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A Letter of Daniele Clario to the Archbishop of Dubrovnik about Epidaurus (1505)
Neven Jovanović
orcid.org/0000-0002-9119-399X
; Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilišta u Zagrebu
Sažetak
I describe, interpret, and publish a letter in Latin sent by Daniele Clario, a teacher and chancellor in Dubrovnik, to Giuliano Maffei, archbishop of Dubrovnik. The letter was sent from Dubrovnik, most probably to Rome, on 15 October 1505. It is preserved in autograph as part of a manuscript codex in the Vatican Library, Ott. lat. 707 (ff. 234–239; a digital facsimile of the codex is accessible on the Internet).
Daniele Clario was born in Parma around 1457. From 1485 to 1505 he was a teacher at the Dubrovnik communal school; from 1505 to 1522 he served as chancellor and notary of the Republic of Dubrovnik. His will was composed in 1517 and opened on 6 October 1523, a day after his death.
The history of Dubrovnik remembers Clario as the addressee of several letters by Aldo Manuzio, four of them printed in Manuzio’s editions of Aristophanes (1498), Poetae Christiani veteres I (1501) and II (1502), Demosthenes and Libanius (1504). Clario sent four private letters to Manuzio (two in 1500, one undated, one in 1510); the 1510 letter indicates that Clario functioned as Manuzio’s commercial agent in Dubrovnik.
I present an overview of research on Clario from 1791 to 2017. A number of scholars, especially Nolhac (1888), Jireček (1897, 1903) and Torbarina (1931), published valuable information about and interpretations of Clario and his activity. However, nowhere was the teacher from Parma the main topic of research.
The recipient of Clario’s letter, Giuliano Maffei from Volterra (1434–1510), became the archbishop of Dubrovnik in March or April 1505. He never visited his archdiocese. The letter refers to Sigismondo de’ Conti from Foligno (1432–1512), who appreciated the style of Clario’s previous letter, written in the name of the Dubrovnik Senate; de’ Conti was the secretary of Pope Julius II. The other person mentioned (but not named) in the letter as Clario’s colleague must have been Girolamo Sfondrati, chancellor of Dubrovnik 1494–1525.
Clario’s letter to Maffei from October 1505 answers the archbishop’s question put forward in a letter from September 1505 on the relationship between Dubrovnik and ancient Epidaurus and Aesculapius. Clario claims that there were three cities named Epidaurus: two in the Peloponnese, the third in Illyricum. From one of the Peloponnesian Epidauruses originated the Aesculapian snake that was brought to Rome during a plague epidemic. The Illyrian Epidaurus is in Clario’s days called Cavtat, or Old Ragusa. Clario briefly describes the city’s sights and traces of antiquity, mentioning arches, tombs, caves (especially Šipun Cave, although Clario does not mention its name), the aqueduct (in Konavle), the old building material used as landfill, and the port.
Sources for knowledge about antiquity used in Clario’s letter are ancient lives of Demosthenes (published by Manuzio in 1504), Ptolemaeus, Pliny’s Natural History, Jerome’s Life of Hilarion, Lucan (in Lucan 2, 624 Clario reads Epidaurus in undas, a reading attractive to the local Dalmatian tradition, but rejected by Sulpicio da Veroli in 1493 and later by Josse Bade in 1506), Virgil (georg. 1, 59 is an example of uncertainty about ancient locations) and of Servius, Macrobius and Fulgentius, Valerius Maximus, Stephanos of Byzantium (published in Greek by Manuzio in 1502), Eusebius of Caesarea, Frontinus, Herodotus. Clario might have found this knowledge in secondary sources, in reference works composed by humanists: Mancinelli’s commentary on the Georgics, Italia illustrata and Roma triumphans of Flavio Biondo, Supplementum Chronicarum by Giacomo Filippo Foresti of Bergamo, Calepinus, Tortelli’s De orthographia.
The letter is a contribution to the topic of the ancient past of Dubrovnik. Similar works by authors connected with Dubrovnik came mostly later: the epic De Epidauro by Ilija Crijević (between 1504 and March 1506) and Crijević’s funeral orations for Junije Sorkočević (1509), for Orsat Gučetić (1514); a speech attributed to the archbishop of Durrës, Pal Engjëlli, in De vita et gestis Scanderbegi by Marino Barlezio (1508–1510); a description of Dubrovnik in De situ orae Illyrici by Palladio Fosco (before 1509, published in 1540); and the Commentariolus de origine et incremento urbis Rhacusanae (1520–1525) by Ludovik Crijević Tubero. Prior to Clario’s letter, but in his lifetime, the connection of Dubrovnik and Epidaurus was stated only in general reference works by Tortelli (1471), Calepinus (1502), and Foresti (1485, revised edition 1503). Clario refutes local claims made two generations earlier (around 1440), by Nicolaus de la Ciria and Philippus de Diversis, that Aesculapius comes from the Epidaurus near Dubrovnik. These claims were previously rejected by the pilgrim Felix Fabri (Evagatorium, finished in 1483 but published only in 1843–1849) and, implicitly, by the historian Marcantonio Sabellico (Enneades ab orbe condito, 1498). Clario’s refutation is the first written by an author active in Dubrovnik. Knowledge collected by Clario is encountered also in some of the later works mentioned above (by Manuzio, Ilija Crijević, Palladio Fosco, and Ludovik Crijević Tubero).
Clario’s letter is written in the careful and cultivated style of Renaissance humanism. It uses uncommon Latin metaphors which suggest intensive study
of Cicero, Quintilian, Persius, Apuleius, Sallust, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Lucan – but also familiarity with contemporary authors (Clario makes linguistic choices similar to Manetti’s, Boccaccio’s, Beroaldo’s) and thesauri (Perotti’s Cornucopiae). Clario demonstrates his competence in Greek, citing Homer and Stephanus in original, but also adapting a Homeric expression. The chancellor formulated the important messages of the letter – an invitation to the new archbishop to come to Dubrovnik, joined to a presentation of its patriciate as a pious and cultured elite – in complex Latin periodic sentences.
The letter is thus, in its content and in its form, simultaneously a private exchange between Renaissance humanists and a move by the city-state in the
political game of self-definition and self-presentation.
Ključne riječi
Dubrovnik; Epidaurus; Cavtat; Konavle; Giuliano Maffei; Daniele Clario; Renaissance humanism; reception of antiquity
Hrčak ID:
304317
URI
Datum izdavanja:
15.6.2023.
Posjeta: 294 *