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POLIZIANO's LAMIA in CONTEXT Christopher S. Celenza The POLIZIANO’S LAMIA IN CONTEXT Christopher S. Celenza Th e year 1492 saw the composition of Angelo Poliziano’s Lamia, a praelectio, or preliminary oration, which he delivered in the fall of that year to open the course he was teaching on Aristotle’s Prior Analytics at the Florentine university.1 In the work, Poliziano is responding to objections from contemporaries, who suggested that he did not have the training necessary to carry out this task, since he was not a “phi- losopher.” Th e work seems, in hindsight, to be an alternate version of the mission of philosophy, even as it is a response to debates that were taking place in the intellectual world of Italian humanism in the late 1480s and early 1490s. To understand the Lamia, it is necessary to set it in the context of Poliziano’s teaching career, before moving on to an analysis of the text. Why was Poliziano, the best philologically oriented humanist of his day, teaching the Prior Analytics, that staple of the logic curricu- lum and integral part of the six-work Organon of Aristotle? First, we know from a recent article of David Lines that the opposition between “humanism” and “scholastic” university culture has always been over- drawn, the product of modern scholars reading too literally humanists’ stock complaints about scholastic language. Lines shows that, from the days of Coluccio Salutati on, many if not most Italian human- ists spent signifi cant amounts of time at universities; that universities on the whole were no more resistant to humanism’s new disciplinary emphases than one would expect institutions of higher education to be, inherently conservative as they are; and that as time went by in the 1 In addition to the literature cited in Wesseling, “Introduction,” see, on the Lamia, W.S. Blanchard, Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), 52–60; F. Mariani Zini, “Ange Politien : la gram- maire philologique entre poésie et philosophie,” Chroniques italiennes 58/59 (1999); eadem, “Poliziano, allievo degli antichi, maestro dei moderni,” in L. Secchi Tarugi, ed., Poliziano nel suo tempo (Florence: Franco Cesati, 1996), 165–91: 185–91. Recent literature on Poliziano can also be found in V. Fera and M. Martelli, eds., Agnolo Poli- ziano: Poeta scrittore fi lologo (Florence: Le Lettere, 1998). Still essential is C. Vasoli, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo: ‘Invenzione’ e ‘metodo’ nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968), esp. 116–31. 2 christopher s. celenza fi ft eenth century there actually occurred a fruitful interaction between humanists and universities, even if traditional subjects retained their hold and professors of those subjects earned higher salaries than those teaching humanism.2 Second, we know that Poliziano had an early and abiding interest in philosophy of all sorts, including Aristotle. Jonathan Hunt’s work has shown that in 1480, when Poliziano was in his middle twenties, he engaged in an intense set of philosophical conversations with Francesco di Tommaso (c. 1445–1514), a Dominican based at Santa Maria Novella in Florence.3 Di Tommaso memorialized his and Poliziano’s interac- tions in a dialogue entitled De negocio logico, representing Poliziano as the interlocutor “Angelus.” Early on, too, Poliziano studied with the Byzantine émigré Andronicus Callistus. Poliziano celebrated Callistus in his Elegy to his respected humanist friend Bartolomeo Fonzio, say- ing that Callistus “loosed the knots of high-fl own Aristotle.”4 Poliziano was also a student of Johannes Argyropoulos (1415–87), well recog- nized by contemporaries as a teacher of Aristotle, and someone whom Poliziano himself called in his Miscellanea “by far the most famous Peripatetic of his day.”5 Finally, Poliziano’s relationship with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola also pushed him toward the posture of excluding no philosophical text, whatever its disciplinary provenance. Poliziano testifi es in numerous places to these interests, and the course of his career, as well as various interactions with his contem- poraries, shows the directions in which he was willing to travel. His early years saw him break onto the cultural scene in Florence aft er translating books two through fi ve of Homer’s Iliad, which he worked on from 1469 until 1475, a fi tting accompaniment, as Francesco Bausi has pointed out, to Lorenzo the Magnifi cent’s military adventures, 2 D.A. Lines, “Humanism and the Italian Universities,” in C.S. Celenza and K. Gouwens, Humanism and Creativity in the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honor of Ronald G. Witt (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 327–46. 3 J. Hunt, Politian and Scholastic Logic: An Unknown Dialogue by a Dominican Friar (Leiden: Brill, 1995). 4 Angelo Poliziano, Ad Bartholomeum Fontium, in idem, Due poemetti latini, ed. F. Bausi (Rome: Salerno, 2003), pp. 2–45, at p. 34, l. 193–194: “Rursus in Andronici doctum me confero ludum / Qui tumidi nodos laxat Aristotelis.” For the meaning here of “tumidi” see Bausi, ad loc. 5 For the Poliziano quotation see below, n. 10; for Argyropoulos and Aristotle see A. Field, Th e Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1988), 107–26; J. Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Lei- den: Brill, 1990), 1: 350..
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