Auctor, Autor, Author: Arguing from Authority in the Classical Tradition

“Non autores, sed artes,” writes Gabriel Harvey in the margins of his copy of Lodovico Guicciardini’s Detti et Fatti (Venice, 1571, p. 18). Taking a cue from the imagined library in a contemporary satirical engraving of Harvey, which shows the Cambridge tutor among both classical texts (Cato, Cicero) and modern reference books (Calepinus’s Dictionarium, Nizolius’s Thesaurus, a floripoetae), this paper examines how quotations from ancient authors were similarly used to adorn their Early Modern hosts, serving the ends of both “art” and “authority.”

While traditional discussions of ancient scholarly practice may pass over the category of loci communes as an outré branch of rhetorical training, the instruments of forensic oratory— including the argument from authority (argumentum ex auctoritate)—had enormous purchase on the literate Roman mind and long-tail influence on post-classical reading practices from medieval florilegia to the Early Modern commonplace book. The use of long, verbatim quotations is what we might, with Roland Barthes, call a “readerly” rather than “writerly” feature of its host texts: employed instrumentally as a supply of rhetorical copia and fulfilling the role of the author as a textual intercessor.

Testimony from Greek and Roman prose authors shows that the practice of collecting reading notes and written quotations had early beginnings. Starting with a student’s first encounter with literary texts in schools—the exercises of copying sententious excerpts (γνώμαι, sententiae) so clearly in evidence in the papyrological record—this method of engaging with books continued into mature literary habit, contributing to the iconic uses of verbatim and paraphrastic quotation in classical authors from Plato to Cicero and beyond.

This paper examines such ancient evidence alongside Early Modern analogues to develop a clearer picture of the continuity of what would be figured as the ars excerpendi in the reading and writing habits of the long classical tradition. Finally, by attending to the history of the idea of auctoritas as it is deployed in medieval and Early Modern reference works including Calepino, I show how the locus communis of quoting ancient sources itself served as a foundational structure for the concept of literary authorship and source for the uncanny philological transformation of auctor to author in the humanist period.