.A remarkable Aldine edition of Carlo Sigonio s fundamental work on Roman history, accompanied for the first time by an extensive commentary by the author. Sigonio s treatise on Roman names is included at the end. .An Italian humanist and historian, Carlo Sigonio (1524-1584) was elected professor of Greek in Modena, his native city, in 1546. Later, he worked as a professor of humanities in Venice, Padua and Bologna. A scholar of Livy and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Sigonio was already interested in the problem of Roman chronology when, in 1546, a mass of fragments of the monumental Fasti of Augustus was discovered in the Forum Romanorum in Rome. This new epigraphical document of great importance is at the basis of his Fasti Consulares , a revised list of Roman kings, republican consuls, consular tribunes, censors, dictators and magistri equitum, with the triumphs they had celebrated, from the regal period to Tiberius. Sigonio s Fasti represents a crucial development to the previous chronologies based only on literary sources, and his insistence on critical methods for reconstructing the past revolutionized the study of ancient Roman history (McCuaig). A complete commentary on the Fasti was published in this 1556 edition for the first time, and it is essentially a manual of Roman history. . De nominibus Romanorum liber is a short but noteworthy treatise on Roman names. It begins with a presentation of the roman system of three names (praenomen, nomen, cognomen); then, it provides a list of all Roman personal and family names with an explanation of their geographical origin and etymological meaning. The etymology of the name Cesar is one of the most fascinating: Sigonio, quoting the grammarian Servius, notes that in the Punic language Caesar means elephant, and that this name was originally attributed to a man who killed an elephant during the Punic wars. This interpretation is accompanied by two woodcuts depicting a Roman coin with an elephant and the inscription CAESAR on one side, and weapons on the other side.
