated with the Cynics and was even ascribed to Socrates by Plutarch, the notion of the sage as a disinterested and contemplative citizen of the world was perhaps most fully developed in the Stoic tradition, especially in the consolatory work of Seneca written to his mother when he was in exile, the Consolatio ad Helviam. (124) The work was owned by Palla Strozzi and certainly known to Filelfo. (125) After discussing the nature of true friendship by distinguishing true friends, who will assist us when our fortunes are troubled, from assentatores (flatterers), who will abandon those in exile, Palla attempts to minimize the effects of being driven from Florence by refocusing his son's attention on his own inner moral condition: "For why have we reckoned that being driven out of Florence is therefore an unhappy thing? We must try hard not to think that we are incapable of being sufficient to ourselves. I trust that I will be both far more content and at peace anywhere other than Florence. Virtue does not follow upon fortune, but fortune rather follows virtue." (126) The city of Florence, then, has become the single place in the world where the pursuit of an identity as a civis mundi is made difficult: everywhere else the sage can find happiness. The sentiments expressed here reflect quite closely those found in Satire 6.4.

Palla's exchange with his son continues to explore the true meaning of the term patria. He insists that where one is educated matters more than where one is born, if we analyze the concept of a homeland carefully. Hercules, we are told, considered all of Greece as his home. And Socrates, when asked from what country he came, replied that he "was not a Lacedemonian, nor an Athenian, but a citizen of the world." (127) Shifting his cultural context from classical to Christian concepts of identity and affiliation, Palla reminds Onofrio that his exile is not a "proscription" but rather a relegatio, a distancing from worldly concerns that should encourage him to focus on his true, celestial patria: just as the soul is imprisoned in the body, so also the world is itself a prison. Given the double prison of human existence--the soul imprisoned in a body that is also imprisoned in the world--Onofrio should realize that "the homeland that is the most pleasing to us is the heavenly one, not Florence, Tuscany, Italy, or Europe, not even the entire earth, nor the whole lower world." (128) Finally, to be exiled from, or to be bereft of, one's sanity is a condition far more lamentable than legal exile; the happy man is like Bias the sage, about whom it was said that he carried all things with him that he needed; the most important thing, of course, is the happy man's ratio recta. Palla even considers that by accepting exile, the oligarchs may be pursuing the best course that they can on behalf of their city, since their exile will reduce the factionalism that was so destructive to the city's welfare. This argument amounts to a striking paradox: one can best serve the public interest by severing one's political affiliation with the community. Interested disinterestedness, though an apparent paradox, would seem to be a key component of the moral position that Filelfo is urging through Palla's comments. (129)

The first dialogue closes with some observations concerning libertas that elaborate further upon the condition of freedom as pursued within a framework of Stoic philosophy. Freedom may often require a virtual rejection of the sphere of the political per se. Since Palla does not favor the further pursuit of Filippo Maria's assistance--contrary to the opinion of Rinaldo, who would rather serve under the Visconti prince than under the wicked Cosimo--he suggests that liberty, even when it lacks material comfort, is always preferable to subjection: "This has always been my opinion, that an adverse and even mean state of liberty ought to be preferred to a state of subjection, howsoever convenient it may be, as a condition far more advantageous to both our private and public honor." (130) Although Palla does not directly say so, Rinaldo's argument is not one that seeks greater freedom, but rather one that seeks greater power. (131) Subjection to Filippo would amount to being a member of the winning side, to suppporting a prince more respectful of ancient customs of aristocratic privilege, but not necessarily to achieving a greater freedom as the term should rightly be understood. Palla can only accept an absolute definition of libertas. The first book closes with further paradoxical Stoic counsels to console the exiles: the wise man is in no way subject to external powers, while those who apparently are the recipients of injuries are in fact less harmed than those who inflict them, a counterintuitive statement that defies conventional common sense, though not Christian spirituality. Provided that the exiles follow the path of ratio recta, they can console themselves with never really living as exiles, even when distant from Florence itself. To live in a cosmopolitan manner is, in effect, to declare reason as one's only true homeland.

The second dialogue, De infamia, centers on the harm suffered by those exiles who, in addition to the proscription from Florence, have suffered because of the promulgation of a sentence of infamy decreed by the Florentine Signoria in 1440. Interestingly, Palla Strozzi was exempted from these charges, probably because of the clemency he had shown Cosimo de' Medici during the latter's brief exile in 1433-34. (132) The figure of Rinaldo degli Albizzi is a greater presence in this book, but the Stoic and Cynic philosophical emphases are a constant presence here, as they were in the first book. Defending his recent political maneuvering, in which he and Ridolfo Peruzzi approached Eugenius as a "patron" of the cause of the aristocrats, Rinaldo explains that his attempt to consolidate a league "against" Florence that would include both Eugenius and Filippo Maria Visconti was not a betrayal of the Florentine Republic, but rather an attempt to secure the safety of the citizens and the ottimati against the "criminal" Mediceans. Most importantly, he did not employ an instrumental method in pursuit of these ends: no "beneficia" were offered to Eugenius, in deference to the ethical principle that "expediency should not struggle with honesty" in the pursuit of a policy. (133) In this second book, Ridolfo Peruzzi gives a lengthy oration that claims to be a speech given by Rinaldo before Eugenius IV during the uprising, a speech that serves as a sort of apologia pro vita sua. He provides a review of his own past experiences as a diplomat of the Florentine state when he faced many decisions that required that he distinguish between policies that were either ethically principled (quid honestatis) or expedient (quid utilitatis). Rinaldo's aristocratic ethos prevented him in 1414 from endorsing a plot to assassinate King Ladislaus of Naples, a plot that he claims to have been supported by Giovanni de' Medici and his two sons. In contrast to the Medici's use of money to gain their political ends, and their adoption of policies that place expediency over honor, Rinaldo retains an ethical position that is absolute in this regard: "I have determined that even in the most difficult and dangerous times for the republic, policy should in no way be determined with regard to the calculation of self-interest." (134) Furthermore, this rejection of situation ethics helps give Rinaldo a theoretical rationale for refuting the claims of the Medici party that the oligarchs had betrayed their country by seeking a league with Milan in order to carry out a countercoup against Cosimo's regime. After all, suggests Rinaldo, would virtuous patricians ever have risked the safety of the Florentine Republic by pursuing a plot with Florence's most notorious enemy? Filelfo absolutely distorts the historical record here, and furthermore makes Rinaldo here contradict the very advice that Filelfo had himself given to the exiles in the Oratio ad exules. Nevertheless, Rinaldo's speech points out that the Florentine patriciate has always put the public interest ahead of its private concerns; furthermore, Florence as a city will benefit far more from behaving charitably towards her neighbors than from hoarding her great wealth. It is clear from Rinaldo's remarks that the current Florentine leadership has little regard for the aristocratic values of magnanimity and charity that are so much a part of his ethical orientation: "The gold and silver of our bankers should be dispersed and disseminated to the ends of the earth to bring resources to the needy and assistance and enjoyment to men." (135) With these remarks endorsing disinterested behavior, even Rinaldo would appear to support a patrician pursuit of cosmopolitanism, where the ends of the earth merit inclusion in the public sphere.

Rinaldo's set-piece oration serves to rehabilitate a nobleman on whom a public judgment of infamy had been declared, but its key moral distinction is analyzed in greater detail later in book two by Palla Strozzi, in concert with his interlocutors Niccolo della Luna and Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459). The virtue ethics discussed at length are most relevant when Filelfo orients the debate over expedient versus honorable actions toward the concrete political choices that have been made by Florence in supporting a Medici regime rather than rule by the oligarchs. The discussion owes a good deal to Cicero's De finibus (On Ends) and Disputationes Tusculanae, in which the theoretical problem of the relation of virtue to happiness is treated extensively. While the discussants acknowledge that the Stoics retain a positive value for utilitas, arguing that it may be among those secondary goods that derive from the primary pursuit of virtus, other philosophical schools have a less narrowly conceived understanding of the pursuit of happiness. Avoiding a contentiousness in these theoretical disputes that is in keeping with his irenic temperament, Palla rejects that component of Stoic philosophy which acknowledges the importance of utilitas, preferring to understand the pursuit of the highest good independently of any benefits or rewards that might accrue to the virtuous individual in pursuit of the good. So long as the good is pursued as an end in itself, and not for any other secondary purpose or gain that its pursuit may grant the seeker, Palla feels no need of inquiring further into its nature: his position, broadly speaking, would appear to harmonize with the positions taken by the narrator of the fifth book of Cicero's De Finibus. (136)

