Ross Caldwell wrote: 02 Jul 2023, 18:39

Phaeded wrote: 02 Jul 2023, 18:29 Epicureanism

Marziano used the good sense of Epicureanism in his chapter on Venus. See pages 40-41 of our edition. Since this was directed at an audience of one, and we know Filippo Maria's nature, it was obviously to call him to refined and moderate pleasures rather than the caricature of Epicurean as hedonism or other vices like greed.

Re: the wives, he and Poggio were fighting on the same level on this score. Poggio was 50 when he married 18-year old Vaggia (whose name I can of course never forget), and had to write a book defending himself for the decision. Marriage was one thing - it meant becoming part of another family - while dispensing with a girlfriend of 20+ years in Rome with fourteen of his children, if Valla can be believed, was another.

I would also tend to say that Filelfo was right about the Medicean ethic. But it wasn't just Cosimo and his family, it was the Zeitgeist. The second half of the 15th century was like our own post-war 20th century, in terms of relaxation of the "virtues of our forefathers."

PART II. The Role of Francesco Filelfo

[deleting the irrelevant - for the present subject - astrological context here]

Filelfo cannot just be classified as a Milanese humanist, perhaps aware of the Marziano deck and playing a guiding hand in the CY and PMB decks, for he was in Florence before the Anghiari ur-tarot was produced and in fact played a leading role in the factionalism that culminated in Anghiari, thereafter fleeing to Siena, Bologna and then Milan.

Before this Florentine factionalism came to a head, Filelfo was invited to lecture at the Florentine studio as a partisan-neutral scholar in 1429 by Medici and Albizzi factions alike. Bruni was instrumental in bringing him there and they shared many ideals, including that of placing Prudence at the head of the virtues. Already in the year before in a letter to one who was a fellow student of his at Padua Filelfo emphasizes a hierarchy of virtues in the way one practices virtuous living; taken straight from Siena, Wisdom [sapientia] lording over the other virtues:

For like some queen or empress who is content in herself, after she has rid herself of all cares concerning nugatory and fleeting matters, Wisdom alone is the one who, so that she may direct herself toward the light of that one supreme and everlasting good and so that she may fix her gaze on it unguarded, places Prudence in charge over all the rest of the moral virtues, and she (as though she were their provider) assigns tasks to each individual virtue according to its own particular duties. (Eps. 9 Dec. 1428 fols. 7-7v, quoted in Robins, 1991: 48)

Bruni, however, was not the problem. Filelfo took sides against the Medici favorites of Niccolo Niccoli and Ambrogio Traversari with backing from the wealthy Palla Strozzi in adapting his teachings against the Medici faction. In addition to his university duties, Filelfo was allowed to lecture on Dante in Florence’s Duomo (while Brunelleschi’s dome was being completed), and used Dante to condemn Cosimo and his party via those lectures – something that lead to a Medici assassination attempt of Filelfo in Florence in May of 1433 (the assassin’s legal fees were paid for by Cosimo’s brother, Lorenzo). The attempt left Filelfo permanently scarred for life with a gash across his left cheek. Just months later on 29 September1433, the Albizzi faction orchestrated the exile of the prominent Medici: Cosimo was banished from Florence for ten years in Padua (moving from there quickly to Venice but would have seen the same famous art works there by his countryman, Giotto), his cousin Averred to Naples and his brother Lorenzo to Venice for five years (Curt S. Gutkind, Cosimo de’Medici, Pater Patriae, 1389–1464. 1938: 77–86).

