BOOK: Poggio Bracciolini, "On Leaders and Tyrants"

Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino of Verona, Pietro del Monte: On Leaders and Tyrants. Edited and translated by Hester Schadee, Keith Sidwell, with David Rundle. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 99. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674297128. xlvii + 566 pp.

This book is about a somewhat unusual subject: a minor controversy that took place amongst several humanist authors, in 1440, about whether Scipio Africanus was more excellent and virtuous than Julius Caesar, or vice versa. Actually we've had one somewhat similar book in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before, Ciceronian Controversies from 2007 (see my post about it); but the pieces that compose the present volume are a bit longer and come from a less numerous cast of authors.

Anyway, while the topic is perhaps a bit obscure, it wasn't too hard to relate to. This whole debate reminded me a little of the sort of arguments that nerds might have nowadays about this or that figure from some science fiction or fantasy franchise; and I guess you could say that the Renaissance-era humanists were fans of ancient Roman civilization in a way not entirely unlike how some people today might be fans of Star Trek or Star Wars or things like that.

On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar

The controversy begins with a short piece by Poggio Bracciolini titled On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar. This is shorter than most of the subsequent works in this volume, and was in many ways my favourite. Poggio gives a brief overview of the careers of both men, and I found the part about Scipio particularly interesting since I knew very little about him. I knew, of course, that he had been one of the leading Roman generals from the Second Punic War, but not much else; I remember reading a book about the Punic Wars many years ago and there must have been something about Scipio there, but I remembered nothing at all.

Poggio clearly considered Scipio to be a vastly more virtuous and excellent figure than Caesar, and from what we see of Scipio's and Caesar's life and actions here in Poggio's account, I was happy to agree with him. Admittedly I had disliked Caesar from before, and Poggio's essay didn't change my opinion about him in any way; as for Scipio, the account of his career that we get here is so glowing and impressive that I couldn't help wondering if there was some bias, either on the part of Poggio or of his sources. For example, there is of course plenty of dirt on Caesar in Suetonius's biography of him, as there is on every of the twelve emperors of whom Suetonius wrote biographies; and we might have had some dirt on Scipio too, if someone like Suetonius had written a biography of him, but no one seems to have done so (“The life of Scipio [. . .] was not written down by any of the ancients”, ¶13). My approval of Scipio might even have grown to admiration, were it not for the fact that I support the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars, so that I can't wholeheartedly approve of a general that fought *against* the Carthaginians. But even if Scipio was an instrument of Roman imperialism, Caesar was even more so; and so Scipio comes out looking better than Caesar anyway.

Speaking of Suetonius, Poggio also uses him as his source for various juicy and unfavourable remarks on Caesar's private life: “Caesar's early years, when he first joined the barracks, were not short of disrepute, for he was sometimes called ‘the bedstead of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia’ and ‘queen’ ” (¶4). “That Caesar was a man of immoderate lust is reported by Suetonius, who makes reference to his very many acts of fornication and adultery. That he was rapacious and covetous of other people's property is generally agreed” etc. (¶10). By contrast, “Scipio's youth is marked both by the most excellent conduct and by honorable deeds, and full of self-restraint, chastity, and modesty; but that of Caesar is reproached by all, and stained by outrages and infamy” (¶20).

But, of course, the main part of the comparison between these two men must concern their public careers. Scipio's conquest of Spain early in his career (¶17) seems to have been a good deal less bloodthirsty than the sort of wholesale genocides that one usually associates with Caesar's conquest of Gaul. And later, after his victory over Hannibal, he refused numerous extraordinary honours which the senate and the people offered him (¶19). Still later, when “his power had grown to the extent that, as Seneca reports, ‘it would become inavoidable that either Scipio must injure liberty, or liberty Scipio,’ [. . .] he left for voluntary exile in Liternum, lest by his presence he violate the liberty of the community” (¶20).* What a tremendous contrast in comparison with Caesar, who amassed power and offices with all the furious greed of a rodent on steroids...

[*Scipio died while in exile in Liternum (p. 476, n. 44), and “declined burial in the family tomb in Rome”; his tombstone bore the inscription “Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones” (ibid., n. 46).]

One curious detail that provides such a neat contrast between them that I couldn't help wondering how much I should trust it: they apparently both had interesting encounters with pirates. That of Caesar, of course, is well known: he got captured by pirates, joked to them that he would have them crucified, and after getting ransomed he gathered a small fleet, caught up with the pirates and kept his promise. By contrast, Scipio's pirate encounter was very different (and quite new to me): “These virtues had earned Scipio so much standing, so much veneration among all that, when he was in exile near Liternum, pirates came to him, revering him as though some divine power: they gave worship at the doorstep of his house as if it were a temple, and once they had placed gifts before the entrance as before some sacred place, they kissed Scipio's hand and left” (¶20). Sure, Caesar comes across as a badass, but also as something of an asshole; meanwhile, Scipio comes across as a paragon, virtuous to a super-humanly (and implausibly) ideal degree.

Anyway, although I enjoyed Poggio's bashing of Caesar (“we find nothing in Caesar's life that deserves worthily to be praised, except for his deeds done in war”, ¶12; “there is nothing on record on which Caesar could leave any trace of his virtue”, ¶21), and read with interest his praises of Scipio, ultimately most of these details are in some sense insignificant compared to the big and obvious difference between them: Scipio had gone out of his way to avoid amassing too much political power in a way that could have harmed the country, while by contrast Caesar went out of his way to gather all the power in his hands, thereby preparing the ground of the reintroduction of monarchy in Rome.

Thus, ultimately, whether you prefer Scipio or Caesar must depend on your attitude towards the monarchy-vs-republic question. I imagine that many people, both in Poggio's time and in other periods, looked with dismay at the turbulent history of republics, both in ancient Greece and Rome, or in renaissance Italy, and decided that monarchy was the preferable option as being more likely to lead to stability; and such people would probably admire Caesar for putting the rotten Roman republic out of its misery and bringing an end to a century of civil wars. I, however, can't regard the introduction of empire in Rome as anything other than a disaster; within a couple of generations they went from people like Caesar or Augustus, who despite their faults were at least capable politicians and administrators, to full-blown lunatics and psychopaths like Nero and Caligula; and they soon had plenty of civil wars again too, as ambitious generals began fighting each other for a chance to become emperor. For all its problems, and they were many, the Roman republic is surely infinitely preferable to the empire that followed it.

Poggio himself is clearly on the side of the republic here, perhaps because he himself was from one (Florence). “Scipio spurned the dictatorship he was offered, Caesar extorted it. One preserved the freedom of his people, the other reduced them to the most pitiful slavery.” (¶24.) In view of all this, the contest between Scipio and Caesar as to who is more excellent and virtuous is not only not close, it's almost completely one-sided; Caesar never stood a chance, and I was happy to see him thoroughly defeated; Scipio comes across as so obviously more virtuous that it's hard to see how Caesar could ever have been seen even as a serious contender.

The debate continues

For me, that first short essay by Poggio was the most interesting part of the book, and the rest of the documents from the controversy don't really add much to it. Another humanist intellectual, Guarino of Verona (also a noted teacher; in one of the early ITRL volumes, Humanist Educational Treatises, there's a treatise by his son, based on Guarino's methods), evidently took exception to Poggio's position and wrote a rebuttal, On the Excellence of Caesar and Scipio, which despite the title is mostly a defense of Caesar (of whom Guarino appears to have been a keen, long-time fan; p. 231). It is much longer than Poggio's essay, and not nearly as interesting; but what I disliked most about it is the rather high-blown rhetorical style in which it is written, constantly addressing Poggio directly and upbraiding him sternly for his supposed errors and shortcomings.

Much of what Guarino does is nitpicking at various little details that Poggio got wrong, or quibbling with small parts of his argument; there's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it has no chance of altering the ultimate conclusion (i.e. that Scipio is better than Caesar). For example, Poggio at some point blames Caesar for the decline of Latin literature in the wake of his reign; Guarino objects and points out the many important authors who flourished after Caesar's time. I'm perfectly willing to agree with Guarino on this particular detail; and moreover, to blame Caesar for any decline in Latin literature is silly because such a decline was inevitable anyway; no golden age lasts for very long, so there was bound to be a decline after Caesar's time regardless of what he did or didn't do. If nothing else, the language was changing, as any living language does; and in most cases, language change is a form of decline; a language usually changes for the worse, not for the better. The Romans, recognizing this, strove to keep on writing in the language of the classical period, and so not unnaturally got the worse at it the more their everyday speech differed from the classical language.

Another example where I agree with Guarino's quibble is where Poggio tried to denigrate Caesar's military successes by suggesting that the Gauls were “a barbarous and wild people, but unused to war” (¶22, p. 29), which is obviously quite absurd, and Guarino cites various authorities to that effect, concluding “that the Gallic people were at no time unused to war” and “were terrifying in arms” (¶57, p. 107).

On the other hand, some of Guarino's quibbles are completely bizarre. When Poggio talks about Caesar's lustful immorality and mentions his affair with Cleopatra as an example, Guarino replies by pointing out that Scipio “was once ensnared by love for a domestic slave and [. . .] surrendered to love”; “which of the two is more deserving of excuse? The man who loved a queen, or the one who loved a servant girl? The man who loved such a beauty that her age produced no finer, or the one who loved an ugly slave?” (¶54). Bold of him to assume that the slave-girl can't have been pretty; and for that matter, who is to say that Cleopatra's beauty can't have been a bit exaggerated by propaganda and then uncritically passed on by ancient historians? (Poggio, in ¶82 of his reply (p. 209), says about Cleopatra being pretty that “Plutarch writes the opposite”, and he mocks Guarino for writing as if he knew that Scipio's slave-girl was ugly.)

