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The Decameron, Volume I by Giovanni Boccaccio
page 13 of 374 (03%)
him, and how far he may have been beholden to him in the compilation of
his elaborate Latin treatise De Genealogia Deorum, in which he essayed with
very curious results to expound the inner meaning of mythology, it is
impossible to say. In 1361 he seems to have had serious thoughts of
devoting himself to religion, being prodigiously impressed by the menaces,
monitions and revelations of a dying Carthusian of Siena. One of the
revelations concerned a matter which Boccaccio had supposed to be known only
to Petrarch and himself. He accordingly confided his anxiety to Petrarch,
who persuaded him to amend his life without renouncing the world. In 1362
he revisited Naples, and in the following year spent three months with
Petrarch at Venice. In 1365 he was sent by the Republic of Florence on a
mission of conciliation to Pope Urban V. at Avignon. He was employed on a
like errand on the Pope's return to Rome in 1367. In 1368 he revisited
Venice, and in 1371 Naples; but in May 1372 he returned to Florence, where
on 25th August 1373 he was appointed lecturer on the Divina Commedia, with
a yearly stipend of 100 fiorini d'oro. His lectures, of which the first
was delivered in the church of San Stefano near the Ponte Vecchio, were
discontinued owing to ill health, doubtless aggravated by the distress which
the death of Petrarch (20th July 1374) could not but cause him, when he had
got no farther than the seventeenth Canto of the Inferno. His commentary is
still occasionally quoted. He died, perhaps in the odour of sanctity, for
in later life he was a diligent collector of relics, at Certaldo on 21st
December 1375, and was buried in the parish church. His tomb was desecrated,
and his remains were dispersed, owing, it is said, to a misunderstanding,
towards the close of the eighteenth century. His library, which by his
direction was placed in the Convent of Santo Spirito at Florence, was
destroyed by fire about a century after his death.

Besides the De Genealogia Deorum Boccaccio wrote other treatises in Latin,
which need not here be specified, and sixteen Eclogues in the same language,
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