Filippo da San Gimignano called himself Callimachus.
The man, mis- understood and insulted by his family, who made his
fortune as a scholar in foreign cities, could afford, even if he were a
Sanseverino, to change his name to Julius Pomponius Laetus. Even the
simple translation of a name into Latin or Greek, as was almost
uniformly the custom in Germany, may be excused to a generation which
spoke and wrote Latin, and which needed names that could be not only
declined, but used with facility in verse and prose. What was
blameworthy and ridiculous was the change of half a name, baptismal or
family, to give it a classical sound and a new sense. Thus Giovanni was
turned into Jovianus or Janus, Pietro to Petreius or Pierius, Antonio
to Aoniuss Sannazaro to Syncerus, Luca Grasso to Lucius Crassus.
Ariosto, who speaks with such derision of all this, lived to see
children called after his own heroes and heroines.
Nor must we judge too severely the latinization of many usages of
social life, such as the titles of officials, of cere monies, and the
like, in the writers of the period. As long as people were satisfied
with a simple, fluent Latin style, as was the case with most writers
from Petrarch to, Aeneas Sylvius, this practice was not so frequent and
striking; it became inevitable when a faultless, Ciceronian Latin was
demanded.
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