[Footnote 345: Sansovino, in his _Famiglie Illustri_, after giving a fabulous pedigree of the Pio family, dates their signorial importance from the reign of Frederick II.]
[Footnote 346: Executed for the Church of the Cordeliers by Paulus Pontius.]
To Alberto Pio the world owes a debt of gratitude, inasmuch as he supplied Aldo with the funds necessary for starting his printing press, and gave him lands at Carpi, where his family were educated. When Aldo conceived the ambitious project of printing the whole literature of Greece, four Italian towns could already claim the honours of Greek publications. Milan takes the lead. In 1476 the Grammar of Lascaris was printed there by Dionysius Paravisini, with the aid of Demetrius of Crete.[347] In 1480 Esop and Theocritus appeared, with no publisher's name. In 1486 two Cretans, Alexander and Laonicenus, edited a Greek psalter. In 1493 Isocrates, prepared by Demetrius Chalcondylas, was issued by Henry the German and Sebastian of Pontremolo. Next comes Venice, where, as early as 1484, the 'Erotemata' of Chrysoloras had been produced by a certain Peregrinus Bononiensis. Vicenza followed in 1488 with a reprint of Lascaris's Grammar due to Leonard Achates of Basle, and in 1490 with a reprint of the 'Erotemata.' Florence, as we have already seen, gave Homer to the world in 1488. Demetrius Chalcondylas revised the text; Demetrius the Cretan supplied the models for the types; Alopa of Venice was the publisher. It will be remarked that, with the exception of Homer and Theocritus, no true classic of the first magnitude had appeared before the foundation of the Aldine Press. I may also add that the Milanese Isocrates was really contemporaneous with the Musæus, Galeomyomachia, and Psalter issued by Aldo as precursors of his Greek library--[Greek: Prodromoi tês Hellênikês bibliothêkês]. This fact makes his thirty-three first editions of all the greatest and most voluminous Greek authors between 1494 and 1515 all the more remarkable.
[Footnote 347: Poliziano's epigram addressed to these earliest Greek printers may be quoted here:
Qui colis Aonidas, Grajos quoque volve libellos; Namque illas genuit Græcia, non Latium. En Paravisinus quantâ hos Dionysius arte Imprimit, en quanto cernitis ingenio! Te quoque, Demetri, ponto circumsona Crete Tanti operis nobis edidit artificem. Turce, quid insultas? tu Græca volumina perdis; Hi pariunt: hydræ nunc age colla seca!]