Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/371

 Books and Science in the Middle Ages 273 Roman writers were constantly referring with enthusiasm to the Greek books to which they owed so much. 453. Chrysoloras begins to teach Greek in Florence (1395). Petrarch had not the patience or opportunity to master Greek, but twenty years after his death a learned Greek prelate from Constantinople, named Chrysoloras, came to Florence and found pupils eager to learn his language so that they could read the Greek books. Soon Italian scholars were going to Constantinople to carry on their studies, just as the Romans in Cicero's time had gone to Athens. They brought back copies of all the ancient writers that they could find, and by 1430 Greek books were once more known in the West, after a thousand years of neglect. 454. The Humanists. In this way western Europe caught up with ancient times ; scholars could once more know all that the Greeks and Romans had known and could read in the original the works of Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, De- mosthenes, and other philosophers, historians, orators, and trage- dians. Those who devoted their lives to a study of the literature of Greece and Rome were called Humanists. The name is de- rived from the Latin word humanitas, which means "culture." In time the colleges gave up the exclusive study of Aristotle and substituted a study of the Greek and Latin literature, and in this way what is known as our "classical" course of study originated. V. BEGINNINGS OF MODERN INVENTIONS 455. Roger Bacon's Attack on Scholasticism. So long, how- ever, as intellectual men confined themselves to studying the old books of Greece and Rome they were not likely to advance be- yond what the Greeks and Romans had known. Even in the thirteenth century there were a few scholars who criticized the habit of relying upon Aristotle for all knowledge. The most distinguished faultfinder was Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan monk (d. about 1294), who declared that even if Aris- totle were very wise, he had only planted the tree of knowledge,