Author: YORKE (Philip), Second Earl of Harwicke:
Title: Lettres Atheniennes Lettres Athéniennes, ou Correspondance d'un Agent du Roi de Perse, à Athènes, pendant la guerre du Péloponèse; Traduites de l'Anglais, Par Alexandre-Louis Villeterque, Correspondant de l'Institut national de France. Orné de Douze Portraist Gravés au Burin; avec une Carte de l'ancien Grèce et un Index Georgraphique.
Description: Paris, Dentus, Impr.-Libraire..., 1803. 3 volumes, 8vo, 192 x 122 mms., pp. [5] 6 - 396; [iv], 408; [iv], 385 [386 test], including half-title in each volume and engraved portrait frontispiece in each volume, 9 other engraved portraits, folding engraved map at end of volume 3, attractively bound in contemporary half calf,, gilt spine, red leather labels, speckled boards, with the small oval library klabel "Bibliotheque de Cirey" on the front paste-down end-paper of each volume. A very good to fine set. While Yorke (1720 - 1790) was at Cambridge University with his brother brother Charles York (1722 - 1770), he "wrote the greater portion of the Athenian letters, or, The epistolary correspondence of an agent of the king of Persia, residing at Athens during the Peloponnesian War (1741). The latter work was an academic exercise edited by Thomas Birch, and other contributors included Henry Coventry, John Green, Samuel Salter, Catherine Talbot, Daniel Wray, George Henry Rooke, John Heaston, and John Lawry. The Athenian Letters was printed for private circulation only, with a first edition of only ten copies and a second, which did not appear until 1781, of 100 copies. In 1792 the vogue for historic fiction created by Barthélemy's Voyage de jeune Anacharsis en Grèce (1788) led to a pirated edition of the Letters being printed in Dublin, but this was subsequently suppressed and was superseded in 1798 by a new edition that had the imprimatur of the third earl of Hardwicke and was furnished with a geographical index, maps, and engravings. A new edition by Archdeacon Coxe appeared in 1810, and another edition was printed at Basel in 1800. There were also French translations by Villeterque and Christophe, published in Paris in 1803" (ODNB).

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