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A year after the appearance of the editio Romana of Pindar, Zacharias Callierges produced his edition of Theocritus. Like the parallel editions of Pindar, this was a complicated a V air. Earlier editions of some of the Idylls had been printed by Bonus Accursius (1481) and Aldus (1496), but in 1516 two editions appeared, one by Frosino Bonini printed at Florence by Filippo Giunta, the other by Callierges at Rome. Both, according to their prelims, owed much to the editorial hand and eye of Musurus, who lectured on Theocritus in Padua c. 1506–7. The two editions di V er in order, but are otherwise, as might be expected, textually similar. This double edition occupies a central position in Luigi Ferreri’s monograph. Like Fogelmark, he is at pains to bring together every fact on every part of Musurus’s scholarly work, his teaching, writing, editorial work, and the books that belonged to him. He begins with a series of essays on Musurus the individual: as a transmitter of texts, on the known or deducible details of his life up to his election as bishop of Monemvasia in June 1516 and death, aged not yet 50, in the night of 24–5 October 1517; this includes the full text, in Greek and Italian translation, of a mov- ing letter written by Demetrius Chalcondyles, replying to Musurus in 1497 (this exists only in a collection of similar letters made for Janus Lascaris by George Hermonymus, whose travels took him to France and England), and a useful bibliography going back to 1742, when Humphrey Hody (mis-spelt throughout) published his pioneering survey of Greek writers and scholars in the renaissance. The main part of the book consists of a survey of Musurus’s known work, divided rather uneasily into ‘editions’, ‘probable or possible editions’, ‘collaborative editions’, ‘probable and possible collabo- rations’ and ‘editions uncertainly or wrongly attributed’. In every case, the full text of the supporting documents, dedications and supplementary letters, is given in Greek or Latin and Italian trans- lation. These stretch from the 1498 Aristophanes and 1499 Epistolae to the posthumous edition of Aldus’s Greek grammar (1515) and the Gregory Nazianzen and the famous Pausania (both 1516). The distinction of the 1495/7 Musaeus, Crastonus Dictionarium 1497 and Pindar (1513) as ‘probable or possible’ is not useful: throughout this period Musurus was on close terms with the Aldine press and his support was constant. ‘Collaborations’ are a more interesting
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