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Silvae
Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) was one of the great scholar-poets of the Renaissance and a leading figure in the circle of Lorenzo de'Medici "il Magnifico" in Florence. His "Silvae" are poetical introductions to his courses in literature at the University of Florence, written in Latin hexameters. They not only contain some of the finest Latin poetry of the Renaissance, but also afford unique insight into the poetical credo of a brilliant scholar as he considers the works of his Greek and Latin predecessors as well as of his contemporaries writing in Italian.
- GenresPoetry
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1996
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March 18, 2026In the final poem of this collection, the Nutricia, Angelo Poliziano delivers a panegyric to what he deems the greatest nurse of mankind: Poetry. Before the gods invented the goddess Poetry, so Poliziano writes, humans had no sense of religion or duty; they could not distinguish one another’s children and had no concept of personal property; they had no understanding of law and crime; they grew terrified at night as if the sun would never reappear. But when Poetry visited the primitive humans of this antediluvian age, they were immediately transformed. Hearing words arranged in meters and rhythms, they suddenly acquired a deeper understanding of right and wrong. “Protinus exseruere hominem,” Poliziano writes, or “they discovered the human,” as Charles Fantazzi translates it (but to put it more literally, “they revealed their humanity” or even “they put forth the human.”) Cicero in his de Inventione had imagined rhetoric as the discovery that lifted humanity from animal status into a communal statehood. Lucretius had identified reason and language as the foundation of human progress and civilization. Poliziano, however, inverts the traditional hierarchy of the arts—poetry, and specifically didactic poetry, is what first taught mankind how to farm and how to understand the seasons, and ultimately how to build the social structures and practices of human life.
But Latin poetry, to the modern reader, will probably seem weird—not just linguistically enigmatic but aesthetically alien. Its pantheon of celebrated poets—Vergil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Statius—wrote with a brash machismo that is mostly absent from modern poetry. “I was the first to show Parian iambs to Latium,” wrote Horace; “I was the first to bring down the Muses from the Aonian mountains,” wrote Vergil. “I have completed a work more lasting than bronze,” wrote Horace; “I have completed my work, which neither the anger of Jupiter nor fire nor iron nor gluttonous time will destroy…my name will be indestructible,” wrote Ovid at the end of his monumental Metamorphoses. Even as they understood themselves as belated heirs to centuries of Greek literature, they nonetheless boasted that they were the ‘first’ and, if not the first, the most important to write in Latin—and they audaciously assumed their own poetic immortality (only Statius shows a slight humility when at the end of his Thebaid, he instructs his book to “follow Vergil’s Aeneid at a distance,” but even this admonition implies his poem will have some enduring canonical status in Latin literature). Roman poetry can seem annoyingly, off-puttingly, self-referential and self-promoting.
Perhaps most confusingly, these plangent expressions of poetic bravado are all a pastiche. When Vergil claims to be the first to bring down the Muses from the Aonian mountains (meaning to write in the style of the Aonian writer, Hesiod—didactic poetry), he hopes that he will be able to “fly through the mouths of men,” and immediately the classical reader will detect here the allusive game: almost the exact wording can be found in the earlier poetry of Vergil himself and in the pre-classical writings of Ennius, and elements of the conceit can also be traced back to archaic Greece: to Pindar, Sappho, Theognis. When Roman poets wrote of their immortality, they were imitating, reworking, parodying, and subverting their Greek models and predecessors. Their braggadocio might seem tedious but it was, in a strange way, actually an homage, an act of fidelity to the genre rather than provocative claim of personal genius. When these authors did write about their poetry, they often framed it more humbly as a form of sampling and commingling: the poet is a bee collecting pollen from different flowers, a lumberjack taking wood from different trees, a farmer grafting one branch onto a different sapling, a weaver threading different strands of fabric, or a man drawing water from different streams (the gushing waters of epic, the small fountains of Callimachean verse). The poets might brag, but when they actually described their craft, they recognized their art as shared and interdependent, as one of selecting and varying public material. Homer, as Quintilian had said (and Poliziano repeats several times in his Silvae), was the ocean from which all other streams of writing originate (not just poetry, but history and oratory, too). Roman writers self-consciously presented all poetry as fundamentally derivative.