This highly confrontational period, focusing on the role that Filelfo’s use of Dante played, is well covered in Simon Gilson’s Dante and Renaissance Florence, (2005: 103f.). Providing an apt commentary and quoting Filelfo’s own incendiary lecture notes, Gilson remarks:

[Filelfo:]‘Now is the time, worthy citizens, now is the time for us, in defending the homeland, to join together not only our wealth but our very selves, until death if need be.’ “The enemy, of course, is within and Filelfo’s attack is directed at the family whom the ruling oligarchy views as threatening to assume power to the detriment of the city’s freedom and its best political traditions. Dante has, in short, become a Republican rally-cry in a manipulation of his name which is, on Filelfo’s part, an especially a cynical one. An outsider, professional rhetorician, and astringent controversialist, who is clientistically linked to the anti-Medici faction, he seizes on the opportunity to make use of Dante as a politically-charged symbol at a time of tumultuous factional rivalry (103)

To get a sense of how incendiary Filelfo’s words were, actually calling for factional violence, one can turn to a 1432 oration by a student follower, holding up Dante as the model for revolt against the Medici:

O liberator of your most ample republic…you alone incurred the infinite persecutions of men for the defense of the patria. You bore the cruel envies of many scoundrels for the defense of the patria.. Finally you were sent into exile for the defense of the patria.. And I will say something even more worthy of recollection – that Dante, finding himself in exile, always praised his patria, always exulted it, and always defended it. So you see then, most prudent citizens [prudentissimi cittadini], how many dangers Dante bore for the defense of the patria. Now what should you do, Florentine citizens? (Deborah Parker, Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, 1993: 54)

The Medici orchestrated their own return the next year in 1434, and had the Albizzi exiled and forcing Filelfo out as well by 1435, condemned with the appropriate sentence - as the mouthpiece of the Albizzi - of having his tongue cut out if he should return. Filelfo would move on to a similar position in Siena, a bitter enemy of Florence (and whom, ironically, Dante despised as a good Florentine).

The “anti-Dante” position (favouring Latin over the volgare) that was led by Niccoli ceased with Niccoli’s death. It is notable therefore that Bruni’s biography of Dante comes out in 1436, following Filelfo’s expulsion of the year before.

Indeed, it may be possible that a further motivation for the [Bruni’s] Vita is one that the Medici were themselves keen to endorse – the desire to promote Florence externally, at a time when the first attempts were being made for the city to be the venue of the Council of the Church. In this light, the Vita can be viewed as a potent example of how the evocative force of Dante’s name and its value for maximizing the ‘gloria della citta’ help to [p. 124] overturn ideologized cultural preferences that had previously militated against him. (Gilson, 2005:, 123-124).

Bruni was not alone in the Dante revival in the period after the Medici return in 1434. Matteo Palmieri's Vita civile, from the same time period right after Filelfo’s exile (released c. 1435-1440), is a work that focuses on the role that the Virtues play in guiding the active life, but ends with an attempt at emulating Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis", with Charlemagne appearing in the role of Scipio the elder and Dante in that of Scipio the younger (a near death experience on the battlefield of Campaldino with a glimpse of the afterlife). But it is Bruni’s use of Dante that is most pointedly direct in regard to Filelfo’s earlier use of Dante.

Ianziti has fully explored the implications of Bruni’s role in the rehabilitation of Dante in Florence, both for himself and for Filelfo, particularly in light of Bruni’s previously wholly positive view of Dante: “The question is especially urgent because in the Lives Bruni appears to have made several significant changes to the account of Dante’s exile contained in the History, despite his claim to be merely transferring detail from that earlier version to his biography” (Gary Ianziti, “From Praise to Prose: Leonardo Bruni's Lives of the Poets”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 10, 2005: 127-148, 135). Instead of focusing on Dante’s positive civic role model as a good soldier in the Florentine victory over Siena at Campaldino, he finds a major character flaw expressed during Dante’s exile:

