I have been in the rare and antiquarian book business for over forty years; my family has been in the rare books business since 1876. Rare books are in my blood.
Homeri Ilias & Odyssea, Et in easdem Scholia, sive Interpretatio, Veterum.
Cambridge: Cornelium Crownfield, 1711. Item #04888
A Fine First edition of Joshua Barnes's Homer in Greek and Latin
In Contemporary Full Olive Green Morocco
[HOMER]. Homeri Ilias & Odyssea, Et in easdem Scholia, sive Interpretatio, Veterum. Item Notae perpetuae, in Textum & Scholia, Variae Lectiones, &c. cum Versione Latina emendatissima. Accedunt Batrachomyomachia, Hymni & Epigrammata, unà cum Fragmentis, & Gemini Indices. Totum Opus cum Plurimis MSS. Vetustissimis, & Optimis Editionibus Collatum, Auctum, Emendatum, & Prifcae Integritati Restitutum. Opera, Studio, & Impensis, Josuae Barnes. Cantabrigiae [Cambridge]: Apud Cornelium Crownfield, 1711.
Two quarto volumes (9 3/16 x 7 3/8 inches; 234 x 187 mm.). [xvi], CXXVI, [2], 432, 431-937, [938-1042, index]; [viii], 272, 275-643, [1, blank], [1], [1, blank], 110, [1], [89, index] pp. Text in Latin and Greek. Folding engraved frontispiece in volume I. General title-page in Greek and Latin, half-title for the Ilias and title-page in volume II for the Odyssea.
Full contemporary olive green morocco, sides triple-ruled in gilt, spines with five raised bands elaborately decorated and lettered in gilt in compartments. Double-ruled gilt board edges and decorative gilt turn-ins, marbled endpapers, all edges gilt. With the bookplate of Homer scholar and author Roberto Salinas Price on front paste-downs.
An absolutely superb copy in its original binding.
This edition contains considerable prefatory material, including three traditional Lives of Homer, the Contest of Homer and Hesiod, and the first book of the Homeric Questions of Porphyry. Regarding this edition, Edward Harwood commented that "this Edition will ever maintain its distinction, not merely for its magnificence and the erudition of the Editor, but from the complete Greek Scholia that are here subjoined to the text" (Harwood, p. 2).
Joshua Barnes (1654-1712), was an English scholar. Born in London, the son of Edward Barnes, a merchant taylor, he was educated at Christ's Hospital and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he was chosen in 1695 as Regius Professor of Greek, a language which he wrote and spoke with facility. Barnes "rarely emended his texts, but commented often of their poetic metre and regularly reported the readings of the few English manuscripts he consulted" (ODNB).
One of his earliest works was Gerania (1675), a Utopian prose romance about a journey to visit the "blameless pygmies" mentioned in the Iliad. A whimsical sketch to which Swift's Voyage to Lilliput may owe something. Among his other works is a History of that Most Victorious Monarch Edward III (1688), an epic work of over 900 pages, in which he introduces long, elaborate speeches into the narrative.
He also produced editions of Euripides (1694), Homer (1711), and Anacreon (1705), of which the last contains titles of Greek verses of his own, which he was hoping to publish. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in November, 1710. Barnes died on 3 August 1712 at Hemingford, near St Ives, Huntingdonshire where his widow erected a monument to him.
Harwood, A View of the Various Editions of the Greek and Roman Classics, London, 1775.
Price: $5,500.00