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This new name was adopted by subsequent writers, and among others by our Spenser. More than a century afterwards Mantuan published his Bucolics with such success that they were soon dignified by Badius with a comment, and, as Scaliger complained, received into schools, and taught as classical; his complaint was vain, and the practice, however injudicious, spread far and continued long.
So there was some hurry to finish it, he wrote to Erasmus in May 1512. Badius, meanwhile, had much more work of Erasmus in hand, or on approval: the Copia, which, shortly afterwards, was published by him; the Moria, of which, at the same time, a new edition, the fifth, already had appeared; the dialogues by Lucian; the Euripides and Seneca translations, which were to follow.
From Bologna, in October 1507, Erasmus addressed a letter to the famous Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, in which he requested him to publish, anew, the two translated dramas of Euripides, as the edition of Badius was out of print and too defective for his taste.
Josse Badius printed all Erasmus offered him: the translations of Euripides and Lucian, a collection of Epigrammata, a new but still unaltered edition of the Adagia. In August the journey was continued. As he rode on horseback along the Alpine roads the most important poem Erasmus has written, the echo of an abandoned pursuit, originated.
First the Catholicon, compiled by John Balbi, a Dominican of Genoa, and completed on 7 March 1286; a work of such importance to the age we are considering that it was printed at Mainz as early as 1460, and there were many editions later. Badius' at Paris, 1506, for instance, was reprinted in 1510, 1511, 1514.
What actually happened is not known. But in December 1513 he writes to an intimate friend that he has been badly treated about the Adagia by an agent a travelling bookseller, who acted as go-between for printers and authors and public; that instead of taking them to Badius and offering him the refusal, the knavish fellow had gone straight to Basle and sold them, with some other work of Erasmus, to a printer who had only just completed an edition of the Adagia.
In the last three years he had completed Jerome and the New Testament, and had also prepared for the press some of Seneca's philosophical writings, from manuscripts at King's and Peterhouse; besides lesser pieces of work. A difficulty arose about the printing. In 1512 he had been in negotiation with Badius Ascensius of Paris to undertake Jerome and a new edition of the Adagia.
He had a sufficient number now, and the printers were eager enough about them, though the profit which the author made by them was not large. At the time when Erasmus took the Moria to Gourmont, at Paris, he had charged Badius with a new edition, still to be revised, of the Adagia. Why the Moria was published by another, we cannot tell; perhaps Badius did not like it at first.
You have already deserved exceedingly well of Greek and Roman literature; you will in this same way deserve well of sacred and divine, and you will help your little Badius, who has a numerous family and no earnings besides his daily trade. Erasmus must have smiled ruefully on receiving Badius's letter. But he accepted the proposal readily.
From the Adagia he promised himself the more profit, but that was a long work, the alterations and preface of which he was still waiting for Erasmus to send. He felt very sure of his ground, for everyone knew that he, Badius, was preparing the new edition. Yet a rumour reached him that in Germany the Aldine edition was being reprinted.