Aristophanes Plutus et les Nuees Paris 1684
Aristophanes. Le Plutus et les Nuées d'Aristophane. Comedies Greques, traduites en François. Avec des remarques & un examen de chaque piece selon les regles du theatre. Par Mademoiselle Le Fevre. Paris: chez Denys Thierry; et Claude Barbin, 1684. (62), 386 pp. 12mo, contemporary mottled calf, spine gilt, red morocco label. First edition in French of two plays of Aristophanes, Plutus, and The Clouds. Translated, with prefaces and commentaries, by Anne Lefèvre (later Mme. Dacier), one of the most remarkable scholars of her day. Anne Lefèvre was born in Saumur in 1654; when her father died in 1672, she moved to Paris, taking with her the materials for her first book, an edition of Callimachus printed in 1675. This volume was so well received that she was engaged as one of the editors of the celebrated Delphin series of classical authors, in which she edited Florus, Dictys Cretensis, Aurelius Victor, and Eutropius. In 1684 she married another classical scholar, André Dacier. In 1699 she published a prose translation of the Iliad, followed nine years later by a similar translation of the Odyssey; these versions were of great importance in that they made the poems of Homer familiar for the first time to a wide French audience. The precocity of her edition of Callimachus may be judged from the fact that it earned her the epithet "feminarum doctissima" from no less an admirer than the great (and exacting) Richard Bentley. Her translations in the present volumes represent the first printed attempt at Aristophanes in French; Ronsard had produced a version of Plutus in 1549, but that was for the stage only, and does not survive. A very good copy. Brunet I, 455.
£500
This item is listed on Bibliopoly by Ximenes Rare Books Inc; click here for further details.