Collected Poetical Works of Francesco Petrarch

by Francesco Petrarch

  However, this work caused me to estimate thee at thy true worth. As regards thee I had long been in error, and I rejoice that I have now been corrected. I saw the dismembered limbs of a beautiful body, and admiration mingled with grief seized me. Even at this moment, indeed, thy work may be resting intact in someone’s library, and, what is worse, with one who perhaps has not the slightest idea of what a guest he is harboring unawares.63 Whosoever more fortunate than I will discover thee, may he be sure that he has gained a work of great value, one which, if he be at all wise, he will consider among his chief treasures.

  In these books (whose number I am ignorant of, but which must doubtless have been many) thou hast had the daring to probe again a subject treated with consummate skill by Cicero himself when enriched by the experience of a lifetime. Thou hast accomplished the impossible. Thou didst follow in the footsteps of so great a man, and yet thou didst gain new glory, due not to the excellence of imitation but to the merits of the original doctrines propounded in thine own work. By Cicero, the orator was prepared for battle; by thee he is molded and fashioned, with the result that many things seem to have been either neglected or unheeded by Cicero. Thou gatherest all the details which escaped thy master’s notice with such extreme care that (unless my judgment fail me) thou mayest be said to conquer him in diligence in just the degree that he conquers thee in eloquence. Cicero guides his orator through the laborious tasks of legal pleading to the topmost heights of oratory. He trains him for victory in the battles of the courtroom. Thou dost begin far earlier, and dost lead thy future orator through all the turns and pitfalls of the long journey from the cradle to the impregnable citadel of eloquence. The genius of Cicero is pleasing and delightful, and compels admiration. Nothing could be more useful to youthful aspirants. It enlightens those who are already far advanced, and points out to the strong the road to eminence. Thy painstaking earnestness is of assistance, especially to the weak, and, as though it were a most experienced nurse, offers to delicate youth the simpler intellectual nourishment.

  But, lest the flattering remarks which I have been making cause thee to suspect my sincerity, permit me to say (in counterbalancing them) that thou shouldst have adopted a different style. Indeed, the truth of what Cicero says in his Rhetorica is clearly apparent in thy case, namely that it is of very little importance for the orator to discourse on the general, abstract theories of his profession, but that, on the contrary, it is of the very highest importance for him to speak from actual practice therein.64 I do not deny thee experience, the second of these two qualities, as Cicero did to Hermagoras, of whom he was treating.65 But I submit that thou didst possess the latter in only a moderate degree; the former, however, in such a remarkable degree that it seems now scarcely possible for the mind of man to add a single word.

  I have compared this magnificent work of thine with that book which thou didst publish under the title De causis.66 (And I should like to say in passing that this work has not been lost, that it might result the more clearly that our age is especially neglectful of only the highest and best things, and not so much so of the mediocre.) In such comparison it becomes plain to the minds of the discerning that thou hast performed the office of the whetstone rather than that of the knife,67 and that thou hast had greater success in building up the orator than in causing him to excel in the courts. Pray do not receive these statements in bad part. For it is as true of thee as of others (and thou must be aware of the fact) that a man’s intellectual powers are not equally suited for development in all directions, but that they will evince a special degree of qualification in one only. Thou wert a great man, I acknowledge it; but thy highest merit lay in thy ability to ground and to mold great men. If thou hadst had suitable material to hand, thou wouldst easily have produced a greater than thyself, O thou who didst so wisely develop the rare intellects intrusted to thy care!

