59© THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE sympathetic study. As a result they in the end gained a much better comprehension of the Latin language and of ancient civilization. New grammars, dictionaries, and other linguistic treatises were issued, and the foundations were thus laid for the sci- ences of philology and literary criticism. Learned Philology . . .111. and literary societies were organized and literary controversies were frequent and led sometimes to abusive per- sonalities. Scholars who began a learned argument over some detail of style or fine point of syntax would end by in- sulting each other's parents. Despots, republics, and popes alike employed humanists as their secretaries and orators. Gian Galeazzo, the despot at Milan, said that he feared a dispatch of the humanist secretary of the Florentine Re- public more than a regiment of its citizen soldiers. The hu- manists prided themselves upon knowing the essentials of classical Latin style, and were careful not to commit any medieval barbarisms. Sometimes they seem singularly con- tent with a scanty body of fact or thought, so long as they have beauties of diction in which to revel. They were in fact a little prone to follow the debased flowery rhetoric of the late Roman Empire rather than the chaste severity of earlier classical models. The later humanists, of whom Politian was probably the most proficient, improved con- siderably in correctness of diction over Petrarch, but their Latin works are as little read to-day as his. It is clear that any one wishing to comprehend classical civilization must read not only the Latin authors, but the Revival of Greek, originals to which they owed so much. Petrarch owned a copy of Homer's poems in the original and longed to read Greek, but could not procure a capable teacher. For a while it was almost necessary to go to Constantinople to learn Greek or to procure copies of Greek texts. Aquinas had probably used a Greek text in his version of Aristotle ; Roger Bacon had attempted a Greek grammar; and Peter of Abano, a scholastic medical author- ity at the close of the thirteenth century, had visited Con- stantinople, He speaks of Greek works which he had seen
