Greek and Latin Poetry

For a young man looking to make his way in the world of fifteenth-century Italy one of the most promising paths to fame and, if not fortune, at least a comfortable life, was literature. That was the path pursued by Angelo Ambrogini, who was born in 1454 in Montepulciano, the city in Tuscany from which he would later take the name by which he became known to history, Poliziano, or in its latinized form, Politianus. It was in the years from about 1470 to the middle of the decade that the young poet began to attract the attention of powerful patrons with his compositions in Latin and Greek. Many of the Latin poems later collected in the Book of Epigrams date from the early 70s, although there is no evidence that at the time of their composition Poliziano contemplated ever publishing them. The same may be said of the poems in the Book of Greek Epigrams that date from this period. From the year of his first appointment to the Studio until his death in 1494, Poliziano's poetic output was intimately connected with his researches as a scholar. In the tumultuous years following his death, his papers were dispersed and his legacy imperilled, to be rescued only by the intervention of his executors, Pietro Crinito and Alessandro Sarti, who delivered his Greek and Latin works to Aldo Manuzio for publication. The texts in this volume are largely the fruit of their devotion.--