The Academy of Naples differed in stamp both from the Florentine and from the Roman. Alfonso V of Aragon, who made himself master of Naples in 1442, had drawn a number of distinguished scholars to his Court in that city. After his death in 1458 there was no longer a centre at Naples round which such men could gather. Then it was that Jovianus Pontanus, an excellent writer of Latin, and especially of Latin verse, developed an Academy out of what had previously been an informal society of scholarly friends. The distinctive note of the Neapolitan Academy continued to be that which it derived from its origin. It was occupied more especially with the cultivation of style. The activity distinctive of it is represented by a series of Latin versifiers, remarkable for scholarship, for vigour, and also for a neopagan tendency. The Florentine Academy was predominantly philosophic; the Roman was antiquarian; the Neapolitan was literary. Many similar societies, of more or less note, arose in other Italian cities. At the close of the fifteenth century almost every considerable centre of culture possessed its Academy. The manner in which these institutions contributed to the advancement of scholarship and learning was somewhat different from that associated with more modern bodies of a similar nature. The Italian Academies of the Renaissance had little to show in the way of “transactions” or memoirs which could be regarded as permanently valuable contributions to special branches of knowledge. But the variety and brilliancy of the men whom these societies are known to have brought into sympathetic converse would suffice to establish the importance of the movement. Such Academies raised the classical Renaissance to a higher level.
Cooperation of the academic kind bore a necessary part in that great work which crowned the labours of the Italian revival by securing the Greek and Latin classics against the accidents of time. Aldo Manuzio was aided in the affairs of his press by the “New Academy” (Neaca-demia) which he founded at Venice. In order justly to estimate his achievement, we must recall what had been done in the same field before him. Italy was the country where the recently invented art of printing first became largely fruitful in the service of letters. In the Benedictine House of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco the German printers Schweinheim and Pannartz printed in 1465 the first edition of Lactantius. Removing to Rome in 1467, they began to issue the Latin classics. In 1469 their press produced Caesar, Livy, Aulus Gellius, Virgil, and Lucan; which were shortly followed by Cicero’s Letters, with a volume of his Orations, and by Ovid. Some twenty-three Latin authors were published by them in little more than two years. At about the same time printing was begun at Venice by John of Speyer, and by a Frenchman, Nicolas Jenson. They, too, sent forth many Latin authors. Milan seems to have had a press as early as 1469. At Florence, in 1471, Bernardo Cennini printed the commentary of Servius on Virgil’s Eclogues. Another Florentine printing-house was that of Giunta, afterwards famed for the editiones luntinae. The printing of Greek began not long after the first entrance of the art into Italy. In 1476 the Greek Grammar of Con-stantine Lascaris was printed at Milan by Zarot. At Milan, Theocritus (Idylls i-xvm), and Hesiod (Works and Days) came from the press in or about 1481; and Isocrates (edited by Demetrius Chalcondylas) in 1493. Venice contributed, in 1484, the Greek Grammar (Erotemata) of Manuel Chrysoloras. At Florence, in 1488, Lorenzo Alopa, a Venetian, published a Homer, edited by Chalcondylas. Such was the general situation when Aldo commenced his labours. Most of the greater Latin classics had been printed; but of the Greek, only Homer, Hesiod’s Works and Days, eighteen Idylls of Theocritus, and Isocrates.
Teobaldo Manucci, who Latinised his name into Aldus Manutius, and is now more usually called Aldo Manuzio, was born in 1450. His aim in youth was to qualify himself for the profession of a humanist. He studied Greek at Ferrara under Guarino da Verona, to whom he afterwards inscribed his Theocritus. At Rome Gasparino da Verona was his master in Latin. Aldo became tutor to the young princes of Carpi, Alberto and Lionello Pio, nephews of his old fellow-student, the brilliant Pico della Mirandola. But he had now formed the great design of printing all the masterpieces of Greek literature, and on that project all his thoughts were intent. He was supplied with the means of executing it by his pupil Alberto Pio, to whom, as ra> rtäv OVTWV epacrry, he dedicated the editio princeps of Aristotle. In 1490 he settled at Venice, in a house near the church of San Agostino, and entered upon preparations for his task. A Cretan, Marcus Musurus, was the most important of his assistants. The handwriting of Musurus was the pattern from which Aldo’s Greek type was cast,—as, in a later day, Person’s hand supplied a model to the Cambridge press. It is noteworthy that another Cretan, Demetrius, had designed the types used by Alopa in the Florentine Homer of 1488. Many of Aldo’s compositors were likewise Cretans. His printing establishment at Venice was a Greek-speaking household. There was a separate department for binding books. The printing-ink was made in the house; the excellent paper came from the mills of Fabriano.
