754J   Aeschylus (c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC), Willem Canter 1542-1575. 

Αισχύλου τραγῳδίαι Ζ =.  Æschyli tragœdiæ VII. In quibus præter infinita menda sublata, carminum omnium ratio, hactenus ignorata, nunc primum proditur; opera Gulielmi Canteri. VLTRAIECTINI.

Antuerpiæ : Ex officina Christophori Plantini, architypographi regij, 1580.               Price $ 2,500

Duodecimo 12 x 8.5 cm. Signatures: A-Z⁸ (Z7, Z8 blank) Bound in full blind stamped pig skin over boards clasps lacking. a very sweet copy.

This handy copy of the plays from the father of Tragedy.  Aeschylus entered many  city competitions for the best play  of   Dionysia of these competitions, and various ancient sources attribute between seventy and ninety plays to him.  Only these seven tragedies attributed to him have survived intact: The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, The Suppliants, the trilogy known as The Oresteia (the three tragedies Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides), and Prometheus Bound (whose authorship is disputed). With the exception of this last play – the success of which is uncertain – all of Aeschylus’s extant tragedies are known to have won first prize at the City Dionysia. This is the first canter edition, Willem Canter was a classical scholar from Utrecht. He edited the Eclogues of Stobaeus and the tragedies of Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus.

Adams A-270; Voet, L. Plantin Press, 1555-1589,no. 11; Cockx-Indestege, E. Belgica typographica 38; STCV 12920582; Brunet I, 78. Dibdin, in his Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics, calls the 1580 Plantin: “an elegant and correct edition, without the scholia” Sandys notes that in Canter’s Euripides: “the metrical responsions between strophe and antistrophe are clearly marked…”and that the text was corrected through attention to those structures. He then adds that Canter’s editions of Sophocles (1579) and Aeschylus (1580) were published posthumously. 

These notes are in the blank in the back of the book. What I cam make out is sketchy but they look Contemporary annotations in Greek and Latin, including references to Theophrastus and notes on ethnographic and philological passages in the Eumenides.