*And gemmy flower, of
Trebizond misnam'd - Inmate of highest stars, where erst it sham'd All other loveliness : its honied dew(The fabled nectar that the heathen knew) Deliriously sweet, was dropp'd from Heaven, And fell on gardens of the unforgiven In
Trebizond - and on a sunny flower So like its own above that, to this hour, It still remaineth, torturing the bee With madness, and unwonted reverie : In Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf And blossom of the fairy plant, in grief Disconsolate linger - grief that hangs her head, Repenting follies that full long have fled, Heaving her white breast to the balmy air, Like guilty beauty, chasten'd, and more fair : Nyctanthes too, as sacred as the light She fears to perfume, perfuming the night :
Already the poor man saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of
Trebizond at least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into execution.
I won him in single fight from the Soldan of
Trebizond mount, I say, behind me in one short hour is pursuit and enquiry far behind a new world of pleasure opens to thee to me a new career of fame.
I have it from my husband, who is a cinquantenier**, at the Parloir-aux Bourgeois, and who was this morning comparing the Flemish ambassadors with those of Prester John and the Emperor of
Trebizond, who came from Mesopotamia to Paris, under the last king, and who wore rings in their ears."
In these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand the basis of the patrician prejudice alluded to by George of
Trebizond and Filippo Da Rimini, whereby formal rhetorical study was regarded as inferior to a hands-on training through experience and observation.
Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria had been re-discovered by Poggio in 1416 and edited by Cardinal Campano in 1470, while Aristotle's Rhetoric had appeared in a Latin translation by George of
Trebizond in 1478 and in a Greek edition, together with the Poetics, by Aldus Manutius in 1508.
(79.) For a distinguished example, see
Trebizond, 365-69.
In 1451, the great opponent of Plato, George of
Trebizond, had argued that much of Plato's teaching was cloaked in obscurity, transmitted "per integumenta quaedam et enigmata." See his preface to his translation of Plato's Laws and Epinomis, edited in Monfasani, 1976, 360-64.
Thus reference is made to res platonicae without recourse to the work of Hankins, to Pletho without Woodhouse or Masai, to George of
Trebizond without Monfasani, to Ficino without Allen, to the beginnings of the Florentine Platonic revival without Field, and to ontological hierarchies without Mahoney, to name only a few instances.
Grouped under three headings - Rhetoric, Lorenzo Valla, and Humanism and Religion - the essays span the years from 1983 to 1992, a decade during which Monfasani also published the anthology of texts relating to George of
Trebizond (Collectanea Trapezuntiana, 1984) and a biography of Fernando of Cordova (1992).
The only strange features of Medine's edition are in the introduction, where his account of classical rhetoric relies too much on the somewhat dated authority of Friedrich Solmsen, and where George of
Trebizond and Melanchthon are taken as paradigmatic for Renaissance rhetoric.
No work is without minor blemishes, and since this work will surely be reprinted, I note here the few factual errors that caught my eye: there was no Duke of Ferrara in the fifteenth century (40); Niccolo Perotti is known to have referred to Bessarion's "Academy" as early as 1453-54 (66; see Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller [Binghamton, NY, 1987], 193); Jacopo Cassiano criticized George of
Trebizond's commentary on the Almagest, not his translation of the same (77; see my George of
Trebizond [Leiden, 1976], 106-08); Heraclides Pontus was the pupil of Plato, not Aristotle (144); and the discussion of the successor of Musurus in the chair at Venice lacks the name of this successor (159).