Elias Petrou
Assistant Professor; Classics Librarian
In a letter to his students from Constantinople in mid. 15th c., the byzantine teacher and later Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios would admit that “…the generations of Italians are taking care of our Language now, and they attribute the greatest honors to the ones who speak Greek. On the contrary, we (the Greeks in Constantinople) do not understand our Language, and now the Greeks, who are living among the Italians, are better than the ones who live here….” (Scholarios IV, p. 405). In a few words, Scholarios described the result of a thriving intellectual process between the Italian States and the Byzantine Empire, having as center the “transportation” of Greek Classical Literature from the East to the West. However, until the end of the 14th c., Greek Language, texts, and authors were almost unknown in western Europe, with very few exceptions. What changed in fifty years, making the western intellectual circles study Greek? How the West, and especially Italy, (re)discover the classical Greek works, and which methods and materials were used to study them? Who were the protagonists of this intellectual process, and what was their fate?
This paper will present the educational journey of various Italian Students who came to byzantine Constantinople in the first half of the 15th c. with a single purpose; to learn Greek. From the reasons of their arrival to the modified-for-their-needs teaching curriculum and their return to the West with a significant number of codices, these foreign scholars salvaged Greek Classical Literature from possible oblivion. They prepared the western intellectual scene to accept the numerous byzantine émigrés, while at the same time, their Greek manuscripts became the nuclei for the special collections at the libraries of the Vatican, Florence, Venice, and much more. The presentation will focus on paleographical evidence of Greek teaching textbooks and other contemporary literature sources, such as letters and intellectual works. An English translation will accompany every piece of evidence, presented through a PowerPoint Presentation.