It will naturally be asked if any of the replies called forth by Petrarch during toward half a century of indefatigable letter-writing have come down to us. A few only have been preserved. Recently a little volume containing thirty letters from his Florentine friend Francesco Nelli, has been published.[35] Besides these, there are four letters from Boccaccio,[36] one from Rienzo,[37] one from the Emperor Charles IV.,[38] three from Guglielmo di Pastrengo,[39] five from the enthusiastic young Humanist, Coluccio Salutati,[40] and perhaps a very few others. With these exceptions, Petrarch's correspondence includes only his own letters; and his friends often exist for us only in his kindly allusions to them. This is pre-eminently true of "Socrates" and "Lælius," to whom so many of the letters are addressed.
[1] Of "Socrates," as Petrarch chose to call one of his most intimate friends whose real name was Ludovico, we know almost nothing. He was born in the Netherlands but appears to have spent most of his life in Avignon, where he died in 1362. Although he never visited Italy he would seem to have been thoroughly Italian in his tastes.
[2] Laura, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, and other friends of Petrarch fell victims to the plague in that year.
[3] It was probably Cicero's expressions of admiration in De Oratore which led Petrarch to choose Isocrates as typifying the oratorical style.
[4] This reference is obscure.
[5] Reading reipublicæ for rempublicam.
[6] Petrarch learned upon visiting Arezzo, as he was returning from the Jubilee in 1350, that the magistrates had ordered that no alterations should be made in the humble house where he was born. See Sen., xiii., 3.
[7] Petrarch refers this journey to his ninth year in his Letter to Posterity.
[8] Sidonius Apollinaris, a Christian writer of the fifth century, is here the innocent victim of Petrarch's doubtless excusable ignorance. In speaking of his own letters Sidonius says that he has modestly refrained from attempting to imitate Cicero's style, and cites the fate of Titianus, who brought derision upon himself by so doing. Unless, as is quite possible, the text which Petrarch used was corrupt, it is difficult to explain how, even if, as he admits (see below p. [143]), he had never heard of Fronto, the tutor of Marcus Aurelius, he could have so completely missed the point. The offending passage reads: "Nam de Marco Tullio silere me in stylo epistolari melius puto, quem nec Julius Titianus totum ... digna similitudine expressit. Propter quod illum cæteri quique Frontonianorum [i.e., admirers of Fronto], utpote consectaneum æmulati, cum veternorum dicendi genus imitaretur, oratorum simiam nuncupaverunt."—Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. lviii., pp. 444-5.