defended against all detractors by Buonamici (1597)', and finally expounded on a large scale by Beni (1613). Meanwhile, a series of treatises on the Art of Poetry had been produced in Italy by Daniello (1536), Muzio (1551), Varchi (1553), Giraldi Cintio (1554), Fracastoro (1555), Minturno (1559), and Partenio (1560). All these culminated in a work by a more famous scholar of Italian birth, Julius Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558), who in 1529 had left the banks of the Lago di Garda for Agen on the Garonne. In his treatise on poetry, posthumously published at Geneva in 1561, he describes Aristotle as 'imperator noster, omnium bonarum artium dictator perpetuus". The elder Scaliger belongs to the history of scholarship in France, the land of his adoption, but we must here notice two eminent Italian scholars, whose studies were closely connected with the Ars Poëtica of Aristotle, though far from being confined to it. Victorius Piero Vettori, whose name is more familiar in the Latin form of Petrus Victorius (1499-1585), may be regarded as possibly the greatest Greek scholar of Italy, as certainly the foremost representative of classical scholarship in that country during the sixteenth century, which, for Italy at least, may well be called the saeculum Victorianum. Descended on both sides from families of distinction in Florence, he owed much to the intellectual ability of his mother. He learnt his Greek from Marcello Hadriano, and Andrea Dazzi", and from the * See Index to Spingarn and Saintsbury. • Poëtices libri septem, VII ii I, p. 932 (ed. 1586). Cp. Saintsbury, ii 69-80. Scaliger's treatise was succeeded by a second work by Minturno (1564), and by those of Viperano (1579), Patrizzi (1586), Tasso (1587), Denores (1588), Buonamici (1597) and Summo (1600). Andrea Dazzi (1475—1548), a pupil of the Latin secretary of Florence, and editor of Dioscorides (1518), Marcellus Virgilius Adrianus (1464—1521), whom he succeeded as professor. In his Latin poem on the 'Battle of the Cats and Mice' he imitated Virgil, Ovid, and Silius Italicus. He also wrote minor hexameter poems, Silvae, and Greek and Latin Epigrams (W. Rüdiger, Marcellus Virgilius Adrianus, 65 pp., and Andreas Dactius aus Florenz, 70 pp., Halle, 1897). Cauato da un Quadro dipinto in Tauola da Tiziano efiftente detto Quadro in Roma nell' Ill Cafa Vettori VICTORIUS. From the portrait by Titian, engraved by Ant. Zaballi for the Ritratti Toscani, vol. I, no. xxxix (Allegrini, Firenze, 1766). blind scholar, Giorgio Riescio of Poggibonsi. An early interest in astronomy led to his eager study of Aratus and his commentator Hipparchus. At the age of 24 he visited Spain in the company of his relative, Paolo Vettori, admiral of the papal fleet which was sent to escort the newly-elected Pope, Adrian of Utrecht, to the shores of Italy; and, in the neighbourhood of Barcelona, he then collected a number of Latin inscriptions'. After taking part in the spirited but unavailing attempt of Florence to oppose the return of the base-born tyrant, Alessandro Medici, he lived in retirement at San Casciano from 1529 to the death of the second Medicean Pope, Clement VII (1534). In 1536-7 he produced in three volumes an edition of the Letters and the philosophi cal and rhetorical works of Cicero, whose Speeches had already been edited by Naugerius. Under Cosimo I, he withdrew to Rome, but was soon invited to return to Florence as professor of Latin. He was subsequently professor of Greek, and of Moral Philosophy. In Latin scholarship he paid special attention to Cicero's Letters; he also edited Cato and Varro, De Re Rustica (1541), and Terence (1565) and Sallust (1576). In Greek his greatest works are his Commentaries on Aristotle's Rhetoric (1548), Poetic (1560), Politics (1576) and Nicomachean Ethics (1584). All of these are published in folio volumes, in which every sentence, or paragraph, of the text is printed separately, followed, in each case, by a full exposition. For the second Juntine edition of Sophocles (1547) he collated certain ancient MSS in Florence (doubtless including the codex Laurentianus) so far as regarded the Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Coloneus, and Trachiniae, but in the preface he is simply described as 'a learned man', without any mention of his name. He produced editions of Plato's Lysis, and Xenophon's Memorabilia (1551), Porphyry, De Abstinentia (1548), Clemens Alexandrinus (1550), Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Isaeus and Dinarchus (1581), and Demetrius, De Elocutione (1562), with the text interspersed in the