CHAPTER II.

SALUTATI. CHRYSOLORAS. BARZIZZA.

The Villa Paradiso, and San Spirito

SHORTLY after the death of Boccaccio, we have a glimpse of the interest inspired by the Classics in two of the social circles of Florence. In the brilliant company that frequented the Villa Paradiso of the Alberti, the conversation sometimes turned on Odysseus and Catiline, on Livy and Ovid, on the ancient Roman Empire, and the old Latin language1. A more learned society assembled at Santo Spirito, where the centre of the traditions of Boccaccio and of Petrarch was the eminent theologian and patriot, Luigi de' Marsigli (d. 1394), who was familiar with Cicero, Virgil and Seneca, and followed St Augustine in assigning a moral meaning to the scene in the Odyssey, where the comrades of Odysseus are transformed into swine by the wand of Circe. Among those who came under Marsigli's influence were Coluccio Salutati, Roberto de' Rossi, and Niccolò Niccoli2.

Coluccio
Salutati

Salutati (1330-1406), who was educated at Bologna and corresponded with Petrarch in his youth, held the high office of chancellor, or Latin secretary, of Florence from 1375 to his death. Like Petrarch, he was a great collector of Latin MSS. He eagerly sought for the lost books of Livy, for Pompeius Trogus, and for a complete copy of Curtius and of Quintilian. He obtained a transcript (1375) of the Verona мs of Catullus, and of Petrarch's Propertius, together with a Tibullus, which is still in existence. He was the first to possess a copy of Cato, De Agricultura, the elegies of Maximianus, the Aratea of Germanicus and the commentary of

Giovanni da Prato, Il Paradiso degli Alberti, ed. Wesselofsky, 1867. 2 Voigt, i 184-190".

S. II.

Ed. Baehrens, Proleg. pp. vii, x.

Pompeius on the Ars maior of Donatus1. On learning in 1389 that the two MSS of Cicero's Letters, from Verona and Vercelli, were at Milan, he caused a copy to be made from the Vercelli MS, which he found, to his joy, contained the Letters Ad Familiares, unknown to Petrarch. In 1392 he received from Milan a copy of the Verona MS of the Letters Ad Atticum, Ad Quintum Fratrem and the Correspondence with Brutus, the only Ms of Cicero's Letters which Petrarch had himself discovered and transcribed. Thus, after the lapse of centuries, the two volumes of Cicero's Letters stood side by side at last in the two ancient Mss at Milan, and in the two modern transcripts in the possession of Salutati in Florence. Both of the latter are now in the Laurentian Library, together with the original of the Ad Familiares, the мs from Vercelli".

Salutati was much more than a mere collector. We find him drawing up summaries of Cicero's Letters, and collating Mss of Seneca and St Augustine. He detects the spuriousness of the De Differentiis, formerly ascribed to Cicero. He encourages younger scholars, and among those whose gratitude he thus won, were men of no less mark than Poggio Bracciolini and Leonardo Bruni. He was honoured with a public funeral in the Cathedral. A full-length portrait of the Chancellor of Florence, a gaunt and grim personage with a Roman nose, robed in the black gown of his office, and bending beneath the weight of a vast volume which he holds in his hands, forms the frontispiece of the monumental edition of his Latin Letters®.

1 Sabbadini, Scoperte, 34 f.

2 p. 7 supra.

3 Cp. Voigt, Ber. d. sächs. Ges. d. Wiss. 1879, 41–65; Viertel, Königsberg Progr. 1879, and Jahrb. für kl. Phil. 1880, 231-247; and Cic. Epp. ed. Mendelssohn (1893), xi f; also Leighton, in Trans. Amer. Phil. Assoc. xxi 59-87, and Kirner, in Studi ital. di filol. cl. ix 399.

4 xlix 7 (Ad Familiares) and 18 (Ad Atticum).

5 xlix 9.

6 Epistolario, ed. Novati, in 3 vols, large 8vo, Rome, 1891-6; frontispiece to vol. i, reproduced in Wiese u. Pèrcopo, Ital. Litt. 193; frontispiece to vol. iii, an earlier portrait by Cristoforo Allori; facsimiles from his letters in iii 621, 661. More than a quarter of vol. iv part 1 (1905) is occupied with his defence of the ancient poets and of classical education. Cp., in general, Voigt, i 190-2123.

Chrysoloras

Salutati was of signal service in promoting the study of Greek in Florence. The youthful Guarino of Verona had been prompted by the high reputation of Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), as a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy, to seek a place in his household at Constantinople with a view to profiting by his instructions'. The gratitude of Guarino caused the name of Chrysoloras to become widely known in the north of Italy; and Chrysoloras and the aged Demetrius Cydonius had hardly landed in Venice as envoys of Manuel Palaeologus (1393), when two of the noble sons of Florence hastened to obtain the benefit of their teaching. One of them, Giacomo da Scarparia, accompanied the envoys on their return to the Byzantine capital, there to learn Greek from Cydonius. The other, Roberto de' Rossi, acquired some knowledge of the language in Venice, and inspired the aged Salutati with an interest in Greek and in Chrysoloras. Salutati urged Scarparia to search for мss of all the Greek historians and poets, and of Homer in particular, together with Plato and Plutarch, and lexicons of the Greek language. In 1396 he was authorised by influential persons, such as Palla Strozzi and Niccolò Niccoli, to invite Chrysoloras to leave Constantinople and to settle in Florence as a teacher of Greek. He accepted the invitation, and held that office for four years (1396—1400). Under his influence, Giacomo da Scarparia translated the Cosmography of Ptolemy, and Rossi certain of the works of Aristotle'; Palla Strozzi, in later life, produced renderings from the Greek, but Niccoli never attained any intimate knowledge of the language. The most enthusiastic pupils of the new teacher were younger men, such as Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini, and possibly Ambrogio Traversari. Bruni had been engaged for four years in the study of law, when the arrival of Chrysoloras prompted him to learn a language that no Italian had understood 'for the last seven

1 Janus Pannonius, Delitiae poëtarum Hung. (1619), 8 f (Legrand, Bibl. Hellén. I xix), famulus colis atria docti hospitis, et mixto geris auditore minis

trum.

