This volume, the first published edition of Boiardo’s La pedìa de Cyro, edited by Valentina Gritti, is an impressive addition to the series of the complete works of Matteo Maria Boiardo — the humanist, courtier, and poet in the Estense court of Ferrara, who lived from 1441 to 1494 — organized by the Centro Studi Matteo Maria Boiardo in Scandiano and published by Interlinea Edizioni. The Centro Studi Boiardo was founded in 2000 for the purpose of promoting research on Boiardo and the culture of his times through conferences, exhibits, and publications. This is the fifth volume of what will eventually be twelve, which will effectively constitute an edizione nazionale of the works of Ariosto’s great predecessor. The completed series will include not only Boiardo’s narrative masterpiece renamed with the title that the poet gave it originally, Inamoramento de Orlando, but also Boiardo’s lyric poetry in both Italian and Latin as well as his adaptations of Herodotus, Cornelius Nepos, Apuleius, Ricobaldo, and the version of Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, or Cyropedia, here under review.

The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon (430–354 BCE), who, like Plato, was a student of Socrates, is a fictionalized biography of Cyrus the Great (ca. 600–530 BCE), the dynamic ruler of Achaemenid Persia, with philosophical reflections on the best form of government. The work was widely read during antiquity and came to be a definitive text in the mirror-of-princes genre in the early modern period. Often appreciated for its perceived opposition to Platonic ideals about government, the work has influenced writers across the centuries, none more so than Machiavelli, whose dependence on it for The Prince is well known. Giacomo Leopardi dramatizes this dependence in his moral essay of the 1820s, “Novella: Senofonte e Niccolò Machiavello.”

As Valentina Gritti carefully elaborates in a substantial introduction to her edition of Boiardo’s translation, fifteenth-century Italian humanists ably prepared the way for the later European reception of Xenophon. She outlines the fortune of Xenophon’s Cyropedia in Italy, which was circulating among humanist readers in the early decades of the Quattrocento. Leonardo Bruni had a copy from Chrysoloras in 1405; Guarino Veronese had various manuscripts with writings by Xenophon in 1408; Giovanni Aurispa brought “omnia Xenophontis” to Italy in 1423 (11). Before the middle of the century, probably in 1446, Poggio Bracciolini translated a reduced version of the Cyropedia into Latin, which earned Guarino’s praise in a letter of 1448 (28), while Francesco Filelfo produced a more complete version sometime in the 1460s (125). In the prologue to his translation (125), Boiardo refers to the respective versions of Poggio and Filelfo. Even a superficial comparison reveals that Boiardo depended primarily on Poggio’s Latin rather than on the original or any other intermediary version. Gritti provides a useful tripartite running table to show the extent to which Boiardo’s vernacular follows Poggio’s Latin and where he diverges from Poggio’s model (89–98).

Once in Ferrara, Xenophon’s text proved useful in making a case for beneficent princely rule of the sort that Ercole d’Este was positioning himself to provide. Through a careful analysis of the two source manuscripts of La pedìa de Cyro for clues as to precisely when they were written, Gritti speculates that the translation was commissioned by Ercole at the end of the 1460s as he prepared to assume the position of his half-brother, Borso d’Este, as ruler of Ferrara. The translation of Xenophon’s Cyropedia was intended to promote the patron as a leader who, like Cyrus, embodied the virtues of justice, temperance, and mercy. Ercole was convinced that there was some strategic value in promulgating Xenophon’s work among his courtiers and other readers beyond his immediate circle. What we might call today a political campaign’s media relations was, in fact, a prime example of Renaissance self-fashioning.

In addition to the text, which is accompanied by a detailed linguistic commentary, there is an extensive “Nota al testo” on all aspects of the manuscript sources. The volume also includes a full bibliography with recent studies on humanistic translation in Northern Italy during this period. Valentina Gritti and her colleagues at the Centro Studi Boiardo are making it possible for us to be better able to appreciate the fullness of Boiardo’s engagement with antiquity and to study his pivotal role in the transmission of key classical texts like Xenophon’s Cyropedia. We eagerly await her edition of Boiardo’s translation of Herodotus.