f one or two. Eight years before
the death of Vegio, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had composed a
brief treatise on education in the form of a letter to Ladislaus, the
young king of Bohemia and Hungary. The Latin poets to be studied include
Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, and (with certain
limitations) Horace, Juvenal and Persius, as well as Plautus, Terence
and the tragedies of Seneca; the prose authors recommended are Cicero,
Livy and Sallust. The first great school of the Renaissance was that
established by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua, where he resided for the
last twenty-two years of his life (1424-1446). Among the Latin authors
studied were Virgil and Lucan, with selections from Horace, Ovid and
Juvenal, besides Cicero and Quintilian, Sallust and Curtius, Caesar and
Livy. The Greek authors were Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and the dramatists,
with Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato, Isocrates and Demosthenes, Plutarch
and Arrian.

Meanwhile, Guarino had been devoting five years to the training of the
eldest son of the marquis of Ferrara. At Ferrara he spent the last
thirty years of his long life (1370-1460), producing text-books of Greek
and Latin grammar, and translations from Strabo and Plutarch. His method
may be gathered from his son's treatise, _De Ordine Docendi et
Studendi_. In that treatise the essential marks of an educated person
are, not only ability to write Latin verse, but also, a point of "at
least equal importance," "familiarity with the language and literature
of Greece." "Without a knowledge of Greek, Latin scholarship itself is,
in any real sense, impossible" (1459).

By the fall of Constantinople in 1453, "Italy (in the eloquent phrase of
Carducci) became sole heir and guardian of the ancient civilization,"
but its fall was in no way necessary for the revival of learning, which
had begun a century before. Bessarion, Theodorus Gaza, Georgius
Trepezuntius, Argyropulus, Chalcondyles, all had reached Italy before
1453. A few more Greeks fled to Italy after that date, and among these
were Janus Lascaris, Musurus and Callierges. All three were of signal
service in devoting their knowledge of Greek to perpetuating and
popularizing the Greek classics with the aid of the newly-invented art
of printing. That art had been introduced into Italy by the German
printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz, who had worked under Fust at Mainz. At
Subiaco and at Rome they had produced in 1465-1471 the earliest