[RESERVED]

First Latin edition of the Discourses of Epictetus as set down by his disciple Arrian of Nicomedes, printed with Angelo Poliziano’s Latin version of the Enchiridion, followed by the original Greek. This is a remarkable copy with exceptional provenance, from the libraries of the first great Scottish bibliophile, Bishop Henry Sinclair (1507/8-65), a significant Scottish Renaissance philosopher, Robert Balfour (c. 1553-1621), with his annotations in Greek, and the great French political philosopher, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1775).

Montesquieu’s library of over three thousand volumes, which he ‘never, in effect, ceased enriching’ (Desgraves, Volphilhac-Auger and Weil, Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de Montesquieu à la Brède (Napoli, Liguori, 1999), p. 2), was housed at his Château de la Brède, where he also wrote most of his works. The catalogue was prepared by Montesquieu’s secretary, the Abbé Bottereau-Duval, in whose hand the ownership inscription in our copy is written, where it appears as number 1397 (Desgraves et al, p. 186); in the sales of 1926, when the library was dispersed, it was lot 120 in the second sale. It seems certain that the book came to Montesquieu’s library directly from Balfour’s collection, which resided at the Collège de Guienne in Bordeaux, of which Balfour had been principal, having been purchased by Balfour in Scotland during the dispersal of Sinclair’s library after his death. Montesquieu possessed books from the libraries of several of the college’s principals, including Balfour, Elie Vinet (1509-87) and Jacques Brassier (Desgraves et al, p. 7). Montesquieu refers to Arrian as an historical source in De l’Esprit des lois (1748) but not Epictetus. However, in the twenty-fourth book of De L’Esprit, Montesquieu singles out Stoicism as the one sect in ancient philosophy that produced citizens and great rulers.

Henry Sinclair was the first significant Scottish bibliophile. T.A.F. Cherry described his library as ‘by far the largest single recorded collection belonging to a Scottish owner of pre-Reformation times’ (‘The Library of Henry Sinclair, Bishop of Ross’ in The Bibliotheck, 4.1 (1963), p. 13). The supralibros with his arms, the cross engrailed of the Sinclair Barons of Roslin, and motto ανεχου και απεχου, or ‘endure and abstain,’ is dated 1550 and is from his time as Dean of Glasgow, 1550-1556, years which were ‘rich in book buying’ (Cherry, p. 14); none of his books bears a date later than 1556. He mostly bought books from France and Germany, and ‘unusually for pre-Reformation Scotland … owned a significant number of volumes in Greek’ (BOO). Throughout the 1550s he served as a diplomat, including for Mary Queen of Scots, on embassies to England, Flanders and France, where he died. Sinclair evidently gave many of his books to friends during his lifetime; several of his books are at the University of Edinburgh, where they were bequeathed by Sinclair’s friend Clement Little (1527-80), who received them as gifts. Over one hundred of Sinclair’s volumes survive.

Robert Balfour was a renowned Scottish Renaissance Greek scholar who studied at St. Andrews and Paris before his tenure as principal of the Collège de Guienne; the gift inscription notes that the book was from his ‘brothers,’ which most likely refers to fellow members of a university or college. He wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Organon, translated and edited the commentaries of Gelasius of Cyzicus on the Council of Nicaea, and translated and edited the Meteora, an ancient Greek astronomical work by Cleomedes; Montesquieu owned copies of the Aristotle and the Cleomedes (nos 1406 and 1624 in his library catalogue; Desgraves, Volphilhac-Auger and Weil, Catalogue de la Bibliothèque de Montesquieu à la Brède (Napoli, Liguori, 1999), pp. 187 and 212). Balfour’s annotations mostly consist of Greek additions and emendations to the Greek text, sometimes of single letters and sometimes several words or even lines, which may imply that he was preparing his own edition of Epictetus in Greek; we have been unable to trace these textual variants to any printed edition of the Greek text. Additions are marked with ^ in the margin; emendations appear to be noted either simply with the new word, if near the beginning or end of a line, or with ‘E.H.’ [emendatio habes?]; when apparently undecided, Balfour underlines the text and adds ‘.d.’ to the margin, so that in some instances you have ‘.d. E.H.’ and no emendation. Some textual interventions correct obvious errors, as when the textual ουρανίων (heavenly) is swapped by Balfour for ανϑρωπίνων (of men) (F3r). Other glosses are more ambiguous and show Balfour’s technical command of Greek, such as πολλαπλάσιος for πλουσιόδωρος, the former meaning ‘to multiply,’ the latter meaning ‘munificent’ (C1r). Some changes to the text are more crucial to its meaning, such as when ϑεων, ‘gods,’ is replaced by Balfour with αγγελων, ‘angels’ (D3r), or when σοί, i.e. ‘Thee,’ referring to a higher deity, is replaced with φυσις, i.e. ‘Nature’ (K1r). In one case these changes were too many to note, as Balfour records in Latinised Greek, presumably intending to return later: ‘numerous enallage … enallage numeri,’ i.e. many changes to words (S3r-S4v). A three-line section is underlined and marked ‘desu[n]t’ in Latin, which could imply either that Balfour wanted to remove it or that it was absent from whichever version he was using (F3r). Equally, Latin annotations to the Greek text note that some passages have been inserted in the wrong order and must be inserted at the correct point, marked with manicules (‘revertere ad signum’ … ‘hic inseruntur q[uo]d supra habes ad sign[u]m’ (Bb3r-Bb4r)). One telling example shows him substituting πιναξ (table) with κεφαλαία (heads) in the heading to the index of the second book (K1v), which might imply consideration of what a new printed edition would look like; he also adds concluding statements to the ends of the second and fourth books (Q4v-Ff4r).

The two annotations to the Latin portion of the text, though in a different and earlier hand, are also Balfour’s, matching his autographs; both refer to pages that have been transposed in the wrong order by the printer, noting that nothing is missing, and that by following the chapter numbers and the opening words these can be easily restored to their proper places.  

The inscription to the front fly, ‘odisse inertiam et amare quietam,’ meaning ‘to hate idleness and love repose,’ is derived from a quotation from Tacitus’s Agricola 10. The same motto appears in an inscription dated 1694 in one of Michel de Montaigne’s books (Villani); according to Pistilli and Sgattoni it is associated with the Métivier family (La Biblioteca di Montaigne (Pisa, 2014)).   

‘Contient les dissertations d’Arrian, trad. en lat. pour le première fois par Jac. Shegk, la version latine de ‘Enchiridion par Politien, et le texte grec des deux ouvrages, avec des variants tirées des éditions de 1528, [1529] et 1531’ (Brunet).