H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: I

 

Catalogue Raisonné of J. L. Speranza’s Publications – H. P. Grice e J. L. Speranza: La Conversazione – I Verbali: I

 

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Iccio: la ragione conversazionale e il portico nel secolo d’oro della filosofia romana  Iccio (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il portico nel secolo d’oro della filosofia romana. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as an accountable inference from what is said to what is meant, licensed by cooperative expectations: speakers can deliberately say something minimal or oblique, and hearers can rationally reconstruct the intended point by considering relevance, sufficiency, and the speaker’s presumed aims. Iccius, known to us chiefly through Horace’s Ode 1.29, sits in a different but illuminating position: he is a Stoic-leaning figure (or at least a philosophical aspirant) being teased for drifting from the Porch toward more worldly projects, and Horace’s address works by insinuation rather than by doctrine—its rebuke lands not as a formal argument but as a socially calibrated reminder of what a friend is expected to be doing. Compared with Grice, this is implicature in the key of moral friendship: Horace’s questions and ironic framing invite Iccius to supply the conclusion (you are neglecting philosophy; your “serious” pursuits are less serious than you pretend) without spelling it out as a bald accusation, because the conversational setting presupposes intimacy, shared values, and the desire to correct without humiliating. In Gricean terms, the poem systematically exploits relevance and understatement: the mention of Panaetius and Stoic texts functions as common ground, and the shift to “trivial pursuits” is achieved by leaving the evaluative premise to the hearer, so that the criticism is both sharper and more deniable than a direct charge. The contrast, then, is between Grice’s analytic project of making the inferential machinery explicit and Horace’s practical mastery of that machinery, where the whole point of the exchange is ethical formation in a relationship—conversation as a tool for nudging a friend back toward the life of reason, precisely by letting what is meant be understood rather than declared. A friend of ORAZIO. He appears to have studied under the Porch, as in one of his odes, Orazio depict him constantly looking out for works by Panezio. Orazio berates Iccio for neglecting his philosophical studies for ‘totally trivial pursuits.’  GRICEVS: Icci—an ICCIVSne sit? an vero ICCIVS, ut nemo dubitet quin sis ex gente Romana et non ex sola taberna Oraziana? ICCIVS: Scribe quod vis, dum “certificatum” mihi detur: philosophus sum. Quid refert utrum geminetur C, an geminetur otium? GRICEVS: Refert, mi ICCI: Horatius te in carmine ipso ICCIVM vocat; et nomen est secundae declinationis, nominativus ICCIVS, genitivus ICCIĪ, vocativus ICCĪ. Porticus amat casus rectos. ICCIVS: Optime: ergo in porticu ICCIVS ero (ut Stoici me agnoscant), apud Orazium ICCĪ (ut rideat), et in negotiis—si Panætium quaero—“Iccio” tantum, ne quis me ad bellum Arabicum rapiat. Iccio (a. u. c. DCCXXV). Dicta. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Ierace: la ragione conversazioanle e il certificato Silvano Doroteo Ierace: la ragione conversazioanle e il certificato -- Roma – filosofia italiana --   – (Roma). Abstract. Grice: “It is very uncommon to find an English philosopher whose surname starts with ‘ie-,’ and also an Italian one. This is due to the fact that the Greeks aspirated everything – while the Romans, and later the Italians, just thought of aspiration as a phonological feature that wasn’t really necessary. The Gallic agree with the Italians on this, but stupidly keep the H in the so-called ‘orthographie’!” Filosofo italiano. The proud possessor of a certificate confirming that he was a philosopher. Grice: “Cicerone uses this as an example of indirect proof. The fact that the certificate certifies that Ierace is a philosopher is no proof that he is one.” Grice: “It seems more proper to render all these “I-“ ancient philosohers with I- turned into G-. Silvano Doroteo Ierace. GRICEVVS: Ierace, de tuo ipso nomine dubito: Latine scribendumne est IERAX (ut avis), an potius HIERAX, ne Graeci nos putent sine spiritu? IERACE: Ego quidem avem non me esse scio—quamquam, si testimonium meum “philosophum” me facit, cur non et “accipitrem” me faciat? Unum sigillum, duo animalia. GRICEVVS: Ciceroni placebit: “testimonium” est indicium, non essentia. Praeterea, si Graecum ἱέραξ spectes, HIERAX doctius; si Romanum fastidium aspirationis, IERAX simplicius. IERACE: Ergo ita faciamus: in diplomate HIERAX, in taberna IERAX; et si quis roget cur, respondebo: “aspiratio est supervacua—nisi cum vinum hauriendum est.”

