The Book Collector - A handsome quarterly, in print and onl…

the book collector

the Aldine Musaeus, in Greek for the 1495 edition, adding Latin for the later bilingual edition. He was to have a constant part in most of the Aldine editions thereafter. It is customary to treat the two Greek publishing initiatives as in competition with each other. But Aldus had already announced the Etymologicum Magnum for future publication, so the Callierges- Vlastos consortium clearly filled a gap. Its other two books, pub- lished later, were Aristotelian commentaries, appropriate for Aldus, who may have been glad of a respite to build up reserves before the launch of the octavo classics in 1501. The unsold Callierges-Vlastos stock was certainly transferred to the Aldine press, and was listed in the 1503 catalogue of the press’s publications. In 1501 Callierges was at Padua, active as a scribe, and in 1503 he was joined by Musurus, appointed professor of Greek at the university. Among the texts he taught there were Pindar (1509) and Theocritus (1506). The French invasion forced him to leave Padua for Venice in 1510. There he found Callierges printing again, this time with a new type, and far-reaching plans for further publications, few of which came to fruition. Musurus himself was kept busy with local a V airs, translating diplomatic Greek letters and teaching young men for o Y cial service. Work for Aldus filled the rest of his time: the great complete Plato (1513), more Aristotelian commentaries, the dic- tionary of Hesychius, and Athenaeus. His name is not mentioned in the editions of Pindar and the Greek orators (both 1513), but it hardly needed to be. Aldus thanked him for urging the grammar of Manuel Chrysoloras in 1513, and after his death in 1515 Musurus saw his Greek grammar through the press, followed by Gregory Nazianzen and Pausanias (both 1516). In 1513 too, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s son Giovanni became Pope as Leo X, and in conjunction with Lascaris determined to found a col- lege to teach Greek to young men of suitably noble birth. It was to be based in the house of Angelo Colocci, a member of the papal literary court, who had his own plans. As early as 1511 he had written to Scipione Forteguerri in search of Callierges to become teacher for a ‘Neakademia’. He had come and so did the first 12 boys, who arrived from Greece to meet the Pope on 15 February 1514. It can have been no coincidence that one of them was Leo Callierges, surely a son or

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