  There was, however, quite a jealous rivalry between thee and a certain other great man — I mean Annaeus Seneca. Your age, your profession, your nationality, even, should have been a common bond between you; but envy (that plague among equals) kept you apart. In this respect I think that thou, perhaps, didst exercise the greater self-restraint; for, whereas thou canst not get thyself to give him full praise, he speaks of thee most contemptuously. I myself should hesitate to be judged by an inferior. Yet, if I were constituted judge of such an important question, I should express this opinion. Seneca was a more copious and versatile writer, thou a keener; he employed a loftier style, thou a more cautious one. Furthermore, thou didst praise his genius and his zeal and his wide learning, but not his choice nor his taste. Thou dost add, in truth, that his style was corrupt, and vitiated by every fault.68 He, on the other hand, numbers thee among those whose name is buried with them,69 although thy reputation is still great, and thou hadst been neither dead nor buried during his lifetime. For he passed away under Nero, whereas thou didst go from Spain to Rome under Galba, when both Seneca and Nero were no more. After many years thou didst assume charge of the grandnephews of Emperor Domitian by his express orders, and becamest sponsor for their moral and intellectual development.70 Thou didst fulfil thy trust, I believe, so far as lay in thy power and with hopeful prospects in both these directions; although, as Plutarch shortly afterward wrote to Trajan, the indiscretions of thy wards were made to detract from thine own fair name.71

  I have nothing more to say. I ardently desire to find thee entire; and if thou art anywhere in such condition, pray do not hide from me any longer. Farewell.

  Written in the land of the living, between the right slope of the Apennines and the right bank of the Arno, within the walls of my own city where I first became acquainted with thee, and on the very day of our becoming acquainted,72 on the seventh of December, in the thirteen hundred and fiftieth year of Him whom thy master preferred to persecute rather than to profess.

  Notes on Fam., XXIV, 7, to Quintilian

  62. Lapo di Castiglionchio gave Petrarch a copy of the Institutes in 1350. (For further details see n. 72.)

  63. How very much like a prophecy this reads! But it was a most natural exclamation for the “first modern scholar,” who stood at the threshold of the Renaissance, when so many of the classics had as yet to be discovered.

  In a footnote of the Latin edition (Vol. III, ), Fracassetti informs us that in one of the codices the following remark is added: “This turned out to be true, for the complete Quintilian was found at Constance.” This refers to the discovery of a complete manuscript of Quintilian in 1416. The Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini, while attending the Council of Constance in the capacity of apostolic secretary, found this copy in an old tower of the monastery of St. Gall. It is, perhaps, the same as the one now preserved at Florence — the Codex Laurentianus.

  The story of the discovery is well told in a letter by Poggio. This letter gives such a faithful picture of the enthusiasm of the humanists, and is of such great interest that, although rather a long letter, it has been thought best to give a translation of it here in full (from the Latin text of Jacques Lefant, Poggiana, Part IV, p-13):

  POGGIO TO GUARINO OF VERONA

  I am well aware that, in spite of your constant occupations, the receipt of my letters is always a source of great pleasure to you — so great is your politeness and singular kindness to all. I beg of you, however, to be particularly attentive in reading the present. I beseech you the more urgently, not because I am the possessor of that which even the most learned of men may be anxious to share, but rather out of respect due to that which I am going to tell you. I feel certain, since you are so pre-eminently learned, that the news will bring no slight enjoyment to you and to the other scholars.

  For tell me, pray, what is there, or what can there be more pleasing, or agreeable, or acceptable to you and to others than the knowledge of those things by the study of which we become more learned and (what is of even greater moment) more discriminating in our likes and dislikes? Our great parent, nature, gave to the human race a rea
soning mind, which we are to consult as our guide in the conduct of a good and happy life, than which nothing better could be imagined. I am not so sure but that, after all, by far the most extraordinary gift of nature is the power of speech, without which the reason and the intellect were of no avail.

  Speech, in giving external expression to the workings of the mind, is the one faculty which distinguishes us from other creatures. We should therefore consider ourselves under deep obligation to all those who have developed the liberal arts, but under deepest obligation to those who, by their patient and unremitting study, have handed down to us the rules of oratory and the norms of correct speech. In short, although mankind is especially superior to all other living creatures through its use of speech, these scholars have striven that in just this respect men should excel themselves.

  Many illustrious Roman authors devoted themselves to the study and to the development of the human speech, as you know. Chief and foremost among them was M. Fabius Quintilianus, who describes the method for the development of the perfect orator with such clearness, and with such characteristic carefulness that, in my opinion, he lacked nothing as regards either the broadest knowledge or the highest eloquence. Even if we possessed nothing of Cicero, the father of Roman eloquence, we should still attain to a perfect knowledge of correct speech with Quintilian alone as our guide.

