Pausanias (2nd century AD).

Estimate

4,000 - 6,000 GBP

bidding is closed

Description

[Works in Greek] Pausanias [edited by Marcus Musurus]. [Venice: Aldus, July 1516]

folio (296 x 191mm.), [4], 282, [2]pp., illustration: woodcut Aldine device on title-page and on verso of final leaf, binding: nineteenth-century red morocco by Hatton of Manchester, Macclesfield arms gilt to upper cover, gilt edges, small hole in title-page, first and last leaves slightly stained, upper hinge cracking, binding slightly soiled

Literature

Texas 130; Ahmanson-Murphy 146; Censimento 16 CNCE 37543

Catalogue Note

editio princeps. Pausanias wrote in the tradition of Herodotus, another Greek from Asia Minor. However, he, living under the Roman Empire, was looking back at the glory that was Greece rather than living in the melting-pot of its establishment. The ten books of his work are arranged by locale in the manner of a modern guide book. His account is drenched in anecdote and observation and shows a particular penchant for obscure local traditions. He was by no means an armchair traveller and his accounts of the religious shrines at Olympia and Delphi are particularly vivid.

Eighteen manuscripts of Pausanias survive (see Aubrey Diller, "The Manuscripts of Pausanias", Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 88 (1957), 169-188) and the manuscript employed for this edition was that of Johannes Calpurnius, the professor of Rhetoric at Padua (now Florence Ricc.gr.29, Aldus had thanked Calpurnius for the loan of it in 1502). Marcus Musurus (c. 1470-1517), professor of Greek at Padua and Venice, had been associated with Aldus since 1493, editing many of his editiones principes, but this was to be his last work.