POLITIAN Angelo Ambrogini, known in liter ary annals as Angelo Poliziano or Politianus from his birthplace, was born at Montepulciano in Tuscany on July 14, 1454. His father, Benedetto, a jurist of good family and distinguished ability, was murdered by political antagonists for adopting the cause of Piero de' Medici in Montepulciano; this circumstance gave his eldest son, Angelo, a claim on the family of Medici. At the age of ten the boy came to study at Florence, where he learned Latin under Cristoforo Landino, and Greek under Argyropulos and Andronicos Kallistos. From Marsilio Ficino he imbibed the rudi ments of philosophy. His genius for scholarship and poetry was early manifested. At 13 years of age he began to circulate Latin letters; at 17 he sent forth essays in Greek versification; at 18 he published an edition of Catullus. In 1470 he won for himself the title of Homericus juvenis by translating four books of the Iliad into Latin hexameters. Lorenzo de' Medici, who was then the autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy, took Poliziano into his household, made him the tutor of his children, and secured him a distinguished post in the University of Florence. Before he reached the age of 3o, Poliziano ex pounded the humanities with almost unexampled lustre even for that epoch of brilliant professors. Among his pupils could be numbered the chief students of Europe, the men who were destined to carry to their homes the spolia opima of Italian cul ture. Not to mention Italians, it will suffice to record the names of the German Reuchlin, the English Grocyn and Linacre, and the Portuguese Tessiras.
Poliziano published the notes of his courses on Ovid, Statius, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and the writers of Augustan his tories. He also undertook a recension of the text of the Pandects of Justinian, which formed the subject of one of his courses; and this recension, though it does not rank high in the scale of juristic erudition, gave an impulse to the scholarly criticism of the Roman code. His versions of Epictetus, Herodian, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch's Eroticus and Plato's Charmides delighted contemporaries by a certain limpid fluency of Latin style and grace of manner which distinguished him also as an original writer. Of these learned labours the most universally
acceptable to the public of that time were a series of discursive essays on philology and criticism, first published in 1489 under the title of Miscellanea. They had an immediate, a lasting and a wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poliziano was not, however, contented with these simply pro fessorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order. These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors. The Manto, in which he pronounced a panegyric of Virgil; the Ambra, which contains a beautiful idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape, and a studied eulogy of Homer; the Rusticus, which celebrated the pleasures of country life in no frigid or scholastic spirit ; and the Nutricia, which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetry—these are the masterpieces of Poliziano in Latin verse, displaying an authenticity of inspira tion, a sincerity of feeling, and a command of metrical resources which mark them out as original productions of poetic genius rather than as merely professorial lucubrations. Exception may be taken to their style, when compared with the best work of the Augustan or even of the Silver age. But what renders them noteworthy to the student of modern humanistic literature is that they are in no sense imitative or conventional, but that they convey the genuine thoughts and emotions of a born poet in Latin diction and in metre moulded to suit the characteristics of the singer's temperament.