outside of Homer, especially VirgilVergil. Probably, VirgilVergil could also provide us with an equally useful set of examples for human instruction and education to those found in the IliadHomerIl..31HomerVergil The content of the commentary ranges widely, from etymological observations, grammatical and syntactical explanations to metrical analysis, paraphrasing and background ideological information.32
Eloquence dressing an elegant and flawless style is always admirable; this was the reason for admiring HerodotusHerodot and setting forth in 1541 an edition, based on a codex that had belonged to Richard CrokeCroke, Richard, Camerarius’s teacher of Greek in Leipzig in the 1510s. Apart from regarding this edition as pointing to a historicization of the father of history metaphor,33 coloured by his esteem for a father figure from his student years,34 Camerarius’ preference for HerodotusHerodot seemed to arouse for HerodotusHerodot’ exemplary figures which overwhelm many historical inaccuracies in the Histories. Camerarius identified the Herodotean historical methodology not with mere rhetorical refinery, but he embroidered it in particular with moral instruction:35 he could admire the ancient historiographer for the latter’s decision not to satisfy a desire for knowledge, but also to provide instruction and to obtain moral edification through enlivening his narratives which included fables or mythic elements. These personified exempla virtutis found in HerodotusHerodot opened the way for seeking much of the same in other Greek historians, such as ThucydidesThukydides or LivyLivius.36Livius How else could a protégé and close friend of MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp not agree with the Lutheran reformer that the main purpose of the study of history was to offer moral examples? Therefore, his biography about MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp (De Philippi Melanchtonis ortu, totius vitae curriculo et morte […] narratio diligens et accurate Ioachimi Camerarii, Leiden 1566)37 testifies to this belief in so far as it focused in particular on the exemplary virtues of its protagonist.38 It was finally as an exemplar of eloquence and morality in style and spirit that HerodotusHerodot was described by Camerarius in his 1541 edition of the Histories as “in all respects the chief writer of history”.39
The summit of his oeuvre, however, was the first complete printed edition of the comedies of PlautusPlautus, adiectis […] argumentis et adnotationibus, first published in 1552 at Basel, which ushered in a new phase in the history of early modern Plautian philology. Whereas all previous editions had been based on late and haphazardly distorted Humanist manuscripts, Camerarius was the first to draw on two medieval texts, one of which, the Palatini B still called the Codex vetus Camerarii,40 is a manuscript of German provenance dating from the 10th century, and offers the oldest and by far the most reliable textual basis for the entire Plautian corpus. Admittedly, the degree to which he used that manuscript is variable from play to play. He did achieve the first reasonably reliable division of lines throughout the text, cleansed the text of its many Humanist accretions, and broke with the vulgate of the day in hundreds of passages. The other manuscript is C (Codex alter Camerarii decurtatus). To this day, no philologist has more generally accepted conjectures in the Plautus texts than Camerarius and no significant improvement in the state of the text he achieved was made until Friedrich Ritschl, working over 300 years later.41
Being a follower of elegance in style he insistently tried to combine it with allegorical composition and allegorical interpretation as basic exercises to foster mental agility. Thus, for AphthoniusAphthonios’ progymnasmata that we find almost every day in the schoolrooms of Lutheran Germany, making the same easy transitions between rhetoric and fictional narration, the new translator J. Camerarius did not only append some notes on the exercises but using the fable of Apollo and Daphne he accused AphthoniusAphthonios of self-contradiction when blaming the authors of poetic fiction for going against what is normal and natural. Those exercises indeed have excellent pedigree as paradigms for linguistic expression and analysis, encourage and generate intellectual pleasure, because they totally rhetoricize allegory42 as a means of instruction in reading classical poetry, and thence the writing and reading of poetry by adults; perhaps this chapter of education nearly began with another Elementa rhetoricae (Basle: J. OporinusOporinus, Johannes 1545) on the subject of rhetoric43 