Eklogaì Apophthegmáton. Sententiae ex thesauris Graecorum delectae (Graece et Latine) ..., nunc primum ... in Latinu(m) sermonem traductae. Ed. and trans. by Conrad Gesner.

Zurich, Christoph Froschauer, 1543. With woodcut printer's mark on title, and numerous woodcut initials. 12 unn. leaves (last blank), 301, (1) pp., leaves 302 (-537), 20 unn. leaves index. Folio. 17th-century full calf, back gilt, marbled end-papers, all edges red. With old ownership entries. Zurich, Christoph Froschauer, 1543. First bilingual edition with the first Latin translation of the famous anthology, compiled from the writings of Greek poets, philosophers, and orators by the Macedonian scholar Joannes Stobaeus (5th cent. A.D.), and intended in the first instance for the instruction of his son Septimius. It deals with a variety of topics, from metaphysics to household economy, and it is concerned chiefly with ethical questions. The illustrative extracts, which Stobaeus probably owed in a large measure to earlier collectors, are arranged under thematic headings. Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople and the best of Byzantine scholars (9th cent.), commends the work for its usefulness to writers and speakers. The special value of the work for us lies in the large number of quotations from many earlier authors whose writings are otherwise lost, or which often throw light upon difficulties in the regular manuscript tradition. As the first Greek edition, Venice 1536, proved to be extremely faulty, Gesner re-edited the Greek text from several manuscripts and added the first Latin translation together with some other works (a.o. an elegy ascribed to Solon and translated by Ph. Melanchthon). "Indeed no editor, up to the close of the last century, had done so much to the supply of lacunae, and the restoration of a pure text, as Conrad Gesner..." (Dibdin, An introduction ... II, 429). - Somewhat browned, slight waterstaining to lower corners at the end. - VD 16 J 769; Rudolphi 300; STC (German), 459; Adams S-1872; Vischer C 324; Wellisch A-11.1; Ley, Gesner, 15; Fischer a.o., Conrad Gesner (1967), 124; Leemann-van Elck, Die Offizin Froschauer, 91. CLASSICS ;