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Ieroteo: la ragione conversazionale e la scuola di Guiliano --  Ieroteo (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e la scuola di Guiliano. Grice: “As a classicist at Corpus, I soon learned – via the reference guides, etc. – that the Greeks aspirated almost anything they touched – the Romans disliked an aspiration as ‘rough’, and the Italians just dropped it from their phonological systems!” -- Filosofo italiano. convinced Giuliano to pave the floor of Hagia Sophia with silver – Grice: “but ultimately the emperor declined to do so on the lack of a reason that would be convincing enough to ACT, not just to BELIEVE!” GRICEVS: In schola Iuliani hodie ambigimus, Ierotee: quomodo te Latine in nominativo scribamus—HIEROTHEVS, an sine asperitate, IEROTHEVS? Graeci enim omnia fere aspirant, Romani “h” rudem amant odisse, Itali vero simpliciter abiiciunt. HIEROTHEVS (ridens): Si mihi H addis, magistri, vereor ne totus “asper” fiam; si tollis, videbor Italus in toga. Sed quid de diphthongo? “TH” saltem serva, ne me in “Ieroteum” solum vertas, quasi sim mera nota marginalis. GRICEVS: Sapienter: Latinitas docta solet HIEROTHEVS (ex Graeco Ἱερόθεος) scribere; Latinitas vero neglegentior facile IEROTHEVS. Utrumque tamen idem fere sonat—et hoc ipsum est iocus: litterae pugnant, sensus manet. HIEROTHEVS: Ergo faciamus pactum Iulianum: in titulo HIEROTHEVS, ut grammatici gaudeant; in colloquio IEROTHEVS, ut amici rideant. Nam, sicut de pavimento argenteo Hagiae Sophiae: pulchrum erat ad credendum—sed non satis rationis erat ad faciendum.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Illuminati: la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del filosofo all’opera – Augusto Illuminati (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e l’implicatura conversazionale del filosofo all’opera. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning explains implicature as a rational, publicly criticizable inference from what is said to what is meant: speakers rely on shared expectations of cooperation to leave things unsaid efficiently, and hearers recover the intended extra content by reasoning about why that particular utterance was made in that context. Illuminati’s work, as suggested by the themes in your passage, relocates that “governance” from the micro-level of conversational maxims to the macro-level of political modernity: representation, manipulation, lobbying, and the “antinomies of citizenship” describe a public sphere in which meaning is routinely produced through apparatuses that distribute visibility and invisibility, so that what is implied is often an effect of institutions rather than the tidy product of a speaker’s transparent intentions. Compared with Grice, then, the key contrast is that Grice models cooperation as a default rational stance that can be voluntarily adopted or withdrawn by agents, whereas Illuminati is preoccupied with how shared rules and representations can be publicly valid without becoming instruments of control—how “letting be” can coexist with demands for recognition, and how politicized speech can avoid turning into disciplinary speech. In Gricean terms, this means that many “implicatures” in civic discourse are not merely cancellable conversational enrichments but structurally induced insinuations: audiences infer motives, alignments, and exclusions because the communicative field is already shaped by power and by the technical organization of representation. The overlap is that both treat meaning as inseparable from practice—Grice from the practice of cooperative talk, Illuminati from the practice of citizenship and institutional life—but Illuminati pushes the Gricean picture toward a harder question: not only how implicatures are derived, but who gets to set the conditions under which certain inferences become inevitable, and how a rational public conversation can remain free when the very mechanisms that make it possible also threaten to manage it. Grice: “I was often asked at Oxford what my surname meant: neither ‘grice’ (pig) nor ‘grice’ (grey) mean anything too philosophical – but cf. grey cells – On the other han Illuminati may be deemed to be a ‘rationalist’ surname in that Reason was iconographically represented as shedding light on things – and people! I would often refer to myself as a quasi-contractualist. But when developing the ‘dialectic’ – ontogenetic and phylogenetic – of ‘significatio’, I grant that it may all be a ‘myth’ which have been proved useful to philosophers since Plato, and