Homer Among Moderns

HOMER AMONG THE MODERNS
Volumes from
The Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana
Supervised by
Ada Palmer
at the University of Chicago
Chicago, USA
2015
Produced for the spring 2015 Renaissance Humanism graduate seminar
taught by Ada Palmer at the University of Chicago.
This book is the result of the collective and collaborative effort of a group
brought together by the desire to learn. The following individuals each
made a valuable contribution to this project:
Online Publication Manager Hilary Barker

Conclusion Nicholas Bellinson
Introduction Beatrice Bradley
Digital File Coordinator George Elliott
Consistency Proofreading Ji Gao
Index Javier Ibanez
Bibliography Blaze Marpet
Online Publication Editor Natalie Parrish
Front Matter Editor Angela Parkinson
Catalog Description & Section Introduction Editor Camille Reynolds
File Assembly Manager Medardo Rosario
Citation Editor Noor Shawaf
Page Design Brendan Michael Small
Style Sheet Manager Felix Szabo
Print Publication Manager Elizabeth Tavella
Cover Design Goda Thangada & Ada Palmer
Project Manager & Image Manager Margo Weitzman
Peer Review & Copy Editing Supervisor Tali Winkler
Supervising Editor Ada Palmer

Managing Editor Margo Weitzman
Section Editors Blaze Marpet, Mack Muldofsky, Medardo Rosario,
Lauren Schiller, Noor Shawaf, Brendan Small, Elizabeth Tavella, Margo
Weitzman, Tali Winkler
© The several contributors 2015
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced

into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without
the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except by a reviewer
who may quote brief passages in a review. Enquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope above should be sent to individual chapter
authors, or to Ada Palmer, University of Chicago, Department of History,
1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.
Limited edition of 80 copies, printed by Blurb in San Francisco, USA.

First printing, December 2015.
ISBN 978–1–944140–00–7
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Led by Professor Ada Palmer from the University of Chicago Department of
History, this volume began life as a part of the hands-on curriculum to teach
the history of the book through the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana.
This Publication was Made Possible by the Generous Help and Support of:
Julia Gardner and Catherine Uecker, Special Collections Research Center at
the University of Chicago Library
William McHugh, Reference Collection Management Librarian at
Northwestern University
M. C. Lang and the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana, The University of Chicago
Library
The University of Chicago Department of Romance Languages and
Literatures, Italian Section
The University of Chicago Department of Classics
The Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago Department of History
The University of Chicago Digital Library Development Center
The Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago
iii
PREFACE
Every book has many makers. This book was authored, edited and
published by graduate students in a seminar on Renaissance
Humanism at the University of Chicago. Renaissance scholars devoted
herculean levels of labor and love, not just to writing, but to editing
and publishing texts, creating the libraries which they hoped would
shape a better world. It can be difficult to remember today just how
many makers it took to bring us the crisp, affordable Homer volumes
which now grace every bookstore. This project explores that
transformation from the outside, and the inside. Exploring from the
outside, the essays we produced about Renaissance editions of Homer
in the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago
Library chronicle the transformation of Homer’s text from precious
manuscripts, to bulky incunables, to comfortable octavos, to accessible
vernaculars, combining approaches from Art History, Classics,
Comparative Literature, English, History, and Romance Languages to
showcase the rich avenues of inquiry opened by what may be the most
multivalent of all human technologies: the book. Exploring from the
inside, the publication of this volume is our own modest contribution
to the long Homeric tradition. By living the same labors as our
subjects—transcription, translation, standardization, typography—we
learned by doing far more viscerally than we could by just repeating
the perennial lesson: every book has many makers, and every maker
transforms the work more subtly and more completely than the word
“author” leads us to believe.
— Ada Palmer
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & PREFACE iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS v
INTRODUCTION. Homer Among the Moderns 1

Beatrice Bradley
SECTION I: PRINTING AND PUBLICATION

Introduction
Jo Nixon 11
Chapter 1. First Impressions: the editio princeps of 1489
Nicholas Bellinson 13
Chapter 2. Ogilby and the Odyssey
George D. Elliott 25
Chapter 3. Fancy That: An Essay on Hobbes’ Homer
Blaze Marpet 35
Chapter 4. Literary London: Pope’s Iliad and the Eighteenth-Century
Book Trade
Margo Weitzman 49
SECTION II: TRANSLATION PRACTICES

Introduction
Goda Thangada 59
Chapter 5. Constructions of Authorship in Valla’s Iliad
Beatrice Bradley 61
Chapter 6. The Editorial and Ideological Project of Lodovico Dolce’s
L’Achille et l’Enea
Elizabeth Tavella 79
Chapter 7. The Thing’s a Sling: Source Squabbles and Mistranslation in
Chapman’s 1611 Iliad
Jo Nixon 93
Chapter 8. Paratext as Metatext and Metafiction: Contextualizing Honest
Satire in Thomas Bridges’ A Burlesque Translation of Homer
Angela Lei Parkinson 107
v
SECTION III: IMAGES
Introduction
Brendan Small 123
Chapter 9. Illustrating the Classics and the Self: John Ogilby and
his Self-Fashioning Portraits
Tali Winkler 127
Chapter 10. Expectation and Image(-ination): The Purpose and
Reuse of Woodcuts in the Books of Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari
Hilary Barker 147
Chapter 11. In Chapman’s Forge: Mistranslation as Ekphrastic Resistance
Javier Ibanez 169
Chapter 12. Henri Estienne’s Concepts of History and Poetry
Goda Thangada 181
SECTION IV: NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

