Abstract
This tightly packed, enjoyable monograph takes its title from one of Livy’s earliest editors in print, Andrea Bussi, who described Ab urbe condita – ‘From the foundation of the city’ (henceforth AUC) – as an ‘ocean untouched and untried’ (‘intactum pelagus atque inexpertum’, p. 1) and its author as a ‘Hercules of histories’ (p. 17). Already, Martial had described Livy, and his history of Rome, as ‘huge’ (‘ingens’, p. 17). Large areas of AUC’s immense expanses remain lost: only 34 of the AUC’s original 142 books, organised in decades, survive, although most of the Periochae, short summaries, are extant. Livy’s early modern European reception is just as immense, with numerous printed editions and a vast range of vernacular translations, which vary in size, format, and intent.
Charting Livy thus requires a steady hand on the helm, an unfailing eye on the compass, and the ability to set oneself a clear route. John-Mark Philo combines those navigational skills. Wisely, he has chosen to map just one area of the ocean, the Tudor translations of Livy and their enduring appeal under Charles I and during the English Civil War. So doing, he invites us to think more widely about the transmission and circulation of texts in multilingual terms, to consider the wider European seascape of this Anglo-Scottish reception, and the political and social environment in which Livy was read, translated, and appropriated.
Chapter 1 begins in Italy, where Livy’s literary fame was indeed a Renaissance of sorts. Only twenty-nine of his books were thought to have survived – further sections of the history were discovered in the early decades of the 16th century, to a background of rumours that attested a fascination with Livy: the discovery of a coffin in Padua thought to contain his remains led to a rush for fragments resembling the medieval traffic in holy relics. Some 50 editions were printed in the six decades that followed the 1469 editio princeps. In prefatory material, commentaries, and later vernacular translations, Virgil provided access to Livy since AUC picks up where the Aeneid – ‘a text familiar to every schoolboy of the period’ (p. 23) – leaves off, with Aeneas’s flight from Troy and arrival in Italy. Philo thus draws attention to the Renaissance method of reading – and refashioning – the classics through other classics that has, of late, received increasing critical attention. Tracing genealogies of textual transmission also reveals how medieval traditions remained relevant alongside new humanist ventures.
Chapters 2–5 turn to the British Isles and discuss five translations. The earliest was John Bellenden’s Scots rendering of the first five books in 1533: he approached Livy through Pierre Bersuire’s influential 14th-century translation, which circulated in manuscript, was printed in 1486 and endured until 1580. Bellenden’s version was followed by four translations into English, which roughly fall in two categories. Anthony Cope’s Historie of Two the Most Noble Capitaines of the World (1544) placed Hannibal and Scipio centre stage in his retelling of the Second Punic War. Like William Painter, who included self-contained narratives from Livy in the two volumes of The Palace of Pleasure (1566 and 1567), he condensed sections of AUC and favoured an ‘Anglo-centric lexis’ (p. 28). William Thomas and Philemon Holland attempted meticulous translations and incorporated ‘Latinate vocabulary’ (p. 28): Holland’s Romane Historie, published in 1600, was the only complete translation into English, published in 1600 in a massive folio volume of over 1400 pages, with an appendix on the topography of Rome and two indexes, a feat few have equalled since. Philo’s approach subtly combines close readings of passages against the Latin text and broader contextualisations that embrace political considerations, social debates, as well as, in the case of Cope, the commercial rationale of the printers who published them.
What emerges is the extent to which the translators varied in their agendas, reflecting ‘pressing political and cultural concerns of their particular historical moments’ (p. 38). In his prologue to James V, who commissioned the translation, Bellenden drew attention to the patriotic potential of Livy’s History, and the instruction it could provide in the arts of war. Cope’s truncated approach (chapter 2) was similarly political, though from a different perspective; he focused on key historical figures, thereby complementing a vogue for the printing of speeches from Livy. Cope used his selection of portraits to justify the war against Scotland and conversely modelled his depiction of the Carthaginians on chroniclers’ representations of the Scots as deceitful.
