Melchiorre Cesarotti

At the University of Padua his literary progress gained him the professorship of Greek and Hebrew in 1768, and then of Rhetorics and Literature in 1797.

As a supporter of the Enlightenment ideas, he wrote in favor of the French on their invasion of Italy in 1797; he received a pension, and was made knight of the iron crown by Napoleon I, to whom he addressed a bombastic and flattering poem called Pronea (1807).

As a professor of Greek at the University of Padua, Cesarotti also published a full translation of Demosthenes, and two different versions of Homer's Iliad: one faithful and literal, the other (called The Death of Hector) was supposed to improve the text in order to adapt it to modern taste.

As a theorist and a critic, Cesarotti produced several prose works, including a Course of Greek Literature, and essays On the Origin and Progress of the Poetic Art (1762), On the Sources of the Pleasure derived from Tragedy (1762), On the Philosophy of Taste (1784).

His Essay on the Philosophy of Language (1785) is one of the most remarkable works in the field of linguistics written in Italy during the age of Enlightenment.