Antonio Bonfini’s Earliest Latin Translation of the Corpus Hermogenianum

Antonio Bonfini (1427–1502) was an Italian humanist active at the court of the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, where he taught rhetoric among other subjects. Besides his most popular work, a History of Hungary (1495), he was also famous as a translator of Greek rhetorical texts, among them Philostratus and Hermogenes. His translation of the Corpus Hermogenianum, although first printed only in 1538, was originally dedicated to king Matthias in 1486 and is therefore the earliest extant Latin translation of Hermogenes, earlier even than the editio princeps of the Greek text in the Aldine of 1508, and much earlier than the next earliest translation by Natale Conti (ca. 1550) and the richly commented translations by Johann Sturm (1570–1571). Bonfini’s translation is remarkable not only by its encompassing the complete Corpus Hermogenianum, including also Aphthonios’s Progymnasmata, if shifted to the end as an appendix, but also by its leaving many of Hermogenes’ example quotations untranslated in the original Greek. In the printed edition, there are also frequent marginal notes adducing the Greek wording for comparison, of which it is unclear whether they stem from Bonfini himself or from a later editor. On the whole, Bonfini’s translation is characteristically uneven, sometimes closely following the Greek original, sometimes freely remodeling it, even suppressing whole clauses or inserting additional comments, where needed. Its Latin, too, is not particularly classical, and not entirely free from manifest translation errors. In comparison with earlier appropriations of Hermogenes by George of Trebizond and the later translations by Conti and Sturm, the paper will describe the individual appearance and purpose of Bonfini’s translation, its peculiar style of Latin and its individual handling of Hermogenes’ technical rhetorical vocabulary.