ALCIONIO, PIETRO, or PETRUS ALCYONIUS (c. 1487-1527),
Italian classical scholar, was born at Venice. After having
studied Greek under Marcus Musurus of Candia, he was employed
for some time by Aldus Manutius as a corrector of the press,
and in 1522 was appointed professor of Greek at Florence
through the influence of Giulio de' Medici. When his patron
became pope in 1523 under the title of Clement VII., Alcionio
followed him to Rome and remained there until his death.
Alcionio published at Venice, in 1521, a Latin translation
of several of the works of Aristotle, which was shown by the
Spanish scholar Sepulveda to be very incorrect. He wrote a
dialogue entitled Medices Legatus, sive de Exilio (1522),
in connexion with which he was charged with plagiarism by
his personal enemy, Paulus Manutius. The accusation, which
Tiraboschi has shown to be groundless, was that he had taken
the finest passages in the work from Cicero's lost treatise
De Gloria, and had then destroyed the only existing copy of
the original in order to escape detection. His contemporaries
speak very unfavourably of Alcionio, and accuse him of
haughtiness, uncouth manners, vanity and licentiousness.
This article is from the 1911 edition of an
encyclopedia, which is out of copyright here in the U.S. It is in the
public domain and you may copy, download, print and distribute this work
as you see fit.
Every effort has been made to present this text accurately and
cleanly, but no guarantees are made against errors. Neither Melissa
Snell nor About may be held liable for any problems you experience with
the text version or with any electronic form of this document.
