The History of Education / Educational Practice and Progress Considered as a Phase of the Development and Spread of Western Civilization

by Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

A rage for Greek learning and Greek books now for a time set in. Aurispa, a Sicilian, went to Constantinople, learned Greek, and returned to Italy, in 1422, with 238 Greek manuscripts. Messer Filelfo, of Padua, after seven years at Constantinople, returned, in 1427, with forty manuscripts and with the grand-niece of Chrysoloras as his wife. In 1448 Theodorus Gaza (c. 1400-75), a learned Greek from the city of Thessalonica, who had fled from his native city just before its capture by the Turks (1430), came to Ferrara as the first professor of Greek in the university there. He made many translations, prepared a very popular Greek grammar, and in 1451 became professor of philosophy at Rome.

Another Greek of importance was Demetrius Chalcondyles of Athens (1424- 1511), who reached Italy in 1447. In 1450 he became professor of Greek at Perugia, and of his lectures there one of his enthusiastic pupils [11] wrote:

A Greek has just arrived, who has begun to teach me with great pains, and I to listen to his precepts with incredible pleasure, because he is a Greek, because he is an Athenian, and because he is Demetrius. It seems to me that in him is figured all the wisdom, the civility, and the elegance of those so famous and illustrious ancients. Merely seeing him you fancy you are looking on Plato; far more when you hear him speak.

In 1463 Demetrius transferred to Padua as professor of Greek, and was the first professor of Greek in a western European university to be paid a fixed salary. He also taught for a time at Milan, and from 1471 to 1491 was professor of Greek at Florence.

A number of other learned Greeks had reached Italy prior to the fall of Constantinople (1453) before the advancing Turks, [12] and after its fall many more sought there a new home. Many of these found, on landing, that their knowledge of Greek and the possession of a few Greek books were an open sesame to the learned circles of Italy.

[Illustration: FIG. 70. DEMETRIUS CHALCONDYLES (1424-1511) (Drawn from a picture of a fresco by Ghirlandajo, painted in 1490, on the walls of the church of Santa Maria Novella, at Florence)]

ENTHUSIASM FOR THE NEW MOVEMENT; LIBRARIES AND ACADEMICS FOUNDED. The enthusiasm for the recovery and restoration of ancient literature and history which this work awakened among the younger scholars of Italy can be imagined. While most of the professors in the universities and most of the church officials at first had nothing to do with the new movement, being wedded to scholastic methods of thinking, the leaders of the new learning drew about them many of the brightest and most energetic of the young men who came to those universities which were hospitable to the new movement. [13] Greek scholars in the university towns were followed by admiring bands of younger students, [14] who soon took up the work and superseded their masters. Academies, named after the one conducted by Plato in the groves near Athens, whose purpose was to promote literary studies, were founded in all the important Italian cities (R. 129). The members usually Latinized their names, and celebrated the ancient festivals. In Venice a Greek Academy was formed in which all the proceedings were in Greek, and the members were known by Greek names. The Academia of Aldus, at Venice, of which his celebrated press was a department, became a veritable university for classical learning, and to participate in its proceedings scholars came from many lands. It was the curious and enthusiastic Italians who, more than the Greek scholars who taught them the language, opened up the literature and history of Athens to the comprehension of the western world.

The financial support of the movement came from the wealthy merchant princes, reigning dukes, and a few church authorities, who assisted scholars and spent money most liberally in collecting manuscripts and accumulating books. Says Symonds:

Never was there a time in the world's history when money was spent more freely upon the collection and preservation of MSS., and when a more complete machinery was put in motion for the sake of securing literary treasures. Prince vied with prince, and eminent burgher with burgher, in buying books. The commercial correspondents of the Medici and other great Florentine houses, whose banks and discount offices extended over Europe and the Levant, were instructed to purchase relics of antiquity without regard for cost, and to forward them to Florence. The most acceptable present that could be sent to a king was a copy of a Roman historian. The best credentials which a young Greek arriving from Byzantium could use to gain the patronage of men like Palla degli Strozzi was a fragment of some ancient; the merchandise insuring the largest profit to a speculator who had special knowledge in such matters was old parchment covered with crabbed characters. [15]

Cosimo de' Medici (1393-1464), a banker and ruler of Florence, spent great sums in collecting and copying manuscripts. Vespasiano, a fifteenth- century bookseller of Florence, has left us an interesting picture of the work of Cosimo in founding (1444) the great Medicean library [16] at Florence (R. 130) and of the difficulties of book collecting in the days before the invention of printing.