folio pages 1 Cp. Epp. 167 f. * Ed. 1536, followed by Castigationes in 1540-1, Ad Familiares 1558, and Ad Atticum 1571. Many of the corrections now universally accepted are due to Victorius, e.g. Ad Fam. iv 8, vwèp Maλéas for 'supra Maias', and Ad Att. xv 19, 'De Menedemo' for 'Demea domi est'; cp. Rüdiger, P. V. 18, 24, 49. of the Latin commentary. In Greek verse, he published the editio princeps of the Electra of Euripides (1545), a play discovered in that year by two of his pupils, and the first edition of Aeschylus which contained the complete Agamemnon (1557)'. Twenty-five books of Variae Lectiones, or Miscellaneous Criticisms, published in 1553, were followed by thirteen more in 1569, and re-issued in the complete folio edition of thirty-eight books in 1582. The only other works that need here be mentioned are his Epistolae ad Germanos missae (1577) and the Epistolae and Orationes published by his grandson in 1586. While he disapproved of the disastrous policy of the Medicean Pope, Clement VII, which ended in the Sack of Rome and the suppression of the liberty of Florence, he was loyal to the successors of Clement, and to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany; and he was sent by Florence to congratulate Julius III on his election (1549). When the Grand Duke, Francesco, married Bianca Capella, Victorius presented the ruler of the State with a very exceptional wedding-gift in the form of a new edition of the commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric (1579). In the Commentary on the Ethics, Aristotle's reference to the opinion of Eudoxus, that pleasure is the chief good3, prompts Victorius to introduce an irrelevant notice of the services of Eudoxus in the correction of the Calendar, and an equally irrelevant compliment to Gregory XIII on his similar services,-a compliment which Victorius also pays the Pope in a separate letter on this subject. None of the attempts to attract Victorius to Rome or Bologna had any permanent result; he remained true to Florence to the last. We are told that, for eighty-five of the eighty-six years of his long life, his sight remained undimmed; also that he drank water only, and constantly bathed in his native stream of the Arno. At the age of 86 he died and was buried in the church of Santo Spirito, where the following inscription may be seen on the wall to the right of the altar : : Owing to the loss of 14 leaves, more than two-thirds of the play is missing in the Medicean MS, viz, 323–1050, 1159-1673, ed. Wecklein. 2 Ethics, x 2, § 1. 3 Epp. p. 222, nactus occasionem idoneam laudandi te etc.' 'D. O. M. In sepulcro hoc sub aram posito Petri Victorii cognomento docti'. During his lifetime five medals were struck in his honour', and his portrait was painted by Titian', while, in the frontispiece of his posthumous Epistolae, we have an engraving representing the great scholar in the 87th year of his age. His fame was not limited to his own land, or his own time. Scholars of his own age, or little later, were loud in his praises. His scrupulous care and unwearied industry are lauded by Turnebus, who declines to be compared with him, even for a moment'; the epithets doctissimus, optimus, and fidelissimus are applied to him by the younger and the greater of the two Scaligers', while Muretus calls him eruditorum coryphaeus; and similar eulogies might be quoted from Justus Lipsius, and the author of the Polyhistor', as well as from editors of the Ars Poëtica of Aristotle, such as Anna Dacier, and of Cicero's Letters, such as Graevius". His Variae Lectiones, however, were sometimes regarded as unduly diffuse, and the prolixity of his Latin letters has been noticed in the Scaligerana1o, and by Balzac, who observed that the perusal of the whole volume was as tedious as travelling, on foot and alone, across the moorlands of Bordeaux". Among his editions of Greek authors, the highest place for wide and varied learning was generally awarded to his commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric", while his contemporary Robortelli lauded him as the only scholar who had really thrown light on the text of Cicero13. He is described by a poet as having 1 Bandini's Vita, 1759, opp. p. civ, and on title-page. 2 Reproduced opp. p. 137. 3 Adversaria, xix 28; Epp. clar. Ital. et Germ. iii 34. • Prima Scaligerana, 99. Var. Lect. ii 25. 7 Morhof, Polyhistor, i 5, 15. Ed. 1692, Préface. Var. Lect. viii 6. f. Epp. Fam., Praef. Cp. Sir Thomas Pope in Blount's Censura, 475 f 11 Lettres à M. Chapelain, iii 21 (6 July, 1638), ed. 1656. 12 Epp. clar. Ital. et Germ. i 36. 13 ib. i 6. |