Leontius translated and commented upon works of Euripides, Aristotle and Homer[1] including the Odyssey and the Iliad[2] into Latin and was the first professor of Greek in western Europe.
It is through this connection with Petrarch and Boccaccio, that the important contribution of Pilatus to the revival of Greek in Western scholarship was effected.
[13] Petrarch's manuscripts contain a number of notes which show that he, like Boccaccio, gathered information on Greek mythology from Leontius.
[12] Leontius had followed the word-for-word method used for translation from Greek into Latin in the West during the Middle Ages, which guarantees that the factual contents of the original are kept intact, but which does not entirely grasp the text's literary and stylistic qualities.
[14] He and his translations were made known in modern times through the writings and acknowledgments of Humphrey Hody and Marquis de Sade.