The most notable change concerns the description of Dante’s behavior during the descent into Italy of the Emperor Henry VII in 1313. In the History Bruni notes Dante’s Epistle VI, written a diatribe against Florence at the moment when Henry seemed on the verge of bringing his wayward Florentine subjects to heel. Bruni describes the harsh tone of this letter not to ‘frivolity or malignity’ on Dante’s part, but to historical circumstance, which deluded the exiles into gloating over an imminent victory that subsequently failed to materialize. Things stand very differently in the Life, where Bruni reports Dante’s outburst with unmitigated disapproval: ‘Dante could not maintain his resolve to wait for favor, but rose up in proud spirit and began to speak ill of those who were ruling the land, calling them villainous and evil and menacing them with their due punishment through the power of the emperor.’ (ibid, 141-142)
[Continuing in this vein]
Exile thus looms as the central theme of the Lives. Nor is the fact of the work’s composition in 1436 without significance. Recent studies have suggested how traumatic the events of the early 1430s were for Bruni [Field’s study]. As Chancellor of the Florentine Republic, he could hardly have avoided involvement in the struggles taking place between the ruling Albizzi oligarchy and the Medici faction that opposed it. Where Bruni stood in relation to these power struggles is still debated. No doubt the situation required him to call upon his own [i[prudentia[/i] in dealing with the contending parties. As is well-known of course, the struggle led in 1433 to the exile of Cosimo de’ Medici and his leading supporters. One year later, however, Cosimo and his followers returned, and it was now the leaders of the oligarchy – many of whom were old and close friends of Bruni – who were banished, as it turned out, for good. As a result, Bruni lost a number of his closest friends, including Palla di Nofri Strozzi and later, the promising young humanist and Bruni devotee Francesco Filelfo (143)…. No doubt the ultimate lesson of 1434 was one Bruni had long been careful to practice: the lesson of [i[prudentia[/i], in this case of avoiding too obvious an attachment to one of the other of the Florentine factions. Such attachment had been the downfall of the young hothead Filelfo. One hundred and thirty-odd years earlier, it had ruined Dante. Bruni was not about to fall into the same trap. (143-144)

It is not speculative at all to flatly state that Filelfo’s brandishing of Dante as some club over the heads of the Medici has been turned against him, and the cherished virtue shared between Filelfo and Bruni, prudence, has been held up to the former as a mirror to show that he has failed to practice it.

Filelfo’s response? He too turns his pen to the theme of exile by placing his primary patron, Palla Strozzi, exiled in Padua (with the Albizzi exiled across northern Italy), in one of the earliest Platonic dialogues in the Renaissance, appropriately entitled On Exile. But the setting is back in Florence at the time of the Medici exile, and we find that even Bruni is imagined as one of the speakers….speaking ill of none other than Cosimo Medici with his own humanists (Poggio Bracciolini):

Leonardo [Bruni]: An object of wonder indeed, Poggio, as you say seeing that he is a vulgar, lowborn, miserable thief who has entrenched himself using the city’s lowest and filthiest manure – a vile and shameful sort of trade - ; who has enrolled on his side all the destitute and the beggars; who has held worthy of his intimate society whomever he knows to have mastered the arts of sprinkling poison and brandishing a dagger; and who has drawn to himself all worthless criminals, not so much by gifts as by boundless hope and his promises of base wickedness. This inexperienced and lazy band of impoverished and forsaken weaklings is easily stirred up by Cosimo de’ Medici, a man practiced in evil ways through all sorts of tainted activity….” (Filelfo,On Exile, Book 3.60-63, tr. W. Scott Blanchard, 2013: 355)

And so on, ad nauseam. One can only imagine Bruni’s response to these words placed in his mouth, still chancellor of Florence and beholden to Cosimo as the real power broker. But this came right after Anghiari had already sealed Strozzi, Albizzi, et al.’s fate. Just before that, when there was still hope of a final victory over Cosimo that flickered out at Anghiari, Filelfo was writing directly about and to Cosimo, in such poetic works as his Satyrae:

Satire 4.1 examines the contrasting figures of Palla [Strozzi] and Cosimo from an imagined point in time when Cosimo, after a brief incarceration in Florence, had just left the city to spend his eleven months in exile in Venice and Padua. Beginning as a poem addressed to Cosimo--who is addressed as "Mundus," punning by way of Latin on the Greek term kosmos--the satire takes up the Stoic theme of the wise man who rules himself and his passions, in contrast to the foolish man whose impulses are unconstrained. Despite Cosimo's use of money to win friends and influence people, the poem notes that during his time of greatest need Cosimo's friends have deserted him. Filelfo makes many of the same points in a taunting letter to Cosimo composed in 1440 on the eve of the battle of Anghiari [this is the letter I suggested get published with the oration], a letter that mocks Cosimo's "egalitarianism," that is, his demagoguery in seeking the "people's" support, even as he refuses to allow himself to be constrained by the same laws that bind the citizens of Florence. (W. Scott Blanchard, “Patrician Sages and the Humanist Cynic: Francesco Filelfo and the Ethics of World Citizenship”, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4, 2007: 1107-1169, 1141)

