ANACREON. [with] TIMAEUS OF LOCRI. [with] FABRICIUS, Georgius. [with] HOTMAN, François. [and] PHALARIS

Very good copies of these classical texts with a few annotations by a contemporary student. The first four were printed in the magnificent ‘Royal Greek type’ designed by Garamond for Robert Estienne, the King’s Printer in Greek, and handed over to his successor, Guillaume Morel. I) Based on Henri Estienne’s editio princeps, ‘Anakreontos … mel ’ features a florilegium of Greek poems (and their Latin translations) written by Anacreon—a 6th-century author—and other lyrical poets including Sappho, accompanied by philological commentary. This influential corpus of ‘Anacreontea’ derives from a C10 ms. and was later acknowledged to be mostly spurious. II) Sometimes found bound with I), ‘Anacreontis … odae’ provides Latin translations of the same poems, on lyrical topics including love and dreams, produced by the humanist Petrus Montaureus. Such texts were fundamental in French Renaissance culture; Anacreon’s verse proved to be excellent study material for Greek students and was translated from Latin into French by the poet Pierre Ronsard. III) This treatise on the nature of the world and the soul was ascribed to Timaeus of Locri, also a character in Plato’s namesake dialogue. In the C16, it was considered a prior version of Plato’s ‘Timaeus’ rather than a derivative; written in Doric Greek probably in the second century AD, it provided a clear summary of Timaeus’s arguments in the Platonic dialogue and was probably born as a student textbook in late antiquity, the same function it plays in this copy. IV) Georgius Fabricius’s terse, didactic work on Greek syntax summarises the grammatical rules of nouns, verbs, adverbs and prepositions through comparisons with Latin, with ‘caveats’ on the differences between prose and poetic language. V) ‘De legibus’ may seem an unexpected find in a student’s book, being a schematic index of Roman laws spanning adultery, rape, parricide and agriculture, identified through the names of the ruling family under which they were approved. It was probably deemed relevant in that most entries bear double-references to works by the likes of Livy, Cicero and Plutarch, where each law was mentioned. VI) ‘Epistolae doctissimae’ was attributed to Phalaris, tyrant of Agrigento in the sixth century BC. Albeit famously ruthless, known for his cannibalism and for roasting his enemies alive inside a brazen bull, by the sixteenth century he was identified as the humane and learned author of these short moral narratives focused on exemplary historical figures like the poet Stesichorus and the Spartan admiral Eteonicus. Among the early annotation in different hands are a few poetic lines from Augustinus Huens’s ‘Dialectica’ (1555), a Renaissance rhetoric manual based on Aristotelian logic.