While readers of this work have acknowledged its nature as both a piece of highly topical propaganda and a rhetorical response to the political situation of the exiled patricians, it is also a philosophical consolatio written in imitation of the Ciceronian dialogue, so that the ethical discussions over values do more than advocate for a particular faction's greater political legitimacy. They define a conception of the public interest as it should be shaped by values that derive from reflection on the relation of virtue to happiness. In other words, they superimpose upon the practical, active world of politics the theoretical concerns that a contemplative, philosophical approach to the problem of human ends and purposes requires. Quite obviously Filelfo had highly personal and political motives that energized him to write invective against Cosimo, but the argumentation in the second dialogue of the Commentationes goes well beyond this more limited function. Filelfo succeeds in demonstrating the extent to which his world is undergoing a massive sea change in values, a displacement of a moral universe grounded on the principle of honestum, of moral value pursued for its own sake (per se expetendum), with one that is now driven by expediency and calculation, by the reckoning of self-interested benefits and rewards. Furthermore, it is not just Cosimo and his minions who behave in this manner. Eugenius IV, at least in the portrait of him given in Rinaldo's speech, has also succumbed to this shift in values: he is abandoning his time-honored commitment and loyalty to the Guelf cause (traditionally underwritten by the Florentine nobility) and is now pursuing, in the post-Anghiari political situation, a league with the Ghibelline-friendly Milanese. This amounts to a complete reversal of the situation in 1434, when Eugenius was (according to Rinaldo) essentially Cosimo's stooge. In contrast, Filelfo argues disingenuously that the patricians do not deserve the sentence of infamy passed on them, since they never colluded with the Milanese in 1434 but simply pleaded with Eugenius's legate, Vitelleschi, to be allowed to remain in Florence as the traditional guardians of the city's people and its liberties. That Filelfo's patrons may not have measured up in their actual behavior to the ethical standards that he proposes does not in the final analysis really matter: what matters is that Filelfo has pursued a philosophical line of inquiry that seeks to justify and reinforce virtue ethics in a world that has lost its ethical bearings. In essence, Filelfo must distort the historical record in order to align the exiles' behavior with his ethical ideal of behavior that is neither expedient nor self-interested, even though the attempt to garner Filippo's assistance in order to provoke a countercoup against Cosimo was quite obviously an expedient strategy confirmed by the historical record. (137)

It is therefore with a poignant sense of the relevancy of classical ethics to his historical moment that Filelfo allows Palla to engage in a lengthy discourse on the nature of the summum bonum. He opens his remarks with an examination of the Stoic position on virtue as the only good, noting that for this philosophical sect, the greatest happiness is acquired through the pursuit of virtue both for its own sake and for the rewards that it brings: "And since the Stoics, as they appear to me, pursued a matter of great importance in philosophy, what they thought ought to be first heard. Following common sense, they define the good to be the beneficial, or no different from the beneficial. And they call the beneficial a kind of virtue and a good action, and they desire that a good man and a friend be no different from a benefit." (138) But after examining this position, Palla cannot agree with it, since for him the term beneficial (utile) resonates with connotations of self-interested behavior. Right actions may be both beneficial and virtuous, but they are not necessarily both, and when forced to choose, the virtuous should always be chosen over the beneficial and expedient. It is no wonder, then, that Palla attempted for so long to remain neutral during the crisis of 1434: remaining neutral was most virtuous precisely because it was that moral position which preserved Florentine unity and refused to condone factionalism, however unlikely the practical success of such a strategy may have seemed at the time.

Palla's advocacy of virtue ethics becomes clearer after a brief interlude during which the bibulous Poggio Bracciolini is lampooned. The aristocratic values that Filelfo has everywhere been championing are defined as those most compatible with an ethical stance that keeps the summum bonum always in view. These values had been defined somewhat earlier in a passage of Rinaldo's speech that is filled with bitterness: "What could be more bitter than for a life, full and fitted with every kind of integrity, a form of life for which the noble class must seem to everyone to have been created for the finest tasks, and which always preserves its honor, advises the commonwealth, upholds the principle of duty rather than anyone's private welfare, submits itself to danger rather than pursuing self-love, receives wounds and sometimes even desires death; [what could be more bitter than] for a brave, active soul to suffer this: not only be driven into exile, but to be accused of seeking renown in every action, and to be branded with every kind of ignominy and abuse?" (139) The list of these selfless forms of activity stands in stark contrast to the description of Cosimo de' Medici much earlier in the Oratio ad exules. There his behavior was deemed to be always self-interested; he acted only "when he hoped that some greater benefit for himself would arise." The philosophical discussions in the final pages of the second dialogue become somewhat mired in technical distinctions that are handled in a confusing manner by Filelfo. What is nevertheless absolutely clear is the distaste that Palla has for behaviors that spring from self-interest. The man who is callidus--that is to say, the man who is shrewd and who possesses what the Greeks term synesis ("wit," for which Palla finds a Latin equivalent in the term prudentia)--is treated disparagingly by the elitist Strozzi: "He is thus called whose soul grows callous from use, as from working with the hands." (140) The term utilitas and its etymological relatives are everywhere held in contempt by Palla Strozzi, while Cosimo is associated with the lowest classes in society.

Lest we completely explain the argumentative positions of both the Commentationes and the Oratio ad exules as owing to the primary motive of tarring Cosimo with the worst possible attributes in an utterly slanderous manner, we ought to reckon as objectively as we can with the following remark made by Cosimo in a meeting in 1448 with other Florentine leaders, in which a philistinism kindred to that which is discussed by Palla Strozzi in the Commentationes can be heard: "Especially when a question such as this arises for consideration, or even more so when the troubles by which the republic is surrounded are to be examined, history needs to be set aside, and argumentation put to an end as to whether honestas or utilitas is to be chosen." (141) Philosophical terminology could thus play a very concrete role, whether in the foreign affairs of Florence or in the fate of its patrician exiles, in the mentality of fifteenth-century political leaders. As moderns we may judge Palla as naive for remaining such a moral absolutist, precisely because the world of situation ethics and moral relativism--or, at the very least, a context-dependent environment for decision making--is part of the very fabric of the moral universe of the modern world today. For Palla, however, there is additionally a Christian morality that underwrites his ethical position: "In all things please all people ... seeking not what is profitable for me, but what is profitable for the many, in order that you may be saved." (142) The contrast between Cosimo and Palla could not be more sharply drawn. Palla, who in the time frame of the dialogue will soon become an exile, is like the Apostles, who achieved renown even though they practiced their ministries "for no country, on behalf of no one's reputation at all." (143) It is this unaffiliated status that defines the ethical universe of the cosmopolitan sage. Cosimo, by contrast, represents pure expediency, and his actual behavior in the world of politics is witness to the distance that in his mind separates the ethical from the political. He is, to borrow a chiastic construction from Kant, a political moralist, whereas Palla Strozzi is a moral politician.

The third dialogue of Filelfo's work takes as its topic the subject of poverty, a topic that necessarily involves the appropriate use of wealth in communities. Given Filelfo's ottimati audience and the dedicatee of the work, he finds it necessary to open this dialogue with a long apology for discussing the ways in which poverty can be seen as a virtue in company that now enjoys, or has enjoyed in the past, a wealthy lifestyle. Filelfo explains that it is really voluntary poverty that will be his topic, not poverty in its more general sense; furthermore, he will be discussing poverty in a more abstract (and even religious) sense, one that can be grasped by statements like this: "It is not a lack of money, but a lack of careful thought and judgment that brings on poverty." (144) Poverty can be, of course, poverty of mind or spirit, which stands in opposition to freedom of spirit and freedom from attachments, both of which are usually not characteristics of those who possess wealth. While Leonardo Bruni, who presides over the discussion in this dialogue, admits that wealth can have power in a society, and allows that, practically speaking, freedom is almost impossible without some economic means, he nevertheless remains quite critical of the ways in which he perceives that wealth is being used in Florence. His words are all the more remarkable when we realize that he had served as Chancellor of the Florentine Republic both before and after the 1434 coup, negotiating the change in regimes more smoothly than most, probably succeeding because of his discretion and political skill. Of course, his words are really Filelfo's, but nevertheless we might reflect on what it might have meant to have had friends like Filelfo when he puts words like these into Bruni's mouth: "Cosimo applies his money to every kind of shameful filthiness, whereas [Vitaliano Borromeo, the work's dedicatee] applies his to the brilliance and honor of virtuous behaviors. And so there is nothing good about wealth, nor is there anything bad, but wealth can be used as a kind of instrument both for good actions and bad ones depending on the intelligence and values of those who use it." (145) Bruni then translates three of the Cynic Epistles that we encountered in the first dialogue, all of which challenge conventional valuations of wealth and status and even express contempt for human beings. When Poggio Bracciolini interrupts to remark on the nature of Cosimo's vast outlays of wealth, he attempts to portray Cosimo as magnanimous, but clearly fails in his task: Cosimo will never part with his wealth unless there is either some "public or personal benefit" to be derived from the expense. (146) The relief of beggars like Diogenes or Crates, which can only indirectly benefit the public interest and which will bring no improvement whatsoever in the status of the giver, is therefore not the sort of charitable behavior that interests Cosimo, who fortifies himself with "commerce" that is shameful to the Florentine Republic and who strengthens his political position by befriending "artisans." True charity--which might involve, for example, the endowment of institutions for the establishment of dowries--is of little interest to Cosimo. (147)

While not expressed in the same ironic tone of Alberti's famous example in Momus, Bruni's praise of poverty contributes to an ethical discourse rather than constituting a rhetorical exercise. The ascetic practices of, say, Apollonius of Tyana, have no worldly purpose behind them: they are the acts of an individual pursuing absolute freedom to answer only to the principle of virtue and the judgment of God. Bruni's laus paupertatis conflates the classical example of Diogenes with the Christian example of Jesus: the former stated his belief that the richest man was actually the one who needed nothing, while Jesus became a poor man in order to make humankind rich.

