Tragoediae

2 volumes bound in 1 octavo volume, Havana calf, gilt fillet around the covers, smooth spine rebacked, original title-piece preserved, marbled edges, cloth slipcase. 18th-century binding.

163 x 101 mm.

"Exceptionally important" (Lowry) first edition, in the original Greek,

of most of the surviving plays of Euripides.

First edition (editio princeps) of the Tragedies of Euripides printed by Aldus Manutius the Elder in 1503.

Very pure copy, unwashed with wide margins.

__________________________

First edition (editio princeps) of the Tragedies of Euripides.

"First and rare edition of Euripides, of which only four tragedies had previously been printed around 1496 in Florence" (Renouard I, pages 102 to 104).

Adams, E 1036; Ahmanson-Murphy 55/1 & 55/2; Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius, pp. 142, 145, 151, 262; Renouard, p. 43, no. 10.

"Exceptionally important" (Lowry) first edition, in the original Greek, of most of the surviving plays of Euripides. It contains 18 plays, fourteen printed here for the first time and four for the second (and in a much more accurate text).

This first edition of nearly all his surviving plays (Electra remained unprinted until 1545) certainly assured the survival of the greater part of Greek historical drama. Only 4 of his plays had been printed previously, by J. Lascaris in Florence, 1495, also in Greek.

In Thomas More's 1516 Utopia, his hero Raphael gives a collection of Greeks books to the Utopians: Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Plutarch, Homer, Aristophanes, Sophocles and Euripides, all in Aldine editions (Lowry, p. 262).

Aldus's first Greek types, in 1495, set the style for the future by following a sloped cursive hand rather than the rounder upright hand that dominated the incunabula period.

The present book is set in the smallest and best of his Greek types, first used in his Sophocles 6 months earlier (Scholderer, Greek printing types, no. 25). It set the style until Garamond's Grec du Roi brought extensively ligatured Greek types back into fashion for about two centuries. Aldus introduced the world's first italic type in 1501 and uses it here for the few bits of Latin text.

"The edition is sought after, and fine copies are hard to find" (Brunet).

"This edition is the first of most of the plays it contains, totalling 18, including Hercules Furens, which is not mentioned in the title, but was added at the end of the second volume" (Brunet).

The first volume has 268 unnumbered leaves, the first of which contains Aldus's title and preface; and on the last four are the register, colophon, and anchor. The second has 190 leaves, the last three of which are occupied by the register, colophon (similar in both volumes), and anchor. Although the title announces only seventeen tragedies, there are eighteen: ten in the first volume, and eight in the second, with "Hercules Furens" added at the end of the second.

In his preface to Demetrius Chalcondylas, Aldus states that he usually printed his octavo editions in runs of about a thousand copies: "Every month, we issue from our Academy a thousand and more volumes of some good author".

Euripides, born in 480 BC, was regarded by ancient scholarly tradition as the point of intersection of the lives of the three great Athenian tragedians; Aeschylus, then forty-five years old, was among the ranks of the soldiers; Sophocles, a teenager, led the chorus that after the battle sang the victory hymn, and Euripides is said to have been born on the very day and at the place of the battle.

"Euripides draws his inspiration from his deep pessimism. Sophocles is also a pessimist, but his pessimism is tempered by a powerful will to believe: Euripides, on the contrary, gives himself up to his despair. He is tormented and at the same time fascinated by the great and mysterious tragedy of human misfortune. He does not manage to create characters capable of opposing their own greatness to fate, characters carried by a single passion and forming but one with it: his characters, on the contrary, are all tenderness and weakness. He is not a heroic poet, but that of a humanity so afflicted that he has but one spiritual brother: Virgil."

Very pure copy, unwashed as bound in the 18th century and with very wide margins.

The first edition of most of Euripides's plays and a beautiful early example of Aldus's best Greek type.