The Old Grammarian of Vicenza1
To Pulice di Vicenza
On my way I stopped overnight in one of Vicenza’s suburbs, and there I found something new to write about. It happened that I had left Padua not much before noon, and so did not reach the outskirts of your city until the sun was getting low. I tried to make up my mind whether I had better put up there or push on a little farther; for I was in a hurry, and the days are long now, and it would be light for a good while yet. I was still hesitating, when lo!—for who can remain hidden from the friends who love him?—all my doubts were happily resolved by your arrival, in company with several other men of mark, such as that little city has always produced in great abundance. My mind was tossing this way and that, but you and your companions, with your pleasant varied talk, furnished the cable that bound it fast. I planned to go, but still stayed on; and did not realise that the daylight was slipping away from me until night was actually at hand. So I discovered once again what I had observed often before, that there is nothing that filches time away from us, without our perceiving it, like converse with our friends. They are the greatest of all thieves of time. And yet we ought to deem no time less truly stolen from us, less truly lost out of our lives, than such as is expended (next to God) upon them.
Well, not to review the story at too great length, you remember that some one made mention of Cicero, as will very often happen among men of literary tastes. This name at once brought our desultory conversation to an end. We all turned our thoughts toward him. Nothing but Cicero was discussed after that. As we sat and feasted together we vied with one another in singing his praises. Still, there is nothing in this world that is absolutely perfect; never has the man existed in whom the critic, were he ever so lenient, would see nothing at all to reprehend. So it chanced that while I expressed admiration for Cicero, almost without reservation, as a man whom I loved and honoured above all others, and amazement too at his golden eloquence and his heavenly genius, I found at the same time a little fault with his fickleness and inconsistency, traits that are revealed everywhere in his life and works. At once I saw that all who were present were astonished at so unusual an opinion, and one among them especially so. I refer to the old man, your fellow-citizen, whose name has gone from me, although his image is fresh in my memory, and I revere him, both for his years and for his scholarship.
Well, the circumstances seemed to demand that I fetch the manuscript of my correspondence with my friends, which I had with me in my chest. It was brought in, and added fuel to the flame. For among the letters that were written to my contemporaries there are a few, inserted with an eye to variety and for the sake of a little diversion in the midst of my more serious labours, that are addressed to some of the more illustrious men of ancient times. A reader who was not forewarned would be amazed at these, finding names so old and of such renown mingled with those of our own day. Two of them are to Cicero himself; one criticising his character, the other praising his genius. These two you read, while the others listened; and then the strife of words grew warmer. Some approved of what I had written, admitting that Cicero deserved my censure. But the old man stood his ground, more stubbornly even than before. He was so blinded by love of his hero and by the brightness of his name that he preferred to praise him even when he was in the wrong; to embrace faults and virtues together, rather than make any exceptions. He would not be thought to condemn anything at all in so great a man. So instead of answering our arguments he rang the changes again and again upon the splendour of Cicero’s fame, letting authority usurp the place of reason. He would stretch out his hand and say imploringly, “Gently, I beg of you, gently with my Cicero.” And when we asked him if he found it impossible to believe that Cicero had made mistakes, he would close his eyes and turn his face away and exclaim with a groan, as if he had been smitten, “Alas! alas! Is my beloved Cicero accused of doing wrong?” just as if we were speaking not of a man but of some god. I asked him, accordingly, whether in his opinion Tullius was a god, or a man like others. “A god,” he replied; and then, realising what he had said, he added, “a god of eloquence.” “Oh, very well!” I answered; “if he is a god, he certainly could not have erred. However, I never heard him styled so before. And yet, if Cicero calls Plato his god, why should not you in turn speak of Cicero as yours?—except that it is not in harmony with our religious beliefs for men to fashion gods for themselves as they may fancy.” “I am only jesting,” said he; “I know that Tullius was a man, but he was a man of godlike genius.” “That is better,” I responded; “for when Quintilian called him heavenly he spoke no more than the truth. But then, if you admit that he was a man, it follows necessarily that he could make mistakes, and did so.” As I spoke these words he shuddered and turned away, as if they were aimed not at another man’s reputation but at his own life. What could I say, I who am myself so great an admirer of Cicero’s genius? I felt that the old scholar was to be envied for his ardour and devotion, which had something of the Pythagorean savour. I was rejoiced at finding such reverence for even one great man; such almost religious regard, so fervent that to suspect any touch of human weakness in its object seemed like sacrilege. I was amazed, too, at having discovered a person who cherished a love greater than mine for the man whom I always had loved beyond all others; a person who in old age still held, deeply rooted in his heart, the opinions concerning him which I remember to have entertained in my boyhood; and who, notwithstanding his advanced years, was incapable of arguing that if Cicero was a man it followed that in some cases, in many indeed, he must have erred, a conclusion that I have been forced, by common sense and by knowledge of his life, to accept at this earlier stage of my development,—although this conviction does not alter the fact that the beauty of his work delights me still, beyond that of any other writer. Why, Tullius himself, the very man of whom we are speaking, took this view, for he often bewailed his errors, bitterly. If, in our eagerness to praise him, we deny that he thus understood himself, we deprive him of a large part of his renown as a philosopher, the praise, namely, that is due to self-knowledge and modesty.
