Title page
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Printer's Mark
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Illustration
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In the Timaeus, Plato gives us a vision of a universe regulated by musical proportions. The "world soul" which he describes is divided into related parts, organized according to the principles of a musical scale. The mathematical proportions found in music thus raise the art into the region of philosophy and metaphysics. Music rests in the very basis of the universe - through it order is brought into the world. At every level of existence, music is a controlling factor, the result of having been placed in the universe at its inception by its Maker.

This commentary on the Timaeus was published by Josse Badius Ascensius (1462-1535), whose presses produced no less than four hundred separate works of classical authors. His was the first French press to produce works with Greek type, as seen in this edition. Badius himself was something of a scholar, giving lectures in Paris and Lyons on the Latin poets. He also published editions of the Adagia for Erasmus, who generally appreciated Badius' scholarship. The famous printer's mark of the Ascension press (the second illustration) was a depiction of a sixteenth-century printing press.