text: Poggio was a fluent and copious writer in Latin, admired for his classical style inspired from Cicero, if not fully reaching the elegance of his model, but outstanding by the standards of his age. Italy was barely emerging from what Petrarch had termed the Dark Ages, while Poggio was facing the unique challenge of making "those frequent allusions to the customs and transactions of his own times, which render his writings so interesting... at a period when the Latin language was just rescued from the grossest barbarism... the writings of Poggio are truly astonishing. Rising to a degree of elegance, to be sought for in vain in the rugged Latinity of Petrarca and Coluccio Salutati..." His knowledge of the ancient authors was wide, his taste encompassed all genres, and his erudition was as good as the limited libraries of the time allowed, when books were extremely rare and extraordinarily expensive.
  Good instruction in Greek was uncommon and hard to obtain in Italy. Proficient teachers, such as Ambrogio Traversari, were few and highly valued. Manuel Chrysoloras used to be occasionally credited as having instructed Poggio in Greek during his youth, but Shepherd cites a letter by Poggio to Niccolò Niccoli stating that he began the study of Greek in 1424, in Rome at age 44 (Shepherd, p. 6). Poggio's preface to his dialogue On Avarice notes that his task was made the harder "because I can neither translate from the Greek language for our benefit, nor are my abilities such that I should wish to discuss in public anything drawn from these writings" Consequently, his knowledge of Greek never attained the quality of his Latin. His best-efforts translation of Xenophon's Cyropaedia into Latin cannot be praised for accuracy by modern standards. But he was the first critic to label it a "political romance", instead of history. He also translated Lucian's Ass, considered an influence of Apuleius's Latin masterpiece, The Golden Ass.