ESTIENNE, FAMIGLIA — Frontispiece of Ulrich von Hutten’s Arts versificatoria, Paris 1528.
and tense, beyond the bounds of current logic and morality, in desperate superhuman assertions. Wagner and Nietzsche attract and repel one another as the solar and nocturnal sides of their aestheticism attract and repel one another.
The drama intrinsic to aestheticism, in all its historical expressions, governs the disjointedness of a life that does not respect the proper proportion among the human values of truth, goodness, and beauty.
ESTIENNE (Stephanus), FAMIGLIA. — Printers who carried on their activity in Paris and Geneva in the 16th century, beginning in 1502.
The founder of the family was HENRI I (b. between 1465 and 1475, d. in 1526), whose edition of a Psalter in five columns (1509) is famous. His second son was ROBERT I, born in Paris in 1499 and deceased in Geneva on 7 September 1559. « Vir ad promovendas bonas litteras quasi natus » (Thesaurus, I, ed. 1740, p. 12), exceptionally learned in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, from 1526 onward he devoted himself in his own printing house, with tireless zeal, to the critical edition and dissemination of Latin classics, Greek ecclesiastical writers, and a highly useful Thesaurus latinae linguae (4 vols., Paris 1531; 2nd ed. there 1536; 3rd ed. there 1543; then editions in Lyon 1573, London 1735, Basel 1740–43), earning the title of imprimeur du roi (1539) and lexicographorum princeps. His activity, however, clearly divided into a Catholic period in Paris (until 1551) and a Protestant one in Geneva (1551–59), had been devoted particularly to Sacred Scripture as early as 1523.
Thus, he prepared several editions of the New Testament in Latin (1523), of the entire Bible in Latin, or Vulgate (1528), of the Hebrew Bible (4 vols., 1539–44), of the New Testament in Greek (1546), and of the New Testament in French (1553). In 1555 he followed these with Concordantiae Bibliarum utriusque Testamenti, Veteris et Novi, novae integrae, quas revera maiores appellare possis, the first work of its kind.
In the various editions of the Vulgate (1528–57), E. attempted critically to restore the authentic text of St. Jerome and « s'est acquis une place de premier ordre dans l'histoire de la Vulgate » (H. Quentin, Mémoire sur l'etablissement du texte de la Vulgate, Rome 1922, pp. 104–20). In the 4th ed. of the Greek-Latin New Testament (Geneva 1551), he introduced the division of the sacred text into numbered chapters and verses that he had devised inter equitandum between Paris and Lyon—a division not always good, but still in use today. His biblical editions, especially on account of his annotations, were viewed unfavorably by the Sorbonne; consequently, in 1551 he moved to Geneva and converted to Protestantism, placing his Geneva publishing house at the disposal of the « reformers ». See his Responsio ad consumat theologorum Parisientium, quibus Biblia a Roberto Stephano, typographo regio, excusa calunniase notarum (Geneva 1552, also published simultaneously in French).
Other valuable works on biblical subjects include a thesaurus of the Hebrew language, or a collection of glosses on the Synoptics, namely: Nomina hebraea, chaldaea, graeca et latina virorum, mutherum, papulorum, idolorum, urbium, flaviorum, montium caeterorumque locorum quae in Bibliis leguntur, restituta... (Paris 1537); Phrases hebraicae, seu loquendi genera hebraica quae in Vetori Testamento passim leguntur... thesaucri linguae hebraicae altera pars (there 1538); in Evangelium secundum Matthaeum, Marcum et Lucam commentarii ex ecclesiasticis scriptoribus collectae, novae glossae ordinariae specimen (Geneva 1553).
His son HENRI II (b. in 1551, d. in Lyon in 1598) brought the printing house into decline, but as a Hellenist he achieved considerable renown through his edition of Anacreon (1554), and even more through the Thesaurus graecae linguae (1572), which, revised and reworked (Paris 1831–63), remains today the most extensive Greek lexicographical repertory.
Adalberto Metzinger—Alessandro Pratesi