The most famous achievement of Regius is his demonstration that the
Rhetorica ad C. Herennium, or
Rhetorica secunda, was not written by
Cicero, a milestone in the development of
textual criticism. His bitter rivalry with other scholars and scorn for the
"semidocti" reflect familiar competitive strains in the sometimes vituperative temper of
Renaissance humanism. Regio, or Regius as he signed himself, was doubtless a pupil of
Benedetto Brugnolo, a central figure among Venetian humanists, who headed the
Scuola di San Marco and delivered daily lectures at the foot of the
Campanile from 1466 until he died in 1502, "universally lamented and aged over ninety" (Lowry). In his edition of
Quintilian's
Institutiones Oratoria ("Institutes of Oratory") Regius was the first to attempt corrections of the numerous errors (
"depravationes") in Quintilian's text. In his treatise on the text of Quintilian, the
Problemata (probably 1492), he laid out his methods in textual criticism, which offer "insights that are still valid and useful for the modern textual critic," though Regius depends more on his own rationalization (
"ratio") for resolution of textual difficulties than on an appreciation of the relationships among manuscripts, for which a modern scholar would strive. Regius recognized how
glosses could creep into a text and corrupt it. Regius published commentary (
enarrationes) on
Ovid's
Metamorphoses (Venice, ca. 1518), which became the most frequently printed edition of Ovid's Latin poem in the sixteenth century. ==Notes==