Name Leontius Pilatus Died 1366, Gulf of Venice | ||
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Occupation Greek literature, Latin literature, Theology and Philosophy Ethnicity disputed, Italian or Greek | ||
Literary movement Italian Renaissance | ||
Leontius Pilatus, or Leontius (Leonzio Pilato; died 1366) (Latin: Leontius Pilatus, Greek: Λεόντιος Πιλάτος, Leontios Pilatos, Italian: Leonzio Pilato), was a Calabrian scholar and was one of the earliest promoters of Greek studies in Western Europe. Leontius translated and commented upon works of Euripides, Aristotle and Homer including the Odyssey and the Iliad into Latin and was the first professor of Greek in western Europe.
Biography
Calabria still had at this time, several centuries after the Norman conquest of the territory from the Byzantine Empire, a large if not majority Greek-speaking and Eastern Orthodox population. The process of "Latinization" — conversion to Roman Catholicism, adoption of Latin for legal documents, and adoption of Romance-language dialects in popular speech — was only definitively completed in the 1500s with the suppression of the Greek Basilian monasteries by Rome.
Thus Pilatus is assumed by most scholars to have been an ethnic-Greek Calabrian. But the situation is confused by a famous letter from Petrarch to Boccaccio, in which he complains:
Leo noster vere Calaber, sed ut ipse vult Thesalus, quasi nobilius sit grecum esse quam italum (Sen. III, 6)
Our Leontius is really a Calabrian, but would have us to consider him a Thessalian as though it were nobler to be Greek than Italian
It is unclear from this whether Pilatus was holding himself out as being from Greece proper, or Petrarch was unaware of the ethno-linguistic situation in Calabria.
It is through this connection with Petrarch and Boccaccio, that the important contribution of Pilatus to the revival of Greek in Western scholarship was effected. He made a bald and almost word for word translation of Homer into Latin prose for Boccaccio, subsequently sent to Petrarch, who owed his introduction to the poet to Pilatus and was anxious to obtain a complete translation. Pilatus also furnished Boccaccio with some of the material for his genealogy of the gods (Genealogia deorum gentilium libri) which was, according to Edward Gibbon: "a work, in that age, of stupendous erudition, and which he ostentatiously sprinkled with Greek characters and passages, to excite the wonder and applause of his more ignorant readers."
Pilatus was killed when lightning struck a ship's mast while he standing against it, on a voyage from Constantinople.