Anyway, Guarino, of course, knows that picking on details such as these can't change the argument in favour of Caesar, and so also defends the latter more directly; in his view, Caesar brought much-needed stability to the Roman state; he did not destroy Roman liberty, which “had long since been destroyed, though people still lived in her shadow” (¶60); under him, the fundamental structure of its government didn't change much, and the people were freer than before, being now liberated of the burden of civil strife. I don't doubt that many Romans in Caesar's time saw it that way themselves; his popularity attests to that; but in the long term their acquiescence in the introduction of monarchy was disastrous, and their descendants paid for it by living as subjects to a long series of horrible emperors.

Guarino's treatise provoked an equally long (or even slightly longer) response from Poggio, titled Defense of ‘On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar’, where Poggio goes into more details that he obviously couldn't go into when writing his original short essay, but on the whole this doesn't really have much potential to affect the outcome of the dispute. By the time you get to this point, you have surely already cast your lot either with Scipio or with Caesar, and you aren't likely to change your mind.

Poggio admits that Caesar does deserve some praise, just not as much as Scipio; “in Caesar there were very great outrages, but none in Scipio” (¶81, p. 207).

One thing where I definitely did symphathize with Poggio in his response was the way he objects not to the fact that Guarino disagreed with him, but to the manner of Guarino's disagreement. Poggio emphasizes that he wrote his opinion and that everyone is free to disagree (though he clearly also thinks that Guarino is being a bit silly with his pro-Caesar position); but since Guarino's response attacked him personally and constantly upbraided him in much too strong terms, he felt obliged to defend himself. (I'm guessing that Guarino had momentarily forgotten that he wasn't dealing with one of his students, who were presumably used to being upbraided by him in this manner.)

Poggio even mocks Guarino by saying that “I, for one, would not have believed this to be his work had it not been signed ‘Guarino’ [. . .] would reckon it had been cobbled together by some ranter in the market place and worthless litigator” (¶1, p. 129). Reminds me of that well-known line: “some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters” :))

Both Poggio and Guarino tried to interest other intellectuals and even various members of the ruling class in the debate, with some success, and the last piece here is a letter to Poggio from Pietro del Monte, a church official who lived in London at the time. (There he even got the Duke of Gloucester (son of King Henry IV) interested in the dispute; ¶6.) Pietro (who was a friend of Poggio's and a former student of Guarino's; ¶1, 4) fully agrees with Poggio, both as regards the original dispute about Caesar and Scipio, as well as regarding the fact that Guarino's response was too personal and that Poggio was right to respond to it in turn. Pietro also provides some more quotations from ancient sources in support of his (and Poggio's) position. I was glad enough to see that we are all (except Guarino) mostly in agreement, but other than that Pietro's letter doesn't change anything substantial about the debate (and it wouldn't be reasonable to expect it to do so), and isn't likely to change anybody's mind.

I liked the part where Pietro compares Caesar to an earlier Roman tyrant, Tarquin the Proud; the expulsion of the latter was generally held to have been praiseworthy; and Caesar being even worse than Tarquin, “the case for killing Caesar was far more just and persuasive than that for expelling Tarquin” (¶32), and he approves full-throatedly of the assassination: “I could never praise worthily enough that deed of the best citizens” (ibid.).

On the Unhappiness of Leaders

Lastly, this volume also contains another work by Poggio, not related to the Scipio/Caesar controversy (though there is a mention of Caesar in C27 here, as an example of how rulers are generally not good people). It is a longish treatise titled On the Unhappiness of Leaders, and though technically in the form of a dialogue involving Poggio and three other learned men, the character of Poggio says very little in it and most of the talking is done by another speaker, Niccolò Niccoli, who I guess represents Poggio's actual views on the subject. He defends, at considerable length and illustrated by countless examples, mostly from ancient history but also a few more recent ones, the idea that “leaders” * aren't (and mostly can't be) happy (“there is no bond between leaders and happiness”, C18). The other speakers occasionally venture minor objections or try to soften his position somewhat, but Niccolò — who seems to be something of a Cynic and has much of the abrasiveness that traditionally went with that philosophical school — mostly just brushes them aside and keeps going (C40).

[*This is how the word principes is translated here, and I wonder why the translators don't say “rulers” or even “princes” instead; surely this would have suited the dialogue better, since pretty much all the examples in it are of monarchs; no other form of leadership is even hinted at. Poggio explicitly writes that “under this heading I want to include emperors, kings, dukes and the rest who hold sway over others” (C18).]

This is the sort of discussion that, although in a sense interesting, nevertheless gets tiresome fairly quickly, since so much of it hinges on how you define happiness. It soon became clear to me that Poggio's understanding of this word is different from mine. He (or should I say Niccolò as one of the characters in the dialogue) points out, for example, that leaders are prone to all sorts of vices and faults, since there is nothing much that would restrain them; the position of a leader “is bound either to corrupt even the good or to wear them out so thoroughly that they can have no taste of happiness” (C28); “ruling corrupts its possessors with a multitude of mental diseases” (C31). The very few who don't get corrupted will still be unhappy because of all the cares and burdens of their position (C18).

Diogenes himself would be proud of Niccolò when he says that “the things which Carlo cited as conducive to gaining happiness, namely riches, resources, the ability to do things, [. . .], these seem rather to be incitements to and instruments of unhappiness than of happiness.” (C32) He finds fault with everything; leaders “fear poison and ambushes set by their friends. Feasts and drinking sessions engender suspicion” etc. (ibid.; cf. also C56–57). Indeed good rulers “have been rarer than the Stoics' sage” (C37). I particularly liked the following sentiment by Niccolò, though I'm not sure if it's meant to be only anti-monarchism or full-blown anarchism: “with how many disasters the desire for power has afflicted the world [. . .] those men appear worthy of execration who first gave to one man what belonged to everyone and who, subjugating the freedom under which they were born to slavery, preferred one person to have more power than everyone else” (C38); “the position of leader is by nature a bad thing” (C40). To the suggestion that some rulers haven't been that bad, he replies simply that “they have been rarer than monsters and miracles” (ibid.)

This is all well and good, and I'm always glad to see rulers being bashed, but what on earth does it all have to do with happiness? Here we come to the crux of the matter. Niccolò turns to ancient authorities as to what happiness even is: “Aristotle tells us [. . .] that happiness is obtained through the exercise of the virtues. Our own Cicero wishes it to be prosperity in honorable matters or a fortune which aids good counsels, and the person who does not experience these cannot by any means be happy. Hence where virtues or good counsels are lacking, where vices are present, in that place there cannot exist any happiness.” (C46) Later Niccolò tells us his own opinion (and, commendably, says he will not define happiness as narrowly as the Stoics would): “happiness follows a mind which is peaceful, at liberty and free of all disturbance” (C84), which he insists a ruler can't possibly be.

Well, at this point the whole dialogue started to feel a bit superfluous; with such a cunning definition of happiness it is of course blindingly obvious that rulers can't be happy. But the definitions he quoted clearly come from moralists who are trying to manipulate us into behaving virtuously by dangling the prospect of happiness before us like some sort of carrot. Our everyday notion of happiness is surely much wider than that; it's an emotion that people feel, sometimes for shorter and sometimes for longer periods, under various circumstances (and I suppose that modern-day science could tell us precisely which hormones are flooding our brains at that particular moment, and which gland emits them, and I'm frankly surprised why we can't buy them in the form of pills yet).

I could very easily imagine a leader being happy; if he has a reasonably well-organized court, he doesn't have to be as paranoid and suspicious all the time as Niccolò suggests; if he has the slightest sense of delegation (a concept which Niccolò never even hints at), he can hand over much of his work to ministers, advisors, etc., and so avoid being overburdened with the business of running the state (which Niccolò often mentions as one of the things that makes rulers unhappy); and then, if he doesn't have too complicated a personality, he can devote himself to enjoying the pomp and ceremony of his court, the feasting and drinking, the musical and theatrical entertainments, he can chat with his friends, he can dally with his concubines, he can go out hunting — heck, he could even dabble in the arts or whatever other hobbies he might be into; he can, in short, be as happy as a pig in the mud. At least he would call himself happy, and you and I would call him happy; but Aristotle and Cicero and Niccolò wouldn't, I suppose.

Later Niccolò lists many instances of cruelties perpetrated by various rulers (especially the killing of family members as potential rivals) and asks rhetorically: “Do you think that among so many and so foul and monstrous crimes any trace of happiness is left?” (C76) But if he cites authorities concerning the nature of happiness, I can do that as well: “One might kill and rob and yet be happy” — Rostov in Tolstoy's War and Peace, book 4, ch. 15. :]

Niccolò also likes to exaggerate the cares and burdens of a ruler's position; “those who think they are in control, are in fact the slaves of everyone” (C85); “a good leader” is “as it were the public slave of everyone” (C87). But, surely, the solution to this is very simple; don't worry too much about being the perfect leader; don't try to micromanage everything; by igoring some of the work and delegating some of the rest, I'm sure the burdens of leadership can be whittled down to something very tolerable.

Towards the end, the author can't resist tooting his own horn a bit; “it is not among leaders, but among private individuals that happiness is sometimes found” (C97), that is if they are virtuous and pursue “wisdom and learning” (C98); “their mind, removed from ambition, free from desire, is content with what is their own, not seeking what is someone else's, they live freely and make their adherents happy” (ibid.); “if any people seek happiness, they should realize that it has its abode not in the position of leader but in virtue and the blessed life” (C102).

