As Good as Its Owner
 

tion need not be taken literally, since similar claims
often appear in scholars' epistolary supplications for
monetary subvention, Adriano Franceschini's
research shows that Aurispa's financial plight was
real. He had difiiculties in obtaining and retaining
profitable positions. Furthermore, Franceschini
points out that many of the books Aurispa sold were
expensive items, and the library described in the
inventories contains, on the whole, less expensive
copies. One gets the impression that Aurispa sold
books in order to build a well-stocked library. By sell¬
ing an expensive copy, he was able to buy another
less-expensive exemplar of the same work and could
use the sa\'ings to buy other texts. It is thus easy to
understand how he was umvilling to part \vith his
laboriously acquired books. This is probably the
background of Filelfo's remark, which might best be
interpreted as friendly banter.

Plimpton MS 103 is one of those relatively inex¬
pensive, quotidian manuscripts that seem to have
made up the bulk of Aurispa's collection. It repre¬
sents, in fact, one of very few entries in the inventoiy
of Aurispa's librar)' that may be identified with an
extant manuscript. Only four volumes that contain
Aurispa's exlibris are known, and in none of them did
Aurispa use such an elaborate exlibris as in the
Plimpton manuscript. Does this mean that he was
particularly fond of his copy of Victorinus? If so, his
interest was not prompted by the potential value of
the book. Its decoradon is minimal. Two initials at the
beginnings of the two books of Victorinus's work have
a simple but tasteful decoration in the form of an
interlacing pattern. The text was copied during the
twelfth century, probably in northern Italy, in a tiny
but well-formed Carolingian minuscule bookhand.
This was by far the preferred bookhand for renais¬
sance humanists. They (wrongly) believed it to be of
 

ancient origin and used it as the model for their own
handwriting, from which today's handwriting and
printed typefaces descend. Plimpton MS 103 is a book
for a scholar, a person who is interested in what the
text says rather than in making a lucrative investment.
Why was Aurispa drawn to this book? At the end
of the twentieth century Marius Victorinus is hardly a
familiar name, but he was a popular author during
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Contribudng
to his fame was the fact that Victorinus converted to
Christianit)' and that Augustine wrote about the
attention this caused in Rome: "When he stepped
fonvard to make his profession [of Christianit)],
ever)'one, when the\' recognized him, whispered his
name. . . . Who did not know him? And a low mur¬
mur ran through the mouths of all the rejoicing mul¬
titude: 'Victorinus! Victorinus!"' (Coiifessions \lll 2.5)
Victorinus was the teacher of many important
Romans. He was rewarded (deservedly, says
Augustine) for his excellence in teaching with a stat¬
ue in the Roman Forum, "which is considered an
extraordinar)' honor by the citizens of this world."

If ever so exalted, Victorinus was a school master
and his commentary on the De inventione of Cicero is a
school book, meant to explain the intricacies of
Cicero's rhetorical teachings to students. This is e\i-
dent from the school-masterly fashion in which
Victorinus expounds at length on almost ever)' word
of Cicero. In our times, when technical rhetoric is no
longer imporLint, the commentary can appear only
tedious. During antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the
Renaissance, however, rhetoric was an important dis¬
cipline. It was one of the three subjects in the trivium
(grammar, rhetoric, and logic), which formed the
basic curriculum taught in the scliools. During the
Renaissance, rhetoric was an especially cherished
subject for the himianists. They valued the eloquence
 

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