IMPROVED ‘FLOWERS AND WEEDS OF FIFTEEN HUNDRED YEARS OF GREEK POETRY’
[ANTHOLOGIA GRAECA PLANUDEA.]
Florilegium diversorum epigrammatum in septem libros, solerti nuper repurgatum cura M.D.XXI. Ανθολογια διαφορων επιγραμματων … Adauctum adiectis epigrammatib[us].
[(Colophon:) Venice, in the house of Aldus and Andrea Torresano, January 1521.]
8vo, ff. 289, [1]; woodcut Aldine device to title and final verso; printed primarily in Greek type; some very occasional light foxing, one or two light stains, small wormhole to final quire, affecting a few characters, nonetheless a very good copy; bound in eighteenth-century vellum over boards, gilt red morocco lettering-piece to spine, edges stained yellow; head of spine scuffed near upper joint; c. 25 pp. intensely annotated in Greek and Latin in an eighteenth-century Italian hand (annotations cropped in places).
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Florilegium diversorum epigrammatum in septem libros, solerti nuper repurgatum cura M.D.XXI. Ανθολογια διαφορων επιγραμματων … Adauctum adiectis epigrammatib[us].
Second Aldine edition of the earliest known anthology in Greek.
Aldus used his own annotated copy of Janus Lascaris’ 1494 editio princeps as an exemplar for his own first edition of 1503, which improved on the princeps with a set of variants and additional verses found in other manuscripts. This second edition was edited by Gian Francesco Torresano.
The Planudean Anthology played a fundamental part in European humanism, as the only collection of Greek poems and epigrams (around 2400) known until the later discovery of the larger manuscript anthology in the Palatine Library in Heidelberg, unearthed by Salmasius in 1606 and witness to around 3700 texts. It is, to this day, the sole vehicle for the transmission of around 390 epigrams (‘Appendix Planudea’) in modern editions of the Greek Anthology.
The annotations in Latin and Greek extend up to f. 13, and consist predominantly of translations and intertextual references, with occasional short comments and interlinear variants. It appears to be the work of a scholar interested in themes such as fate/providence, love, and the verse of the Byzantine poet Paulus Silentiarius (d. AD 575–580), for whom the Anthologia would have been the only accessible source.
EDIT16 CNCE 1973; Ahmanson-Murphy 195; Cataldi Palau 63; Renouard 93:17.
