Ioannis Deligiannis – författare

The book contains the editio princeps of Mattia Palmieri’s mid-fifteenth-century Latin translation of Herodotus’ Histories, almost contemporary or even earlier than that by Lorenzo Valla. It also investigates the intellectual and historical milieu in which Palmieri produced it as preparatory work for his historical works and to secure patronage under a church prelate by offering it to Cardinal Prospero Colonna. It includes some information on Palmieri’s life and work and Herodotus’ fortuna, a brief comparison between Palmieri’s and Valla’s translations, Palmieri’s Greek model and Livy’s influence on him in language and style. It finally approaches some methodological issues related to editing a text preserved in authorially revised versions, because the translation shows three different stages of revision. This first approach of Herodotus by Western scholars is significant, because Herodotus was foremost read as a quarry of information of ethnographical, geographical, historical and anthropological nature, in order for the Europeans to understand peoples they encountered on their exploratory voyages and the Ottomans, who were considered as descendants of the Persians.

The volume aims at complementing the international literature on the interaction between Cicero and Greece. It offers new and unpublished material on Cicero’s presence in Greece literally, deriving from his epistles, speeches and philosophical treatises, but also on his interaction with the Greek philosophical schools, the Greek language and politics, etc. Besides, it offers new knowledge on the appreciation and reception of Cicero and his texts by the Greek world from Late Antiquity to Byzantium and Modern Greece, based on material deriving from a variety of sources (papyri, manuscripts, compendia or encyclopaedias, imitations, translations, early editions, etc.), an aspect of the relationships between Cicero and Greece still understudied. Thus, the volume offers an image as illustrative as possible of various aspects of the presence of the Greek world in Cicero’s works and of Cicero’s presence in Greece from his own times to the present day.