Exil und Heimatferne in der Literatur des Humanismus von Petrarca bis zum Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts
is linked to virtue.
*
In the third book, when discussing the differences between voluntary and involuntary action – drawing for the greater part on Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics and on the Magna Moralia – Palla Strozzi has just argued that “Since we have now completed – not so much carefully as briefly – one of the three parts in one of which we classed the voluntary (appetency, itself being tripartite), two parts remain, choice and reasoning: let us briefly skim over these lest we annoy our friend Poggio with this prolix discourse of ours” (3, 125).10 Poggio at once quips that he is done with this hair-splitting, since he is hungry and running to a banquet “both prolix and elegant is in readiness; that is where all my reasoning and choice reside” (3, 126). Rinaldo replies that if Poggio were like Socrates rather than Epicurus, he “would have judged this learned and wise discourse of our friend Palla far preferable to all the rest of your delicacies. But you define everything by the standard of pleasure – not that of the mind, which perhaps even Epicurus recognised, but rather that of the body, by which the senses, gently soothed and as it were lulled to sleep, are customarily moved.” When Poggio is gone, Leonardo Bruni states that he would love to hear Palla continue his explanations, “in particular the part where you expounded for us doctrines from the outstanding philosophical schools” (3, 127), on which, so he confesses, he did not expect Palla to deliver such a detailed and learned discourse. Palla replies with an anecdote (3, 129–130):
At noli mirari, Leonarde. Num es oblitus quod dicere solitum tradunt Philolaum: esse quosdam sermones nobis meliores? Non enim de prophetis et Sibyllis hominibusque afflatis modo intelligi id arbitror oportere, sed de iis omnibus qui quemadmodum ego apud vos gravissimos eruditissimosque viros loquuntur aliquid supra se. Sermo hic profecto meus non est, sed maximi illius sapientissimique viri, quo tu et ego doctore olim amicoque usi sumus, Manuelis Chrysolorae, cuius neptem Theodoram, modestam et pudicam adolescentulam, Iohannis Chrysolorae filiam, Franciscus Philelfus his noster uxorem habet. Cum enim per id temporis quo illustris ille summusque philosophus Graecam sapientiam Florentiae doceret, et nostra haec urbs et universa prope Tuscia pestilentiali morbo laboraret, institui mutandi aeris gratia ruri tantisper agere, donec illa caeli inclaementia mitior Florentiae redderetur. Itaque invitatus a me Manuel, ut erat vir omni humanitate humanior, rus una mecum profectus est, ubi quandiu Florentiam pernicies illa vexavit, mansit assidue. Nam ruri quod est mihi in Casentino, erat aer saluberrimus.
(Do not be surprised, Leonardo. Have you forgotten what Philolaus is reported to have said: some discourses are better than we are? I think this must be understood not only about prophets and Sibyls and inspired men, but also about all those who say something over their heads, as I just did in your presence, you who are the most serious and erudite of men. You see, this discourse is not mine but that of a very great and wise man whom you and I once had as a teacher and a friend, Manuel Chrysoloras, whose grandniece Theodora, a modest and chaste young woman, daughter of John Chrysoloras, our friend Francesco Filelfo here has as his wife. For at the time when that distinguished and supreme philosopher was teaching Greek wisdom in Florence, and this city of ours and practically all Tuscany was suffering from plague, I decided for the sake of a change of air to spend time in the countryside until the rigors of the climate softened in Florence. Therefore, on my invitation, Manuel, being a man more humane than all humanity, set out with me for the countryside, where he remained constantly for as long as the plague was attacking Florence, for the air was very salubrious at my estate in the Casentino).
Reading the framing of this anecdote about Manuel Chrysoloras,11 one recalls Giovanni Boccaccio’s frame story about the plague raging in Florence in 1348, fifty years before Chrysoloras’ sojourn in the city, and about the allegra brigata leaving town and escaping the lethal disease in order to indulge in some storytelling.12 So far scholarship has not, to my knowledge, pointed to any correspondences between Filelfo and Boccaccio, but alongside this narrative element, I believe some more parallels can be drawn. First of all, in the initial setting of his Commentationes in the first book, Filelfo points out that (1, 6):
Quoniam igitur aliquando cum Florentiae agerem, evenit ut quorundam clarissimorum et optimorum civium et eorundem gravitate doctrinaque praestantium de exilio commentationi disputationique familiariter interessem, quae decem deinceps continuis diebus ab illis dicta eleganter, erudite, divinitus audieram, in decem itidem libros contuli.
