Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.

Presumably not long after his arrival in Rome, Raphael drew a figure of Lucretia (Figure 7.1).1 The drawing is a telling example of the transformation of her reception. After 1500, the Roman heroine of freedom and chastity became a pin-up model.2 Raphael skillfully anticipates the requirements of the genre. Her torn attire follows the curves of her body, and a dysfunctional fold underscores her genitalia. Her hair is tied but slightly disheveled. The theatrical gesture of the left arm conveniently reveals her bare breast. The dagger in her right-hand changes into an overt phallic reference from a mortal instrument. Lucretia has just been raped and her suicide is imminent, yet the painter opts for a voyeuristic presentation of her body. The narrative context and physical signs of violence are retained inasmuch as they support this sanitized scenario.

A part of this book’s story shows how four poets sought to create an institution of poetry because other paths to recognition and power in the civic space were blocked to them. The defense of poetry and laurel crowning were modes of political empowerment. By the end of the fourteenth century, with the increasing bureaucratization of cities like Florence, the intellectuals who take up the cause of poetry no longer do so to defend their own role in society. The authority of the poet is reabsorbed by the authors of the works read by these functionaries, who shared a similar training in grammar, rhetoric, and law with these poets, but whose effective authority in the city required no defending. As a concluding example, the epilogue examines the first defense of poetry of Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), which takes place in a series of private letters written to Bolognese Chancellor Giuliano Zonarini in 1378–79. It suggests that the previous poets’ concern for situating themselves vis-à-vis political power is translated into a role for poetry itself.