CEBES (Johann ELICHMANN, editor and translator, and Claud...

Tabula Cebetis Graece, Arabice, Latine. Item Aurea Carmina Pythagorae, cum paraphrasi Arabica . . . Cum praefatione Cl[audii] Salmasii.

      First edition in Arabic. This copy is complete with the folding plate, usually lacking. The mysterious Tabula Cebetis, a first-century Hellenistic allegorical work of doubtful authorship, was first published in Greek in Florence c. 1496. It was translated into Latin by the Paduan humanist Ludovico Odasio (1455–1509).Johann Elichmann (c. 1600–1639), a physician from Silesia, disccovered the Arabic texts published here while inspecting the Leiden manuscript of Miskawayh’s Jawidan Khirad. The Arabic version of the Tabula is printed together with the Greek text (emended in the light of the Arabic) and Elichmann’s Latin translation of the Arabic. At the end is printed Odasio’s Latin version. The final part of the work contains an Arabic paraphrase of the Golden Verses of Pythagoras with a parallel Latin translation by Elichmann. Elichmann had intended to add a Persian version of the Arabic paraphrase, but he died before the work went to press. Vocalisation was therefore added by Claudius Salmasius, who also wrote the extensive preface in which he expresses reservations about using Arabic texts to emend Greek ones. ‘In publishing the remarkable edition prepared by his friend, Dr. Elichmann, Salmasius made an important contribution to scholarship. He, like the dozens of philologists who concerned themselves with the little allegory of the Tabula, must have found the dialogue not only a charming literary piece, but a work of real value for education. It is ironical that, in this, he was in agreement with his implacable enemy, John Milton, who, in his famoud Letter to Samuel Hartlib on education, recommends the Tabula as a work eminently suitable for schoolboys “to win them over to the love of true virtue and labour” ’ (Cora E. Lutz, ‘The Salmasius-Elichmann edition of the Tabula of Cebes’, Harvard Library Bulletin, Volume XXVII, No. 2 (April 1979), pp. 165–171, p. 171).Smitskamp, Philologia orientalis 322; Schnurrer 409. Leiden, Jan Maire, 1640.