Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/642

 548 Otitlmes of European History Course of study Petrarch tries to learn Greek Chr>'Soloras begins to teach Greek in Florence, 1396 Thomas Aquinas, we see that the scholastic philosopher might be a person of extraordinary insight and learning, ready to recognize all the objections to his position, and able to express himself with great clearness and cogency.^ The training in logic, if it did not increase the sum of human knowledge, accustomed the student to make careful distinctions and pre- sent his arguments in an orderly way. No attention was given to the great subject of history in the medieval universities, nor was Greek taught. Latin had to be learned in order to carry on the work at all, but little time was given to the Roman classics. The new modern languages were considered entirely unworthy of the learned. It must of course be remembered that none of the books which we consider the great classics in English, French, Italian, or Spanish had as yet been written. Although the medieval professors paid the greatest respect to the Greek philosopher Aristotle and made Latin translations of his works the basis of the college course, very few of them could read any Greek and none of them knew much about Homer or Plato or the Greek tragedians and historians. In the fourteenth century Petrarch (1304-13 7 4) set the example in Italy of care- fully collecting all the writings of the Romans, which he greatly admired. He made an unsuccessful effort to learn Greek, for he found that Cicero and other Roman writers w^ere constantly referring with enthusiasm to the Greek books to which they owed so much. 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 tfiat they could read the Greek books. Soon Italian scholars were going to Constanti- nople to carry on their studies, just as the Romans in Cicero's time had gone to Athens. They brought back copies of all the 1 An example of the scholastic method of reasoning of Thomas Aquinas may be found in Translations and Reprints^ Vol. Ill, No. 6.