RESOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF ANCIENT GREEK IN FRANCE

Gerald Sandy

Introduction

The title of an article by L. Delaruelle, one of the doyens of the study of the development of Hellenism in France, succinctly defines the subject of this chapter: Comment on devenait Helléniste à la fin du XVe siècle.1 I shall extend the subject to encompass approximately the first third of the sixteenth century. This period, from 1458 when Gregorio da Città di Castello (Gregorius Tifernas) began teaching ancient Greek in Paris to 1530 when the Collège royal (Collège de France) was founded and its two chairs in Greek were established, saw the developments that were to establish France as the pre-eminent centre of Hellenic studies in western Europe by the second half of the sixteenth century. Although Petrarch's knowledge of ancient Greek never progressed beyond the most rudimentary stage, his unfulfilled desire for it remained passionate right up to his death in 1374. He transmitted his unrealized desire to Boccaccio. He in turn in the early 1350s hosted in his own residence in Florence a Greek-speaking Calabrian whom he and Petrarch had engaged to translate Homer into Latin, thereby initiating in a sense the teaching of ancient Greek in western Europe.2 It is because of these precise circumstances that the Greek intellectuals who fled from Constantinople a century later found a ready market for the manuscripts of classical Greek authors that they carried with them to Italy, especially to Venice. At the time of their arrival cultured Italian patrons were already commissioning agents to search out Greek manuscripts. Lorenzo de' Medici, for instance, instructed his principal agent, the Byzantine Greek Janus Lascaris,

1 Delaruelle 1935. Us origines du Collège de France (1500-1560) (Paris: Collège de France/Klincksieck, 1998), éd. M. Fumaroli, became available to me after I had written this chapter. It contains relevant chapters written by leading authorities. 2 Pfeiffer 1976: 13-15 and 25. See also Geanakoplos 1962 and 1976. 48 GERALD SANDY whom we shall later encounter in Paris, to buy good Greek manu• scripts "at any price whatsoever."3 Others such as Francesco Filefo, a member of the Venetian embassy in Constantinople during the 1420s, and Giovanni Aurispa took advantage of their official post• ings or private travels in the Greek East to acquire significant num• bers of Greek manuscripts. Lorenzo's buying spree had been preceded by those of his grandfather Cosimo and by Pope Nicolas V, the lat• ter of whom near the middle of the fifteenth century employed copy• ists and scholars to form at a stroke the department of classical manuscripts in the Pontifical Library. The information in the preceding paragraph is familiar, readily available in much greater detail in coundess studies of humanism and the Renaissance. What is generally less well appreciated is that France in the sixteenth century displaced Italy as the pre-eminent centre of Hellenic studies in western Europe. Educated French peo• ple of this period recognized that Hellenism had taken root in French soil within their own lifetime. Rabelais, writing in 1532, represents Gargantua as celebrating the event in a letter to his son, "Maintenant, toutes disciplines sont restituées, les langues instaurées: grecque, sans laquelle c'est honte que une personne se die sçavant." The reality that Rabelais celebrates comprises such manifestations as the print• ing of the first Greek book in France in 1507, Girolamo Aleandro's arrival from Venice in the next year to teach Greek in Paris and Orléans, Janus Lascaris' mission to Venice in 1520 under the spon• sorship of François I to recruit pupils for the king's abortive Collège de jeunes grecs and to acquire Greek manuscripts for the king, the publication in 1529 of Guillaume Budé's Commentani Linguae Graecae and above all the appointment by François I in 1530 of the first two lecteurs royaux in Greek to the newly founded Collège royal.4 Abel Lefranc imagines a particularly piquant scene, "Was it not a unique moment in history when Calvin, Ignatius of Loyola and Rabelais . . .

3 Pontani 1992 and Knös 1945. 4 M. Jean-Louis Charlet has reminded me that Greek characters appear at an earlier date in the Parisian edition of Niccolo Perotti's Rudimenta Grammatices (Paris: Gering, 1479) (Bibliothèque mazarine, No. 227). All the Greek characters in this edition appear on one page, folio lvo, and do not include accents or breathings, e.g. "Unde dicitur vox? απο του βοαω." They are not used elsewhere in this edi­ tion, even for Greek words, e.g. "Graeca vero in 'n' genus suum servant: haec Syren, hie delphin." The announcement of Jacques Toussain's appointment as lecteur royal is dated 29 November 1529 (Omont 1903).