To return, however, to that day; after a long discussion we were compelled by the lateness of the hour to desist, and separated with the question still unsettled. But as we parted you asked me to send you from my first resting-place, inasmuch as the shortness of the time would not let me attend to it just then, a copy of each of these letters of mine, in order that you might look into the matter a little more carefully, and be in a position to act as a mediator between the parties, or, possibly, as a champion of Cicero’s steadfastness and consistency. I approve of your intention, and send the copies herewith. I do so, strange to say, with a fear that I may be victorious, and a hope that I may be vanquished. And one thing more: I must tell you that if you do prove the victor you have a larger task on your hands than you now imagine. For Annæus Seneca, whom I criticise in my very next letter in a similar way, insists that you act as his champion too.
I have dealt familiarly with these great geniuses, and perhaps boldly, but lovingly, but sorrowfully, but truthfully, I think2; with somewhat more of truthfulness, in fact, than I myself relish. There are many things in both of them that delight me, only a few that trouble me. Of these few I felt constrained to write; perhaps to-day I should feel otherwise. For, although I have grouped these letters together at the end, it is only because their subject-matter is so unlike the others; they came from the anvil long ago.
The fact is, I still grieve over the fate of these great men; but I do not lament their faults any the less because of that. Furthermore, I beg you to note that I say nothing against Seneca’s private life, nor against Cicero’s attitude toward the state. Do not confuse the two cases. It is Cicero alone whom we are discussing now; and I am not forgetting that he as consul was vigilant and patriotic, and cured the disease from which the republic was suffering; nor that as a private citizen he always loved his country faithfully. But what of his fickleness in friendship; and his bitter quarrels upon slight provocation,—quarrels that brought ruin upon himself and good to no one; and his inability to understand his own position and the condition of the republic, so unlike his usual acumen; and, finally, the spectacle of a philosopher, in his old age, childishly fond of useless wrangling? These things I cannot praise. And remember that they are things concerning which no unbiassed judgment can be formed, by you or anyone else, without a careful reading of the entire correspondence of Cicero, which suggested this controversy.3
May 13th, en route.
Of the two letters addressed directly to Cicero himself, and referred to in the preceding epistle, one has already been given. The other is, in part, as follows:
To Marcus Tullius Cicero.1
If my earlier letter gave you offence,—for, as you often have remarked, the saying of your contemporary in the Andria is a faithful one, that compliance begets friends, truth only hatred,—you shall listen now to words that will soothe your wounded feelings and prove that the truth need not always be hateful. For, if censure that is true angers us, true praise, on the other hand, gives us delight.
You lived then, Cicero, if I may be permitted to say it, like a mere man, but spoke like an orator, wrote like a philosopher. It was your life that I criticised; not your mind, nor your tongue; for the one fills me with admiration, the other with amazement. And even in your life I feel the lack of nothing but stability, and the love of quiet that should go with your philosophic professions, and abstention from civil war, when liberty had been extinguished and the republic buried and its dirge sung.
See how different my treatment of you is from yours of Epicurus, in your works at large, and especially in the De Finibus. You are continually praising his life, but his talents you ridicule. I ridicule in you nothing at all. Your life does awaken my pity, as I have said; but your talents and your eloquence call for nothing but congratulation. O great father of Roman eloquence! not I alone but all who deck themselves with the flowers of Latin speech render thanks unto you. It is from your well-springs that we draw the streams that water our meads. You, we freely acknowledge, are the leader who marshals us; yours are the words of encouragement that sustain us; yours is the light that illumines the path before us. In a word, it is under your auspices that we have attained to such little skill in this art of writing as we may possess....
