9. I believe I have now approached sufficiently close to the goal I had set myself, for I have taken the kernels of truth from the husks of falsehood, in that question which asked whether the office of monarchy was essential to the welfare of the world, and in the next which made inquiry whether the Roman people rightfully appropriated the empire, and in the last which sought whether the authority of the monarch derived from God directly, or from some other. But the truth of this final question must not be restricted to mean that the Roman Prince shall not be The ideal relation of the two powers subject in some degree to the Roman Pontiff, for well-being that is mortal is ordered in a measure after well-being that is immortal. Wherefore let Cæsar honor Peter as a first-born son should honor his father, so that, brilliant with the light of paternal grace, he may illumine with greater radiance the earthly sphere over which he has been set by Him who alone is Ruler of all things spiritual and temporal.[617]
81. Petrarch's Love of the Classics
Francesco Petrarca was born at Arezzo in northern Italy in July, 1304. His father was a Florentine notary who had been banished by the same decree with Dante in 1302, and who finally settled at Avignon in 1313 to practice his profession in the neighborhood of the papal court. Petrarch was destined by his father for the law and was sent to study that subject at Montpellier and subsequently at Bologna. But from the moment when he first got hold of the Latin classics, notably Cicero and Vergil, he found his interest in legal subjects absolutely at an end. He was charmed by the literary power of the ancients, as he certainly was not by the logic and learning of the jurists, and though his father endeavored to discourage what he regarded as a sheer waste of time by burning the young enthusiast's precious Latin books, the love of the classics, once aroused, was never crushed out and the literary instinct remained dominant. The beginnings of the Renaissance spirit, which are so discernible in Dante, become in Petrarch the full expression of the new age. In the words of Professor Adams, "In him we clearly find, as controlling personal traits, all those specific features of the Renaissance which give it its distinguishing character as an intellectual revolution, and from their strong beginning in him they have never ceased among men. In the first place, he felt as no other man had done since the ancient days the beauty of nature and the pleasure of mere life, its sufficiency for itself; and he had also a sense of ability and power, and a self-confidence which led him to plan great things, and to hope for an immortality of fame in this world. In the second place, he had a most keen sense of the unity of past history, of the living bond of connection between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. That world was for him no dead antiquity, but he lived and felt in it and with its poets and thinkers, as if they were his neighbors. His love for it amounted almost, if we may call it so, to an ecstatic enthusiasm, hardly understood by his own time, but it kindled in many others a similar feeling which has come down to us. The result is easily recognized in him as a genuine culture, the first of modern men in whom this can be found.... Finally, Petrarch first put the modern spirit into conscious opposition to the mediæval. The Renaissance meant rebellion and revolution. It meant a long and bitter struggle against the whole scholastic system, and all the follies and superstitions which flourished under its protection. Petrarch opened the attack along the whole line. Physicians, lawyers, astrologers, scholastic philosophers, the universities—all were enemies of the new learning, and so his enemies. And these attacks were not in set and formal polemics alone, his letters and almost all his writings were filled with them. It was the business of his life."[618]
In the latter part of his life Petrarch enjoyed the highest renown throughout Europe. The cities of Italy, especially, vied with one another in showering honors upon him. A decree of the Venetian senate affirmed that no Christian poet or philosopher could be compared with him. Arezzo, the town of his birth, awarded him a triumphal procession. Florence bought the estates once confiscated from his father and begged him to accept them as a meager gift to one "who for centuries had no equal and could scarcely find one in the ages to come." The climax came in 1341 when both the University of Paris and the Roman Senate invited him to present himself and receive the poet's crown, in revival of an old and all but forgotten ceremony of special honor. The invitation from Rome was accepted and the celebration attending the coronation was one of the most splendid of the age. In 1350 Petrarch became acquainted with Boccaccio and thenceforth there existed the warmest friendship between these two great exponents of Renaissance ideals and achievement. In 1369 he retired to Arquà, near Padua, where he died in 1374.