Now, I'm perfectly willing to agree that the life of a (preferably independently wealthy*) scholar-intellectual who doesn't seek public office could indeed be very happy; I just disagree that the concept of happiness should be defined so narrowly. Most people, from most walks of life, can be happy from time to time, and pretty much nobody will be happy all the time, since that just isn't how our brain works. Happiness is not confined to any particular segment of society, and it's nonsense to say that rulers aren't, and can't ever be, happy.

[*He adds later: “I would not call leaders more unhappy than those who hang on the leader's nod in their desire for external things”, C102.]

Miscellaneous

I have to commend the translators for translating a quotation from the Aeneid on pp. 261–3 as real verse, with metre and all, and not as prose as is usually done in the ITRL. I tried to google a few phrases from their translation of this passage but got no hits, so I guess the translation is their own, made especially for this volume.

On the other hand, their use of “taboo” on p. 383 feels anachronistic; you can't help being reminded of the fact that the term and the concept come from Polynesian cultures, with which Europeans would not have had contact for quite some time after Poggio's day.

I also raised an eyebrow at “mining bronze” on p. 365. Surely you can't mine bronze, since it's an alloy of copper and tin? Isn't it more likely that the Latin word aes, which can mean both ‘bronze’ and ‘copper’, is intended in the latter sense here?

And on p. 291, we have “as bluebottles fly toward honey”; since this English word was new to me, I peeked at the Latin on the facing page and found that there they are muscae, i.e. simply “flies” and not specifically bluebottles, which are just a subset of flies.

An interesting anecdote that I didn't previously know about: “Plato, after being summoned by Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily because of the glory of his learning, was sold into slavery upon the tyrant's orders.” (On the Unhappiness of Leaders, C62.) Well, that escalated quickly! I wonder how he got out of this terrible predicament.

I have never given this any thought before, but the words serve and preserve are obviously related, but it isn't so obvious why two such related words should have such unrelated meanings. Apparently the ‘preserve’ sense came first: “slaves [servi] are named from the fact that commanders are wont to sell, and thus save [servare], slaves, and not to kill them” (p. 497, n. 109).

Interesting: Poggio, while attending the Council of Constance, spent some time travelling in Germany looking for manuscripts of otherwise lost ancient literary works, and made several important discoveries (p. 510, n. 20).

BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Dinner Pieces"

Leon Battista Alberti: Dinner Pieces. Vol. 1. Edited by Roberto Cardini. Translated by David Marsh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 97. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674295742. xxxi + 363 pp.

Leon Battista Alberti: Dinner Pieces. Vol. 2. Edited by Roberto Cardini. Translated by David Marsh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 98. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674295742. vi + 359 pp.

By now we've seen several works by Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library (his Biographical and Autobiographical Writings; Momus, a novel; and Philodoxus, a comedy) and there's definitely a pattern here: nearly all these works of his are (supposed to be) comical, or satirical, or humorous, and at pretty much no point have I been able to appreciate the comedy, satire or humour in them; in fact most of the time I couldn't quite see the point of such writings at all, so that I can only conclude, with considerable regret, that I'm missing the point of Alberti's work completely and that I'm definitely not part of the intended target audience for it.

The present work, Dinner Pieces, is a collection of about 50 short pieces, the shortest of which are less than a page long, the longest run to maybe twenty pages or so, and most are toward the lower end of this range. Some are short stories or fables, many are dialogues and a few almost resemble one-act plays. In his preface Alberti hopes they will be “read over dinners and drinks” (vol. 1, p. 3), hence the title; I didn't try to read them over dinner, but I suspect that Alberti had a longer and more leisurely banquet in mind, and most of his dinner pieces would be too long for my dinners :)

A lot of the pieces are allegorical in a rather ponderous and drawn-out way. For example, 1.4 is a philosopher's dream in which human souls are struggling in a river, some on planks, some on boats, some with floats; the river, of course, is called Life. 3.1 describes a long series of alegorical paintings of virtues and vices. In 3.7, Truth and Reason uproot a monstrous plant called Suspicion. In Appendix 2.2, the protagonist (a stand-in for Alberti himself) has crafted twelve rings with various allegorical designs, whose meaning is then described at great length; they show how to live a virtuous life. On a somewhat related note, 8.2 is a long list of enigmatic teachings by ancient philosophers, along with their supposed interpretations, many by Alberti himself; for example, we are told that Plutarch “interprets the saying [by Pythagoras] ‘Abstain from beans’ to mean that we should shrink from public office” (¶12). It's nonsense like this that gives philosophy a bad reputation :(

4.1 is a dream-journey into a bizarre underworld; there's a river of human faces; lost things — empires, authorities, favours, the narrator's brain; crossing the river by riding an old hag while she swims on her back.* If there's any allegory behind all this, it's quite impenetrable to me. But it's insane enough that it might very well be based on an actual dream :)

[*This part of the story features one of the most hilarious passages in the whole book; it's like something straight out of an incel forum: “You can't imagine how loudly I laughed as I swam across this river. Men are ferried across by old women condemned to this task because as girls they acted haughty and cruel, and as hags practiced sorcery and witchcraft. [. . .] What's more, women's heads are completely empty, and thus provide an excellent means of crossing a river.” (¶39–40, 47) :)))]

Some pieces espouse Stoic ideas that were no doubt fresh back in Ancient Greece when the world was young, but are less so today (though they are no less true); some are more in the Cynic vein, content to mostly just show people at their worst. In 1.6 we see a group of recently enslaved Scythians giving their various opinions about their future life in capticity; they conclude that the little babies have it best, as they never knew life in freedom. In 2.4, we see an astrologer and his assistant collecting money from customers and then making worthless predictions. In 3.3, gods are looking for Justice, but she is not to be found anywhere on earth. In 4.2, various characters desire a garland from the beautiful maiden Praise, but are mocked by her ugly chaperone Envy; none are found worthy. In 4.3, a Cynic, advising Phoebus on which animals to change various groups of human souls into, vituperates them all mercilessly (in the end, he, too, is turned into an animal, a “gold-winged fly”). In 4.4, a group of talentless writers tries to enter the Temple of Fame (chaos ensues). In 4.6, a philosopher argues that the slave is really more free than his master, who is burdened with responsibility for his whole household and thus is himself a slave to Necessity; I hope that this is sarcastic, but it's honestly hard to tell :)) — and it reminded me a little of the arguments by modern-day capitalists (and their bootlickers), who like to pretend as if their life and work were harder and more stressful than that of their workers.

But the most sustained example of grim cynical pessimism is Appendix 2.1, where Neophronus, recently deceased, finds that his spirit is now able to move freely at will, and promptly experiences one disappointment after another. His wife laments him in public, but cheats with his steward... during his funeral :))) (¶67); his son is overjoyed at his death (¶117); his servants gather in his cellar, drinking his fine wines (¶139); his kinsmen curse him for not remembering them in his will, and rifle through his library in search of hidden valuables (¶174), destroying his manuscripts, the fruit of a lifetime's worth of literary study (¶250). All his actions in life had been in vain (¶361); “life is an evil to be shunned” (¶370); thoroughly disgusted with human nature, he is content to be and remain dead (¶392–7). — None of this is exactly wrong, but it's grim stuff nevertheless. Alberti shows people at their worst, but they aren't actually always as bad as this, though he might pretend otherwise.

A few of the pieces are critical of religion in what was probably a fairly daring way in his time. 1.2 is a dialogue in which one of the two interlocutors espouses boldly Stoic ideas about how gods don't intervene in the world and certainly don't listen to human prayers. In 2.6, priests argue which god to worship, but finding a coin on the altar, decide to worship that henceforth. In 3.6, the priests have “always revered and loved the wicked”.

Many pieces have some sort of moral lesson which, for the most part, is fairly conventional, neither particularly original nor particularly insightful. 1.5: have patience, but only as long as necessity requires it; 2.2: find a good middle path between frugality and avarice; 2.5: it's better to be thought a miser than to be thought poor; 3.2: flowers that, driven by ambition, came from the ground too early in spring, found themselves frosted by a cold wind; 3.4: how to treat captured enemies in war? he recommends keeping them as hostages, a middle road between killing them and releasing them; 3.5: an allegory in which stones come to regret their “eagerness for revolution”; 9.1: rely on yourselves and hope rather than despair (this particular piece also has the good feature of looking at least somewhat like a reasonably straightforwardly told story, as opposed to being just a pile of allegories like so many other pieces in this collection); 10.3: bend rather than break; 10.4: stick with established institutions.

I enjoyed 3.2, a short fable: a cock, realizing they are being fattened up for slaughter, refuses to eat; but then the farmer, seeing him all scrawny, thinks he is sick and slaughters him even sooner, to prevent the disease from spreading :))

Book 10 is almost entirely on political subjects. I liked 10.1, set in a community of birds; the Owl proposes that birds of prey, “who cannot scratch the ground for food”, should be provided with food by others; the Duck argues against this with arguments that are *exactly* like those of modern-day libertarians (tAxAtIoN iS sLaVeRy etc etc.). This argument carries the assembly, and the birds of prey then decide to take by force what has thus been denied them. The moral of the story is not exactly uplifting: “There are some citizens whom it is better to support with deference, rather than at peril to your life” (10.1.50); but I guess this made sense in the turbulent environment of renaissance Italy, with its constant risk of coups by powerful cliques and the like. Anyway, the part of this story that I found the most interesting was the libertarian-like arguments of the Duck, since they are so similar to ones made today. An important difference, of course, is that in the story it is the most powerful (i.e. the birds of prey), rather than the weakest, class of society that would be the recipients of the proposed system of welfare; it is easy to oppose that system while being in favour of the present-day welfare systems; but the Duck's libertarian arguments apply equally to both, and I despise those arguments regardless of the merits of the specifical welfare system under consideration.

