The beauty and the art they desired they found in Plutarch and Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Lucian, Virgil and Livy, Horace and Homer. They devoured those texts of which Scholastics had little knowledge, and for which they had even less respect: essays, letters, histories, biographies. And when it came to philosophy, the humanists were enthused less by Aristotle’s dry treatises than by Plato’s stylish dialogues. They established a new model of intellectual excellence that emphasized literature, philology, oratory, history, ethics and politics – the studia humanitatis, or
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