You have heard what I think of your life and your genius. Are you hoping to hear of your books also; what fate has befallen them, how they are esteemed by the masses and among scholars? They still are in existence, glorious volumes, but we of to-day are too feeble a folk to read them, or even to be acquainted with their mere titles. Your fame extends far and wide; your name is mighty, and fills the ears of men; and yet those who really know you are very few, be it because the times are unfavourable, or because men’s minds are slow and dull, or, as I am the more inclined to believe, because the love of money forces our thoughts in other directions. Consequently right in our own day, unless I am much mistaken, some of your books have disappeared, I fear beyond recovery. It is a great grief to me, a great disgrace to this generation, a great wrong done to posterity. The shame of failing to cultivate our own talents, thereby depriving the future of the fruits that they might have yielded, is not enough for us; we must waste and spoil, through our cruel and insufferable neglect, the fruits of your labours too, and of those of your fellows as well, for the fate that I lament in the case of your own books has befallen the works of many another illustrious man.
It is of yours alone, though, that I would speak now. Here are the names of those among them whose loss is most to be deplored: the Republic, the Praise of Philosophy, the treatises on the Care of Property, on the Art of War, on Consolation, on Glory,—although in the case of this last my feeling is rather one of hopeful uncertainty than of certain despair. And then there are huge gaps in the volumes that have survived. It is as if indolence and oblivion had been worsted, in a great battle, but we had to mourn noble leaders slain, and others lost or maimed. This last indignity very many of your books have suffered, but more particularly the Orator, the Academics, and the Laws. They have come forth from the fray so mutilated and disfigured that it would have been better if they had perished outright.
Now, in conclusion, you will wish me to tell you something about the condition of Rome and the Roman republic: the present appearance of the city and whole country, the degree of harmony that prevails, what classes of citizens possess political power, by whose hands and with what wisdom the reins of empire are swayed, and whether the Danube, the Ganges, the Ebro, the Nile, the Don, are our boundaries now, or in very truth the man has arisen who ‘bounds our empire by the ocean-stream, our fame by the stars of heaven,’ or ‘extends our rule beyond Garama and Ind,’ as your friend the Mantuan has said. Of these and other matters of like nature I doubt not you would very gladly hear. Your filial piety tells me so, your well-known love of country, which you cherished even to your own destruction. But indeed it were better that I refrained. Trust me, Cicero, if you were to hear of our condition to-day you would be moved to tears, in whatever circle of heaven above, or Erebus below, you may be dwelling. Farewell, forever.
Written in the world of the living; on the left bank of the Rhone, in Transalpine Gaul; in the same year, but in the month of December, the 19th day.
Over against the foregoing should be placed a part at least of the long letter addressed to Homer. This will serve to correct the somewhat too favourable impression of Petrarch’s critical insight that the letters to Cicero may have induced, and will reveal some of the limitations of his scholarship.
To Homer1
Long before your letter2 reached me I had formed an intention of writing to you, and I should really have done it if it had not been for the lack of a common language. I am not so fortunate as to have learned Greek,3 and the Latin tongue, which you once spoke, by the aid of our writers,4 you seem of late, through the negligence of their successors, to have quite forgotten. From both avenues of communication, consequently, I have been debarred, and so have kept silence. But now there comes a man5 who restores you to us, single-handed, and makes you a Latin again.
Your Penelope cannot have waited longer nor with more eager expectation for her Ulysses than I did for you. At last, though, my hope was fading gradually away. Except for a few of the opening lines of certain books, from which there seemed to flash upon me the face of the friend whom I had been longing to behold, a momentary glimpse, dim through distance, or, rather, the sight of his streaming hair, as he vanished from my view,—except for this no hint of a Latin Homer had come to me, and I had no hope of being able ever to see you face to face. For as regards the little book that is circulated under your name, while I cannot say whose it is I do feel sure that it is yours only as it has been culled from you and accredited to you, and is not your real work at all.6 This friend of ours, however, if he lives, will restore you to us in your entirety. He is now at work, and we are beginning to enjoy not only the treasures of wisdom that are stored away in your divine poems but also the sweetness and charm of your speech. One fragment has come to my hands already, Grecian precious ointment in Latin vessels....7
To turn now to details, I am very eager for knowledge, and consequently was delighted beyond all measure and belief by what you wrote about your instructors, of whom I had never before heard, although now I shall reverence them because of the merits of their great pupil; and about the origin of poetry, which you explain at the greatest length; and about the earliest followers of the Muses, among whom, in addition to the well-known dwellers upon Helicon, you place Cadmus, the son of Agenor, and a certain Hercules, whether the great Alcides or not I do not fully understand; and, finally, about the place of your nativity, concerning which there used to be very vague and misty views here in my country, and no great clearness, so far as I can see, among your compatriots; about your wanderings, too, in search of knowledge, into Phœnicia and Egypt, whither, several centuries after you, the illustrious philosophers Pythagoras and Plato also made their way, and the Athenian law-giver who in his late years wooed the Pierian Muses, wise old Solon, who while he lived never ceased to admire you, and when he died doubtless became one of your cherished friends; and, last of all, about the number of your works, the majority of which even the Italians, your nearest neighbours, have never so much as heard of. As for the barbarians, who bound us upon two sides, and from whom I would that we were separated not by lofty Alps alone but by the whole wide sea as well, they scarcely have heard—I will not say of your books, but even of your very name. You see how trivial a thing is this wonderful fame which we mortals sigh for so windily....