published at first in 1540 by Joachim Camerarius;44 a typical rhetorical work of him that reflects Camerarius’ integration of Humanism with Protestantism insofar as he placed in it the traditions of the ancient rhetorical manuals and medieval homiletics and added to this a theory of didactic texts. In his Elementa he allowed rhetorical narration and strategies for reading to develop along more interesting ways than MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp’s narrow way, but he kept allegory securely demystified. In Joachim Camerarius’ expression, rhetoric becomes an instrument both of speaking and writing coherently and persuasively and of deriving critical evaluations of Scripture and profane texts. Of course, MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp’s pedagogy had a tremendous impact on the development of Protestant education, although his successors soon narrowed his program by adopting a more rigorous Ciceronianism45, and Camerarius, his friend and biographer, was, like MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp, a moderate Ciceronian. For Camerarius, CiceroCicero first demonstrated the full powers of the Latin language and remains the timeless and unsurpassable standard. Furthermore, in the Disputatio de imitatione that Camerarius included in his commentary on Cicero’s Tusculan DisputationsCiceroTusc., he responds to ErasmusErasmus von Rotterdam, DesideriusCiceronianus’ Ciceronianus (1528),46 i.e. a treatise attacking the style of scholarly Latin written during the early 16th century, which style attempted to adherently imitate Cicero’s Latin.
Camerarius included letter-writing in his Elementa, a textbook that adapted the ancient progymnasmata in a graded series of exercises: narratio (fabula and historia), expositio and descriptio, chreia, sententia, ethologia, epistola, comparatio, paraphrasis, imitatio, aetiologia, aenigma, loci communes, probatio and reprehensio, laudatio and vituperatio. His illustration of most of these exercises, for instance his famous description of Albrecht DürerDürer, Albrecht’s “Melencolia I” as an example of expositio and descriptio (ecphrasis), suggest that he encouraged original composition.47 Camerarius edited a Greek text of TheonTheon, Ailios’s progymnasmata adorned with model themes from Libanius together with a Latin translation of the exercises and the themes in 1540; TheonTheon, Ailios commenting briefly on letter-writing. If we consider the axiom that intellectual history is not the story of personal genius, great ideas, or chains of influence, but only a project of applied scepticism,48 rhetorical projects in the Confessional Age were elaborated and schematized upon the classical canon, supplemented at times by select Church fathers and the leading Humanists of the preceding generations. When Camerarius assures his readers that rhetoric must be taught to schoolboys “so that we can defend against the ignorance and rudeness of our age and repel nonsensical barbarisms”,49 the more overtly political function of oratory in fostering obedience to the law or modifying the behaviour of the masses (in moderanda plebe) cannot be really excluded from the purpose of preparing textbooks on rhetoric larded with rules for correct usage and designed to raise neo-Latin to the Italian standard.50 But Camerarius’ notion of rhetoric did not entail any sort of scepticism, for it enhanced upper moral and pedagogic intentions such as those of hagiographic writing. Hagiography was practised particularly intensely throughout the Middle Ages and it was closely linked to the medieval concept of sainthood and to the ritual of the cult of the saints. These Lives were generally brief, quite unlike some luxuriant Humanist biographies such as ErasmusErasmus von Rotterdam, Desiderius’ Life of Jerome or Camerarius’ Life of MelanchthonMelanchthon, Philipp.51Melanchthon, Philipp The later sixteenth-century Lives of the reformers, regardless of whether they were friendly or hostile, helped create an image or images of the Reformation which survived into the twentieth century and beyond, although the original accounts remain for the most part forgotten and neglected. Moreover, rhetoric could disclose the meanings of enigma and apocalypse,52 which might “exercise the intelligence” according to Poole recapitulating the vices of style presented by George Puttenham in his Arte of English PoesiePuttenham, GeorgeArte of English Poesie (1589).53 In the case of the application of rhetorical analysis to Biblical text this point is always crucial, mainly for a Protestant scholar that adjusted himself to a historically orientated interpretation of the sacred texts.
If the 15th century