Note 498 — Chapter XIV

Boccaccio does not forget to ask him for the return of his Tacitus, and thus shows us that he possessed the works of this historian, which he not seldom quotes in the De Genealogiis Deorum. Cf. Hortis, Studi, pp. 424-6, and Paget Toynbee, Boccaccio's Commentary on the Divine Comedy in Modern Language Review (Cambridge, 1907), Vol. II, No. 2, p. 119. Boccaccio was certainly acquainted with the twelfth to the sixteenth books of the Annals and the second and third books of the Histories. How did he come into possession of this treasure? Hortis (loc. cit.) suggests that he found the MS. when he paid his famous visit (when we do not know) to the Badia of Monte Cassino. It is Benvenuto da Imola, Boccaccio's disciple, who tells us of this visit. "My reverend master Boccaccio," he says in his Commentary on the Divine Comedy, Paradiso, xxii. 74, "told me that, being once in the neighbourhood of Monte Cassino, he paid the monastery a visit and asked if he might see the library. Whereupon one of the monks, pointing to a staircase, said gruffly, 'Go up; it is open.' Boccaccio went up and saw to his astonishment that the library, the storehouse of the monastic treasures, had neither door nor fastening; and on entering in he found grass growing on the windows and all the books and benches buried in dust. When he came to turn over the books, some of which were very rare and of great value, he discovered that many of them had been mutilated and defaced by having leaves torn out or the margins cut—a discovery which greatly distressed him. In answer to his enquiries as to how this damage had been caused, he was told that it was the work of some of the monks themselves. These vandals, desirous of making a little money, were in the habit of tearing out leaves from some of the MSS. and of cutting the margins off others, for the purpose of converting them into psalters and breviaries which they afterwards sold" (see Paget Toynbee, Dante Studies and Researches (Methuen, 1902), p. 233 et seq.) Boccaccio does not seem to have shown his MS. to Petrarch, who nowhere quotes Tacitus or shows us that he knows him.