Cornelii Galli Fragmenta

About

4to. ff. [14]. Signatures: A-B4 C6. Imprint from colophon. Engraved vignette on title page with eagle, coat of arms and letters "FD". No cover present, leaves held at spine by colored paper. On title page, ink mark: "II.2." Some sentences underlined in the same ink. First separate edition, a deliberate attributional forgery by a young Neapolitan humanist, Pomponio Gaurico (1480/81–c.1530). By suppressing one key distich in which the actual author, Maximianus Etruscus, a fifth-century Roman envoy to Byzantium, identifies himself, altering a reference to the poet’s contemporary Boethius, and publishing the remaining short text as the restored work of Gallus, Gaurico claimed these six elegies as the celebrated but lost work of Cornelius Gallus, the first-century BC orator, administrator, and poet. Reprinted as such hundreds of times, usually in collections with Catullus, Propertius, and sometimes Tibullus and Statius, they remained ‘Gallus’ to most readers for at least two centuries. See Universal Short Title Catalogue on-line, 841634; Short-title catalogue of books printed in Italy and of Italian books printed in other countries from 1465 to 1600 now in the British Museum. London, 1958, p. 289.