The peroration of the Commentationes is given by Bruni, who returns to the concerns of his immediate audience, the exiled ottimati and the profoundly immoral sentence passed upon them: "But there is nothing that I worry about less, Palla, than being an exile along with you, the illustrious and excellent ottimati, and this not just because where the wise man is, he is both free and has a homeland, but because for a long time in Florence, seeing everything oppressed there by the dreadful yoke of subjection, I have not been allowed to take up more freely the weapons of my oratory against these wicked parricides, so to speak, of their homeland, a topic that, because I understand you will speak about it tomorrow, I will hand over to you in the early morning." (148) Filelfo's original plan for the Commentationes envisioned seven further dialogues on topics related to exile, but he probably abandoned the work in about 1444, by which time a plan to recall the exiled aristocrats seemed an unlikely possibility. While the work as we have it still betrays some haste in composition, especially in the third book, and while Filelfo's work here and elsewhere can be eclectic to the point of being pretentiously farraginous in its concatenation of classical (especially Greek) allusions, Bruni's final sentence is an impressive synthesis of Filelfo's civic concerns. Now it is Bruni--who remained behind in Florence--who addresses the issue of freedom of speech and complains of the constraints he has "for a long time" been experiencing, even as he celebrates the unsponsored habitus of the sage, the freedoms of one always at home in the world even in the absence of a specific citizenship status. Even if Filelfo's work does not reflect in any modern, realist manner the psychic realities of exile--only the young Onofrio's occasional commentary registers with any force for a modern reader (149)--the expression of cosmopolitan yearnings, extracted from the ethical discourses of Cynicism and Stoicism, is an impressive achievement for an author who lived in a world that was otherwise so local in its mentality and so thoroughly complicated by social bonds so as to make a construct of personhood that would resemble modern individualism such a distant conceptual possibility. If Filelfo tended toward Cynicism--and, alas, toward the cynical as well (150)--he took from its traditions an ethical idealism that may have lent him little in the way of practical rewards, but that nevertheless represented an important response to the problem of factionalism and interest groups in Renaissance Florence.

In modern discussions of cosmopolitanism, it is Immanuel Kant's invocation of a "cosmopolitan right" that exists for all of humanity to be assured "hospitality" as aliens in a foreign nation that has been most often invoked. But Kant's context for employing the term is certainly too narrow to shed much light on its meaning for Renaissance readers. (151) As we have seen, for a Renaissance author like Filelfo, the adjective cosmopolitan would be associated with the figure of Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic philosopher who defined himself as a kosmopolites, or citizen of the world, a definition echoed also in a statement by Socrates attributed to him by Plutarch. (152) The term seems to have suggested in the classical world a resistance to specific political affiliations and dependencies; in particular, for a Cynic the term cosmopolitan might have been a means of expressing a freedom that comes from disaffiliation, whether voluntarily chosen in the manner of Apollonius of Tyana, or coerced, as in the exile of figures like Diogenes himself, or in later authors who experienced periods of exile, such as Seneca, Cicero, Juvenal, and Ovid. The term seems also to connote dissent, a discordant sensibility in relation to conventional or local standards, a posture assumed in the interest of discovering more universal (and naturally grounded) values that somehow transcend culture and that may also resist the claims of popular consensus or common sense. But for Filelfo the term acquires deeper moral connotations, implying detachment from political formations equally as it might imply attachment to certain principles, such as autonomy (the Cynic's autarkeia) and philanthropy (conceived of as acting in accordance with the best interests of humanity as a whole rather than with the interests of a specific group or nation in mind). In a world so thoroughly permeated with institutions and interest groups, Filelfo's moral imagination glimpsed an alternative conception of human belonging and identity, one in which human interests became detached from their moorings in social practice and achieved a more ideal expression in an ethics of virtue, even as he was paradoxically working energetically on behalf of the cause of a specific interest group. It finally matters little that his ideas bore no practical consequences, for they nevertheless constitute an important, if neglected, source in the history of discourses about human freedom.

In Filelfo's work, Palla Strozzi becomes the chief exponent of these cosmopolitan moral positions, all of which are construed as being especially relevant to the Florentine crisis of the 1430s, though other figures in the Satyrae and many of the members of the exiled group of ottimati are portrayed as if they could also be stewards of these ethical principles. In disclosing the moral and political valences of the notion of world citizenship, Filelfo brought classical conceptions to bear on the more parochial concerns of a Renaissance city that suffered from factionalism and from a politics of interest groups; while world citizenship necessarily must have meant something different in a world so much more geographically circumscribed, the revived concept nevertheless allowed at least one humanist to carry on a discourse with social elites that provided an alternative path to understanding citizenship and personal identity through the prism of morality rather than politics, and to imagining those elites in a world that transcended the merely local and private. In this sense, we can begin to suggest that the community of learning in which Filelfo urged his patrons to find their home constituted an incipient form of the public sphere, a sphere defined more by communicative possibility and openness of discourse than by geographical and temporal boundaries. Kant's establishment in the Enlightenment of a "cosmopolitan right" finds a distant echo in Filelfo's insistence that ius not always be subordinated to the whims of vis, even if he was cynical about this possibility in the satire to Valla, a likeminded humanist who discovered (to his own danger) the precise degree to which might can make right, and who might have suffered the punitive consequences that can follow from exercising freedom of speech had it not been for the intervention of his protector, King Alfonso. Filelfo's restoration to Western culture of Cynic freedom demands the attention of intellectual historians, even if it was a concept that would only enjoy an underground existence for several more centuries as absolutist forms of government made it ever more difficult for intellectuals to speak their minds or to disclose their secrets.

MISERICORDIA UNIVERSITY

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*The research for this essay was supported by grants from The Renaissance Society of America/Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and the College Misericordia Faculty Development Committee, to both of whom I am grateful. An earlier version of the paper was discussed at the Wesleyan University Seminar on the Renaissance, and I wish to thank Laurie Nussdorfer, Marcello Simonetta, and John Paoletti for the invitation to present there. I also wish to thank David Marsh, Diana Robin, Riccardo Fubini, Chris Celenza, Silvia Fiaschi, and an anonymous reader for helping me at various stages of my work on Filelfo. Citations of Filelfo's letters are from both the Venice 1502 edition, and from ms. Triv 873. Quotations from the Satyrae are given in English translation in the text, and cited in the footnotes by book (decade), hecatostich, and line number(s); the footnotes also give the Latin, cited by page number in Fiaschi's edition for decades 1-5, or by folio number of the Milan 1476 editio princeps for decades 6-10. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own. I have used the following abbreviations for libraries in citations of manuscripts: Amb = Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; Triv = Milan, Biblioteca Trivulziana; FBN = Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale; BMawr = Special Collections, Bryn Mawr College Library, Pennsylvania.

(1) Bruni, 2000, 23: "Itaque omnes qui aut seditionibus pulsi aut invidia deturbati patriis sedibus extorres aguntur, ii se Florentiam universi recipiunt quasi in unicum refugium tutamenque cunctorum. Nec ullus est iam in universa Italia qui non duplicem patriam se habere arbitretur: privatim propriam unusquisque suam, publice autem Florentinam urbem. Ex quo quidem fit ut hec communis quedam sit patria et totius Italie certissimum asilum, ad quod omnes undique, cum sit opus, confugiunt recipiunturque cum summo incolentium favore summaque benignitate ... ne quisquam patria se carere putet donec Florentinorum supersit urbs."

(2) Bruni, 1996, 286-87: "Multitudinem vero civium tam numerosam nostra civitas habet, ut preter hanc ipsam innumerabilem copiam in patrio solo degentem infinita quedam insuper civium vis per universum orbem terrarum diffusa conspiciatur.... Nullus est tam remotus neque tam avius mundi locus, in quo Florentinus aliquis non incolat civis.... Quare si omnis absentium multitudo civium nostrorum, que per universum terrarum orbem varie diffusa est, huic presentium multitudini adiungatur, resultet profecto infinita quedam et innumerabilis multitudo populi, cui nulla penitus civitatum Italicarum in ista quidem parte fuerit comparanda." For the expansionist chauvinism of this work, see Viti, 1992, 395-401. Bruni's shift in emphasis from the earlier Laudatio to this funeral oration may also reflect his own personal trajectory from outsider advena to eventual chancellor (I thank David Marsh for this observation).

(3) The literature on Florence's social structures is vast; a sampling can be found in Becker, 2:93-149; Brucker; Kent; Kent and Kent; Martines, 1963.