Introduction
Angela Lei Parkinson 195
Chapter 13. Homer, Venice, and Byzantium: Aldus Manutius’ First
Edition of the Iliad
Felix Szabo 199
Chapter 14. Alfonso, Valla, & Homer: Poetry and Politics in
Renaissance Naples
Camille Reynolds 211
Chapter 15. The Language Question: Cultural Politics of the Medici Dynasty
Brendan Michael Small 221
Chapter 16. Translating Homer in the French Renaissance: The 1584
French Verse Translation of the Iliad
Ji Gao 239
Chapter 17. “Too Much of a Modern Beau”: Macpherson’s Iliad and the
Nationalist Epic
Noor Shawaf 253
CONCLUSION. Homer Among the Shades

Nicholas Bellinson 263
APPENDIX & INDEX 269
vi
Introduction
Homer Among the Moderns
BEATRICE BRADLEY
Early in the Iliad, Helen defends her lover, the “blind mad
Paris,” to his brother, and she tells Hector, “Zeus planted a killing
doom within us both, / so even for generations still unborn / we will
live in song.”1 Excusing her role in the destruction of Troy, she under-
stands the carnage as the price they all must pay for fame. The trope of
immortality through literature, life through song, is so familiar to a
modern audience that it has become near cliché. Yet the concept be-
gan with Homer, in the nascence of the written word, and in Helen’s
reference to future generations, the poet bridges the divide between
the oral and literary tradition: Helen foretells a lasting existence
through “song,” but she will require a medium for transmission so
enduring that the story of Troy will reach those still unborn. However,
due to the decline of ancient Greek in Western Europe during the
Middle Ages, the mythic figures of Homer almost died a second death,
as they faded from literary consciousness.
From antiquity through the late medieval and early modern
periods, the work of classical Roman poets appeared more frequently
in circulation than Greek texts, for Latin remained in use in religious
writing and in educated circles. Yet the literary world by and large did
not regain the ability to read Greek and therefore did not have access
to the Hellenic poets of antiquity until the fifteenth century, when
scholars began to produce renditions of the Homeric works in dia-
logue with the original Greek text. Following the advent of the print-
ing press, these translations and reworkings of the ancient poet were
able to reach a far broader audience than had earlier manuscript ver-
sions. Thus, Homer exerted immense influence on the readership of
1 Robert Fagles, trans., The Iliad (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 6.423–6.
Beatrice Bradley B
the Renaissance, and it is these early print editions and their long-term
significance that this volume will address.
The aim of this collection is to consider the publication of
Homeric texts in the Renaissance in the context of early modern clas-
sical reception as well as in relation to the history of the book and the
production of books as material objects. The scholarship in this vol-
ume is necessarily interdisciplinary—the widespread and variant edi-
tions of the Renaissance allow and encourage multiple academic ap-
proaches—and, as such, the resulting essays participate in classical
studies, the history of the book, art history, biographical history, and
translation studies. These disciplines converge to generate vastly dif-
ferent readings of Homer, the Homeric texts, and their evolution in
early modern Europe. The collection of essays in this volume delivers
a multifaceted examination of the Hellenic influence on Renaissance
thought and moreover provides a new lens for the study of Homer.
Even as the chapters engage with widely variant translations—written
in several languages and with differing degrees of faithfulness to the
original text—the authors of this volume work in concert to offer nu-
anced approaches that emphasize the vitality of the Homeric text in
Renaissance Europe.
THE BIBLIOTHECA HOMERICA LANGIANA
This volume is especially unusual in that all of its scholarship

treats books to some degree as a material object and does not merely
deal with the text in abstract terms. The authors within worked closely
with the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana, a collection of Homeric
works at the University of Chicago Library, and the editions cited in
this volume were often consulted in person. The book collector M. C.
Lang gave the collection to the University in 2007, and it contains an
expansive assortment of Homeric texts spanning the fifteenth to the
twentieth century.2 Given this volume’s focus on Renaissance engage-
ment with Homer, the chapters cover a wide publication history, from
2 See Alice Schreyer in her preface to Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Homeri-
ca Langiana at the University of Chicago Library, eds. Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Library, 2013), vii.
2
Introduction
a 1489 incunable Greek edition to a 1773 English translation of

Homer. Bridging nearly three hundred years of translation practices,
this volume works closely with the Bibliotheca to demonstrate how
the spread of Homeric texts across Europe shaped generations of
readership, generations that gave rise to and formed our own concep-
tions of Homer.
THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK
In emphasizing the book as artifact, the authors of this vol-

ume understand the book as at once being produced by and exerting
an influence on a historical period.3 In his seminal essay, “What Is the
History of Books?,” Robert Darnton defines the purpose of the disci-
pline as, “to understand how ideas were transmitted through print and
how exposure to the printed word affected the thought and behavior
of mankind during the last five hundred years.”4 He diagrams what he
describes as a “Communications Circuit,” the path through which
books and with them ideas were disseminated in a given society, and
he lists the major factors: authors, publishers, printers, shippers,
booksellers, and readers. His circuit has been heavily debated and
much revised in current scholarship—including a subsequent 2007
essay by Darnton himself—to encompass various other factors, such
as piracy, commercial structures, or religious institutions. 5 Neverthe-
less, Darnton’s original six categories in the circuit are integral to the
history of books. The essays in this volume remain in conversation
with his foundational tenets and simultaneously seek to expand our
understanding of the many factors in Renaissance culture that led to
book production.
The Homeric opus, much in demand, was published across
countries and cultures, which thus produced more errors, more copies,
3 In their introduction to A Companion to the History of the Book, Eliot and Rose argue
that the history of the book is “based on two apparently simple premises”: “books
make history” and “books are made by history.” See Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose,
eds., A Companion to the History of the Book (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 1.
4 Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (1982): 65.
5 Robert Darnton, “‘What Is the History of Books?’ Revisited,” Modern Intellectual His-
tory 4, no. 4 (2007): 495–508.
3
Beatrice Bradley B
and more extant editions today than resulted from a lesser-known