In 1493 Aldo began his series of Greek editions with the Hero and Leander of Musaeus; whom, as appears from the preface, he identified with the pre-Homeric bard of legend. Thenceforward Aldo’s work was prosecuted with steady vigour, though not without some enforced interruptions. The whole of Hesiod, with Theocritus (thirty Idylls), Theognis, and some other gnomic poetry, came out in 1495. Aristotle, in five volumes, appeared in the years 1495-8. Nine plays of Aristophanes were issued in 1498. The year 1502 produced Thucydides, Sophocles, and Herodotus. In 1503 came Xenophon’s Hellenica, and Euripides; in 1504, Demosthenes; in 1508, Lysias and other orators; in 1509, parts of Plutarch. The year 1513 was signalised by the editio princeps of Plato, dedicated to Leo X. In 1514 Pindar was sent forth; also Hesychius and Athenaeus. When Aldo died in 1515, he had produced twenty-eight editiones principes of Greek and Latin classics within the space of some twenty-two years. And these editions were of a merit hitherto unequalled. Pains had been taken with the collation of manuscripts and with criticism of the text; and in this respect many of the books, though they may fail to satisfy the modern standard, were superior to any that had preceded them. The printing was of much beauty; and the small form of the volumes was a welcome boon in an age accustomed to folios or quartos. But the most important benefit was the extraordinary cheapness of these editions. The price of an Aldine volume ranged from about a shilling to half-a-crown of our money. It was not without many difficulties and discouragements that such a result had been attained. Aldo suffered from the jealousy of rival printers and the frauds of piratical booksellers. On four occasions (he writes in 1501) the persons in his employment had caballed against him, with the aim of making larger gains at his expense. Then the work of his press was twice stopped by war; first in 1506, and again in 1510-15. But Aldo was sustained by a sober enthusiasm.
He must also have been cheered by the sympathy of the Hellenists whom he had drawn around him. His “Neacademia” was formed at Venice at 1500. Its rules were drawn up in Greek, and that language was spoken at its meetings. The secretary of the society was Scipione Fortiguerra, the author of a once famous essay In praise of Greek Letters, who grecised his name as Carteromachus; an example which the other members of the body followed. The eminent scholar John Lascaris was one of several distinguished Greeks resident in Italy who joined Aide’s Academy. Among the subjects with which the Neacademia occupied itself was the choice of books to be printed, the collation of manuscripts, and the discussion of various readings. Some of the members assisted Aldo as editors of particular classics. It was in order to see a new edition of his own Adagia through the press that Erasmus became a guest under Aldo’s roof in 1508. He has described how he sat in the same room with his host, revising the book, while Aldo and his proof-reader Seraphinus pushed forward the printing. Erasmus became, as was natural, an honorary member of the Neacademia. That distinction was enjoyed also by an Englishman who had studied humane letters under Politian, Thomas Linacre. Aldo’s Academy thus stands out among kindred institutions of the Italian Renaissance as a body actively associated with a definite work on a grand scale, the printing of the classics. After Aldo’s death in 1515, the business of the press was carried on by his brothers-in-law and partners, the Asolani; and then by his son, Paolo Manuzio, and his grandson, Aldo the younger. The series of Greek classics was continued with Pausanias, Strabo, Aeschylus, Galen, Hippocrates, and Longinus. When Aeschylus had appeared, in 1518, no extant Greek classic of the first rank remained unprinted. Aldo was not only one of the greatest of all benefactors to literature, but also a man