  Hitherto, however, among us (and by this I mean among us Italians) Quintilian was to be had only in such a mangled and mutilated state (the fault of the times, I think), that neither the figure nor the face of man was to be distinguished in him. [For the parts then missing see Sabbadini, Scoperte, , n. 64.] You yourself have seen him [Aen., vi, 495-97]:

  “His body gashed and torn,

  His hands cut off, his comely face

  Seamed o’er with wounds that mar its grace,

  Ears lopped, and nostrils shorn.”

  — (Conington, ed. 1900, )

  A grievous fact, indeed, and an insufferable, that in the foul mangling of so eloquent a man we should have inflicted such great loss upon the domain of oratory. But the greater was our grief and our vexation at the maiming of that man, the greater is our present cause for congratulation. Thanks to our searchings, we have restored Quintilian to his original dress and dignity, to his former appearance, and to a condition of sound health. [Andreolo Arese seems to have found a complete Quintilian in France as early as 1396. See Sabbadini, op. cit., p, 36.]

  Forsooth, if M. Tullius rejoices heartily in having secured the return of M. Marcellus from exile, and that too at a time when there were at Rome many other Marcelli who were just as good men, just as prominent and well known both at home and abroad, what are the learned men of today (and especially students of oratory) to do, seeing that this matchless glory of the Roman name (because of whose loss nothing was left except Cicero), and that this work, which but recently was so mangled and fragmentary, have been recalled not merely from exile but from utter destruction?

  By Hercules, unless we had brought him aid in the nick of time, he would have died shortly. There is not the slightest doubt that that man, so brilliant, genteel, tasteful, refined, and pleasant could not longer have endured the filthiness of that dungeon, the squalor of that place, and the cruelty of those jailors. He was dejected and shabby in appearance, like unto those who have been condemned to death. His beard was unkept, and his hair matted with blood. [A quotation of Aen., ii, 277.] His very features and dress cried out that he was sentenced to an undeserved death. He seemed to stretch out his hands to me, to implore the assistance of the Quirites to protect him against an unjust judge. He seemed to be making an accusation, in that he, who once had been the means of safety to so many with his resourceful eloquence, could now find not a single patron to take pity on his misfortune, not one who would consult for his safety or prevent his being led out to an unmerited end.

  Often by mere chance, things come to pass which we do not dare to hope for, as Terence says [Phormio, 5, 1, vss. 30, 31]. And so Fortune (and not so much his as ours) would have it that, when we found ourselves at Constance with nothing to do, a sudden desire should seize us of visiting the place where Quintilian was imprisoned — the monastery of St. Gall, twenty miles away. And so several of us proceeded thither [among whom Bartolomeo da Montepulciano and Cencio Rustici: Sabbadini, op. cit., ] to relax our minds and at the same time to search through the volumes of which there was said to be a great number. There, among crowded stacks of books which it would take long to enumerate, we discovered a Quintilian, still safe and sound, but all moldy and covered with dust. For the books were not in the library, as their merit warranted, but in a most loathsome and dreary dungeon at the very foundations of one of the towers — a place into which not even those awaiting execution would be thrust.

  I for one feel certain that if there were any today who would tear down these barbarian penitentiaries in which such men are held prisoners, and would submit them to a most careful search, as our predecessors did, they would meet with the same good fortune in the case of many authors whose loss we now mourn.

  In addition to the Quintilian, we discovered the first three books and half the fourth book of the Argonauticon of C. Valerius Flaccus [books i-iv, 317: Sabbadini, op. cit., ]; and explanations or commentary on eight orations of Cicero by Q. Asconius Pedianus, a very eloquent man mentioned by Quintilian himself. All these I transcribed with my own hand, and somewhat hastily [the Quintilian in thirty-two days, Burckhardt, ], for I was anxious to send them to Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo and to Niccoló of Florence [Niccoló Niccoli, for whom he was acting as agent].

  You have now, my dearest Guarino, all that could be given to you, for the present, by one who is most devoted to you. I wish I could have sent to you the book as well. But I had to please our Leonardo first. Still, you now know where it is to be had, so that if you really want to have it (which I should judge to be as soon as possible), you can easily obtain it. Farewell.

