Editio Princeps of 1500 Years of Greek Poetry
[ANTHOLOGIA GRAECA PLANUDEA.]
[Edited by Janus Lascaris.] [Florence, Lorenzo di Francesco de Alopa, 11 August 1494.]
4to, ff. [272] (of 280); Α–Ω8 ΑΑ–ΚΚ8, without final quire ΛΛ8 (see below); printed in Greek epigraphic letters; occasional foxing, mostly marginal, else a fine copy; bound in early nineteenth-century British calf, triple gilt fillet border, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, edges gilt; binding a little rubbed, upper joint neatly repaired; armorial bookplate of John Vertue (1826–1900, first bishop of Portsmouth from 1882), to front pastedown, small paper shelf label at foot of upper board.
Editio princeps, a beautiful printing in elegant epigraphic type, of the Planudean Anthology, a substantial collection of classical Greek verse which influenced artists, poets, and scholars. ‘The Greek Anthology is one of the great books of European literature, a garden containing the flowers and weeds of fifteen hundred years of Greek poetry, from the most humdrum doggerel to the purest poetry’ (Oxford Classical Dictionary).
Maximus Planudes (c. 1255–1305), scribe, scholar, monk, and poet, revised the anthology of epigrams taken from ancient sources in the tenth-century manuscript now known as the Palatine Anthology, adding perhaps 450 new verses and rearranging them. Many of these epigrams would have been carved on monuments, so Alopa’s epigraphic typeface provided a meaningful representation of their original appearance. This was the first book in which Alopa’s epigraphic typeface was used; his editions of the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes and the plays of Euripides were also printed with this typeface, though it was subsequently supplanted by Aldus Manutius’s cursive Greek fonts.
The final quire contained the dedication to Piero de’ Medici, whose diplomatic failures resulted in his exile from Florence in November 1494, shortly after the completion of printing; it is likely that copies issued after his exile had the problematic dedication removed.
HC 1145*; BMC vi 666; GW 2048; Goff A765; ISTC ia00765000; Legrand I: 13.