Angelo Poliziano did not simply write Latin verse; he imitated this same aesthetic style of imitation and cross-pollination. He had, without a doubt, an incredibly broad reading of classical literature. He had meticulously studied the Roman classics (delivering lectures on Quintilian, writing commentaries on Statius) and his Silvae show compendious knowledge of the Latin lexicon (there are many hapax legomena in this collection—“hirritus” for the “snarling of dogs” found only in Sidonius Apollinaris; “trigonus” for “sting-ray” found only in Plautus). But Poliziano had also studied Greek and he was at the forefront of this literary Renaissance. He had translated Homer’s Iliad; he had consulted the Byzantine Suda for eclectic information about Greek poets; he had sought out mythography in the commentaries of Achilles Grammaticus (who knew that some believed the Nemean lion was born on the moon?); he was clearly also familiar with Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and Aelian’s Various History (few classicists today can say the same). His Silvae (a nod to Statius’ own collection of poems titled the Silvae—woodlands) demonstrates an intimate knowledge of ancient poetry and its aesthetic sensibilities. With a knowing wink, he talks about “clear waters” and “thin streams” (gesturing to the aesthetics of Callimachus); he talks about his “triple language” (evoking Ennius who famously was trilingual); he talks about how “the crowd” and “profane persons” of worldly ambition should not be admitted to his poetry (reworking Horace’s ‘Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo—‘I hate the profane crowd and keep them out’); he writes about the danger of Envy (another nod to Callimachus’ Phthonos and Ovid’s Invidia). Sometimes, verbatim phrases are taken straight from classical writers. In the prologue to the first Silva, when the divine prophetess Manto comes to the crib of Vergil, everyone goes quiet (conticuere viri—the same exact syncopated form used by Vergil at the start of Book 2 of the Aeneid, just before Aeneas gives the story of his arrival). Poliziano is ostentatiously intertextual and metatextual, exactly like the Greek and Roman authors he pored over.
But Poliziano shows a critical awareness not just of the poets he studies but also of the grammarians and rhetors who read them. In his Suasoriae, Seneca the Elder noted a dispute among declaimers and poets about the use of a Virgilian phrase “plena deo” (full of divinity). Arellius Fuscus the declaimer said that he often borrowed phrases from Vergil and had fashioned his own phrasing “numine impleat” on this phrase “plena deo”. The words “plena deo” then became a catchphrase for clever Vergilianizing—and a pointed critique of a declaimer who was perhaps too ornamental (the declaimers Arellius Fuscus and Nicetes, and the poet Ovid all seem to have enjoyed it—“plena deo” is in fact one of the few phrases we know from Ovid’s lost Medea.) So, when Poliziano’s Manto arrives to repeat her prophecy of Virgil’s poetic fate, it is significant that she, too, is “plena deo,” or “full of the god”. Poliziano puts himself squarely camp Vergil—and Fuscus, and Ovid—embracing the poeticisms that rankled more ornery readers.
In other poems, it is possible to see how Poliziano not only imitates classical authors but consciously embroils himself in their aesthetic debates. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, had criticized poets who begin their poems with grandiose sentences and then end weakly, resulting in an absurdly lopsided poem: “the mountains will labor in birth and then a mouse will be born” (‘nascetur ridiculus mus’—a metaphor absurd not just because of the incongruous juxtaposition of mountains and mice but also because of the monosyllabic word at the end “mus” and the diminutive “ridiculus”, which spoils the epic sound of the final spondee). In his poem, the Rusticus, Poliziano alludes to this moment from the Ars Poetica, describing how the countryman, with all his knowledge of stars and seasons, can predict the storms while all the other animals will struggle and the “improbulus mus” (a wicked little mouse) will have to scamper away. The whole poem is overwrought and, maybe even contradictory, panegyric—a celebration of the farmer who enjoys free leisure and peace, is free of vicious ambition, luxury, fractious politics, and hard labor, but who is toughened and resilient and can fight in any war, and knows exactly how to evade storms. That little phrase, “improbolus mus,” coming near the end of the poem, may seem incidental but, subtly, Poliziano, with a nod to Horace, shows that he is self-aware when he transgresses the Horatian fiat and when his own poem breaches the constraints of poetic decorum—from rustic bliss to rodent pests.
Poliziano’s Silvae are not Statius’ Silvae. Statius’ collection ranges from ekphrastic descriptions of Roman statues and patron’s villas, epicedia and funeral consolations to dead children and parrots (obviously imitating, and extravagantly outdoing, Catullus), genethliaca and other occasional poems, and they were written in a variety of meters (both dactylic hexameter and hendecasyllabic and other lyrical meters). Poliziano’s Silvae, while dedicated to eminent Florentines (one of whom, a Medici), are more literary experiments. The Manto is a prophecy of Vergil’s triumphs as a poet; the Countryman is a praise of the life of the rural man, whether farmer or shepherd (à la Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics); the Ambra is a panegyric to Homer’s genius that summarizes and reworks the Iliad and Odyssey into a Latin epyllion (and includes a ghostly apparition of Odysseus to Homer, much like Hector’s visitation of Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid); and, finally, the Nutricia is a poem of thanksgiving to poetry itself. All are, but for a few prefatory poems in elegiac couplets, composed in dactylic hexameter, and stylistically imitative of Homer and Vergil. They are Silvae, the Woodlands, in the metatextual sense—of poetic material drawn from different sources.
