1357-1363

LEON PILATUS AND THE TRANSLATION OF HOMER—
THE CONVERSION OF BOCCACCIO

That a profound change had already taken place in Boccaccio's point of view, in his attitude towards life, in his whole moral consciousness, it might seem impossible to doubt after reading the Corbaccio and the Vita di Dante; but though its full significance only became apparent some years after the publication of those works, the curious psychologist may perhaps find signs of it before the year 1355. For while that change was on the one hand the inevitable consequence of his youth and early manhood, a development from causes that had always been hidden in his soul, it was also a result, as it was a sign, of his age, of his passing from youth to middle age, and it declares itself with the first grey hairs, the first sign of failing powers and loss of activity, in a sort of disillusion and pessimism. From this time his life was to be a kind of looking backward, with a wild regret for the mistakes and wasted opportunities then perhaps for the first time horribly visible.

Yes, a part at least of that bitterness, scorn, and anger against woman might seem to be but the approach of old age. But side by side with that moral and spiritual revolution that by no means reached its crisis in 1355, we may see an intellectual change not less profound, that in its own way too is also a "looking backward." His creative powers were paralysed. The Corbaccio is the last original or "creative" work that he achieved; henceforth his life was to be devoted to scholarship and to criticism, and however eager we may be to acknowledge the debt we owe him for his labours in those fields, we cannot but admit that they are a sign of failing power, of a lost grip on life, on reality; and though we can hardly have hoped for another Decameron, we are forced to allow that the energy which created the one we have was of quite another and a higher sort than that which produced the works of learning which fill the last twenty years of his life.

When Petrarch first met Boccaccio, as we have seen, it was not so much of Italian letters as of antiquity that they spoke; and ever after we find that the elder poet brings the conversation back to that, to him the most important of subjects, when Boccaccio, with his keener sense of life and greater vitality, would have involved him in political discussion, or persuaded him to consider such aspects of the life of his own time as are to be found, for instance, so plentifully in the Decameron. Seeing the way Petrarch was determined to follow, venerating him as his master and leader, always ready to give him the first place, it is not surprising that Boccaccio interested himself more and more in what so engrossed his friend. In 1354 Petrarch thanks him[447] for an anthology from the works of Cicero and Varro that he had composed and given him, and in the same year he thanks him again for S. Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms.

Long before he met Boccaccio in Florence in 1350, however, Petrarch had begun the study of Greek in Avignon in 1342 under the Basilian monk Barlaam,[448] whom he had met there in 1339.According to Boccaccio, Barlaam was a man of small stature but of prodigious learning, the Abbot of the monastery of S. Gregory, a bitter theological disputant with many enemies, but in high favour at the court of Constantinople, whence the Emperor Andronicus had sent him to Avignon ostensibly on a mission for the reunion of the Churches, but really to ask for the assistance of the West in the struggle with the Turks. Barlaam was in fact a Calabrian, but most of his life had been spent in Salonica and Constantinople. He knew Greek; that was his value in Petrarch's eyes, and he seems to have read with the poet certain dialogues of Plato.[449] In 1342, however, Barlaam become Bishop of Gerace,[450] and Petrarch lost him before his greatest desire had begun to be satisfied, to wit, the translation of Homer, which, with the Middle Age, he only knew in the mediocre abridgment Ilias Latina, the weakness of which he recognised.[451] Eleven years later, in 1353, however, Petrarch met in Avignon Nicolas Sigeros, another ambassador of the Emperor of Constantinople, come on a similar mission to Barlaam's. They spoke together of Homer, and in the following year when Sigeros was departed, he sent Petrarch as a gift the Greek text of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This the poet received with an enthusiastic letter of thanks, at the same time confessing his insufficiency as a Hellenist.[452]

Now in the winter of 1358-9, during a sojourn at Padua, there was introduced to Petrarch by one of his friends a certain Leon Pilatus, who gave himself out for a Greek; and the poet seized the opportunity to get a translation of a part of his MS. of Homer.[453] In the spring, however, he went to Milan, and it was there, on March 16, 1359, that Boccaccio visited him, finding him in his garden "in orto SanctÆ ValeriÆ Mediolani."[454]