In 10.2, a community of clouds asks Jupiter to assign them a king; he tells them to elect one themselves, and they promptly break into factional violence. Jupiter smiles, knowing this is a good way “to restrain and repress their aggressiveness” (10.2.48).

In 10.5, a community of fish and frogs living in a lake descends into factional conflict and even invites two outside rulers: the fish invite a snake, the frogs an otter, and both then rule as tyrants. Eventually the fish and frogs manage to mend their relations, overthrow the tyrants and live in harmony. (I guess this was of great contemporary relevance to Alberti, when foreign rulers were meddling in Italy's countless wars and occasionally were even invited to administer this or that city-state for a limited time.)

He has some favourite topics that he freqently returns to, and that we've already seen in the earlier ITRL volumes of Alberti's works, such the unprofitability of studying literature (though he persists in it anyway; 1.1, 4.5, Appendix 2.1, Preface to Book 4), or his distrust of women and marriage (7.1, 7.2, 11.2).

Several of the books have short prefaces, in which Alberti espouses some surprisingly reasonable and moderate ideas. In the preface to Book 7, he points out that many now wish to be good orators, but instead of practicing their own oratory, they waste time by criticizing others. Alberti thinks we can't expect everyone to be great orators, and should be content with what contemporary writers are able to accomplish. In the preface to Book 10, he calls for more “goodwill and affection” between scholars, and less detraction; they all strive for “virtue and glory”; and they can bond over hating the “ignorant masses” :)

*

Unlike with many other ITRL volumes, the translation (by David Marsh) in the present edition isn't new, but a reprint of a translation first published in 1987; at first sight it seems identical but I didn't compare it all that closely, so I guess that some minor changes have perhaps have been made to bring it in line with the Latin text (which is from Cardini's edition of 2010). Having taken a glimpse at the 1987 edition of Marsh's translation, I think that I find his introduction more useful and informative than Cardini's introduction in the present volume, but when it comes to endnotes it's just the opposite. I couldn't help feeling, while reading the introduction to the present edition, that Cardini has immersed himself so deep, and for so many decades, in the study of Alberti's work, that he wasn't able to write his introduction at the level needed by a reader completely unfamiliar with these things, such as me (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course; I'm not *really* the target audience for these books).

For example, I must be blind, but I couldn't even find any explanation as to why Book 4 of the Dinner Pieces is immediately followed by Book 7. What happened to Books 5 and 6? The answer, according to Marsh's introduction (pp. 1, 9 in his 1987 edition), is that the work was not printed early on, like most of Alberti's works have been, and has survived only in a few manuscripts, none of which happens to include Books 5 and 6. (Incidentally, the first printed edition, from 1890, is available on archive.org, but contains only about half of the material now known.) Anyway, I thought this was quite interesting; I vaguely remembered Alberti as a 15th-century figure, and I thought of the 15th century as already within the age of printing; but I guess it stands to reason that printing got established only gradually over the course of that century, and manuscripts still remained important for a while.

Nevertheless some parts of the introduction were very interesting. For example, it points out that for earlier humanists such as Petrarch, humanism was mostly about reading and writing of books: “Petrarch placed architects, painters, and sculptors among the practitioners of the ‘mechanical arts’ ” (vol. 1, p. xv); by contrast, Alberti promoted a “nonbookish concept of humanity” in which “painting and sculpture, music and goldsmithing, astronomy and astrology, mathematics and geometry” (ibid.) had an equal part with reading and writing. I guess this helps explain why he keeps ranting about how useless the study of literature is :)

I was also interested to learn that Alberti's real name was Battista; Leone was just a pen-name (p. xxvi). He was an illegitimate child but later obtained a papal dispensation for it, which allowed him to progress in his career (p. xxvii).

As for the English translation, it has one very interesting characteristic: in nearly all the other ITRL volumes, the English translation is a good deal longer than the Latin original, but here the English translation is shorter by about the same amount. I'm not suggesting that we should accuse the translator of omitting anything; in the present edition, every sentence is numbered (both in the Latin and in the English text) and accounted for. I guess that Marsh simply uses a more efficient style, and from time to time I couldn't help wishing that the other translators in the ITRL series would follow his example.

But I have to protest against Marsh's use of “zombie friend” (4.6.27) to translate cadaverosum hospitem. It feels very anachronistic, since you can't help but be reminded that in Alberti's time, the Europeans hadn't even discovered America yet, let alone colonized Haiti, populated it with African slaves and waited for zombie folklore to emerge there.

The editor's introduction to the present volume has an interesting remark that “[t]he Latin of the Dinner Pieces is a delicious mélange” (vol. 1, p. viii), mixing many different styles, but I can't say that I noticed this in the translation; but perhaps I just don't have a sufficiently sensitive ear for style to notice it.

A funny tidbit from the notes: in 1441 Alberti sponsored a competition “for the best poetic composition in Italian. [. . .] the jury, made up of Latin-writing humanists, spitefully refused to pick a winner” :)) (vol. 1, p. 344).

*

Anyway, what to say at the end? Alberti's Dinner Pieces were not really my cup of tea overall, but readable enough in small quantities; and since I wasn't expecting anything more from the book, I can't say that I was in any way disappointed by it.

BOOK: Johan Ludvig Runeberg, "The Tales of Ensign Stål"

Johan Ludvig Runeberg: The Tales of Ensign Stål. Translated by Charles Wharton Stork, Clement Burrbank Shaw, and C. D. Broad. With an Introduction by Yrjö Hirn and illustrations by Albert Edelfelt. Helsingfors: Söderstrom & Co., 1952. xxvi + 244 pp.

I first heard of this book and its author about ten years ago, thanks to a rather remote connection: I was reading Sven Hedin's propaganda book America in the Struggle of the Continents and found him quoting a phrase that seemed evidently to be from a poem, but there was no hint as to its source. By googling a bit, I found that it was from one of Runeberg's poems which form part of The Tales of Ensign Stål (in the present volume that particular poem is translated as The Ensign at the Fair).

There was much to fascinate me and excite my curiosity about this book and its author, and make me want to read it. Here was a man who was hailed as the national poet of Finland, but he wrote everything in Swedish! I was amazed by this. Finland had been under Swedish rule for many centuries, but apparently had been treated well enough that there was not much bad blood between them. I couldn't help but compare it to our own history; Slovenia had been part of the Austrian Empire (and its various predecessors) for many centuries, but if someone asked if a poet writing in German could have been considered our national poet, the idea is completely unthinkable. I could never regard such a poet as anything but a foreigner, even if he and his ancestors had lived here for generations. But apparently in Finland things were very different; I cannot entirely understand them, but I am fascinated by it nonetheless.

And then there was the subject matter of this book; here is a volume of poems about the Finnish War of 1808–9, a conflict so obscure by present-day standards that I had hardly ever heard of it before! — but it clearly loomed enormously large in the minds of Runeberg and his contemporaries in 19th-century Finland. How could I resist wanting to read more about it? I soon bought a secondhand copy of this book, but only got around to reading it now, some ten years later.

The book comes with a useful and interesting introduction which provides enough historical background that one can appreciate the poems just fine without feeling the need to look anything up in the wikipedia (though at times looking things up can be interesting just the same). Sweden used to be something of a great power in northern Europe, and that role brought her into a never-ending sequence of conflicts with Russia, conflicts which Sweden eventually mostly started losing. The war of 1808–9 was just the last step in this process, and in it Sweden lost Finland to Russia. Runeberg was born in 1804, so that as a young man he must have had plenty of opportunities to read and hear about the war from people who had experienced it themselves, and it was these things that inspired the poems in the present volume. In one of the first poems he presents the whole thing as being based on his conversations with an elderly veteran, the eponymous Ensign Stål, though judging by Yrjö Hirn's introduction at the start of the book, Runeberg's sources of inspiration were actually a bit more varied and complex than that.

I was a bit surprised that the volume, which is not very extensive, was translated by as many as three translators. The table of contents shows who translated which poem; if I counted aright, 25 poems are in Stork's translation, 9 in Shaw's, and only one (the first poem in the book, Finland) by Broad. In fact Shaw had previously published his own translation of the entire work, as The Songs of Ensign Stål (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1925). On the other hand, Stork had published a translation titled The Tales of Ensign Stål (Princeton University Press, 1938), with an introduction by Yrjö Horn same as the present edition, but it was only about 150 pages long (the present edition is about 240 pages), so it was probably incomplete and contained only the poems which are marked, in the table of contents in the present volume, as having been translated by Stork. The present volume, then, is something of a second edition of Stork's 1938 book, with the missing poems supplied from Shaw's 1925 book.

Incidentally, Shaw's edition is available on hathitrust.org and actually looks very good. It has many of the same illustrations (by Edelfelt) as the present volume, as well as some musical scores, maps, a fairly extensive historical introduction, and best of all, a short introduction before each poem, with useful background information — just the thing which I occasionally missed while reading the present edition. One downside of Shaw's edition, however, is that he insists of describing the work as an ‘epic’ and the individual poems as ‘cantos’, which strikes me as simply silly; it's obviously a collection of poems about a shared topic, not a single epic poem.

