ABSTRACT
A large number of testimonies from printer-publishers have come down to us pointing out how much care has been lavished on the faultless printing of a text. Erasmus of Rotterdam expressed similar views to Celtis on the prospects printing offered for popular education. Aldus had to close down his printing office between 1509 and 1512 on account of the war against Venice by the League of Cambrai; but in the final three years of his life to 1515 he published Pindar, Plato, Hesychius, Athenaeus and the Attic orators. In language bristling with metaphor, Vadian describes how in his need he had sought refuge in the new text edited by Aldus Manutius, and compared the resource - in Homer’s words in the Odyssey - with a “rescue from a great disaster at sea”. Vadian had a thousand copies of Aldus’s edition reprinted by the printer-publishers Hieronymus Vietor and Johann Singrenius in Vienna in 1510.