The Ancient Greek Sophists in Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1670): Thrasymachus and Gorgias

Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Spyglass of Aristotle) is widely considered a masterpiece of the Baroque, mainly because of his theory of metaphor as a cognitive tool. But this work is much more than that. Tesauro presents his volume as the ultimate interpretation of Aristotle’s rhetorical art, which is clearly not the case. Indeed, his work is a polycentric discourse on a revolutionary theory of rhetoric that goes beyond any previous treatise written on the subject, including Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Despite his relevance in the history of rhetorical theories, Tesauro’s work is still waiting for a comprehensive study of its own as well as investigations of some of its specific aspects. Furthermore, the majority of the existing studies of Tesauro are in Italian (with only very few in English), which makes it difficult for this text to reach an international public. This essay explores what seems to be a specific aspect that has so far been almost completely neglected: the role played by the ancient sophists in the Cannocchiale aristotelico and in the history of rhetoric that Tesauro redesigns. Tesauro proclaims his fidelity to Aristotle but actually contradicts Aristotle’s anti-sophistic approach. During this analysis, we will discover even more about Tesauro’s pro-sophistic attitude: he grounds the climax of Latin rhetorical tradition in Greek sophistry. This positive assessment of the ancient sophists, especially Thrasymachus and Gorgias of Leontini, coexists with a critique of Socrates. Except for Sperone Speroni, no other early modern Italian author—or European author—has proposed this radical inversion of the canon established by Plato. This reversal makes Tesauro a relevant case study in the on-going exploration of the legacy of ancient sophists in Western literature.