Sententiae ex Thesaurus Graecorum.

Johannes Stobaeus.

Sententiae ex Thesaurus Graecorum.

Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1543. [And:] Eclogarum Libri Duo. Antwerp: Christopher Plantin, 1575.

1543, 1575.

In the Renaissance, these two volumes were thought to be two separate books, but it has since been established that together they form a single work, a doxography, originally written in the fourth century CE. The Eclogues is the first edition of the first part of the whole and the Sententiae is the first edition in both Greek and Latin of the second part. A doxography is a collection of the sayings of famous people and the combined work contains extracts from about 500 Greek authors, many of which are otherwise unrecorded. It has always appealed to me because of the remarkable survival and longevity of the work, the beauty of both books as objects and as subjects of study, and for its romantic associations with the very earliest sources of Western culture and philosophy. The first doxography was the Physikon Doxai of Theophrastus, a student and successor of Aristotle himself.

Robin Raybould