BOOK: Aldus Manutius, "The Greek Classics"

Aldus Manutius: The Greek Classics. Edited and translated by N. G. Wilson. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 70. Harvard University Press, 2016. 9780674088672. xvii + 395 pp.

Aldus Manutius was a famous printer who was active in Venice in the late 15th and early 16th century. I probably first heard of him indirectly because a company named after him were the makers of one of the early desktop publishing programs, Aldus PageMaker. Anyway, the original Aldus published the first printed editions of numerous works of ancient Greek and Roman literature, as well as some contemporary works.

Many of these books included a short preface by Aldus himself, and the present volume includes about 50 of these prefaces from his editions of Greek authors. In 2017 they also published a similar volume containing his prefaces to books by Latin authors, and according to a note by Prof. Hankins (p. ix in the present volume), they are also planning a similar book with prefaces by Sweynheym and Pannartz, the German printers who had been the first to bring printing technology to Italy.

I found Aldus's prefaces to be more interesting than I had expected. For Aldus — like for many publishers, especially before that whole industry had been consolidated into a handful of gigantic faceless media conglomerates in the late 20th century — publishing was not just a business and a way to make money. He had had a humanist education and had worked as a tutor before going into the printing business (p. xiv), and throughout his prefaces you can see how keenly aware he was of the fact that he and his fellow humanists were involved in a grand effort to revive and restore the study of classical languages and literature. Aldus's publishing of Greek works, many of which had previously been extant in manuscript form only and had not been widely available, was an important part of that and he approached it with tremendous enthusiasm.

It was a huge project, and in his prefaces Aldus often comes across as an extraordinarily busy man who dedicates all his waking hours to furiously collecting, editing and printing yet more of his beloved classical authors (p. 215). He compares his labours to those of Hecules (p. 53) and Sisyphus (pp. 241, 257). He often emphasizes how he is doing this for the benefit of his readers, people who wish to learn the Greek language and then profit from the study of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, etc. (pp. 45, 47). As the translator's introduction points out (p. xiii), in Aldus's time there was still a great shortage of textbooks and the like from which one could learn Greek (which I guess is why the presence of native speakers of Greek who had fled from the collapsing Byzantine Empire gave such a boost to the study of Greek in Italy); several of his books were specifically meant to address that, and he often points out in his prefaces how this or that work would be useful to someone learning Greek, or how he included a Latin translation for the benefit of those whose Greek wasn't good enough yet (pp. 85, 87; sometimes the translation is by Aldus himself).

The fact that printing was making books widely available clearly meant a great deal to him, and occasionally he rants against “buriers of books” (bibliotaphs) who hoard manuscripts in their private libraries and don't let anyone else read them (p. 101: “I have no doubt that they will soon die of jealousy since everything worth reading will be published” :))). I completely sympathize with that, especially since nowadays the internet can be the next step in making books more easily accessible than ever before. I have had a keen interest in that ever since I got on the internet in the mid-90s. A lot has already been done in that direction, and a lot more could be done if it wasn't for those pesky copyright laws.

In a 1495 preface Aldus reports that the interest in Greek had recently grown so much that even many old men learn it, not just young ones (p. 13). Still, he says in 1497 that “Greek and Latin studies, though a little better off than for many years in the past, are still depressed” (p. 55).

He has some interesting remarks about the variety of ancient Greek dialects and the degree of freedom that this afforded to their poets, unlike e.g. in Latin (p. 31). It's tempting to think how much more variegated literature could be if everyone wrote in his own dialect (like the Greeks did before the Hellenistic period) instead of having just one standard form of each language as is usually the case nowadays.

To some extent his prefaces were of course meant as advertisements, and we should probably regard some of his enthusiastic claims as “sales patter typical of publishers” (translator's note 482, p. 360). But you cannot help admiring his honesty when he writes things like “I had hoped [. . .] to read in Philostratus' books [. . .] a great many important things worth knowing, but it really turned out quite otherwise. I cannot recall ever reading anything worse or less deserving attention; [. . .] it was tasteless and very stupid.” (P. 131.) Can you imagine a publisher putting *that* on their back cover nowadays? :)

Many of his prefaces are in the form of letters addressed to specific notable individuals, but as he himself says, they are really meant for the public at large (p. 205).

