Demosthenis orationes quatuor contra Philippum, À Paulo Manutio latinitate donatæ
Venice: apud Aldi filios, 1549. First Aldine edition.
Quarto (8 1/8” x 5 ¾”, 206mm x 146mm): A-N4, binder’s blank [$2 signed; –A1]. 52 leaves, pp. [6] (title, blank, 4pp. dedication to Jean de Morvillier) [98] (97pp. text, blank).
Bound in early (remboîté?) stabbed vellum (rebacked). “DEMOSTH: ORATION:” in ink manuscript to the top edge of the text-block.
Re-backed (spine-wrap). Straightened yapp edges and holes for two pairs of ties. A little splayed. A chip to the lower edge of the title-leaf. Creases to the upper fore-corner in quires I-N (dropped?), particularly M-N. Ink strike-through to B2 (unclear whether recto or verso), burnt through, affecting one word on each page. Ink ownership signature of “Franciscus de Pastorio/ Castionas/ 1758” to the title-page and a faded ink inscription (“?Domi[nus] De Pastorio/ Castilij Stiverorum”) to the recto of the first free end-paper. Bookplate of T. Kimball Brooker laid in.
Demosthenes (384–322 bc) was the greatest of Greek orators — so crowned by Longinus, Quintilian and Cicero — and an exact contemporary of Aristotle in Athens. Flourishing in the decades after Athenian supremacy had ebbed following the Peloponnesian Wars, Demosthenes used his rhetorical skill to defend democracy against the rising threat of autocracy. Philip II of Macedon (382–336 bc), father of Alexander the Great, began what his son completed: the consolidation of empire as never before in the Hellenic world; indeed, it was against the vast hegemonies of the east (Persia, particularly) that the Greeks defined themselves.
A series of halting Athenian military victories against Philip in the 350’s brought Demosthenes to compose the first of his four so-called “philippics,” invectives so powerful as to occasion the generic term still used for any impassioned denunciation, ca. 350. Rhetorical in form, the four philippics, delivered in the decade following, beg the Athenian people to recognize the threat of tyranny and to act to stop it. They have ever since been held up not only as the most powerful defense of democracy, but as paragons of speechifying and delivery, used to teach students and masters — including Cicero, who composed his own against Mark Antony — alike for twenty-three centuries.
Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio, ca. 1450–1515) was the Venetian humanist-printer whom we have largely to thank for the dissemination of texts in small formats. His printer’s mark of a dolphin wrapped around an anchor has persisted into the present as a symbol of humane letters and publishing (e.g., the logo of Doubleday). Aldus sent scouts through the libraries — especially monastic libraries — of Europe to find texts hitherto uncommitted to print, or superior witnesses to the traditions of ancient texts. Fueled by the Greek diaspora from the fall of Constantinople that settled in Venice, Aldus brought the widest range of ancient texts to the scholarly public. After his death, his “filii” (“sons” qua heirs) continued to publish using his name, plant and resources. Paolo Manuzio (1512–1574) helmed the press until his death, and like his father was himself an accomplished man of letters; he translated the present work from Greek into Latin (still far more widely understood, even in educated circles) and dedicated the work to Jean de Morvillier, bishop of Orléans and ambassador of France to Venice 1546–1550.
The florid inscription on the title page is that of Francesco Pastorio (1741–1803) of Castiglione delle Stiviere in Lombardy, near Mantua. The date (1756) shows the young nobleman as a schoolboy, studying rhetoric as a preparation for aristocratic life. Pastorio married Smeralda Bedulli in 1769, and their wedding was celebrated by verses by Giambattista Zelini (1729–1799), a noted orator — and perhaps Pastorio’s rhetorical master?
The volume was lot 325 in a Sotheby’s London sale of 26-27 January 1976, purchased by Thomas Kimball Brooker (Kim, b. 1939), an American industrialist with a life-long scholarly interest in books. To wit, his Harvard Business School Master’s thesis was titled Rare Books as a Hedge against Devaluation and Inflation; he went on to get an MA in Art History and a PhD, both from the University of Chicago. He is the most significant collector — certainly among the living, perhaps ever, or at the least on par with the likes of J.P. Morgan — of early printed books, with a particular focus on Aldus Manutius and the Aldine Press. His collection is being dispersed by Sotheby’s in a series of eight auctions, the Bibliotheca Brookeriana, from 2023 into 2026 (to include his formidable reference library). The present volume was lot 514 in part II (the Aldine Collection D-M) 18 October 2024 in New York.
Adams D288; Edit16 16739; Renouard 146:6; UCLA IIIa.345.
Item #JLR0801
Price: $3,800