Phallic Treatise Concealed in Classical Novel
XENOPHON; Antonmaria SALVINI, translator.
Di Senofonte Efesio degli amori di Abrocome e d’Anzia libri cinque ... Edizione seconda corretta, ed accresciuta. London (i.e. Florence?), ‘presso gli Eredi Pickard’, 1757.
Three parts in one, 12mo, pp. xi, [1, blank], 144; woodcut tailpieces, floral woodcut vignette to title; sporadic marginal foxing; a very good copy in contemporary mottled sheep, borders triple-filleted in gilt, small floral cornerpieces, flat spine gilt in compartments, red gilt morocco lettering-piece to spine, blue silk place-marker; a few slight scuffs to boards, lettering-piece chipped, joints rubbed, endcaps chipped, corners worn.
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Di Senofonte Efesio degli amori di Abrocome e d’Anzia libri cinque ... Edizione seconda corretta, ed accresciuta.
Second edition of this erotic work on the splendour of the male member, cleverly disguised as a treatise on an ancient bronze statue and bound after Salvini’s Italian translation of Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale, adding for the first time a second mock-academic treatise on teenaged girls.
The first Pickard edition of Xenophon’s Ephesian Tale was printed in London in 1723 ‘per Giovanni Pickard’, with the editor’s preface signed ‘P.A.R.’ (i.e. Paolo Antonio Rolli). This second edition, ‘corretta, ed accresciuta’, is indeed much expanded, adding for the first time two salacious cicalate, the first disguised as a discourse on a bronze statue but in fact on ‘how noble, majestic, and splendid’ the phallus is (‘Do you not know, fools, how great was Nature’s mastery in forming that part?’, trans.), also touching upon syphilis, Ceres regaining her humour after the departure of Proserpina when she is flashed by an old woman, and an episode from Ovid’s Fasti in which Priapus attempts to sexually assault the nymph Lotis during a night of drunken revelry, only to be interrupted by the cry of a donkey, awakening Lotis and the others and forcing him to flee in embarrassment.
The second mock-academic discourse, ‘Cicalata amenissima recitata dal D.T.C. in un’ accademia di belle lettere’, advises readers to romantically pursue teenage girls instead of jaded women in their twenties, with anecdotes about a fourteen-year-old girl from Siena and two Persian hermits who fall in love with a young greengrocer.
The 1723 Pickard edition of the ‘Cicalata sopra una certa curiosa statuetta antica di bronzo’ appears to have been published separately from Xenophon’s work, but the two were frequently bound together and are here issued together as a result; the work may have been published by Paolo Antonio Rolli, author of the preface (Parenti).
ESTC finds five copies in North America (Alberta, Fisher, McMaster, NYU, UCLA), and at six institutions in the UK (BL, Bodley, CUL, Leeds, Magdalen College Oxford, NLS).
ESTC T105253.