Translated from the Original Latin, with a Preface and Notes
WITH FINE MILITARY PROVENANCE
Military Institutions of Vegetius, in Five Books Translated from the Original Latin, with a Preface and Notes
Printed for the Author, and Sold by W. Griffin 1767.
8vo. First edition thus. Full contemporary sprinkled calf, spine gilt with double fillets, green morocco title with roll borders, gilt. A fine copy in fine contemporary binding, a trifle rubbed, lower rear corner lightly bumped.
First and only edition of this rare English translation of Vegetius's De re militari, the only surviving military text from Roman antiquity, with fine military provenance.
The translator was John Clarke, then a lieutenant in the Royal Marines, and later the governor of Senegambia in West Africa, where he died in 1778. As Clarke notes in the preface, his translation was preceded by the 1572 edition of John Sadler, which he criticises for its many inaccuracies: "The author has often mistaken the original, and his work has little value but that of antiquity." Clarke's translation remained the standard until the 1990s.
This copy has distinguished military provenance: B.H. Liddell Hart was a noted military theorist during the 1920s and 30s, and his emphasis on mechanised warfare - influenced by his experiences serving on the Western Front during the First World War - was claimed (largely by Hart himself) to have influenced the German Blitzkrieg tactic during the Second World War. Hart's reputation reached its greatest heights during the 1960s, when he was critical of the great powers' reliance on nuclear weapons: "when he visited Israel in 1960 his trip stimulated more public interest than any other foreign visitor except Marilyn Monroe" (Brian Holden Reid, "The Legacy of Liddell Hart" in British Journal for Military history, 1.1 (2014), p. 67).
PROVENANCE: Bookplate to front pastedown of B.H. Liddell Hart (1895-1970), British soldier, military historian and military theorist; title-page with ownership inscription, inkstamp and library label of Old Sleningford Hall, of Thomas Kitchenham Staveley (1790-1860), MP and captain in the Royal Engineers.
ESTC T111899.
Stock ID: 47109
