attack on the part of one of Bessarion's protégés, Michael Apostolius, who hoped to retain Bessarion's favour by defending Plato' (1460-1). But Bessarion, who thoroughly disapproved of his protégé's controversial methods, protested that he himself had a profound respect for Aristotle, as well as for Plato', and even gave a cordial welcome to a short treatise, in which Aristotle was defended, and Apostolius refuted, in a sensible and moderate manner by a Greek of better breeding named Andronicus Callistus (1462). Bessarion was afterwards attacked in a petulant spirit by Georgius Trapezuntius (1464), who in his turn was answered by Bessarion (1469). Simply for approving this answer, Argyropulos was denounced by Theodorus Gaza, who, so far as the Greeks were concerned, had the last word in this long debate (c. 1470). Bessarion, however, had the support of Italians such as Filelfo and Ficino, and his own pupil Perotti, who wrote a treatise against Trapezuntius'. Throughout all the tangles of this complicated controversy, a thread of gold is inwoven by the serene and imperturbable temper of Bessarion. Among the Aristotelians who joined in the fray, Theodorus Gaza shines by contrast with Georgius Trapezuntius, while Andronicus Callistus is far more attractive than the selfish and interested Platonist, Apostolius. 1 Apostolios, Tovhμara τpla, Smyrna, 1876; also мs in Bodleian, mentioned by Hody, 78. 3 ἐμὲ δὲ φιλοῦντα μὲν ἴσθι Πλάτωνα, φιλοῦντα δ ̓ ̓Αριστοτέλη καὶ ὡς σοφωτάτω σεβόμενον ἑκατέρω. Text of Bessarion's Letter in Migne, P. G. clxi 685—692,; cp. Legrand, 1 lxii f. 3 MS in Escurial; Miller, Catal. des MSS Grecs, p. 177. • Comparatio inter Aristotelem et Platonem (printed Ven. 1523). Adversus Calumniatorem Platonis (printed in Rome, 1469). • 'AvTippηTIKór. Cp. Bandini, Catal. MSS Gr. ii 275 f. 7 Valentinelli, Bibl. ms. ad S. Marci, Venet. iv 7, 9. The earliest account of this controversy is that of Boivin le Cadet, Querelle des Philosophes du quinzième siècle, first printed in the Mémoires de Littérature of the French Academy, ii (1717) 775-791, where the correspondence about Apostolius and Andronicus (1462) is translated for the first time. Cp. Tiraboschi, vi c. 2 § 18, pp. 368-370; Buhle, Gesch. der neuern Philos. ii, 1800; Legrand, 1 xxxvif; Gaspary (on the chronology of the controversy), in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, iii (1890) 50—53; and Voigt, ii 1553. Michael Apostolius Andronicus Callistus Michael Apostolius (c. 1422—1480), who had been a pupil of Argyropulos at Constantinople, fled to Rome in 1454. He subsequently settled in Crete, where he supported himself as a copyist'. His bitter attack on Theodorus Gaza was answered (as we have seen) in a courteous spirit by Andronicus Callistus, a native of Constantinople, who makes his first appearance in Italy in 1461, when (like Argyropulos at an earlier date) he aided the Greek studies of Palla Strozzi at Padua. It was probably at Padua that John Free' wrote a letter of introduction to a friend at Ferrara describing Callistus as fully equal in learning to Gaza, and as a modest and pleasant person3. Callistus afterwards taught at Bologna and at Rome, and, on the death of Bessarion in 1472, left for Florence, where his lectures were attended by the youthful Politian, who wrote a graceful set of Latin elegiacs urging Lorenzo not to allow Callistus to leave Florence*. His fame as a lecturer reached the Hungarian bishop, Janus Pannonius, who had left Italy in 1458-9, but imagines himself as returning to the school in which Callistus was discoursing on Homer, Demosthenes, and Aristotle', Callistus dedicated to Lorenzo a translation of Aristotle, De Generatione et Corruptione. He subsequently lived in Milan and in Paris. He died in London, far from his friends', after aiding a fellowcountryman, Hermonymus of Sparta, to return to Paris", where he was one of the earliest teachers of Greek in France. Constantine Lascaris A more notable name is that of Constantine Lascaris of Constantinople (1434-1501), a pupil of Argyropulos. He was nineteen years of age when he was made a prisoner by the Turks on the fall of his native city. During the greater part of the next seven years he probably stayed 1 Legrand, 1 lviii f. " Creighton's Historical Lectures and Addresses, 202. * Hody, 228 f. Politian, ed. 1867, 227 f. Delitiae poëtarum Hungaricorum, 1617, p. 198 (cp. Hody, 227—-232; Legrand, I lii n. 6). 