From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media The Aldine Theocritus: Scholarly Compromises in Running a Publishing House (February 1495 – 1496)

Scholar printer, Aldus Manutius of Venice, issues the Idyllia of Theocritus in Greek along with other works in Greek and Latin, including the writings of Hesiod. (ISTC no. it00144000).

"We must not ask of Aldine editions what they cannot give, a balanced critical recension which even in our own day has hardly been achieved for many Greek authors. The aims of textual purity and correctness were often trumpeted in early editions, long before Aldus, indeed, but with special emphasis in his prefaces. But these aims, no doubt genuinely held, all too frequently succumbed to the messy pressures of the printing house, as the number of errata pages attached to his editions attest. Something is better than nothing, Aldus says in the preface to Theocritus in 1496, and a text once printed can at least find many correctors where a manuscript can only receive occasional emendation. This of course is true in the long run, but sidesteps the whole problem of corrupt texts being fixed in hundreds of copies by the printing press" (Davies, Aldus Manutius, Printer and Publisher of Renaissance Venice [1999] 23).

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