Zibaldone

by Leopardi, Giacomo

  1. See Z 57 and note 3.

  Z 538

  1. That is, the Epicureans.

  Z 543

  1. The passage from this letter may be found in Fronto, Opera inedita, tome 1, pp. 58–61 (ed. Van den Hout pp. 4–5), and the observations in the Laudes negligentiae (ibid., tome 2, p. 371, ed. Van den Hout pp. 219–20). Both passages were translated by Leopardi (Opere inedite, vol. 1, pp. 375, 471 [B2]).

  2. In the following pages—a small treatise on politics implicitly in dialogue with Rousseau’s theory of the “contract”—Leopardi focuses on the concept of unity, considering it from a historical as well as an ontological point of view. Alberto Folin, “Uno e molteplice in Leopardi,” RISL 7, 2011, pp. 69–81 (B6) has suggested comparing these pages with those on the ancient chorus (Z 2804–809).

  Z 545

  1. See Vico, The New Science, §§ 251–55 and 1007–1008. Cf. Z 590–91, 3411–12.

  Z 550

  1. In Du contrat social, bk. 3, ch. 6, Rousseau makes some ironical observations about the use by monarchical apologists of the notion of a perfect ruler (Damiani).

  Z 552

  1. The Italian “nell’uso e nella vita comune” is a rendering of “in usu vitaque communi,” a phrase from Cicero’s Laelius sive de amicitia, ch. 5.

  Z 554

  1. Cf. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine de l’inégalité (in Oeuvres, vol. 3, pp. 125, 127).

  Z 555

  1. This marginal addition from 1824 refers to Antoine-Yves Goguet, De l’origine des lois, des arts et des sciences, et de leur progrès chez les anciens peuples (Paris 1758), a work written in collaboration with Alexandre Fougère and read by Leopardi in the Italian translation Della origine delle leggi; see bk. 1, tome 1, p. 7, for the observation to which Leopardi refers here.

  Z 556

  1. See Z 4041–42 and note.

  Z 557

  1. Cf. Rousseau’s Du contrat social, bk. 3, ch. 6, “De la monarchie.”

  Z 560

  1. Goguet, Della origine delle leggi, bk. 2, art. 7, tome 2, p. 39 (see Z 555 and note), who writes here about the forms of government in ancient Greece.

  Z 564

  1. On Z 523 Leopardi cites Florus to the effect that a corrupt and debased man such as Antony could not be equal to another man but only his master or his slave.

  Z 568

  1. Fabricius, censor in Rome in 275 BCE, famously punished another citizen for having silver vessels in his house. Fabricius is an example of probity in ch. 5 of Cicero’s Laelius sive de amicitia, a crucial text for Leopardi. It is worth noting that Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts hinges upon the Prosopopoeia of Fabricius. Cato, here associated with him, is mentioned on Z 274.

  Z 571

  1. Leopardi here refers to Athens and the other Greek cities, whose institutions were, in their beginnings, closer anthropologically and closer in time to a supposed “natural” state (as defined, e.g., on Z 579–80).

  Z 575

  1. See Z 304–305 and note.

  Z 576

  1. Leopardi alludes to the constitutional and revolutionary movements that swept across Europe in 1820–21.

  Z 581

  1. Cf. Rousseau’s Du contrat social, bk. 1, ch. 4, “De l’esclavage” (Damiani).

  Z 584

  1. The excess of precision of mathematics excludes approximation, and all that does not exist: nature, on the contrary, does not exclude the possibility of being other than what it actually is (and to undergo radical changes); this is why modern philosophy conceives what exists as the only possible model of nature. Alexander Koyré will explain this modern position as the result of a shift from the world of approximation—the Leopardian almost (l’appresso a poco)—to the universe of precision (see his essay “Du monde de l’‘à peu près’ à l’univers de la précision,” in Critique, 4, no. 28, 1948, pp. 806–23). This thought prefigures the later demolition of the principle of noncontradiction (Z 4129), and the recognition that nature acts, so to speak, “in spite of” itself (Z 4462).

  Z 591

  1. Leopardi uses this word incorrectly here to mean “capital.” The term was, however, in use in the Marche and elsewhere to refer to an “economic prospectus” (Pacella).

  Z 592

  1. According to Cicero, Archytas of Tarentum said that if someone had climbed up to the heavens and observed the earth and the stars, the sight would have afforded him no pleasure if there was no one to whom he could tell what he had seen. See Z 486–88.