6 Legrand, I lvii. 7 pixwv Epnμos, Const. Lascaris, ap. Legrand, 1 lvi n. 3. 8 1476. Boissonade, Anecd. Gr. v 420–6. at Corfu, but he found time for a visit to Rhodes, where he copied or acquired certain MSS now at Madrid'. From 1460 to 1465 he was transcribing MSS and teaching Greek in Milan. It was there that, in a happy moment, he presented to the princess Hippolyta Sforza a beautifully written transcript of his work 'On the Eight Parts of Speech', now in the Paris Library. On her marriage to Alfonso II, the future king of Naples, Lascaris followed her to that court, and, a year later, started for Greece in a vessel that stopped at Messina. He was urged to stay, and there he abode for the remaining thirty-five years of his life. At Messina he taught Greek, one of his pupils being the future Cardinal Bembo3. In the bitterness of his spirit he once wrote to a friend lamenting the enslavement of Greece, and longing to leave Sicily for the British Isles, or for the Islands of the Blest'. In gratitude, however, to the Sicilian city, where he had spent the latter half of his life, he left his мss to Messina, then under the rule of Castile. At Messina they remained until 1679, when they were removed, first to Palermo, and thence to Spain. In 1712 they were placed in the National Library founded in that year in Madrid". Among them (dated Messina, 1496) is his own copy of Quintus Smyrnaeus-the poet once known as 'Quintus Calaber', simply because the manuscript of his epic was first found, by Bessarion, in 'Calabria'. The small Greek Grammar of Constantine Lascaris, published at Milan in 1476, is the first book printed in Greek". Constantine Lascaris is a pathetic figure in the history of scholarship. Though he bore an imperial name, he found himself little better than a slave in Italy. He was reduced to support himself by teaching, and by copying MSS; and even his industry as a 1 Cod. Matrit. no. 43 (Aphthonius etc.), no. 85 (Byz. law), no. 101 (Choricius). Cp. Legrand, 1 lxxi, and Iriarte's Catalogue. 2 no. 2590. 3 In 1492. Bembo, Epp. ed. 1582, p. 4 f. Iriarte, Bibl. Matrit. Codd. Gr. 290 (Legrand, 1 lxxx f). • Legrand, 1 1-5. Reprinted by Aldus at Venice (1495); the Pronouns had been finished at Milan, 1460, the Nouns, 1463; the Verbs at Messina, 1468, and the Subscript Vowels, 1470. His abstract of Herodian is in the Hamburg Library. copyist was of no avail, when his skill was superseded by the newly-invented art of printing'. Janus Lascaris The same famous surname was borne by Janus Lascaris (1445-1535), who, on the fall of Constantinople, was taken to the Peloponnesus and to Crete. On his subsequent arrival in Venice, he was sent, at the charges of Bessarion, to learn Latin at Padua. On the death of his Greek patron, he was welcomed by Lorenzo in Florence, where he lectured on Thucydides and Demosthenes, and on Sophocles and the Greek Anthology. As the emissary of Lorenzo, he went twice to the East in quest of MSS. He recovered as many as 200, but, before his second return, his great Florentine patron had passed away (1492). On the fall of the Medici, he entered the service of France, and was the French envoy at Venice from 1503 to 1508. When the second son of Lorenzo became Pope as Leo X, Janus Lascaris was at once invited to Rome and set over a Greek College. One of