Hellenism and Cultural Unease in Italian Humanism: the Case of Francesco Filelfo

Han Lamers

As a collector of Greek manuscripts, a translator of Greek classics, and a writer of Greek poetry and prose, Francesco Filelfo is commonly regarded as an important promoter of Hellenism, that is, the study of ancient Greek language and literature, which during his lifetime began to change the intellectual horizon of the Latin West. After receiving an appointment as secretary to the consul general of the Venetians in Constantinople, Filelfo spent almost seven years (1420–1427) in Greece, where he studied Greek with John Chrysoloras, a relative of the famous Manuel Chrysoloras. During this time, he also mar- ried John’s daughter Theodora, worked in the service of Emperor John VIII, and associated with learned Greeks like Bessarion, John Argyropulus, and Theodore Gaza.1 Due to his intimate first-hand knowledge of Greece, Greek, and the Greeks, Filelfo regarded himself as the most accomplished Hellenist in Italy and boasted that he was thoroughly familiar with all varieties of Greek in both writing and speaking.2 “There is no Latin man who knows the language, customs, and places of the region of Greece better and more meticulously than I do,” he claimed, “since I spent seven years3 with John Palaeologus – the wise and brave Emperor – in Constantinople”.4

1 On Filelfo’s Greek contacts, see John Monfasani’s chapter in this volume. 2 PhE·24.01, dated 31 October 1464: “At illud quoque mihi gloriari licet: me solum esse hac tem- pestate, qui in omni dicendi genere, et versu pariter et soluta oratione, tum Latine audeam, tum etiam Graece omnia quae velim quamfacillime et scribere et loqui; id quod ex homi- nibus nostris video nemini, neque poetae neque oratori, eidem uni adhuc contigisse, non modo praesentibus ac vivis, sed ne ex universa quidem antiquitate” (lines 527–531). 3 According to Ganchou 2005, 249–258, Filelfo was in the service of John VIII between the Summer of 1423 and the Summer of 1427, i.e. for a period of four years. 4 PhE·20.27, dated 23 January 1464: “Accedit ad rem quod nemo vir Latinus et linguam et mores et locos Graeciae regionis me aut melius novit aut exquisitius, quippe qui annos septem apud Iohannem Palaeologum, imperatorem et sapientem et fortem, Constantinopoli egerim” (lines 11–13). Greek learning was central to Filelfo’s self-image as a humanist (De Keyser 2015, 18–19, 25). For a discussion of such self-advertising passages from his letters, see De Keyser 2012. The most important assessments of different aspects of Filelfo’s Hellenism are Bianca 1986, Calderini 1913, Cortassa 2001, Cortesi 1986, Resta 1986, and Rotolo 1973. For Filelfo’s stay in Constantinople and his connection with the Chrysoloras family, see Ganchou 2005.

Filelfo’s exceptional familiarity with Greek literature has given rise to the idea that, in relation to Greek culture, there was “a sense of cultural absorption” on his part.5 It has moreover been suggested that, due to his direct experience of the Greek world, Filelfo was an impartial observer of Greek culture.6 It is the purpose of this article to show that his attitude toward Hellenism was more complex than scholars have hitherto acknowledged. By collecting and discussing, critically, Filelfo’s own statements about Hellenism, this article first revises the idea that he actually absorbed Greek culture to the point of eclips- ing his Latinity – an idea we find not only in the modern scholarship but also in fifteenth-century responses to his Greek learning. The discussion of Filelfo’s Hellenism is placed against the background of the criticism of his rival and opponent Galeotto Marzio da Narni (1424–1494/7), which elucidates the anxiety over the influence of Hellenism on Latin culture to which Filelfo responded throughout his letters. Filelfo mediated between the anxiety of Greek influence felt by some of his contemporaries and the enthusiasm about the new vistas opened up by Greek literature experienced by humanists like himself. The second part of the argument explores Filelfo’s attitude to the people who carried Greek learning to the Latin West – the Byzantine Greeks – and shows that he was by no means an impartial observer of the Greek world, but instead looked at it from a Latin humanist viewpoint. The essay does not discuss Filelfo’s philosophical and literary reception of specific Greek texts through translations, commentaries, and belles lettres. Instead, it charts underlying cultural assumptions about Hellenism in an attempt to contribute to a more subtle understanding of humanist views on the Greek world. The next section first introduces the notion of cultural unease with regard to Greek learning in the Italian Renaissance in more detail.

1 Hellenism and Latin Cultural Unease in the Italian Renaissance

Americans import European antiques and employ European chefs and have their houses – those that can afford it – decorated in what is gener- ally a parody of lush European styles. But this does not make them any less suspicious of European cunning, European ‘sophistication’, or, in the worlds which Henry James inhabited at the end of the nineteenth century, European decadence, European senescence.7

5 Bisaha 2004, 129. 6 Rotolo 1973, 87. 7 Pagden 2008, 59–60.