  Z 593

  1. The Crusca does in fact define Italian comunicare as “to share in.”

  Z 595

  1. The lines quoted, from Ennius, Annales 10, 327–29, were addressed by an Epirote shepherd to Titus Quinctius Flaminius, then (198 BCE) at war with Philip of Macedon. Here, however, Cicero applies them to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Forcellini’s examples were drawn from Virgil, Aeneid 7, 345, and from Silius Italicus, Punica 14, 103 (and not in fact from Statius).

  Z 596

  1. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2, 40, 3.

  Z 597

  1. St. Jerome, Opera omnia, vol. 1, tome 3, p. 31 (letter 126 to Evagrius).

  2. The etymology given by Leopardi in Z 2823–24, i.e., from stuppa, meaning tow or oakum, is false (Pacella).

  Z 598

  1. Sallust, Oeuvres, vol. 1, p. 5 (the text in Latin on p. 4). Alfieri, “Caio Crispo Sallustio tradotto in italiano,” in Opere, vol. 5, p. 2. The italics are Leopardi’s.

  Z 599

  1. Sallust, Oeuvres, vol. 1, pp. 22–24; Alfieri, “Caio Crispo Sallustio tradotto in italiano,” in Opere, vol. 5, p. 8.

  Z 602

  1. Leopardi uses etymology in order to reflect on a problem that had been crucial to European philosophy since Descartes contended that the soul is simple. See Z 1635–36, 3503, 4111, 4206–208.

  Z 605

  1. Cicero’s reference is to Plato, Phaedo, 72e–73b, 78–80; Phaedrus, 245c.

  Z 606

  1. This passage comes from ch. 58 of the Bellum Catilinae. Leopardi had originally referred to ch. 61 before noting that “other” editors referred to it as ch. 58.

  2. Gradatio, or “gradation,” is a semantic figure: words in ascending order of forcefulness.

  Z 609

  1. Cf. Z 403 and note.

  2. Here Leopardi has added a sixth argument, in addition to the five already presented, in support of the thesis that accidental differences between men, in nature, do not confer upon them a right to command.

  Z 618

  1. See Z 4105–108.

  Z 619

  1. Leopardi was going to write senso morale (moral sense), before finally opting for senso dell’animo, which translates “animi sensus.” This expression means “consciousness” in Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius, 21, 12; here it seems, rather, to define a relaxation or “blunting” of the “embodied mind” of the materialistic tradition (from Hobbes to Locke and Hume). The two preceding parentheses are interlinear additions.

  Z 621

  1. Florus, Epitome 2, 33, 59 (Mannheim ed., pp. 194–95).

  2. Florus, Epitome 1, 33–34 and 2, 10 (Mannheim ed., pp. 90–97, 148–150).

  Z 622

  1. The Spanish peasantry’s extraordinarily brave though frenzied resistance to Napoleon’s troops had astonished Europe, and inspired the novel concept of guerrilla war.

  2. Staël, Corinne, bk. 6, ch. 3, tome 1, p. 272, with reference to Italy, where “life is no more than a dreamy sleep under a beautiful sky.”

  Z 624

  1. See Z 621–22 and note 1.

  Z 625

  1. Cf. Z 75 and note.

  Z 627

  1. Buffon, Histoire naturelle, tome 2, “De la vieillesse et de la mort,” pp. 571ff. (LL = Storia naturale dell’uomo, tome 2, pp. 273–74), compares and discusses life spans in ancient and modern times.

  Z 629

  1. Sallust, Oeuvres, vol. 2, pp. 328–30 (in modern eds. ch. 99 becomes 95).

  Z 63
1

  1. Here Leopardi repeats a phrase from Cicero, Cato Maior, already quoted on Z 605.

  Z 633

  1. Leopardi had already quoted from Mme. de Lambert three months earlier, on Z 302–309. Now he comes back to her works, in another edition with the same date 1808. Neither edition is currently in the LL.

  Z 635

  1. Cf. Z 214 and note.

  Z 636

  1. This last sentence is an interlinear addition.

  Z 637

  1. Apuleius recounts the fable of Psyche in Metamorphoses, bks. 4–6.

  2. This sentence is an interlinear addition.

  Z 640

  1. Agnolo Firenzuola, Discorso delle bellezze delle donne (1540), a reference found in the Crusca.

  2. Vincenzo Monti, “Dialogo tra Matteo giornalista, Taddeo suo compare, Pasquale servitore e ser Magrino pedante,” Biblioteca Italiana, tome 3, no. 8, August 1816, pp. 271–72.

  Z 642

  1. In the place cited by Leopardi, Diogenes Laertius records a discussion between Diogenes the Cynic and Plato regarding table and tableness, concrete object and abstract idea. The following sentence is a ms. interlinear addition.

