Alternative Adventures of the Argo
VALERIUS FLACCUS, Gaius; Giovanni Battista PIO, editor.
Argonautica. Joan. Baptistae Pii carmen ex quarto Argonauticon Apollonii. Orphei Argonautica, innominato interprete. Lyon, Sébastien Gryphe, 1548.
16mo, pp. 308, [1], [3, blank]; woodcut printer’s device to title, woodcut initials; a very good copy; bound in contemporary vellum, yapp fore-edges with remains of tawed ties, endguards of manuscript waste on vellum (see below), sixteenth-century manuscript lettering in ink to head of spine; binding a little dusty; eighteenth-century inscription to title-page ‘a LEglise de Paris’ and ink shelfmark ‘PP 42s’ to front free endpaper verso.
Added to your basket:
Argonautica. Joan. Baptistae Pii carmen ex quarto Argonauticon Apollonii. Orphei Argonautica, innominato interprete.
A pocket-sized edition of several poetic works on the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, in a contemporary vellum binding reusing fragments from a thirteenth-century medical manuscript.
Valerius Flaccus’ epic on the adventures of the Argonauts was unfinished, though the text here has been continued following the break halfway through book VIII by Giovanni Battista Pio (1460–1543), who added books IX and X, all based on the Argonauticon of Apollonius of Rhodes (first published in Bologna, 1519). The second part of the volume is an anonymous Latin translation of the late antique poem on the same subject, written from the perspective of Orpheus, though with considerable variations in the narrative between the two works. The preface and the verse summaries of each book are by the German scholar Philipp Engelbrecht (c. 1490–1528), which first appeared in the 1525 Strasbourg edition of Valerius Flaccus.
The two strips of manuscript used as endguards are taken from a thirteenth-century French manuscript of a medical text in Latin.
USTC 149936; von Gütlingen V, Gryphe 1064.