in Switzerland, since Rousseau! I like I., especially his essay on Rousseau, between solipsism and conversation! I enjoyed I.’s treatment of Rousseau’s myth of the social contract, since I made use of it!” – ‘Imagine is a good thing, but is there such a thing as co-imagine?” -  sharing an hallucination, the myth of the contract. Myth and theory. Filosofo italiano. “La città e il desiderio. Viene meno un modo di fare in cui la soggettività potente si appropria il mondo subordinando le altre potenze soggettive e realizza la sua essenza destinale mediante adeguati meccanismi di rappresentazione e manipolazione tecnica. Come utilizzare regole pubblicamente valide senza colpevolizzare e controllare dall'altro le forme di vita degli uomini è precisamente l'antinomia della cittadinanza. La politicizzazione di sfere inabituali va insieme alla diserzione di istituzioni sclerotiche. Una ricaduta pratica ne è l'integrazione delle strutture rappresentative con nuove lobbies o la richiesta di quote per minoranze Nel lasciar-essere che si contrappone alla tracotanza istituzionale convivono cosi l'ancora-non-rappresentato che cerca lobbisticamente rappresentazione, e rifiuto radicare di rappresentazione. Professore associato di storia della filosofia politica, dall'anno accademico ha assunto la cattedra di storia della filosofia, dove è stato chiamato come straordinario. Insegna a Urbino. il filosofo all’opera. Grice: Caro Illuminati, ti confesso una cosa che farà sorridere chiunque abbia un po’ di passione per la musica: per me, “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” è quasi come una fiaba per bambini! Ogni volta che la ascolto, mi sembra di sfogliare un libro illustrato pieno di personaggi coloriti e morali semplici. Illuminati: Ah, Grice, permettimi di dissentire con il sorriso: Wagner, di solito così tragico, qui si diverte a giocare con la leggerezza, è vero, ma le sfumature ironiche e i rimandi alla tensione tra regola e creatività sono tutto fuorché infantili! Forse è proprio lì il suo fascino: parlare ai grandi con il linguaggio dei bambini. Grice: Ecco, vedi perché amo queste conversazioni con te! Riesci sempre a svelare una profondità inaspettata anche dove io vedevo solo scherzo e ingenuità. Forse i veri bambini siamo noi filosofi, che cerchiamo la verità giocando con le interpretazioni. Illuminati: Touché! In fondo, ogni mito, come ogni buona opera d’arte, nasce dalla capacità di meravigliarsi. E che cos’è la filosofia se non il prendersi sul serio… ridendo un po’ di sé stessi? Su questo, caro Grice, siamo davvero in sintonia. Illuminati, Augusto (1967). Sociologia e classi sociali. Torino: Einaudi.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Imbriani. Acri srive un saggio contro Imbriani.   Vittorio Ugone Imbriani (Napoli, Campania). Acri srive un saggio contro Imbriani. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an accountable inference from what is said to what is meant, produced under cooperative expectations that can be cancelled or repaired once the relevant background is made explicit. Imbriani, by temperament and by genre, belongs to a polemical culture in which meaning is often designed to sting rather than to cooperate: the critic’s sentence is written to force the reader into an attitude—admiration, contempt, ridicule—through insinuation, caricature, and strategic overstatement, so that the “implicature” is frequently the main act and the literal content a mere vehicle. Compared with Grice, this changes the default rationality of the exchange: Grice’s hearer is licensed to infer because the speaker is presumed to be helping the conversation along, whereas Imbriani’s reader infers because the writer is presumed to be fighting, and the background assumption is adversarial rather than benevolent. That makes Acri’s critique of Imbriani a nice Gricean case-study: the very act of rebuttal confers salience and invites a new round of inferences about seriousness, authority, and stakes—much as Grice worries, in the Quine episode, that responding to an anti-dogmatist can inadvertently elevate the provocation into a “dogma” worth defending. In short, Imbriani exemplifies implicature as rhetorical weapon and reputational signal within intellectual combat, while Grice models implicature as a rational instrument of coordination; the overlap is that both depend on shared expectations and shared background, but they diverge on whether those expectations are oriented toward mutual understanding or toward victory. Grice: “St John’s, 1953.Quine is coming as George Eastman Visiting