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EPISTOLAE GRAECAE -- Epistolae diversorum philosophorum, in Greek. Edited by Marcus Musurus. Venice: Aldus Manutius [29] March 1499; [not before 17 April 1499].
EPISTOLAE GRAECAE -- Epistolae diversorum philosophorum, in Greek. Edited by Marcus Musurus. Venice: Aldus Manutius [29] March 1499; [not before 17 April 1499]. 2 volumes, super-chancery 4 o (205 x 150 mm). 266 and 138 leaves. 26 lines. Type: 2:114Gk (text), 2:114R (titles, preliminary matter, colophons). Initial spaces with guide-letters. 18th-century calf gilt, with the gilt supralibros of the Bünau Library "Ex Bibliotheca Bünauiana." Provenance : Ottobeuren Monastary (inscription); Bünau, Heinrich Graf von (1697-1762) Saxon statesman, historian and collector (binding and bookplate); T.J. Coolidge, Jr. (bookplate); acquired David O'Neal, 1985. EDITIO PRINCEPS of the great majority of the letters. Letter-writing was an art and study allied to rhetoric, which formed part of a humanistic education, and compendia of letters circulated as model precedents. Musurus brought together 35 authors in his extensive collection, ranging from Plato, Isocrates and Aeschines from antiquity to 4th-century authors such as Gregory of Nazianzus and later to Procopius of Gaza. Also included are Synesius, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, and St. Basil; other letters are spurious or of doubtful authorship, such as those by Hippocrates and Euripides. The Aldine Epistolae Graecae "was not replaced by an equally useful collection until 1873, the date of R. Hercher's Epistolographi graeci " (Wilson, Byzantium to Italy, p.150). The Library of Heinrich Graf Bünau comprised some 42,000 books, and was considered to be the best private Library in German at that time. From 1748-1754 Johann Joachim Winckelmann worked in Bünau's library which is memorialized in the Catalogus Bibliothecae Bunauianae , Leipzig, 1750. The library was lost in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Ahmanson-Murphy 24; BMC V, 560; BSB-Ink E-86; GW 9367; Goff E-64; HC *6659; Renouard Alde , p.18, 1. (2)