Unknown Greek Poems of Francesco Filelfo

Abstract

During the years 1457-1465 Francesco Filelfo, the first important Western European professor of Greek after Guarino Veronese, composed a remarkable collection of poems in classical Greek. On April 9, 1458 Filelfo claimed in a letter to Girolamo Castelli, Duke Borso d'Este's court poet and personal physician, that he was the first Italian to write Greek poetry. In the same letter Filelfo announced that he fully intended to compose not merely a single verse epistle in Greek, but rather several books of Greek poems: “nec id una epistola quapiam sum facturus, sed libellis, ut spero, compluribus.“ In 1457 Filelfo had already written the distinguished scholar and philosopher from Constantinople, John Argyropulos, to ask for primers on Greek prosody and the Greek dialects, particularly the Aeolic. By July 27, 1465 Filelfo wrote to Cardinal Bessarion in Rome, then the leading figure in Greek emigré circles, informing him that he had just mailed three books of his own Greek poems, amounting to twenty-four hundred lines, to the Cardinal for his appraisal.