Professor, and I find myself wondering—yet again—who Eastman was and why his name must endure as a kind of annual excuse for importing foreigners in bulk. That, however, is a small irritation. The greater one is watching Strawson take Mr Quine with a solemnity usually reserved for bishops and railway timetables. It reminds me of that old Italian pattern Collingwood once remarked upon: he went running to the Bodleian to fetch Imbriani, not because he had any independent hunger for Imbriani, but simply because Acri had taken the trouble to criticize him, and criticism, like an accusation, confers importance by sheer act of attention. I fear I am about to do the same with Quine. His irreverences against the “dogmas” that keep my spine upright are designed to make one respond; and once one responds, one is already playing his game—defending what one had never thought needed defence, and thereby granting it the status of a doctrine. The danger is that Quine will be remembered here not as the visiting professor with an American title attached, but as the anti-dogmatist whom Strawson and I were obliged to take down a peg or two; and that our “defence” will look, in retrospect, like the very parochialism we congratulate ourselves on avoiding. Perhaps the only honest posture is to treat him as one treats any clever provocateur in conversation: take the point where it is genuine, refuse the inflated conclusion, and deny him the satisfaction of thinking that the rest of us exist merely as his audience. Grice: Caro Imbriani, mi hanno detto che Acri ha scritto un saggio tutto contro di te. Ma dimmi, qual è il vero motivo? Hai forse rubato la sua penna preferita? Imbriani: Grice, non posso negare che la penna di Acri fosse tentatrice, ma credo che il suo saggio sia nato più dalla sua voglia di filosofeggiare che dalla perdita degli strumenti! In fondo, in Italia, si scrive contro per sport. Grice: Eh già, Imbriani, qui da noi un attacco filosofico vale più di una partita a carte. Ma la domanda è: hai risposto al saggio con una poesia oppure ti sei limitato a offrirgli un caffè? Imbriani: Grice, ho fatto entrambe le cose! Prima una poesia che nessuno ha capito, poi un caffè così forte che Acri ha smesso di scrivere contro di me... almeno fino a domani. Imbriani, Vittorio Ugone (1866). Le leggi dell’organismo poetico e della poesia popolare italiana.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Ippolito: la ragione conversazionale e il culto di Giove -- Roma Ippolito (Roma, Lazio): la ragione conversazionale e il culto di Giove. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an accountable inference from what is said to what is meant: speakers normally rely on shared expectations of relevance, clarity, and sufficiency, and hearers recover the intended extra content by rational reconstruction, with the possibility of challenge and cancellation. Hippolytus, as a Greek-writing Roman-era theologian whose Refutatio omnium haeresium (Philosophumena) first lays out the “heretics’” philosophical systems before denouncing them, provides a revealing contrast in method and audience design: his expository strategy presupposes that readers can track (and perhaps be tempted by) the very doctrines he wants to refute, so the text constantly manages a delicate implicature that Grice would have noticed—detailed sympathetic description can suggest partial endorsement unless the author signals distance, and the refutation must therefore control what the reader is entitled to infer about the author’s stance at each stage. Compared with Grice, Hippolytus’ rationality is not the micro-rationality of cooperative everyday conversation but the macro-rationality of polemical pedagogy, where the “common ground” is contested and where quotation and paraphrase are risky because they can confer legitimacy; this is why his work is simultaneously a sourcebook for contemporary philosophy and a moral warning about it. Grice’s aside about “by Jove” underscores the divergence: for Grice, even casual oaths carry pragmatic force and social meaning beyond their literal content, whereas Hippolytus’ primary concern is doctrinal content and its theological danger, so he is liable to overlook the conversational layer in which Roman religious language functions as stance-marking rather than as belief. In short, Grice explains how rational agents trade on implicature to coordinate understanding, while Hippolytus shows how a rational polemicist must anticipate implicatures he may inadvertently generate—especially when he must present an opponent’s system