Anyway, I enjoyed The Tales of Ensign Stål a great deal (the illustrations are a nice touch as well), so in the rest of this post I'll just write a few words about each of the poems that I particularly liked:

• Finland (pp. 3–5): a beautiful poem full of love for his country. I particularly liked this stanza: “This is a sweet and lovely spot, / All, all we need lies here. / However fate may cast our lot / A land, a homeland, we have got — / And what is worthier, far or near, / To cherish and hold dear?”

• The Veteran (pp. 29–35): an old veteran, hearing that a battle is to be fought close to where he lives, puts on his old uniform and goes to sit at the edge of the battlefield to watch the fight! “He longed to hear the clashing / Of sword-blades yet once more, / The full familiar echo / Of great field-cannons' roar;— / Would call to recollection / His young life's valiant mood, / See this new race of fighters,— / The courage of its blood.” Amazingly, although the fight occasionally comes close to him, nobody molests him and all bullets miraculously whizz past his ears. The Finns win the battle, and the veteran cheers on them as they return from the field: “Great thanks to you he renders / For this illustrious day; / For no more glorious combat / Did e'er his eye survey. / To God be praise and glory, / We triumph yet again; / Still lives our fathers' spirit, / And still our land has men!”

I really liked this poem because it is so very different from what we could imagine today. For someone to watch a battle and not get horribly killed himself in the process, is inconceivable today (frankly, I wonder how realistic it was even in 1808/9). Moreover, nowadays it seems as if two adjacent generations couldn't possibly do anything but hate each other and consider each other wrong about everything; but here the veteran gave full-throated, full-hearted praise to the soldiers of the young generation. Back then there was still the idea that society could continue from one generation to another, that where one generation left off, the next would continue building upon that; now, by contrast, everyone is convinced that it is every generation's duty to ignore or dismantle everything that was built before their time, and start anew from scratch. Sigh.

• The Girl of the Cottage (pp. 42–6): a nice poem with a twist. The girl is watching soldiers returning from battle, but doesn't see her sweetheart amongst them. She goes to look for him on the battlefield, but doesn't find him among the dead there either. Previously, she grieved for him because she thought he was dead; but now, realizing that he had deserted to avoid risking his life, her grief takes an altogether darker turn: “When others came and he came not, I wept his fate most truly, / Among the dead there on the field I thought him lying duly; / I sorrowed, but my grief was sweet, 'twas not a grief to kill, / I would have lived a thousand years to sorrow for him still. // Mother, I sought until the light no more the west was streaking, / But never found amid the slain the face that I was seeking, / I'll dwell no longer in a world where men deceive and lie; / I found him not among the dead, and therefore I will die.” A beautiful ballad in a beautiful metre — what more could you wish for?

• Sven Duva (pp. 47–54): Sven is a big and strong lad, with a brave heart but not much of a brain, and horribly clumsy at everything he tries to do; he joins the army, but even there he's the laughingstock of everyone by getting all the orders mixed up while drilling. But when war comes, he has the chance to prove himself; his unit is sent to hold a bridge against the incoming Russians, but his comrades are soon killed and Sven holds the bridge by himself long enough for reinforcements to arrive. (I was reminded of Macaulay's brave Horatius, but he had two companions while Sven stood alone.) Their commander, General Sandels, comes to praise Sven, but it is too late: “But Sandels saw that underneath his heart the grass was red, / His breast was pierced, and through the wound his life by now had sped. // These were the words the general spake: ‘We'll all of us admit / That bullet knew far more than we, it knew the place to hit; / It left unhurt the poor lad's head, which was not of the best, / And found itself a worthier mark, his noble, valiant breast.’ ”

You might say that this poem partly deals with the question of whether it's better to have a good heart or a good brain; I for one would be happy to agree that a person with a good heart and not much of a brain is to be preferred over the opposite, and I suspect that most people would say the same, but alas, in practice those with more brain than heart tend to fare better in life.

Incidentally, poor Sven's surname seems to be something of a joke: duva is Swedish for ‘dove’.

• The Dying Soldier (pp. 59–62): although the war of 1808/9 was a bitter one, this poem shows that the author could see the humanity in his enemies as well. Night has fallen on the battlefield and an old Russian soldier is dying next to the body of a younger Finnish soldier with whom they had fought during the day. A girl arrives, searching for her sweetheart amongst the dead; and to be sure, it is none other than the young Finn we have just mentioned. The Russian tries to get up and say something, but in that moment he dies. “He came from out a hostile land, / He served a hostile cause; / But pity him, brother, take his hand, / And mind not what he was! / The time for vengeful thoughts is o'er, / And in the grave men hate no more.”

• Sandels (pp. 70–7): General Sandels is taking his time at dinner and ignoring the messengers bringing increasingly urgent reports of a Russian attack. Soldiers begin to grumble that he is evidently a coward. But he proves his courage by showing himself on horseback in view of the enemy forces, indifferent to the bullets whistling past him; and it turns out that he had a plan all along: “Your men, are they good for a counter-attack? / Will they strike a downright blow? / The enemy's bottled, that was my plan.” It proves a great success, and the enemy is routed.

• The Two Dragoons (pp. 80–3): a poem about a friendly rivalry between two soldiers. Lod was awarded a medal while Stål was recovering from an injury, and so Stål now recklessly charges a group of enemies in the hopes of either getting a medal of his own, or getting killed in the process. And he would have got killed, but Lod rushes to help him, and they both survive. “Lod to Sandels came, / With the medal from his jacket / In his hand displayed, / ‘Let Stål have another like it, / Or take this,’ he said.”

• Old Man Hurtig (pp. 84–8): the fortunes of war have been turning against the Finnish side; Hurtig is an old soldier who feels they have been retreating too much, and resolves not to retreat any more. He goes to sleep “[d]reaming how he nevermore would flee”. The poem now deliberately skips any details about what exactly happens, and ends very touchingly with a scene of Hurtig's body lying in the field in the wake of the Finnish retreat: “And he slept, as if of Gustaf's glory / Every memory long since had passed;— / Deeper slept, from march and battle's story, / Than on bivouac field his last;— / Slumbered, from all care and trouble free, / Dreaming how he nevermore would flee.”

• Kulneff (pp. 89–96): Kulneff is a Russian commander full of energy and zest for life, and his vigour and courage win the respect of his enemies: “Yet all the while throughout the war / There was no Finn but felt a glow / Of undisguised affection for / This battle-seasoned foe. / His well known features would evoke / An answering grin among our folk. / And bear would greet his brother bear / Across the carnage there. // [. . .] 'Twas something that can scarce be told, / When Kulneff and the Finns took hold; / They knew how to appreciate / A worthy wrestling-mate. // [. . .] Cowards alone deserve our hate, / Heap shame on them without remorse; / But hail to him who soon and late / Ran a true soldier's course! / A joyous cheer, a hearty cheer / For him who fought and knew no fear! / Further than that, why ask to know / If he was friend or foe?” I was really impressed by this poem and the sentiments contained therein, especially since they are so unthinkable today. I can't imagine that anybody in the numerous armed conflicts that are going on at present would admit to having such gallant respect for his enemies. Perhaps it's because technology has changed and war is now more impersonal than two hundred years ago.

• Sveaborg (pp. 105–8): the important fortress of Sveaborg was handed over to the Russians treacherously by its commander, for which the narrator of this poem badmouths him in the most impressive manner — it's practically an adjuration — while scrupulously avoiding his name (which accordingly never occurs in the poem): “Call him the arm we trusted in, / That shrank in time of stress, / Call him Affliction, Scorn and Sin / And Death and Bitterness, / But mention not his former name, / Lest they should blush who bear the same. // Take all that's dismal in the tomb, / Take all in life that's base, / To form one name of guilt and gloom / For that one man's disgrace, / 'Twill rouse less grief in Finland's men / Than his at Sveaborg did then.”

Incidentally, the historical note at the start of the book tells us that his name was Karl Olof Kronstedt. He was sentenced to death in absentia, but “kept away from Sweden and lived in Finland where he received a pension from the Russian government” (p. x). A happy end, I guess :)) By the way, judging by the wikipedia, it isn't quite so clear if Kronstedt was really acting treacherously or not.

• Döbeln at Jutas (pp. 109–21): General Döbeln has been badly ill with fever for some time, but an important battle is at hand and he realizes that his army will be routed unless he is there to lead it. His soldiers are delighted to see him again, he reviews the troops and speaks a few words to a soldier here and there, then leads them to a glorious attack: “From Döbeln's haughty eyes two tears were streaming: / ‘Come on, you gallant folk, then, to the fray! / I've seen enough, we've no more time for dreaming. / 'Twill be a good fight; this is Döbeln's day. / The harvest's ready. Adjutant, give orders / On hill and plain and through the forest borders / Down the whole front that we're to move ahead. / Not here, out there we'll fight. I've such reliance / In troops like these, I'd bid the world defiance. / We wait no longer, we attack instead.’ // From all the line rose sudden jubilation: / ‘Forward to death or victory!’ it rang.” Wow, what rousing lines! To slightly misquote a sentence from TV Tropes: ‘what can you say to verse like that, except: Get me a horse, I want to *invade* something!’