That visit, from one point of view so consoling for Boccaccio, must have cost him a pang; for he had, as we have seen, always blamed Petrarch for accepting the hospitality of the Visconti, those enemies of his country. But he had not allowed the fact that Petrarch had disregarded his protests to interfere with their friendship. Keen patriot as he always remained, Boccaccio, without in any way changing his opinion, accepted Petrarch's strange conduct, his indifference to nationalism, with a modesty as charming as it is rare, and allowing himself to take up the attitude of a disciple, made a pilgrimage to the city he hated for the sake of the friend he loved; and cost what it may have done, that visit, long planned we gather, must have been full of refreshment for Boccaccio. We see them in that quiet garden in Visconti's city planting a laurel, a favourite amusement of Petrarch's, for it reminded him alike of Laura and of his coronation as poet;[455] and, "as the pleasant days slipped by," talking of poetry, of learning, above all of Greek and of that Leon Pilatus recently come into Italy, whom Petrarch had met in Padua.

It is probable that Boccaccio met this man in Milan before he returned to Florence;[456] it is certain that Petrarch spoke to him of Pilatus, and that Boccaccio asked him to visit him. That invitation was accepted, and before the end of the year we see Pilatus established in Florence.

This man who makes such a bizarre figure in Boccaccio's life seems to have belonged to that numerous race of adventurers half Greek, half Calabrian, needy, unscrupulous, casual, and avaricious, who ceaselessly wandered about Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seeking fortune. It might seem strange that such an one should play the part of a teacher and professor, but he certainly was not particular, and Petrarch and Boccaccio were compelled to put up with what they could get. Pilatus, however, seems to have wearied and disgusted Petrarch; it was Boccaccio, more gentle and more heroic, who devoted himself to him for the sake of learning. Having persuaded Pilatus to follow him to Florence, he caused a Chair of Greek to be given to him in the university, and for almost four years imposed upon himself the society of this disagreeable barbarian. For as it seems he was nothing else; his one claim on the attention of Petrarch and Boccaccio being that he could, or said he could, speak Greek.

We know very little about him. He boasted that he was born in Thessaly, but later owned that he was a Calabrian.[457] His appearance, according to Boccaccio [458] and Petrarch,[459] had something repellent about it. His crabbed countenance was covered with bristles of black hair, an untrimmed beard completing the effect; and his ragged mantle only half covered his dirty person. Nor were his manners more refined than his physique; while his character seems to have been particularly disagreeable, sombre, capricious, and surly. Petrarch confesses that he had given up trying to civilise this rustic, this "magna bellua."[460]

Such was Leon Pilatus; but for the love of Greek Boccaccio pardoned everything, and he and two or three friends, the only persons in Florence indeed able to do so, followed the lectures[461] of this improvised professor. But it was above all in admitting this creature to his own home that Boccaccio appears most heroic. There he submitted him to long interviews and interminable sÉances in order that he might accomplish the great task of a complete translation of Homer.

Afar off Petrarch associated himself with this work and tried to direct it with wise counsels that Leon Pilatus was doubtless too little of a scholar to understand and too ignorant to follow blindly. In fact but for Petrarch, as the following letter proves, they would have lacked the text itself:—

"You ask me," he writes in 1360,[462] "to lend you, if as you think I have bought it, the book of Homer that was for sale at Padua, in order that our friend Leon may translate it from Greek into Latin for you and for our other studious compatriots, for you say I have long since had another example. I have seen this book, but I have neglected it, because it appeared to me inferior to my own. One could easily get it, however, through the person who procured me the friendship of Leon; a letter of his would be all-powerful and I will write him myself. If by chance this book escapes us, which I do not believe, I will lend you mine. For I have always been desirous of this translation in particular and of Greek literature in general, and if Fortune had not been envious of my beginnings in the miserable death of my excellent master (? Barlaam), I should perhaps have to-day something more of Greek than the alphabet.