clearly enough to refute it, yet not so invitingly that the reader takes the clarity itself as a recommendation. Grice: “When I was studying classics for my moderations at Corpus, I found out that while the Greeks were very jealous about the H, the Romans could not care less – and in fact this is evidenced by modern-day Italians, who care even less than the Romans, if that’s possible!” -- Filosofo italiano. A leading theologian. His essay, “The refutation of all heresies” is a valuable source of information on the Roman philosophy of his day. He begins by setting out all the heresies and their philosophical theories in detail – BEFORE accusing why whom he called the ‘heretics’ are being led astray by these theories. Grice: “Ippolito fails to detect the conversational implicature in that common Romanism, ‘by Jove!’!” Grice: “Corpus, 1932. Dear Father, I am at last abandoning the declensions (and, mercifully, a good portion of the conjugations) and making my way toward what is solemnly called Greats. I have decided I shall not do History. It is odd to say that, given that the Great War and its theatrical archdukes are still everyone’s favourite explanatory device for everything; but I am happier leaving causes to the historians and concentrating on what words are doing when people offer causes. The alternative, as you know, is Philosophy. Hardie, who is excellent at everything, manages to make it look as if being good at both History and Philosophy means being merely regular at either—an effect of his that I both admire and resent. Today he taught me a word which is too useful to keep to myself: philosophumena (singular philosophumenon). He explained that it is the name by which a certain book was known—what the Middle Ages, with their gift for titles, preferred to call Refutatio omnium haeresium. I thought at once that you might enjoy having “Refutation of all heresies” as a phrase to hold over Aunt Matilda, who seems to treat nonconformity as a hobby and everyone else as an exhibit. Hardie added the detail that the author is Hippolytus—Roman, yet writing in Greek, like Marcus Aurelius, which keeps me wondering what is wrong with these Romans that they insist on borrowing other people’s language even when they already have an empire to speak in. Hardie says it is not so much wrong as ambitious: Greek, apparently, was the language in which a Roman could sound most philosophical. This, too, is a lesson for an Englishman at Oxford: one can be entirely at home in one’s tongue and still find oneself reaching for a foreign register when one wants to be taken seriously. Yours, Paul.” GRICEVS: Cum apud Corpus Moderationes in litteris classicis agerem, animadverti Graecos litterae H tamquam thesauro quodam invidere; Romanos vero eam neglegere: quod hodie etiam in Italicis apparet, qui—si fieri potest—Romanis ipsis neglegentiores sunt. HYPPOLITVS: Facile est litteras dimittere; difficilius est fidem retinere. At tu, Grice, quasi per iocum in me invehēris: in libello meo, Refutatione omnium haeresium, haereses prius expono, ut postea refellam. GRICEVS: Profecto—sed nonnulli suspicabuntur te haeresibus ipsis paulum indulgere, quandoquidem eas prius ornate describis et quasi in prima subsellia collocas, orthodoxiam vero postremo, anhelantem, introducis. HYPPOLITVS: Methodus est, non risus. Et quod ad Romanorum “per Iovem!” attinet—iusiurandum est, non dogma. GRICEVS: Verum; sed etiam implicatura est togata: “per Iovem!” saepe hoc valet, “nolo dicere quod sentio—tamen vehementer sentio”; ideo theologi tui id non animadvertunt, Romani autem libenter intellegunt. Ippolito (a. u. c. CMLXXIII). Philosophumena.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Irtio: la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano Aulo Irtio (Roma, Lizio): la ragione conversazionale e l’orto romano. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as a rationally accountable enrichment of what is said: speakers choose forms of words on the assumption of cooperative uptake, and hearers supply what is meant by reconstructing intentions under shared norms of relevance, adequacy, and clarity. Hirtius (Aulus Hirtius, author of De bello Gallico, Book 8, written in the narrow political window after Caesar’s death in 44 BC and before Hirtius’ own death in 43 BC) gives a historically sharp foil because his writing is itself a kind of pragmatic bridge: it must “continue” Caesar while simultaneously signalling, without quite announcing, that the voice has changed, that legitimacy is at stake, and that the narrative is now being managed under