Philology and Poetry in the Humanism of Giovanni Pontano
The great Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano (1429-1503) was a serious student of ancient authors. He transcribed, corrected, and annotated their texts, wrote treatises on Latin orthography and metrics, and took issue on points of style with ancient critics and on Latin syntax with modern grammarians. These activities, diverse as they are, all clearly fall under the heading of philology. Pontano also wrote reams of Latin poetry in virtually every genre and metre—an endeavor that also deserves to be called philological since his poetry imitates, builds on, and interprets its ancient models, often in very specific and even technical ways.
In this paper I will explore the range and depth of his philological interests by considering several representative examples of different kinds, including his technical works, De aspiratione and the long treatise on the hexameter (De numeris poeticis) in the Actius, his transcriptions of Propertius and Tibullus, and some of his poetry and poetic criticism. I will suggest that his philology was always actively engaged with the classical past—that he wanted not merely to study the ancient texts, but to understand the elements (both technical and aesthetic) underlying their production and to make use of that understanding in creating his own works.
