The first to take up the cudgels in defence of the writers of the _romanzi_ was Giraldi Cintio, who in his youth had known Ariosto personally, and who wrote his _Discorso intorno al comporre dei Romanzi_, in April, 1549. The grounds of his defence are twofold. In the first place, Giraldi maintains that the romance is a poetic form of which Aristotle did not know, and to which his rules therefore do not apply; and in the second place, Tuscan literature, differing as it does from the literature of Greece in language, in spirit, and in religious feeling, need not and indeed ought not to follow the rules of Greek literature, but rather the laws of its own development and its own traditions. With Ariosto and Boiardo as models, Giraldi sets out to formulate the laws of the _romanzi_. The _romanzi_ aim at imitating illustrious actions in verse, with the purpose of teaching good morals and honest living, since this ought to be the aim of every poet, as Giraldi conceives Aristotle himself to have said.[221] All heroic poetry is an imitation of illustrious actions, but Giraldi, like Castelvetro twenty years later, recognizes several distinct forms of heroic poetry, according as to whether it imitates one action of one man, many actions of many men, or many actions of one man. The first of these is the epic poem, the rules of which are given in Aristotle's _Poetics_. The second is the romantic poem, after the manner of Boiardo and Ariosto. The third is the biographical poem, after the manner of the _Theseid_ and similar works dealing with the whole life of a single hero.