A rare and important Latin edition of Stobaeus’s Sentences, the great anthology of Greek wisdom literature compiled in late antiquity and here edited and Latinized by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565). Drawn from some 250 Greek authors, many of whose works survive nowhere else, Stobaeus’s collection preserves fragments of philosophers, mystics, and poets stretching from Pythagoras and Heraclitus to the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and early Hermetists. In this sense, the Sententiae is not merely a commonplace book of moral aphorisms but one of the principal vessels through which the Hermetic and Orphic currents of Greek thought were transmitted to the Renaissance.
Gessner’s humanist edition, produced in the early years of the Reformation, gave new life to these ancient voices. For thinkers of the sixteenth century (Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, and later Fludd and Kircher) Stobaeus offered a vision of a primordial theology in which divine truth was already intuited by the sages of Greece. The text’s meditations on the harmony of the cosmos, the unity of spirit and matter, and the hidden correspondences between human and divine order would deeply influence the developing Hermetic and alchemical traditions of Europe.
A beautiful Parisian printing and a crucial repository of fragments that might otherwise have perished; a true treasury of ancient wisdom, serving as one of the most direct conduits of the Hermetic heritage into the modern world.
John Stobaeus. Sententiae ex thesauris Graecorum delectae... Collected and arranged by Conrad Gessner. Paris: Charles Perier, in vico Bellovacensi sub Bellorophonte. Small octavo (12.5 × 8.5 cm). [120], 1041 (i.e., 943, numerous pagination errors), [12] pp. Contemporary binding with parchment spine and marbled boards, manuscript title to spine. The first leaf partly detached, occasional minor stains, but overall a handsome and well-preserved sixteenth-century edition. Text in Latin.
A rare and important Latin edition of Stobaeus’s Sentences, the great anthology of Greek wisdom literature compiled in late antiquity and here edited and Latinized by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565). Drawn from some 250 Greek authors, many of whose works survive nowhere else, Stobaeus’s collection preserves fragments of philosophers, mystics, and poets stretching from Pythagoras and Heraclitus to the Stoics, Neoplatonists, and early Hermetists. In this sense, the Sententiae is not merely a commonplace book of moral aphorisms but one of the principal vessels through which the Hermetic and Orphic currents of Greek thought were transmitted to the Renaissance.
Gessner’s humanist edition, produced in the early years of the Reformation, gave new life to these ancient voices. For thinkers of the sixteenth century (Ficino, Pico, Agrippa, and later Fludd and Kircher) Stobaeus offered a vision of a primordial theology in which divine truth was already intuited by the sages of Greece. The text’s meditations on the harmony of the cosmos, the unity of spirit and matter, and the hidden correspondences between human and divine order would deeply influence the developing Hermetic and alchemical traditions of Europe.
A beautiful Parisian printing and a crucial repository of fragments that might otherwise have perished; a true treasury of ancient wisdom, serving as one of the most direct conduits of the Hermetic heritage into the modern world.
John Stobaeus. Sententiae ex thesauris Graecorum delectae... Collected and arranged by Conrad Gessner. Paris: Charles Perier, in vico Bellovacensi sub Bellorophonte. Small octavo (12.5 × 8.5 cm). [120], 1041 (i.e., 943, numerous pagination errors), [12] pp. Contemporary binding with parchment spine and marbled boards, manuscript title to spine. The first leaf partly detached, occasional minor stains, but overall a handsome and well-preserved sixteenth-century edition. Text in Latin.
