SOURCE: “Ancients and Moderns in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and History in Accolti's Dialogue on the Preeminence of Men of His Own Time,” in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 43, No. 1, January-March 1982, pp. 3-32.

In the essay that follows, Black analyzes Benedetto Accolti's Dialogue, one of the first long pieces about the quarrel between ancients and moderns. Placing this work within the history of the dispute, the critic considers the Dialogue “a forerunner of the development of the quarrel in the later Renaissance.”

The comparison of ancients and moderns, so prominent a theme in western thought until the nineteenth century, was a child of epideixis or panegyric, the rhetoric of praise and blame.¹ As in the other branches of rhetoric, there were five stages in composing a pangyric: invention, disposition, diction, memory, and delivery. Of these invention, or thinking of what to say, was the most important,² and...