Historiarum libri priores quinque

In-folio of (4) ff., 282 pp., (1) f., bl., (4) ff., 323 pp. (319), (5) pp.
Greek and Latin, two parts in one volume, folio, historiated woodcut initials, woodcut device on the title, contemporary limp vellum, flat spine gilt in compartments divided by double rules and centered with a fleuron, the title in manuscript in the top compartment, the sides centered with a laurel wreath in gilt and with a gilt double-fillet border, gilt edges.

320 x 203 mm.

Polybius (c. 200-118 BC). The First Five Books of the Histories.
Basel, Johann Herwagen, 1549.

First edition of the fragments from books VI-XVII of Polybius' Histories, with a Latin translation by Wolfgang Musculus, and second edition of books I-V, reproducing the Latin translation provided by Niccolò Perotti in the early 1450s.

This edition was entrusted to the Basel printer Johannes Herwagen (Hervagius) by Arnoldus Arlenius Peraxylus (c. 1510-1582), a Dutch humanist and librarian to the Spanish ambassador in Rome, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, to whom the work is dedicated.

As Peraxylus states in his dedication to Mendoza, the Greek text of books VI-XVII was preserved in a collection of abridged fragments that he discovered in his master's private library, the so-called Excerpta Antiqua. Since Mendoza's manuscript was lost in the Escorial during the fire of 1671, the 1549 edition is now the only source for its readings.

Polybius (c. 200-120 BC) was the most important and influential Greek historian of the Hellenistic Age. A prominent politician in his own homeland and a soldier before becoming a historian, Polybius was deported to Rome in 167 BC as a detainee after the Third Macedonian War. On that occasion, he became a friend and adviser to Scipio Aemilianus, the nephew of Scipio Africanus.
Throughout the 40 books of his Histories, mostly written during his stay in Rome, he recounted as an eyewitness the sudden rise of the Roman State to dominion over the Greek and Hellenistic World.

With this work, he acted as a political and cultural mediator, aiming to provide both Greeks and Romans with a useful tool for mutual understanding.

"Writing in the mid-second century BC, Polybius had set out to explain to his fellow Greeks by what means and under what system of government, the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years [220-167 BC] in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement which is without parallel in human history. Thirty books followed on the formation and the growth of the Roman Empire, subsequently extended by a further ten books in order to accommodate the years 167-146 BC" (Kempshall 2011, 509).

Polybius was highly appreciated throughout Antiquity for his accuracy, the rigor of his historical analyses, and his firsthand political and military experience. As a result, he was widely read and praised by Greek and Roman authorities such as Cicero, Livy, and Plutarch, and soon secured his place within the canon of Classical historians.

"Polybius was rediscovered in Florence as a historian of the First Punic War by Leonardo Bruni around 1420. Though he had been translated into Latin by the middle of the fifteenth century, his reputation as a historian and political thinker does not seem to have been widely diffused. It was in Republican Florence, too, that the importance of his Book VI was recognized for the first time by Machiavelli and others at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Polybius' reputation soared rapidly in the second half of the sixteenth century. His fame was based on his expertise as a military and diplomatic historian" (Momigliano 1974, 3).

Superb copy preserved in its contemporary gilt vellum.

Provenance: Christie's, London, Valuable Books and Manuscripts, Dec. 1, 2016, lot 86; Demetrius S. Spanos, MD Collection, Jonesboro, AR.