Fourteenth-century beginnings

Although knowledge of Greek was exceedingly rare in the West during the late Middle Ages, it never died out entirely. From the ninth to the thirteenth centuries a handful of Western scholars used their abilities in the language to make a small number of Greek works available in Latin translation. The emphasis was on philosophical, theological, scientific and medical texts, serving practical purposes and needs. What began to emerge in the fourteenth century, under the impetus of the nascent humanist movement, was a new desire to gain direct access to Greek works, including the great works of classical literature, rhetoric and history. The scholar who initiated this new attitude, along with so much else in the humanist agenda, was Petrarch. What sparked his interest were the many references to Greek literature which he encountered in his reading of classical Latin authors. His desire to learn Greek was motivated by the belief, which he bequeathed to his humanist followers, that it would give him a deeper understanding of the masterpieces of Roman antiquity.

Petrarch possessed Greek manuscripts of the Iliad (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, I 98 inf.) and of Plato (Bibliothèque nationale de France, gr. 1807, a ninth-century codex, which is the oldest surviving witness of the corpus and which later passed through the hands of distinguished Italian and Byzantine humanists). To his great regret, however, he was never able to read them, despite seeking the help of two scholars from southern Italy, where knowledge of Greek was kept alive in Basilian monasteries. The first of these, Barlaam of Calabria, taught Petrarch Greek, to little effect, in Avignon around 1342; the second, Leonzio Pilato, also from Calabria, he met in Padua in the late 1350s. Together with his friend Giovanni Boccaccio, Petrarch arranged for him to give public lectures on Greek in Florence, probably from 1360 to 1362, and to make a Latin translation of the two Homeric epics – in reality, a plodding, literal crib equipped with explanatory notes – on which both Petrarch and Boccaccio drew in their writings.