Aires Barbosa

Aires de Figueiredo Barbosa (1460 – 1540) was a Portuguese classical scholar and poet. In 1495, he became the first professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca.

Biography

Aires Barbosa was born in Aveiro, Portugal, Kingdom of Portugal. In his youth, he went to Florence, where he studied under Politian. Around 1494, he returned to Spain, where he taught Latin and Greek in Salamanca until 1523 (when he wrote an epigram in farewell to Salamanca). He was a colleague of Antonio de Nebrija (who moved to Alcalá de Henares in 1513), and both introduced the humanism born in Italy to the great Iberian university. His most famous listeners were: Diego López de Zúñiga (c. 1470–1531), who in 1502 was recruited by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros as part of the team preparing the Complutensian Polyglot Bible; Francisco de Vergara, who held the chair of Greek at Alcalá de Henares from 1523; and his Portuguese compatriot André de Resende. His successor in the chair at Salamanca was Hernán Núñez de Toledo.

In 1523, he was called to the Portuguese court to teach eloquence and dialectics to the Infante Don Afonso, younger brother of King John III, who had become a cardinal. In 1530, he retired to his home in Esgueira. He was seriously ill from 1532 to 1535. He died in 1540.

We have preserved from him: textbooks corresponding to his teaching in Salamanca (In verba M. Fabii: quid, quod & reliqua. Relectio de verbis obliquis (1511); Relectio cui titulus Epometria (1515); Relectio cui titulus prosodia et orthographia, followed by a selection of Latin epigrams (1517); a commented edition of Arator's Historia apostolica (1516); a Latin poem of 616 lines entitled Antimoria, followed by 50 Latin epigrams of varying lengths, with a preface of an epistle to the Infante Don Afonso (1536).

Works

• Relectio de verbis obliquis (1511)
• Relectio cui titulus Epometria (1515)
• Relectio cui titulus prosodia et orthographia (1517)
• Obra Poética (1517)

References

• De Dios, Ángel Marcos (2017). "Portugueses en la Universidad de Salamanca de la Edad Moderna." In: Eduardo J. Alonso Romo, ed., Letras Portuguesas: Literatura Comparada y Estudios Ibéricos. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, pp. 201–30.
• Esperabé Arteaga, Enrique (1917). Historia pragmática é interna de la Universidad de Salamanca, Vol. 2. Salamanca: Lib. de F. Nuñez Izquierdo.
• Hirsch, Elisabeth F. (1970). "Erasmus and Portugal," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, pp. 539–57.
• Manso, José Henrique (2011). Comentário de Aires Barbosa ao segundo livro da Historia apostolica de Arátor. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian/Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia.
• Marques, Armando de Jesus (1980). Portugal e a Universidade de Salamanca. Participação dos escolares lusos no governo do estudo (1503-1512). Salamanca: Ed. Universidad de Salamanca.
• Percival, W. Keith (1999). "A Portuguese Humanist's Critique of Erasmus's Praise of Folly: The Antimoria of Aires Barbosa (1536)," Mediterranean Studies, Vol. VIII, pp. 157–64.
• López Rueda, José (1973). Helenistas españoles del siglo XVI. Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones cientificas, Instituto de filología, pp. 53–59.