  Z 643

  1. Here Leopardi gives his own rendering of the passage from Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, ch. 7 quoted on Z 593.

  Z 646

  1. A thought of great consequence for Leopardi’s poetics; see also Z 4277–79.

  Z 649

  1. Originally Leopardi had given only the second part of the quotation, attributing it to Montaigne, from whom Pascal had in fact derived this thought (see Essais, bk. 1, ch. 3). Muñiz (Letture di Leopardi [B12]) thinks that Leopardi copied the quotation from Madame de Lambert’s Traité de la vieillesse (Oeuvres complètes, p. 149). The well-known aphorism (Pensées sur la religion, ch. 24, “Vanité de l’homme,” § 12, p. 124 [= LL]) had a wide circulation; Leopardi might have encountered it, for example, in a review of Michele Leoni’s translation of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, Parma 1819 (Biblioteca Italiana, vol. 18, April 1820, p. 10). In the following sentence Leopardi alludes—we don’t know how consciously—to Pascal’s theme of “distraction” (see Z 104, 172 and notes, 4187).

  2. Initially Leopardi had written “soyez grand et malheureux … (Raynal’s dictum),” mistakenly attributing these words to the French philosophe G.T.F. Raynal. The attribution to D’Alembert is a later addition, not—as Pacella suggests—from the time of his Pisan visit (December 1827–May 1828), when he read D’Alembert’s work, but from an earlier time (see Peruzzi, “Lo Zibaldone leopardiano,” pp. 393–96 [B12]). The dictum is not D’Alembert’s, however: D’Alembert, in his “Éloge de Sacy,” attributes it, in a different form (“sois grand homme, et sois malheureux”) to an unnamed “poet,” that is, Diderot, as Muñiz (Letture di Leopardi [B12]) has pointed out, indicating also Leopardi’s source for the Italian form of the dictum (L. Pignotti, Storia della Toscana, Pisa: Capurro, 1815, tome 4, p. 163 [= LL]: “sii uomo grande e sii infelice”). See also Z 2414, 2583.

  Z 651

  1. Cf. Leopardi, “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica,” Prose, pp. 400ff.

  Z 654

  1. Cf. Z 681–82, and Leopardi’s “Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo Genio familiare” (Prose, p. 74).

  Z 660

  1. Martano is the cowardly and inept knight in Cantos XVII and XVIII of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.

  2. Diogenes Laertius, De vitis, vol. 2, p. 252.

  Z 661

  1. According to Laertius, Diogenes the Cynic thought that there was nothing impious in eating human flesh. Ménage (De vitis, vol. 2, p. 252) refers to a discussion in Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3, 24, while Leopardi cites another work by Sextus, commonly known as Against the Professors. On Skepticism and Sextus see Z 427 and note 1, 1623.

  Z 662

  1. Aristotle, Poetics 1453a. See Z 225, 1847.

  Z 663

  1. Cf. Z 220.

  Z 664

  1. The Galateo, Giovanni Della Casa’s treatise on manners, was so celebrated that its name sometimes serves, as here, as a generic description of manners and etiquette.

  Z 675

  1. Cf. Manutius, Adagia, Venice 1609 (= LL), p. 173.

  2. Euripides, The Phoenician Women 499–503. Both the Greek text and the Latin translation that follows are drawn from Manutius, Adagia, ed. cited above, pp. 173–74. In the LL, as far as we know, there were no editions of the Greek tragedians in Greek. See note 1 to Z 3120.

  Z 676

  1. Leopardi adds this quotation from Cicero, De finibus 1, 15, to the list found in Manutius, which includes Terence (Phormio), Persius, Horace, Euripides, Homer. It is noteworthy that the reference from Horace quoted above by Leopardi is not the same as the one given by Manutius, which means that Leopardi has done further research on this maxim.

  2. This question seems a variation on Theognides 425–28 or Sophocles cited later on (Z 2672 and note 1), when Leopardi had access to the apothegms of what Nietzsche called in The Birth of Tragedy, ch. 3, “Silenic wisdom” (see Cicero, Tusculanae disputationes 1, 48, 114).

  Z 678

  1. Jacopo Nardi was a hero of republican Florence, exiled after the siege of 1529–30, and a friend of Guicciardini, whose Storia d’Italia he had read and commented on. The Vita, originally published in 1577, sang the praises of another republican hero, Malespini, and, more generally, of the Florentine citizenry, for its signal display of fortitude and heroism, and for its civic commitment to the public good.

