The Monument, or, Christopher Wren's Roman Accent
To commemorate the Great Fire, the Corporation of London commissioned Christopher Wren to design the Monument. This article identifies its formal sources in ancient Roman triumphal columns and in a sixteenth-century fluted Tuscan Doric column in Paris, in the inscription on the Column of Trajan, and in a passage from Ammianus Marcellinus. Textual models for the Latin inscriptions on the pedestal include Suetonius's Augustus, Seneca the Younger's Epistle no. 91, and Tacitus's Annals. The political situation in Restoration England cast references to Tacitus into oblivion, yet this commission demonstrates how Wren's knowledge of Latin had a determining effect on his architectural practice.
Politics and Translation: The English Tacitus of 1698
In 1698 the London publisher Matthew Gillyflower issued a collaborative translation of Tacitus's Annals and Histories, the first English Tacitus in a century.' The book reached a second and final edition in 1716; thereafter it was remembered only to be dismissed as a hurried rendering of Amelot de la Houssaye's Tacite avec des Notes Politiques et Historiques.? Of course, many translations of the Roman historians appeared in the later seventeenth century and have been similarly forgotten, but Gillyflower's Tacitus has a number of claims on our attention. Among Gillyflower's contributors was John Dryden, then engaged in a series of brilliant translations distinguished no less by their subtle and at times pointed topical allusiveness than by their literary authority. In the Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1693), the Works of Virgil (1697), and Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), the former laureate found repeated occasion to reflect on English politics, to regret the decline of civic ideals, and to deplore the consequences of the Glorious Revolution. And Tacitus provided a particularly suitable vehicle for such purposes: his emphasis on deceit and indirection, his suspicion of political motives, his warnings against arbitrary power, his arraignment of courtly hypocrisy and greed: all could be turned against the Revolution and the regime of William III. Even Tacitus's reputation for highminded republicanism would have appealed to Dryden at a time when the republican critique of arbitrary power could be thrust against William's government.3 In To My Honor'd Kinsman (1700), a work he described as "a Memorial of my own Principles to all Posterity,"4 Dryden assumes a Tacitean detachment and disinterestedness in order to present his cousin Driden as a model of republican virtue steering his way
A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700
It is a historical commonplace that Renaissance historians studied and modelled their works on the histories of the great historians of Greece and Rome. But these ancient historians were not equally popular in this period, nor with the same people, nor for the same reasons. It is with these variations that this survey is concerned. It attempts to chart the variations in their popularity, by counting their editions and classifying them by countries and phases; to work out the varying reasons for their popularity, by means of the analysis of their reputations; and to take some steps toward the discovery of the audience of these ancient historians. The period for which these attempts will be made is 1450 to 1700: between the invention of printing, when edition analysis becomes possible, and the victory of the "moderns" in the "Battle of the Books," when the ancients cease to be considered as greater than any modern historians. This study is, then, a small contribution to the study of the diffusion or "reception" of the classical historians, and also an attempt to find some quantitative evidence for statements about changing tastes in history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Editions of twenty-one works of seventeen historians were analyzed (Sallust, Tacitus, Josephus, and Xenophon each being represented by two works, the others by one). The figures here, as elsewhere in this note, are taken from a single source: F. L. A. Schweiger, Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie, three volumes (Leipzig, 1830-4). This source is not complete; it can be shown to lack a considerable number of Spanish translations, for example. However, I have used it because it would take many years' work to produce a complete list, and because I hope that the relationships expressed in the figures I have drawn from it are generally valid, even if the precise figures are not. If it is biased in any way, it is likely to be in over-representing German editions and translations, as Schweiger gleaned most carefully in that field.