work. The wide degree of variation in the Homeric texts of the Renais-
sance encourages us to consider the books themselves as material ob-
jects: that is, to examine the early modern copies for potential errors
that may be elided in modern editions; to assess how the printer set
the page and how the layout itself shapes our reading experience; to
inquire how images, whether woodcuts or engravings, work with or
against the written word; and to carefully attend to the views expressed
in the often lengthy paratextual materials. It should be noted that sev-
eral editions included in this volume are unavailable outside rare books
libraries and must be returned to in their original form in order to be
read at all. Moreover, although modern editions of Homer provide a
certain ease when reading his work, we must keep in mind that recent
translations are by no means contained in themselves but are instead
the product of a rich translation history that has been filled with varia-
tions, uncertainties, and tensions. In this respect, the following collec-
tion of essays provides a necessary background to contemporary read-
ings of Homer and enriches our understanding of the dynamic process
that is translation.
HOMER AND HUMANIST STUDY
Scholars have long debated how to define “humanism,” and

Nicholas Mann notes this in his discussion of the term, at last describ-
ing it as follows:
It involves above all the rediscovery and study of an-

cient Greek and Roman texts, the restoration and in-
terpretation of them and the assimilation of the ideas
and values they contain. It ranges from archeological
interest in the remains of the past to a highly focused
philological attention to the details of all manner of
written records—from inscriptions to epic poems—
but comes to pervade […] almost all areas of post-
medieval culture, including theology, philosophy, po-
litical thought, jurisprudence, medicine, mathematics
4
Introduction
and the creative arts. Grounded in what we would

now think of as learned research, it rapidly found ex-
pression in teaching. And in this way it was to be-
come the embodiment of, and vehicle for, that very
classical tradition that is the most fundamental aspect
of the continuity of European cultural and intellectual
history.6
The inclusivity of this definition and its attention to the long-term ef-
fects of fourteenth-century humanism is very much in line with the
scholarship of this volume and its view of Renaissance engagement
with classical sources. Although this collection focuses primarily on
early modern humanist practice, the classical revival began with Pet-
rarch and his call for a return to antiquity. 7 Italian scholars, among
them the chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, used the word
“humanism” as early as the fourteenth century:8 they adopted it from
the Latin phrase studia humanitatis, which appears in numerous classical
texts—including several of Cicero’s speeches—to describe an educa-
tional system that resembled what we would consider the liberal arts.9
At first popular in Italy, humanist study rivaled and eventually sur-
passed scholasticism as the primary mode of inquiry in universities
throughout the continent and England.
The early humanist movement necessarily focused on Latin
texts. Although post-classical Greek was still widely spoken in the
Mediterranean basin and trade routes existed between Italy and Byzan-
tium, the language was mostly lost in medieval Europe. 10 Petrarch
studied Greek with a tutor, Leonzio Pilato, in 1358, but few advances
were made; Pilato’s Latin translations of the Iliad and Odyssey were
largely incomprehensible.11 It was not until 1396, when Salutati invited
6 Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renais-
sance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2.
7 For an extended discussion of Petrarch and humanism, see Mann, “The Origins of
Humanism,” 8–16.
8 See Michael D. Reeve, “Classical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renais-
sance Humanism, 21–22.

9 Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” 1; Reeve, “Classical Scholarship,” 21–22.
10 Ibid., 32.
11 Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” 16.
5
Beatrice Bradley B
the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras to teach at the University

of Florence that at last Greek was accessible to Italian scholars. Not
only did Chrysoloras provide classes and lectures on the famous Hel-
lenic poets—including, of course, Homer—but his grammar, Erotemata
(“Questions”), became immensely popular. 12 The grammar allowed
scholars to study Greek at home, thus no longer needing to travel to
Florence, and the language was able to spread at a greater speed.
Chrysoloras argued for the fluidity of translation, instructing his stu-
dents to forgo the verbatim stylistic choices of Pilato and others in
favor of their own artistic renditions.13 Such an approach to translation
informed Renaissance humanist practices for centuries, as many of the
essays in this volume emphasize.
The study of classical Greek continued and in fact grew in the
fifteenth century, thanks to the influx of Hellenic manuscripts and the
advent of the Gutenberg press. In 1453, following the invasion and
subsequent overthrow of Constantinople by the Turkish army, large
numbers of Greek citizens migrated into Italy, bringing with them
manuscripts and their knowledge of the language.14 This event, com-
bined with several expeditions into Greece to bring back manuscripts,
led to a rapid influx of Hellenic texts and, as Michael D. Reeve ex-
plains, “By 1500 nearly all the Greek literature that survives today had
reached Italian libraries” (36). In 1496, the Venetian printer and schol-
ar Aldus Manutius began his series of printed classical texts, providing
standardized and clean copies of works that had previously been inac-
cessible.15 With these Aldine texts and the explosion of print in gen-
eral, humanist study was able to expand across Europe.16
12 Reeve, “Classical Scholarship,” 33–34.

