£350
FIRST EDITION, 4to, pp. [iv], i, [xxi], ccvi, [ii], 315, [3, ads]. Half-title discarded, title-page printed in red and black. Contemporary marbled calf. A little scattered foxing. Sometime rebacked, spine divided by gilt rules, brown morocco label, old leather a little worn to extremities. Armorial bookplate of the Cowper family library at Panshanger to pastedown.
The first edition of West's best remembered work, the translation that remained a standard into the 19th century and reached a third edition by 1766. It is preceded by a lengthy dissertation on the Olympic games, also by West, and followed by an assortment of other classical pieces rendered into English, among them an ode by Horace, a dialogue by Plato and a translation of the play Iphigenia in Tauris. 'While the translation itself is conventionally elegant, West's notes mark a breakthrough in the reading of the odes in terms of their historical occasion, and the dissertation, praised by Gibbon, offers a rare eighteenth-century appreciation of the cultural and political significance of sport' (ODNB).
ESTC calls for a duplication in pagination of pp. 175-6 not present here: the duplication represents the retention of a sort of cancel leaf evidently produced mid-printing. The two versions of pp. 175-6 (leaves Y4 and Z1) contain the same lines of the poem, but Z1 replaces a woodcut tailpiece and catchword with the first part of a two and a half page footnote that continues on Z2 recto and verso. It seems obvious that Y4 was therefore meant to be cancelled so that the text would be continuous, as it has in this copy, but a binder without specific instructions could have easily left it in place as was done in some other copies.
