DIODORUS SICULUS.

OPERA [SELECTA].

      Basileae: Excvdebat Henricvs Petrvs, 1531 - 12 p.l., 374 (i.e., 363), [1] pp. Attractive recent retrospective speckled calf, raised bands, original titling in ink along bottom of textblock. Woodcut historiated initials, printer's device on verso of last leaf. Title page with early ink inscription at foot, and remnants of an erased oval stamp. Expert older (18th century?) paper repair strengthening lower (blank) portion of last printed leaf, head of preliminary leaves lightly dampstained, index and a few gatherings toward rear with light mottling, other minor defects, but AN EXCELLENT COPY, the text generally very clean and fresh, and in an unworn sympathetic binding. Hoffman I, 560. This item contains selections in Latin translation from the "Histories" or "Library of History" of Diodorus Siculus, which, at the date of the present publication, had not yet been printed in its entirety. Our volume contains Books I-VI and XVI and XVII, the latter two translated by Angelus Cospus, the other by Poggio Bracciolini. Until archaeologists began digging in Egypt, and until they could decipher discovered inscriptions, all we knew about ancient Egypt was based on what the Greeks Diodorus and Herodotus, along with Manetho the Egyptian priest, wrote about the location and its civilization. And this fact explains the commercial feasibility of a publication like the present item, issued for an avid readership in the 16th century, a period of Egyptomania. The text of Diodorus (first century B.C.) derives from several older and sometimes obscure authors, a number of whose works have perished, and for that reason the work is useful, especially when Diodorus tells the history of his own island. He is, for example, the chief source on the career of Dionysius, the fourth century B.C. tyrant of Syracuse. Diodorus is believed to have based Book XVII largely on the account of Clitarchus, who interviewed Alexander's veterans in Egyptian Alexandria, where they settled, but who was not averse to occasional romanticizing. In addition to the text of Diodorus, our volume contains a brief life of Alexander by Johannes Monachus as well as a few very short selections from Boccaccio's book on famous women. $800 [Attributes: Signed Copy]