Note 324 — LORENZO DI PIERO DE’ MEDICI (continued 3)

This codex had belonged to Battista Guarino and was highly valued and jealously guarded. The Duke refused to send it to Florence but allowed Lorenzo to have it copied by a Greek scribe he sent to Ferrara. Three years later Lorenzo asked the Duke to lend for a few days the translation of the book by Dione Cassio (Dionysius Cassius) made for the Duke by Niccolò Leoniceno. Again afraid to trust the manuscript out of his hands, he had a copy made in all haste by divers scribes, and sent it as a present to Lorenzo, on the condition that he was neither to lend it nor to allow it to be published. The translation was printed for the first time in Venice in 1532, the Greek original in Paris in 1548.