Angelo Poliziano was born in 1454. His name, so famous in Italian literature, is a Latinised version of his birthplace, Montepulciano. His father, Benedetto Ambrogini, was a man of some consequence, but of small means, who fell a victim to the enmity of private foes among his fellow-citizens, leaving his widow and five young children almost wholly unprovided for.[324] This accounts for the obscurity that long enveloped the history of Poliziano's childhood, and also for the doubts expressed about the surname of his family. At the age of ten he came to study in the University of Florence, where he profited by the teaching of Landino, Argyropoulos, Andronicos Kallistos, and Ficino. The precocity of his genius displayed itself in Latin poems and Greek epigrams composed while he was yet a boy. At thirteen years of age he published Latin letters; at seventeen he distributed Greek poems among the learned men of Florence; at eighteen he edited Catullus, with the boast that he had shown more zeal than any other student in the correction and illustration of the ancients. As early as the year 1470 he had not only conceived the ambitious determination to translate Homer into Latin verse, but had already begun upon the second Iliad. The first book was known to scholars in Marsuppini's Latin version. Poliziano carried his own translation as far as the end of the fifth book, gaining for himself the proud title of _Homericus juvenis_; further than this, for reasons unexplained, he never advanced, so that the last wish of Nicholas V., the chief desire of fifteenth-century scholarship--a Latin Iliad in hexameters--remained still unaccomplished. [Footnote 324: See Carducci, preface to _Le Stanze_, Florence, 1863, and Isidoro del Lungo in _Arch. Stor._ series iii. vol. ii.]