Cantori amatissimo, magistro deoque vero poetarum:
I first met you when I was young: like Vergil before Ovid, you passed before me when I was no Ovid, and your shadow like St. Peter’s cured me of the ills of the melancholy of this life by the daylight of your verse. The wrath of Thetis’ son taught me joy; the exuberance of Diomedes my patience; the tears and tones of Achilles beside the roaring sea the truth there is in music where I had previously known only its frivolity. In the lamentations of the dead on the limina of Troy I first knew life, in the unembraced shade of Patroklos what it is to be among those that walk the earth.
Loving your gods first has made me more devoted to my own—though Him I knew first, I didn’t yet love him truly until I knew what it was to love a god. Your critics are so dull: they can never seem to see that poetry is better suited to the pathos of those that do not suffer, that like a catechist you first taught us divine words in human letters, for lion’s whelps must certainly first learn to crawl before they may prowl. Even the divine Samian thought he saw you tormented in Hades for lies spun about the gods, near to your esteemed Boiotian colleague; but even supposing he did it was surely your own katabasis you were on, offering your blood that the dead might speak, as my God has done.
I longed not merely to read you as a barbarian but as a Greek, though of course that name would mean nothing to you, as the Athenian pointed out. Petrarch could not speak to you but by secondhand: you serenaded me with your own words, never letting me forget the sweet pleasure of your verse as I became a man of letters. I exulted in your works more than in my own; I triumphed by you. But when I learned to read you I was distraught, for at length your disciples told me I would not find you, as though you were a daimon exorcised alongside your gods. My beautiful captive, if you were not real Calliope herself must have woven you of words, her most truthful lie; your very name is a song on Muses’ lips, one I asked them to sing in my despair: you are the many-mannered man I desired them to chant. They told me then that your true name was lost to time, and then that you were two. Perhaps indeed you were: but as though a paean to Apollo, like Pallas Athena, I know you only as one Homer.
Whether god or man I know you not, and yet I love you, for you have taught my soul those worthy things it knows. If you truly suffer punishments as thought Pythagoras, if in Limbo you idle as Dante saw, then I do not wish to traverse those shores beyond the wine-dark void without first coming to get you; but I know my God has not left you there, his whose descent all other descents evoke. Wherever you are let us then swear the oaths of xenia, beloved friend, that you may dine with me and I with you, with wine and song and all the best things of this or any life, and let us by speaking of the great deeds of gods and men thereby adore their common God.
Ex animo, discipulus tuus indignissimus
''Whether god or man I know you not, and yet I love you, for you have taught my soul those worthy things it knows. If you truly suffer punishments as thought Pythagoras, if in Limbo you idle as Dante saw, then I do not wish to traverse those shores beyond the wine-dark void without first coming to get you; but I know my God has not left you there, his whose descent all other descents evoke''
Barz
''I was no Ovid, and your shadow like St. Peter’s cured me of the ills of the melancholy of this life by the daylight of your verse. The wrath of Thetis’ son taught me joy; the exuberance of Diomedes my patience; the tears and tones of Achilles beside the roaring sea the truth there is in music where I had previously known only its frivolity'' Stuck out particularly many thanks