Pomponius Graecinus (appointed AD 16) Gaius Cornelius Tacitus (appointed AD 97) Topos of the "new man" The literary theme of homo novus, or "how the lowly born but inherently worthy man may properly rise to eminence in the world" was the topos of Seneca's influential Epistle XLIV. At the endpoint of Late Antiquity, it was likewise a subject in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (iii, vi). In the Middle Ages Dante's Convivio (book IV) and Petrarch's De remediis utriusque fortunae (I.16; II.5) take up the subject, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale. In its Christian renderings, the theme suggested a tension in the scala naturae or great chain of being, one that was produced through the agency of Man's free will. The theme came naturally to Renaissance humanists who were often homines novi rising by their own wits in a network of noble courts that depended on the highly literate new men to run increasingly complicated chancelries and create the cultural propaganda that was a contemporary vehicle for noble fame, and that consequently offered a kind of intellectual cursus honorum. In the fifteenth century Buonaccorso da Montemagno's Dialogus de vera nobilitate treated of the "true nobility" inherent in the worthy individual; Poggio Bracciolini also wrote at length De nobilitate, stressing the Renaissance view of human responsibility and effectiveness that are at the heart of Humanism: sicut virtutis ita et nobilitatis sibi quisque existit auctor et opifex. Briefer summaries of the theme were to be found in Francesco Patrizi, (VI.1), and in Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo's encyclopedic Speculum vitae humanae. In the sixteenth century these and new texts came to be widely printed and distributed. Sánchez de Arévalo's Speculum was first printed at Rome, 1468, and there are more than twenty fifteenth-century printings; German, French and Spanish translations were printed. The characters of Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (1528) discuss the requirement that a cortegiano be noble (I.XIV-XVI). This was translated into French, Spanish, English, Latin and other languages. Jerónimo Osório da Fonseca's De nobilitate (Lisbon 1542, and seven reprintings in the sixteenth century), stressing propria strennuitas ("one's own determined striving") received an English translation in 1576. The Roman figure most often cited as an exemplum is Gaius Marius, whose speech of self-justification was familiar to readers from the set-piece in Sallust's Bellum Iugurthinum, 85; the most familiar format in the Renaissance treatises is a dialogue that contrasts the two