(4) On Bruni's commitment to the aristocratic faction and his political discretion, see Fubini, 1992, 1:399-443, esp. 413-14. See also Field, 1124-27.

(5) Even though Habermas sees the public sphere as a later, bourgeois phenomenon, his notion of the public sphere can be a useful concept when examining practices of communication and their relative openness or constraint in earlier centuries, especially when levels of literacy were fairly high, as they were in fifteenth-century Florence: Habermas, 1991. Clearly humanists like Filelfo often used their writing to stimulate political discourse. For the shifting and even baffling senses of the terms private and public during the early modern period, see Chittolini.

(6) Very little correspondence survives between the two humanists, but Filelfo managed to remain on good terms with Bruni. On their relations, see Field, 1119-22; Viti, 1992, 133-35, 337, 362-63. Gualdo Rosa, 386-87, rightly emphasizes the phrase "eadem est condicio quae prius" ("The situation is the same as before") in Bruni's 1435 letter to Filelfo (Bruni, 1741, 2:69) as an indication that Bruni's oligarchic sympathies had not fundamentally changed even after the establishment of Medici dominance. Bruni, importantly, presides over much of the philosophical discussion in the third book of the Commentationes Florentinae de exilio.

(7) Rosmini, Filelfo's nineteenth-century biographer, is still an invaluable source for the details of his life. See also Viti, 1997; Robin, 1991: despite its title, the latter work treats much more than Filelfo's Milanese years. More detailed investigations of portions of Filelfo's life are in Zippel (the Florentine years); De Feo Corso (the period in Siena); Adam (the Milanese years); Gualdo (attempts at papal patronage); Fiaschi (Filelfo, 2005).

(8) For more extensive discussion of these key terms, see below. In Bruni's Laudatio, Florence is glorified as a commonwealth whose value system places "integrity before self-interest" and where acting expediently is acceptable only when it is at the same time an action that has integrity or honesty; furthermore, even enemies of the state are guaranteed rights in the republic. See Bruni, 2000, 25.

(9) The term instrumental reason can be traced back through the Frankfurt School to its ultimate roots in Max Weber's sociology; for my understanding of the concept I have relied primarily on the work of Jurgen Habermas, who attempts to replace the term with a more value-neutral concept of communicative reason: see Habermas, 1984, 1:366-99. Quite obviously, the kind of situation ethics that the term implies were given an important foundation in the work of Machiavelli. A philosophical attempt to champion an ethics that opposes instrumental reason can be found in Maclntyre, whose virtue ethics I mention below.

(10) Rosmini, 1:185; De Feo Corso, 194; Errera, 214.

(11) I borrow the notion of a hidden versus an official "transcript" from Scott, 1-16. There are instances in which Filelfo modulates between the two, even in the same work. On the "performance of deference" (Scott, 3), see also Goffman.

(12) Legrand, 10, translating "xeno logio" as "un etranger instruit" (11).

(13) Rosmini, 3:122, cites a late letter in which Filelfo clearly projects some of his own experiences onto his son: his son has been a wanderer, and the father fears he will die as an exile.

(14) For overviews of ancient cosmopolitanism as it developed in Stoicism, see Nussbaum; Schofield. For the modern concept, see Brennan; Appiah; Benhabib; Dallmayr (a critique of Nussbaum).

(15) Sabbadini first drew attention to the oration, and his brief summary still remains the only one available. Field, 1121, n. 47, and 1136, n. 95, identifies two more copies of the oration and offers a date of 1435 for its composition: I have reservations about this date, as does Boschetto, 36. For the work as propaganda, see Fiaschi, 2005; for humanists as propagandists at a later stage in Milanese history, see Ianziti, who in a felicitous phrase speaks of the "compromise with power" (5) that humanists made in the generation that succeeded Bruni and Biondo.

(16) Ferrau remains the most comprehensive discussion to date of this important, unedited work. The extensive, even excessive, use of recondite Greek sources, combined with the digressive invectives against Poggio Bracciolini, do make the work something of a mixed bag, but I would maintain that it is Filelfo's most important prose work. For its classical antecedents in the works of Cicero, see Ferrau, 375, n. 10: to his choices I would also add Seneca's Consolatio ad Helviam, a work owned by Palla Strozzi and recorded in his collection as the "Epistole ad Elbiam" (Fiocco, 306). For the work as a consolatio, or remedium, see Ferrau, 375. The work is considered as an example of humanist propaganda by Vasoli, 134, who also makes an important observation that I pursue at greater length below: "The third dialogue [of the Commentationes] also ends with the celebration of the ethical superiority of a political and social class that not only is clothed in humanistic dress but sets the values of wisdom and of a more rigorous morality apart from any specific interest, any outcome, and from its own power" (122, my emphasis). Garin, 1952, 454-517, translates a portion of the third book, De paupertate.

(17) Filelfo's Satyrae have been mined as a source for understanding humanistic rivalries and invectives by a number of scholars, such as M. Davies, but have not yet achieved the stature they deserve as sources that reflect on, or respond to, the political events of the 1430s and '40s. Fiaschi's edition of the first half of the Satyrae (Filelfo, 2005) will doubtless rectify this situation. Her edition became available to me after this essay had reached the stage of an initial draft. Rosmini's biography is the only work that uses the satires in any kind of sustained and broad manner; Albanese is also a good introduction. The satires are notoriously difficult to date with precision, as they underwent constant revision until reaching their final form in 1451.

(18) The humanist-monk Ambrogio Traversari had been translating one of the main sources of knowledge about the Cynics, the Lives of Diogenes Laertius, throughout the 1420s; Filelfo, when asked by Traversari for assistance in rendering some of the poetic quotations in Diogenes, was initially receptive but eventually declined. He later composed a satire addressed to Giannozzo Manetti (Satyrae 2.7) ridiculing Traversari's insufficient Greek skills. On Traversari's translation of Diogenes Laertius, see Gigante. For Filelfo as the first reader and translator of Sextus, see Cao, 2001.

(19) For the adoption by Renaissance elites of a civic humanist ethos that originated in the civic-minded community orientation of the popolo--who had previously behaved with relatively shameless self-interest--see the shrewd remarks of Najemy, 2004, 7-15; Najemy, 2006, 293. Najemy, 2004, 12, argues that the elite's adoption of a civic-minded ethos "masked upper-class hegemony in the language of patriotism" and that this language had been in fact adopted from the popolo and from the culture of the late medieval communes. The alternative politics that Filelfo entertained prior to 1444, however ephemeral or abstract it may have been, imagined a world that was driven neither by the exclusive hegemony of private interest groups (whether defined by class or wealth) nor by patriotic civic humanism grounded in a specific polity, but by a cosmopolitan moral standard. This was almost unthinkable during the period, but faint traces of it could be detected in the classical discourse of Cynicism. For an excellent picture of such an alternative politics as it was theorized by Zeno, a follower of Cynicism and the founder of Stoicism, see the brilliant study of his "city of love" in Schofield. Filelfo could have encountered some of Zeno's thought in the works of Plutarch, especially the Life of Lycurgus, and in scattered passages in Diogenes Laertius. For the term citizen of the universe (kosmopolites) in Diogenes Laertius, 6.63, see Schofield, 141-45.

(20) Machiavelli's reflections on the fate of republics in book 7 of his History of Florence (Machiavelli, 309-11) rely on a distinction between private and public interests and have been often repeated.

(21) Fiaschi (Filelfo, 2005, xlii) has called attention to Filelfo's innovative stance as a political activist demonstrating "the desire to reclaim the civic power of the intellectual," and considers the fifth decade of the satires as an example of Filelfo's function as an "intellectual mediator" (xxxv).

(22) Filelfo, 1476, f. 91v (Satyrae 7.2.29): "carmen cynicum"; cf. ibid., 147v (Satyrae 10.10.21-22). Fiaschi (Filelfo, 2005, xix) notes that there are indications that at least one satire was drafted in 1428, when Filelfo was in Bologna, but the project of the satires became more vigorously pursued in Filelfo's Florentine period.

(23) Filelfo, 1502, f. 9 (ms. Triv 873, f. 13v), to Antonio Loschi, 19 April 1429: the letter also suggests that the Florentines, since they possess "more cunning minds" than the Bolognese, whose city Filelfo had just left, would be more prone to doing harm. The more frequently quoted letter to Aurispa that describes Florence as "a whole city bursting with factions" appears only in the Trivulziana manuscript (ms. Triv 873, f. 24). A later letter that is probably misdated describes the two main factions as those headed by Niccolo da Uzzano and Cosimo: the letter reports that no action was taken when a plot to assassinate the former was revealed, and that Filelfo's enemies are clients of Cosimo, who, though "most loving" toward Filelfo himself, is nevertheless "the kind of man who counterfeits and deceives about everything" (Filelfo, 1502, f. 10v-11 [ms. Triv 873, f. 23v]).

(24) Filelfo, 2005, 5 (Satyrae 1.1.12): "alio calamum vocat."