"I applaud, then, with all my heart and strength your enterprise.... I am sorry to see so much solicitude for the bad and so much negligence of the good. But what would you? One must resign oneself to it....

"I hope also here and now to prevent you in one thing, so as not to repent myself later for having passed it by in silence. You say that the translation will be word for word. Hear how on this point S. Jerome expresses himself in the preface to the book De Temporibus of Eusebius of CÆsarea that he translated into Latin. It pleases me to send you the very words of one so learned in both tongues and in many others, and especially in the art of translation. 'Let him who says that in translation one does not lose the grace of the original try to translate Homer literally into Latin, and into any tongue which he has, and he will see how ridiculous is the order of the words and how the most eloquent of poets is made tostammer like a child.' I tell you this for your advice whilst there is yet time, so that such a great work may not be useless.

"For myself I desire only that the thing be well done.... In truth the portion I have which the same Leon translated for me into Latin prose—the beginning of Homer—has given me a foretaste of the complete work.... It contains indeed a secret charm.... Go on then with the aid of Heaven; give us back Homer who was lost to us....

"In asking me at the same time for the volume of Plato that I have with me and that escaped the fire in my house across the Alps, you give me a proof of your ardour, and I will hold this book at your disposition when you want it. I will second with all my power such noble enterprises. But take care that the union of these two great Princes of Greece be not unseemly, and that the weight of these two geniuses does not crush the shoulders of mortals.... And remember that the one wrote many centuries before the other. Good-bye. Milan, 18 August (1360)."[463]

From that letter we may gather how eagerly Boccaccio had turned to this new labour. Was it in order to escape from himself? Certainly it might seem that in his new enthusiasm he found for a time, at any rate, a certain consolation; but the crisis was not long delayed. In those long months while the wretched Pilatus was with him, however, he was able for a time to ward off the danger; and realising this, the comedy of that friendship is almost pathetic.

We seem to see him eagerly drinking in the words that fell from the surly Calabrian, pressing him with questions, taking note of all and trying to understand everything—even what his master himself could not understand. As for the master, flattered and puffed up by the confidence that Boccaccio seems to have felt in him, he no doubt replied to all his questionings in the tone of a man who knew perfectly what he was talking about, and had nothing to fear or to hide. Sometimes, no doubt, the adventurer showed itself. Weary and bored by the incessant work, his sullen humour exasperated by the sedentary life, Pilatus would demand his liberty. Then Boccaccio would have to arm himself with all his patience, and by sweetness and gentleness and good-humour would at last persuade the wretched man to remain a little longer with him.

Suddenly in the midst of this difficult work with Pilatus his trouble descended upon him, with a supernatural force as he thought. He received a message from a dying saint—a message that warned him of his approaching end and certain damnation unless he should repent. When exactly this message reached him we do not know. It may well have been in the end of 1361, but it was more probably in the first months of 1362. He was in any case in no fit state to meet the blow.

In those days when political crises followed hard on one another, and the very aspect of a city might change in the course of a few years, Boccaccio's youth must then have seemed infinitely far away. His Corbaccio had been written "to open the eyes of the young" to the horror of woman. While in very many ways he is the pioneer of the Renaissance, in his heart there lingered yet something, if only a shadow, of the fear of joy. All his joys had been adventures on which he scarcely dared to enter, and while he was never a puritan, as one sometimes thinks Petrarch may have been, he was so perfectly of his own time as to "repent him of his past life." For a nature like that of Boccaccio was capable only of enthusiasm. He had loved Fiammetta to distraction, and those who only see there a lust of the flesh have never understood Boccaccio. His other loves were what you will, what they always are and must be; but when Fiammetta died, the very centre of his world was shaken.[464] He could not follow her through Hell and Purgatory into the meadows of Paradise as Dante had followed Beatrice: he was of the modern world. For Dante, earth, heaven, purgatory, and hell were but chambers in the universe of God. For Boccaccio there remained just the world.

