[2] Erasmus also sought to defend medieval Latinists whose allegedly barbarous style the Ciceronians had ridiculed.
Ciceronians are portrayed as having to write their ultra-sterilised prose in soundproof rooms to avoid any violation by real life, especially the distressingly vulgar speech of children and women.
[3] Erasmus believed that strictly imitating Cicero to the exclusion of other writers, styles, and modern vocabulary turned Latin into a dead language rather than a living and evolving means of international intellectual communication.
In 1531, Julius Caesar Scaliger printed his first oration defending Cicero and the Ciceronians from Erasmus, Oratio pro M. Tullio Cicerone contra Des.
[6] Modern scholars have called Ciceronianus "extremely violent" in its literary and theological points of view[7] and "a major chapter in a searing polemic" under a "light and genial surface".