Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/537

Rh M A N U T I U S 513 tracts issued from his press, and are called by him &quot; Precursors of the Greek Library.&quot; At Venice Aldo gathered an army of Greek scholars and compositors around him. His trade was carried on by Greeks, and Greek was the language of his household. Instructions to type-setters and binders were given in Greek. The prefaces to his editions were written in Greek. Greeks from Crete collated MSS., read proofs, and gave models of calligraphy for casts of Greek type. Not counting the craftsmen employed in merely manual labour, Aldo entertained as many as thirty of these Greek assistants in his family. His own industry and energy were unremitting. In 1495 he issued the first volume of his Aristotle. Four more volumes completed the work in 1497-98. Nine comedies of Aristophanes appeared in 1498. Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus followed in 1502; Xenophon s Hellenics and Euripides in 1503; Demosthenes in 1504. The troubles of Italy, which pressed heavily on Venice at this epoch, suspended Aldo s labours for a while. But in 1508 he resumed his series with an edition of the minor Greek orators; and in 1509 appeared the lesser works of Plutarch. Then came another stoppage. The league of Cambray had driven A r enice back to her lagoons, aud all the forces of the republic were concentrated on a struggle to the death with the allied powers of Europe. In 1513 Aldo reappeared with Plato, which he dedicated to Leo X. in a preface eloquently and earnestly comparing the miseries of warfare and the woes of Italy with the sublime and tranquil objects of the student s life. Pindar, Hesychius, and Athenneus followed in 1514. These complete the list of Aldo s prime services to Greek literature. But it may be well in this place to observe that his successors continued his work by giving Pausanias, Strabo, yEschylus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Longinus to the world in first editions. Omission has been made of Aldo s reprints, in order that the attention of the reader might ba concentrated on his labours in editing Greek classics from MSS. Other presses were at work in Italy : and, as the classics issued from Florence, Rome, or Milan, Ald;&amp;gt; took them up, bestowing in each case fresh industry upon the collation of codices and the correction of texts. Nor was the Aldine press idle in regard to Latin and Italian classics. The Asolani of Bembo, the collected writings of Poliziano, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Dante s Divine Comedy, Petrarch s poems, a collection of early Latin poets of the Christian era, the letters of the younger Pliny, the poems of Pontanus, Sannazzaro s Arcadia, Quintilian, Valerius Maximus, and the Adagia of Erasmus were printed, either in first editions, or with a beauty of type and paper never reached before, between the years 1495 and 1514. For these Italian and Latin editions Aldo had the elegant type struck which bears his name. It is said to have been copied from Petrarch s handwriting, and was cast tinder the direction of Francesco da Bologna, who has been identified by Panizzi with Francia the painter. Aldo s enthusiasm for Greek literature was not confined to the printing-room. He burned with a humanist s enthusiasm for the books he printed; and we may well pause astonished at his industry, when we remember what a task it was in that age to prepare texts of authors so numerous and so voluminous from MSS. Whatever the students of this century may think of Aldo s scholarship, they must allow that only vast erudition and thorough familiarity with the Greek language could have enabled him to accomplish what he did. In his own days Aldo s learning won the hearty acknowledgment of ripe scholars. To his fellow workers he was uniformly generous, free from jealousy, and prodigal of praise. His stores of MSS. were as open to the learned as his printed books were liberally given to the public. While aiming at that excellence of typography which renders his editions the treasures of the book-collector, he strove at the same time to make them cheap. We may perhaps roughly estimate the current price of his pocket series of Greek, Latin, and Italian classics, begun in 1501, at 2s. per volume of our present money. The five volumes of the Aristotle cost about S. His great undertaking was carried on under continual difficulties, arising from strikes among his workmen, the piracies of rivals, and the interruptions of war. When he died, bequeathing Greek literature as an inalienable possession to the world, he was a poor man. In order to promote Greek studies, Aldo founded an academy of Hellenists in 1500 under the title of the New Academy. Its rules were written in Greek. Its mem bers were obliged to speak Greek. Their names Avere Hellenized, and their official titles were Greek. The biographies of all the famous men who were enrolled in this academy must be sought in the pages of Didot s A Me Manuce. It is enough here to mention that they included Erasmus and the English Linacre. In 1499 Aldo married Maria, daughter of Andrea Torresano of Asola. Andrea had already bought the press established by Nicholas Jenson at Venice. Therefore Aldo s marriage combined two important publishing firms. Henceforth the names Aldus and Asolanus were as sociated on the title pages of the Aldine publications ; and after Aldo s death in 1515, Andrea and his two sons carried on the business during the minority of Aldo s children. The device of the dolphin and the anchor, and the motto festina lente, which indicated quickness combined with firmness in the execution of a great scheme, were never wholly abandoned by the Aldines until the expiration of their firm in the third generation. II. PAULUS MANUTIUS (1512-1574). By his marriage with Maria Torresano, Aldo had three sons, the youngest of whom, Paolo, was born in 1512. He had the misfortune to lose his father at the age of two. After this event his grandfather and two uncles, the three Asolani, carried on the Aldine press, while Paolo prosecuted his early studies with unremitting industry at Venice. Excessive applica tion hurt his health, which remained weak during the rest of his life. At the age of twenty-one he had acquired a solid reputation for scholarship and learning. In 1533 Paolo undertook the conduct of his father s business, which had latterly been much neglected by his uncles. In the interregnum between Aldo s death and Paolo s succession (1514-33) the Asolani continued to issue books, the best of which were Latin classics. But, though their publications count a large number of first editions, and some are works of considerable magnitude, they were not brought out with the scholarly perfection at which Aldo aimed. The Asolani attempted to perform the whole duties of editing, and to reserve all its honours for them selves, dispensing with the service of competent colla borators. The result was that some of their editions, especially their ^Eschylus of 1518, are singularly bad. Paolo determined to restore the glories of the house, and in 1540 he separated from his uncles. The field of Greek literature having been well-nigh exhausted, he devoted himself principally to the Latin classics. He was a passionate Ciceronian, and perhaps his chief contributions to scholarship are the corrected editions of Cicero s letters and orations, his own epistles in a Ciceronian style, and his Latin version of Demosthenes. Throughout his life he combined the occupations of a student and a printer, winning an even higher celebrity in the former field than his father had done. Four treatises from his pen on Roman antiquities deserve to be commemorated for their erudition no less than for the elegance of their Latinity. Several Italian cities contended for the possession of BO XV. 65