urgent political constraints. Compared to Grice, the relevant “implicatures” are not conversational in the everyday sense but historiographical: the decision to keep Caesar’s plain style, to round off the campaign sequence, and to omit explicit editorial self-marking can be read as calculated attempts to get readers to take the continuation as seamlessly authoritative, even when authorship and motive have shifted. Grice helps articulate what is going on here: the text relies on the reader to infer more than is explicitly stated—about provenance, purpose, and alignment—because the writer presumes a shared background and because making those things explicit might undermine the very effect sought. Where Grice’s cooperative principle models rational coordination between interlocutors, Hirtius shows the same rational coordination operating across author and audience in a politically charged literary act: saying “just enough” in Caesar-like Latin so that the reader supplies continuity, while the differences in voice, like a slightly altered maxim of manner, invite the attentive reader to infer that the war narrative has become, inevitably, an exercise in rhetorical and political self-positioning. Grice: “It was Pater, in his novel – and philosophers OUGHT NOT to write novels – who popularized the philosophy of the garden at Oxford. What he did not popularize is the epithet for any member of this sect: the ‘gardener’!” -- Filosofo italiano.A Gardener and correspondent of CICERONE, although none of their letters survive. Hirtius continued (or completed) Book 8 of Caesar’s De bello Gallico because Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC and the narrative in the seven books Caesar himself authored stops short of the end of the Gallic campaigns; a continuation was needed to bring the account up to the point where the Civil War narrative begins. Hirtius was a close Caesarian associate and a competent literary man, so he was well placed to edit, compile, and finish the story from Caesar’s papers and from the recollections of participants. Dates, to keep the comparison straight:  Caesar’s assassination: 44 BC. Hirtius’ consulship and death at Mutina: 43 BC (he is killed in the campaign against Antony). So Hirtius’ continuation must have been written in a very narrow window: after the material of the campaigns was “available” (i.e., after the events), and before Hirtius’ death, and likely close to 44–43 BC, when Caesarian self-presentation and legitimation were politically urgent.  That narrow timing is part of the point: Book 8 is not just “more narrative,” but a politically and rhetorically useful bridge between Caesar’s Gallic self-portrait and the later civil-war literature, produced by someone whose authority derives from proximity to Caesar and whose text-making is constrained by rapidly changing power in Rome. Grice: “Clifton, 1926 Letter to Mother (I) Dear Mother, We have begun De Bello Gallico today. You were right to recommend it. Even the Latin master—who is not given to praise unless he can disguise it as a rebuke—declared that he cannot imagine anything at once so plain and so Latin. Caesar, he says, writes as if he were issuing orders to the world and expecting the world to parse them correctly. It is the first Latin I have read that seems to think it has no need to show off. Letter to Mother (II) (three weeks later) Dear Mother, We are about to “finish” De Bello Gallico, though only in the Clifton sense of finishing, which means skipping whatever the master decides is not strictly necessary for examinations. He has raced through whole campaigns with the air of a general moving pins on a map and has now announced—almost cheerfully—that we shall go straight on to Liber VIII. Letter to Mother (III) (shortly after). Dear Mother, No. Liber VIII is a different animal altogether, as they say in France. It lacks Caesar’s crystalline monotony and that admirable syntactic simplicity—what Shropshire calls his “noble stupidity,” meaning the kind that never once loses the thread. This eighth book is cleverer, fussier, and somehow more eager to sound like literature. The master says that is because it is not Caesar at all. Caesar died in 44 B.C., and Book VIII was put together the year after—43 B.C.