[Footnote 49: Petrarch's letter to Ugone di San Severino, _Epist. Rer. Sen._ lib. xi. 9, p. 887, deserves to be read, since it proves that Italian scholars despaired at this time of gaining Greek learning from Constantinople. They were rather inclined to seek it in Calabria. 'Græciam, ut olim ditissimam, sic nunc omnis longe inopem disciplinæ ... quod desperat apud Græcos, non diffidit apud Calabros inveniri posse.'] [Footnote 50: _De Gen. Deor._ xv. 6, 7.] [Footnote 51: _Comento sopra Dante, Opp. Volg._ vol. x. p. 127. After allowing for the difficulty of writing Greek, pronounced by an Italian, in Italian letters, and also for the errors of the copyist and printer, it is clear that a Greek scholar who thought Melpomene was one 'who gives fixity to meditation,' Thalia one 'who plants the capacity of growth,' Polyhymnia she 'who strengthens and expands memory,' Erato 'the discoverer of similarity,' and Terpsichore 'delightful instruction,' was on a comically wrong track.] Such was the bathos reached by erudition in Byzantium. Yet Boccaccio made what use he could of his contemptible materials. At the dictation of Leontius he wrote out the 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' in Latin; and this was the first translation made of Homer for modern readers. The manuscript, despatched to Petrarch, was, as we have seen already, greeted with enthusiasm.[52] This moment in the history of scholarship is so memorable that I may be excused for borrowing Baldelli's extract from an ancient copy of Boccaccio's autograph.[53] Lycaon addresses his last prayer to Achilles:-- Genu deprecor te Achilles: tu autem venerare et me miserere. Vada Servus. Jove genite venerabilis. Penes enim te primo gustavi Cereris farinam, Die illo, quando me cepisti in bene facto viridario; Et me transtulisti procul ferens patreque amicisque Lemnon ad gloriosam. Hecatombium autem honorem inveni, Nunc autem læsus ter tot ferens. Dies autem mihi est Hæc duodecima, quando ad Ilion veni Multa passus. Nunc iterum me in tuis manibus posuit Fatum destructibile. Debeo odio esse Jovi patri, Qui me tibi iterum dedit, medio cuique, me mater Genuit Lathoi, filia Altai senis. [Footnote 52: See above, p. 53, note 4.] [Footnote 53: _Vita del Boccaccio_, p. 264. The autograph was probably burned with other books of Boccaccio, and some of the unintelligible passages in the above quotation may be due to the ignorance of the copyist.] Only by keeping firmly in mind that such men as Petrarch and Boccaccio, the two chief masters of Italian literature, prized this wretched stuff as an inestimable treasure, can we justly conceive how utterly Greek had been lost, and what an effort it required to restore it to the modern world.