The Latin word humanitas corresponded to the Greek concepts of philanthrôpía (loving what makes us human) and paideia (education) which were amalgamated with a series of qualities that made up the traditional unwritten Roman code of conduct (mos maiorum).
[1] Cicero (106–43 BCE) used humanitas in describing the formation of an ideal speaker (orator) who he believed should be educated to possess a collection of virtues of character suitable both for an active life of public service and a decent and fulfilling private life; these would include a fund of learning acquired from the study of bonae litterae ("good letters", i.e., classical literature, especially poetry), which would also be a source of continuing cultivation and pleasure in leisure and retirement, youth and old age, and good and bad fortune.
Hence Cicero's advice to his brother that "if fate had given you authority over Africans or Spaniards or Gauls, wild and barbarous nations, you would still owe it to your humanitas to be concerned about their comforts, their needs, and their safety.
[5] In 1333, in Liège, Belgium, Petrarch found and copied out in his own hand a manuscript of Cicero's speech, Pro Archia, which contained a famous passage in defense of poetry and litterae (letters): Haec studia adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugium ac solacium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur.
These studies nourish youth, entertain old age, enhance prosperity, offer refuge and solace too in adversity, delight us at home, not hindering us out of doors, spend the night with us, go abroad, and live in the countryside.
In this they followed the fifth century Church fathers such as Jerome and Augustine, who taught that Greek and Roman learning and literature were gifts of God and models of excellence, provided, of course, they were filtered and purified in order to serve Christianity.
[9] Virtue, Cicero insisted, is nothing but nature perfected and developed to its highest point, and there is therefore a resemblance between man and God: "Est autem virtus nihil aliud quam in se perfecta et ad summum perducta natura; est igitur homini cum deo similitudio"[10]... Cicero's humanitas... reappeared in the first century in Seneca's claim – made in the midst of a lament over Roman bestiality – that man is a sacred thing to man: “homo res sacra homini”;[11] and reappeared once more in the eighteenth century in Kant's call for human autonomy and in Voltaire's stern injunction: “Remember your dignity as a man.”[12] In the beginning of his Meditations, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius elaborated a veritable catalog of qualities which, all together, made up the virtues which Cicero had called humanitas and which the philosophes hoped they possessed in good measure: modesty, self-control, manliness, beneficence, practicality, generosity, rationality, tolerance, and obedience to the dictates of nature.
Historian William McNeil writes that Herder boldly proclaimed that:each age and every people embody ideals and capacities peculiar to themselves, thus allowing a fuller and more complete expression of the multiform potentialities of humankind than could otherwise occur.
In one of his works, he linked benevolence and the concept of "fellow-feeling," which allows self-love, self-centred choice, solipsism, and egoism"[clarification needed] to finally be wholly overcome.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Call Archimedes from his buried tomb Upon the plain of vanished Syracuse, And feelingly the Sage shall make report How insecure, how baseless in itself, Is the Philosophy, whose sway depends On mere material instruments;—how weak Those arts, and high inventions, if unpropped By virtue.—He, sighing with pensive grief, Amid his calm abstractions, would admit That not the slender privilege is theirs To save themselves from blank forgetfulness!