Carolus Sigonius

Carolus Sigonius (Carlo Sigonio or Sigone) (c. 1524 – 12 August 1584) was an Italian humanist, born in Modena.

Biography

Having studied Greek under the learned Franciscus Portus of Candia, he attended the philosophical schools of Bologna and Pavia. In 1545, he was elected professor of Greek in his native place in succession to Portus. In 1552, he was appointed to a professorship at Venice, which he exchanged for the chair of eloquence at Padua in 1560.¹

To this period of his life belongs a quarrel with Robortello, due to the publication by Sigonius of a treatise De nominibus Romanorum, in which he corrected several errors in a work of Robertelli on the same subject. The quarrel was patched up by the intervention of Cardinal Seripando (who purposely stopped on his way to the Council of Trent), but broke out again in 1562, when the two rivals found themselves colleagues at Padua. Sigonius, who was of a peaceful disposition, thereupon accepted (in 1563) a call to Bologna. He died in a country house purchased by him in the neighbourhood of Modena, in August 1584. The last year of his life was embittered by another literary dispute.¹

In 1583, Sigonius edited a manuscript purported to be the long-sought Consolatio by Cicero, written as a distraction from his grief at the death of his daughter Tullia. Published in Venice, it was based on a book found by an obscure bookseller, named Vianelli. Sigonius declared that, if not genuine, it was at least worthy of Cicero; those who held the opposite view (Antonio Riccoboni, , and others) asserted that Sigonius himself had written it with the object of deceiving the learned world, a charge which he explicitly denied. The original manuscript was never produced. The work is now universally regarded as a forgery, whoever may have been the author of it.