editions
of Cicero, _De Oratore_ and the _Letters_, and eight other Latin
authors.

The printing of Greek began at Milan with the Greek grammar of
Constantine Lascaris (1476). At Florence the earliest editions of Homer
(1488) and Isocrates (1493) had been produced by Demetrius Chalcondyles,
while Janus Lascaris was the first to edit the Greek anthology,
Apollonius Rhodius, and parts of Euripides, Callimachus and Lucian
(1494-1496). In 1494-1515 Aldus Manutius published at Venice no less
than twenty-seven _editiones principes_ of Greek authors and of Greek
works of reference, the authors including Aristotle, Theophrastus,
Theocritus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides,
Demosthenes (and the minor Attic orators), Pindar, Plato and Athenaeus.
In producing Plato, Athenaeus and Aristophanes, the scholar-printer was
largely aided by Musurus, who also edited the Aldine Pausanias (1516)
and the _Etymologicum_ printed in Venice by another Greek immigrant,
Callierges (1499).

The Revival of Learning in Italy ends with the sack of Rome (1527).
Before 1525 the study of Greek had begun to decline in Italy, but
meanwhile an interest in that language had been transmitted to the lands
beyond the Alps.

In the study of Latin the principal aim of the Italian humanists was the
_imitation_ of the style of their classical models. In the case of
poetry, this imitative spirit is apparent in Petrarch's _Africa_, and in
the Latin poems of Politian, Pontano, Sannazaro, Vida and many others.
Petrarch was not only the imitator of Virgil, who had been the leading
name in Latin letters throughout the middle ages; it was the influence
of Petrarch that gave a new prominence to Cicero. The imitation of
Cicero was carried on with varying degrees of success by humanists such
as Gasparino da Barzizza (d. 1431), who introduced a new style of
epistolary Latin; by Paolo Cortesi, who discovered the importance of a
rhythmical structure in the composition of Ciceronian prose (1490); and
by the accomplished secretaries of Leo X., Bembo and Sadoleto. Both of
these papal secretaries were mentioned in complimentary terms by Erasmus
in his celebrated dialogue, the _Ciceronianus_ (1528), in which no less
than one hundred and six Ciceronian scholars of all nations are briefly
and brilliantly reviewed, the slavish imitation of Cicero denounced, and
the law laid down that "to speak with propriety we must adapt ourselves
to the age in which we