Sance Humanism An

J. IJSEWIJN AGRICOLA AS A GREEK SCHOLAR If one looks for fundamental diverging characteristics between Renais sance Humanism and Medieval Scholasticism the most important one - apart from the completely different use of Latin1 - might well be the new knowledge of and new approach to classical Greek literature. This fact has been pointed out quite convincingly by eminent scholars such as G. Folena, E. Garin2 and, last, not least, P.O. Kristeller. From the latter's Renaissance Thought and its Sources allow me to quote a page which makes the whole extent and the cultural significance of those new acquisitions perfectly clear:3 Even more obvious and perhaps more important is the humanist contri bution in the case of those Greek texts which had never been translated into Latin during the Middle Ages. The volume and importance of these texts seems to have been greatly underestimated by many historians who have studied the problem. They include even a few texts of the Corpus Aristoteli- cum, such as the Mechanics (and in a way the Poetics) and a large number of Greek commentaries on Aristotle, as well as many writings of the same scientific authors that had been known to the Middle Ages through some of their works, such as Hippocrates, Galen, Archimedes, and Ptolemy. Moreover, there are other ancient philosophers besides Aristotle of whom the Middle Ages knew only some works, such as Plato, Sextus, and Proclus; or nothing at all, such as Epicurus, Epictetus, or Plotinus; and, if we include the more popular and more widely read authors, Xenophon, Plutarch, or Lucian. If we turn to Greek literature in the proper sense of the word, everything was new and unknown from the Western point of view: Lysias, Isocrates, Demosthenes, and the other orators; Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius; Homer and Hesiod; the tragedians and Aristophanes; Pindar and the other lyrical poets, not to mention the Anthology of the Greek epigrams or many lesser poets and prose writers. In other words, an educated person of the sixteenth century, whether he was able to read Greek or not, had at his disposal the complete patrimony of classical Greek literature and science. For anybody who appreciates Greek literature and non-Aristotelian philo sophy, this is a cultural development of the very first order, and it is a fact of which we must remind those numerous historians who insist on the essentially medieval character of humanism and of the Renaissance. 1 See on this Blatt, 'Die letzte Phase der lateinischen Sprache' and IJsewijn, 'Mittelalterliches Latein und Humanistenlatein'. 2 See now Gualdo Rosa, 'Le traduzione dal greco nella prima meta del '400'. 3 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, 148-149. 22 J. IJSEWIJN Nobody will deny that in the late Middle Ages some Western scholars knew Greek and translated Greek texts into Latin. These texts were mainly if not exclusively philosophic and scientific in nature. But it is not less true - and the works of R. Weiss and W. Berschin4 leave no doubt on that point - that an aesthetic interest in Greek literature such as we find from the Renaissance onwards was altogether non-existent. No one bothered to read Homer or Sophocles or any other of the major poets and prose-writers. The feelings Petrarch expressed in a letter to a Byzantine friend who had sent him a manuscript of the Iliad5 were unknown before and can be taken as a symbol of the new spirit, and the letter itself is a manifesto of the humanist revival of Greek literary studies. The next step in the process was the arrival in Florence at the very end of the fourteenth century of the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras. The humanist chancellor Coluccio Salutati had invited him to Florence to teach Greek at the Studio. The three years he spent in this chair were to leave a deep impression on Florentine humanist circles and laid the solid base in Italy for a quickly expanding and flourishing Greek scholarship. From then on scholars such as Leonardo Bruni, Francesco Filelfo, Guarino da Verona, Lorenzo Valla, Pier Candido Decembrio and many others undertook the enthralling task of making known again to the West the rich treasures of classical Greek literature. Some of them went to Constantinople in search of manuscripts; all worked at Latin translations of Greek authors, pagan as well as christian.6 Today we can hardly imagine how arduous and difficult it was to translate Greek texts when there were as yet no good grammars or dictionaries, and when the texts to be read were not in a critical edition but in a faulty manuscript lacking learned commentaries and clarifying notes. Humanist Greek scholarship for a long time was an Italian affair, i.e. carried out by Italians and a growing number of Greek exiles and refugees who knew Latin and joined with the Italians in translating and commentating on Greek works. Famous among those Greeks were Agricola's older contemporaries Theodorus Gaza, whose Greek gram mar was later translated by Erasmus, and George of Trebizond, author of a great handbook on rhetoric and in that way a precursor of Agricola's main work De inventione dialectica. Outside Italy a humanist knowledge or study of Greek was totally unknown for the greater part of the fifteenth century. And although a 4 Weiss, Medieval and Humanist Greek; Berschin, Griechisch-lateinisches Mittelalter. 5 Epistolae ad Familiäres 18:2. 6 For the translation of patristic literature see for example Stinger, 'Greek patristics and Christian antiquity in Renaissance Rome'. .

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