Döbeln's army achieves a resounding victory, but the general himself finally succumbs to his fever. In the last few stanzas we find him dying alone on the field, addressing god in a way which is not exactly prayer, for his religious opinions are too unconventional for that: “ ‘You have restored my country, by no merit / Of mine, for every other hope was hid. / Do You, all-seeing, look into my spirit, / If gratitude be there for what You did. / The slave may court his god with genuflexion; / I cannot cringe and grovel for protection, / I seek no favor, ask for no reward. / I would but stand here happy in Your presence, / With fervent heart but yielding no obeisance; / That prayer a free man's soul may still afford. // [. . .] But You it was who saved us and none other, / How shall I speak to You? My God, my brother, / Giver of victory, my thanks to You!’ ”

• The Soldier Boy (pp. 125–8): the narrator of this poem is a boy descended from a long line of soldiers; he is an orphan: his father died in battle, and his mother “wept three long days through, / The fourth day she was dead.” But the boy thinks so highly of military glory that, at news of his father's death, he “was distressed, and happy too”; and although he is a beggar now, he can't wait to turn fifteen so he can join the army as well and continue the family tradition: “When whizzing bullets fill the air, / Whoever seeks may find me there, / For I in turn would follow where / My fathers led the way.”

• The Ensign at the Fair (pp. 133–42): an old veteran, fallen on hard times, ekes out a miserable living as a balladeer, singing about old wartime days in the hope of alms from passers-by. At the end of the poem, a general whom we saw at the start of the poem as a rather cold and haughty figure, recognizes the veteran as an old comrade: “ ‘Random are the gifts of fortune, such is Wisdom's high decree; / Mine are glory and abundance, yours are need and poverty; / But the best are ours in common: faith untarnished, ever bright, / Honor by our blood attested, and the consciousness of right. // Therefore we are comrades. Come and sit by me then, battle-mate! / Gladly let us share the small things, who are equal in the great. / I have gold, if you require it; shelter, food unstintingly. / You may end your days in comfort, singing your brave song for me.’ ”

• Lotta Svärd (pp. 143–51): Lotta is a soldier's widow who now works as a vivandière, following the troops with a cart and selling drinks, often close enough to the battle lines that a bullet occasionally whizzes through her tent. “She loved the war, with its griefs and joys, / Whatever their ebb and flow, / She was fond of the grizzled old soldier boys, / And that's why we liked her so. // [. . .] She followed the army, bold and true, / On all of its hard career. / Where shots were cracking and bullets flew / She never was far in the rear. // She liked to see her boys at their game, / And always she used to say, / No matter how close the fighting came, / ‘Well, I'm no nearer than they.’ ”

I liked this poem not just because it's quite touching, but also because it's an example of the wide range of people covered by the poems in this volume: war affects a lot of people besides just the soldiers who fight in it, and its effects linger long after the battles are over; Runeberg is of course very well aware of all this and shows it in the choice of characters and incidents illustrated in his poems (although soldiers and officers and battles understandably do take up the majority of his attention).

Incidentally, later this poem inspired the name of a Finnish women's auxiliary organization in the 1920s and '30s.

• The Stranger's Vision (pp. 159–63): one of several poems that show the lasting impacts of the war decades after it was over. Late one evening, a traveller observes a curious scene through the windows of a stately home: “Upon the wall / I saw a picture and, with interval / Of space between, another there suspended. / The woman, as her steps drew near the pair, / Stopped short, the while her downcast brow ascended / With a glad attitude as if in prayer.” It turns out that she does this every night, and the paintings are of her two sons who had died in the war years ago: “She was those youthful heroes' aged mother; / She did not pray to them—she said good-night.”

• Von Törne (pp. 170–7): one nice thing about the poems in this book is that the poet is very good at showing us the distinct personalities of his characters, many of whom have their own peculiar eccentricities. Major von Törne here is a kind of country squire, now commanding a regiment which he seems to have raised from amongst his own tenants, and he knows all his soldiers personally. He has stopped his regiment a good distance from the fight, and his men are taking pretty successful shots at the Russians from there; but a messenger from the general arrives, with an order to advance. At first von Törne shows no inclination to advance, and wastes time in endless prattling; but then an enemy bullet comes flying “[r]ight through the portal 'twixt the old man's knees”. The man now flies into a rage, and finally orders the attack: “He's shot the coat to tatters and damnation / The second day I've had it on my back! / The devil take that devil! Boys, attack!” :)

• The Commissary Driver (pp. 204–9): a recurring theme in this book is how long the Finnish/Swedish army kept retreating, and how unhappy the men were about these endless retreats. In this poem we meet a remarkably lethargic and ill-kempt driver of a provisions cart; but then when the army reaches Siikajoki and finally gets ready to stop retreating and make a stand, the driver suddenly appears clean, upright, and looking several years younger. He explains why the change: “Slow's the way you travel, when your land you fly. / [. . .] What's the use, besides, to keep your face so clean? / When 'tis washed, your shame's the easier to be seen. / [. . .] Now 't 'as all been changed, like, no more shame to hide, / Finland lies before us, open heaven-wide; / There's no stain upon her, never more shall be, sir, / So a man can wash his face again, d'ye see, sir?”

• Wilhelm von Schwerin (pp. 210–17): the protagonist is a young captain, only fifteen years old, who has distinguished himself by his courage and leadership, but within weeks he gets badly injured and dies; the poem ends with his funeral. You cannot help being touched, but you also can't help wondering how desperate they must have been if they allowed such a young man to get involved in the fighting.

• Number Fifteen Stolt (pp. 218–23): here we meet a vagabond who has sort of joined the army in an informal manner — “you took the gun / A fallen man's hand let go / And came along with us on the run / To the heart of the battle's glow”. He distinguished himself in combat, and is accepted into the ranks and given the uniform of a recently killed comrade. It is the first time he was actually accepted anywhere, and he is moved to tears: “Now the first time on his wintry heart / A sunbeam of spring was cast, / And something within him thawed apart, / For tear upon tear flowed fast.”

• The Brothers (pp. 224–9): the betrayal of the Sveaborg fortress, which we already encountered in one of the earlier poems, casts its long shadow over the current poem as well. Johan Wadenstjerna is visited by his brother, whom he has not seen for almost twenty years, but who evidently had some share in the guilt for the betrayal at Sveaborg, though the details aren't clear to me;* this brother is seeking reconciliation, but Johan drives him away at gunpoint; but Johan himself is anguished about this, and spends a sleepless night in tears.

[*According to the note in Shaw's edition, the brother's name is Carl Wilhelm Wadenstjerna and he doesn't seem to have been guilty of much more than commanding a battallion at Sveaborg, and going along with the surrender. That note also says that he and Johan were actually just brothers-in-law (more specifically, their wives were sisters), and that Johan “died within a year of Sveaborg's capitulation”, so I guess the poet took some liberties here in showing both men still alive 19 years after the end of the war. Perhaps he was inspired by the fact that Carl died in 1819, soon after the date of this poem, and we are perhaps meant to imagine that his death had something to do with the failed reconciliation attempt depicted here.]

• The Provincial Governor (pp. 230–5): this poem shows as an example how valour can be found outside of combat as well. The protagonist, as the title shows, is a senior civil servant, not a soldier. By now most of Finland is in Russian hands, and a Russian general shows up, telling the governor to issue a proclamation that if those who still resist won't surrender, their families' property will be seized. The governor, however, dares to stand up to him and points out that such a confiscation would be contrary to Swedish law, which the czar had promised to uphold when he took over Finland. The general, evidently impressed by the man's courage and uprightness, shakes his hand and goes away. I couldn't help being impressed by this surprisingly wholesome turn of events; if this poem had been set in the present time, in the Russian-occupied parts of the Ukraine, the governor would probably have simply been killed, or deposed and packed off to some prison camp. In some ways our civilization has taken some considerable steps backwards since the days in which this book is set.

BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Biographical and Autobiographical Writings"

Leon Battista Alberti: Biographical and Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Margin McLaughlin. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 96. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674292680. xxvii + 346 pp.

We have encountered Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before — one of the early volumes is his satirical novel, Momus. I (re-)read it a few years ago (see my post about it), but didn't like it very much, mostly because I didn't find its brand of humour particularly funny. The present volume brings us five shorter works by him, and I didn't like these very much either, so I'm starting to conclude that I'm just not the right person to appreciate Alberti's writing. The fact that the works here are shorter at least had the advantage that I was never at any real risk of getting bored by them.

Often I felt that he was more interested in showing off his rhetorical skills and his ability to deploy an endless amount of allusions to classical literature than in saying something interesting, original, entertaining or persuasive. His Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature presents us such a pointlessly exaggerated view of the disadvantages that it's hard to believe that he meant it seriously; his Life of St. Potitus is suffering from the problem that it can't tell us much of a story because so little is known about this highly obscure saint; his Dog is based on a silly gimmick: he writes about his dog using tropes from classical biographies of great men, and in doing so he mostly misses the opportunity to express sincerely his feelings for his recently deceased and much beloved canine companion; in his Autobiography, Alberti writes about himself in such glowing terms that it's hard to take him quite seriously, and at the same time he tells us almost nothing about the actual course of his life; and lastly, his Fly praises this animal in the most exaggerated and undeserving terms, a contrast which is supposed to provide humour but which in practice soon grew just as tiresome as the insect itself.

I don't deny that there is originality and variety here, but there are also so many missed opportunities for a work to be about more than just a gimmick and an exercise in style. Overall I just couldn't feel very excited about any of the works in this volume. Thank goodness that nobody reads this blog any more, so that at least I won't be getting hostile comments for admitting that I didn't enjoy the book :)

On the other hand, I have to praise the translator for the interesting introduction and notes, and especially for making a good effort to translate the occasional puns and word-play (see e.g. p. 93, ¶30).

