He was born at Verona, and studied Greek at Constantinople, where for five years he was the pupil of Manuel Chrysoloras. When he set out to return to Italy, he had with him two cases of precious Greek manuscripts which he had been at great pains to collect; it is said that the loss of one of these by shipwreck caused him such distress that his hair turned grey in a single night. On arriving back in Italy, he earned a living as a teacher of Greek, first at Verona and afterwards in Venice and Florence; in 1436 he became, through the patronage of Lionel, marquis of Este, professor of Greek at Ferrara; and in 1438 and later acted as interpreter for the Greeks at the councils of Ferrara and Florence. He died at Ferrara 1460.
His principal works are translations of Strabo and of some of the Lives of Plutarch, a compendium of the Greek grammar of Chrysoloras, and a series of commentaries on Persius, Juvenal, Martial and on some of the writings of Aristotle and Cicero.
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.