Thucydide

1540 · Best.-Nr. 4885 — Basel: Ex Officina Hervagiana 1540. THIRD EDITION IN GREEK 1st ed. 1502. Hardcover. Fine. Bound in contemporary blind-tooled pigskin lightly soiled some surface abrasions discreet repairs to hinges. The binding is stamped with the date 1542 and the initial M. The boards are ruled in compartments with blind-stamped figurative rolls featuring female personifications of Prudence holding a mirror and Justice with her scales as well as Christ Moses and Lucretia plunging her a sword into hear breast. Further tools include interlocking sheaves of wheat and small pomegranates. A nice copy with broad margins. There is a little light dust-soiling to the margins of the first few leaves the final leaf and scattered instances in the upper margin elsewhere; a persistent light dampstain to the upper inner corner of the leaves; a wormhole to the outer blank margin occasionally developing into a short trail only entering the text in gatherings Z A and B. With minute contemporary annotations in the first three books. Printed in Greek with attractive woodcut Greek initials and Herwagen’s printer’s device on final leaf. This is the third printed edition of the Greek text of Thucydides edited by the renowned humanist Joachim Camerarius to whom Henri Estienne would dedicate in 1564 his own edition of Thucydides. In his introduction Camerarius tells us that he used a manuscript -brought to Italy from Constantinople over one-hundred years earlier- that had only recently come to Basel thanks to Herwagen. The text is followed by the scholia. “The standards and methods of Thucydides as a contemporary historian have never been bettered. Thucydides has been valued as he hoped; statesmen as well as historians men of affairs as well as scholars have read and profited by him. He began work at the very start of the events he records and the penetration and concentration which he devoted to his account of the ‘Peloponnesian War’ the war between Athens and Sparta from 431 to 404 B.C. were based on the conviction that it would prove the most important event in Greek history.”PMM 102. Ex Officina Hervagiana hardcover