Things Left Unsaid

Butler reflects on Angelo Poliziano who wrote a phrase that has often been quoted: Someone says to me, "You don't express Cicero." So what? I'm not Cicero! All the same, as I see it, I express myself." These sixteen words comprise roughly one-half hundredth of a percent of Poliziano's published Latin and Greek works, and one suspects that their author would be dismayed to rind his vast, rich oeuvre--and his brief but extraordinary life--so often reduced to a single epigram. One way or another, one cannot really reckon with Poliziano without reckoning with his most famous dictum.