Marius Nizolius (; 1498–1576) was an Italian humanist scholar, known as a proponent of

Cicero Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator, writer and Academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises tha ...

. He considered

rhetoric Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It is one of the three ancient arts of discourse ( trivium) along with grammar and logic/ dialectic. As an academic discipline within the humanities, rhetoric aims to study the techniques that speakers or w ...

to be the central intellectual discipline, slighting other aspects of the philosophical tradition. He is described by Michael R. Allen as the heir to the oratorical vision of Lorenzo Valla, and a better

nominalist In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are two main versions of nominalism. One denies the existence of universals—that which can be inst ...

Life

He was born in Brescello. He was professor of philosophy at

Parma Parma (; ) is a city in the northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna known for its architecture, Giuseppe Verdi, music, art, prosciutto (ham), Parmesan, cheese and surrounding countryside. With a population of 198,986 inhabitants as of 2025, ...

and Sabbioneta.

Works

His major work was the ''Thesaurus Ciceronianus'', first published in 1535 in

Brixen Brixen (; , ; or , ) is a town and communes of Italy, commune in South Tyrol, northern Italy, located about north of Bolzano. Geography Brixen is the third-largest city and oldest town in the province, with a population of nearly twenty-three t ...

but not under this title, and running into many further editions. It was a lexicon of Latin words used in Cicero's works. It was adopted by Renaissance extremists who considered that writing in Latin could only be correct within this restricted vocabulary. His ''Antibarbarus philosophicus'' (original title ''De veris principiis et vera ratione philosophandi contra psudophilosophos'', Parma, 1553) was edited by Leibniz in 1670 with an important Preface. It was a reply in a controversy with Marco Antonio Maioragio (1514-1555), and going back to a dispute from the mid-1540s over the ''Paradoxes'' of Cicero.Lawrence D. Green, ''John Rainold's Oxford Lectures on Aristotle's Rhetoric'' (1986), p. 414. He died in Sabbioneta.

Notes

External links

Ignacio Angelelli, Nizolius' notion of class (multitudo) (PDF)
in Anales de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Buenos Aires, XXXV(2), 2001, 575-595.

{{DEFAULTSORT:Nizolius, Marius 1498 births 1576 deaths Linguists from Italy Italian Renaissance humanists