2 Salutati, Epp. iii 129–132.

3 Attested in Guarino's dedication of Plutarch's Flamininus, ap. Bandini, Catal. Cod. Lat. ii 738.

centuries a language that would unlock for him the treasures of Homer, Plato and Demosthenes, and of all the poets, philosophers and orators, of whom he had heard such wonders2. Bruni learnt Greek for two years under Chrysoloras, and his memorable translations from the Greek will be mentioned at a later point. Another notable pupil, Vergerio, left a distinguished position as a teacher at Padua, to learn Greek in Florence. But the first enthusiasm for Greek had begun to abate on the Arno, when Chrysoloras, in obedience to the bidding of the emperor Manuel Palaeologus, left Florence in 1400 for Milan, where he was invited in 1402 to teach Greek at Pavia. It was there that he commenced a literal rendering of Plato's Republic, afterwards revised by his favourite pupil Uberto Decembrio, who transmitted to his scholarly son, Pier Candido, a reverence for the memory of Chrysoloras. The latter returned for a time to the East, but between 1407 and 1410 he was once more in the West as the envoy of his emperor, the places visited during these years including Venice, Florence, Paris, London, and finally Rome. He was afterwards sent to Constantinople to treat with the patriarch on the union of the Churches. In 1413 he went to Germany with two cardinals to arrange about the Council of Constance, and at Constance he died of a fever in the spring of 1415. He was buried, not in the church of the Dominican monastery, but in a chapel between the north side of the choir and the sacristy. The monastery has been secularised; the finely vaulted church has become the diningroom, and the adjoining chapel the pantry, of the Insel-Hôtel; but

1 This interval of time (in which several other humanists agree) is deemed too small by Hody (p. 54), and by others. But it closely corresponds to the statement in Martin Crusius, Annales Suevici 274, that Greek was extinguished in Italy in 690 A.D. (exactly 706 years before).

2 Hody, 28-30; cp. Gibbon, vii 122 Bury, and Symonds, ii 110 f.

5 See his letter in Traversari, Epp. xxiv 69. He was only a child of three when Chrysoloras reached Pavia.

6 Ep. al Joannem (Palaeologum II) imperatorem, èv ĥ σúykpiσis Tŷs taλaiâs καὶ νέας Ρώμης, in Migne, P. G. clvi 34α, μέμνημαι δὲ τῆς ἐν Λονδινίῳ τῆς Βρεταννικῆς... γενομένης αὐτοῖς (St Peter and St Paul) πομπῆς καὶ πανηγύρεως τῶν ἐκεῖ.

on the ceiling of the ancient chapel the traveller may still read the simple epitaph composed by Vergerio in memory of his master'.

His funeral was attended by his Roman pupil, the poet Cenci, and by Poggio Bracciolini. The catechism of Greek Grammar known as his Erotemata, the earliest modern text-book of the subject, was printed in Florence shortly before 1484 and at Venice in the February of that year, and was afterwards used by Linacre at Oxford and by Erasmus at Cambridge.. We also have his letter to Guarino on the meaning of the term Theorica in Demosthenes, and on the edition of the Iliad described by Plutarch as that of the narthex2. But he was unproductive as an author, and needlessly diffuse and redundant as a teacher. In his general character, however, he was a man of a far finer type than either of his precursors, Barlaam and Leontius Pilatus. His pupil Poggio, who, in his relation to others, is only too apt to give proof of an implacable and bitter temper, is eloquent in praise of his master's integrity, generosity and kindness, and of that grave and sober earnestness, which was in itself an incentive to virtue. He had been a bright example to others, a heaven-sent messenger who had aroused an enthusiasm for the study of Greek3. His fame was cherished by another celebrated pupil, Guarino, who compared him to a ray of light illuminating the deep darkness of Italy. Forty years after his master's death, he fondly collected all the many tributes to his memory and enshrined them in a volume under the title of Chrysolorina. A Greek мs that once belonged to Chrysoloras is now at Wolfenbüttel, and his own transcript of Demosthenes in the VaticanR.

1 Ante aram situs est D. Emanuel Chrysoloras,...vir doctissimus, prudentissimus, optimus etc. (complete copy in Legrand, I xxviii f). An epitaph, which I have seen in the Portinari chapel (1462–6) of the church of S. Eustorgio in Milan, strangely confounds Manuel Chrysoloras, litterarum Graecarum restitutor, with his nephew John, the father-in-law of Philelphus.

2 Rosmini, Vita di Guarino, iii 181, 187-189.

Poggio, Epp. i 4, xiii 1.

4 Partly preserved in Harleian MS 2580 (Sabbadini, La Scuola...di Guarino, 16). Cp., in general, Voigt, i 222—2323; ii 1133; also Hody, 12—54; Legrand, Bibliographie Hellénique, I xix-xxx; and Klette, Beiträge, i 47 f. Portrait in Paulus Jovius, Elogia (1575) 41, copied in Legrand, III 59.

5 Gud. 24.

6 Gr. 1368 (De Nolhac, Bibl. de F. Orsini, 145).