e significant of their authors'
conviction as to the vitalizing power of the ancient poet. No author
from among the classics has been so frequently translated as Horace.

Petrarch, as we have seen, led the modern world by a century in the
appreciation of Horace. It was in 1470, ninety-six years after the
laureate's death, that Italy achieved the first printed edition of the
poet, which was also the first in the world. This was followed in 1474
by a printing of Acro's notes, grown by accretion since their origin in
the third century into a much larger body of commentary. In 1476 was
published the first Horace containing both text and notes, which were
those of Acro and Porphyrio, and in 1482 appeared Landinus's notes, the
first printed commentary on Horace by a modern humanist. Landinus was
prefaced by a Latin poem of Politian's, who, with Lorenzo dei Medici,
was a sort of arbiter in taste, and who produced in 1500 a Horace of his
own. Mancinelli, who, like many other scholars of the time, gave public
readings and interpretations of Horace and other classics, in 1492
dedicated to the celebrated enthusiast Pomponius Laetus an edition of
the _Odes_, _Epodes_, and _Secular Hymn_, in which he so successfully
integrated the comments of Acro, Porphyrio, Landinus, and himself, that
for the next hundred years it remained the most authoritative Horace. In
Italy, between 1470 and 1500, appeared no fewer than 44 editions of the
poet, while in France there were four and in Germany about ten. Venice
alone published, from 1490 to 1500, thirteen editions containing text
and commentary by "The Great Four," as they were called. The famous
Aldine editions began to appear in 1501. Besides Venice, Florence, and
Rome, Ferrara came early to be a brilliant center of Horatian study,
Lionel d'Este and the Guarini preparing the way for the more
distinguished, if less scholastic, discipleship of Ariosto and Tasso.
Naples and the South displayed little activity.

Roughly speaking, the later fifteenth century was the age of manuscript
recovery, commentary, and publication; the sixteenth, the century of
translation, imitation, and ambitious attempt to rival the ancients on
their own ground; the seventeenth and eighteenth, the centuries of
critical erudition, with many commentaries and versions and much
discussion of the theory of translation; and the nineteenth, the century
of scientific revision and reconstruction. In the last movement, Italy
had c