That year he entrusted to the Aldine publish a dialogue in the nature of a eulogy on the theme of exile (Medices legatus, sive de exsilio), in a Ciceronian Latin so finely honed that he was charged with plagiarism by his personal enemy, Paulus Manutius.

The accusation was that he had taken the finest passages in the work from Cicero's lost treatise De Gloria and had then destroyed the only existing copy of the original to escape detection.

The 18th century scholar Abate Girolamo Tiraboschi in his Storia della letterature italiana demonstrated this to be groundless, but the smear has dogged the reputation of Alciono.

Alcionio is one of the four humanists in the circle of Clement VII selected by Kenneth Gouwens to illustrate the shock of cultural discontinuity and new sense of human vulnerability caused by the Sack of Rome that put a premature end to the High Renaissance.

Of Alcionio's numerous translations of Greek classics into Latin, which included the orations of Isocrates and Demosthenes mentioned by Ambrogio Leoni, only his Aristotle has survived (Simon Finch).