Omero - Opera Omnia - 1650

An interesting bilingual edition of the two poems: Two Destinies, the War and the Return, Achilles and Ulysses
This seventeenth-century edition of Homer's works, printed in Amsterdam by Johann Ravestein, returns the founding poet of the West according to an editorial structure of great symbolic and philological awareness. The project is in fact articulated in two distinct volumes: on the one hand the Opera Omnia, which gathers the Iliad together with the corpus of the minor texts traditionally attributed; on the other, a volume entirely dedicated to the Odyssey, isolated as an autonomous poem of return, cunning, and intelligence. This choice reflects a mature conception of the Homeric canon, founded on the thematic distinction between the poem of war and that of nostos, and mirrors a reading tradition already strongly rooted in European humanism. The Greek text is accompanied by a literal Latin translation ad verbum, in accordance with the rigorous method of the philological tradition associated with Henri Estienne, conceived as a tool for grammatical and interpretative study, not as literary mediation.
Market value
The complete seventeenth-century editions of Homer with Greek and Latin facing text, especially when laid out in two separate volumes and kept in contemporary bindings, maintain a stable presence on the European antique market. Complete and properly collated copies generally fall within a price range of 1,400 to 1,600 euros, with possible increases for copies that are particularly fresh, well preserved, or endowed with significant provenance.

Physical description and condition
2 volumes. Contemporary parchment bindings with manuscript titles on the spine. Pages with some yellowing, foxing, and signs of use, consistent with prolonged consultation in an academic setting. The second volume bears an applied date on the title page above the original date of 1648, a common publishing practice in the seventeenth century to refresh the edition's marketing. In old books, with a multisecular history, there may be some imperfections not always noted in the description.
Collation: Vol. I: pp. (2); 16 unnumbered; 896; 14 unnumbered; (4). Vol. II: (2); 804; 68; 40 unnumbered; (2).

Full title and author
Vol. I: The Complete Works of Homer. Iliadis
Amsterdam, at Joannes Ravestein, 1650.
Vol. II: Homer's Odyssey.
Amsterdam, at Joannes Ravestein, 1650.

Context and Significance
The edition is set within the context of the great Northern European Protestant classical publishing, which in the 17th century made Amsterdam one of the leading centers for printing and disseminating Greek texts. The separation of the Odyssey from the Opera Omnia does not respond to a mere practical need, but reflects a precise structural reading of the Homeric corpus: the Iliad and the minor texts embody the poem of violence, fate, and the warrior community, while the Odyssey is elevated to an autonomous account of ingenuity, survival, and the individual return. The ad verbum Latin translation, tied to the Estienne philological tradition, privileges semantic and syntactic fidelity to the Greek, making the work a central instrument for the linguistic and grammatical study of Homer in modern Europe, in the educational, university, and philological domains.

Biography of the Author
Homer is the epic poet par excellence of ancient Greece, traditionally placed between the 8th and 7th century BCE. To him are attributed the Iliad and the Odyssey, foundations of Western literature, as well as a series of minor compositions. A figure shrouded in myth and the subject of millennial debate about his identity and the genesis of his works, Homer represents the very origin of epic poetry, of heroic narration and of reflection on fate, on war, on travel, and on the construction of human identity.

Printing history and circulation
The work was originally published in 1648 and reissued in 1650 with a new date applied to the title page, a common practice in seventeenth-century publishing to extend the commercial life of editions. Johann Ravestein operated in a dynamic editorial environment, internationally oriented, sensitive to the scholarly demand for reliable Greek texts. The circulation chiefly involved the Netherlands and the major university centers of northern Europe; today complete copies in two volumes, properly bound together, are relatively less common than the original production.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND REFERENCES
Schweiger, A. F., Handbook of Classical Bibliography, Leipzig, 1834, vol. I, p. 158.
Fabricius, J. A., Bibliotheca Graeca, Hamburg, 1705–1728, vol. I, coll. 1–25.
Graesse, J. G. T., Trésor de livres rares et précieux, Dresde, 1859–1869, vol. IV, pp. 366–368.
Brunet, J.-C., Manuel du libraire et de l'amateur de livres, Paris, 1860–1865, vol. III, pp. 274–276.
Renouard, A. A., Annales de l'imprimerie des Estienne, Paris, 1843, pp. 298–305.
van Selm, B., Dutch Printing and Publishing in the Seventeenth Century, Leiden, 1987, pp. 121–134.
ICCU – OPAC SBN: reports of 17th-century Homeric editions in Greek and Latin (to be verified).