Leontio was the translator of Homer, and expounded his poems from the
Chair of Rhetoric at Florence. He was a man of forbidding appearance, and
'more obdurate,' said Petrarch, 'than the rocks that he will encounter in
his voyage': 'fearing that I might catch his bad temper, I let him go,
and gave him a Terence to amuse him on the way, though I do not know what
this melancholy Greek could have in common with that lively African.'
Leontio was killed by lightning on his return voyage; and there was much
anxiety until it could be ascertained that his literary stock-in-trade
had been rescued from the hands of the sailors. It was not till the end
of the century that Chrysoloras renewed the knowledge of the classics:
but we may regard the austere Leontio as the chief precursor of the crowd
of later immigrants, each with a gem, or bronze, or 'a brown Greek
manuscript' for sale, and all eager to play their parts in the
restoration of learning.
Towards the end of his life Petrarch became tired of carrying his books
about. When he broke up the libraries at Parma and Vaucluse he had formed
the habit of travelling with bales of manuscripts in a long cavalcade;
but he determined afterwards to offer the collection to Venice, on
condition that it should be properly housed, and should never be sold or
divided. The offer was accepted by the Republic, and the Palazzo Molina
was assigned as a home for the poet and his books. Petrarch, however, had
other plans for himself.
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