[Footnote 210: See the correspondence between Filippo Maria and Poggio, _Opp._ pp. 333-358. Letter to Cosimo, p. 339.]
[Footnote 211: 'The World, the Stammering Simpleton, the Execrable Poet, and the Nobody.' See _Auree Francisci Philelphi Poete Oratorisque Celeberrimi Satyre_. Paris, 1508. Passim.]
[Footnote 212: _Opp. Omn._ pp. 164-187. The first invective is the most venomous, and deserves to be read in the original. The last, entitled 'Invectiva Excusatoria et Reconciliatoria,' is amusing from its tone of sulky and sated exhaustion.]
[Footnote 213: _Life of Poggio_, pp. 263-272, 354. _Vita di Filelfo._]
[Footnote 214: The language of the arena was used by these literary combatants. Thus Valla, in the exordium of his _Antidote_, describes his weapon of attack in this sentence:--'Hæc est mea fusana, quandoquidem gladiator a gladiatore fieri cogor, et ea duplex et utraque tridens,' p. 9.]
The dispute with Filelfo was rather personal than literary. Another duel into which Poggio entered with Guarino turned upon the respective merits of Scipio and Julius Cæsar. Poggio had occasion to explain, in correspondence with a certain Scipione Ferrarese, his reasons for preferring the character of Scipio Africanus. Guarino, with a view to pleasing his pupil Lionello d'Este, a professed admirer of Cæsar, took up the cudgels in defence of the dictator,[215] and treated Poggio, whom he called Cæsaromastix, with supreme contempt. Poggio replied in a letter to the noble Venetian scholar Francesco Barbaro.[216] Hard words were exchanged on both sides, and the antagonists were only reconciled on the occasion of Poggio's marriage in 1435. Rome, however, was the theatre of his most celebrated exploits as a disputant. It chanced one day that he discovered a copy of his own epistles annotated by a Spanish nobleman who was a pupil of Lorenzo Valla.[217] Poggio's Latinity was not spared in the marginal strictures penned by the young student; and the fiery scholar, flying to the conclusion that the master, not the pupil, had dictated them, discharged his usual missile, a furious invective, against Valla. Thus attacked, the author of the 'Elegantiæ' responded in a similar composition, entitled 'Antidotum in Poggium,' and dedicated to Nicholas V.[218] Poggio followed with another invective; nor did the quarrel end till he had added five of these disgusting compositions to his previous achievements in the same style, and had drawn a young Latinist of promise, Niccolo Perotti, into the disgraceful fray.[219] What makes the termination of the squabble truly comic is that Filelfo, himself the worst offender in this way, was moved at last to write a serious letter of admonishment to the contending parties, exhorting them to consult their own dignity and to lay down arms.[220] Concerning the invectives and antidotes by which this war was carried on Tiraboschi writes, 'Perhaps they are the most infamous libels that have ever seen the light; there is no sort of vituperation which the antagonists do not vomit forth against each other, no obscenity and roguery of which they are not mutually accused.'