17 - The re-emergence of ancient novels in western Europe, 1300-1810

Summary

In 1453, Francesco Griffolini, already known for Latin translations of Greek works, borrowed from the new Vatican Library four Greek manuscripts: of Thucydides, Demosthenes, Heliodorus, and Lucian. The official who recorded the loan entered the third as 'Eliodorus' history of matters in Ethiopia'. Whether Griffolini would have expected a Thucydidean history or just a story, he did not translate Heliodorus, and no other reader is known before Politian, who read far enough into Charicleia and Theagenes to meet the giraffe (10.27). Few scholars of the day would have been capable of shedding light from so recondite a quarter, and in so timely a translation, on the creature that had crowds agape when the sultan of Egypt sent Lorenzo de' Medici one as a present in 1487. Politian's reading also took in Longus and Xenophon of Ephesus, but from Longus' 'Story of shepherds in four very stylish books' he cites only the garb of Philetas, particularly his sandals (2.3.1), and from Xenophon, 'no less appealing' than his Athenian namesake, he translates a passage early in the work, the procession to the temple of Artemis (1.2.2-5). He brings the passages to bear on problems in Catullus and Martial. The manuscript in which he read them is immediately identifiable, because no other of Xenophon has survived from his day and it had been in Florence, to which it owes its symbol F in modern editions, since at least 1425. In a sequence interrupted only by a snippet opportunistically fitted into a blank space at the end of Achilles Tatius, it includes Longus, Achilles Tatius up to 4.4, Chariton and Xenophon. Some manuscripts of Greek novels had been in Italy longer, and indeed some of these may have been written in Greek-speaking Calabria.