STATIUS, Publius Papinius.
Opera, ex recensione et cum notis … J. Frederici Gronovii.
Amsterdam, Louis Elzevir, 1653.
32mo in 8s, pp. [8], 424; title copper-engraved, woodcut ornaments and initials; p. 187 minimally trimmed at top-edge (touching running title and pagination), very short marginal paperflaw to X7, occasional marks; a very good copy in mid-eighteenth-century olive morocco, borders triple-filleted in gilt, spine gilt in compartments with gilt red morocco lettering-piece, edges marbled and gilt, marbled endpapers, ribbon place-marker; short superficial splits to joints, headcap chipped; eighteenth-century armorial bookplate to upper pastedown, ink stamp to front free endpaper verso, twentieth-century private collector’s bookplate to front free endpaper.
First and only Elzevir edition, in elegant eighteenth-century olive morocco. The volume opens with the Silvae, a collection of poems in five books addressed to patrons including the emperor Domitian, containing Statius’s famous lines on the death of a friend’s parrot. His twelve-book epic hexameter poem the Thebaid follows, relating the quarrel between Oedipus’s sons Eteocles and Polyneices, and the collection ends with the unfinished Achilleid, telling the story of Achilles up to his departure for Troy, including his adventures on Scyros disguised as a girl.
Settled as Professor of Rhetoric and History at Deventer after studying in England, France, and Italy, Johann Friedrich Gronovius (1611–1671) was commissioned by Louis Elzevir to prepare a version of Statius’s works with notes.
Brunet III, p. 206; Willems 1166.
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