Francesco Petrarca. "Sobre a Invenção e o Engenho: Epístola Familiar 1.8 a Tommaso de Messina".

In what follows we present a translation of Petrarch's Familiar 1.8 from Latin into Portuguese. Addressed to Tommaso Caloiro, this epistle integrates a set of seven letters to the same addressee in the first book of the collection (Fam. 1.1, 1.2, 1.7-1.12). Considering the book structure, the last six epistles of the Caloiro's set (1.7-1.12) constitute the second half of Familiares' book 1 and develop a rhetorical motif introduced in the first letter of book (1.1) addressed to Ludwig van Kempen. Writen between 1350 and 1351, the epistle 1.8 in addition to other two familiares (1.7 and 1.9) composes, as it were, a kind of Petrarch's brief rhetorical treatise. As a model for his Familiar 1.8, Petrarch resorts to Seneca's Epistle 84 and takes from it the metaphor of the bees in order to approach poetical and rhetorical notions as imitatio, inventio and ingenium.