And now what shall I say about the matter of imitation? When you found yourself soaring so high on the wings of genius you ought to have foreseen that you would always have imitators. You should be glad that your endowments are such that many men long to be like you, although not many can succeed. Why not be glad, you who are sure of holding always the first place, when I, the least of mortals, am more than glad, am in fact puffed up with pride, because I have grown great enough for others—though I scarcely can believe that this is really true—to desire to imitate and copy me? In my case the pride and joy would only increase if among these imitators there should be found some few who were capable of surpassing me. I pray—not your Apollo, but the true God of Intellect whom I worship, to crown the efforts of all who may deem it worth their while to follow after me, and to grant that they may find it an easy thing to come up with me, and outstrip me too....
But I am wandering. It was my intention to speak to you of Virgil, than whom, as Flaccus says, this earth has produced no soul more spotless; and to suggest to you, great master of us both, certain excuses for his conduct.... I admit the truth of everything that you say concerning him, but it does not necessarily follow that I lend a sympathetic ear to the charges that you base upon this failure of his to make anywhere any mention of your name, laden and bedecked though he is with your spoils,—mention, you remind me, such as Lucan made, remembering in grateful strains the honour due to Smyrna’s bard. Far from that, I am even going to suggest to you additional cause for complaint. Flaccus also remembers you, in many a passage, and always with the highest praise. In one place he exalts you above the very philosophers; in another he assigns to you the highest seat among the poets. Naso remembers you too, and Juvenal, and Statius. But why try to mention all who mention Homer? There is scarcely one of our writers but that belongs in that class. Why is it then, you will say, that I find the one man from whom I deserved most gratitude proving so utterly ungrateful? Before I answer you let me furnish you still another reason for complaint. Observe that he was not equally ungrateful in every case. Musæus and Linus and Orpheus are referred to more than once. So also, and with even greater humility, Hesiod the Ascræan and Theocritus of Syracuse. And finally, a thing that he never would have done if he had had any touch of jealousy, he takes pains to speak of Varus, and Gallus, and certain others of his contemporaries.
Well, have I aggravated sufficiently the resentment which I proposed to assuage, or entirely remove? The natural conclusion, certainly, for anyone to draw, if this were all that I had to say. But it is not; we have not considered yet the reasons for all this, and given them their due weight, and that we should always do, especially when we are sitting in judgment upon others.
Is it not true, then, that he chose Theocritus for his guide and model in the Bucolics, and Hesiod in the Georgics, and, having done so, took pains to introduce the name of each in its appropriate place? Yes, you will say; but after choosing me for his third model, in his heroic poem, what was there to prevent his making some mention there, in like manner, of my name? He would have done so, believe me, for he was the gentlest and most unassuming of men, as is proved by all that is written of him and all that we know of his daily life; but impious death forbade. The others he had referred to wherever he thought of it or found it convenient; for you, to whom he owed so much more, he was reserving a place that had been determined not by mere chance but by the most careful consideration. And what place, think you? What but the most prominent and conspicuous of all? The end of his glorious work!—it was for that that he was waiting; it was there that he was intending to exalt you and your name to the stars in resounding verse, and to hail you as his leader. What better place to praise a leader than at the journey’s end? You have good reason, then, for lamenting his too early death, and so has the whole Italian world; but for reproaching your friend, none whatever....
Now, in conclusion, I must run over the various little complaints that are scattered up and down the whole length of your letter. You grieve because you have been mangled so by your imitators. But do you not see that it could not possibly have been otherwise? No one could deal comprehensively with so great a genius. Then you mourn because your name, which was held in great honour by the lawyers and physicians of old, is despised by their successors of to-day. But you forget that these professions are filled now by men of a very different stamp from those who followed them in former times. If they were of the same sort they would love and cherish the same things. So put away your indignation and your grief, and be of good hope; for to have gained the disfavour of the evil and the ignorant is to have given sure sign of virtue and genius....