Thomas’s Argument Wherin the Apparaile of Women is both Reproved and Defended (1551), discussed in chapter 3, foregrounded the revolt of Roman women against the Lex Oppia, a law that proscribed women’s use of gold and dyed cloths at the height of the Second Punic War. Philo contextualises the publication of this small duodecimo volume, of which only one copy has been identified, within the female-centric commercial strategy of Thomas Berthelet, the king’s printer: texts coming out of his shop in praise of women and in defence of their education included translations of Agrippa’s De Nobilitate and Vives’ De Institutione foeminae christianae.
Philo then turns to Painter and Shakespeare (chapter 4), reading their respective versions of the story of Lucrece against other, contemporary references, as in Edward III. While the focus, especially in Shakespeare’s poem, is on Lucrece’s rape and her inner thoughts leading up to her suicide, Philo traces how tapping Livy’s, as well as Ovid’s version of the story ensures the presence of a political component that Shakespeare activates throughout his Roman plays. This is to some extent mediated by Painter who, returning to Livy, foregrounds Brutus’ ‘dramatic and political potential’ (p. 104) as an ‘Ur-republican’ (p. 165) – a potential Thomas Heywood went on to stage in his popular play, The Rape of Lucrece, first published in 1608, which receives only a passing reference in this volume. Philo draws attention to the way Shakespeare links Lucrece’s fate to that of Rome. Livy saw in the Capitol and its temple to Jupiter ‘physical testaments to the transition from monarchy to republic’ (p. 109), and the sacred hill is a powerful presence not only in Shakespeare’s Lucrece but in his Roman plays, a ‘synecdoche for Roman political and military power’ (p. 110), that he refers to alongside allusions to the banishment of the Tarquins.
Chapter 5 looks at Livy as an under-explored intertext in Macbeth. Returning to the chronicles, Philo recalls how they were ‘already imbued with Livy’s History of Rome’ (p. 116), since their authors turned to AUC to fill in gaps in British ‘national’ history: Boece, for instance, whom Bellenden also translated into Scots, modelled Macbeth on Tarquin the Proud and Lady Macbeth on Tarquin’s wife Tullia. It has been less frequently observed that Lady Macbeth also resembles Tanaquil, an earlier, equally ruthless, Roman queen – the two being brought together in Painter. Through attention to subtle details (pp. 117–20), Philo persuasively suggests that, besides drawing on Holinshed, Shakespeare may have had access to Bellenden’s translation of Boece.
Chapter 6 considers how Holland’s translation became a classic during the English Civil War, when opposing factions sought authority for their viewpoints in Livy, directly or through Machiavel’s Discorsi, which provided another fruitful mediation throughout Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. While this use of AUC belonged to a wider intellectual trend that turned to the classics to help conceptualise – and justify – the conflict, Livy was, Philo argues, ‘without exaggeration the most prominent ancient historian of the Civil War era…exploited by parliamentarians, royalists and Levellers alike’ (p. 162). William Prynne traced an analogy between Livy’s account of Tarquin the Proud and Charles I; others described his son, the future Charles II, as a ‘young Tarquin’, aligning him with Lucrece’s rapist. John Milton spoke of Oliver Cromwell and Junius Brutus as liberators. Debates on the appropriate attitude to one’s opponents also tapped into Livy, especially on the opportunity of the ‘media via’ (p. 156), the medium way between punishment and pardon.
Except for a few typos (misspelling the names of André Lefevere and Albert Feuillerat), this volume is carefully produced. It is a welcome contribution to the mapping of early modern engagements with the classics, in public debates and in the personal annotations of a careful reader like Gabriel Harvey. In drawing attention, through Livy, to cross-generic webs of encounters and refashionings, Philo confirms that the classics were at the heart not only of literary and artistic creation, but also of contemporary debates and events, which they helped conceptualise.