 Valla did not have an easy life. Equipped with a sharp and polemical mind, an even sharper pen and a sense of self-importance verging on the pathological, he made many enemies throughout his life. Born in Rome in (most likely) 1406 to a family with ties to the papal curia, Valla as a young man was already in close contact with some major humanists working as papal secretaries such as Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). Another was his uncle Melchior Scrivani, whom Valla had hoped to succeed after his death; but opposition from Poggio and Antonio Loschi (1365/8–1441) must have led the pope to refuse to employ him. Valla had criticized an elegy by Loschi, and had also boldly favored Quintilian over Cicero in a treatise which has long considered to be lost; but a lengthy anonymous prefatory letter has recently been found and ascribed, convincingly, to the young Valla (Pagliaroli 2008; it turns out not to be a comparison between Cicero’s theory of rhetoric and Quintilian’s handbook, as scholars have always assumed, but a comparison between a declamation of Ps-Quintilian, Gladiator—the declamations were considered to be the work of Quintilian in Valla’s time—and one of Cicero’s orations, Pro Ligario.) Valla’s Roman experience of humanist conversations found an outlet in his dialogue De voluptate (On Pleasure), in which the Christian concepts of charity and beatitude are identified with hedonist pleasure, while the “Stoic” concept of virtue is rejected (see below). Valla would later revise the dialogue and change the names of the interlocutors, but his Epicurean-Christian position remained the same.