How to advice the prince : three Renaissance forms of Plutarchian parrhesia

This article sheds light on a little known chapter in the history of parrhesia. After a historiographical premise, the second and the third sections recall that parrhesia is conceived as a form of friendly admonition and is held to be the distinctive feature of good counsellors in Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend. The next three sections show how Erasmus, Elyot and Castiglione reworked Plutarch’s ideas in their mirrors for princes. The final references to Foucault’s analysis of autocratic parrhesia make it clear that for these humanists, but not for Plutarch, parrhesia is also a process of moral conditioning by which counsellors advocate a system of values to be followed.