The first complete edition of Procopius’s Secret History, third overall. Octavo (198 x 120mm). xxx, 449, [1]. Bound in contemporary half calf over marbled paper-covered boards.
 
A very good copy, clean internally, binding a little rubbed.
 
The first complete edition of Procopius’s Secret History.
 
The two previous printed editions of the Secret History, Alemanni’s of 1623 and Eichel’s in 1654, omitted sections from Chapter 9 that related to the promiscuity of the Emperor Justinian’s wife Theodora. These sections of the work had circulated in scholarly circles in manuscript form, and were printed in Gilles Menage’s Menagiana in 1693.
 
But it is in the present work that the passages are finally issued alongside the rest of the text. Orelli’s edition opens with Alemanni’s preface and one of his own, before presenting the text in Greek and Latin, and closing the work with a series of notes and relevant extracts from other sources.