(3) Petrarch entertained a clear notion of a living bond between himself and men of like sort in the ancient world. Greek and Roman civilization was to him no dead and buried antiquity, but its poets and thinkers lived again as if they were his neighbors. His love for the past amounted almost to an ecstatic enthusiasm. (4) Petrarch tremendously influenced his contemporaries. He was no local, or even national, figure. He was revered and respected as "the scholar of Europe." Kings vied with each other in heaping benefits upon him. The Venetian senate gave him the freedom of the city. Both the University of Paris and the municipality of Rome crowned him with laurel. [Sidenote: "Humanism" and the "Humanities"; Definitions] The admirers and disciples of Petrarch were attracted by the fresh and original human ideas of life with which such classical writers as Virgil, Horace, and Cicero overflowed. This new-found charm the scholars called humanity (_Humanitas_) and themselves they styled "humanists." Their studies, which comprised the Greek and Latin languages and literatures, and, incidentally, profane history, were the humanities or "letters" (_litterae humaniores_), and the pursuit of them was humanism. Petrarch himself was a serious Latin scholar but knew Greek quite indifferently. About the close of his century, however, Greek teachers came in considerable numbers from Constantinople and Greece across the Adriatic to Italy, and a certain Chrysoloras set up an influential Greek school at Florence. [Footnote: This was before the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453.] Thenceforth, the study of both Latin and Greek went on apace. Monasteries were searched for old manuscripts; libraries for the classics were established; many an ancient masterpiece, long lost, was now recovered and treasured as fine gold. [Footnote: It was during this time that long-lost writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Quintilian, Plautus, Lucretius, etc., were rediscovered.] [Sidenote: Humanism and Christianity] At first, humanism met with some opposition from ardent churchmen who feared that the revival of pagan literature might exert an unwholesome influence upon Christianity. But gradually the humanists came to be tolerated and even encourage, until several popes, notably Julius II and Leo X at the opening of the sixteenth century, themselves espoused the cause of humanism. The father of Leo X was the celebrated Lorenzo de' Medici, who subsidized humanists and established the great Florentine library of Greek and Latin classics; and the pope proved himself at once the patron and exemplar of the new learning: he enjoyed music and the theater, art and poetry, the masterpieces of the ancients and the creations of his humanistic contemporaries, the spiritual and the witty--life in every form. [Sidenote: Spread of Humanism]