MACROBIUS.

£8,500 · Offered by Sokol Books

A very good copy, with contemporary Spanish provenance, of this attractive incunabular edition of two of the most influential works of late antiquity – the first being ‘the most satisfactory and widely read Latin compendium on Neoplatonism that existed during the Middle Ages’ (DSB). Macrobius (fl. early 5thC) was a poet probably born in Greek-speaking areas of the Roman Empire. ‘Somnium Scipionis’, part of Book VI of Cicero’s ‘De Republica’, recounts the dream vision of the Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, two years before the fall of Carthage in 146BC. Visited in his sleep by his late grandfather Scipio Africanus, he is foretold his future and given a ‘mystical’ overview of the Earth from the heavens, its climatic zones, and the workings of the celestial spheres and planets, with Stoic discussions of the nature of the soul, the gods and virtue. Macrobius’s Neoplatonic commentary to Cicero’s text contributed to its enormous success through the middle ages down to the Renaissance, with hundreds of extant mss. Of particular interest, to the likes of Dante and Chaucer, were his theories of music, astronomy and the interpretation of dreams, i.e., how to determine which were predictive of events, and which were not, as well as the cosmographical information he provided, with ‘lengthy excursuses on Pythagorean number lore, cosmography, world geography and the harmony of the spheres’ (DSB). Ms and printed copies quickly absorbed the visual aids of medieval cartography, with the pres

• Binding: Hardcover

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