  Z 680

  1. The anchorites of the third and fourth centuries, who lived in the desert wastes of Arabia, Syria, and Egypt. Leopardi was an eager reader of their lives, in particular that of the most famous of them, St. Anthony, by Athanasius.

  Z 683

  1. Italics and emphasis both Leopardi’s.

  Z 684

  1. Lorenzino de’ Medici’s Apologia is printed at the end of Nardi’s Vita d’Antonio Giacomini, pp. 119–36.

  2. Leopardi read this comedy by Aristophanes in Selecta ex Graecis scriptoribus in usum studiosae iuventutis, Florence 1754 (= LL), p. 293.

  Z 686

  1. Rather than ἰδιώτης, “private person,” “individual,” as against the State, Leopardi, who had a few lines earlier referred to idiotismi, or “particularities,” may in fact have intended to write ἰδιότης, “peculiar nature,” “specific character,” which the Crusca itself gives as the Greek equivalent of proprietà. See also Z 4127. The notion of the genius of a language, and therefore, also, of the genius of a nation, had been elaborated by Condillac, in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), and by many others (Herder, Cesarotti, etc.). Leopardi’s source is probably Algarotti’s Saggio sopra la necessità di scrivere nella propria lingua (1750), in Opere, tome 4, pp. 3–24.

  2. See Z 1888 and note.

  Z 687

  1. See Z 324 and note 1.

  Z 692

  1. A reference to Antonio Cesari and the “purists.” Cf. Z 1 and note 6, 2395.

  Z 699

  1. Bernardino Baldi’s ms. biography of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino, was mentioned by Giulio Perticari in an article published in the Biblioteca Italiana, tome 4, no. 10, October 1816, pp. 32–49.

  Z 702

  1. Camillo Porzio’s history of the revolt of the Barons against Ferrante I attracted the attention of Pietro Giordani as early as 1816, and he warmly recommended it to Leopardi in a letter of July 1819. Eric Cochrane describes the history as a “polished, concise, elegant commentary, fully worthy of all its ancient and modern models” (Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 271).

  Z 703

  1. See Z 143–44.

  Z 708

  1. In the original the sentence does not make sense; after Leopardi’s correction it means “Suddenly sack, fire, and death were feared by everyone.”

  Z 712

  1. Cf. Leopardi, “Le
ricordanze,” ll. 75–94.

  Z 714

  1. The Scholastic dictum “quod nimis probat nihil probat.” Leopardi comes back often to this idea, cf. Z 1653, 1776, 2478.

  Z 715

  1. One of the crucial definitions of Leopardi’s poetics, embodied in the most celebrated of his idylls, “L’infinito,” which narrates how the poet’s thought “sinks” in the “immensity” of the “sea” (trans. Galassi). See Z 259 and note 1.

  Z 717

  1. A dictum attributed by Cato the Censor to Scipio Africanus and taken from Cicero, De officiis 3, 1 (Pacella).

  Z 720

  1. See Leopardi, “Ultimo canto di Saffo,” ll. 19–36.

  Z 723

  1. A quotation from Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina, loc. cit., in an article entitled “De Floro, et Ampelio” and referring to Histoire critique de la république des lettres, tant ancienne que moderne, Utrecht and Amsterdam 1712–18, a work in 15 vols. the principal compilation of which is variously attributed to Jean Masson and his son Samuel.

  Z 724

  1. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina, vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 23, § 3, p. 627.

  Z 727

  1. Cf. Z 3480.

  Z 734

  1. On “sentimental poetry,” see Z 136 and note, 226 and note 1, 1448, and note 2, 1860–62 and note.

  Z 737

  1. For an extended treatment of this question, see F. Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à nos jours, Paris: Armand Colin, 1966–79, part 9.

  Z 739

  1. See Dante, Paradiso 6, 1–2.

  Z 740

  1. Leopardi here refers to cyclical theories of culture. See Z 314, note 1, 403 and note.

  Z 741

  1. The reference is a later marginal addition, probably from June 1823 (Pacella). In Leopardi’s day this text, a pamphlet (c. fifth century BCE) also referred to as Old Oligarch, was still attributed to Xenophon. In §§ 7–8 the author comments on the naval power of the Athenians, which enabled them to mingle with various peoples, to hear every kind of dialect and take something from each. Leopardi alludes to the same passage on Z 2061.

  Z 742

  1. Note that “With every examination … fashion” is a marginal addition dating from May 1821, at a time when Leopardi was developing his theory of continuative verbs. See also Z 1104ff.

  Z 745

  1. Velleius, 1, 17.

  Z 748