Given the fact that Dante was at the heart of Filelfo’s attack on the Medici party and the first known production of trionfi cards immediately follows upon Anghiari, a deck whose trumps themes are arguably the same as those 14 images painted for Bianca Visconti in Ferrara some three months after Giusti’s deck was completed for Malatesta, as well as the Milanese CY deck some ten months after Giusti’s deck, I will argue that the Dantean schema was common to all as evidenced in the surviving CY Deck’s trumps, albeit based on the Florentine “Anghiari ur-tarot”. In fact, one is almost forced to muse that it was not just Bruni’s Vita di Dante that has taken Filelfo’s weapon and used it against that humanist, even now resident in Milan and working as the mouthpiece for Visconti and the rebel Albizzi faction, but the Giusti/Anghiari deck has achieved the same objective in a pictorial format. If his old friend Bruni was behind the Anghiari deck, that must have specifically stung – but considering Bruni’s own allegiance might have been suspect at the time by the Medici (see Arthur Field, "Leonardi Bruni, Florentine traitor? Bruni, the Medici, and an Aretine conspiracy of 1437", Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1109-50) he had no option but to do their bidding. The CY, assuming it follows the same trumps as the Anghiari, did not necessarily need a humanist behind its creation but certainly Filelfo was available for any Visconti tweaking and would have understood the “Anghiari ur-tarot” all too well. He had been in Milan since 1439 and may have been looking for such a project to involve himself in order to make his mark there.

Phaeded wrote: 02 Jul 2023, 19:26 But alas we need the oration.

...was the first of the humanist popes. In his day the infamous Poggio began his half-century of office as papal writer. (p. 13)

These doors of bronze doors (Filarete's bronze doors on St. Peter's basilica) typify in a certain way the spirit of the early fifteenth century and reflect the attitude of the humanists, for they combine the traditional religious with the mythological pagan. …
The taste is deplorable, but it was the taste of an age when some, not all but too many, humanists imitated not only the Latin literary style of their classical models but their morals also.
Among the papal secretaries was a number of Latinists of that sort, who yet remained undisturbed under several popes. Typical of them was Poggio Bracciolini, a brilliant stylist, but really a pagan, who wrote scathingly of the Church and particularly of the monks and Observants as “work-shy.” He was immoral, licentious, a master of the most scurrilous invective, a member of a kind of club whose amusement was the manufacture of stories of double-meaning and even blasphemy. He was, with but slight interruption, “writer” to the popes for half-a-century till 1453. It seems unintelligible that popes of high characer – Martin V and Eugenius IV at least – should have tolerated the presence of such men, for he was not the only one in their service. They probably did not fully realise their character, but they cannot have been in complete ignorance of it. To retain them in their employment was unjustifiable, but the reason why they did so is not far to seek. Every little court in those days had its humanist secretaries; the popes had to be able to frame their replies in a style that would not draw down ridicule. The humanists of the day had a power out of all proportion to their value. Philip Maria Visconti, who knew only too well what paid, remarked that a letter of Coluccio Salutato could do more damage than a thousand Florentine cavalry.
In contrast to Poggio was Flavio Biondo, a humanist and a real Christian, who wrote not only good Latin but was a student of history.... (pp. 195-196)

Ross Caldwell wrote: 03 Jul 2023, 08:21

Phaeded wrote: 02 Jul 2023, 19:26 But alas we need the oration.

Here's a copy, at the BNF, latin 18532, folios 31r-91v
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b ... f/f67.item

Francisci Philelphi orationum Cosmum Medicem. Ad exules optimates florentinos. Liber primus.