—by a man called Aulus Hirtius, who wished to round things off and make a proper set of it. The master added, in his usual comic scholarship, that the Romans dropped their aitches in the same way Cockneys do, so Hirtius becomes “Irtius,” and the class laughed as if that were the main lesson of Roman history. Hirtius, apparently, even intended to give us a Liber IX, and perhaps make the whole thing a decina, as if war were a school exercise that ought to come out to a pleasing number; but history, unlike Clifton, did not allow him to meet the deadline—or perhaps he met it elsewhere and we shall never know. In any case, the contrast is the point: with Caesar one reads to learn Latin; with Hirtius one reads to learn that Latin can be imitated, and that imitation is already a form of commentary.” GRICEVS: Salve, Aule Irtio; audio te hortulanum esse et Ciceroni quondam scribere—quod est mirum, cum epistulae omnes, ut herbae nimis tenerae, evanuerint. HIRTIVS: Salve, Grice; epistulae periisse possunt, sed hortus manet: folia cadunt, ratio conversationalis manet—et Ciceroni satis erat scire ubi ambularem. GRICEVS: Apud Oxonium Pater hortum philosophicum in fabula vendidit; quod philosophis vetitum esse dicis. Sed verbum hortulanus ipse non popularizavit—quasi secta nostra sine nomine sit, ne a collega salutem accipiat. IRTIO: Noli queri: si nos hortulanos vocant, bene; si non vocant, melius. Nam in horto et in sermone idem valet: qui minus dicit, plus significat—et qui nimis narrat, quasi romanum cucurbitam facit ex philosophia. Gens Hirtia here? Other members of it? Yes: if the name is Aulus Hirtius, the gens is Hirtia. The nomen is Hirtius, and that points to the gens Hirtia. So, as with Antistius, Laelius, and Ebutius, the clean formula is: gens Hirtia nomen Hirtius praenomen Aulus A few cautions are worth adding. The gens Hirtia is real, but it is not among the great heavily populated Roman gentes. It is comparatively modest in what survives in our sources. That is why Aulus Hirtius tends to dominate the name almost completely. The principal member is of course Aulus Hirtius, consul of 43 BC, Caesarian, correspondent of Cicero, and the man commonly associated with Book 8 of De bello Gallico. Another notable member is Quintus Hirtius, but here one must be cautious: the evidence is thinner, and in some cases the appearance of another Hirtius in prosopography does not amount to a richly individuated public figure in the way Aulus does. There may also be women of the family who would bear the feminine form Hirtia, but these are much less visible in the literary and political record. So if you ask for “other members of the gens,” the strict answer is: yes, there were other Hirtii, but the gens is not well represented in surviving major historical memory, and Aulus Hirtius is by far the most important bearer for us. A useful dry note would run like this: Hirtius is the nomen of the gens Hirtia, a real but not especially populous Roman gens in the surviving record. Its most famous bearer is Aulus Hirtius, the Caesarian consul of 43 BC and continuator of Caesar’s Gallic narrative in Book 8. Other Hirtii are attested, but none approaches his prominence; in practice, the family’s historical afterlife is carried almost entirely by him. Two further philological points. Your Italian “Irtio” reflects the common dropping of aspiration in later pronunciation and schoolroom joking, but the classical Latin form remains Hirtius. So for formal Roman identification, gens Hirtia is right. “Roma, Lazio” in a modern heading again does not prove birthplace. It may indicate where the figure is being filed in your own project, or his Roman civic affiliation. Aulus Hirtius is certainly Roman politically and culturally; whether one wishes to say “Rome-born” requires stricter evidence than a modern rubric usually gives. And one historical correction to keep your prose clean. Hirtius is not really “a gardener” in any serious ancient biographical sense, though your Speranza joke on hortus and hortulanus is perfectly in character. The stronger historical identities are: Caesarian officer, statesman, orator, correspondent of Cicero, and literary continuator of Caesar. So the compact answer is: Yes, gens Hirtia. Other members existed, but the gens is not densely represented in surviving sources. Aulus Hirtius is by far the principal Hirtius for literary and political history. If useful, I can now do one of three things, still in chat only. I can give you a compact dictionary-style note on gens Hirtia and the known Hirtii. I can separate the secure historical facts about Aulus Hirtius from the playful Speranzian overgrowth. Or I can draft a dry Speranza-style paragraph on why Hirtius is such a good Gricean figure: not conversation proper, but politically managed continuity of voice.Irtio, Aulo (a. u. c. DCCXI). De bello gallico, librus VIII. Roma.

