Les Annales de Tacite. Premiere Partie. Contenant le Regne de Tibere. Nouvelle édition (+) Les Annales de Tacite. Seconde partie contenant les regnes de Claudius & de Neron.

1651. Paris, J. Camusat & P. Le Petit, 1650 & 1651. 8vo. In a nice contemporary Cambridge-style mirror binding with four raised bands and richly gilt spine. Small paper-label pasted on to upper compartment on spine. A few scratches to front board with a bit of loss of leather. Ex-libris pasted on to pasted down front end-paper. Title-page of vol. 1 with red underlignings and previous owner's name in contemporary hand and closely trimmed in lower margin with loss of print-year. A few occassional underlinings in text, but generally internally nice and clean. (40), 456, (42), (8), 448, (56) pp. Fine copy of D’Ablancourt’s translation of Tacitus’ Annals, arguably the best and most popular 17th and 18th French translation of Tacitus. “Some translators interpreted efforts to bring Tacitus’s texts into the vernacular in similarly political terms. One of those was Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, who produced his innovative French version between 1640 and 1650. For him, Tacitus not only had been translated into all languages and appreciated by all peoples, he also had “given birth to all of Spanish and Italian politics. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the works of the Latin historian Caius Cornelius Tacitus, who wrote in the irst century AD, became bestsellers in Europe1 . From Italy to France, and in England, the Netherlands, the German Empire, and the Spanish monarchy, Tacitus’s Annals, Histories, Life of Agricola, Germania, and even the Dialogue on Orators – which in that period was not consistently attributed to him – became privileged objects of reading. Soon, a wide array of derivative works appeared. Commentaries on the text, discourses based on selected passages, aphorisms, judgments or notes, and virtually any kind of book related to Tacitus’s texts in any possible form found a printer and readers” (Bermejo, Translating Tacitus). Not in Dibdin