free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
he was doing - he believed in the supremacy of Greek culture, which
must be transmitted from the moribund east to the vigorous west. It
was his misfortune to live half-way between the two worlds.
Candia was now a centre for the copying of manuscripts. Michael’s
son Arsenios continued his work, before leaving for Italy. But Cretans
tended more and more to emigrate to the west, for the island could not
contain them. Before 1453 the level of education in Crete was low,
even among the clergy. The monastery of St Catherine in Candia
taught the rudiments of ancient Greek, philosophy, theology, rhetoric
and so forth. Elsewhere there was little learning. After 1453 the learned,
like Michael Apostolis, had to set up their own schools. But it was no
life for the ambitious. All that scholars could do in Crete was to copy
for Venetian patrons or teach privately. There was no university;
whereas in Italy the Greek language had begun to sweep through intellectual
circles, revealing a whole new world. There were openings for
teachers, for printers, for professors.
At the centre of this Italian movement was the Aldine Press. Aldus
Manutius himself was not merely a publisher – he gathered round him
eminent Hellenists, both Greek and Latin, in an Academy where only
Greek was spoken. From 1495 on, the Aldine Press employed Emigre
Greeks, mostly Cretans, as compositors, editors and correctors. Aldus’s
chief editor, for instance, was the Cretan Markos Mousouros, the leading
Hellenist of his time and indeed one of the great Hellenists of all
times, who edited among others Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes
and Plato. (His Plato was the first complete edition of the philosopher
in Greek.) Mousouros was not only an editor. He also held the Greek
chair at Padua for six years. Students of this exciting, rapidly expanding
subject came from all over Europe to hear him lecture. Erasmus, who
met him at Padua, was full of praise for his scholarship. In 1509
Mousouros moved back to Venice where he became professor shortly
afterwards; and Aldus wrote that Venice was a second Athens because
students of Greek congregated from everywhere to hear Mousouros, the
most learned man of his age. Aldus died in 1515, Mousouros in 1517,
and by that time most of the major authors of antiquity had been
published in new editions in Venice.
Mousouros is a well-known Cretan name. So is Kallergis, a name
which figures so prominently in fourteenth-century revolts. One of
this noble family, Zacharias, set up the first exclusively Greek press in
Venice; (for the Aldine Press published also Latin). The first publication
was the enormous Etymologicum Magnum, a mediaeval Greek
dictionary whose effect on Greek studies in Italy was profound.
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