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature

This is the longest work in this volume, but unfortunately it wasn't much to my liking. The subject, of course, is an old and well-trodden one, and I didn't have the impression that Alberti had anything particularly original to say about it; the whole thing is better thought of as a youthful exercise in rhetoric (he himself speaks of the importance of practicing writing; 1.15), and the editor of the present volume calls it an invective on more than one occasion (pp. ix, 292), though unlike Petrarch's invectives that I read many years ago in one of the early ITRL volumes, Alberti's treatise is not directed against any particular individual. But what he does have in common with Petrarch is that rather than trying to be sober and fair and balanced, they deliberately fight dirty with all sort of exaggerations, biases and rhetorical tricks in the service of their goals. Alberti's gimmick is basically to spend the first and last 5% of the work on the advantages of literature, and the intermediate 90% on its disadvantages, so as to make it seem more impressive that he is nevertheless committed to the study of literature despite its immense disadvantages.

Incidentally, what he means by literature here is very broad, basically any sort of study that revolves largely on reading (preferably in Latin) — he includes even lawyers, notaries and physicians among the students of literature. He deliberately takes an unhealthily extremist attitude towards study, so as to have a good excuse to play up its disadvantages; in his view, a student of literature should pore over his books day and night (2.16–22), smell badly of lamp oil (5.39), be a pale and scrawny nerd that people will shun and almost literally point and laugh at (3.10–13); even the slightest interruption to his studies will cause him to forget so much that he will have to spend many hours catching up again (3.32, 45); nothing short of total non-stop dedication will do. Apart from the great expenditure of time and effort, it will also cost you a lot of money to pay for your studies, buy books etc. (4.16–18, 23). He is also aware of the idea of opportunity costs; as a student of literature, you are spending money when you could be making it.

He then proceeds to spend most of his treatise arguing at great length how all this effort and expense will yield you neither wealth not honours. He purports to justify this by indulging in some very dubious mathematics and statistics (4.88–112) to argue that out of every 1000 people who begin the study of literature, only three will “be able to make money from literature” (4.110). Only lawyers, notaries and physicians have some chance of making good money (4.137), but even of them most don't, especially if they are honest (4.144, 154). Nor can a literary scholar get rich by marriage, since women with a big dowry won't have him (4.184–91).

Not only do literary scholars get no wealth, they also get no respect. Alberti argues that they *deserve* the highest respect (5.4), but nobody actually respects them. Rich people will not be impressed by the literary scholar's rhetoric enough to give him a seat at the table when it comes to political decision-making (5.26–9); in fact they simply won't care about his learning; it means nothing to them (5.31–40). The common people won't respect him either, for the simple fact that he isn't rich (5.54, 65). Alberti is also doubtful about trying to win honour by serving in the public administration, as such jobs will distract you from literary study and “expose you to vanity and envy” (5.82).

It is only at the very end of the treatise that he finally returns to the advantages of the literature; he reasserts his commitment to this field of study; of course, that's why he expounded at such length on it disadvantages — the greater these are, the greater his merit is in nevertheless persisting in his studies. And perhaps he doesn't spend too much time on his advantages because he considers them obvious enough that it suffices to state them plainly: “Let the minds of scholars burn with a desire, not for gold or wealth, but for morals and wisdom, and let them learn from literature, not power and the causes of things, but the form and cult of virtue and glory” etc. (6.16–17). You will be rewarded by “peace of mind, the stability of virtue and the beauty of the arts” (6.26); “such a man [. . .] will believe that all his goods are placed within himself” (6.36).

This is a very charming view of literary scholarship, and of course one wishes to believe it; and yet, you can't help noticing that this is nothing more than argument by vigorous assertion. There used to be a widespread idea that studying ancient Greek and Roman literature somehow made you a better and wiser person; I think it was probably true, but that was back when people were still able to study literature earnestly. There would be no use in trying to revive the study of classical literature now that our entire intellectual class has, for the better part of a century, betrayed the rest of society by going in for modernism, postmodernism and other such corrosive ideologies; they know only how to criticize and deconstruct and play language games, but would react to the idea of holding a sincere opinion, or of searching in literature for truth and beauty, like a vampire to sunlight.

*

Apparently Alberti conducted something of a poll: “I diligently asked many literature scholars” (2.3) and they all wanted to deter other people from studying literature rather than encourage them. You can read similar advice from humanities professors nowadays :)

Amongst the expenses involved in the study of literature he lists “those foolhardy ceremonies they call doctorates” (4.24) :))

When he talks about professions where it is easier to make money than in literature, he suggests soldiering and farming... He had a bizarrely rosy view of these: “no expectation is more certain from any other thing than what is reaped from a well cultivated field [. . .] the countryside offers [. . .] the maximum amount of leisure to enjoy the good life” (4.72). Clearly his idea of a farmer was a big landowner who doesn't actually do any farming himself, probably doesn't even bother running his own estate but has managers for that.

A hilarious quote from 4.180: “women are by nature stupid, arrogant, contentious, bold, insolent and rash” :)))) I don't disagree, but then men are all these things as well; it's just human nature :(

Alberti is commendably self-critical: “We have now reached the stage where [. . .] nobody except the most abject and lazy turns to literary studies. For it is the lame, or the scrofulous, or the distorted and diminished, the stupid, dense, inert people who are unable to incompetent to do any other work who all end up studying literature.” :)) (5.85–6)

The Life of St. Potitus

Alberti wrote this biography at the suggestion of his patron, a prelate named Biagio Molin (p. 293, n. 1); I wonder how he chose this obscure saint. Unsurprisingly, very little is known about Potitus, and as a result Alberti's biography can't help but be rather thin, even though he did his best to pad it out with long speeches and the like.

According to Alberti's biography, Potitus was originally from Serdica (present-day Sofia) and lived during the reign of the emperor Antoninus. The son of a rich pagan father, Potitus adopts christianity as quite a young man; ignoring his father's entreaties and arguments (e.g. that the authorities were persecuting christians pretty badly just then), the young zealot moves away from home. The devil tries to lure him away from his chosen path by appearing in the form of a phantom and then of an ox, but Potitus successfully ignores these manifestations. He successfully cures a senator's wife of leprosy by converting her to christianity.*

[*Alberti writes as if he didn't think very highly about this conversion (¶57): “Since the minds of the sick are credulous, the woman suffering from leprosy was willing to try anything if she thought it would do her good.”]

Soon, word of Potitus' miracle reaches the ears of the emperor, by a rather bizarre mechanism: the devil obsesses Antoninus' daughter and makes her tell him that Potitus is a christian and where he lives. Potitus is summoned before the emperor and, with god's help, easily drives out the devil out of the emperor's daughter. However, his subsequent interview with the emperor goes very badly indeed. Now, I'm the first to agree that zealots can be tiresome and Potitus is no exception, but the way Antoninus reacts here is just plain ridiculous. He goes on an unhinged rant (¶81–100) which levels the most implausible accusations against the christians: “there is no people on earth more abject than those who have decided to live all their life in leisure, rejecting both diligence and hard work. They shun, think little of and even hate military duty, literary study, and any ornamentation of life. You must realize that these same Christians are the most worthless race of men: they are lazy, idle, supine; they pursue no labor nor arts, undergo no civic discipline, but have learned to languish in idleness, solitude and sleep” (¶83–4). Holy shit, is he supposed to be for or against this thing? If christianity was like that, I'd convert in a heartbeat :))) But in actual fact, of course, I don't doubt that most christians in Antoninus' time were pretty normal people leading pretty normal lives; I suppose there may have been a few who tried to avoid participation in society as much as possible to avoid being dragged into its sins — but the idea that all or even most of them were like that, as Antoninus says, is just plain silly.

Anyway, the emperor sees that the people have been rather impressed by Potitus' miracle, and is worried that more of them might convert unless he makes an example of him. He tries to pressure Potitus into making a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and when the youth refuses, he is promptly taken to the amphitheatre, tortured with fire and then consigned to the beasts; but lo, another miracle, the beasts grow meek in his presence and worship him. The emperor sends his minions to finish the job by hacking Potitus to pieces, but a (probably unintentionally) comical scene ensues: “The executioners were seized by such zeal for carrying out his order that while trying to be the first to cut pieces off Potitus, they actually wounded each other, whereas the young man remained untouched” (¶106) :)) After another few similar failures, the emperor falls to the ground in a fit of rage and gets badly injured. His daughter implores Potitus — who is somehow *still* not dead — to save him, and she promptly converts to christianity to secure divine aid (¶110).

Antoninus recovers at once, but alas, his temper has not improved. He sees Potitus holding a sermon to the crowd, orders his tongue to be cut off, but Potitus continues speaking despite the lack of a tongue. Eventually they finally manage to kill him by cutting off his head (¶114). He was not yet fourteen years old (p. 171).

I can't say that I found this hagiography particularly enjoyable, though I'm sure that's not Alberti's fault, it's simply what this genre is like. The characters are shallow and two-dimensional; god and the devil intervene in events all the time; and there is something unpleasantly self-congratulatory about the whole thing. The writer and the reader both know that the saint or martyr will eventually triumph; there is never any doubt about the outcome, the story as a whole is predictable and only the details remain to be filled in.

I suppose the christians looked back at their early martyrs as the plucky underdogs who took on the mighty Roman empire and won, triumphed over all the persecutions and the like. And I suppose that a christian who lived in the 2nd century could justifiably consider himself the underdog; but not so in Alberti's time; someone who writes a hagiography in the 15th century is not a supporter of the plucky underdog, but of the establishment; he is the sore winner who has been absolutely triumphant for more than a thousand years yet still can't stop grinding the face of his long-defeated opponent into the dust.

