ANNOTATED IN 1552 WITH BIBLICAL REFERENCES
CURTIUS RUFUS, Quintus.
De rebus gestis Alexandri Magni regis Macedonum opus … Accesserunt enim antehac nunquam visa … Omnia summa fide atque diligentia … congesta, per Christophorum Brunonem …
Basel, Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius, March 1545.
Folio, pp. [8], 171, [13]; full-page woodcuts to title verso and *4r, woodcut initials, woodcut Froben device to last page; a few light marks and ink stains, small hole from ink corrosion to l5 touching a few characters; a very good copy in eighteenth-century vellum over boards, remains of gilt-lettered red morocco spine label, edges speckled red; some light marks; later arms blocked in blind to boards, early twentieth-century armorial bookplate with the arms of the House of Anhalt and shelf label to front pastedown; marginal annotations in Latin to c. 130 pp. largely in one elegant sixteenth-century hand, with a few notes in a slightly later, more cursive, hand, with underlining.
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De rebus gestis Alexandri Magni regis Macedonum opus … Accesserunt enim antehac nunquam visa … Omnia summa fide atque diligentia … congesta, per Christophorum Brunonem …
Handsome folio edition of Curtius Rufus’ history of Alexander the Great, edited by the German humanist Christoph Bruno (fl. 1541–1566), with extensive sixteenth-century marginal annotations.
Composed in the first century AD in ten books, of which the first two are lost, the surviving text begins in 333 BC with Alexander’s march through Phrygia and his cutting of the legendary Gordian Knot. ‘The narrative is dramatic and rhetorical, but founded on good sources … [and] lays stress upon Alexander’s gradual moral deterioration’ (Oxford Companion to Classical Literature). Christoph Bruno was a lawyer and professor of literature at Munich; his dedication of this edition to the co-regent Dukes of Bavaria William IV and Louis X, and to the future Albert V takes the form of a splendid full-page woodcut depicting an enthroned duke and various coats of arms.
This copy contains Latin annotations throughout in a very elegant sixteenth-century italic hand; while the annotator does not give his name, he supplies a date at the end (’14.10b.52’ i.e. 14 December 1552), and a short passage in Italian is perhaps a clue to his nationality. His interesting notes draw numerous parallels between Curtius’ text and passages from the Bible: from the Old Testament he quotes from Genesis, Deuteronomy, Kings, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah, and, from the New Testament, Luke, Corinthians, Ephesians, and Hebrews. A reference to wine in book 8, for example, is annotated with a quote from Proverbs 20 (‘Wine is a luxurious thing, and drunkenness riotous: whosoever is delighted therewith, shall not be wise’); and a passage on being perceived to be a god is accompanied by a reference to Genesis 3, ‘you shall be as gods said the serpent to Eve’. He also refers to St Augustine’s De vera religione. An interesting note to p. 8 alludes to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V entering a city in 1528 in the manner of Alexander the Great.
USTC 688890; VD 16 C 6466; Adams C 3123.
