Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi ("Essay on the popular errors of the ancients"), which brings the ancient myths back to life. The "errors" are the fantastic and vague imaginings of the ancients. Antiquity, in Leopardi's vision, is the infancy of the human species, which sees the personifications of its myths and dreams in the stars. The year 1815 saw the production of Orazione agli Italiani in Occasione della Liberazione del Piceno ("Oration to the Italians on the liberation of Piceno"), a paean to the 'liberation' achieved by Italy after the intervention of the Austrians against Murat. In the same year he translated Batracomiomachia (the war between the frogs and mice in which Zeus eventually sends in the crabs to exterminate them all), an ironic rhapsody which pokes fun at Homer's Iliad, once attributed to the epic poet himself. In 1816 Leopardi published Discorso sopra la vita e le opere di Frontone ("Discourse on the life and works of Fronto"). In the same year, however, he entered a period of crisis. He wrote L'appressamento della morte, a poem in terza rima in which the poet experiences death, which he believes to be imminent, as a comfort. Meanwhile, there began other physical sufferings and a serious degeneration of his eyesight. He was acutely aware of the contrast between the interior life of man and his incapacity to manifest it in his relations with others. Leopardi abandoned his philological studies and moved increasingly toward poetry by reading Italian authors of the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries, as well as some of his Italian and French contemporaries. His vision of the world underwent a change: he ceased to seek comfort in religion, which had permeated his childhood, and became increasingly inclined toward an empirical and mechanistic vision of the universe inspired by John Locke among others. In 1816 the idylls Le rimembranze and Inno a Nettuno ("Hymn to Neptune") were published. The second, written in ancient Greek, was taken by many critics as an authentic Greek classic. He also translated the second book of the Aeneid and the first book of the Odyssey. In the same year, in a letter to the compilers of the Biblioteca Italiana (Monti, Acerbi, Giordani), Leopardi argued against Madame de Staël's article inviting Italians to stop looking to the past, but instead study the works of foreigners, so as to reinvigorate their literature. Leopardi maintained that "knowing",