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Updated: June 1, 2025
How much Greek Boccaccio learned from him, and how far he may have been beholden to him in the compilation of his elaborate Latin treatise De Genealogia Deorum, in which he essayed with very curious results to expound the inner meaning of mythology, it is impossible to say.
For two centuries, when but little was known of the Decameron north of the Alps, he was famous all over Europe simply on account of his Latin compilations on mythology, geography, and biography. One of these, de Genealogia Deorum, contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age.
The Stoics, on the other hand, with their strong conviction of providence working in the world, were rather inclined to deny the validity of this argument from common consent, and rested their belief in the gods, as Cicero makes his Stoic do in De Natura Deorum, on the evidence of design and purpose in the universe, but by this process succeeded only in proving to their own satisfaction that the world is divine a fatalistic pantheism which roused the ire of the Epicurean and Sceptic alike, and which even Cicero seemed hardly to be able to accept.
Now here is a strange thing: those passionate devotees of Boletus Satanas absolutely refuse certain mushrooms which we find delightful eating, including the most celebrated of all, the oronge, the imperial mushroom, which the Romans of the empire, past masters in gluttony, called the food of the gods, cibus deorum, the agaric of the Caesars, Agaricus caesareus.
One of these, 'De Genealogia Deorum, contains in the fourteenth and fifteenth books a remarkable appendix, in which he discusses the position of the then youthful humanism with regard to the age. We must not be misled by his exclusive references to 'poesie, as closer observation shows that he means thereby the whole mental activity of the poet-scholars.
This liberal and popular doctrine he is aware will be undermined by the absolute scepticism of the New Academy; but he is willing to risk this, and to put his view forward as the best possible approximation to truth. With these ultimate principles Cicero, in his De Natura Deorum, approaches the questions of the existence of God and of the human soul.
His library, which by his direction was placed in the Convent of Santo Spirito at Florence, was destroyed by fire about a century after his death. Besides the De Genealogia Deorum Boccaccio wrote other treatises in Latin, which need not here be specified, and sixteen Eclogues in the same language, of which he was by no means a master.
Indeed there seems to be not a little direct use of Philodemus' works in Cicero's De finibus and the De natura deorum written many years later. In any case, at least Catullus, Horace, and Ovid made free to paraphrase some of his epigrams.
A light galley, so called from the Liburnians, a people of Illyricum, who built and navigated them. The signum, here likened to a galley, was more probably a rude crescent, connected with the worship of the moon, cf. Caes. B.G. 6, 21: Germani deorum numero ducunt Solem et Lunam. Ex magnitudine. Ex==secundum, cf. ex nobilitate, ex virtute Sec. 7.
One finds there almost every thing but religion. SEWARD. 'He speaks of his returning to it, in his Ode Parcus Deorum cultor et infrequens. JOHNSON. 'Sir, he was not in earnest: this was merely poetical. BOSWELL. 'There are, I am afraid, many people who have no religion at all. SEWARD. 'And sensible people too. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, not sensible in that respect.
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