Ross Caldwell wrote: 03 Jul 2023, 10:37 Regarding Poggio, since my earliest studies I had always taken him as an intellectual hero, and never cared to judge him ethically or in his personal moral character. He may have stolen books from German monasteries, true, but they weren't doing the monks any good. In my world, Renaissance humanism was the beginning of intellectual modernity, freedom of thought and expression, and Poggio was one of those at the forefront of it.

So it was refreshing to read another perspective, from a churchman, the Jesuit Joseph Gill (1901-1989)....

Roo Bookaroo
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Outstanding Celebration of two Pioneers of the Modern Age: Poggio Bracciolini and Lucretius
Reviewed in the United States on March 8, 2013
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"The Swerve" is a magnificent scholarly celebration of Poggio's role in recovering this famous manuscript of Lucretius.

There are only two full-scale biographies of Poggio Bracciolini. The only English one is William Shepherd's The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (1837). [See my own Amazon review.] It shows its age. Some of the language can strike us as quaint. Many turns of phrase seem too long in coming to the point and flowery, in the 19th-century rhetorical style. On another hand, some formulations are sharp and strikingly concise. Long quotations in Latin (in the notes at the bottom of pages) are shown without translation. The lack of an initial table of contents and the lack of any kind of index are particularly irksome. In addition there are some errors in the text. For instance, Pope John XXIII is mislabeled XXII, following the renumbering of Gibbon, (as John XXI skipped the XX numbering, there had been no Pope John XX).

It is helpful to check details and dates against the superior biography by the German scholar Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus, Leben Und Werke (German Edition, Berlin, 1914; Reprints: Georg Olms,1974; Nabu Press, 2011), which remains by far the most complete biography to-date, with more recent, accurate, and detailed information than William Shepherd's, but unfortunately not translated into English.

Poggio was marked by the passion of his teachers for books and writing, inspired by the first generation of Italian humanists centered around Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), who had revived interest in the forgotten masterpieces of Livy and Cicero, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406).
Poggio joined the second generation of civic humanists forming around Salutati. Resolute in glorifying "studia humanitatis" (the study of "humanities", a phrase popularized by Leonardo Bruni), learning (studium), literacy (eloquentia), and erudition (eruditio) as the chief concern of man, Poggio ridiculed the folly of popes and princes, who spent their time in wars and ecclesiastical disputes instead of reviving the lost learning of antiquity.
[See Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers , (Un. of Michigan Press, 1997).]

The literary passions of the learned Italians in the new Humanist Movement, which were to influence the future course of both Renaissance and Reformation, were epitomized in the activities and pursuits of this self-made man, who rose from the lowly position of scribe in the Roman Curia to the privileged role of apostolic secretary.
 He became devoted to the revival of classical studies amid conflicts of popes and antipopes, cardinals and councils, in all of which he played an official part as first-row witness, chronicler and (often unsolicited) critic and adviser.

After John XXIII had been elected pope (later labeled antipope) by the dissident Council of Pisa (May 1410), he was deposed by the Council of Constance in May 1415, while Gregory XII abdicated in July 1415, as agreed with the Council to clear the way to a restoration of a unified papacy.

Poggio's duties had called him to the Council of Constance in 1414, following John XXIII. After John XXIII's termination, the papal office in Italy remained vacant for two years, which gave Poggio some forced leisure time in 1416-17.

He indulged in some welcome relaxation from the papal court environment.

In the spring of 1416 (sometime between March and May), Poggio visited the baths at the German spa of Baden. In a long letter to Nicolli, he reported his discovery of a "Epicurean" lifestyle -- one year before finding Lucretius -- where men and women bathe together, barely separated, in minimum clothing: "I have related enough to give you an idea what a numerous school of Epicureans is established in Baden. I think this must be the place where the first man was created, which the Hebrews call the garden of pleasure. If pleasure can make a man happy, this place is certainly possessed of every requisite for the promotion of felicity."


Poggio also persevered in his pursuit of manuscript hunting, exploring the libraries of Swiss and Swabian abbeys. His great manuscript finds date to this period, 1415-1417. The treasures he brought to light at Reichenau, Weingarten, and above all St. Gall, retrieved from the dust and abandon many lost masterpieces of Latin literature, and supplied scholars and students with the texts of authors whose works had hitherto been accessible only in fragmented or mutilated copies.

