"Anacreon's Odes (...)" edited by Jacques Bins, comte de Saint Victor.

A Paris, chez H. Nicolle / P. Didot, MDCCCXIII (1813 - 2nd edition).

Illustrated with a frontispiece, as well as with one more full-page engraving.

Handwritten Ex Libris inscription dated from 1838.

Leather binding. Nice gilt ornaments on spine, as well as on both boards. 

Poems displayed in greek and french in parallel; annotations in latin.

256 pages in total (lii + 204), 16.5 x 10.5 x 2.5 cm.

Good to Good condition - probably 2 engraved plates are missing, few defects not affecting text, foxing, few leaves more-foxed-than-the-average, yellow/brown stains, paper merely creasy on few leaves, small piece of paper missing from few leaves' margin, &c.

Anacreon (/əˈnækriən/; Greek: Ἀνακρέων ὁ Τήϊος; c. 575 – c. 495 BC)[1] was a Greek lyric poet, notable for his drinking songs and erotic poems. Later Greeks included him in the canonical list of Nine Lyric Poets. Anacreon wrote all of his poetry in the ancient Ionic dialect. Like all early lyric poetry, it was composed to be sung or recited to the accompaniment of music, usually the lyre. Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals and the observations of everyday people and life. Anacreon's poetry touched on universal themes of love, infatuation, disappointment, revelry, parties, festivals, and observations of everyday people and life. It is the subject matter of Anacreon's poetry that helped to keep it familiar and enjoyable to generations of readers and listeners. His widespread popularity inspired countless imitators, which also kept his name alive. Anacreon had a reputation as a composer of hymns, as well as of those bacchanalian and amatory lyrics which are commonly associated with his name. Two short hymns to Artemis and Dionysus, consisting of eight and eleven lines respectively, stand first amongst his few undisputed remains, as printed by recent editors. But hymns, especially when addressed to such deities as Aphrodite, Eros and Dionysus, are not so very unlike what we call "Anacreontic" poetry as to make the contrast of style as great as the word might seem to imply. The tone of Anacreon's lyric effusions has probably led to an unjust estimate, by both ancients and moderns, of the poet's personal character. The "triple worship" of the Muses, Wine and Love, ascribed to him as his religion in an old Greek epigram, may have been as purely professional in the two last cases as in the first, and his private character on such points was probably neither much better nor worse than that of his contemporaries. Athenaeus remarks acutely that he seems at least to have been sober when he wrote. His character was an issue, because, according to Pausanias, his statue on the Acropolis of Athens depicts him as drunk. He himself strongly repudiates, as Horace does, the brutal characteristics of intoxication as fit only for barbarians and Scythians. Of the five books of lyrical pieces by Anacreon which the Suda and Athenaeus mention as extant in their time, only the merest fragments exist today, collected from the citations of later writers. A collection of poems by numerous, anonymous imitators was long believed to be the works of Anacreon himself. Known as the Anacreontea, it was preserved in a 10th-century manuscript which also included the Palatine Anthology. The poems themselves appear to have been composed over a long period of time, from the time of Alexander the Great until the time that paganism gave way in the Roman Empire. They reflect the light-hearted elegance of much of Anacreon's genuine works although they were not written in the same Ionic Greek dialect that Anacreon used. They also display literary references and styles more common to the time of their actual composition.

Jacques-Maximilien Benjamin Bins, comte de Saint-Victor (1772 - 1858) was a French poet and man of letters. Bins de Saint-Victor was born in Fort Dauphin, Saint Domingue (now Fort-Liberté, Haiti) on the island of Hispaniola in 1772. At the time of his birth, Saint Domingue was a French colony. He died in Paris in 1858. His son, Paul de Saint-Victor, became a well-known essayist and critic. During the First Empire, Bins de Saint-Victor was arrested as a royalist conspirator and incarcerated at Paris. After the fall of Napoleon, he was one of the editors of the Journal des débats and also worked on the Drapeau blanc. Having tried without success to found a bookstore with Félicité Robert de Lamennais, he spent some time in the United States. On his return he worked at the La France newspaper. In addition to his poetical works and a verse translation of Anacreon, he published numerous historical studies as well as three opera libretti.

Richard François Philippe Brunck (30 December 1729 – 12 June 1803) was a French classical scholar. Brunck was born in Strasbourg, France, educated at the Jesuits' College in Paris, and took part in the Seven Years' War as military commissary. At the age of thirty he returned to Strasbourg to resume his studies, especially Greek. He spent considerable sums of money in publishing editions of the Greek classics. The first work he edited was the Anthologia Graeca or Analecta veterum Poetarum Graecorum (1772–1776), in which his innovations on the established mode of criticism startled European scholars. As an editor, he made no commentaries, but occupied himself only with the text. Persuaded that all faults in the language of the Greek poets came from the carelessness of copyists, wherever it seemed to him that an obscure or difficult passage might be made intelligible and easy by a change of text, he did not scruple to make the necessary alterations, whether the new reading were supported by manuscript authority or not. He became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1777.