Janus Lascaris

Janus Lascaris (Greek: Ἰᾶνoς Λάσκαρις, Ianos Laskaris; born about 1445 in Constantinople; died in Rome on 7 December 1535), also called John Rhyndacenus (from Rhyndacus, a country town in Asia Minor), was a noted Greek scholar in the Renaissance.

After the Fall of Constantinople Lascaris was taken to the Peloponnese and to Crete. When still quite young he came to Venice, where Bessarion became his patron, and sent him to learn Latin at the University of Padua.

On the death of Bessarion, Lorenzo de' Medici welcomed him to Florence, where Lascaris gave Greek lectures on Thucydides, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and the Greek Anthology. Lorenzo sent him twice to Greece in quest of manuscripts. When he returned the second time (1492) he brought back about two hundred from Mount Athos.

Meanwhile, Lorenzo had died. Lascaris entered the service of France and was ambassador at Venice from 1503 to 1508, at which time he became a member of the Greek Academy of Aldus Manutius; but if the printer had the benefit of his advice, no Aldine work bears his name. He resided at Rome under Leo X, the first pope of the Medici family, from 1513 to 1518, returned under Clement VII in 1523, and Paul III in 1534.

In the meantime he had assisted Louis XII in forming the library of Blois, and when Francis I had it removed to Fontainebleau, Lascaris and Budé had charge of its organization.

We owe to him a number of editiones principes, among them the Anthologia Graeca (1494), four plays of Euripides, Callimachus (about 1495), Apollonius Rhodius, Lucian (1496), printed in Florence in Greek capitals with accents, the scholia of Didymas (Rome 1517) and of Porphyrius (1518) on Homer (Rome 1518), and the scholia vetera on Sophocles (Rome 1518).

Among his pupils were Marco Musuro, Germain de Brie and Dimitrije Ljubavić.

He was buried in the gothic church of Sant' Agata dei Goti. On his memorial the following epigram is inscribed, composed by himself:

i.e., Lascaris in foreign land deposided his earth [his body], and he does not blame her [the land] that she is very foreign, oh stranger. He found her sweet. But he is worried about the Achaeans [the Greeks], because their country does not cover them with free soil.