Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), one of the great scholar-poets of the Italian Renaissance, was the principal humanist working in Lombardy in the middle of the Quattrocento and served as court poet to the Visconti and Sforza dukes of Milan. His long life saw him as busy with politics, diplomacy, and intrigue as with literature and scholarship, leaving him very often on the run from rival factions--and even from hired assassins. The first Latin poet of the Renaissance to explore the expressive potential of Horatian meters, Filelfo adapted the traditions of Augustan literature to address...