13 - [PSEUDO-QUINTILIAN]. DU TEIL, Bernard.

[PSEUDO-QUINTILIAN]. DU TEIL, Bernard. The Great and Complete Orations of the Famous Orator Quintilian Paris: Jean-Baptiste Loyson, 1659. Quarto, (12) leaves, including an engraved title page, 379 pp. Fine, finely grained, period havana sheepskin, ribbed spine, red title label, ornate panels, edges speckled with red (binding worn, slight foxing, tiny loss in the side margin of the engraved title page). *Declamationes maiores et minores*, a collection of declamations and controversial exercises by Pseudo-Quintilian. Falsely attributed to Quintilian as early as the 4th century, these pieces of eloquence—noted for both their inventiveness and the beauty of their thought—are school controversies or “model assignments given to students in rhetoric classes.” With a large frontispiece title page featuring a portrait, engraved in black on copper. Provenance: Joannes Richard (Jesuit), with the congregation’s stamped mark affixed at the bottom of a handwritten text in his own hand dated 1701. Various old 18th-century handwritten ex libris marks on an endpaper and the title page.