THE REVIVAL OF GREEK IN THE WEST. With the new interest in Latin literature it was but natural that a revival of the study of Greek should follow. While a knowledge of Greek had not absolutely died out in the West during the Middle Ages, there were very few scholars who knew anything about it, and none who could read it. [10] It was natural, too, that the revival of it should come first in Italy. Southern Italy (_Magna Graecia_) had remained under the Eastern Empire and Greek until its conquest by the Normans (1041-71), and to southern Italy a few Greek monks had from time to time migrated. With southern Italy, though, papal Italy and the western Christian world seem to have had little contact. In 1339, and again in 1342, a Greek monk from southern Italy visited the Pope, coming as an ambassador from Constantinople, and from him Petrarch learned the Greek alphabet. In 1353 another envoy brought Petrarch a copy of Homer. This he could not read, but in time (1367) a poor translation into Latin was effected. Boccaccio studied Greek, being the first western scholar to read Homer in the original. Near the end of the fourteenth century it became known in Florence that Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1350-1415), a Byzantine of noble birth, a teacher of rhetoric and philosophy at Constantinople, and the most accomplished Greek scholar of his age, had arrived in Venice as an envoy from the Eastern Emperor. Florentine scholars visited him, and on his return accompanied him to Constantinople to learn Greek. In 1396 Chrysoloras was invited by Florence to accept an appointment, in the university there, to the first chair of Greek letters in the West, and accepted. From 1396 to 1400 he taught Greek in the rich and stately city of Florence, at that time the intellectual and artistic center of Christendom. For a few years, beginning in 1402, he also taught Greek at the University of Pavia. He had earlier written a _Catechism of Greek Grammar_, and at Pavia he began a literal rendering of Plato's _Republic_ into Latin. From his visit dates the enthusiasm for the study of Greek in the West. OTHER GREEK SCHOLARS ARRIVE IN ITALY. Chrysoloras returned to Constantinople for a time, in 1403, and Guarino of Verona, who had been one of his pupils, accompanied him and spent five years there as a member of his household. When he returned to Italy he brought with him about fifty manuscripts, and before his death he had translated a number of them into Latin. He also prepared a Greek grammar which superseded that of Chrysoloras. In 1412 he was elected to the chair at Florence formerly held by Chrysoloras, and later he established an important school at Ferrara, based largely on instruction in the Latin and Greek classics, which will be referred to again in the next chapter.