Aldus Manutius, Teacher

Pius Manutius's brilliant reputation as a printer has tended L to obscure the fact that he was by temperament and choice primarily and consistently throughout his life a dedicated teacher. By a curious irony the circumstances that influenced Aldus to direct his life toward teaching were the very ones that have driven many another away from scholarship entirely. As a boy in Rome he had an inept instructor who compelled pupils to memorize all of Alexandre de Villedieu's Doctrinale, a Latin grammar of 26,000 lines in rhymed hexameter. The dullness and pedantry of the book, written in 1 199 and used almost exclusively for three hundred years, made vivid to Aldus the pressing need for a suitable Latin grammar, the foundation for all education.