BOCCALINI, Traiano.

Comentarii . . . sopra Cornelio Tacito . . . Opera non ancora stampata & grandemente desiderata da tutti li virtuosi.

‘In Cosmopoli, appresso Giovanni Battista della Piazza’ [but Geneva, De Tournes], 1677. 4to (255 x 200 mm), pp. [viii], 519, [1, blank], 262, [2, blank], 47; occasional worming and light foxing; untrimmed in contemporary boards, parchment reback. First edition of one of the outstanding early modern political commentaries on Tacitus. Boccalini, who died in 1613, was refused permission to print his book by the ecclesiastical censors. In 1627 his children showed it to the Venetian Council of Ten, which considered the work too inflamatory to print, but granted them a pension in return for the surrender of their father’s manuscript. In spite of this, the children sold copies and the book circulated widely in manuscript form before finally finding its way into print in 1677 under a fictitious ‘In Cosmopoli’ imprint (see Dizionario biografico degli italiani XI p. 16–17).In an age of absolute monarchs, powerful favourites and bloody civil wars, the Roman histories of Tacitus had a particular resonance and his writings were scoured for historical lessons. ‘The political opinions of Cornelius Tacitus are not easy to discern. As the greatest modern authority has remarked, “Tacitus gives away little” (Syme). His ironic manner reveals a contempt for flattery and other forms of servility and also a certain impatience with theory, but leaves ambiguous his attitude to the Roman monarchy. Although he obviously disliked what went with it, Tacitus may well have regarded the institution as the lesser evil. As a result of his ambiguity he could be claimed as an ally by both the opponents and the supporters of monarchy in early modern Europe . . . . The parallels between the Rome of Tiberius and the courts of early modern Europe were constantly made explicit, whether the commentators believed that human nature never changes, or, with Lipsius and Montaigne, that Tacitus was of particular relevance to their own troubled times’ (Burke, ‘Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state’, in Burns, ed., Cambridge history of political thought 1450–1700 pp. 484–7).Between 1580 and 1700, more than 100 authors wrote commentaries on Tacitus, the majority political, of which ‘surely the most brilliant . . . [is the Comentarii] of Traiano Boccalini . . . written around the year 1600. The author spent much of his life as a judge in a Roman tribunal and as an administrator in the Papal States. However, his sympathies, in the political and ideological conflicts of the early seventeenth century, were not with Rome but with the republic of Venice, “the honour and the strength of Italy”, a “miraculous city” which has “the divine benefit of liberty” and a model government, including, so he claimed, an aristocracy uncorrupted by luxury. Boccalini disliked monarchies in general and hated Spain in particular as a cruel and despotic regime which reminded him of Rome under Tiberius. Giving a typically ironic twist to the common comparison of princes to physicians, he described Philip II as dealing with the revolt of the Netherlands by sending “the medicine of the duke of Alba”. Bitter medicine indeed. Boccalini had much in common with Tacitus, but he could not approve of a writer whose works taught tyrants how to hold on to power. Others might praise Tacitus for producing a manual of statecraft like the Cyropaedia of Xenophon; Boccalini called it an anti-manual, a cruel “Tiberipaedia”. Yet he could not but admire the skill with which Tacitus penetrated the secret designs of princes, pulling away the “cloak” or “mask” of idealism to reveal the workings of naked “interest” underneath’ (Burke, ‘Tacitism’ p. 490).BL, Italian p. 118.

• GBP 1,750.00 > otras divisas
• nº de pedido: T2162

• librero: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. (GREAT BRITAIN)