But after the subjection of
Greece by the Turks was completed, the succession of scholars was
maintained only by the sons of the fugitives and perhaps here and there
by some Candian or Cyprian refugee. That the decay of Hellenistic
studies began about the time of the death of Leo X was due partly to a
general change of intellectual attitude, and to a certain satiety of
classical influences which now made itself felt; but its coincidence
with the death of the Greek fugitives was not wholly a matter of
accident. The study of Greek among the Italians appears, if we take the
year 1500 as our standard, to have been pursued with extraordinary
zeal. Many of those who then learned the language could still speak it
half a century later, in their old age, like the Popes Paul III and
Paul IV. But this sort of mastery of the study presupposes intercourse
with native Greeks.
Besides Florence, Rome and Padua nearly always maintained paid teachers
of Greek, and Verona, Ferrara, Venice, Perugia, Pavia and other cities
occasional teachers. Hellenistic studies owed a priceless debt to the
press of Aldo Manuzio at Venice, where the most important and
voluminous writers were for the first time printed in the original.
Aldo ventured his all in the enterprise; he was an editor and publisher
whose like the world has rarely seen.
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