  Given that his earliest development of an interest in logic and philosophy occurred at the University of Padua, it is surely no surprise that a close familiarity with the works of Aristotle and his interpreters would form a major part of his training. It is perhaps worth stressing that in philosophy as in other areas such as art, architecture, science and literature, the Renaissance was a “retrospective” age. From roughly the mid-Fourteenth through the late Sixteenth centuries, many of the leading scholars of Europe were engaged in attempting to recover the high levels of skills and learning that characterized late classical antiquity.  Humanists trained in the ancient languages sought to recover texts which had been lost or ignored for a millennium or more. We owe the very concept of the “Middle Ages” (not to mention the more pejorative notion of the “dark ages”) to this movement. Patrizi's early mastery of Greek and his interest in assembling a library of classical Greek manuscripts (Muccillo 1993) places him well within the tradition of seeking to restore the legacy of antiquity as a precondition for moving ahead to a “new” era.