(25) Cicero, 140-41 (On Ends 2.53): "Non oportet timidum aut imbecillo animo fingi non bonum illum virum, qui quidquid fecerit ipse se cruciet omniaque formidet, sed omnia callide referentem ad utilitatem, acutum, versutum, veteratorem, facile ut excogitet quomodo occulte, sine teste, sine ullo conscio fallat." See, for example, Filelfo, 1502, f. 11, and the two letters to Palla Strozzi in ms. Triv 873, ff. 31r-v, 32 (in Rosmini 1:140-41, 143) that do not appear in the Venice 1502 edition. The second letter warns specifically of pecunia Cosmiana. Cosimo, moreover, is not only "a man of few words," but also versutus et callidus: "he will never allow so great an opportunity [as the unsteady state of affairs in Florence in September of 1434] to slip through his hands."

(26) Filelfo, 2005, 6-7 (Satyrae 1.1.44-46): "quin veri quidquid cognovero fraetus / iusticia atque animo, nulli parsurus, id omne / eloquar audacter." Cf. a similar claim in Filelfo, 1476, f. 95 (Satyrae 7.4.99-100): "Whatever things now lie hidden, / I will make sure that boys, adolescents, and men / Know the truth about them."

(27) Filelfo, 2005, 7 (Satyrae 1.1.54): "Quid tuta silentia norunt?" Fiaschi (ibid.) points to the echo of Horace, Carmina 3.2.25.

(28) Filelfo, 2005, 6 (Satyrae 1.1.25-26): "arma ministrat / fortia vel Nemesis vel mentis conscia virtus."

(29) Ibid., 12 (Satyrae 1.2.23-24): "vir probatus." For the importance of Niccolo da Uzzano in defining the values of the Florentine ottimati, see Kent, especially 198-99. Ibid., 211-15, also discusses a poem in terza rima attributed to Uzzano that uses a poetics of stilnovisti devices--Florence is a donna that is being mistreated but who does have worthy followers; the ottimati are contrasted with those who feign love for Florence's "blue shield and golden lilies" but actually play false to her--to lament the rise of the nuova gente and to urge Florentine aristocrats to strengthen their support of the parte Guelfa. The text of the poem is in Canestrini, 297-300. Similar sentiments are found in an anonymous poem in Guasti, 3:649, that directly reflects the rise of Cosimo to power. Uzzano's poem of 1426 is too early to single out the Medici as leaders of a popular faction--Kent, 42, suggests 1426 or 1427 as the earliest dates for evidence of "an active Medici party"--but the poem's repeated allusions to the nuova gente help to chart a shift in Florentine values. As Kent indicates throughout her study, the shift clearly involved the deterioration of public values by private interest groups, but she wisely points out (see especially 203-05) that both factions claimed at different times to be representing the public interest.

(30) Filelfo, 2005, 14 (Satyrae 1.2.93-96): "Civibus aequalem si cultu gesseris omni, / si dictis factisque modum servaris, honesta / utilibus praeferre die noctuque laborans, / numquam civilis patriam discordia turbet."

(31) See, for example, Cicero, 132-33 (On Ends 2.45); ibid., 464-69 (On Ends 5.64-66).

(32) Filelfo, 2005, 11 (Satyrae 1.2.12-13): "ius viribus / omne concedit."

(33) Ms. Amb G 93 inf., 165, "Eulogium in Pallantem Strozam equitem auratum": "Hic situs est Pallas ethruscae gloria gentis / Stroza pater patriae militiaeque decus." For biographical information on Palla Strozzi, see Fabroni; Gregory; Belle; Vespasiano 2:139-65. For the many uses of the term pater patriae as applied to Cosimo, see Brown, 190, who cites Filelfo, 1502, f. 26 (ms. Triv 873, f. 57), perhaps the first instance of the phrase. Filelfo tells the story of Cato's bestowal of the term upon Cicero in the Commentationes (ms. FNB II ii 70, f. 40).

(34) Ms. Amb G 93 inf., 165, "Eulogium": "Hic nunquam hostile quenquam vel saeva merentem / supplicia est animo passus ad arma sequi."

(35) This letter (Filelfo, 1502, f. 39 [ms. Triv 873, f. 79v]) is especially revealing insofar as it simultaneously asserts Filelfo's right to react in an aggressive manner to contemptuous treatment by others (contumelia) while it also allows for the wisdom of Palla's advice to behave in a less violent manner when suffering wrongs (iniuria): "I will follow your advice and I will control myself, unless my bile has grown irrationally hot, for I am a man who can endure a wrong but can in no way put up with contempt, nor do I wish to, for it is in the nature of a prudent and measured man to endure wrongs, but I reckon it to be the nature of a fool or an idiot to put up with contempt." Filelfo does not specify in this letter the context of this advice given to him by Palla: the letter's date of 1447 may be incorrect.

(36) Filelfo, 2005, 207 (Satyrae 4.1.19): "vir mitissimus."

(37) Filelfo, 1502, f. 25-26 (ms. Triv 873, ff. 55v-57v). This important letter is an odd combination of (presumably ironic) flattery, threats, and persuasion. In the letter it is suggested that the ottimati are particularly incensed at the unfairness of Cosimo's self-exemption from many of the Florentine Republic's laws. Filelfo warns that Cosimo needs to fear his friends as well as his enemies (the ottimati), because he has secured his friends with money alone. The "shrewd men" who support Cosimo in fact have power over him, since their loyalty will last only as long as their expectations of favors and rewards from Cosimo are met. Cosimo is told that he will only have conquered the ottimati when he conquers himself. This statement specifically contrasts a comment on Filippo Maria Visconti in the letter of the same period to the people of Florence encouraging them to seek Filippo's help: Filippo "has conquered himself no less than his enemies," and we are asked to believe that he has no "desire for conquest": Filelfo, 1502, f. 24v (ms. Triv 873, f. 54v).

(38) Filelfo certainly exaggerates the putative consensus in favor of a death sentence for Cosimo in 1433. Kent, 294, cites Cosimo's diary for evidence of death threats at the time of his arrest, but there were apparently no official discussions of anything other than a sentence of exile. Filelfo's letter of 1433 mentioning the possibility of Cosimo's death (see above, n. 25) sounds more like street reportage or rumor than insider knowledge.

(39) Filelfo, 2005, 207 (Satyrae 4.1.17-22): "sentis ut et omnibus una / sis odio, caedem et populus caedemque senatus / aequa lance tuam decreverit. Omnibus unus / Strozza virum Pallas mitissimus obstat, et idem / cui tu saepe malum fecisses, crimina damnans, / auxilium tibi ferre tamen non desinit."

(40) Guasti, 3:657-64, gives the details of the interrogation of Domenico de' Lamberteschi, who clearly implicated Palla Strozzi in the "plot" to summon Milanese assistance to the cause of the oligarchs in 1434--the putative reason for many of their number being exiled. Palla, he claimed, was present at a meeting where under Rinaldo's leadership it was decided "to accomplish with force what could not be persuaded by words" (658); furthermore, Rinaldo would conspire with the Duke of Milan, because "freedom without power" meant nothing to him (660). It has been surmised that Palla's pleas for leniency for Cosimo in 1433 preserved him from the sentence of infamy passed on Rinaldo and others, for which see Guasti, 3:665-68; Errera, 226-27.

(41) Filelfo, 2005, 208 (Satyrae 4.1.30-38, 42-43): "Quid facis, o Palla? Quo te claementia cursu / praecipiti culpanda trahit? Pater optime, Mundo / ignovisse paras? Nescis portenta latronis / immani quae mente latent? Secumne volutet / quam bene promeritus fueris? Gratesne referre / forte velit, qui triste nefas aequique bonique / edidicit pensare loco? lam desine, Palla, / decretam prohibere necem, sine legibus uti / afflictam patriam.... / O utinam potius nunquam pressisse furorem / nobilitas rabiemque tuam coepisset!"

(42) Ibid., 209 (Satyrae 4.1.77): "civiles ... rapinae"; ibid. (Satyrae 4.1.76-77): "privata ... / commoda." In Satyrae 5.5.27, written to Onofrio Strozzi, Palla's support of Florence in its war with Lucca is mentioned, and Palla is characterized there as "magnanimous" (line 4). Fabroni, 26, depicts Palla as thoroughly devoted to the Florentine Republic, and hence least deserving of the sentence of exile.

(43) Filelfo, 1476, f. 100v-101 (Satyrae 7.8.73-74, 80-81).

(44) Filelfo, 2005, 143 (Satyrae 3.1.50): "Non privata dolet, sed publica vulnera Pallas."

(45) Ibid. (Satyrae 3.1.39-44, 46-49): "Usqueadeo minimi Pallantem ducis, ut ullos / fortunae trepidare putes plaususve minasve? / Vir sapiens nunquam fortunae e nutibus ullis / pendeat; ex aequo variantem cernit utranque; / omnia quaeque hominum vitam mutantia turbant / provider, et casum se fortem munit in omnem .... / Sed quis Pallanta sereno / fortunae vultu dextrisque assensibus unquam / aut magis elatum, vel se minus aequa ferentem / senserit?"

