privilege of listening to the men who kept alive the traditions of the university’s best days, Argyropulos and Andronikos Kallistos, Landino and Ficino. That polite literature attracted him more than philosophical lectures he declares himself, saying that he had done with philosophy as dogs with the Nile: one drink, and then away! ‘Nature and youth drew me to Homer, and with all the zeal and industry of which I was capable I set myself to translate him into Latin verse.’ In one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, of his Latin poems, the distichs addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici in commendation of his master Kallistos, he sets forth how the latter was reading the Trojan war in Argive verse. In this poem he alludes to the time when he hopes to sing the deeds of Lorenzo, then limited to youthful exercises, and his adroit conduct in the matter of the Pitti conspiracy, which Poliziano commemorates in a later elegy.[31] It must have been about 1470 that he began to translate the ‘Iliad.’ Carlo Marsuppini had translated the first book; Angelo began with the second. It was a great undertaking for a young man. A Latin Homer had been the _in votis_ up to that time; and now the work was begun by one who had but just entered the world and was still unknown, but who displayed an ease and grace of diction, melodiousness and richness of versification, that caused general surprise. This work and the admiration it excited opened the Medicean house to the young poet. It was probably Ficino who recommended the ‘Homeric youth’ to Lorenzo. The young head of the house, who had only become independent the year before, took him up; and whatever changes outward and inward occurred in Lorenzo’s life, the man who owed his brilliant endowments to Heaven, and their early and happy recognition to him kept faithful; he stood beside his patron’s death-bed and ere long followed him to the tomb. The dedication of the second book contains praises of the generous protector—praises lavish according to custom, but not untrue if the custom and the glory with which the young ruler of Florence had surrounded himself be taken into consideration.[32] A troop of panegyrists followed, Marsilio Ficino at their head. There was no lack of exaggeration. The head of the Platonists raised a flattering doubt whether any one could discover if the Greek or the Latin text of this Iliad was the original; another asked who had the greatest merit, he who had given occasion for the undertaking, or he who had accomplished it. Meanwhile the translator went on with his work; and when, two years after the completion of the second book, he presented the third to his patron, he expressed a hope that after finishing the whole he might begin an epic poem on a subject taken from Lorenzo’s own life, the war of Volterra. The ‘Iliad’ was never finished, the epic was never written. Lorenzo, who knew the world much better than did Angelo, probably objected to the glorification of an expedition of questionable