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[ SOLD OUT ] DEL GRANDE, C., Hybris. Colpa e castigo nell' espressione poetica e leeteraria degli scrittori della Grecia Antica. Da Omero a Cleante. Riccardo Ricciardi editore, Napoli, 1947. 560p. Nicely rebound. Half cloth. Gilt titled vignette to spine. Small name stamp on inside title page. (Rare). ‘Professor Del Grande’s book bears the sub-title ‘Crime and Punishment in the Literature of Ancient Greece, from Homer to Cleanthes.’ The present volume is an historical outline and philological study; it assembles and evaluates the evidence for the law of Hybris-Nemesis. (…) Del Grande’s method entails a general survey of Greek literature. He proceeds by categories of literary form, dealing separately with the epic, the lyric poets, the tragedians, the historians, the comic poets, the orators, and the philosophers. (…) Let me say at the outset that I find the method adopted by Del Grande - a wide survey of Greek literature under a particular aspect - both interesting and rewarding. New and unusual prospects compensate for the inevitable distortions of perspective. There are of course files in which the material is meagre. (…) It is when we reach the field of tragedy that the method proves most fruitful. Not only the extant but also the lost plays are studied, on the basis of didascalia and fragments, for their treatment of the hybrid-nemesis theme. (…) The author’s comment is both acute and illuminating. There are no footnotes to the pages, but 68 pages of notes are printed after the appendices. These notes constitute a bibliography briefly and usefully commented. In any such vast study the reader will somewhere disagree with the author as to emphasis and detail; but the value of the study is determined by the validity of its method, the general soundness of its scholarship and the new perspective it creates. (…) The five appendices are all of interest, particularly that on the meaning of ’agnos’ and the long discussion on the authenticity of ‘the ‘Prometheus Vinctus’ in which, after a survey of preceding discussion, the author analyses the tragedy and compares it with others of Aeschylus (pp.435-457). This appendix, as also the long discussion of hybris in tragedy in the body of the book, is both valuable and illuminating. (…) One follows the treatment of the present volume with growing interest and cannot but look forward to the promised second volume.’ (J.A. PHILIP in the American Journal of Philology, 1952, pp.432-436). (Antiquarian) (approx. delivery time: undeliverable)