Having the religious sense, he accused himself of sin as St. Paul had done, as St. John of the Cross was to do, with an astonishing eccentricity, an exaggeration which lost sight of the truth, in a profound self-humiliation. Of such is the lust of the spirit. He too had found it difficult "to keep in the right way amid the temptations of the world." And then, suddenly it seems, on the threshold of old age, poor and alone, he thought to love God with the same enthusiasm with which he had loved woman. He was not capable of it; his whole life rose up to deny him this impassioned consolation, and his "spirit was troubled," as the wise and steadfast eyes of Petrarch had seen.

It was in the midst of this disease, to escape from which, as we may think, he had so eagerly thrown himself into the translation of Homer with Pilatus, that a certain Gioacchino Ciani sought him out to warn him, as he intended to warn Petrarch, of the nearness of death. In doing this the monk, for he was a Carthusian, was but obeying the dying commands of the Beato Pietro Petroni,[465] a Sienese who had seen on his death-bed "the present, the past, and the future." Already drawn towards a new life—a life which under the direction of the Church he was told would be without the consolations of literature—at the sudden intervention, as it seemed, of Heaven, Boccaccio did the wisest thing of his whole life—he asked for the advice of Petrarch.

The letter which Petrarch wrote him takes its rank among the noblest of his writings, and is indeed one of the most beautiful letters ever written.

"Your letter," he says—"Your letter, my brother, has filled me with an extraordinary trouble. In reading it I became the prey of a great astonishment, and also of a great chagrin: after reading it both the one and the other have disappeared. How could I read without weeping the story of your tears and of your approaching death, being totally ignorant of the facts and only paying attention to the words? But at last when I had turned and fixed my thoughts on the thing itself, the state of my soul changed altogether, and both astonishment and chagrin fled away....

"You tell me that this holy man had a vision of our Lord, and so was able to discern all truth—a great sight for mortal eyes to see. Great indeed, I agree with you, if genuine; but how often have we not known this tale of a vision made a cloak for an imposture? And having visited you, this messenger proposed, I understand, to go to Naples, thence to Gaul and Britain, and so to me. Well, when he comes I will examine him closely; his looks, his demeanour, his behaviour under questioning, and so forth, shall help me to judge of his truthfulness. And the holy man on his death-bed saw us two and a few others to whom he had a secret message, which he charged this visitor of yours to give us; so, if I understand you rightly, runs the story. Well, the message to you is twofold: you have not long to live, and you must give up poetry. Hence your trouble, which I made my own while reading your letter, but which I put away from me on thinking it over, as you will do also; for if you will only give heed to me, or rather to your own natural good sense, you will see that you have been distressing yourself about a thing that should have pleased you. Now if this message is really from the Lord, it must be pure truth. But is it from the Lord? Or has its real author used the Lord's name to give weight to his own saying? I grant you the frequency of death-bed prophecies; the histories of Greece and Rome are full of instances; but even though we allow that these old stories and your monitor's present tale are all true, still what is there to distress you so terribly? What is there new in all this? You knew without his telling you that you could not have a very long space of life before you. And is not our life here labour and sorrow, and is it not its chief merit that it is the road to a better?... Ah! but you have come to old age, says your monitor. Death cannot be far off. Look to your soul. Well, I grant you that scholarship may be an unreasonable and even bitter pursuit for the old, if they take it up then for the first time; but if you and your scholarship have grown old together, 'tis the pleasantest of comforts. Forsake the Muses, says he: many things that may grace a lad are a disgrace to an old man; wit and the senses fail you. Nay, I answer, when he bids you pluck sin from your heart, he speaks well and prudently. But why forsake learning, in which you are no novice but an expert, able to discern what to choose and what to refuse?... All history is full of examples of good men who have loved learning, and though many unlettered men have attained to holiness, no man was ever debarred from holiness by letters.... But if in spite of all this you persist in your intention, and if you must needs throw away not only your learning, but the poor instruments of it, then I thank you for giving me the refusal of your books. I will buy your library, if it must be sold, for I would not that the books of so great a man should be dispersed abroad and hawked about by unworthy hands. I will buy it and unite it with my own; then some day this mood of yours will pass, some day you will come back to your old devotion. Then you shall make your home with me, you will find your books side by side with mine, which are equally yours. Thenceforth we shall share a common life and a common library, and when the survivor of us is dead, the books shall go to some place where they will be kept together and dutifully tended, in perpetual memory of us who owned them."[466]

