I - EPISTOLA TO FREDERICK OF ARAGON

and with the sword, and so many wonderful excellences of the valiant ancients, who without any doubt, as our Tuscan poet The "Tuscan poet" refers to Petrarch (1304–1374), the father of humanism. well says, will never be without fame,

original: "se l'universo pria non si dissolve" — a line from Petrarch's Triumph of Fame.

These were wonderful and truly divine men who, as they were highly desiring of true and immortal praise, were also kindled with a fiery love toward those who could render the valiant and illustrious deeds of excellent men immortal through the virtue of the poetic style. Inflamed by this same most glorious desire, Alexander the Great, when he arrived at the SigeumA promontory in the Troad (modern Turkey), traditionally identified as the site of the tomb of the Greek hero Achilles. at the most noble sepulcher of the famous Achilles, let out a sigh and uttered that ever-memorable royal voice, truly worthy of himself:

original: "Oh fortunato che sí chiara tromba / trovasti, e chi di te sí alto scrisse." These lines are from Petrarch’s Sonnet 187, paraphrasing Alexander the Great's famous address to Achilles regarding the poet Homer.

And he was, without doubt, fortunate: because if the divine poet Homer had not existed, one and the same tomb would have covered both the body and the fame of Achilles. Nor would this poet, the most excellent above all others, have risen to such honor and fame if he had not been raised up from the earth by a most illustrious Athenian—indeed, almost restored from death to such a long life. For, the sacred work of this most celebrated poet being scattered and almost dismembered in many and various places of Greece after his death, Pisistratus, the Athenian prince Pisistratus (6th century BCE) was a ruler of Athens credited by ancient tradition with commissioning the first definitive collection of Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.—a man most outstanding in many virtues of both mind and body—offered most ample rewards to anyone who brought him any of the Homeric verses. With the greatest diligence and examination, he gathered together the entire body of the most holy poet; and just as he gave that poet perpetual life, so he acquired for himself immortal glory and most clear splendor. Because of this, no other title was engraved beneath his statue except for this one: that he had been the author of bringing the glorious Homeric poem back together. Oh, truly divine men, born into the world for the benefit of mankind!

This distinguished prince knew that his other virtuous deeds, however many and wonderful they might be, were nonetheless all [subordinate] to this one...