13 Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” 16.
14 Reeve, “Classical Scholarship,” 34.
15 For a discussion of Aldus Manutius’ influence on humanist study, see Martin Da-
vies, “Humanism in Script and Print in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Renaissance Humanism, 57–60.
16 David Shaw, “The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century,” in Compan-
ion to the History of the Book, 207.
6
Introduction
ABOUT THIS VOLUME
This volume exists in four sections, divided for the reader’s

convenience. Section I, “Publication, Book-making, Biography,” be-
gins with Nicholas Bellinson’s “First Impressions: The editio princeps of
1489,” an essay that underscores the impressive temporal range of this
volume in its discussion of an early print edition of the Iliad. Bellinson
contextualizes the Homeric text as emerging from the humanist tradi-
tion of Petrarch and discusses at length the copy in the University of
Chicago Library with special attention to its binding and handwritten
annotations. In his chapter “Ogilby and the Odyssey,” George Elliott
likewise refers to the Bibliotheca and in particular an edition of John
Ogilby’s Odyssey. Elliott provides a biographical examination of the
translator’s work, and he discusses in detail how the 1665 edition re-
flects Ogilby’s ambition and personal struggles. Blaze Marpet’s essay
entitled “Fancy That: An Essay on Hobbes’ Homer” considers a con-
temporary of Ogilby, Thomas Hobbes. Marpet argues that the philos-
opher’s 1667 Iliad and Odyssey, much maligned in recent criticism, in
fact acted as a last resort for Hobbes, who was no longer allowed to
publish philosophical treatises. With a close attention to the word
“fancy,” this essay situates Hobbes’ treatment of epic in relation to his
earlier work. Rounding out this section, Margo Weitzman also ex-
plores the historical factors involved in translation in her chapter, “Lit-
erary London: Pope’s Iliad and the Eighteenth-Century Book Trade.”
Weitzman reads Alexander Pope’s Iliad within the ambit of his literary
career and in the larger scope of London’s book trade.
Following Weitzman, Section II, “Literary / Philological
Translation Practices,” offers a survey of the ideologies and stylistic
choices that shaped early modern editions of Homer in vernacular and
Latin translations. In “Constructions of Authorship in Valla’s Iliad,”
Beatrice Bradley reads Lorenzo Valla’s translation of the Iliad in the
context of the 1522 edition’s printed marginalia and index, composed
after the humanist’s death, and she discusses how the editorial inter-
ventions shape the text. Elizabeth Tavella turns our attention to the
1570 edition of L’Achille et l’Enea, an interweaving of Homer’s Iliad and
Virgil’s Aeneid into one poem. Her essay, “The Editorial and Ideologi-
7
Beatrice Bradley B
cal Project of Lodovico Dolce’s L’Achille et l’Enea,” emphasizes the

translator’s attempts to cater to a contemporary audience and his en-
gagement with popular literary genres. Similarly interested in the trans-
lator’s relationship with his audience, Jo Nixon considers George
Chapman’s efforts to anglicize the Iliad in “The Thing’s a Sling: Source
Squabbles and Mistranslation in Chapman’s 1611 Iliad.” She carefully
examines how the translator’s claims of accuracy, which he asserts in
his extensive paratexts, are belied by his in-text treatment of Homer.
Moving into the eighteenth century and thus demonstrating the long-
term effects of Renaissance translation practices, Angela Parkinson
explores Thomas Bridges’ 1772 A Burlesque Translation of Homer in her
chapter, “Paratext as Metatext and Metafiction: Contextualizing Hon-
est Satire in Thomas Bridges’ A Burlesque Translation of Homer.” Parkin-
son argues that Bridges’ treatment of the Iliad provides a satirical ren-
dition of the Greek poet in its tongue-in-cheek suppositions of
Homer’s hidden designs.
Section III, “Images,” discusses the visual representations in
Homeric texts and how illustrations can work in conjunction with
translation practices to inform our reading. Tali Winkler returns to
Ogilby in her chapter, “Illustrating the Classics and the Self: John
Ogilby and his Self-Fashioning Portraits.” Winkler discusses the im-
port of the translator’s frontispiece portrait, which appears in several
of his published works in the seventeenth century, and she explores
how Ogilby thereby crafted his own authorial persona. Hilary Barker
likewise attends to the impact of illustration in her essay, “Expectation
and Image(-ination): The Purpose and Reuse of Woodcuts in the
Books of Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari,” which traces the use of woodcut
images in both the 1542 Italian edition of Orlando Furioso and the 1570
L’Achille et l’Enea di Lodovico Dolce. In his article, “In Chapman’s Forge:
Mistranslation as Ekphrastic Resistance,” Javier Ibáñez urges us to
consider the ways in which translators made use of Homer’s famously
vivid poetic imagery in their reworkings of the text; in particular, Ibá-
ñez focuses on George Chapman’s treatment of Achilles’ shield in his
1616 translation of the Iliad. Finally, Goda Thangada’s “Henri Es-
tienne’s Concepts of History and Poetry” discusses Estienne’s ornate
and lavish anthology of seemingly unrelated Greek poets, and Thanga-
8
Introduction
da seeks to understand Homer’s place in the collection. She argues that

