Although all these developments occurred in the Greek East, Hellenic studies were all but extinct in the Latin West during the time period discussed above. The one exception was southern Italy and Sicily, which had had a large percentage of Greek-speaking inhabitants since the first arrival of the Greek colonists in the eighth century b. c.e. This eastern orientation was reaffirmed in the sixth century c. e. when Emperor Justinian, with the help of his chief general Belisarius, reconquered this territory for the vestigial eastern Roman Empire. Hellenism then remained common in southern Italy and Sicily throughout the Middle Ages. When Robert Guiscard of Normandy conquered Sicily in 1059, he ushered in a cosmopolitan age featuring greater contacts with the Muslim populations of Spain and northern Africa, where there was already a well-entrenched study of Greek texts.
Very significant in the Medieval study of ancient Greece was the work of Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania in southern Italy. Toward the end of his life (d. 1164), he oversaw a large-scale attempt to make Greek writings accessible to the West. He himself translated Plato's Phaedo and Meno, as well as some of Aristotle's medical texts, into Latin. Others working under him translated Euclid's Geometry, Hero's Pneumatica (a compendium of mechanical gadgets), the works of Proklus, and Ptolemy's O Magiste, which ultimately came to be known by the Arabic rendering of its title, Almagest (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 110, 119-120).
In this same century, Arabic commentaries on Aristotle written by Avicenna and Averroes were translated into Latin and passed through Spain for study in Europe. But in spite of this apparent new Western zeal for ancient Greek texts, access to the language still proved difficult, and Greek studies were limited either to a few Hellenic enthusiasts or to the study of Latin translations.
The study of ancient Greece was truly reborn in the West during the Renaissance. The most important individual in this respect was Manuel Chrysoloras, a Greek scholar who came to Florence in 1397 at the invitation of Coluccio
Salutati, humanist scholar and chancellor of Florence, and stayed three years before moving to Pavia, where he remained until about 1403. During the period when he lived in Florence and then in Pavia, he lectured on Greek language and Greek topics; he eventually wrote the Erotemata, the first standard Greek language textbook in the West. The book went to press in 1471, and it served as the Greek primer for no less illustrious men than the Dutch scholar Erasmus (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 147).
Greek studies gained pace in the fifteenth century. At first there were some holdovers from the Middle Ages, notably the interest in translating Greek texts into Latin for study. This especially occurred under the enthusiastic eye of Pope Nicholas V (1447-1455) who commissioned translations of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastos, Ptolemy, and Strabo (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 148).
But soon the works of the ancient Greeks were to receive widespread appreciation in their own language. This was primarily due to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Countless Greek refugees arrived in western Europe, especially in Italy, during the latter half of the fifteenth century, many of whom settled in the Latin West as teachers and translators of ancient Greek. For the first time in centuries, Greek teachers were readily available in the West.
Two men who made use of this turn of events were Cardinal Bessarion of Constantinople (1403-1472) and Angelo Politian of Montepulciano (14541494). The former was one of the early refugees from the dying remnants of the eastern Roman Empire. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 incited Bessarion to collect many Greek texts from the East before they were destroyed in war. In 1468, he donated his books to the city of Venice, to be of use to the city and its Greek refugees.
The scholar Politian was exceedingly well versed in the Greek language, allowing him to compose in that language as well as to translate and publish documents from the classical world. His scholarship was such that his name still appears in the bibliographies of modern textual editions, and he is most significant for his groundbreaking work in the field of Hellenistic poetry. Politian's use of the work of Callimachus to emend a passage from the author Catullus (who wrote in Latin) was one of the earliest steps in the recognition of the influence of Greek on classical Roman literature (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 154).
During the fifteenth century, then, the groundwork had been established for the study of ancient Greece. The great Humanists—from Petrarch to Poggio to Erasmus—had collected, copied, and commented upon all of the classical texts from which we work today. Their work was facilitated by the rise and spread of the printing press in the middle of the fifteenth century, and the following 150 years saw the rise of several prestigious printing families who dedicated themselves to the printing of Greek texts. Aldus Manutius, patriarch of the Aldus publishing house, hired Marcus Musurus of Crete to edit and help publish Greek texts in their original language. Between the years 1498 and 1512, the Aldine press in Italy produced editions of Herodotus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. Meanwhile, to the north, in
Basle, Johan Froben of the Froben publishing house was collaborating with Erasmus to publish Greek texts of the Bible and other church doctrine.
The first Greek book published in France came to light in 1507, and during the sixteenth century the Estienne family became the premier publishers of classical Greek texts. The dynasty's founding father, Robert Estienne, was later obliged to leave France for Switzerland because of his Protestant views. As he continued publishing in Geneva, his son Henri Estienne joined forces with Pier Vittori (the foremost Hellenist of his day) to continue the publication of Greek texts in France. Henri's most important contribution to the spread of Hellenism in western Europe was the publication of his Thesaurus Linguae Graecae in 1572. A small series of Greek classics Estienne prepared for the dauphin (the heir to the throne) was the first serial collection of classical texts published in Europe.
The corpus of Greek texts that the modern student now has to work with was mostly complete by the seventeenth century, augmented here and there by the occasional most fortunate discovery. In 1777, for example, the one surviving text of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter was discovered in Moscow. Since 1788, various papyri have come to light in Egypt, providing original documents for the study of the ancient world. But in modern times, the most important advances in the study of ancient Greece have been made in the field of archaeology.
World History
