[Greek: Laskaris allodapê gaiê enikattheto, gaiên outi liên xeinên ô xene memphomenos. eureto meilichiên, all' achthetai eiper Achaiois oud' eti choun cheuei patris eleutherion].
[Footnote 394: Cf. Giovio, close of the _Elogia_.]
Any account of erudite society in Rome would be incomplete without some notice of its antiquaries. While the Pope and his cardinals were bent on collecting statues, coins, vases, and inscriptions, it was natural that the scholars should devote themselves to their illustration. Much of this industry was carried on by the academicians, who discussed difficult readings and exchanged opinions at their meetings. Treatises on Roman antiquities, topographical essays, and commentaries on Vitruvius and Frontinus abounded. Amid a multitude of minor works it will be enough to mention the cyclopædias of Andrea Fulvio and Bartolommeo Marliano, the comprehensive collection of inscriptions by Mazochi, and Valeriano's dissertation on the hieroglyphics of the Roman obelisks.[395] The greater number of these compositions were published by Jacopo Mazochi, bookseller to the Roman Academy, and himself no mean scholar. Together with his coadjutor, Francesco Albertini, he undertook what he describes as 'the Herculean labour' of saving inscribed tablets from the lime-kiln and the mason's hammer. Built into the walls of houses, embedded in church pavements, mingled with the rubbish of the Forum, unearthed by the mattock or the plough in vineyard and cornfield, these records of old history encumbered Rome. To decipher them as best he could, arrange them by the regions where they had been found, and incorporate his own readings with the previous collections of Ciriaco and Fra Giocondo,[396] was the object of Mazochi. His work formed the nucleus of the ponderous collection known as the _Corpus Inscriptionum_.
[Footnote 395: _Andreas Fulvius Sabinus Antiquarius, Antiquitates Urbis Romæ_, 1527. _Bartholomæus Marlianus, Eques D. Petri, Urbis Romæ Topographia_, 1534. _Jacobus Mazochius, Epigrammata antiquæ urbis Romæ_, 1521. _Johannis Pierii Valeriani Hieroglyphica seu de Sacris Ægyptiorum_, &c., in his collected works, Ven. 1604.]
[Footnote 396: The architect of Verona who first edited Vitruvius, and was employed by Lorenzo de' Medici in collecting inscriptions for him at Rome.]