the 1566 anthology was greatly influenced by Estienne’s approach to
history, which he understood as necessarily interconnected with poet-
ry.
The final section, Section IV, “Nationalism and National
Identity,” considers the potential for political expression in translations
of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Felix Szabo’s chapter, “Homer, Venice,
and Byzantium: Aldus Manutius’ First Edition of the Iliad,” demon-
strates that such political and nationalistic concerns have long gov-
erned translations of Homer. Szabo considers Manutius’ apparent fail-
ure to consult the Byzantine manuscript of the Iliad, the tenth-century
Venutus, and she situates the 1504 Aldine edition in the greater cultural
climate of sixteenth-century Venice. Camille Reynolds also explores
the politics of Renaissance Italy in her essay, “Alfonso, Valla, &
Homer: Poetry and Politics in Renaissance Naples.” Reynolds provides
another reading of Valla, examining his relationship with his patron,
King Alfonso of Aragon, and argues for increased contemporary at-
tention to the way Valla’s translation of the Iliad functioned as a politi-
cal tool. Brendan Small further discusses the role of Italian politics in
humanist translation, and his chapter, “The Language Question: The
Cultural Politics of the Medici Dynasty,” carefully considers the impact
of the Tuscan dialect and its cultural influence on Girolamo Baccelli’s
1582 L’Odissea D’Homero Tradotto in Volgare Fiorentino. Ji Gao’s “Trans-
lating Homer in the French Renaissance: The 1584 French Verse
Translation of the Iliad” similarly emphasizes the tensions in vernacu-
lar translation. In particular, Gao analyzes the translation practices in-
volved in a late sixteenth-century translation of the Iliad—a collabora-
tive endeavor at the hands of several translators—and he presents it as
being deeply informed by French nationalism. We end with Noor
Shawaf’s discussion of James Macpherson’s 1773 rendition of Homer
in her essay, “‘Too Much of a Modern Beau’: Macpherson’s Iliad and
the Nationalist Epic.” She outlines the ways in which the translator
challenges the Greek poet’s supremacy over the epic as a political form
and the weaknesses of previous translations. This section spans centu-
ries and traverses countries to demonstrate the many political aims
9
Beatrice Bradley B
invested in the translations of Homer’s texts, and it embodies the wide

range of scholarship that is found throughout the chapters.
CONCLUSION
This volume asks the reader to consider the many renditions

of Homer in Renaissance Europe—the translations that provided the
foundation for our modern readings of the great epic poet—and in so
doing, it emphasizes the many potentialities of book history. Although
the history of the book is ever evolving, this volume offers the reader
an in-depth and innovative approach to the reception studies of
Homer and proposes new avenues for further research. When we
study the Renaissance and the humanist movement, we must also con-
sider the books it produced and how they were distributed, for
through attention to the publication practices and readership of early
modern Europe we can better understand the circulation and genera-
tion of humanist ideals. Indeed, it is the growing print trade of the fif-
teenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries that allowed for such ide-
als to take hold and become integral in modern day study. In these
essays’ varied approaches to the historical contexts that surrounded
the Renaissance printing of Homer—at once considering economic,
social, and cultural factors—this collection provides a interdisciplinary
reading of Homeric text. As in response to the premonition of Helen,
the volume gives voice to Homer’s song, revealing how Renaissance
translations of the classics have reverberated across generations and
echo still in contemporary thought.
10
Section One
Printing and Publication
JO NIXON
Necessarily, most essays in a collection about volumes of

Homeric epic will dip into the circumstances of their publication. Any
essay chosen at random from Homer Among the Moderns weaves a rich
tapestry of Homeric reception, historical circumstances, and printing
conditions. And reducing the four papers in this section to the single
theme of “Printing and Publication” is certainly impossible. Each author
in this section offers the nuances involved in their particular subjects;
nonetheless, together they compile information on the different aspects
of publication, from book size to public opinion. Furthermore, the four
chapters are tied together by the authors’ research at the University of
Chicago.
Nicholas Bellinson’s “First Impressions: The editio princeps of
1489” introduces this section and the volume at large with his
considerations of Homeric reception in Italy. Through his careful gaze,
we examine the University of Chicago’s copy of the editio princeps,
scrutinizing the marginalia and the content of the missing pages.
Bellinson balances this micro-view with a helpful history of both the
historical environs of the editio princeps and Homeric reception more
generally. The return to the roots of the Homeric revival in the western
world through a particular printed volume prepares us for the jump
across time and place to the projects on John Ogilby, Thomas Hobbes,
and Alexander Pope.
We turn to George Elliott’s “Ogilby and the Odyssey.” This
chapter provides a rich biography of the translator/cartographer’s life
before moving to the Homeric volume and the lottery publishing
technique that contributed to its success. Like Bellinson, Elliott
considers both the University of Chicago volume specifically—noting its
current calfskin rebinding—and the production of printing the volume
at large. Through the narrative of Ogilby’s life, Elliott lays bare the
political and mercantile facets of late-seventeenth-century British
printing. For example, he examines the physical aspects of the book—
such as the high quality paper—and the lack of copyright laws that
prompted Ogilby to use his political connections for publication
protection. I should note that Elliott’s chapter harmonizes with another
chapter on Ogilby by Tali Winkler (see Section Three).
If Elliott, through politics and business, continues Bellinson’s
project of considering Homeric reception, then Blaze Marpet’s “Fancy
That: An Essay on Hobbes’ Homer” draws in questions of banned
authorship. As is suggested by the title, the chapter questions the
philosopher’s use of fancy in his Homeric publication and the extent to
which that method of inquiry harmonizes with his philosophical
writings. But Marpet’s chapter also acknowledges how the printed size
of a work contributes to sale and how banning an author from
publication influences circulation.
Finally, Margo Weitzman allows us to reconsider the Homeric
revival that bursts from Bellinson’s chapter. “Literary London: Pope’s
Iliad and the Eighteenth Century Book Trade” examines Pope’s printing
practices—through comparing the size of the volume to its availability
through subscription or the trade market—and the resulting mercantile
failure. Her chapter, which goes on to discuss the interdependency of a
population’s literary habits and publication, provides an immediate
counterpoint to what we learn through Elliott’s work on Ogilby.
Together, these four chapters reveal how printing practices shift
over time and the reasons for those changes. This project, then, is a
testament to the value that history bound within these volumes.
Certainly, these authors illustrate how specific political, mercantile, and
intellectual circumstances grip a work’s publication in their clutches. But
they also remind us how we lovingly transport a particular volume
through time.
12
Chapter 1
First Impressions: The Editio Princeps of 1489
NICHOLAS BELLINSON
THE HIDDEN TREASURE: FROM PETRARCH TO PRINT
Donant aurum quidam vel argentum, concupiscibilem

