section_path: Life/Work
section_name: Work
paragraph_text: Work
  
  Having completed all his studies in Italy, 30-year-old Copernicus returned to Warmia, where he would live out the remaining 40 years of his life, apart from brief journeys to Kraków and to nearby Prussian cities: Toruń (Thorn), Gdańsk (Danzig), Elbląg (Elbing), Grudziądz (Graudenz), Malbork (Marienburg), Königsberg (Królewiec).
  
  The Prince-Bishopric of Warmia enjoyed substantial autonomy, with its own diet (parliament) and monetary unit (the same as in the other parts of Royal Prussia) and treasury.
  
  Copernicus was his uncle's secretary and physician from 1503 to 1510 (or perhaps until his uncle's death on 29 March 1512) and resided in the Bishop's castle at Lidzbark (Heilsberg), where he began work on his heliocentric theory. In his official capacity, he took part in nearly all his uncle's political, ecclesiastic and administrative-economic duties. From the beginning of 1504, Copernicus accompanied Watzenrode to sessions of the Royal Prussian diet held at Malbork and Elbląg and, write Dobrzycki and Hajdukiewicz, "participated... in all the more important events in the complex diplomatic game that ambitious politician and statesman played in defense of the particular interests of Prussia and Warmia, between hostility to the Order and loyalty to the Polish Crown."
  
  In 1504–1512 Copernicus made numerous journeys as part of his uncle's retinue—in 1504, to Toruń and Gdańsk, to a session of the Royal Prussian Council in the presence of Poland's King Alexander Jagiellon; to sessions of the Prussian diet at Malbork (1506), Elbląg (1507) and Sztum (Stuhm) (1512); and he may have attended a Poznań (Posen) session (1510) and the coronation of Poland's King Sigismund I the Old in Kraków (1507). Watzenrode's itinerary suggests that in spring 1509 Copernicus may have attended the Kraków sejm.
  
  It was probably on the latter occasion, in Kraków, that Copernicus submitted for printing at Jan Haller 's press his translation, from Greek to Latin, of a collection, by the 7th-century Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta, of 85 brief poems called Epistles, or letters, supposed to have passed between various characters in a Greek story. They are of three kinds—"moral," offering advice on how people should live; "pastoral", giving little pictures of shepherd life; and "amorous", comprising love poems. They are arranged to follow one another in a regular rotation of subjects. Copernicus had translated the Greek verses into Latin prose, and he published his version as Theophilacti scolastici Simocati epistolae morales, rurales et amatoriae interpretatione latina, which he dedicated to his uncle in gratitude for all the benefits he had received from him. With this translation, Copernicus declared himself on the side of the humanists in the struggle over the question of whether Greek literature should be revived. Copernicus's first poetic work was a Greek epigram, composed probably during a visit to Kraków, for Johannes Dantiscus ' epithalamium for Barbara Zapolya 's 1512 wedding to King Zygmunt I the Old.