To return to Poliziano’s bold claim, “they revealed the human,” (exseruere hominem), it seems grandly absurd—what has verse and meter to do with the dramas of human history or the recesses of the human soul? Coupling poetry with humanity also reverses the traditional literary history: Romans generally apologized for the paucity of their earliest literature: “There was no honor in poetry and if anyone studied it or devoted himself to it at banquets, he was considered idle,” wrote Cato the Elder, from the second century BCE. “Homer and Hesiod preceded the foundation of Rome, Archilochus appeared when Romulus was ruling, we took up poetry later,” Cicero said in his Tusculan Disputations. But when Poliziano describes the function of poetry—delineating city walls, setting down laws, codifying and conveying human knowledge—he sounds much like Cicero and Lucretius and their accounts of early man’s discovery or language and rhetoric. Perhaps anticipating Jakobson, Poliziano understood that poetry and language have always gone hand in hand. The pairing of sound with meaning, meaning with the world, is a poetic act, and it constitutes the organizing principle of human life. Even Jupiter, in Poliziano’s description, sets the planets in motion according to a particular rhythmic harmony, governing the cosmos with a certain kind of poetry. But this is not hyperbole. When Poliziano talks about poetry, he does so with a Roman understanding: it is a collective patrimony, a shared language and aesthetics, the Homeric Ocean which encircles and feeds all other forms of speech. And in that light, it makes perfect sense that poetry underscores humanity: it is the intertextual repository and heredity of human language.
In the final poem, the Nutricia, Poliziano catalogues the great poets of antiquity (from Homer and Hesiod of ancient Greece, to Moses and Jesse of the Old Testament, to Vergil and Lucan of Imperial Rome, and finally to Florence’s own Dante and Boccaccio), but it’s noteworthy to observe what stories he is drawn to: Arion who was, supposedly, the poet who first turned to illicit desires with ephebic men; Pindar who, supposedly, died in the lap of a boy; Ibycus who song only of “male love”. Poetry might be the genesis of law and morality but, for a scholar and secretary in Florence, whose time in the city overlapped with Savonarola’s campaign against homosexual activity, poetry also offered numerous examples of transgressive, same-sex love. When Poliziano praises Vergil’s Eclogues in the Mantua, it is Corydon’s love for the boy Alexis that he eulogizes. “They discovered their humanity” (exseruere hominem) but that singular ‘hominem’ is deceptive. Poetry can reveal not just the essence of human nature but also the diversity of human life, a humanity that is as plural and varied as the forms of poetry itself.
But Latin poetry, to the modern reader, will probably seem weird—not just linguistically enigmatic but aesthetically alien. Its pantheon of celebrated poets—Vergil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, Statius—wrote with a brash machismo that is mostly absent from modern poetry. “I was the first to show Parian iambs to Latium,” wrote Horace; “I was the first to bring down the Muses from the Aonian mountains,” wrote Vergil. “I have completed a work more lasting than bronze,” wrote Horace; “I have completed my work, which neither the anger of Jupiter nor fire nor iron nor gluttonous time will destroy…my name will be indestructible,” wrote Ovid at the end of his monumental Metamorphoses. Even as they understood themselves as belated heirs to centuries of Greek literature, they nonetheless boasted that they were the ‘first’ and, if not the first, the most important to write in Latin—and they audaciously assumed their own poetic immortality (only Statius shows a slight humility when at the end of his Thebaid, he instructs his book to “follow Vergil’s Aeneid at a distance,” but even this admonition implies his poem will have some enduring canonical status in Latin literature). Roman poetry can seem annoyingly, off-puttingly, self-referential and self-promoting.