That noble letter, so sane in its piety, in some sort cured Boccaccio. We hear no more of the fanatic monk, and the books were never bought, for they were never sold. Petrarch, however, did not forget his friend. He caused the office of Apostolic Secretary to be offered him, and that Boccaccio had the strength and independence to refuse the sinecure assures us of his restored sanity.

But we may well ask ourselves what had brought Boccaccio to such a pass that he was at the mercy of such infernal humbugs and liars as the Blessed Pietro and his rascal friend. That he was in a wretched state of mind and soul we know, and the causes we know too in part, but they by no means account for the fact that the first enemy of monks and friars and all their blackguardism should have fallen so easily into their hands. Was Boccaccio superstitious? That he was less superstitious, less credulous, than the men of his time generally is certain; that he was content to believe what Petrarch attacked and laughed at we shall presently see; but that he can be properly accused of superstition remains doubtful. Certainly he believed in dreams;[467] he believed in astrology;[468] he believed that a strabism or squint was an indication of an evil soul;[469] he believed in visible devils;[470] he believed that Æneas truly descended into Hades and that Virgil was a magician.[471] He may well have believed all such things and have been no worse off than many a Prince of the Church to-day; at any rate, such beliefs, unreasonable as they may appear to us, cannot have led him to the incredible folly of believing in the Blessed Pietro and his messenger.

It might seem inexplicable that he who had exposed the lies and tricks of the monks so often should have been himself so easily deceived. Had he not exposed them? There was Fra Cipolla—true he was a friar—part of whose stock-in-trade was a tale of relics—"the finger of the Holy Ghost as whole and entire as ever it was, the tuft of the seraph that appeared to S. Francis and one of the nails of the cherubim, one of the ribs of the Verbum caro fatti alle finestre (factum est) and some of the vestment of the Holy Catholic Faith, some of the rays of the star that appeared to the Magi, a phial of the sweat of S. Michael abattling with the Devil, the jaws of death of S. Lazarus, and other relics."[472]

It might seem inexplicable! Unfortunately, however, Boccaccio also believed that those about to die can participate in the spirit of prophecy.[473] Thus he was for the moment, at any rate, altogether at the mercy of the Blessed Pietro. The splendid common-sense, the caustic wit of Petrarch helped him, it is true, to recover himself, but that bitter and humiliating experience left a permanent mark upon him. He was a changed man. With an immense regret he looked back on his life, and would have destroyed if he could the gay works of his youth, even the Decameron, and, for a time at least, he would have been content to sacrifice everything, not only his poetry in the vulgar and his romances and stories, but the new learning itself, the study of antiquity, and to enter into some monastery.

That he did not do so we owe in part at least to Petrarch. For when he had read his letter and come to himself, he returned to Pilatus and the translation of Homer.[474]

That translation was scarcely finished when Pilatus wished to be gone, and he seems in fact to have accompanied Boccaccio to Venice on his visit to Petrarch probably in May, 1363.[475] That visit was a kind of flight; he seems to have taken refuge with Petrarch from the fears of his own heart, and that it was as full of pleasure and enjoyment for Petrarch, as of consolation for Boccaccio, happily we know and can assert."I have always thought," Petrarch writes to him after his return to Tuscany,[476] "I have always thought that your presence would give me pleasure, I knew it would, and I felt that it would please you too. What I did not know, however, was that it would bring good fortune. For during the very few months, gone so quickly, that you have cared to dwell with me in this house that I call mine, and which is yours, it seems to me, in truth, that I have contracted a truce with fortune who, while you were here, dared not spoil my happiness...."

