A companion to Latin studies.

  • John Edwin Sandys
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: A companion to Latin studies. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

    900/940 (page 856)
    8s6 1269. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Italian humanists had been bril- liantly represented at the court of the emperor Frederick III Germany. person of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (afterwards Pope Pius II), who spent thirteen years in Vienna (1442-55). It was in the next generation, and with reference mainly to Northern Germany, that r-coia Rodolphus Agricola (1444—1485), a native of the Nether- Agnco a. ]^^xlds, who studied at Paris and Ferrara, was described by Erasmus as 'the first who brought from Italy some breath of a better culture'. He became the 'standard-bearer' of humanism in Germany. Late in life he resided at Heidelberg. Another important literary centre was Basel, where valuable editions of Latin historians were published with the aid of newly-discovered mss :—the edUt'o princeps of Velleius Paterculus (1520), and editions of Livy (1531 and 1535) and Ammianus Marcellinus (1533)- At Basel, at the age of twenty, Reuchlin (1455—1522) produced a ReucWn brief Latin dictionary, which, in less than thirty years, passed through twenty editions. It was in the defence of Reuchlin that the barbarous Latinity and the mediaeval scholasticism of his opponents were admirably parodied in the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum (1516-7)- In the next generation, Melanchthon (1497—1560), the praeceptor , , ^ Germaniae, lectured at Wittenberg on Virgil, Terence, and Melanchthon. , , , , . ° . ° ^ ' , the rhetorical works of Cicero, and produced many ele- mentary editions of the Classics, and a Latin Grammar, which remained Camerarius friend Camerarius (1500—1574) is best known through the edition of Plautus (1552) which he founded on two important mss, both of which were then in Heidelberg. In critical acumen he holds one of the foremost places among the German scholars of the sixteenth century. The Seventeenth Century. 1270. In the seventeenth century the classical learning of Italy was The 17th mainly limited to archaeology. Latin Composition was, century: howcver, agreeably represented by the Frolusioties (1617) strada °^ Roman Jesuit, Famianus Strada (1572—1649), taste- fully dealing with large questions of style in prose and poetry, and illustrating that of Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius and Claudian by original poems in imitation of those poets. 1271. In France, the high promise of Salmasius (1588—1653), a native of Saumur, was early recognised by Casaubon. In his edition Safmasius HistoHae Atlgustae Scriptores (1620) he distinguished himself less as a sound textual critic than as an erudite commentator; and, in his Plinianae Exercitationes (1629), he devoted more than 900 pages to the elucidation of those portions of Pliny which