(46) Ibid., 144 (Satyrae 3.1.85-88): "cuncto tibi ditior auro / est animus, quem celsa potens atque inclyta virtus / et colit et rebus maiorem reddit avitis / omnibus."

(47) Ibid., 145 (Satyrae 3.1.100): "nam qui se superat, meruit divinus haberi."

(48) John 14:1-2.

(49) Filelfo, 1476, f. 79v (Satyrae 6.4.17-20, 23-29): "At graviter Palla tibi certe consulis: urbem / qui tanta probitate vigens contempseris unam / esse tibi patriam, quem totus vis capit orbis. / Concipis en totum faecundo pectore mundum.... / Terris iactamur et undis, / lege relegati nullius civis et hostis, / sed nutu iussuque dei moderamine certo / cuncta gubernantis, cui non fortuna nec ullus / casus ab ancipiti veniens certamine rerum, / sed virtus et recta placet sententia castae / mentis in aetherium tollentis lumina solem."

(50) Two Greek odes to Palla (Filelfo, 1997, 34-35, 45-47) and a funeral elegy for him in Filelfo's Psychagogia (ibid., 125-26) enunciate a similar notion of world citizenship being embodied in Strozzi, though with less expressive power than in this satire. The first of these poems is translated into English and discussed by Robin, 1991, 125-31, who notes the "topos of the world citizenship of the sage" (128), which she attributes as a borrowing from either Plutarch's De exilio or Aristophanes' Plutus.

(51) Najemy, 2006, 259.

(52) Filelfo, 1476, f. 79v (Satyrae 6.4.39-47): "Sunt [Homer, Virgil, Aristotle] pulchra senectae / haec alimenta tuae, qui cunctis unus abundes / subsidiis vitae quae convenere probatae. / Naufragium Zeno Thebani cura Cratetis / votis saepe suis quodcunque hostile fuisset, / quam foret optandum, fausto discrimine novit. / Non igitur tristes exul tot duxeris annos, / qui patriam pulchris studeas ascendere pennis / laudis et ingenii; Dios habiturus honores."

(53) Diogenes Laertius, 2:115 (Lives 7.5).

(54) Filelfo, 1476, f. 80v (Satyrae 6.4.98-100): "Felix igitur, iustissime Palla, / cuius recta deum noctuque dieque volutat / mens, nec ob exilium quicquam demissus orat."

(55) The funeral oration appears as a letter to Onofrio and Gianfrancesco Strozzi in Filelfo, 1502, f. 125v-126v (ms. Triv 873, ff. 227v-228v). Adam, 357-60, publishes a vernacular oration translated by Pierantonio Acciaiuolo that is not the same as the Latin oration in Filelfo's letters and for which the original Latin does not survive: Fiaschi in Filelfo, 2005, 397. In the Latin oration Palla is compared to Odysseus, who serves to emphasize his cosmopolitan nature as well as his patriotism for his homeland. In death, Palla has gone to a place "where there is no faction, no envy, no place for hatred"; during his life, he behaved like the well-traveled Odysseus, another exile, who nevertheless "knew the minds of many men, and saw many cities." In the vernacular oration, emphasis is placed on Palla's consistently high opinion of his native Florence: Adam, 359-60.

(56) Filelfo, 2005, 319 (Satyrae 5.8.9): "libertatis amor cunctos tenet."

(57) Ibid., 320 (Satyrae 5.8.20-21): "nefandos / Pucinos." The nickname Puccini for Medici party followers derives from the name of one of Cosimo's major supporters, Puccio Pucci. Kent, 253-88, discusses the impact of the war with Lucca on the Medici party, acknowledging the catalytic effect that war had on consolidating Medici power, but she also points out that both factions at different times supported the war. Cosimo was the Commune's largest creditor, lending nearly five times the amount of the next largest creditor (ibid., 285).

(58) Filelfo, 2005, 320 (Satyrae 5.8.34-35): "nomen honesti / iusticiaeque decus"; ibid., 320 (Satyrae 5.8.35-36): "Vincere pulchrum / est alios, verum longe puto pulchrius ipsum / vincere se, longe puto magnificentius esse." As Fiaschi points out (Filelfo, 2005, 501; Fiaschi, 2005, 420-22), there is substantial distortion of the truth by Filelfo in relation to Filippo's "magnanimity" toward Alfonso.

(59) Filelfo, 2005, 321-22 (Satyrae 5.8.64-65, 71-80): "Servit Florentia Mundo, / at cui, proh superi, servit Florentia monstro!... / Hanc impune igitur pateris, vir maxime, pestem / tam regnare diu? Quae te tam lenta retardat / omnibus optatum patientia? Surge, quid haeres? / Quo minus occurras pandenti vela secundis / flatibus, et totam tibi se donare volenti / fortunae? Ne sperne deam: nam saepe patentis / contraxit contempra sinus, et flamina pressit. / Hac si spiranti scisset ferus Annibal uti, / numquam Scipiadum strages Carthago nec ullas / sensisset superata vices."

(60) Ibid., 323 (Satyrae 5.8.100): "auxilium nobis properat praestare Philippus."

(61) Ibid., 269 (Satyrae 5.1.7-8): "Age, maxime princeps, / te facilem mitemque meis hortatibus adde."

(62) Ibid., 270 (Satyrae 5.1.37-38): "Pereunt qui vivi teque tuumque / nomen ad astra ferant."

(63) Ibid., 271 (Satyrae 5.1.53-55): "Tua fac claementia cunctis. / praebeat exemplum, quo te vereantur amentque, / non metuant: nanque est odio quicunque timetur." The commonplace of a leader preferring to be loved rather than feared derives from Cicero, De officiis 1.22.

(64) Ibid., 272 (Satyrae 5.1.85-87): "Liberet exilio tua munificentia, qui te / hostili ex animo quo semper inarserat armis, / et studiis et amore pio servetque colatque."

(65) Ibid., 272 (Satyrae 5.1.94-98): "Quod si neglexeris ... at me / contineo: vatum mens est praesaga futuri. / Non autem nescis, quid Florentia tyrannis / nunc agitat, quid alit monstri, quo dirigit arcus. / Consule virtuti; propriis aut prospice rebus."

(66) For an anecdote about Cosimo's inability to forgive Filelfo even to his confessor, see Poliziano 57 (#178). For details on Filelfo's Siena years, including both the further plot on Filelfo's life and a possible plot by Filelfo against Cosimo and others, see De Feo Corso.

(67) Filelfo, 1476, f. 98v (Satyrae 7.7.18): "carmen protervum." Cf. ibid., f. 95 (Satyrae 7.4.85-86): "Ne satyras semper carmenque placere protervum / insimulent, quorum mens est obnoxia culpae.

(68) Ibid., f. 98v (Satyrae 7.7.23, 25-27): "Ergo animi redeant iungatur dextra dextrae ... / fugiatque procul simulatio fallax. / Laus mihi quidem clara quidem, tibi sed praeclarior uni, / cui magis alludit fortunae vultus et ora."

(69) Ibid., f. 99 (Satyrae 7.7.63-65): "Haecne videns Italas inter celeberrima divas / otia ferre potes? Nec te Florentia sentis / tanta mole premi?"

(70) See D'Addario.

(71) For Bruni's efforts, see Viti, 1992, 311-38; for further implications on Bruni and the exiles, see Field. The letters of 1444 are to Rinaldo degli Albizzi and show Filelfo being initially compassionate, though firmly uncommitted to assisting the exiles further, and then, in the second letter, reproachful of the exiles for disagreeing among themselves and stubbornly resisting opportunities for negotiation: Filelfo, 1502, f. 36v (ms. Triv 873, ff. 75v-76).

(72) Ms. Amb G 93 inf., f. 22v contains a poem in which Acciaiuoli is praised for his intelligence and also for "remaining firm in preserving ancestral right" (patrito iure): the close of the poem repeats the word nobilitas three times, making clear that the ius patritum is the exiles' claim of a right to return.

(73) Filelfo, 1476, f. 100v (Satyrae 7.8.73-74): "civisque boni quam triste tyranni / nomen."

(74) Ibid., f. 101 (Satyrae 7.8.80-81): "Integra ne populos metuat Florentia cunctos / nobilis Europae?"

(75) Ibid. (Satyrae 7.8.95-96): "Troius alter / Aeneas titulis tolletur in astra superbis."

(76) This typology can be found in many places: see, for example, the comments of Bacchelli and D'Ascia, in Alberti, 2003, Ixxx-lxxxi; Romano; lanziti; Martines, 1963, who notes that "political reflection" by Florentine humanists had come to a standstill by the 1450s. Filelfo's career nicely straddles the century and to a certain degree exemplifies this typology, even if such a typology should not be imposed too rigidly on Quattrocento humanists.

(77) Gramsci's categories of the organic and traditional intellectual are not as useful as they would appear to be; more useful are the categories of oppositional and hegemonic intellectual, as suggested by Said. The notion of an oppositional intellectual allows for a category to emerge that is neither bound to existing, traditional institutions, nor to emergent ("organic") classes that are in the process of creating new institutions.