Perhaps most confusingly, these plangent expressions of poetic bravado are all a pastiche. When Vergil claims to be the first to bring down the Muses from the Aonian mountains (meaning to write in the style of the Aonian writer, Hesiod—didactic poetry), he hopes that he will be able to “fly through the mouths of men,” and immediately the classical reader will detect here the allusive game: almost the exact wording can be found in the earlier poetry of Vergil himself and in the pre-classical writings of Ennius, and elements of the conceit can also be traced back to archaic Greece: to Pindar, Sappho, Theognis. When Roman poets wrote of their immortality, they were imitating, reworking, parodying, and subverting their Greek models and predecessors. Their braggadocio might seem tedious but it was, in a strange way, actually an homage, an act of fidelity to the genre rather than provocative claim of personal genius. When these authors did write about their poetry, they often framed it more humbly as a form of sampling and commingling: the poet is a bee collecting pollen from different flowers, a lumberjack taking wood from different trees, a farmer grafting one branch onto a different sapling, a weaver threading different strands of fabric, or a man drawing water from different streams (the gushing waters of epic, the small fountains of Callimachean verse). The poets might brag, but when they actually described their craft, they recognized their art as shared and interdependent, as one of selecting and varying public material. Homer, as Quintilian had said (and Poliziano repeats several times in his Silvae), was the ocean from which all other streams of writing originate (not just poetry, but history and oratory, too). Roman writers self-consciously presented all poetry as fundamentally derivative.
Angelo Poliziano did not simply write Latin verse; he imitated this same aesthetic style of imitation and cross-pollination. He had, without a doubt, an incredibly broad reading of classical literature. He had meticulously studied the Roman classics (delivering lectures on Quintilian, writing commentaries on Statius) and his Silvae show compendious knowledge of the Latin lexicon (there are many hapax legomena in this collection—“hirritus” for the “snarling of dogs” found only in Sidonius Apollinaris; “trigonus” for “sting-ray” found only in Plautus). But Poliziano had also studied Greek and he was at the forefront of this literary Renaissance. He had translated Homer’s Iliad; he had consulted the Byzantine Suda for eclectic information about Greek poets; he had sought out mythography in the commentaries of Achilles Grammaticus (who knew that some believed the Nemean lion was born on the moon?); he was clearly also familiar with Nonnus’ Dionysiaca and Aelian’s Various History (few classicists today can say the same). His Silvae (a nod to Statius’ own collection of poems titled the Silvae—woodlands) demonstrates an intimate knowledge of ancient poetry and its aesthetic sensibilities. With a knowing wink, he talks about “clear waters” and “thin streams” (gesturing to the aesthetics of Callimachus); he talks about his “triple language” (evoking Ennius who famously was trilingual); he talks about how “the crowd” and “profane persons” of worldly ambition should not be admitted to his poetry (reworking Horace’s ‘Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo—‘I hate the profane crowd and keep them out’); he writes about the danger of Envy (another nod to Callimachus’ Phthonos and Ovid’s Invidia). Sometimes, verbatim phrases are taken straight from classical writers. In the prologue to the first Silva, when the divine prophetess Manto comes to the crib of Vergil, everyone goes quiet (conticuere viri—the same exact syncopated form used by Vergil at the start of Book 2 of the Aeneid, just before Aeneas gives the story of his arrival). Poliziano is ostentatiously intertextual and metatextual, exactly like the Greek and Roman authors he pored over.
But Poliziano shows a critical awareness not just of the poets he studies but also of the grammarians and rhetors who read them. In his Suasoriae, Seneca the Elder noted a dispute among declaimers and poets about the use of a Virgilian phrase “plena deo” (full of divinity). Arellius Fuscus the declaimer said that he often borrowed phrases from Vergil and had fashioned his own phrasing “numine impleat” on this phrase “plena deo”. The words “plena deo” then became a catchphrase for clever Vergilianizing—and a pointed critique of a declaimer who was perhaps too ornamental (the declaimers Arellius Fuscus and Nicetes, and the poet Ovid all seem to have enjoyed it—“plena deo” is in fact one of the few phrases we know from Ovid’s lost Medea.) So, when Poliziano’s Manto arrives to repeat her prophecy of Virgil’s poetic fate, it is significant that she, too, is “plena deo,” or “full of the god”. Poliziano puts himself squarely camp Vergil—and Fuscus, and Ovid—embracing the poeticisms that rankled more ornery readers.
