Lecture by Dr. Adam Foley

The lecture, entitled "Theodore Gaza’s Attic Prose Paraphrase of the Iliad", has been presented by Dr. Adam Foley with the participation of 20 people at the Byzantine Studies Research Center.

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Abstract

A generation after humanists of the Italian Renaissance had been introduced to Greek learning for the first time (1390s), Homer was being read by schoolboys from the well-heeled families of Florence, Milan, Ferrara and Mantua. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Homer was hailed as the first orator, and translators unanimously insisted on a prose rendering. Francesco Filelfo attracted hundreds to his lectures in Florence on the Iliad and Odyssey. In his personal copy of Homer (ms Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Plut. 32.03) we find that the text is surrounded not by scholia or a commentary but by an Attic prose paraphrase of the Iliad. Filelfo had commissioned the Greek scribe and scholar Theodore Gaza to copy out the Iliad and add to its margins a prose paraphrase. At the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan there is another manuscript (I 24 inf.) containing a prose paraphrase of the Iliad. A collation of passages in both manuscripts confirms that they are nearly the same text with some notable variations. The latter codex, however, is not attributed to Gaza but to Janus Lascaris. In this presentation I offer a few conjectures about the relationship between these two manuscripts with the intention of resolving the problem of attribution. But more important than the attribution is the more elusive question of why one of the foremost Hellenists of the century would want a prose paraphrase of the Iliad at a time when eruditi of the age were tracing the origins of their prose oratory back to Homer.

Dr. Adam Foley:

Adam Foley is a classicist and historian whose interests span the classical tradition, including Greek epic and lyric poetry, translation and reception studies, the history of Platonism, and the history of historiography. Trained in classics, he completed his PhD in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame where he wrote his dissertation on the first Latin translations of Homer in the Italian Renaissance. He lived for two years in Rome (2015-2017), where he spent one year as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2017-2018). He is currently pursuing a joint fellowship between the Byzantine Studies Research Center at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul (fall term, 2018-2019) and Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in Florence (spring term, 2018-2019) where he is working on a monograph on Homer’s reception in the Italian Renaissance and its late Byzantine backstory.