[117]. For the poetical efforts of Cicero consult C. F. W. Mueller (Teubner, 1898), Vol. III, Pt. IV, pp. 350-405, “Fragmenta Poematum.” As to Vergil, we gather that he must have written letters to Augustus from the words of Donatus (Vita Verg., XII, 46, p. 61R). Macrobius (I, 24, 11) gives a five-line quotation from a letter of the poet to the emperor. In fact, comparing the contents of this quotation with the statement in Donatus, it seems that the five lines are from the very letter referred to by the biographer.
[118]. St. Jerome, Chron., II, praef. 2, end, in Migne, Vol. XXVII, coll. 223, 224. Petrarch quotes the same passage, and à propos of the same subject, in Var. 25. [Consult n. [111] above, in which a lengthy extract from that letter is given. The present letter to Homer (Fam., XXIV, 12) is dated October 9, 1360; Var. 25 to Boccaccio is dated August 18, 1360. If, then, the aliquando of the present letter alludes to Var. 25, it will be evident that the interval elapsed was but a short one.
[119]. The translation by Leonzio Pilato was made into Latin prose. The reference here, however, must be to the preliminary translation made at Padua in the winter of 1358-59 (cf. nn. [111] and [112]). In Var. 25 Petrarch employs the same figure.
[120]. Fam., XXIV, 10 (to Horace) and XXIV, 11 (to Vergil) are in the form of poetic epistles. In 1359 (cf. Fam., XX, 7, note) Petrarch separated all those letters which he did not destroy into two groups: the prose epistles, which he dedicated to Socrates (Fam., praefatio, I, pp. 15, 16, and Fam., XXIV, 13), and the poetic epistles, which he dedicated to Barbato da Sulmona (praef., loc. cit., and Fam., XXII, 3). The appearance in this collection, therefore, of the poetic epistles to Horace and to Vergil, must be due to their subject-matter, for they very naturally fall among those letters written “veteribus illustribus viris” (Vol. III, p. 306).
[121]. Apparently, Petrarch had received a letter purporting to be from the shade of Homer. The author of it is unknown. If it came from Florence, then of course it must have emanated from the circle of his Florentine friends. However, in Vol. 5, pp. 197, 198, Fracassetti, commenting upon the words, “Tua illa Bononia quam suspiras . . . unum habet” (Vol. III, p. 301), but reading “qua suspiras,” translates, “That Bologna of yours whence you send such laments,” and hazards the suggestion that the letter to which this of Petrarch is a reply came from Bologna and not from Florence. We may go a step farther. Since Homeric scholars in Italy were so scarce at the time, and since Petrarch states that Bologna could boast of but one—Pietro di Muglio or de Muglo ([cf. n. [139])—it would seem (if Fracassetti be right) that Pietro di Bologna was responsible for the pseudo-Homer letter. As Messrs. Robinson and Rolfe perhaps justly remark of that letter (Petrarch, p. 253, n. 2): “It must have been even more interesting than this reply, in its unconscious revelation of mediaeval limitations.”
[122]. In this instance Petrarch is carried away by his subject, and addresses his (to us unknown) correspondent as if he were the real Homer and a Greek. Compare what has been said on this subject in the preceding note.
[123]. The reference is to Rem. utr. fort., I, 64, entitled De aviariis avibusque loquacibus—a most ridiculous place in which to find mention of the bard of Smyrna. On p. 193 one of the interlocutors says, “I own a most eloquent magpie.” To which the other replies that it is absurd to apply such a term to a magpie, adding, “But if the magpie forthwith forget a word, either because the word is a difficult one or because of its own weak memory, it may even die of grief. Hence we must now consider less marvelous the death of the poet Homer, if indeed the current report be true”—“si tamen illa (mors) etiam vera est.” The De remediis was begun in 1358 (Frac., I, p. 1, n. 1) and finished in 1366 (Torraca, I, Pt. II, p. 231). Since the date of the Homer letter is October 9, 1360, it results that at least the first sixty-four chapters of Book I of the De remediis were written before this date. We see, too, that by this slight reference to Homer, Petrarch did give some currency to the report that Homer died of grief, and did add to it a note of uncertainty.
The story of Homer’s death, as Petrarch and other mediaeval men knew it, must have been the one they found in Valerius Maximus; and though Petrarch does not actually cite him as his source, this clearly results from the references to Sophocles and to Philemon shortly following. Valerius, then, says (ix, 12, ext. 3):
The cause of Homer’s death too is said to have been an uncommon one. Having landed at the island of Ios, certain fishermen asked him a riddle which he was unable to read, in consequence of which Homer is believed to have died of grief.
The legend in its more complete form (unknown to Petrarch) is derived from the so-called Lives compiled from the minor poems falsely attributed to Homer. It runs as follows. On his way to Thebes, Homer landed at Ios, where he saw some young fishermen on the shore with their nets. In answer to his question as to what they had caught, the young fishermen propounded to him this riddle: “What we caught we left, what we caught not we bring.” Homer was unable to read this riddle; and remembering an oracle which had foretold that he would die “through chagrin at his inability to read the riddle of the fishermen,” he wrote an epitaph for himself and died of vexation and grief on the third day thereafter (cf. New International Encycl., and the Brit.).