The Father of Humanism
253
Long before your letter[2] reached me I had formed an intention of writing to you, and I should really have done it if it had not been for the lack of a common language. I am not so fortunate as to have learned Greek,[3] and the Latin tongue, which you once spoke, by the aid of our writers,[4] you seem of late, through the negligence of their successors, to have quite forgotten. From both avenues of communication, consequently, I have been debarred, and so have kept silence., But now there comes a man[5] who restores you to us, single-handed, and makes you a Latin again.
Your Penelope cannot have waited longer nor- ↑ Fam., xxiv., 12.
- ↑ Someone had sent Petrarch an epistle that purported to come from the shade of Homer. It must have been even more interesting than this reply, in its unconscious revelation of mediæval limitations. Petrarch took it very seriously. He often forgets in this answer that he is not writing to Homer himself.
- ↑ In Petrarch's day, as has been hinted above (p. 237), there was no apparatus for the study of Greek. Oral instruction, from Greek or Byzantine scholars, was the only possible means of access to the great writers of the past. Such instruction was very difficult to secure, as Petrarch's repeated efforts and final failure prove. For his own statements concerning this subject see Fam., xviii., 2.
- ↑ The reference is of course to the Latin translations of Homer, the Odyssey of Livius Andronicus and the abridgment of the Iliad mentioned just below, p. 254, note i.
- ↑ Leo Pilatus (or Leontius Pilatus, as Boccaccio writes the name), a Calabrian, who, at the instance of Petrarch and Boccaccio, was making at Florence at about this time a Latin prose version of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For a good brief account of what is known concerning Pilatus, with a few specimens of his translation, see Körting, op. cit., i., 474 sqq.
