Complete Works of Saint Ephrem the Syrian, Volume 3

The same Filelfo narrates the matter in his twenty-sixth book of Letters, writing thus to Leodrisio Crivelli, for I consider it worth the effort to recite his words: "While among other Greek books, which were daily being translated into the Latin tongue, some were being turned well and others perverted, he (Nicholas), a most acute censor and judge of intellect, learning, and eloquence, was held by a great desire to read in Latin those two Homer poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he knew were held in such high esteem by all learned men; he had intended, a few days before he rendered his soul to the immortal Redeemer of the human race, to give me shortly as a gift in the City of Rome a most beautiful house, and a very wide estate in the Roman countryside, which would be enough to support my entire family lavishly and in accordance with my dignity; furthermore, to deposit in my name, with whomever I myself had chosen among all the bankers, ten thousand gold coins, which would be counted out to me immediately, once those two Poems were translated into Latin." I find this fragment of Filelfo’s letters recited in the Commentary mentioned above, and it is reported in the same place from Jacopo Manetti in the Life of Nicholas V that two interpreters were employed by that same Pope for the translation of those two Homeric Poems, one of whom we know from Aeneas Silvius to have been Horatius Romanus.