One of Poggio's finds that has become especially famous was, in January 1417, in a German monastery (never named by Poggio, but probably Fulda), the discovery of the only manuscript of Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura" known at the time. Poggio spotted the name, which he remembered as quoted by Cicero.

This was a Latin poem of 7,400 lines, divided into six books, giving a full description of the world as viewed by the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. It has been translated as "On the Nature of the Universe" (Oxford World's Classics).

The manuscript found by Poggio was not even preserved, but he sent the copy he had ordered to Niccolo Niccoli, who made a transcription in his beautiful book hand (the creator of italic script), which became the model for the more than fifty other copies circulating at the time. Poggio complained that Niccoli didn't return his original copy for 14 years! Later two 9th-century manuscripts were discovered, the O ("Oblongus", ca. 825) and Q ("Quadratus") codices, now kept at Leiden University. The book was first printed in 1473.

This miraculous discovery is the subject of Greenblatt's magnificent book "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" (Sept. 2011). The book details the sensational discovery of the old Lucretius manuscript by Poggio. It describes the strange materialistic Epicurean physics based on the atomism of Democritus -- the world is made only of atoms (irreducible, indestructible, non-divisibles), "the seeds of things", forming objects through the random collision due to the clinamen, the "swerve" -- and its ethics. Greenblatt analyzes the poem's subsequent impact on the development of the Renaissance, the Reformation and modern science.

The book won the 2011 National Book Award for Non-fiction, and the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. It was well received by the public, although many critics contended that Greenblatt's enthusiasm sounded hyperbolic, and doubted that the Lucretius manuscript had any immediate influence on the development of the European Weltanschauung.
[See for instance David Quint's review, "Humanism as Revolution", (The New Republic, Sept. 28, 2011), and Anthony Grafton's "The Most Charming Pagan", (The New York Review of Books, Dec. 8, 2011)]

Anthony Grafton remarked: The discovery can be seen as a miracle, since monks, "athletes of holiness" lived the opposite of Epicurus's model life. "The monasteries, in Greenblatt's account--a curious blend of 'Gibbonian irony and Sadean relish' --were not quiet, dignified centers for the performance of the liturgy and the copying of texts but 'theaters of pain.' Their inmates vied to torment themselves more effectively than their rivals, wielding everything from whips and chains to iron crosses fixed with nails into their bodies. In these houses of self-punishment, classical texts naturally aroused relatively little interest, and pleas for the pursuit of pleasure were stigmatized as especially evil. Only a swerve or two--the fact that a copy survived in a library that Poggio happened to explore--saved 'On the Nature of Things' from the extinction suffered by most of Epicurus' own works." However, concludes Grafton, "We never quite learn, in the end, how the world became modern...[But Greenblatt] has brought Lucretius a good many new readers, to judge from the fact that A.E. Stallings's wonderful Penguin translation of the poem is now Amazon's best-selling title under Poetry."

This discovery was enhanced by the translation from Greek into Latin of "The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius" (ca. 1430), including three full letters by Epicurus. This convergence introduced the philosophy of Epicurus to the mindset of the Italian humanists, and was noted essentially by philosophers and literary circles for its views on ethics and religion (understood in its original sense as the binding down power of beliefs) -- its proclaimed indifference of gods to human affairs, who didn't create the world either; its condemnation of superstitions; its ridiculing of the fear of death since the soul dies with the body; its dispelling the notion of founding morality on an illusory afterlife and its imagined terrors -- and its advocation of the pursuit of beauty and pleasure (happiness) and the avoidance of pain. In fact, the new philosophy was seen as liberating thinking from the Christian worldview of asceticism and preoccupation with angels and demons, and indulging the pleasure of knowledge, the natural curiosity for the workings of the real world and history.
[See the fundamental article by David Sedley, "Lucretius", (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, SEP, Aug. 2008) and Ronald G. Witt, The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (Cambridge Un. Press, March 2012)]


