[CHAPTER XIII]
1357-1363
LEON PILATUS AND THE TRANSLATION OF HOMER—
THE CONVERSION OF BOCCACCIO
That a profound change had already taken place in Boccaccio's point of view, in his attitude towards life, in his whole moral consciousness, it might seem impossible to doubt after reading the Corbaccio and the Vita di Dante; but though its full significance only became apparent some years after the publication of those works, the curious psychologist may perhaps find signs of it before the year 1355. For while that change was on the one hand the inevitable consequence of his youth and early manhood, a development from causes that had always been hidden in his soul, it was also a result, as it was a sign, of his age, of his passing from youth to middle age, and it declares itself with the first grey hairs, the first sign of failing powers and loss of activity, in a sort of disillusion and pessimism. From this time his life was to be a kind of looking backward, with a wild regret for the mistakes and wasted opportunities then perhaps for the first time horribly visible.
Yes, a part at least of that bitterness, scorn, and anger against woman might seem to be but the approach of old age. But side by side with that moral and spiritual revolution that by no means reached its crisis in 1355, we may see an intellectual change not less profound, that in its own way too is also a "looking backward." His creative powers were paralysed. The Corbaccio is the last original or "creative" work that he achieved; henceforth his life was to be devoted to scholarship and to criticism, and however eager we may be to acknowledge the debt we owe him for his labours in those fields, we cannot but admit that they are a sign of failing power, of a lost grip on life, on reality; and though we can hardly have hoped for another Decameron, we are forced to allow that the energy which created the one we have was of quite another and a higher sort than that which produced the works of learning which fill the last twenty years of his life.
When Petrarch first met Boccaccio, as we have seen, it was not so much of Italian letters as of antiquity that they spoke; and ever after we find that the elder poet brings the conversation back to that, to him the most important of subjects, when Boccaccio, with his keener sense of life and greater vitality, would have involved him in political discussion, or persuaded him to consider such aspects of the life of his own time as are to be found, for instance, so plentifully in the Decameron. Seeing the way Petrarch was determined to follow, venerating him as his master and leader, always ready to give him the first place, it is not surprising that Boccaccio interested himself more and more in what so engrossed his friend. In 1354 Petrarch thanks him[447] for an anthology from the works of Cicero and Varro that he had composed and given him, and in the same year he thanks him again for S. Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms.
Long before he met Boccaccio in Florence in 1350, however, Petrarch had begun the study of Greek in Avignon in 1342 under the Basilian monk Barlaam,[448] whom he had met there in 1339.
According to Boccaccio, Barlaam was a man of small stature but of prodigious learning, the Abbot of the monastery of S. Gregory, a bitter theological disputant with many enemies, but in high favour at the court of Constantinople, whence the Emperor Andronicus had sent him to Avignon ostensibly on a mission for the reunion of the Churches, but really to ask for the assistance of the West in the struggle with the Turks. Barlaam was in fact a Calabrian, but most of his life had been spent in Salonica and Constantinople. He knew Greek; that was his value in Petrarch's eyes, and he seems to have read with the poet certain dialogues of Plato.[449] In 1342, however, Barlaam become Bishop of Gerace,[450] and Petrarch lost him before his greatest desire had begun to be satisfied, to wit, the translation of Homer, which, with the Middle Age, he only knew in the mediocre abridgment Ilias Latina, the weakness of which he recognised.[451] Eleven years later, in 1353, however, Petrarch met in Avignon Nicolas Sigeros, another ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, come on a similar mission to Barlaam's. They spoke together of Homer, and in the following year when Sigeros was departed, he sent Petrarch as a gift the Greek text of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This the poet received with an enthusiastic letter of thanks, at the same time confessing his insufficiency as a Hellenist.[452]
Now in the winter of 1358-9, during a sojourn at Padua, there was introduced to Petrarch by one of his friends a certain Leon Pilatus, who gave himself out for a Greek; and the poet seized the opportunity to get a translation of a part of his MS. of Homer.[453] In the spring, however, he went to Milan, and it was there, on March 16, 1359, that Boccaccio visited him, finding him in his garden "in orto Sanctæ Valeriæ Mediolani."[454]