A word now with reference to your complaint that the valley of Fiesole and the banks of the Arno can furnish only three men who know you and love you. You ought not to wonder at this. It is enough; indeed, it is a very great deal, more than I should have expected, to discover three Pierian spirits in a city so entirely given up to gain. But even if you think otherwise you need not be discouraged; it is a large and populous place, and if you seek you will find there a fourth. And to these four I could once have added a fifth, a man who well deserves to be honoured thus, for the laurels of Peneus bind his brow—or of Alpheus rather. But alas! the great Babylon beyond the Alps has contrived to steal him away from us. To find five such men at one time and in one city, is that, think you, a little thing? Search through other cities. Your beloved Bologna that you sigh for,8 hospitable though she is to all who are of studious mind, has yet but one such person, though you seek in every corner and crevice. Verona has two; Solmona one; and Mantua one, if the heavens have not tempted him quite away from the things of earth, for he has left your banner and enlisted under that of Ptolemy. Rome herself, the capital of the world, has been drained of such citizens almost to a man, strange though it seems. Perugia did produce one, a man who might have made a name for himself; but he has neglected his opportunities, and turned his back not on Parnassus only but on our Apennines and Alps as well, and now, in old age, is leading a vagabond life, in Spain, toiling as a copyist to earn his daily bread. And other cities have given birth to others, but all of these whom I have known have before now left this mortal home and migrated to that continuing city which one day shall receive us all....
For a long while I have been talking to you just as if you were present; but now the strong illusion fades away, and I realise how far you are from me. There comes over me a fear that you will scarcely care, down in the shades, to read the many things that I have written here. Yet I remember that you wrote freely to me.
And now farewell, forever. To Orpheus, and Linus, and Euripides, and all the others, I beg you to give my kindest greetings, when you come again to your abode.
Written in the world above; in the Midland between the famous rivers Po and Ticino and Adda and others, whence some say our Milan derives its name; on the ninth day of October, in the year of this last age of the world the 1360th.
With this, as throwing further light upon Petrarch’s limitations, may be placed the letter to his brother, upon the nature of poetry, to which reference was made above in discussing the question of allegory:
Notes
1 Fam., xxiv., 2.
2 This artificial repetition of the adversative conjunction is a trick of style that Petrarch is very fond of.
3 This last sentence, with its schoolmasterly tone, is an interesting revelation of Petrarch’s feeling of superiority, in point of scholarship, to all of his associates. It was a feeling that the facts fully justified.
1 Fam., xxiv., 4.
1 Fam., xxiv., 12.
2 Someone had sent Petrarch an epistle that purported to come from the shade of Homer. It must have been even more interesting than this reply, in its unconscious revelation of mediæval limitations. Petrarch took it very seriously. He often forgets in this answer that he is not writing to Homer himself.
3 In Petrarch’s day, as has been hinted above (p. 237), there was no apparatus for the study of Greek. Oral instruction, from Greek or Byzantine scholars, was the only possible means of access to the great writers of the past. Such instruction was very difficult to secure, as Petrarch’s repeated efforts and final failure prove. For his own statements concerning this subject see Fam., xviii., 2.
4 The reference is of course to the Latin translations of Homer, the Odyssey of Livius Andronicus and the abridgment of the Iliad mentioned just below, p. 254, note 1.
5 Leo Pilatus (or Leontius Pilatus, as Boccaccio writes the name), a Calabrian, who, at the instance of Petrarch and Boccaccio, was making at Florence at about this time a Latin prose version of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For a good brief account of what is known concerning Pilatus, with a few specimens of his translation, see Körting, op. cit., i., 474 sqq.
6 The reference here is to the metrical abridgment of the Iliad by Silius Italicus. This contains 1070 lines, half of them condensed translation of passages from books I.-V., the remainder little more than the driest epitome. Poor as it is, it was widely accepted in the middle ages, in some confused sort of a way, as ‘Homer.’ But Petrarch was able to look below the surface and see just what it was.
7 De Nolhac has shown (op. cit., pp. 342, 354) that Pilatus probably had made for Petrarch alone, more than a year before this epistle was written, a preliminary translation of the first five books of the Iliad.
8 Voigt argues from these words that the letter to which this of Petrarch’s is a reply came from Bologna. De Nolhac thinks it more probable that it was written from Florence, by Boccaccio and his friends.