In other poems, it is possible to see how Poliziano not only imitates classical authors but consciously embroils himself in their aesthetic debates. Horace, in his Ars Poetica, had criticized poets who begin their poems with grandiose sentences and then end weakly, resulting in an absurdly lopsided poem: “the mountains will labor in birth and then a mouse will be born” (‘nascetur ridiculus mus’—a metaphor absurd not just because of the incongruous juxtaposition of mountains and mice but also because of the monosyllabic word at the end “mus” and the diminutive “ridiculus”, which spoils the epic sound of the final spondee). In his poem, the Rusticus, Poliziano alludes to this moment from the Ars Poetica, describing how the countryman, with all his knowledge of stars and seasons, can predict the storms while all the other animals will struggle and the “improbulus mus” (a wicked little mouse) will have to scamper away. The whole poem is overwrought and, maybe even contradictory, panegyric—a celebration of the farmer who enjoys free leisure and peace, is free of vicious ambition, luxury, fractious politics, and hard labor, but who is toughened and resilient and can fight in any war, and knows exactly how to evade storms. That little phrase, “improbolus mus,” coming near the end of the poem, may seem incidental but, subtly, Poliziano, with a nod to Horace, shows that he is self-aware when he transgresses the Horatian fiat and when his own poem breaches the constraints of poetic decorum—from rustic bliss to rodent pests.
Poliziano’s Silvae are not Statius’ Silvae. Statius’ collection ranges from ekphrastic descriptions of Roman statues and patron’s villas, epicedia and funeral consolations to dead children and parrots (obviously imitating, and extravagantly outdoing, Catullus), genethliaca and other occasional poems, and they were written in a variety of meters (both dactylic hexameter and hendecasyllabic and other lyrical meters). Poliziano’s Silvae, while dedicated to eminent Florentines (one of whom, a Medici), are more literary experiments. The Manto is a prophecy of Vergil’s triumphs as a poet; the Countryman is a praise of the life of the rural man, whether farmer or shepherd (à la Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics); the Ambra is a panegyric to Homer’s genius that summarizes and reworks the Iliad and Odyssey into a Latin epyllion (and includes a ghostly apparition of Odysseus to Homer, much like Hector’s visitation of Aeneas in Vergil’s Aeneid); and, finally, the Nutricia is a poem of thanksgiving to poetry itself. All are, but for a few prefatory poems in elegiac couplets, composed in dactylic hexameter, and stylistically imitative of Homer and Vergil. They are Silvae, the Woodlands, in the metatextual sense—of poetic material drawn from different sources.
To return to Poliziano’s bold claim, “they revealed the human,” (exseruere hominem), it seems grandly absurd—what has verse and meter to do with the dramas of human history or the recesses of the human soul? Coupling poetry with humanity also reverses the traditional literary history: Romans generally apologized for the paucity of their earliest literature: “There was no honor in poetry and if anyone studied it or devoted himself to it at banquets, he was considered idle,” wrote Cato the Elder, from the second century BCE. “Homer and Hesiod preceded the foundation of Rome, Archilochus appeared when Romulus was ruling, we took up poetry later,” Cicero said in his Tusculan Disputations. But when Poliziano describes the function of poetry—delineating city walls, setting down laws, codifying and conveying human knowledge—he sounds much like Cicero and Lucretius and their accounts of early man’s discovery or language and rhetoric. Perhaps anticipating Jakobson, Poliziano understood that poetry and language have always gone hand in hand. The pairing of sound with meaning, meaning with the world, is a poetic act, and it constitutes the organizing principle of human life. Even Jupiter, in Poliziano’s description, sets the planets in motion according to a particular rhythmic harmony, governing the cosmos with a certain kind of poetry. But this is not hyperbole. When Poliziano talks about poetry, he does so with a Roman understanding: it is a collective patrimony, a shared language and aesthetics, the Homeric Ocean which encircles and feeds all other forms of speech. And in that light, it makes perfect sense that poetry underscores humanity: it is the intertextual repository and heredity of human language.
In the final poem, the Nutricia, Poliziano catalogues the great poets of antiquity (from Homer and Hesiod of ancient Greece, to Moses and Jesse of the Old Testament, to Vergil and Lucan of Imperial Rome, and finally to Florence’s own Dante and Boccaccio), but it’s noteworthy to observe what stories he is drawn to: Arion who was, supposedly, the poet who first turned to illicit desires with ephebic men; Pindar who, supposedly, died in the lap of a boy; Ibycus who song only of “male love”. Poetry might be the genesis of law and morality but, for a scholar and secretary in Florence, whose time in the city overlapped with Savonarola’s campaign against homosexual activity, poetry also offered numerous examples of transgressive, same-sex love. When Poliziano praises Vergil’s Eclogues in the Mantua, it is Corydon’s love for the boy Alexis that he eulogizes. “They discovered their humanity” (exseruere hominem) but that singular ‘hominem’ is deceptive. Poetry can reveal not just the essence of human nature but also the diversity of human life, a humanity that is as plural and varied as the forms of poetry itself.
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