whole series of documents which we have been describing was brought together and edited in a masterly manner by J. B. Cotelier of Paris in 1672.
The Greek Apologists form a convenient class, and we may survey their destinies next. The only one who was introduced to the West in the fifteenth century was one of the obscurest, Athenagoras. Large portions of his book On the Resurrection were rendered into Latin by Ficino and also by ,G. Valla, and printed in 1488. The Greek appeared in 1541. The Apology was edited by Gesner at Zurich and by Robert Estienne at Paris in 1557.
The first portion of Justin Martyr's works that saw the light was the Address to the Greeks, printed in the Latin version of Pico della Mirandola in 1507. In 1551 Robert Estienne brought out a corpus of this writer's works, genuine and spurious, which for most of them- notably the two Apologies and the Dialogue with Trypho-was the editio princeps.
Tatian and Theophilus first appeared at Zurich in 1546: the unimportant tract of Hermias in 1553 at Basel. The editor of the first two was Gesner, of the third Raphael Seiler.
All the extant works of Clement of Alexandria, with a few unimportant exceptions, were placed in the hands of scholars together, in the Florentine edition of 1550, superintended by Pietro Victorio. But the best work done on the text of this Father was that of Friedrich Sylburg, who brought out his writings at Heidelberg in 1592. The printer was Commelin.
The first nine editions of Irenaeus, ranging in date from 1526 to 1567, all give a text constructed by Erasmus, and improved to a certain extent by him in those which were published during his lifetime. The Erasmian text, however, never attained a very high pitch of excellence. A step forward was taken by Gallasius, who brought out an Irenaeus at Geneva in 1570, and more decided progress by Feuardent of Paris, whose best edition was printed at Cologne in 1596. Nothing of any great importance was done for the elucidation of this writer before the publication of Grabe's great work at Oxford in 1702.
The works of Origen, largely preserved in old Latin versions, were never wholly unrepresented in Western libraries. It is a curious fact that, in spite of the deep interest which this great thinker excited in the minds of men like Erasmus, no portion of his writings appeared in the original Greek during the sixteenth century. As early as 1475 some Homilies were printed in Latin, and the books Against Celsus, also in Latin, in 1481. A collective edition in the same language was brought out by Merlin at Paris in 1512. Erasmus was engaged on another when he died in 1536, and Beatus Rhenanus completed it in that year. Genebrard, Archbishop of Aix, produced a third in 1574. The first attempt at a complete edition in Greek and Latin was that