his colleagues was Musurus, and among his pupils was Matthaeus Devarius of Corfu (c. 15001570), the future author of a work on the Greek particles3, and the future editor of the editio princeps of Eustathius (1542-50). In 1518 Lascaris returned to France, where he aided Francis I in founding the Royal Library at Fontainebleau. In this work he was associated with Budaeus, who, as an occasional pupil of his colleague, learnt more Greek from Lascaris than from his former teacher, Hermonymus of Sparta. Lascaris returned to Rome on the accession of the second Medicean Pope, in 1523, and again in 1534. In the following year he died, and was buried in the church of Sant' Agata, where the Greek epitaph, composed by himself, tells of his grief for the enslavement of his 1 Cp. Hody, 240–6; Tiraboschi, vi 822-5; Voigt, i 3693; and esp. Legrand, 1 lxxi-lxxxvii. 2 He visited Corfu, Arta, Thessalonica, Mount Athos, Constantinople, Crete. The memoranda of his acquisitions (Cod. Vat. no. 1412) were published by K. K. Müller, in Centrlbl. f. Bibl. i (1884) 333-412. Cp. De Nolhac, Bibl. de F. Orsini, 154–9, and in Mélanges d'arch. et d'hist. vi (1886) 255 f, 264 f. Ed. Klotz, 1835-42; originally published in 1587 (details of his life in his nephew's dedication of this work, and in Legrand, I cxcv-viii, and II 52 f). Cp. Omont, Catalogues des MSS grecs de Fontainebleau (1889), p. iv f. country, and of his gratitude to the alien land that had given him a new home'. His reputation rests on his five editiones principes, all of them printed in Florence, in Greek capitals with accents: namely, four plays of Euripides?, Callimachus, Apollonius Rhodius, the Greek Anthology, and Lucian (1494-6). At Rome he produced at the Greek press on the Quirinal the ancient scholia on the Iliad and on Sophocles (1517-8)". Marcus Musurus Among his pupils in Florence was the Cretan Musurus (c. 1470-1517), who was so diligent in teaching Greek at Padua that he hardly allowed himself four days of holiday throughout the year'. In 1513 we find him lecturing on Greek in Venice, and making it a 'second Athens'. Such is the language of Aldus Manutius" whom he aided, from 1498 to 1515, in the preparation of the earliest printed editions of Aristophanes, Euripides, Plato, Athenaeus, Hesychius, and Pausanias. In recognition of the beautiful Greek poem, prefixed in 1513 to the editio princeps of Plato', he was appointed bishop of Monembasía in the Morea, but died at the age of less than fifty, before starting for his distant diocese3. He was the editor of the 'Etymologicum 1 Lascaris Epigr. ed. 1544, f. 13 verso, Adoxapis dXXodarĤ yaly évikátOeTO, γαίην ͵ οὔτε λίην ξείνην, ὦ ξένε, μεμφόμενος. | εὕρετο μειλιχίην, ἀλλ ̓ ἄχθεται, εἴπερ ̓Αχαίοις | οὐδ ̓ ἔτι χοῦν χεύει πατρὶς ἐλευθέριον. Med. Hipp. Alc. Androm. 3 Cp. Boerner, 199f; Hody, 247—275; Wolf, Analecta, i 237; Vogel in Serapeum, 1849, no. 5 and 6; Symonds, ii 427 f; and esp. Legrand, I cxxx-clxii, and portrait, ib. 111 411. Erasmus, iii 788 B; Nichols, i 449. His teaching is highly praised by Beatus Rhenanus: 'nihil (in Graecis auctoribus) erat tam reconditum, quod non aperiret, nec tam involutum, quod non expediret Musurus, vere Musarum custos et antistes' (Ep. ad Carolum V; Leyden ed. of Erasmus, i init.; cp. Hody, p. 304). Preface to Oratores Graeci, 1513. 6 Facsimile in Early Venetian Printing (1895), 111. 7 Printed in Botfield's Prefaces to the Editiones Principes, 290-6, and in Didot's Alde Manuce, 491-8; translated in Roscoe's Leo X, i 421 f, ed. 1846. He is described, in his epitaph in S. Maria della Pace, as exactae diligentiae grammaticus et rarae felicitatis poëta (Legrand, 1 cxxi), and by Erasmus as not only gente Graecus, eruditione Graecissimus (Ep. 295), but also as Latinae linguae usque ad miraculum doctus (Ep. 671). Cp. Hody, 294307; Boerner, 219-232; R. Menge in Schmidt's Hesychius, v 1-88 (1868); |