forte sed certe periculosissimam terre fecem; donant
spolia Rubri Maris et alge ditioris exuvias, lapillos
gemmasque, cometarum in morem sepe lugubre
prorsus ac sanguineum rutilantes; donant monilia et
baltheos, fuliginosorum decus artificum; donant,
squalentium opus architectorum, arces et menia. Tu
vero, vir optime, nil horum que et opulentiam largien
tis ostenderent et accipientis avaritiam irritarent. Quid
igitur? rarum munus et iocundum meque utinam, te
profecto dignissimum…. Quid enim vir ingeniosissi
mus atque eloquentissimus nisi ipsum ingenii et elo
quentie fontem daret?1
The great gift that Petrarch valued more than all the treasures of the
East was a book, handwritten on about three hundred vellum leaves,
containing the Greek text of Homer’s Iliad. The most ingenious and
eloquent giver was the Byzantine ambassador Nicola Sigero, who had
met Petrarch and promised him the volume in 1348. At the time, Pet-
rarch was receiving rather unsatisfactory instruction in Greek from the
1 “Some give gold and silver, the perhaps desirable but certainly extremely dangerous
dregs of the earth; some give booty of the Red Sea and the spoils of sumptuous sea-
weed, stones and gems, which often in the manner of comets emit a mournful and
bloody glow; some give necklaces and girdles, the splendor of sooty workmen; some
give citadels and walls, the work of dirt-caked builders. But you, O best of men, gave
none of these things which both display the opulence of the giver and excite greed in
the receiver. What, then, did you give? A rare gift, and delightful—if only I were as
worthy of it as you who have left… What then could the most ingenious and eloquent
of men give, if not the source itself of ingenuity and eloquence?” Petrarch, Epistolae
familiares XVIII 2. My translation.
Nicholas Bellinson N
monk Barlaam, who died in the same year, leaving Petrarch with com-
pletely inadequate reading knowledge of the language. On the
authority of Latin authors he knew and loved well, Petrarch regarded
Homer as the “source and origin of every divine invention,”2 but his
own ignorance of Greek made “your Homer deaf to me, or rather, me
deaf to him.”3 The most that the greatest humanist of the fourteenth
century could do with this treasured volume was to hold it in his hands
and imagine the pleasure of reading it:
sepe illum amplexus ac suspirans dico: ‘O magne vir,

quam cupide te audirem! sed aurium mearum alteram
mors obstruxit, alteram longinquitas invisa terrarum.’4
Frustration marked simultaneous efforts to bridge this distance

through translation. Barlaam’s pupil Leontius Pilatus (ȁİȩȞĲȚȠȢ
ȆȚȜȐĲȠȢ), at the urging of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, did produce a
Latin version of both the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1360s, but the
flavorless translation fell short of everyone’s expectations. It would
take more than one hundred years for the West to unstop its ears to
the splendors of Homeric Greek.
Finally, in 1489, the Greek editio princeps of Homer’s works
appeared in Florence.5 The combined efforts of Petrarch and Boccac-
cio, along with their fifteenth-century successors, had produced some
partial and complete Latin translations. Meanwhile, Greek scholarship
in Italy had advanced by leaps and bounds: the Medici circle in
Florence boasted some extremely capable Hellenists, including
Marsilio Ficino, who had translated Plato and the Corpus Hermeticum,
the mystical polymath Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the
consummate commentator, humanist, and poet Angelo Poliziano. In
other words, an audience of Greek readers had sprung up, enough to
2 Ibid. Quoting Macrobius.

