| Method | |
| Artist | Macrobius |
| Published | Lugduni apud Seb. Gryphium, 1550. [Lyon, 1550] |
| Dimensions | Octavo (8°). 160 x 110 mm |
| Notes |
1550 printing. Original full vellum binding, lacking ties. Title page with printer's device, 567pp, lxxi (Index), in-text illustrations, including world map on page 144. Manuscript title (twice) on spine, vellum chipped at head, boards and spine puckered and somewhat soiled, pastedowns puckered, front pastedown torn, internally some minor foxing and damp staining, with minor manuscript annotation and marginalia, pagination in quire i misnumbered as issued and corrected in manuscript in old hand, otherwise an excellent clean and complete example. Sebastian Gryphius' influential edition of the works of the fifth century AD Roman writer and neoplatonist, Ambrosius Theodosius Macrobius, this particular example issued in 1550. The book supplies the text of Macrobius' two best known works, his commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio, one of the most popular works of cosmography and neoplatonic thought throughout the post-Roman period, as well as the surviving books of the Saturnalia, Macrobius' midwinter-themed contribution to the genre of 'dinner-time conversations' akin to Plato's Symposium and Aulus Gellius' Atticae Noctes. Most significantly, Macrobius' text is ornamented with one of the very earliest printed world maps, a depiction of the globe as discussed in the Dream of Scipio, showing the limits of the world as known to the classical geographers, Europe, western Asia, and north Africa, as well as the theorised southern continent. The climatic zones that are represented in detail in other in-text diagrams on previous pages are also labelled on the map, with the poles described as 'Frigida' and the impassable equatorial band labelled 'Perusta' - the burnt zone. Around the sphere, twelve windheads are also shown. Somnium Scipionis, or the Dream of Scipio, was originally penned by Cicero as part of the sixth and final book of his De re publica, a dialogue in the model of Plato's Politeia, using the 2nd century BC Roman general and Punic War hero Scipio Aemilianus as its primary Socratic figure. In the sixth book, Scipio recounts a dream he had as a young man to his guests. He is visited by his grandfather, Scipio Africanus, who, in a case of classical astral projection, takes him high above the city of Carthage, to look down upon the earth from the position of the stars. Scipio observes the nature of the universe, the composition of which is made up of nine concentric spheres that contain the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the immovable Earth at the centre. Scipio then hears a wonderful celestial music, caused by the movement of the spheres, and remarks upon the composition of the Earth, divided into different climatic bands from frozen to scorching hot. Such was the popularity and success of the Dream of Scipio in the medieval period, that the remaining parts of Cicero's sixth book are lost, with the Dream copied and adapted so regularly as to become its own stand-alone text. As well as informing the medieval view of the known world and the makeup of the cosmos, the Dream was also influential in its discussion of the soul, and the belief in a heavenly afterlife in the band of stars known as the Milky Way. The survival of the original text owes much to Macrobius' commentary, which excerpted heavily from Cicero, as well as providing the most popular and widely disseminated discussion of the neoplatonic and stoic philosophies embedded in the text. For the Saturnalia, Macrobius created his own version of the conceit used by Cicero in bringing together various historical figures in a discussion over dinner. The Saturnalia, a Roman festival in honour of the god Saturn, was held each year on the 17th of December, and by the imperial period had become a period of feasting, merry-making, present-giving, and the inversion of various societal norms. Macrobius' text is one of the best sources of evidence for the festival. His guests, a selection of neoplatonic philosophers, politicians, and men of the era, engage in conversation on a variety of subjects, from the mundane to the arcane, including a lengthy discussion on the relative merits of Homer and Virgil. Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (fl. c. AD 400) was a Roman writer, most famous as the author of an influential commentary on Cicero's Dream of Scipio. Little is known of his life, and his works provide only the enigmatic biographical statement that he was 'born under a foreign sky,' though where in the Roman world this was, or even when, is debated. From the themes of his text and some of the historical figures therein he is usually assumed to have been active towards the end of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth. His text presents a neoplatonic view of the world, and his sympathetic treatment of pagan writers and other figures have led many historians to assume that he was himself a pagan. Sebastian Gryphius (c.1493-1556) was a German humanist author, philologist, and one of the most influential printers of the sixteenth century. Living most of his adult life in Lyon, by the 1540s Gryphius' printing house is estimated to have produced half of Europe's academic texts, printing under the emblem of the gryphon and using Manutius' italic type in place of the gothic types used in his earlier career. Although his specialism was classical texts, he also produced the work of his contemporaries, including Bude, Poliziano, Erasmus, Savonarola, Philip Melanchthon, and Rabelais. Rabelais was also a frequent collaborator, assisting Gryphius with his important edition of Macrobius, as well as choosing Gryphius for the publication of his Latin translations of Greek texts by Galen and Hippocrates. Relatives of Sebastian Gryphius were also members of the printing trade, with his brother Franz and his cousin Johann both using the Gryphon device for their own printing houses in Paris and Venice respectively. Sebastian was succeeded by his son Antoine (c.1527-1599). |
| Framing | |
| Price | £1,750.00 |
| Stock ID | 53184 |