Besides his poems Petrarch wrote a great number of letters, some in Latin and some in Italian. Letter-writing was indeed a veritable passion with him; and he not only wrote freely but was careful to preserve copies of what he wrote. His prose correspondence has been classified in four divisions. The largest one comprises three hundred forty-seven letters, written between the years 1332 and 1362, and given the general title of De Rebus Familiaribus, because in them only topics presumably of everyday interest were discussed and without particular attention to style. The second group, the so-called Epistolæ Variæ, numbers about seventy. The third, the Epistolæ de Rebus Senilibus ("Letters of Old Age"), includes one hundred twenty-four letters written during the last twelve years of the poet's life. The fourth, comprising about twenty letters, was made up of epistles containing such sharp criticism of the papal régime at Avignon that the author thought it best to suppress the names of those to whom they were addressed. Their general designation, therefore, is Epistolæ sine Titulo. The following passages are taken from a letter found in the Epistolæ Variæ. It was written to a literary friend, August 18, 1360, while Petrarch was at Milan, uncertain whither the political storms of the period would finally drive him. In the portion which precedes that given below the writer has been commenting on various invitations which had reached him from friends in Padua, Florence, and even beyond the Alps. This gives him occasion to lament the unsettled conditions of his times and to voice the longing of the scholar for peace and quiet. Thence he proceeds to speak of matters which reveal in an interesting way his passionate love for the beauties of classical literature and his sympathy with its dominant ideas. Cicero was his favorite Latin author; after him, Vergil and Ovid. Greek literature, unfortunately, it was impossible for him to know at first hand. In spite of a lifelong desire, and at least one determined effort (which is referred to in the letter below), he never acquired even a rudimentary reading knowledge of the Greek language. At best he could only read fragments of Homer, Plato, and Aristotle in extremely faulty Latin translations.[619]
Source—Franciscus Petrarca, Epistolæ de Rebus Familiaribus et Variæ ["Letters of Friendly Intercourse, and Miscellaneous Letters">[, edited by J. Fracassetti (Florence, 1869), Vol. III., pp. 364-371. Adapted from translation in Merrick Whitcomb, Source Book of the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia, 1903), pp. 14-21 passim.
If you should ask me, in the midst of these opinions of my friends, what I myself think of the matter, I can only reply that I long for a place where solitude, leisure, repose, and silence reign, however far from wealth and honors, power and favors. But I confess I know not where to find it. My own secluded nook, where I have hoped not only to live, but even to die, has lost all the advantages it once possessed, even that of safety. Petrarch's longing for peace and seclusion I call to witness thirty or more volumes, which I left there recently, thinking that no place could be more secure, and which, a little later, having escaped from the hands of robbers and returned, against all hope, to their master, seem yet to blanch and tremble and show upon their foreheads the troubled condition of the place whence they have escaped. Therefore I have lost all hope of revisiting this charming retreat, this longed-for country spot. Still, if the opportunity were offered me, I should seize it with both hands and hold it fast. I do not know whether I still possess a glimmer of hope, or am feigning it for self-deception, and to feed my soul's desire with empty expectation.
But I proceed, remembering that we had much conversation on this point last year, when we lived together in the same house, in this very city [Milan]; and that after having examined the matter most carefully, in so far as our light permitted, we came to the conclusion that while the affairs of Italy, and of Europe, remain in this condition, there is no place safer and better for my needs than Milan, nor any place that suits me so well. We made exception only of the city of Padua, whither I went Drawbacks of even Milan and Padua shortly after and whither I shall soon return; not that I may obliterate or diminish—that I should not wish—but that I may soften the regret which my absence causes the citizens of both places. I know not whether you have changed your opinion since that time; but for me I am convinced that to exchange the tumult of this great city and its annoyances for the annoyances of another city would bring me no advantage, perhaps some inconvenience, and beyond a doubt, much fatigue. Ah, if this tranquil solitude, which, in spite of all my seeking, I never find, as I have told you, should ever show itself on any side, you will hear, not that I have gone, but that I have flown, to it....
In the succeeding paragraph of your letter you jest with much elegance, saying that I have been wounded by Cicero without having deserved it, on account of our too great intimacy.[620] "Because," you say, "those who are nearest to us most often injure us, and it is extremely rare that an Indian does an injury Common indifference to people and events near at hand to a Spaniard." True it is. It is on this account that in reading of the wars of the Athenians and Lacedaemonians, and in contemplating the troubles of our own people with our neighbors, we are never struck with astonishment; still less so at the sight of the civil wars and domestic troubles which habit has made of so little account that concord itself would more easily cause surprise. But when we read that the king of Scythia has come to blows with the king of Egypt, and that Alexander of Macedonia has penetrated to the ends of India, we experience a sensation of astonishment which the reading of our histories, filled as they are with the deeds of Roman bravery in their distant expeditions, does not afford. You bring me consolation, in representing me as having been wounded by Cicero, to whom I am fondly attached, a thing that would probably never happen to me, at the hands of either Hippocrates[621] or Albumazar....[622]
You ask me to lend you the copy of Homer that was on sale at Padua, if, as you suppose, I have purchased it (since, you say, I have for a long time possessed another copy) so that our friend A request for a copy of Homer Leo[623] may translate it from Greek into Latin for your benefit and for the benefit of our other studious compatriots. I saw this book, but neglected the opportunity of acquiring it, because it seemed inferior to my own. It can easily be had with the aid of the person to whom I owe my friendship with Leo; a letter from that source would be all-powerful in the matter, and I will myself write him.