pindar and theocritus in the 16 th century
matter, including the 1499 Etymologicum Magnum and 1502 Statius (Musurus wrote elegiac couplets in Latin as readily as in Greek), Politian (1498) and the Greek Anthology (1503), Cicero’s letters (1513), replete with chic Greek phrases, Strabo’s geography (1516) and the great 1518 Septuagint, where his participation is confirmed by Andrea d’Asola’s introductory letter to Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo. Even the 1502 Sophocles, cautiously demoted to ‘uncer- tain’, includes Aldus’s vivid picture of the Neacademia sitting round the fire in winter with Musurus at hand. Similar quotations fill out the account of the lectures that Musurus gave in Padua and as a visit- ing lecturer in Venice, alternating with his Roman period. Musurus had a very distinctive if variable hand, and over the last thirty years a quantity of manuscripts by him or books that were annotated by him have been identified, at the Escorial, the Laurenziana (which has his scholia on Euripides) and Riccardiana at Florence, the famous Burney 96 (the Greek orators) and Harley 5577 at the British Library, Musurus’s autograph introduction to the 1498 Aristophanes at the Rylands, two books in his hand at the Ambrosiana, another each at Modena and at Sélestat, five at the Bibliothèque de France, four at the Vatican plus three annotated incunables, four at the Marciana and two at Vienna. In each case Ferreri gives full contents, details of quiring and watermarks,and a bibliography, with details of when identified and by whom. There are also a dozen books that belonged to Musurus, listed with locations. Outside public collections remain the famous collection of letters by Musurus, the Gregoropulos family, Callierges and Vlastos, acquired by Renouard, printed by Ambroise Firmin- Didot, and currently intransit between Milan and Venice. Finally, there is the composite volume of print and manuscript, to which Ferreri devotes his second volume. As with Pindar, there is a lost manuscript to contend with. There is a letter in the 1516 Giunta Hesiod to Frosino Bonini from Filippo Pandolfini, in which he describes a Theocritus he had seen corrected by Musurus from a very old book then in the hands of Paolo Capodivacca. This was used to supplement the Giunta Theocritus, probably with the agreement of Musurus, who mentions the same ‘old book’ in a note in his copy of the 1494 Greek Anthology. This
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