Read them as though they were still alive

To the Renaissance humanists, the ancients authors felt more like close friends than distant figures

The Renaissance humanists did more than recover the texts of antiquity; they revived their authors as though they still breathed.

For the first time since the ancient world itself, Cicero, Seneca, and Homer were read not as distant figures of veneration but as contemporaries, not as auctores (author, authority?), but as friends. What drove this remarkab…