  At Constance, December 16, 1416.

  The real date of the discovery is in June or July, 1416; cf. Sabbadini, op. cit., .

  64. Cic., De inv., i, 6 extr.

  65. Fracassetti translates this passage, Vol. 5. (at bottom): “Non io peró, com’egli ad Ermagora, a te vorrei dell’una o dell’altra cosa negare il vanto.” From this rendering, one receives the impression that Cicero was equally ready to deny Hermagoras both theory and practice. Cicero, however, distinctly testifies to the theoretical ability of Hermagoras in the words “quod hic [i. e., H.] fecit,” and just as distinctly affirms his lack of experience— “ex arte dicere, quod eum minime potuisse omnes videmus.” The words of Petrarch now, therefore, become clear. He says (Vol. III, ): “oratori minimum de arte loqui, multo maximum ex arte dicere. Non tamen ut ille [i. e., Cicero] Hermagorae de quo agebat, sic ego tibi horum alterum eripio.”

  66. This work has sometimes been wrongly identified with the Dialogus de oratoribus, which was not known until the fifteenth century. The De causis mentioned by Petrarch must be a reference to the collection of Declamationes which in the Middle Ages passed as the work of Quintilian (P. de Nolhac, II, p, n. 3, and 85; Teuffel, par. 325 and n. 11).

  67. Horace, Ars Poetica, 304, 305.

  68. These criticisms are to be found in Quintilian, book x. Since Petrarch uses almost the same words, and in fact quotes verbatim in the last instance, the tenth book (or at least this portion of it) must have been part of the Quintilian given him by Lapo di Castiglionchio (see n. 72). Petrarch says (Vol. III, ): “et tu [i. e., Quintilian] quidem ingenium eius et studium et doctrinam laudas [Quint., x, 1, 128], electionem ac iudicium non laudas [x, 1, 130]: stilum vero corruptum et omnibus vitiis fractum dicis [x, 1, 125].” (For the parts of the Institutes generally missing in the Middle Ages, see Sabbadini, Scoperte, , n. 64.)

  69. Sen., Contr., x, praef. 2: “Pertinere autem ad rem non puto . . . quomodo L. Asprenas aut Quintilianus senex declamaverit: transeo istos quorum fama cum ipsis extincta est.” This criticism, evidently, was not spo
ken by Seneca the philosopher, as Petrarch thought, but by the elder Seneca, the author of the Controversiae and Suasoriae. Petrarch has simply confused the two, not being aware of the existence of the latter. Furthermore, the elder Seneca died before or about the time that Quintilian was born. Hence the criticism could not have referred to the author of the Institutes, but, perhaps, to Quintilian’s father (who is merely mentioned in Quint., ix, 3, 73), or to Sextus Nonius Quintilianus, consul in 8 A.D. In either case the identity of this other Quintilian remains a doubtful one.

  70. There is no question that Quintilian’s pupils were the sons of Flavius Clemens and Domitilla the Younger — in other words, the grandsons of Emperor Domitian’s sister, and hence his grandnephews. The Italian version wrongly gives (Vol. 5, ): “i figli di sua sorella, nipoti suoi — the sons of his sister, his nephews.” Petrarch’s Latin reads (Vol. III, ): “sororis Domitiani principis nepotum curam ipso mandante suscipiens.” The confusion seems to arise from the double function of the Italian word “nipoti” for both “nephews” and “grandchildren.”

  71. Plutarch, Moralia (ed. Gregorius N. Bernardakis), Vol. VII, , “Institutio Traiani, Epistola ad Traianum,” 11, 7-16:

  I therefore congratulate you upon your merits, and myself upon my good fortune, provided that in the exercise of your power you exhibit the same justice and honesty which have earned it for you. Otherwise I am sure that you will be exposed to serious dangers, and that I shall be subjected to the criticism of my detractors. For Rome cannot tolerate worthless emperors, and men, in their gossiping, are wont to heap upon teachers the faults of their pupils. In consequence, Seneca is justly censured by those who detract from his Nero, Quintilian is justly charged with the rash acts of his wards, and Socrates is justly accused of having been over-indulgent with his pupil.