Leontius Pilatus
Leontius Pilatus, or Leontius (Leonzio Pilato; died 1366) (Latin: Leontius Pilatus, Greek: Λεόντιος Πιλάτος, Leontios Pilatos, Italian: Leonzio Pilato), was a Calabrian scholar and was one of the earliest promoters of Greek studies in Western Europe. Leontius translated and commented upon works of Euripides, Aristotle and Homer including the Odyssey and the Iliad into Latin and was the first professor of Greek in western Europe.
Biography
Calabria still had at this time, several centuries after the Norman conquest of the territory from the Byzantine Empire, a large if not majority Greek-speaking and Eastern Orthodox population. The process of "Latinization" — conversion to Roman Catholicism, adoption of Latin for legal documents, and adoption of Romance-language dialects in popular speech — was only definitively completed in the 1500s with the suppression of the Greek Basilian monasteries by Rome.
Thus Pilatus is assumed by most scholars to have been an ethnic-Greek Calabrian. But the situation is confused by a famous letter from Petrarch to Boccaccio, in which he complains:
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