ARISTOTLE.

De republica libri VIII. Interprete & enarratore Io. Genosio Sepulveda Cordubensi. Ad Philippum Hispaniarum principem.

      First edition of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s extensively annotated Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics. Sepúlveda had been the translator of Aristotle’s works for the papal court, but in 1536 returned to his native Spain to become official chronicler and chaplain to Charles V and, in 1542, tutor to Prince Philip. He is best known for his defence of the Spanish conquest of America in which he invoked Aristotle’s concept of natural slavery as justification for subjugating inferior races. This he famously disputed with Bartolomé de Las Casas before an adjudicative council especially convened by the emperor at Valladolid in 1550–51.‘Sepúlveda during his twenty years in Italy had become one of the principal scholars in the recovery of the “true” Aristotle. His contributions to learning were recognized in Spain, and on the eve of the battle with Las Casas he had just completed and published at Paris in 1548 his Latin translation of Aristotle’s Politics, which he considered his principal contribution to knowledge. It was the best translation that had appeared, and was recognized for centuries as an indispensable work. Therefore when Sepúlveda began to write on America he was completely saturated with the theory of “The Philosopher”, including his much-discussed concept that certain men are slaves by nature’ (Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians pp. 31–3).‘The willingness of sixteenth-century humanists, even including those in Erasmus’s circle, to countenance war on behalf of the respublica against its enemies, explains what has otherwise puzzled many commentators, that one of the most startling accounts of the legitimacy of war by Christians on non-Christians came from the pen of an absolutely stereotypical humanist, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. Sepúlveda was an almost embarrassingly good example of an early-sixteenth century ultra-Ciceronian humanist, who was employed at the papal court in the mid-1520s as a translator of Aristotle into Ciceronian Latin – the pre-eminently humanist approach to Aristotle, rendering the Greek philosopher a participant in a Roman philosophical discourse. Sepúlveda’s allegiance is neatly illustrated . . . by the fact that his translation and edition of Aristotle’s Politics is entitled De republica – a feature of all truly Ciceronian translations of the Politics in the sixteenth century (for politica was of course a barbarous term, a mongrel piece of Greco-Latinity) . . . . Sepúlveda’s Ciceronian translation of the Politics . . . contained the clearest and most accurate translation of the Aristotelian passages about the acquisition of natural slaves, breaking the medieval tradition of construing the passages in a more humane light, and . . . despite the comprehensive defeat which Sepúlveda’s views suffered in Spain, broadly similar ideas continued to be put forward by humanist jurists outside Spain’ (Tuck, Rights of war and peace pp. 43–4; see also p. 68n.).Adams A1916; Palau 16694, 309360; Riley 198. Paris, Michel de Vascosan, 1548.