, where he
attracted the attention of some friars who tried to guide him into
their cloister, an effort apparently frustrated by his father. In the
autumn of 1498 he matriculated at Vienna. For some unknown cause he
was suspended soon afterwards, but was readmitted in the spring of
1500. Two years later he went to Basle, where he completed his studies
by taking the master's degree. [Sidenote: 1506] While here he taught
school for a while. Theology apparently interested him little; his
passion was for the humanities, and his idol was Erasmus. Only in 1513
did he begin to learn Greek.

If, at twenty-two, before he had reached the canonical age, Zwingli
took orders, and became parish priest at Glarus, it was less because of
any deep religious interest than because he found in the clerical
calling the best opportunity to cultivate his taste for letters. He
was helped financially by a papal pension of fifty gulden per annum.
His first published work was a fable. [Sidenote: 1510] The lion, the
leopard, and the fox (the Emperor, France, and Venice) try to drive the
ox {150} (Switzerland) out of his pasture, but are frustrated by the
herdsman (the pope). The same tendencies--papal, patriotic, and
political--are shown in his second book, [Sidenote: 1512] an account of
the relations between the Swiss and French, and in _The Labyrinth_,
[Sidenote: 1516] an allegorical poem. The various nations appear again
as animals, but the hero, Theseus, is a patriot guided by the Ariadne
thread of reason, while he is vanquishing the monsters of sin, shame,
and vice. Zwingli's natural interest in politics was nourished by his
experiences as field chaplain of the Swiss forces at the battles of
Novara [Sidenote: 1513] and Marignano. [Sidenote: 1515]

Was he already a Reformer? Not in the later sense of the word, but he
was a disciple of Erasmus. Capito wrote to Bullinger in 1536: "While
Luther was in the hermitage and had not yet emerged into the light,
Zwingli and I took counsel how to cast down the pope. For then our
judgment was maturing under the influence of Erasmus's society and by
reading good authors." Though Capito over-estimated the opposition of
the young Swiss to the papacy, he was right in other respects.
Zwingli's enthusiasm for the prince of humanists, perfectly evident in
his notes on St. Paul, stimulated him to visit the older scholar at
Basle in the spring of 1516. Their correspondence began at the same
time