Author: [Historiae Augustae] (Casaubon, Isaac, ed.:)
Title: Historiæ Augustæ Scriptores Sex. Aelius Spartianus, Julius Capitolinus, Aelius Lampridius, Vulcatius Gallicanus, Trebellius Pollio et Flavius Vopiscus [...].
Description: Parisiis [Paris]: Apud Amberosium & Hieronymum Drouart, [...] cum privilegio Regis, 1603. First edition thus. 2 parts in 1 vol., 4to., pp. [xx], 375, [lvii]; 576, [xxxvi]. Illustrations in text. Title-page to first part in red and black, to second part in black only, woodcut initials and head- and tail-pieces, with final errata leaf. Top corner of title-page a little frayed, first leaf of text with 2-line note in blue biro to head margin, head margins a bit dusty with very occasional light dampstains, occasional spots of foxing, a few paper flaws to fore-edge margins. Small scorch marks to pp.47-8 and pp.101-4 affecting a few letters, smudgy mark (ink or wax?) to fore-edge margin pp.115-22, ink spots to p.345. Contemporary semi-limp vellum, fore-edges slightly overlapped. Quite browned, covers somewhat creased, ties lost, turn-ins lifting, without ffep but still good and sound overall. Latin inscription in an old hand to title-page translates roughly as 'from the common library of the preachers of Dijon'. First appearance of Casaubon's edition of this collection of biographies of the emperors from Hadrian to Carinus, considered to be the first critical edition and also the first to use the title Historiæ Augustæ. (The title as recorded on the 9th-century Codex Palatinus manuscript of the Vatican Library is Vitae Diversorum Principum et Tyrannorum a Divo Hadriano usque ad Numerianum Diversis compositae, and it is generally thought that the work may have been originally known as de Vita Caesarum or Vitae Caesarum.) In early editions 'the emphasis had been laid on the Latin text, but in the seventeenth century the work of the editors included not only textual emendation, but comment and illustration. Of these editions the first was that of Casaubon, published in 1603. It was not unnatural that these biographies should have attracted the editor of Suetonius and Polybius and the scholar who wrote in the preface to his edition of the Historia Augusta that "political philosophy may be learned from history, and ethical from biography."' (from David Magie's introduction to his 1921 Loeb edition.) Though its authenticity was regarded with a little scepticism, Casaubon's edition was for hundreds of years used as a genuine source by historians (including Edward Gibbon in the first volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Browning sums up the tricky position the work occupies: "in modern times most scholars read the work as a piece of deliberate mystification written much later than its purported date, however the fundamentalist view still has distinguished support. […] The Historia Augusta is also, unfortunately, the principal Latin source for a century of Roman history. The historian must make use of it, but only with extreme circumspection and caution." ('Biography', in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 2 (1983).) Graesse III, 303; Sandys II, 209; Schweiger II, 384.

Keywords: Early Printing (to c.1800, all subjects);Classics & Antiquity


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