PLUTARCH.

Greek ‘editio princeps’ and first edition in any language of this foundation text of ancient scholarship and ethics, taken into the highest esteem by generations of Western thinkers, Montaigne above all. A remarkably large paper copy which, Renouard suggests, is technically a 4to, due to the horizontal chain lines, but virtually a folio, as the original paper sheets, printed as half-sheets, were the largest ever used by Aldus.

Plutarch (c.46-120 AD) was the most acclaimed Greek intellectual of his age. Born from a wealthy Boeotian family in Chaeronea, there he spent much of his life, serving as priest of Apollo in Delphi. His series of parallel biographies of famous Greek and Roman personalities won him long-lasting fame. His several other short essays are gathered under the title of ‘Moralia’, showing all the extent of his knowledge. They include major and minor philosophical questions (most famously, whether the hen or the egg came first), religious, political and historical dissertations (on Iris and Osiris; the decline of oracles; Alexander the Great’s fortune and virtues; on music; Herodotus’ methodological shortcomings; on monarchy, democracy and oligarchy), lighter interludes like the dialogue between Odysseus and one of the wretched men turned by Circes into pigs, and more philosophical or physical studies such as the essays on hearing, chance, the control of anger, brotherly love, talkativeness, table talk and Stoicism.

The relatively late appearance of the ‘Moralia’ into print in respect of Plutarch’s ‘Lives’ is probably due to the difficulty in establishing a good Greek text. The edition, planned by Aldus since 1506, was eventually accomplished with the help of Erasmus, Girolamo Aleandro and the Greek scholar and later printer Demetrios Ducas, who was the main editor. In his preface, Ducas is forced to admit that the C13 ms he had mainly relied on was so corrupt that he resolved to leave many passages as unintelligible as they originally stood. Much of the textual work took place directly at the press, so that ‘the process of criticism and emendation did not precede that of printing but advanced jerkily alongside it, step by alternating step […]. Printing classical texts was first and last an exercise in improvisation’ (Lowry, ‘The World of Aldus’, p.240). In the dedication to Jacopo Antiquario, Aldus recollects his short stay in Milan, while he is hailed as the ‘saviour of the Greek language’ at the very beginning of Ducas’ Greek preface.  

An attractive and desirable copy.

Wilmot Vaughan, 1st Earl of Lisburne (1728-1800), of Trawsgoed, Cardiganshire, also Viscount Lisburne (1766-76), was a Welsh politician and peer.

Henry John Beresford Clements (1869-1940), of Killadoon, County Kildare and Lough Rynn, County Leitrim, ‘collected a very fine collection of armorial bookbindings which he bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and wrote about the subject, and lectured on it to the Bibliographical Society of London shortly before his death’ (Brit. Arm. Bookbind.)