Additional support came from a dialogue by Lorenzo Valla, "De Voluptate" ("On Pleasure", 1431) revised as "De Vero Bono" ("On the True Good", 1433), where Valla construed Epicurean "pleasure" as a component of Christian charity and beatitude, rejecting the classical association with Stoic virtue.
[See the excellent article by Lodi Nauta, "Lorenzo Valla", (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, SEP, 2009)]

The recovery of Lucretius's iconoclastic poem had to face the hostility of the Catholic Church. Jerome had already "reported" that Lucretius had died in madness from a "love philter". "The poet Titus Lucretius was born. Later he was turned mad by a love potion, but in the intervals in between the madness he composed some books, which Cicero afterwards edited. He killed himself when he was 44 years old." In Chronological Tables, (ed. A. Schoene, 171st Olympiad 96-93 BC, 171.3).
Epicurus's philosophy was labeled as "atheism" by the Catholic Church, which tried to suppress Lucretius's book.

After teaching Epicurean philosophy was banned in Florence in 1513, Machiavelli (1469-1527) made his own copy by hand, and 16th-century scholars used Lucretius covertly, his book fuelling an underground counterculture opposed to the medieval ideas of the "gothic" Dark Age. This was the key period of Italian humanists launching the recovery of reason and liberation from faith and superstition through reconnecting with the Greco-Roman texts, as well described by John Addington Symonds in Renaissance in Italy, Volume 2 (7 vol., 1875-86), Voltaire and David Hume. Thomas More made the pursuit of pleasure the focal point of his Utopia (1516). Lucretius was repeatedly quoted by Montaigne in his Essays (1580).
[See Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History) . (Harvard Un. Press, 2010)
And Frederick Krantz, "Between Bruni and Machiavelli: History, Law, and Historicism in Poggio Bracciolini", in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge Un. Press, 1987), p. 119-152.]

This heralded the dramatic change of world focus that Greenblatt calls "the swerve" in Western civilization. 
Greenblatt quotes one of Epicurus's disciples: Living with pleasure is impossible "without living prudently and honorably and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic."
This basic philosophy of pleasure and the need for friends, (later termed "pursuit of happiness"), was the key to Epicurus.

It was grotesquely caricatured by Christian critics as unrestricted sensual indulgence. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), burnt at the stake as a "heretic" by the Inquisition (1600) had incorporated some of Lucretius's ideas into his own cosmology and pantheism.
[See Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla , (transl. Martha King, Duke Un. Press, 2003).]

Fuller recognition of Lucretius's physics -- its theory of atoms and the "swerve" -- by modern physicists did not happen until at least the 17th century with the atomism of Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), while Isaac Newton (1642-1727) also declared his support for atomism.
Lucretius's modern-sounding views on evolution (of geology, nature, and primitive human society) were not acknowledged by scientists until the 18th century, when Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Charles's grandfather, announced ideas of evolution in his poems "The Loves of the Plants" (1789) and "The Temple of Nature" (1803) . Thomas Jefferson owned eight editions of De Natura Rerum.
[See, Gordon Lindsay Campbell, "Lucretius on Creation & Evolution", (Oxford Un. Press, 2003)]

Whoever has read Lucretius cannot forget his description of the three methods of primitive man's love-making: woman's own desire, man's brutal force, or seduction with "pira lecta" (choice pears).

"Et Venus in silvis jungebat corpora amantum;
conciliabat enim vel mutua quamque cupido
vel violenta viri atque inpensa libido
ver pretium, glandes atque arbita vel pira lecta.
(Book V, 962-965)

And Venus used to join the bodies of lovers;
for either common desire attracted each woman
or the violent force of a man and his excessive lust
or a bribe, acorns and arbute-berries or choice pears.

[See Robert D. Brown, "Lucretius on Love and Sex", (Brill, 1987), in the series "Columbia Un. Studies in the Classical Tradition"]. The whole world of courtship in New York City remains driven by the sophisticated use of "pira lecta".