(78) Filelfo, 2005, 95 (Satyrae 2.4.1-2): "Valla, vide ne dum cunctos in proelia poscis / incautus pereas ac fias fabula vulgi."

(79) Ibid. (Satyrae 2.4.15-16): "Quo tandem sub iudice prisca iacentia / Caesaris orator possis defendere iura?" To appreciate the multiple ironies here, the passage can be rendered somewhat freely as follows: "How then can you as an orator uphold ancient rights when you [stand] before the judge of a Caesar [i.e., Pope Eugenius's inquisitor] who has been defeated [by your arguments]?"

(80) On Valla as an oppositional figure, see Blanchard.

(81) Filelfo, 2005, 96 (Satyrae 2.4.34-40): "litem fuge, amice, malignam / invidiaeque luem, ne dum contendere verbis / ipse paras, patiare nefas et tristia facta: / iudice nam pravo superant mendacia verum, / et vis iura premit. Stultum est contendere frustra, / nec damnosa placer victoria. Valla, quiescens, / vive tibi, populi metuens aurasque minasque."

(82) Fubini, 1992b, 399-401; Fiaschi (Filelfo, 2005, 382).

(83) Filelfo, 2005, 97 (Satyrae 2.4.72-74): "At nequeo verum tacuisse: iuvare / si te vita nequit, stimulat si nomen et aura / festinasque mori."

(84) Filelfo reminds Valla that power always trumps the law--ibid., 96 (Satyrae 2.4.38): "et vis iura premit"--and that survival in a time such as this now demands skill and prudence in many things, not just scholarship: ibid., 97 (Satyrae 2.4.65-66): "Natus id aetatis, cui iam prudentia rerum / multarum callensque periria debet adesse."

(85) Filelfo, 1502, f. 61 (ms. Triv 873, ff. 113r-v).

(86) Filelfo, 1476, f. 147v (Satyrae 10.10. 21-22): "cynicaque severi / libertate soni saeclum damnanda per omne."

(87) Filelfo, 2005, 6-7 (Satyrae 1.1.44-46): "quin veri quidquid cognovero / ... eloquar audacter."

(88) See, for example, ibid., 98 (Satyrae 2.4.91-95).

(89) I have been unable to identify Varidaeo, though in a personal communication Silvia Fiaschi describes him to me as a Milanese intellectual.

(90) Filelfo, 1476, f. 93 (Satyrae 7.4.1-6): "Dissimulem, Rainalde, mones, iramque prementem / contineam, donec melior mi tempore quondam / se fortuna dabit. Nescit simulare Philelfus; / dissimulare nequit, nec vult. Varidaee, probati / dissimulare viri non est; nunquam ipsa simultas / mi placuit. Simulata loqui, Rainalde, vetamur."

(91) Ibid., f. 95 (Satyrae 7.4.99): "quaecunque latent nunc."

(92) On this aspect of the humanist vocation, see Simonetta.

(93) Filelfo, 1476, ff. 91v-92v (Satyrae 7.3. 24-28, 76-80, 85-93, 96-97): "Omnia qui mecum mea porto dixerat, auri / nil tulit aut gemmae, sed veri conscia secum / mens secreta boni penirus gaudebat, et omnem / contemnens sorrem, vacuis exire Prienen / libera et erectis humeris.... / Non equidem ignavam possum deducere vitam; / otia dura mihi. Vel me per aperta Philippus / quaeque pericla vocet, nostro studioque fideque / utatur, vel me quod nolim, liberet omni / obsequio.... / Non ego desidiae causa studioque placendi / otia ferre velim, malim lucemque meumque / quem colo luce magis, divum amisisse Philippum, / quam noctem sub luce pati. Per sydera testor / perque caput nostri divinum principis Angli, / ni me quamprimum studia ad maiora vocarit / quo velit obsequio, quod sit se principe dignum, / hinc me subripiam, quo me fors egerit ulla, / ipse sequens.... / Audistin? Nolim, nolim sic vivere, nolim / mi iam verba dari, turpe est me fallier."

(94) Line 24 is borrowed from Cicero, Paradoxa Stoicorum 8.

(95) Filelfo, 1476, f. 93v (Satyrae 7.3.70-71): "rerum secreta probasque / arte mentis sequi."

(96) See Albanese, 414, who describes the milieu defined in this poem as Filelfo's "gabbia dorata" (gilded cage).

(97) The political upheavals in Milan during the shortlived republic (1447-50) were only partly the cause of Filelfo's troubles in reaching Naples via Rome. He also experienced a number of quarantines because of plague in towns en route to Naples. Numerous letters of this period chronicle his frustrations in making the trip: Robin, 1991, 104-05.

(98) Filelfo, 2005, 188 (Satyrae 3.8.66-72): "Non te qui scurra dolosis / artibus alludit, non assentator iniquus / te sibi conciliat, tua non patet auris inepto, / talibus occurris qualem te moribus esse / noveris et vita. Tenebras lux respuit omnes, / nec patitur secum vitium coalescere virtus, / stulticiam semper ratio aspernatur."

(99) Filelfo, 1476, f. 147r-v (Satyrae 10.10.17-24): "Egimus his tecum, quae vel fortuna diesve / obtulit, oscenum siquid fortasse legendum / inter et effusum plus aequo occurrerit, illis / id vitio dederis quorum turpissima verbo / vita suo reddenda fuit, cynicaque severi / libertate soni saeclum damnanda per omne. / Non fuimus blandi, numquam assentatio nobis / grata fuit; fraus est occludere pectore verum."

(100) On this phenomenon, see Grendler, 162-77.

(101) Filelfo, 1476, f. 148v (Satyrae 10.10.93-100): "At si vera loqui tecum, non ficta pacisci, / rex Alphonse, licet, quoniam meus ille Marias / censuit e cunctis [te] solum et regibus omni / laude refulgentem, stimulos mihi iecit amoris / infinxitque tui. Non est fortuna, nec ulla / corporis exterior bonitas, sed nobile mentis / egregiumque decus, numeros vis ducta per omnes / quae facit aeternos homines cunctisque verendos."

(102) Filelfo, 2005, 189 (Satyrae 3.8.96-97): "docti et diserti."

(103) Filelfo did not consistently express his personal philosophical commitments, though he clearly leaned toward Stoicism during the period of the composition of the satires. In Filelfo, 1502, f. 53r-v (ms. Triv 873, f. 101r-v), for example, he indicates his preference for Stoicism: "I follow and have always strongly pursued that set of teachings which, begun by Antisthenes, was expanded by Zeno and completed by Chrysippus." Filelfo clearly understood the genealogical relationship of Stoicism to Cynicism.

(104) For Filelfo's extensive use of Greek sources, see Calderini; Cao, 2001.

(105) Fiaschi (Filelfo, 2005, 477-78) clarifies this component of Filelfo's argument, but see below, n. 113.

(106) See also Filelfo, 1476, f. 93v (Satyrae 7.4.38-9) for the charge that Cosimo ceded the right of the first nuptial night to the antipope John XXIII (r. 1414-18).

(107) Ms. Amb V 10 supp., f. 4v: "Nisi cum aut maiorem aliquam utilitatem consecuturum se speravit aut saevitiae impotentiaeque animi satisfacere aut cuipiam turpisve spurcique libidini morem gerere voluerit."

(108) Ibid., 5v, 20r-v.

(109) Ibid., 18v, 20v: "licentia et potestas."

(110) Ibid., 22v.

(111) Ibid., 55v-56: "Verum ut Italiae terminis hoc tempore contenti nec externis viribus egere videamur quibus urbibus ac potentiis florentia circundatur.... Et quidem recipiet vos Phillipus socios, libenter recipiet. Amat enim nobilitatem. Calamitosorum misereatur. Iusticiam fovet. Impietatem odit."

(112) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 3.

(113) Ibid., f. 3v The Commentationes are more ambivalent than the Oratio on the role of Eugenius IV in the betrayal of the ottimati. Filelfo is apologetic at times (on which see Errera, who argues that one of the work's main purposes is to spare Eugenius's reputation the charge of treachery), but allows Rinaldo to justify his actions in September of 1434 by giving him a set-piece oration in which he faults Eugenius IV for abandoning the cause of the ottimati. In Filelfo, 2005, 280 (Satyrae 5.2.97-100), Filelfo blames Eugenius IV more directly for their exile.

(114) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 6v: cf. Dio Chrysostom, 101-05 (On exiles, 16). This source is not indicated by Calderini's otherwise thorough research.

(115) On the "picture-thinking" encouraged by the Sophists and by the archaic system of Greek paideia, see Havelock.

(116) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 11v.

(117) Ibid., 13v: "Non is sum qui verbis gaudeam; menti oratio respondit. Non enim aliter te institui cupio quam me ipsum instituerim."

(118) For Alberti's interest in these pseudepigraphic writings, see Alberti, 1890, 270-71, for a letter to Francesco Griffolini (Francesco d'Arezzo) thanking him for making Diogenes' writings known to him. Filelfo corresponded with Griffolini in the 1460s.

