C. Crispus Sallustius; Et. L. Anaeus Florus

Birmingham: John Baskerville, 1773. FIRST BASKERVILLE EDITION. Contemporary tree calf, rebacked. An excellent copy from the library of Edward Davenport with his armorial bookplate. First Baskerville edition of this excellent work. Baskerville (1706-1775) was the greatest printer of his era. He began experiments in letter founding and produced his amazing series of types now named after him.

"The volume itself can be divided into two main parts. First, it contains Sallust's opus, which consists of the following works: two historical monographs, Bellum Catilinae (ca. 42/1 BC) and Bellum Iugurthinum (c. 41-40 BC); the extant fragments of Sallust's Histories, written in the conventional annalistic style and covering events from 78 BC onward; and a series of short works which have been wrongly ascribed to Sallust. They are two letters addressed to Caesar, Orationes ad C. Caesarem, de republica ordinanda and an invective against Cicero, C. Crispi Sallustii Declamatio in M. Tullium Ciceronem. It is very likely that both the letters and the invective were actually written after Sallust's death, possibly by rhetoricians writing during the early empire. Finally, the second part of the volume contains a summary of Roman history composed by Florus in the second century AD, Lucii Annaei Flori Epitome rerum romanarum (Lucius Annaeus Florus' abridgement of Roman history). Composed in a panegyric style, it covers 700 years, emphasizing the wars leading to the reign of Augustus, who is praised for being the emperor who finally brought peace to the Roman world. While in Baskerville's edition we find this historical summary divided into four books, the arrangement currently accepted by scholars is in two books, with the following generic title: Flori epitomae de Tito Livio bellorum omnium annorum DCC libri duo"(Pablo Alvarez, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester).

Sallust (86-35 BC) was a fourth-century writer, historian and politician. A Roman aristocrat, he was later a partisan of Julius Caesar. He is the earliest known Roman historian with surviving works to his name. Lucius Annaeus Florus (74-130 AD) was a Roman historian born in Africa, compiled his history of Rome that, despite a number of flaws in geographic and chronological detail, was used as a textbook into the nineteenth century.