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Leighton Library has 6 volumes of 1790-91 edition of "Travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece" by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy
Added at 08:40 on 24 February 2025
🏛️ #OnThisDay 24 February 1795, Reverend Mr Robert Campbell (1738-1803), Minister of Erskine Secession Church in Stirling from 1766-1803, borrowed books from Dunblane's historic Leighton Library. He borrowed 6 volumes of the 1790-91 edition of "Travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece" by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy. Robert Campbell had paid the subscription of 10 shillings & sixpence to be able to borrow books from the Leighton Library. These 6 volumes were a fictional work about the travels of the Scythian named Anacharsis in Greece in the middle of the 4th century BCE, written by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy and first published in 1788. The books gave a fanciful but learned imaginary travel journal, one of the first historical novels. It also included a supplementary volume of maps and reproductions of coins. The novel was hugely popular, appeared in about eighty editions, and helped stir an interest in ancient Greek culture. Barthélemy highlighted the mundane, everyday activities, settings and objects that history itself often overlooks. Barthelemy was a classical scholar and an enthusiast for Greek antiquities, and poured his extensive knowledge and research into the book to describe the laws, government, religion, philosophy, art and antiquities of ancient Greece, and he cited all his sources in exhaustive footnotes
