That visit, from one point of view so consoling for Boccaccio, must have cost him a pang; for he had, as we have seen, always blamed Petrarch for accepting the hospitality of the Visconti, those enemies of his country. But he had not allowed the fact that Petrarch had disregarded his protests to interfere with their friendship. Keen patriot as he always remained, Boccaccio, without in any way changing his opinion, accepted Petrarch's strange conduct, his indifference to nationalism, with a modesty as charming as it is rare, and allowing himself to take up the attitude of a disciple, made a pilgrimage to the city he hated for the sake of the friend he loved; and cost what it may have done, that visit, long planned we gather, must have been full of refreshment for Boccaccio. We see them in that quiet garden in Visconti's city planting a laurel, a favourite amusement of Petrarch's, for it reminded him alike of Laura and of his coronation as poet;[455] and, "as the pleasant days slipped by," talking of poetry, of learning, above all of Greek and of that Leon Pilatus recently come into Italy, whom Petrarch had met in Padua.
It is probable that Boccaccio met this man in Milan before he returned to Florence;[456] it is certain that Petrarch spoke to him of Pilatus, and that Boccaccio asked him to visit him. That invitation was accepted, and before the end of the year we see Pilatus established in Florence.
This man who makes such a bizarre figure in Boccaccio's life seems to have belonged to that numerous race of adventurers half Greek, half Calabrian, needy, unscrupulous, casual, and avaricious, who ceaselessly wandered about Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seeking fortune. It might seem strange that such an one should play the part of a teacher and professor, but he certainly was not particular, and Petrarch and Boccaccio were compelled to put up with what they could get. Pilatus, however, seems to have wearied and disgusted Petrarch; it was Boccaccio, more gentle and more heroic, who devoted himself to him for the sake of learning. Having persuaded Pilatus to follow him to Florence, he caused a Chair of Greek to be given to him in the university, and for almost four years imposed upon himself the society of this disagreeable barbarian. For as it seems he was nothing else; his one claim on the attention of Petrarch and Boccaccio being that he could, or said he could, speak Greek.
We know very little about him. He boasted that he was born in Thessaly, but later owned that he was a Calabrian.[457] His appearance, according to Boccaccio [458] and Petrarch,[459] had something repellent about it. His crabbed countenance was covered with bristles of black hair, an untrimmed beard completing the effect; and his ragged mantle only half covered his dirty person. Nor were his manners more refined than his physique; while his character seems to have been particularly disagreeable, sombre, capricious, and surly. Petrarch confesses that he had given up trying to civilise this rustic, this "magna bellua."[460]
Such was Leon Pilatus; but for the love of Greek Boccaccio pardoned everything, and he and two or three friends, the only persons in Florence indeed able to do so, followed the lectures[461] of this improvised professor. But it was above all in admitting this creature to his own home that Boccaccio appears most heroic. There he submitted him to long interviews and interminable séances in order that he might accomplish the great task of a complete translation of Homer.
A WOODCUT FROM THE "DECAMERON." (STRASBURG, 1553)
(By the courtesy of Messrs. J. & J. Leighton.)
Afar off Petrarch associated himself with this work and tried to direct it with wise counsels that Leon Pilatus was doubtless too little of a scholar to understand and too ignorant to follow blindly. In fact but for Petrarch, as the following letter proves, they would have lacked the text itself:—
"You ask me," he writes in 1360,[462] "to lend you, if as you think I have bought it, the book of Homer that was for sale at Padua, in order that our friend Leon may translate it from Greek into Latin for you and for our other studious compatriots, for you say I have long since had another example. I have seen this book, but I have neglected it, because it appeared to me inferior to my own. One could easily get it, however, through the person who procured me the friendship of Leon; a letter of his would be all-powerful and I will write him myself. If by chance this book escapes us, which I do not believe, I will lend you mine. For I have always been desirous of this translation in particular and of Greek literature in general, and if Fortune had not been envious of my beginnings in the miserable death of my excellent master (? Barlaam), I should perhaps have to-day something more of Greek than the alphabet.
"I applaud, then, with all my heart and strength your enterprise.... I am sorry to see so much solicitude for the bad and so much negligence of the good. But what would you? One must resign oneself to it....