Pindari carmina

Tall 8vo. pp. xiv, 216. Red leather gilt, gilt arms on cover, glossy blue pastedowns. “Stiftsbibliothek S. Steffan.,” “Philos. 8.500,” and “Ex libris S. Weber” inked on front pastedown. Text in Greek, notes in Latin.

First edition of this translation of the odes of the Greek poet Pindar, critically edited by Christian Wilhelm Ahlwardt (1760-1830). Ahlwardt was a classicist, schoolmaster, and latterly Professor of Ancient Literature at the University of Greifswald, and the author of studies of Theocritus, Callimachus, Catullus and Ariosto, and translator of ‘Ossian’ (Leipzig, 1811, see Bib# 1160008/Fr# 647 in this collection). Forgeries in Ahlwardt’s edition of Pindar are noted by Wolfgang Speyer, in his standard Literarische Fälschung (Munich, 1971), pp. 320-21, citing the correspondence of August Böckh and Georg Ludolf Dissen (1907), relating to Ahlwardt’s collational use of certain Neapolitan manuscripts supplied to him by ‘a friend’. Speyer makes no bones about calling Ahlwardt a ‘Fälscher’, alongside Wagenfeld, August Bielowski, and Simonides, although his edition enjoyed a long life as an admired scholarly resource.

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