Boccaccio, like Petrarch, wrote much in Latin, chief among such writings being the historical or biographical compilations on Illustrious Women and the Vicissitudes of Great Men, and especially his Genealogy of the Gods, which for one hundred years and more became the standard hand-book of mythology. In Italian poetry he was far more voluminous than Petrarch. Among the best known of his poems are the Vision of Love; Filostrato, which tells the story of Troilus and Cressida, afterwards imitated by Chaucer and Shakespeare; and the Theseid, imitated by Chaucer in his Knight's Tale. His Ninfale Fiesolana describes the beautiful suburbs of Florence, while his pastoral poem, Ameto, is the first example of that popular branch of poetry, which found its highest development in Sannazaro's Arcadia, Tasso's Aminta, and Guarini's Pastor Fido. All these, however, are now almost forgotten. The one book by which Boccaccio is known to-day, not only in Italy, but the world over, is his Decameron, a collection of short stories in prose. In this book he becomes epoch-making in a double sense, for it begins both Italian prose and the modern novel. The name of the book is composed of two Greek words, meaning "ten days," and is explained by the fact that there are one hundred stories in all, told ten at a time, on ten successive days. Neither the various stories themselves nor the idea of uniting them in a framework is original with Boccaccio. The latter device was especially popular in the Orient, and is illustrated in the Seven Wise Men, so vastly popular in the Middle Ages. Chaucer imitated Boccaccio in this respect in his Canterbury Tales. The sources of the stories in the Decameron are various. Such tales were among the most popular kinds of literature of the times, as may be seen in the Fabliaux in France and the well-known collections, the Novellino and Cento Novelle, in Italy. Boccaccio gathers them from all sides and adds many he had heard told orally, especially anecdotes of his contemporaries. All these are changed, however, by the alchemy of his own genius, and become original in style, in delineation of character, and in local color. The framework of the Decameron is as follows: During the terrible pestilence which raged in Europe in 1348, a famous description of which is given in the opening chapter of the book, seven young ladies and three young men meet in one of the churches at Florence and agree to forsake the plague-stricken city, retire to their villas in the country and try to forget in pleasant converse the terrors that surround them. The plan is carried out. Each day a leader is chosen, whom all must obey. After breakfast they betake themselves to the garden, and here on green lawns covered with flowers, beneath shady trees and beside clear-running streams, they dance, play, and sing; and then, comfortably seated on the soft grass, they pass the hours away in cheerful conversation and story-telling.