[619] "There was no apparatus for the study of Greek at that time. Oral instruction from Greek or Byzantine scholars was the only possible means of access to the great writers of the past. Such instruction was difficult to secure, as Petrarch's efforts and failure prove."—Robinson and Rolfe, Petrarch, p. 237.
[620] This is a humorous allusion to the fact that Petrarch had recently received an injury from the fall of a heavy volume of Cicero's Letters.
[621] A renowned Greek physician of the fifth century B.C.
[622] A famous Arabian astronomer of the ninth century A.D.
[623] Leo Pilatus, a translator.
[624] Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 B.C.), one of the literary lights of the Augustan Age, was a younger contemporary of Cicero. His Ars Poetica was a didactic poem setting forth the correct principles of poetry as an art.
[625] Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea in Palestine, is noted chiefly as the author of an Ecclesiastical History which is in many ways our most important source of information on the early Christian Church. He lived about 250-339. St. Jerome was a great Church father of the later fourth century. His name is most commonly associated with the translation of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek into the Latin language. The resulting form of the Scriptures was the Editio Vulgata (the Edition Commonly Received), whence our English term "Vulgate."
[626] Eyeglasses were but beginning to come into use in Petrarch's day.
[627] Petrarch's father and Dante were banished from Florence upon the same day, January 27, 1302 [see [p. 446]].
[628] Marcus Gavius Apicius was a celebrated epicure of the time of Augustus and Tiberius. He was the author of a famous cook-book intended for the gratification of high-livers. Though worth a fortune, he was haunted by a fear of starving to death and eventually poisoned himself to escape such a fate. There was another Apicius in the third century who compiled a well-known collection of recipes for cooking, in ten books, entitled De Re Coquinaria. It is not quite clear which Apicius Petrarch had in mind.