3 Ibid.
4 “often I embrace him and say, sighing, ‘O great man, how longingly I would listen to
you! But of my ears, death has blocked one up, the other the hated distance of our
homelands.’” Ibid.
5 The printing-house is uncertain. Proctor argues for Bartolomeo de’ Libri, others for
the Nerli brothers themselves.
14
Chapter 1 - First Impressions: The editio princeps of 1489
justify the first work printed entirely in Greek (in 1474; see below) and
the continued creation of editiones principes of Greek authors. Greek
typography still lagged well behind Latin in sophistication, but the
1489 Homer had the virtue of an entirely Greek font; many earlier
Greek works were printed in confusing, hybrid fonts, like one which
employed the Roman “a” for alpha, lambda, and delta.
The Homeric text of the editio princeps was edited by the native
Athenian Demetrius Chalcondyles, a figure central to Greek studies in
Italy during the second half of the fifteenth century. Chalcondyles
came to Italy in 1447, where he enjoyed the patronage of Cardinal
Bessarion and studied under Theodore Gaza—two other monumental
figures in the Italian recovery of the Greek language. In 1463, he re-
ceived an appointment at the University of Padua, and in 1479, Lo-
renzo de’ Medici summoned him to Florence, where he stayed until
1492. It was here that he encountered Marsilio Ficino and Angelo
Poliziano, as well as the brothers Bernardo Nerli and Nerio Nerli who
pressed him into service editing Homer.6 In Bernardo’s Latin preface
to the edition, he noted the less than desirable state of the text in its
manuscript sources, but Chalcondyles’s triumph over these difficulties
continued to impress even nineteenth-century scholars. As William
Beloe put it in 1808,
He has shewn himself equal to the work of editing

our Poet, as well by the labour, as by the critical skill
which he bestowed on it, in which he appears to have
exceeded all the other ancient editors. He began by
collecting all the manuscripts which he could procure,
but as he did not find any one copy that was perfect,
and not corrupted in various parts, he set himself to
form the best text that was in his power by the aid of
and constant reference to the commentary of
Eustathius. How well he succeeded is known from
the opinions of later editors…. [His edition] has been
repeatedly collated, but the valuable readings in it
6William Beloe, Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books, vol. 3 (London: Law & Gilbert,
1808), 302.
15
have not even yet been so entirely exhausted, as that

some gleanings may not perhaps still be left for future
scholars.7
The meat of the edition consisted of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the spurious
Batrachomyomachia, and the Hymns; these were preceded by a Latin
dedicatory letter by Bernardo Nerli and a Greek letter by Chalcondyles,
along with excerpts on Homer’s life and work from pseudo-Herodotus,
pseudo-Plutarch, and Dio Chrysostom. Bernardo included these ex-
cerpts not only for the light they shed on Homer’s biography, but also
for their use in illuminating the teachings within the text—a nod to the
long tradition of reading Homer allegorically.8
The history of Homeric allegory is too involved to be consid-
ered in any depth here, but the idea of reading beneath the literal
meaning of Homer to find hidden philosophical or religious truths
already had ancient proponents.9 Stoic scholiasts interpreted the gods
as symbols of elemental forces, making myth into natural philosophy.
This way of reading had enormous appeal to Christian humanists in
their enthusiasm for stoic thought and occasional discomfort with the
pagan content of their favorite ancient authors. Thus, Bernardo’s ref-
erence to Homer’s teachings implicitly exhorted the reader to a partic-
ular mode of reading, prioritizing high seriousness over entertainment.
On the other hand, many humanists aspiring to Greek literacy
in the latter half of the fifteenth century must have had a rather playful
introduction to Homeric epic. Although Latin translations of the Iliad
and the Odyssey had appeared in the fifteenth century, the only one of
Homer’s works (as it was then thought to be) which had been printed
in Greek before the complete editio princeps was the Batrachomyomachia, a
mock-epic describing a heroic battle between frogs and mice. Indeed,
its 1474 Brescia edition by Thomas Ferrandus was the first text ever
printed entirely in Greek.10 The nineteenth-century bibliophile Thomas
7 Ibid.
8 Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer, eds., Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca
Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library (Chicago: University of Chicago
Library, 2013), 20.
9 Nor did it lack for modern ones, enduring at least into the twentieth century.
10 Howard Jones, Printing the Classical Text (Utrecht: Hes & De Graaf, 2004), 145.
16
Dibdin notes a further quarto edition, in Greek and Latin, in 1486, and
a third one of an uncertain date but probably a couple of years after
Chalcondyles’s Homer.11 At just over 300 lines, the Battle of the Frogs
and the Mice was certainly a more manageable project for a printing-
house than the rest of Homer’s works. What we now take as evidence
of a much later composition, contemporary readers saw as the
immature style of a young poet; Byzantine schoolmasters found the
text fittingly childish and taught it to their students as “a short and
entertaining introduction to Homer.”12 Between 1474 and 1489, there-
fore, any student without access to rare and precious manuscripts
would have been reading about frogs and mice rather than Greeks and
Trojans. Only with the publication of the editio princeps did the serious
Homeric epics become objects of study for the larger community of
humanists.
ANATOMY OF A VOLUME: BIBLIOTHECA

HOMERICA LANGIANA ALC. INCUN. 1489 .H6
In its entirety, the 1489 edition in folio consisted of 440 leaves,

but most of the remaining copies are incomplete. Its richest realization,
now in Naples (Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III S.Q.
XXIII K 22), is very likely the copy presented to the dedicatee, Piero
de’ Medici: it contains, along with exquisite illuminations, a full-page
portrait of him by Gherardo di Giovanni di Miniato. Less eye-catching,
though still impressive, is the Greek text itself, cast and set by Deme-
trius Damilas (a.k.a. Cretensis).13 Damilas already had some experience
with Greek fonts: in 1476, he had printed the Epitome of Constantine
Lascaris, and his font for the Homer edition was based on this earlier
type.14 Among early modern Greek fonts, it is eminently legible, using
11 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, An introduction to the knowledge of rare and valuable editions of
the Greek and Latin classics: together with an account of Polyglot Bibles, Polyglot psalters, Hebrew
Bibles, Greek Bibles and Greek Testaments; the Greek fathers, and the Latin fathers, vol. 2
(London: Harding and Lepard, 1827), 51–55.
12 Martin L. West, ed. and trans., Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives of Homer
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 235.