 

Speranza, J. L. (n. d.). ‘Grice ed Isidoro: la rgione conversazionale e il cinargo romano sotto il principato di Nerone  Isidoro (Roma, Lazio): la rgione conversazionale e il cinargo romano sotto il principato di Nerone. Grice’s theory of reason-governed conversational meaning treats implicature as an inference licensed by a cooperative presumption: speakers and hearers are expected to be mutually intelligible and rationally responsive, so that saying little can legitimately make more understood, and the implied content remains, in principle, cancellable and criticizable. Isidoro, the Cynic who publicly harangued Nero (an anecdote preserved in Suetonius) represents a sharply different conversational ecology: the Cynic stance is defined by principled uncooperativeness with power, a readiness to violate decorum, and an insistence that truth be said where polite conversation would only whisper, so the “reason” governing his speech is not helpfulness but parrhesia—frank speech—at personal risk. In Gricean terms, Isidoro’s street rebuke exploits implicature in a paradoxical way: it says few words, but in the presence of the emperor those words implicate an entire moral indictment of rule and hypocrisy, relying on the audience’s shared recognition of what it means to confront a prince in public; yet the same setting destroys Grice’s usual background assumption that the conversational game is safe and jointly sustained, since the addressee may answer with violence rather than uptake. The comparison therefore clarifies the limits of Grice’s cooperative framework: it models ordinary communication among rational agents who can, as a default, treat one another as partners; Isidoro shows a case where conversation is deliberately made non-partnered, where implicature becomes a weapon of critique rather than a device of coordination, and where the very success of the implicature (everyone understands “more than is said”) may be what makes the speaker disappear from the record. Grice: “It is odd that when I introduced the Oxonian dialectic as a sequitur of the Athenian dialectic, I overpassed the cynics, the stoics, and the epicureans!” -- Filosofo italiano. A member of the Cinargo under the principate of Nerone. One one occasion, he publicly harangued Nerone in the street. We do not hear from him after that. Isidoro. Grice: “Some like Isidoro, but Isidoro is MY man!” – , “Grice ed Isidoro. GRICEVS: Salve, Isidore; mirum mihi videtur quod, cum dialecticam Oxoniensem quasi ex Atheniensi deducerem, Cynicos Stoicos Epicureos praeterii, quasi essent hospites quos ad cenam invitas sed deinde ianuam non aperis. ISIDORVS: Salve, Grice; ego Cynicus sum, non hospes: si ianuam non aperis, per fenestram intrabo. Neroni quoque in via dixi quod multi in triclinio tantum susurrant. GRICEVS: O fortis; ego Oxonii Neroni similem numquam habui, sed habui examinatores: illi coronam non dabant, sed classim. Tu in via principem obiurgas; ego in disputatione principium obiurgo, ne me obiurget. ISIDORVS: Ita est: tu principia, ego principes; uterque tamen eadem lege utitur—dicimus pauca, significamus multa. Et si quis rogat cur Cynicos praeterieris, responde: non praeterii; tantum implicavi. Isidoro (a. u. c. DCCCSVII). Dicta. Roma.