Janus Lascaris was a renowned Greek scholar who worked in Italy and later in France. Having fled Greece as a child after the fall of Constantinople, Lascaris lived in Venice and Padua, and later was invited to Florence by Lorenzo de' Medici. There, unhampered by the monopoly on the printing of Greek that Aldus Manutius had obtained in Venice, Lascaris and his colleague Lorenzo di Alopa published the first editions of many important works of classical Greek literature, including the Greek Anthology, Callimachus, four plays of Euripides, and the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius. In an unusual departure from custom, Lascaris chose to print the Argonautica entirely in accented Greek capitals, with the accompanying commentary (scholia) surrounding the text in Greek miniscule.

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