1 Cf. Pansa, Giovanni, Giovanni Quatrario di Sulmona: Contribute alla storia dell’ umanesimo (Sulmona, 1912)Google Scholar.

2 In this it is not unique: Quatrario's style is usually obscure, awkward, unidiomatic, and occasionally downright incomprehensible; sentence structure sometimes sprawls; the author displays little real aptitude for the tricks of rhetoric, and produces a good many unmetrical hexameters. Pansa's text is no aid to comprehension: misprints are everywhere, words are sometimes wrongly divided (e.g., in one place pendetque should be pendet quae), and the division between speakers is occasionally incorrect; retention of the manuscript punctuation is of interest to the palaeographer, no doubt, but is only a hindrance to ordinary mortals.

3 Medieval Latin eclogues exist, it is true, but most are not at all Virgilian: cf. Carrara, E., La poesia pastorale (Milan, 1907), pp. 40–67 Google Scholar; Hyberg, Betty Nye, ‘The Bucolics and the Mediaeval Poetical Debate’, TAPA LXXV (1944), 47–67 Google Scholar and abundant literature there cited; Faye Wilson, E., ‘Pastoral and Epithalamium in Latin Literature’, Speculum XXIII (1948), 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Cf. Wicksteed, P. H. and Gardiner, G. E., Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio (Westminster, 1902)Google Scholar and Albini, G., L'egloga di Giovanni del Virgilio ad Albertino Mussato (Bologna, 1925)Google Scholar.

5 Cf. Massèra, A., Giovanni Boccaccio: Opere latini minori (Bari, 1928), pp. 89–95 Google Scholar; Boccaccio's sixteen finished eclogues are on pp. 3-85. Cecco's two eclogues appear in Giovanni Bottari (the editorship has also been attributed to Tommaso Buonaventuri), Carmina illustriuin poetarum Italorum (Florence, 1719-1726), VI, 315-318; cf. also Massèra, pp. 290-291 and 304-305, and Carrara in Giom. stor. XLIII (1904), 13-21.

6 In the period 1325-1800 I know of only two other epistolary eclogues—one by Fausto Andrelini and the other by Joannes Leochaeus (John Leech of Montrose and Aberdeen).

7 The best modern text is A. Avena, ‘Il Bucolicum carmen e i suoi commenti’ in Padova in onore di Francesco Petrarca, vol. 1 (Padua, 1906), in which the scholia appear in full.

8 On the nature of cryptic pastoral cf. my ‘Early Neo-Latin Pastoral’, Phoenix IX (1955), 19-26; Pansa, , op. cit., pp. 6 Google Scholar and 200-201; de Hortis, A., Scritti inediti di Francesco Petrarca (Trieste, 1884), pp. 221–222 Google Scholar; Petrarch, Epp. font. rer. X, 4; Epp. var. xlii. Cf. also Sperduti, Alice, Petrarch on Poetry (Cornell Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 15–18 Google Scholar.

9 On these cf. Carrara, , La poesia pastorale, pp. 142–143 Google Scholar.

10 Novati, Francesco, Epistolario di Coluccio Salutati (Rome, 1891 ff.), I, 150–151 (Epp. III, 9)Google Scholar.

11 They were for long falsely attributed to Albertino Mussato; the text appears in Osio's 1636 (Venice) edition of Mussato's poems.

12 Cf. Carrara in Archivio storico lombardo XXV (1898).

13 Petrarch sent a revised copy of the poems to Barbato in 1359: cf. Rossi, V. and Bosco, U., Francesco Petrarca: Le familiari (Florence, 1933 ff.) IV, 351 Google Scholar (col. 2, ad fin.).

14 He also knew Coluccio Salutati well, and the great chancellor of Florence had a very high opinion of his abilities: the tone of the four extant letters which Salutati wrote to Quatrario (cf. Novati, , op. cit., 1, 63–71 Google Scholar and III, 368) is familiar, confidential, and admiring —one is headed ‘eloquenti viro musarumque amico lohanni Quatrario Sulmonensi fratri carissimo et optimo’.

15 The reference is to Petrarch's visit to Naples in 1343, as envoy of Clement VI; his purpose was to point out that the provisions of King Robert's will in regard to the guardianship of Giovanna I—she was barely nineteen at the time of her grandfather's death—were not being carried out. At the same time he had been commissioned by his friend and patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, to protest the imprisonment of Giovanni, Pietro, and Luigi Pipino, incarcerated by King Robert for acts of violence committed in the course of a feud with the Del Marra family. Petrarch was not hopeful of success in this second duty; but the three brothers were actually released in 1344. What success he may have had as papal envoy is quite unknown. These matters can all be seen through a glass darkly in Quatrario's first eclogue, the characters of which are Arrius (Barbato), Menalcas (Philippe de Cabassoles, Bishop of Cavaillon?), Thyrsis (some young friend of Barbato), and Daphnis (Petrarch).

16 I.e., until my heart stops bearing with excitement and I can catch my breath. The indicative here and those in line 39 are characteristic of fourteenth-century Latin.

17 Quatrario, like Petrarch, was fond of the et or -que of equivalence: ‘Pythias, that is to say, your friend.’

18 Mount Parnassus, several times described at length and with innumerable flourishes of rhetoric by Petrarch and Boccaccio.

19 Ecl. II, 34-39.

20

The phrase formosior undis is no doubt intended to recall Ovid's ‘Sulmo mihi patria est, gelidis uberrimus undis’ (Tristia iv, 10, 3). The ante of line 42 perhaps suggests that the dramatic date of this poem is late, well after 1363. In 43 nomine montis is practically equivalent to de monte (sc. Pamasso, i.e., de poesia: Barbato had in fact actively encouraged Quatrario in his study of Latin poetry).

21

22 It depends on the poem's date whether this refers to Parma, Milan, Padua, or Arquà; but the last is the most likely: cf. Ecl. iii, 110.

23 I.e., I wish to be buried near your home.

24

25 Actually no more remarkable than several self-congratulatory passages in Petrarch's own Latin and Italian poems; consider, for instance, Africa IX, 229-236:

26 This (pace Quatrario's editor) I take to refer to fourteenth-century eclogists, pastoral Petrarchists like Boccaccio, the anonymus Venetus and Giovanni de Bonis later on, Coluccio Salutati, Tommaso Rigo, Domenico Silvestri, Giacobbe Allegretti, Giovanni Quatrario, and many others whose very names are unknown.

27 The muses, presumably; as in his own works, Petrarch is here claiming to have been the first to rouse the muses from their long sleep during the middle ages: cf. my note in Philological Quarterly XXXIV (1955), 76-81.

28 The reference is naturally to Petrarch's laurel crown, presented to him at Rome in 1341 at the urging of King Robert of Naples: cf. especially Epp. fam. rer., IV, 7, written to King Robert. The reader of Petrarch's works grows as weary of subsequent references to this crown as of Cicero's allusions to the glorious events of his consulate in 63 B.C.

29 Quatrario at this time was living under sentence of banishment from his native city; it is clear from the third eclogue that he did not regret exile.

30 Cf. my ‘Later Neo-Latin Pastoral’, Studies in Philology LIII (1956), 429-451, LIV (1957), 481-497.

31 Cf. my ‘New Forms of Neo-Latin Pastoral', Studies in the Renaissance IV (1957), 71-100.