(Once when I was living in Florence, I happened to be present at a friendly discussion and debate among some of the finest and most distinguished citizens, who were likewise among the most excellent in authority and learning; the topic was exile. So I later set down in ten books what was said eloquently, learnedly, and with inspiration by these men on ten successive days).
The number of interlocutors staged in the three books of Commentationes that Filelfo in the end actually wrote are only nine, but while not participating in the conversations as he recorded them, Filelfo himself may be considered the one who completed the company to ten, which also happens to be the number of speakers during the ten-day long symposium we see related in Boccaccio’s Decameron.
Filelfo’s deliberate interest for significant numerical choices and patterns can be determined beyond all doubt: his collection of satires, for example, consists of ten books of ten satires each – all of them running to exactly one hundred verses in length. And all completed books of his Sphortias, an epic poem about the conquering of Milan by Francesco Sforza, run to exactly 800 verses, while Filelfo initially wanted the epic poem to comprise twenty-four books, matching Homer’s canonical number of books in both the Iliad and Odyssey.
It is a legitimate question, though, whether it would have been plausible for Filelfo to practice imitation of Boccaccio in his oeuvre. A striking aspect of Filelfo’s prolific writings is indeed that he hardly ever dwells on any of the tre corone. For sure, this silence should not be interpreted as an implicitly negative attitude, since Filelfo was allegedly the first humanist who ever lectured on Dante and Petrarch.13 Still, the passages in his Latin writings where he explicitly mentions one of the three canonical vernacular authors are very few. He is even rather dismissive of his efforts in this respect: in a letter sent to Giovanni Andrea Bussi on 13 February 1471 (PhE·33.05),14 Filelfo states that he cannot comply with Bussi’s wish to obtain a copy of Filelfo’s commentary on Petrarch’s poems, which he once produced at the request of Filippo Maria Visconti, since he does not have the text at hand (anymore), nor does he know where it is (Petis tu quidem quae quondam ducis Philippi iussu in Ethruscas Francisci Petrarcae delicias commentati sumus. Ea mihi non sunt, neque cui sint novi.).
Interestingly, however, in one of his earliest satires (1, 5), written probably in 1436, shortly after his Florentine period, Filelfo attacks Niccoli – Utis, as he is nicknamed, ‘Nobody’ – who allegedly dismisses Chrysoloras, Dante and Petrarcha (Additur huic dius Dantes suavisque Petrarca, 38), Leonardo Bruni, Antonio Beccadelli (Panormita), Guarino, Cencio de’ Rustici, Antonio Loschi, Flavio Biondo, Giovanni Aurispa and Giannozzo Manetti, while he usually only praises people of his own kind, “pederasts and drunks” (cinaedos / ac madidos, 46b–47a), such as Poggio Bracciolini and Carlo Marsuppini. Furthermore, so Filelfo claims, Niccoli does not refrain from criticizing major classical writers like Ovid, Statius, Lucan and Virgil and even Cicero himself.15
Within the context of this grotesque attack on Niccolò Niccoli, perhaps the über-classicist of his era, it may seem remarkable that Dante and Petrarch are placed on the same level as both the founding fathers of the humanism movement and the Latin classics, yet we should bear in mind that Dante and Petrarch were Latin writers as well. However, apart from the above-mentioned tepid remark about Filelfo’s previous occasional interest in Petrarch, the topic of the opposition between ancients and moderns, between Latin and volgare, that is, the central issue of Leonardo Bruni’s important Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum,16 seems absent from Filelfo’s writings. In Filelfo’s mind that issue was not really an issue: for him it was crystal clear that Latin was the only language and literature that mattered. Although he considered Tuscan the superior version of the volgare, he asserted that the volgare was to be used only in casual communication that was not to be transmitted to the posteri. A more relevant distinctive