Ancient Greek materialist physics was the subject of Karl Marx's Ph.D. thesis. Karl Marx started working on the materialism and atheism of the Greek atomists under the guidance of Bruno Bauer at Bonn University. Marx presented his thesis, "The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature" to the more liberal Un. of Jena, which granted him his Ph.D. in April 1841. When Bauer was expelled, on express order of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, from his position as lecturer in theology in the spring of 1842 for his revolutionary ideas on the New Testament writings, Marx abandoned any hopes for an academic career.
Both Harvard philosopher George Santayana and French philosopher Henri Bergson were strongly influenced by Lucretius's ideas of evolution and ethics.

Greenblatt has paid an outstanding homage to Lucretius and Poggio Bracciolini, two great figures of the Western World's emancipation from the Middle Ages' obscurantist Christian worldview into a modern vision of humanism -- based on the retrieval of Greco-Roman texts, literacy, education, experimental knowledge, and centered on human aspirations -- bringing our horizon back from the celestial heaven of angels and demons down to earth, and the reality of what the ancient Greeks called polis, nature and our cosmos.

There are only two full-scale biographies of Poggio Bracciolini. The only English one is William Shepherd's The Life of Poggio Bracciolini (1837).

It is helpful to check details and dates against the superior biography by the German scholar Ernst Walser, Poggius Florentinus, Leben Und Werke (German Edition, Berlin, 1914; Reprints: Georg Olms,1974; Nabu Press, 2011), which remains by far the most complete biography to-date, with more recent, accurate, and detailed information than William Shepherd's, but unfortunately not translated into English.

The Council of Florence
Joseph Gill
CUP Archive
https://books.google.de/books?id=8RE9AA ... navlinks_s

Phaeded wrote: 03 Jul 2023, 20:44
Gill, who is indispensable for the history of the Church Union, looks about as biased as Filelfo, but for church-centric reasons. I wouldn't read to much into Gill, although Poggio probably lent an attribute into the Momus figure.

Joseph Gill (September 8, 1901 – October 15, 1989) was a British Jesuit, theologian, church historian and Byzantine scholar.

Joseph Gill graduated from Jesuit-run Leeds Catholic College. In 1918 he entered the Society of Jesus. From 1920 he devoted himself to improving his knowledge of ancient Greek, and he enrolled at London University. From 1923 to 1926 he completed the three-year philosophy course of the Jesuits, spending the third year at the Gregoriana in Rome. He graduated with a Ph.D. From 1929 to 1933 he studied theology. In 1934 he was appointed to the Pontifical Oriental Institute. However, he spent the years up to 1936 in Athens, where he taught himself both the Dimotiki and the Katharevousa variants of Modern Greek. After a brief stay at the Oriental Institute, he taught Latin and Greek at Bachelor level in London from 1936. Back at the Pontifical Oriental Institute, he began teaching the Greek language in 1938. In 1940, however, the Superior General sent him to England, where he was to spread news about the persecution of the Catholic Church in Nazi Germany. A short time later he worked as a chaplain in the Royal Air Force in various theaters of war. In 1946 he was demobilized and returned to the Pontifical Oriental Institute, where he resumed his scientific career.

Gill devoted himself to the project initiated by Georg Hofmann of a critical edition of the acts of the Council of Florence, which he published from 1953 onwards. He also dealt with issues of edition in his London dissertation of 1948. His history of the Council of Florence, which he published in 1959, was unexpectedly successful. Further research into various aspects of the Council found expression in about thirty essays and two monographs. In Rome, Gill taught Byzantine Church History and Anglican Theology. He also taught in England. From 1948 he was secretary and from 1962 to 1967 rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute. At times he was editor of the Orientalia Christiana Periodica. In 1967 he handed over his duties to a younger colleague and took a sabbatical in Southern Rhodesia, where he also taught.

From 1969 to 1980 Gill was a member of Campion Hall, a permanent private hall at the University of Oxford, and taught in its modern history department. Here he devoted himself primarily to the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church in the Byzantine Empire. He also published a monograph on this subject.

In 1980 he retired, which he spent in Harborne, Birmingham, where he taught Greek to novices.