Turnebus

(Adrien Turnèbe). A great French classical scholar of the sixteenth century, born at Andelys, near Rouen, in 1512, of Scottish descent, his family name having been originally Turnbull. He was educated at the University of Paris, in which he became Professor of Greek in 1547, and where Scaliger (q.v.) was one of his pupils. He was director of the royal press, in which capacity he did much for the dissemination of corrected classical texts, while winning a wide reputation for his own Hellenic scholarship. Montaigne, his personal friend, pronounced him the greatest man of letters whom Europe had seen for a thousand years. From the press which he directed came the editio princeps of Philo and of Synesius, and he himself edited Aeschylus, Aristotle's Ethics, Cicero De Legibus, and (with notes) Varro's treatise De Lingua Latina and Horace, with translations of Arrian, Oppian, Theophrastus, and portions of Plutarch. He died June 12th, 1565, greatly lamented. His miscellanies (Opera) were published in Strassburg in 1600 in 3 vols., containing, among other productions, his Adversaria, with critical emendations on many classical authors. See the account of Turnebus prefixed to that work, and also Maittaire's Historia Typographorum Aliquot Parisiensium (London, 1817).