Beschreibung:

First Greek book printed at Rome Pindar, 1515 PINDAR (c.522-c.443 BCE). Olympia, Pythia, Nemea, Isthmia, in Greek. Rome: Zacharias Kallierges for Cornelio Benigno, 13 August 1515. The first Greek book printed at Rome, first edition of Pindar with scholia. Pindar was “the brightest star in the Alexandrian canon ... [and] this edition has always been acknowledged as textually superior” to the editio princeps published two years earlier by Aldus (The Greek Book). When Laskaris founded a Greek college at Rome at the behest of Leo X, he enlisted Kallierges as his head teacher. Kallierges set up the first Greek press in the Villa Chigi, where he produced this book for his students. The knotty poetry of Pindar is accompanied by the scholia, “in order to give the reader some help with a difficult text” (Wilson). There are many variants of the text, impressively described by Steffan Fogelmark, who has also solved a longstanding quirk of this book. The register states that the first gathering is a ternion but all extant copies contain only two leaves, bearing an epigram to Benigno as funder—except for one. The first gathering of the copy at Jesus College contains an epistle thanking Chigi for his funding and likely originally had 6 leaves; Fogelmark argues that the first gathering was reset after Chigi pulled his patronage of the project, but it was too late to reset the colophon. Adams P-1221 (variant B); The Greek Book 5; see Nigel Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy and Steffan Fogelmark, The Kallierges Pindar: A Study in Renaissance Greek Scholarship and Printing. Quarto (234 x 159mm). Greek types. Printed in red and black. Woodcut devices of caduceus and Kallierges’s double-headed eagle on title, eagle device repeated on final leaf (a few small marginal paper repairs, in one instance touching a letter). 18th-century mottled calf, spine gilt in compartments with morocco label (rubbed). Provenance: J. S. Hall & amicorum (printed book label).