FROBEN, Jo annes (Latinized name Frobenius), a G erman printer and scholar, was born at Hammelburg in Franconia about 1460. After completing his university career with great distinction at Basel, he established a printing office in that city about the year 1491, and was the first German who brought the art to anything like perfection. He was on intimate terms of friendship with Erasmus, who not only had his own works printed by him, but superintended Frobenius’s editions of St Jerome, St Cyprian, Tertullian, Hilary of Poitiers, and St Ambrose. It was part of Frobenius’s plan to have printed also editions of the Greek Fathers. He did not live to carry out this project, but it was very creditably executed by his son Jerome and his son-in-law Bisschop or Episcoρius. Frobenius died in 1527, in consequence of an accident which had befallen him some years before. An extant letter of Erasmus, written in the year of Frobenius’s death, gives an epitome of his life and an estimate of his character; andin it Erasmus mentions that his grief for the death of his friend was far more poignant than that which he had felt for the loss of his own brother. The epistle concludes with an epitaph in Greek and Latin.