8vo. (XXXII, including frontispiece),882,(30 index) p. Modern vellum. 21 cm (Ref: STCN ppn 840093780; Schweiger p. 965: 'Saubrer Abdr. des Gronovsch. Textes; mit guten Auszügen aus den Anmerkgg. früheren Erklärer, auch aus Gronov's diatribe. Ziemlich seltne Ausg.'; Dibdin 2,425: 'It is not only beautifully printed, ex offic. Hackiana, but is a very scarce, accurate, and valuable production'; Fabricius/Ernesti 2/336; Moss 2,613, praises its accuracy and its intrinsic merit; Brunet 5,512: 'assez recherchée'; Graesse 6/1,481; Ebert 21685) (Details: The frontispiece is engraved by P. Appelmans, it depicts the laureated poet writing his Thebaid; in the background battle and murder scenes from this poem. Woodcut printer's mark on the title, its depicts a soaring eagle, motto 'movendo'. Poems printed in italics, commentary in Roman type and printed in 2 colums at the lower half of the pages. Edges dyed red.) (Condition: The vellum has been cleansed, resulting in a slightly rough surface. Some slight and faint foxing) (Note: His fluent and highly polished verse brought the Roman poet Publius Papinius Statius, ca. A.D. 45-96, to the court of the Roman emperor Domitianus. He is best known for his epic, the 'Thebaid', which tells the story of the civil war between the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, contesting power over the city of Thebes. The 'Achilleid', tells the story of the education of Achilles. Statius' 'Silvae' is a collection of 32 occasional poems addressed to his friends, celebrating their marriages etc. 'The various episodes, highly coloured and rhetorical though they be, are generally successful regarded as separate wholes, the descriptive passages striking, and the narrative lively'. (OCD, 2nd edition, p. 1011/12) § The 'Thebaid' enjoyed widespread medieval interest. There are more than hundred manuscripts extant. 'Survival of the 'Silvae' has been more precarious, apparantly dependent at one point on a single manuscript; the collection was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini on one of his book-hunting expeditions in 1417. Some poems in the collection have nevertheless enjoyed a vigorous afterlife - especially 1.2, an epithalamium that outdoes its Catullan precedent with a florid (and floral) extravagance that sets a new standard for the genre. (...) It provided a template for a wide tradition of wedding poems in the 16th and 17th centuries. The name of the collection also captured the early modern imagination, as we see, for instance, with Milton's 'Sylvarum liber' (1645), a selection of his Latin poems. When Ben Jonson included in his Works (1616) a collection of 15 poems named 'The Forest', he was bringing Statius' title into English'. (The Classical Tradition, Cambridge Massachusetts 2010, p. 908) § In this 'Variorum' edition of Statius the German classical scholar Johannes Veenhusen of Bremen, 1643-1675, skillfully compared and contrasted the excerpted material of brighter minds. Such editions were very popular, and reissued more than once, because they contained everthing a student required. It offered the 'textus receptus' which was widely accepted, accompanied with the commentary and the annotations of specialists, taken from earlier useful, normative or renewing editions. Editions like these, 'cum notis Variorum', were useful, but never broke new ground. Veenhusen based his edition upon the best available edition, that of Johannes Friedrich Gronovius of 1653 (Amsterdam). Gronovius' text and the essential substance of his commentary was adopted by Veenhusen, and became through this 1671 edition the undisputed foundation of all later editions of Statius well into the first half of the 19th century) (Collation: *-2*-8, including frontispiece; A-3L8) (Photographs on request)