Leontius Pilatus

Leontius Pilatus, Leo Pilatus or Leonzio Pilato († December 1365 on a ship in the Adriatic Sea ) was the first chair of the Greek language in Western Europe and the first translator of Homer's works into Latin.

He came probably from the Greek dominated southern Italy Calabria, are themselves but also as the home of Thessaly. He is regarded as a disciple of Barlaam of Calabria. 1358 he lived in Padua, where he made the acquaintance of Francesco Petrarca. This was in 1353 or 1354 received a Greek manuscript of the works of Homer by the Byzantine ambassador Nikolaos Sygeros. Because he lacked the necessary language skills, he begged Leontius Pilatus, to make a translation. This provided a little elegant, verbatim reproduction of the first chapter of the Iliad of Homer. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio took him then to Florence in 1360 and left there for him a chair of Greek language set, the first in Western Europe since ancient times. Leontius Pilatus finally completed his work ( the manuscript is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, BNF lat 7880 ms (1) and 7880 ( 2) ). The relationship between Petrarch and Boccaccio one hand, and Leontius Pilatus on the other hand became cloudy. They described this as a sullen, ragged and unkempt. Speaking at a joint trip with Petrarch in Venice Leontius Pilatus was sent from there to Constantinople, to procure with the ostensible aim of further manuscripts of classical authors, actually to get rid of it. They sent him by a letter, in which you told him that his return was no longer desired. However, he ignored the letter and traveled by ship back to Venice. The ship caught in a storm and Leontius Pilatus was killed by lightning. From his luggage Petrarca awards include manuscripts of Sophocles and Euripides.