On not knowing Greek: Leonzio Pilatus's rendition of the iliad and the translatio of Mediterranean identities

For it is vain and foolish to talk of Knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh … All the more strange, then, is it that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, feel for ever drawn back to Greek, and be for ever making up some notion of the meaning of Greek. Both Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) wished to know Greek and tried to know Greek. Of course, neither Boccaccio nor Petrarch – along with most of the learned elite of the medieval West – ever acquired the facility to read ancient Greek texts. By Petrarch's own account, he was nonetheless forever drawn back to Greek, or at least to a few ancient Greek authors, primarily to Homer as well as Euripides and Plato. His interest in these texts led him to undertake private instruction in the Greek language from a Calabrian monk named Barlaam (d. 1348), who offered Greek lessons in Avignon. For Boccaccio, the Greek language meant access to classical mythology and ancient history, to accounts of the Theban story or the narratives of the Trojan War – interests he had initially developed during his sojourn in Naples between 1326 and 1341 as a young merchant.