We know nothing more of that visit save that Boccaccio must have returned to Tuscany before the writing of that letter, before the 7th of September then. As for Pilatus, he too left Venice "at the end of the summer"[477] to return to Constantinople, "cursing Italy and the Latin name," as Petrarch says. "One would have thought him scarcely arrived there," Petrarch continues, "when I received a badly written and very long letter, more untidy than his beard or his hair, in which among other things he said he loved and longed for Italy as for some heavenly country, that he hated Greece which he had loved and execrated Byzantium which he had praised, and he supplicated me to send for him back as eagerly as Peter, about to be shipwrecked, prayed Christ to still the waves."

To make a long story short, Petrarch ignored his petition. This, however, did not stop Pilatus. He embarked for Italy, but a storm wrecked the ship in which he sailed in the Adriatic, and though he was not drowned he was struck and killed by lightning. Petrarch wonders if amid his "wretched baggage, which, thanks to the honesty of the sailors, is in safety, I shall find the Euripides, Sophocles, and other manuscripts which he had promised to procure for me."[478] The two friends mourned him sincerely, forgetting their disgust in remembering that Pilatus had known Greek, and finding touching words to deplore the tragic death of the first translator of Homer.

As for the translation he had made, Petrarch did not see it for some years. The first time he asks for it is in a letter of March 1, 1364.[479] There he asks for a fragment of the Odyssey, "partem illam OdysseÆ qua Ulyxes it ad inferos et locorum quÆ in vestibulo Erebi sunt descriptionem ab Homero factam ... quam primum potes ... utcumque tuis digitis exaratam." Later he asks for the whole: "In futurum autem, si me amas, vide obsecro an tuo studio, mea impensa fieri possit ut Homerus integer bibliothecam hanc ubi pridem graecus habitat, tandem latinos accedat." These words are very clear. Petrarch says he will pay the copyist himself. So that, as Hortis asserts, the first version of Homer was made at the suggestion of Petrarch by Pilatus at the expense of Boccaccio.

In the letter of December 14, 1365,[480] Petrarch thanks Boccaccio for sending him the Iliad and a part of the Odyssey; but that part did not contain the details he wanted concerning the descent of Ulysses into Hades and his voyage along the Italian shores. Even this incomplete copy, though sent off in 1365 by Boccaccio, was a long time in reaching him. On January 27, 1366, he had not yet received it.[481] But at last it arrived, and Petrarch wrote to thank Boccaccio for it.[482] This letter, however, is not dated, and its contents do not help us to decide exactly when it was written. At any rate, it was after January, 1366, that Petrarch received the precious work. He promised to return this MS. to Boccaccio when he had had it copied; but he seems to have found it difficult to get a capable person to do this; and when he had found him we see him travelling about with him, that the work might be done under his constant supervision.[483]

It is this MS., which M. de Nohlac discusses and describes, that is now in Paris (Bib. Nat., 7880, 1). In it we are able to judge of the extent of Pilatus's knowledge. That he knew Greek seems incontrovertible, but that he knew the Homeric idiom very imperfectly is not less certain; he seems too to have had a poor knowledge of Latin. His translation is full of obscurity, platitude, and mistranslations—in fact, crammed with all the errors of a schoolboy: when he does not know a word, and has to confess it, he writes the Greek word in Latin characters; what we see in fact is not a faithful but a blind translation. And it was for this that Petrarch had waited so patiently! "Penelope," he says, "had not more ardently longed for Ulysses."[484] He studied it with passion, often deceived, no doubt, but never discouraged. The notes with which he covered page after page show us the growing feebleness of his hand, but never of his spirit. He died while he was annotating the Odyssey.

Boccaccio, on the other hand, with a charming and naive sincerity, owns that he did not understand much, but adds that the little he did understand seemed to him beautiful. He was very proud of his victory, and rightly; for by its means the Renaissance was able to give Homer his rightful place in its culture.