Phalaris was the tyrant of Acragas in Sicily (c. 570–554 BC), notorious for roasting his victims alive in a hollow bronze bull so that their screams issued as the animal's bellowing. The letters that pass under his name are among the most famous forgeries in the history of scholarship.

Their fame rests less on their substance than on the war they started. When Charles Boyle edited them in 1695, Richard Bentley proved, in his celebrated Dissertation, that the epistles could not be the tyrant's: their author had, as the argument ran, "borrowed money from men who lived three hundred years after his death," destroyed towns not yet founded, and written in a dialect he could not have known. Bentley was right — the letters are a production of the second century AD — but the wits of Christ Church answered him with ridicule, and out of the fray came Swift's The Battle of the Books.

This 1749 translation belongs to the long afterlife of that quarrel. Thomas Francklin (1721–1784) — here styled "M.A. Fellow of Trinity-College, Cambridge," and elected Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge the following year — was among the most respected classical translators of his age; that a scholar of his standing gave the discredited letters so careful a rendering is itself a measure of their tenacious hold on the eighteenth-century imagination [Leah Orr, "Thomas Francklin's Minos," Studies in Philology 114, no. 2 (2017)].

[16], xxiii, [1], 224, [2] pp. Octavo (230 × 140 mm). Engraved frontispiece by Charles Grignion after Thomas Worlidge (1748), half-title, and the eight-page list of subscribers. Rebound in nineteenth-century red half-morocco and marbled boards, raised bands and gilt-lettered morocco labels, marbled endpapers, edges speckled red.

Very good, and attractively bound. Engraved frontispiece and subscriber list present; boards a little rubbed, edges lightly worn; two owners' bookplates and a small perforated library stamp to the title-page. A clean, handsome copy in nineteenth-century half-morocco.

PROVENANCE

Two earlier owners' bookplates and a perforated "Library of the Dropsie College" stamp to the title-page; latterly Heritage Book Shop, Beverly Hills.

REFERENCES

ESTC T111261; George III's reference copy Royal Collection Trust RCIN 1058742