146 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
opposition from either king or pope. Most interesting in this
connection is an exhortation which Jason gave to his students
at the opening of his course in Padua in 1487. This exhorta-
tion is printed at the beginning of his commentaries on the
first part of the Digest. It consists almost entirely of a para-
phrase of Sallust’s first paragraph in his history of Catiline’s
conspiracy. Jason pointed out to his students that humankind
was divided into body and soul, that the body was mortal
while the soul was immortal and that it was necessary there-
fore to cultivate those virtues which partake of the soul
rather than those pursuits which are served by the body. He
closed by quoting Isocrates who had said to the King of
Cyprus, “Since your body is mortal and your soul immortal,
strive that by the benefits of your virtues you may have an
immortal memory of your soul.” It is the immortality of the
memory of the soul in this world for which Jason is pleading,
that is to say, fame rather than immortality in a convention-
ally Christian sense. Indeed, although Jason had changed a
few words in Sallust’s paragraph in order to make the lan-
guage more palatable to Christian ears, there is very little in
the passage which would not be found perfectly acceptable
in a world which had not known Christianity. To argue from
this one exhortation to his students that Jason was less Chris-
tian than many of his contemporaries would doubtless be
to go too far. We can, however, see in this passage how
much the familiar theme of fame and the interest in the sur-
vival of one’s reputation had gripped him and, to this extent,
he represents both medieval and renaissance traditions. A
far more apparent revolt against the church can, however,
be traced in his celebrated pupils.
Among these was Filippo Decio, the younger son of a
family of the minor nobility in Milan during the period of the