PETRARCH, 1304-1374 A.D.
Petrarch, a younger contemporary of Dante, and like him a native of Florence, has been called the first modern scholar and man of letters. He devoted himself with tireless energy to classical studies. Writing to a friend, Petrarch declares that he has read Vergil, Horace, Livy, and Cicero, "not once, but a thousand times, not cursorily but studiously and intently, bringing to them the best powers of my mind. I tasted in the morning and digested at night. I quaffed as a boy, to ruminate as an old man. These works have become so familiar to me that they cling not to my memory merely, but to the very marrow of my bones."
[Illustration: PETRARCH
From a miniature in the Laurentian Library, Florence]
PETRARCH AS A LATIN REVIVALIST
Petrarch himself composed many Latin works and did much to spread a knowledge of Latin authors. He traveled widely in Italy, France, and other countries, searching everywhere for ancient manuscripts. When he found in one place two lost orations of Cicero and in another place a collection of Cicero's letters, he was transported with delight. He kept copyists in his house, at times as many as four, busily making transcripts of the manuscripts that he had discovered or borrowed. Petrarch knew almost no Greek. His copy of Homer, it is said, he often kissed, though he could not read it.
BOCCACCIO, 1313-1375 A.D.
Petrarch's friend and disciple, Boccaccio, was the first to bring to Italy manuscripts of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Having learned some Greek, he wrote out a translation of those epic poems. But Boccaccio's fame to- day rests on the Decameron. It is a collection of one hundred stories written in Italian. They are supposed to be told by a merry company of men and women, who, during a plague at Florence, have retired to a villa in the country. The Decameron is the first important work in Italian prose. Many English writers, notably Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales [4] have gone to it for ideas and plots. The modern short story may be said to date from Boccaccio.
STUDY OF GREEK IN ITALY
The renewed interest in Latin literature, due to Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others, was followed in the fifteenth century by the revival of Greek literature. In 1396 A.D. Chrysoloras, a scholar from Constantinople, began to lecture on Greek in the university of Florence. He afterwards taught in other Italian cities and further aided the growth of Hellenic studies by preparing a Greek grammar—the first book of its kind. From this time, and especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 A.D., many learned Greeks came to Italy, thus transplanting in the West the culture of the East. "Greece had not perished, but had emigrated to Italy."