Occasionally his efforts to describe how busy he was end up being very funny: “take pity on your friend Aldus, since he often does not have time to eat or to relieve himself. Sometimes [. . .] it is not even possible to wipe our nose. What a hard profession it is!” (P. 215.)

Sometimes he gives useful advice to students, e.g. recommending them to copy some texts by hand in order to get used to the spelling and especially the accents of Greek (p. 221). The translator adds (p. 357, n. 428) a hilarious remark from a 19th-century book: “concerning that man who misplaces them [i.e. Greek accents], or, worse still, altogether omits them, damaging inferences will certainly be drawn, and in most instances with justice.” (You can see the original on archive.org; be sure to also look at the previous page for a fine rant about the Kids These Days™. :))

Aldus on his perfectionism: “I have never yet produced a book with which I felt satisfied. My love of literature is such that I want the books which I put into the hands of the educate to be very accurate and very beautiful.” (P. 241.)

As an appendix, the book includes a few letters from other people to Aldus. There's a letter from William Grocyn, an Englishman who had studied in Italy around 1490, with this delightful opinion about Aristotle and Plato: “the difference between these two greatest of philosophers is simply — forgive me, everyone — the difference between a polymath and a ‘polymyth’.” (P. 285.) From what I've seen of Plato and his enthusiasm for inventing wild tales and inserting them in his philosophical dialogues, the term “polymyth” strikes me as very appropriate.

Aldus established something he called the “New Academy”, and often refers to it in his prefaces as if the books were being issued by this academy. But from the statutes of the academy, included here on pp. 289–93, it seems to have been mostly a sort of social club for Aldus and his friends, who wanted to practice speaking Greek to each other. Anyone caught using another language was to pay a fine, and when enough funds had been accumulated they were to be used by Aldus to throw a party for the members. Sounds fun :) It reminded me a little of an anecdote in Tolstoy's War and Peace. When Russia was at war with Napoleon's France, a group of Russian aristocrats grew a bit embarrassed by the abundance of French in their everyday conversation, and agreed that anyone caught speaking French would pay a small sum of money as a contribution to the war effort. One of them, on being fined thusly, complained: “But how am I supposed to express that in Russian?” :))

Aldus's enthusiasm for Greek was so great that sometimes he even wrote his prefaces in it (though judging by the translator's notes, Aldus and many other renaissance humanists made a lot more errors in Greek than when writing Latin; n. 26 on p. 326). As an appendix there is also a 200-line poem (pp. 303–17) by Marcus Musurus, a Greek who had edited several volumes for Aldus, including Plato's works (pp. 243, 257; “an exceptionally gifted textual critic”, n. 516 on p. 362). This is probably the first book in the ITRL series where we have such extensive amounts of Greek. I was surprised to see how much leading they used for Greek in this volume; perhaps the idea is that it's useful because Greek has so many accent-marks, and yet people normally manage to print Greek just fine without such an excessive amount of leading. As a result this book fits much less text on a page when the text is Greek than when it is in Latin.

A notable innovation by Aldus was to print smaller, pocket-sized books (p. xv and n. 228 on p. 344) rather than just the bulky folios that probably predominated earlier. There's an interesting letter from Scipione Forteguerri, a member of Aldus's circle, praising one of these small books: “The charm of its contents wil not contribute as much as its handiness [. . .] lest readers should be distracted from the contents of the text by the weight of the volumes being handled.” (Pp. 297–9.)

There are some interesting remarks on Aldus's Greek typeface, which tried to imitate various abbreviations and ligatures that the scribes had used in their handwritten books to save time on frequently occurring suffixes and the like. The translator clearly dislikes this: “Aldus' influence was so great that these annoying and aesthetically unpleasing conventions remained in use until the nineteenth century” (p. 325, n. 11). But he admits that Aldus probably had good reasons to imitate handwritten books because some of his potential buyers were still distrustful of the printed book (p. xiv).

This was a very interesting book and I definitely look forward to reading the second volume of Aldus's prefaces, hopefully in the not too distant future.