ERMOLAO

BARBARO (HE1 Mor.AUS BARBARUS) (1454-1493)  , Italian scholar, was born at Venice on the 21st of May 1454 . At an early age he was sent to Rome, where he studied under Pomponius Laetus . He completed his education at the university of Padua, where he was appointed professor of philosophy in 1477 . Two years later he revisited Venice, but returned to Padua when the plague broke out in his native city . He was sent on various missions to persons of high rank, amongst them Pope Innocent VIII., by whom he was nominated to the important office of patriarch of Aquileia (1491) . The Venetian senate, however, refused to ratify the appointment, which, contrary to the law, he had accepted without first obtaining its sanction . He was banished and forced to resign the patriarchate, under the threat of being punished vicariously by the confiscation of his father's property . Barbarus remained at Rome, in receipt of a small pension from the pontifical government, until his death (probably from the plague) on the 14th of June 1493 (according to some, two years later) . He edited and translated a number of classical works, of which the most important were: Castigationes Plinianae (1492), in which he boasted of having made 5000 corrections in the text of Pliny's Natural History; Themistius' Paraphrases of certain works of Aristotle (1480); Aristotle's Rhetorica (published in 1544) ; Castigationes in Pompanium Melam (1493) .