Petrarch was the father of the revival of ancient literature. Not only was he himself a profound student of it, but he suggested to Boccaccio that line of study which governed the entire intellectual life of the author of the "Decameron." With the application of Boccaccio to the translation of Homer into Latin we perceive a singular illustration of the trend of the classic devotion of the time. Despite the fact that the "Divina Commedia" had magnificently demonstrated the beauty of Italian as a literary medium, fourteenth century scholars regarded the language with contempt. Pride in their connection with historic Rome, as well as the environment of places associated with his personality, made Virgil their literary deity. The ancient language of the eternal city and of the "Æneid" was for them the only suitable literary instrument. That they played upon it as amateurs seems never to have occurred to them. The study of Greek which followed the activities of Petrarch was at first confined to a narrow circle and it never spread far beyond the limits of university walls. But the study of Greek thought and ideals, as obtained from the ancient works, speedily found its way through the entire society of cultivated Italians. The people had their own poets and their own songs, but the aristocracy, which was highly cultivated, plunged into the contemplation of Grecian art. The influence of all this on Italian literature was deep and significant.

But there were other significant facts in the history of this era. Italy was not yet a nation. She had no central point of fixture and no system of radiation. She was divided into a group of small centers, each with its own dominating forces. Naples was unlike Rome; Florence was unlike Venice; Milan was different from all. Each had its characteristics, yet all had points of similarity. All were steeped in the immorality of the age, and all embarked with equal enthusiasm in the pursuit of classic learning. The strange combination of physical vice with intellectual appetite produced throughout Italy what Symonds has happily called an "esthetic sensuality." The Italian's intellectual pursuits satisfied a craving quite sensuous in its nature.

It is not at all astonishing that in these conditions we find no national epic and no national drama, but a gradual growth of a poetry saturated with physical realism and the final appearance of a dramatic form equipped with the most potent charms of sensuous art. It was in such a period that a special kind of public was developed. The "Cortegiano" of Castiglione, Bembo's "Asolani," the "Camaldolese Discourses" of Landino could have been addressed only to social oligarchies standing on a basis of polite culture.

In such conditions the stern ideals of early Christianity were thrust into obscurity and the sensuous charms of a hybrid paganism, a bastard child of ancient Greece and medieval Italy herself, excited the desires of scholars and dilettanti from the lagoons of Venice to the Bay of Naples. In the midst of this era it is not remarkable that we hear the pipe of Pan, slightly out of tune and somewhat clogged by artifice, as it was later in the day of Rousseau, but none the less playing the ancient hymns to Nature and the open air life.

Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530) embodied the ideals of the time in his "Arcadia," in which Symonds finds the literary counterparts of the frescoes of Gozzo and Lippo Lippi. At any rate the poem contains the whole apparatus of nymphs and satyrs transplanted to Italian landscape and living a life of commingled Hellenism and Italianism. The eloquence of Sannazzaro is that of the Arcadian the world over. He sighs and weeps and calls upon dryads, hamadryads and oreads to pity his consuming passion. When he sees his mistress she is walking in the midst of pastoral scenes where satyrs lurk behind every bush and the song of the shepherd is heard in the land. Sannazzaro's "Arcadia" was the inspiration of Sir Philip Sidney's. It was a natural outburst of the time and it conveys perfectly the spirit of Italian imaginative thought in a period almost baffling in the complexity of its character.

It was not strange that in such a time Italian poets should have discerned in Orpheus the embodiment of their own ideals. There is no evidence that the Italians of the fifteenth century knew (or at any rate considered) the true meaning of the Orpheus myth. Of its relation to the Sun myth and of Euridice as the dawn they give no hint. To them Orpheus was the embodiment of the Arcadian idea. He was the singer of the hymns that woke all nature to life. For him the satyr capered and the coy nymph came bridling from her retreat, the woods became choral and the streams danced in the sunlight to the magic of his pipe. This was the poetic phase of the general trend of human thought at the time. The philosophers began by questioning the authority of dogma. Next they turned for instruction to the ancients, and finally they interrogated nature. In the course of their development they revolted against the deadening rule of the church and claimed for the human mind the right to reason independently. The scientific investigation of natural phenomena followed almost inevitably and the demonstrations of Giordano Bruno and Galileo shook the foundations of the church.

In the field of polite literature men turned to nature for their laws of daily life and believed that in the pastoral kingdom of Theocritus they had found the promised land. Inevitably it followed that the figure of Orpheus, singing through the earth, and bringing under his dominion the beast and the bird, the very trees and stones, should become the picture of their fondest dreams. He was the hero of Arcady "where all the leaves are merry." In his presence the dust of dry theology and the cruel ban of the church against the indulgence of human desires were impossible. From solemn ecclesiastic prose the world was turned to happy pagan song. The very music of the church went out into the world and became earthly in the madrigals of love. The miter and the stole gave way to the buskin and the pack; and the whole dreamland of Italy peopled itself with wandering singers wooing nymphs or shepherdesses in landscapes that would have fired the imagination of a Turner.

And withal the dramatic embodiment of this conception was prepared as a court spectacle for the enjoyment of fashionable society. Thus we find ourselves in the presence of conditions not unlike those which produced the tomfooleries of the court of Louis XVI and the musettes, bergerettes and aubades of French song.

The production of Poliziano's "Orfeo" may not have seemed to its contemporaries to possess an importance larger than that which Rossi and D'Ancona attribute to it; but its proper position in musical history is at the foundation of the modern opera. Poetically it was the superior of any lyric work, except perhaps those of Metastasio. Musically it was radically different in character from the opera, as it was from the liturgical drama. But none the less it contained some of the germs of the modern opera. It had its solo, its chorus and its ballet.