pindar and theocritus in the 16 th century
nephew of Zacharias. Besides Greek, they were to be taught Latin, by Benedetto Lampridio. If there was to be a press attached to this academy, it too should have been in the house of Angelo Colocci. But it was not, at least in 1514. Instead, Callierges set up a printing house in the house of the merchant prince, Agostino Chigi, where the second edition (after Aldus’s of 1513) of Pindar was printed and completed on 13 August 1515. On the verso of the title-page in all but one copies is a short poem by Lampridio, dedicating the book to Cornelio Benigno of Viterbo and asserting that it has come about thanks to his gifts. The colophon, however, states that it was printed at the expense of Chigi, with the encouragement of Benigno, and the labour and skill of Callierges. In fact, Chigi did put up the money for Pindar and the Theocritus that followed it. Benigno paid the bills incurred (his ‘gifts’), collected the proceeds, including the sale of the residual stock, and repaid Chigi the money he had advanced. Similarly, with Theocritus, where Benigno is simply acknowledged as paymaster. After the completion of Theocritus, there was a marked change in the work printed with Callierges’s types. Not classical, but liturgical and grammatical texts followed in 1516–17, the Horae , Thomas Magister and Phrynichus. There was then another change. The Callierges types were set aside, and in 1517–19 the old Scholia in Iliadem , edited by Janus Lascaris, Porphyry Quaestiones Homericae , the Scholia in Sophoclis Tragedias , Geras Spanion and Apophthegmata Philosophorum edited by Arsenios Aristoboulos and dedicated to Leo X, all printed in the types used at Florence in 1494–6 for the Greek Anthology, Callimachus, Euripides, Lucian and Apollonius Rhodius; undated editions of Isocrates and Cebes seem more likely to date from now rather than earlier. Over all these events, the great shadow of Janus Lascaris hovers, whose part in them can only be surmised. Invited by the newly elected Leo X, he had come to Rome in 1513 to set up the ‘Medicean College’ on the Quirinal, and with him came the type for the books of 1517–19. It is custom- ary to see the di V erent initiatives of Callierges and the Medicean press as rivalry, but it seems more likely that they took it in turns, each alternately addressing a di V erent part of the minute market for Greek books. The death of Aldus and then of Leo X brought
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