From my perspective, of course, it is not christianity, but the Greco-Roman paganism that was the underdog; even in the 2nd century its days were numbered, and it was very much the underdog by the 4th. So when I read something like the life of Potitus here, I can't sympathize with the saints and martyrs, because I know that very soon they would win and become the oppressors in turn. Moreover, my sympathies are instinctively with the pagans, and I can never quite understand why people converted from paganism to christianity; my attitude can be summarized by Swinburne's lines: “What ailed us, o gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain?” Perhaps the problem is that ancient paganism, being long gone, is not so well known to us; we all see how many pleasures christianity denies its followers, and how many unpleasant duties and restrictions it lays upon them; for all I know, ancient paganism, as actually practiced, may well have had many of the same faults; but I know so much less about it that it is easy to see it in a more sympathetic light. You sometimes hear that the closest thing to a modern survival of the ancient pagan religions is hinduism, and that religion certainly looks like a total mess that doesn't seem to have much more to recommend itself than christianity does. Perhaps ancient Roman paganism would also seem less appealing if it survived into the present day.

*

A funny passage from ¶42: at one point, the devil changed “into the color and shape of an ox; and that with a great mooing sound he struck the young man [i.e. Potitus] down” We're used to Satan appearing as a goat, but apparently even the poor ox is now to be distrusted. What's next, a kitten? :))

A fine passage from Antoninus' anti-christian rant: “My goodness, it is ridiculous the way they exaggerate when they speak. The heavens, all the gods, the world itself seem not to be enough for them to talk about; they actually descend to the underworld with their tales.” (¶92) You can practically see him getting enraged at the tiresome religious zealouts and missionaries who keep knocking at his door, trying to convert him :)

My Dog

This rather bizarre composition is again in some sense an exercise in rhetoric; Alberti says he was inspired by funeral oratory with which the ancients used to praise eminent men after their deaths (¶1–3); he apparently also wanted to prove that he could do such a thing better than a certain lesser orator (p. 211).

Anyway, the chief conceit of this piece, of course, is that it is written not for an eminent man, but for Alberti's dog. This is a neat idea and I liked it, but the execution leaves something to be desired; in principle seeing someone praise a dog in terms usually used of a person could make for very funny reading, but most of the time I didn't find Alberti's piece to be particularly funny. There are a few puns here and there, which mostly didn't make it into the translation (but the notes point them out); and at times you can have fun figuring out what certain features and character traits, described as if about a person, actually mean when applied to a dog; but most of the time you can't find any meaningful connection between his oration and a dog's life, and the effect is mostly just odd. As the translator's notes point out, Alberti often uses nearly the same phrases here which he would later reuse in his own autobiography (e.g. see notes 36, 38–9 on p. 306).

By way of illustration, here are a few of the stranger passages from this canine biography. The dog's “mother was distinguished for her piety” (¶9); his ancestors included practically every dog mentioned by any ancient author, and Alberti is tireless in rifling through the works of Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero and countless others for anecdotes in praise of dogs; “some were endowed with such courage and bravery” that they would fight “even an elephant [. . .] no matter how fierce and violent” (¶11). Alberti's dog combined the virtues of “the most renowned commanders” — Fabius Cunctator, the Scipios, Caesar, Alexander, etc. (¶30–1). He “mastered in just a few days all the liberal arts that are worthy of a wellborn dog” (¶44); “before he was three he could understand Greek and Latin as much as Tuscan” (¶46; I guess the joke is that he of course didn't understand any human language; there is some wit there, but you are hardly going to laugh out loud). Such was his dedication to the arts that he “would sometimes sing to the moon in various musical modes which he drew from the harmony of the spheres” (¶58). And he lacked the faults of many great men, e.g. he was not “ambitious like Cicero, who when he was almost exhausted from praising himself, in one of his letters then asked other people to write a book in his praise” ¶69). :))

My favourite part of this oration comes at the very end, when Alberti finally, for a brief while, drops the conceit and writes plainly and honestly about how much he loved his dog and how much he misses him (¶73–6). That brief moment of genuine feeling is worth more than the rest of the treatise combined.

My Life

This short autobiography of Alberti wasn't much to my liking either. First of all, the translator's notes at the end of the book point out so many parallels to various classical authors that I can't help wondering how much this is meant to be taken seriously as an autobiography at all, as opposed to being merely yet another exercise in rhetoric. Alberti writes about himself in the third person and doesn't hold back in attributing to himself all sorts of excellent qualities, abilities, talents and personality traits (even the power of divination :)) ¶77). If you can believe him, he really was the very archetype of the Renaissance man, constantly busy studying and working in a wide range of fields.

Meanwhile this autobiography is actually very bad if you expected any clear account of his actual life, rather than merely 20 pages of saying what a great guy he was. He tells us about his various literary works and briefly discusses each of them, which is nice, but other than that there's almost none of the things I would expect in an autobiography: nothing about his ancestors and family; where and how he grew up; his studies, his travels (I saw from passing mentions in the translator's notes that Alberti studied in Bologna, but he never mentions this in his autobiography here); his employments, if he had any (the impression one gets from the lack of this information in his autobiography is that he was simply an independently wealthy man who spent his time tinkering and writing, and who by dint of sheer grit and talent managed to become an important and influential humanist intellectual; but I wonder whether he really was wealthy, since we read at in the translator's notes that Alberti was an illegitimate child, who therefore couldn't take public office (p. 292, n. 24), and moreover that when his father died and left some money in his will to Alberti, the other family members refused to hand this money over).

An interesting feature of this autobiography is a longish list of his supposed witty sayings, which he was apparently able to come up with on the spur of the moment and in considerable abundance (¶40–107). I didn't actually find most of them to be all that witty, but then I already knew that humour is one of those things that doesn't travel well across centuries and cultural boundaries. Nevertheless here's one anecdote that I liked: when a foreigner in his city asked him the way to the palace of justice, Alberti said he didn't know; upbraided by some passers-by who pointed out that the courthouse was right there, he replied: “I had no recollection of justice ever having been in those premises” :)) (¶43).

He was in the “habit of dictating the first draft of his works”, which “accounts for the oral dimension of early drafts and the complex philology behind his texts” (translator's note 20, p. 313).

At the age of 20, he wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, which “circulated for ten years as though it had been written by a little-known ancient writer Lepidus”, until Alberti finally admitted his authorship (translator's note 8, p. 311). I like this idea; it proves that his Latin must have been really good, and moreover people might be less likely to criticize small defects if they believed the work was by a genuine ancient author.

I greatly liked his opinion about art: “He used to ask young boys whether they recognized whose likeness he was painting, and he used to deny that anything could be said to have been painted artistically that could not instantly be recognized by children.” (¶34.) How far we have fallen from this ideal after more than a century of degenerate art!

The Fly

Most of us would agree that the fly is an annoying and worthless creature, but in this short piece Alberti turns this on its head and spends the whole time praising the fly in the highest terms. Much as in the case of My Dog, I agree that this in principle a neat and humorous idea, but in practice I didn't find The Fly particularly funny.

The author pretends to uphold the flies as altogether nobler animals than “the bees, those unworthy favorites of the poets” (¶20; see also ¶4). They are descended from the Centaurs (¶4), a proud warrior race (which we can tell because swarms of flies always accompany human armies, ¶8, and because they always wear “a breastplate with varied colors of gold and bronze”, ¶12) which yet never commits atrocities like human armies do (¶15–16); honourable and sociable creatures, they do everything together and in the open (¶17, 19); they are scientists and philosophers (¶42), “endowed by nature with such enormous eyes that they can easily discover what lies hidden beyond the heavens” (¶25);* a true stoic, the fly “always shows itself to be of the same demeanor” (¶31); the fly “is never idle” and “energetically encourages the lazy to action” (¶39); etc. “We wrote the above laughing, and you too should laugh”, Alberti says at the end; but alas, I almost never did laugh. I don't disagree that there is wit in Alberti's praise of the fly; but it takes more than that to make one laugh.

[*The fly “even knows what blemishes Helen of Troy has on her bottom, has fondled all of Ganymede's hidden parts, and knows by constantly landing on them how bitter is the taste of Andromache's ancient, sagging breasts.” (¶26.) One of the few passages that actually made me laugh :)) ]

Miscellaneous

Apparently another of Alberti's works, the Intercenales or Dinner Pieces, “is forthcoming in this I Tatti Renaissance Library series” (p. xxvi, n. 23). Let's hope I will enjoy it better than the two Alberti volumes I've read so far :)

I was interested to learn (translator's note 36, p. 327) that the names of the musical notes come from “the first syllables in the lines of a famous medieval hymn to St. John the Baptist by Paulus Diaconus: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, mira gestorum famuli tuorum, solve polluti labii reatum”. From this we also see why so is sometimes called sol. The wikipedia says that ut was replaced by the now usual do in the 17th century, to make it an open syllable.

In his autobiography, Alberti mentions some of his works which he wrote in Italian rather than Latin; the thing I found interesting is that, where the translation says “in the vernacular” and “Tuscan” (p. 219, ¶13), the corresponding word in the original was “etruscos” both times. Of course, in one way it makes sense — the words ‘Tuscan’ and ‘Etruscan’ are related — but on the other hand it sounds a little as if he had written those works in the ancient Etruscan language, and that is a very intriguing alternative-historical idea :)