(119) Griffolini's 1464 translation of the Cynic Epistles exists in a number of manuscripts: I have consulted ms. BMawr Gordan 99. In the dedicatory letter to Pius II, Griffolini speaks of Diogenes as a philosopher so "unattached" (vacuus) that he would even speak out against a friend (f. 55; cf. Filelfo, 1476, f. 92v [Satyrae 7.3.27-28], describing Bias of Priene as leaving his city "with unburdened, upright shoulders" ["vacuis / ... et erectis humeris"]). It is interesting to notice that a figure like Diogenes was all the more shocking to Renaissance minds because his misanthropic behavior repudiated the very sort of patronage networks that loomed so large in the social world of the period. On Griffolini, see Mancini.

(120) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 18-19: "Sciebat certe vir sapiens eum qui sese divitiis dedidisset libero esse animo nunquam posse, at hominem quidem ad libertatem non ad servitutem natum ... etsi cynice aperte tamen ac vero virtutem et divitias simul esse non facile posse Diogenes, ut vides, ostendit."

(121) Ibid., f. 19: "Virtus ipsa satis per sese ad felicitatem munita est; satis armata adversus omnem fortune impetum atque naufragium; nullius opis indiget, nullius subsidii. Praeterea ut inquit Pindarus, 'Cum virtute simul divite insite rare sunt homini.'" Filelfo may be alluding to the second of Pindar's Olympian Odes, l. 54.

(122) Ibid.: "qui [Cosimo] vi pecuniarum quas omni sibi flagitio, omni scelere et comparavit et comparat; quantas calamitates, quantos igni, quantas pestes in rem publicam intulit."

(123) Though we might expect exaggeration here for rhetorical effect, Filelfo was actually expressing concerns over a real issue in Florentine social and economic life: see Becker, 2:72, where Cosimo's failure to make payments to the communal fund for dowries (the Monte delle Doti) is discussed; Najemy, 2006, 257.

(124) For Plutarch's ascription of the concept of the world citizen to Socrates, see Plutarch, 529 (On Exile, 5).

(125) See above, n. 16.

(126) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 34v: "Quid enim Florentia pelli adeo miser ducimus? Danda est opera ne nosmetipsi nobis defuisse existimemur. Ego longe et quietius et tranquillius ubivis gentium me futurum spero quam florentie. Nor virtus fortunam, sed virtutem fortuna sequitur."

(127) Ibid., f. 35: qui [Socrates] cuias esset interrogatus: non Atheniensem aut Lacedaemonium, sed mundanum se esse respondit."

(128) Ibid., f. 36: "Non enim exilium nostrum est non proscriptio, sed relegatio. Nam nostra nobis amicissima patria caelum est, non Florentina, non Tuscia, non Italia, non Europa, non totus denique terrarum orbis, non mundis hic universus inferior."

(129) Ibid., f. 41. For an important discussion of the complications involving disinterested activity, see Kahn.

(130) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 41v: "Ea vero mea sententia semper fuit: longe nobis conducibilius esse et ad privatam et ad publicam dignitatem ut mala etiam obscuraque libertas anteponeretur cuivis utili servituti."

(131) We should recall the statement that the witness Domenico de' Lamberteschi made in 1434 concerning Rinaldo's state of mind at the time of the coup: "freedom without power" was pointless. See above, n. 40. This, of course, contradicts Rinaldo's later support of an alliance between the exiles and the Milanese prince.

(132) Errera draws attention to the sentence of infamy and the topic of the second book of the Commentationes.

(133) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 48v: "Nec tamen quibus esset a nobis affectus [Eugenius] beneficiis commemoravimus quam leniter monuimus, ne utilitatem cum honestate pugnare unquam arbitraretur."

(134) Ibid., f. 55v: "Quod enim difficillimis ac periculosissimis rei publicae temporibus, id nullo modo in in urilitatis ratione habendum esse iudicavi."

(135) Ibid., f. 56: "Ea est Florentinis argenti et auri copia, ut vel mensarii nostri in ultimas usque terras ad ferendam indigentibus opem ad hominum usum ac fructum dispersi disseminarique sint."

(136) Filelfo's late work De morali disciplina clarifies the Stoic position and shows Filelfo questioning the notion that the good is in any way achieved through actions per aliud as opposed to per se; much of the later work, dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici in 1473, was recycled from book 3 of the Commentationes, and some passages there have been translated from Sextus Empiricus: see Cao, 2001.

(137) For the distortion of the historical record, see Fiaschi, 2005.

(138) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 65v: "Et quoniam stoici magnum quiddam in philosophia mihi profiteri visi sunt, ii primi quid sentiant, audiendi sint, qui sequentes communis notiones bonum utilitatem esse definiunt, aut non aliud ab utilitate. Et utilitatem quidem virtutem dicunt bonamque actionem. Non aliud ab utilitate esse volunt bonum hominem et amicum"; for the source in Sextus, see Cao, 2001, 267.

(139) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 61r-v: "Nam quid amarius esse possit, quam cuius omnis vita plena sit consertaque honestatis, cui velut ingenerata optimorum operum nobilitas videri omnibus debeat, qui et dignitate servierit semper, et reipublicae consuluerit, et officii non alicuius privati commodi rationem habuerit, et pro propria caritate pericula propria adierit, vulnera exceperit, aliquando etiam mortem appetiverit, et quantum in se positum senserat, alacri et forti animo subierit eum non modo extorrem agi, sed per omnis coronas / carpi accusari, omni ignominia, omni contumelia affici?"

(140) Ibid., f. 77[bis]v: "Is est appelatus cuius animus usu ut manus opera concalluit."

(141) As cited in Fubini, 1996, 80: "Obmittendas historias, disputationes relinquendas utrum honestas an utilitas sit capienda, presertim cum hec questio sub iudice existat, sed profecto magis cogitandum quibus difficultatibus sit respublica circumtecta" (my emphasis). The context is a meeting of the Consiglio di Balia concerning Florence's choice of alliances with either Milan or Venice.

(142) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 78v: "non quarens quod mihi utile est." Cf. 1 Corinthians 10:33.

(143) Ibid., f. 80v: "qui [Apostoli] nulla patrie luce, nullo nomine dum virtutem veritatemque sequuntur."

(144) Ibid., f. 82: "Non caritudo pecuniarum, sed rationis atque consilii paupertatem efficit."

(145) Ibid., f. 89: "Utitur Cosmus ad omnem turpitudinis foeditatem nummis suis. At ille [Borromeo] suis ad honestatis decus ac lumen. Itaque nihil in divitiis boni est, nihil mali, sed instrumenta quaedam esse possint et bonae actionis et malae pro ingeniis moribusque utentium." For an analysis of book 3, see Cao, 1997.

(146) Ms. FBN II ii 70, f. 93: "Nam in iis [Diogenes and Crates and other beggars] nullam nec publicam videt [Cosimo] nec privatam utilitatem esse repositam praeter impudentiam singularem, sed in eos se liberalem praestat qui vel sibi possint vel reipublicae esse usui."

(147) Ibid., f. 93v-94v.

(148) Ibid., 113v: "At nihil est, Pallas, quod minus metuam quam me vobiscum viris optimis et clarissimis exulem fore, et id non modo quod sapiens ubiubi est, vel in patria est vel liber, quam ut orationis gladios in nefarrios quosdam patriae parricidas liberius distringam, quod quamdiu sic sum Florentiae, facere non licet, ita omnia pressa video teterrimo iugo servitutis, qua quidem ipsa de re quia te cras dicturum accipio, cum primum illuxerit, ad vos ibo." In light of Filelfo's recognition of the constraints of Bruni's freedom of speech, see also a letter to Giannozzo Manetti of the same period: Filelfo, 1502, f. 35v-36, dated October 1444 (ms. Triv, f. 74v, dated October 1442).

(149) Ferrau, 376-77, suggests that Filelfo's dialogue achieves a certain psychological verisimilitude with Onofrio's statements (37v-38) about the painful loss of his father's library. I am in obvious agreement with Ferrau's excellent formulation of Filelfo's demonstration of "such a confidence in the function of the intellectual, such a positive assessment of the power of the word" (378) as expressed in the Commentationes.

(150) While examples of this more modern brand of cynicism can be found in many places in his work, Filelfo's collection of epigrams, the De iocis et seriis, is the most thoroughgoing expression of his cynical, anti-courtier streak. Zaggia has begun work on this interesting question.

(151) Filelfo's understanding of the concept of world citizenship originated in classical philosophy's response to the experience of exile, an experience that in the ancient world would have combined a loss of citizenship, temporary or otherwise, with an existential experience of freedom, however harshly acquired. For Kant, the right of a nation to political sovereignty underwrote the right of the alien for protection under that sovereignty according to a ius cosmopolitanum. Kant, 1983, 128, famously distinguishes the "political moralist" from the "moralizing politician."

(152) Diogenes Laertius, 2:65 (Lives 6.63); Plutarch, On Exile (see above, n. 124).