College Record 2013

firm in 1516. It includes a variety of texts including Proclus’s commentary on
Plato’s Alcibiades and Priscian’s commentary on Theophrastus’ De Sensu. A second
volume published by Aldus and his successors in 1536 is the first printed edition
of a commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics by the Byzantine commentators
Eustratius and Michael of Ephesus. Long before Aldus, this commentary had been
translated into Latin in the thirteenth century by Oxford’s first Chancellor, Robert
Grosseteste. As well as these two philosophical books, Wolfson also has Aldine
editions of Ovid (1516) and Lucian (1522).
A third philosophical text, printed in Florence, is the first edition of Porphyry’s
On Abstinence from Killing Animals, issued with Michael of Ephesus’ commentary
on Aristotle’s On Parts of Animals in 1548. This edition was assembled by Petrus
Victorius (Pietro Vettori, 1499-1585), who has been described as ‘possibly the
greatest Greek scholar of Italy’ and ‘the outstanding personality of the period’;
he also wrote his own commentaries on Aristotle. Texts in all three of these early
editions have been translated into English in volumes edited by Richard Sorabji, and
at the conference we showed the first printed editions and the modern translations
side by side, probably for the first time.
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The first printed edition of Porphyry’s On Abstinence from Killing Animals