13 Most and Schreyer, Homer in Print, 20; Beloe, Anecdotes, 303.
14 For a discussion of other works using the same or a similar font, see Thomas
Frognall Dibdin, Bibliotheca Spenceriana; or, a descriptive catalogue of the books printed in the
17
upright characters and comparatively few ligatures (as Most et al. point
out).15 Both vellum and paper copies are recorded.16
The University of Chicago’s copy is incomplete and without
formal adornment. Of the 440 original paper folia, 192 remain,
comprising part of Chalcondyles’s introductory letter, the lives of
Homer by pseudo-Herodotus, pseudo-Plutarch, and Dio Chrysostom,
most of the Odyssey, the Batrachomyomachia, the Hymn to Apollo, and part
of the Hymn to Hermes. It is regrettable that the provenance of this
volume is almost completely unknown before it was purchased by M.
C. Lang in 1989. We can, however, attempt to reconstruct the interests
of whoever rebound the book by collating the sections missing from
the Odyssey. These are as follows:
a. 1.1–2.220: invocation of the Muse; council of the Gods, ex-

cluding Poseidon, who is among the Ethiopians; Zeus, think-
ing of the murder of Agamemnon, says that humans are un-
just in blaming the Gods for their misfortunes; Athena and
Zeus discuss Odysseus’s woes; Athena goes down to Tele-
makhos to prepare him to seek news of his father; the suitors’
revels; Telemakhos welcomes Athena in the guise of Mentes;
the feast continues; Athena’s prophecy and exhortation to
Telemakhos; Athena departs in the form of a bird; Tele-
makhos commands Penelope to return to her room, where
she bewails Odysseus until falling asleep; Telemakhos con-
verses with the suitors; everyone goes home for the night, Eu-
rukleia leads Telemakhos to bed; [Book 2] Telemakhos con-
venes the council and addresses them, Antinoos responds,
Telemakhos responds; Zeus sends two eagles as omens, which
Halitherses interprets; Eurumakhos dismisses the interpreta-
tion and tells Telemakhos that Penelope must re-marry; Tele-
makhos asks the suitors for ships to seek news of his father.
fifteenth century . . . in the library of George John Earl Spencer . . . , vol. 2 (London: Longman,
Hurst, Rees, 1814–23), 60f.
15 Most and Schreyer, Homer in Print, 20. (Though see Dibdin’s comments, discussed
below).
16 Beloe, Anecdotes, 304.
18
b. 2.376–3.70: Eurukleia swears not to tell Penelope of

Telemakhos’s journey; Eurukleia prepares wine and barley for
Telemakhos’s journey; Athena, in the guise of Telemakhos,
gathers a ship and crew; they all depart, with Athena providing
a favorable wind; they sacrifice to Athena; [Book 3] arrival at
Pylos, where Nestor’s company is preparing a feast in honor
of Poseidon; Athena, in the guise of Mentor, prays to
Poseidon, and herself fulfills the prayer.
c. 3.384–4.250: Nestor’s libation to Athena; in the morning,
sacrifice to Athena; Nestor gives Telemakhos horses, and he
leaves for Sparta; [Book 4] arrival in Sparta, where Menelaos is
giving a marriage-feast for his son; the strangers are welcomed
by Menelaos; the feast; Menelaos recounts his wanderings in
Africa; at the mention of Odysseus, Telemakhos weeps; Helen
enters and recognizes Telemakhos; Peisistratos confirms their
suspicion; general weeping; Peisistratos reveals his parentage
and asks that they cease weeping and have supper; Helen
drugs the wine with an Egyptian preparation which prevents
sorrow; Helen begins to tell of Odysseus’s infiltration of Troy.
d. 8.578–9.55: Alkinoos asks Odysseus who he is; [Book 9]
Odysseus praises the banquet, begins his story; Odysseus
summarizes his travails; the drunken slaughter of the Ciconian
cattle.
e. 10.481–11.45: Kirke announces the journey to the under-
world; Kirke describes the sacrifice and libation Odysseus will
have to perform; Odysseus readies his men for departure; ar-
rival at Okeanos; Odysseus performs the sacrifice.
The coincidence of the missing sections with discrete narrative epi-

sodes indicates a conscious selection; in every case, a narrative portion
dealing with feasting, libation, or sacrifice has been removed. A partic-
ular focus on wine suggests itself, though the omission of Kirke’s wine
potion is perhaps dispositive. Similarly, not all sacrificial scenes have
been excerpted. Whether the unknown excerpter was motivated by
anthropological or literary interest remains mysterious, but the com-
mon theme is clear from a sequential reading of the passages.
19
The volume also contains Greek marginalia, probably by an-

other, earlier reader, whose interests of a different sort are vaguely
traceable. Most frequently, these marginalia gloss an unfamiliar word
for easy reference later on; errors in accentuation (kaneón for káneon
and Demodókos for Demódokos at FFVIr), the elucidation of obscure
morphology (hala dian is glossed by hals dia at FFVIr), and basic
grammatical notes (like the insertion of an O! to mark an obscure
vocative on the page facing DDIr) all suggest that the reader was an
amateur student of the language rather than a master like Chalcondyles,
Chrysoloras, or for that matter a mature Erasmus or Bentley. Correc-
tions are made which suggest access to another, more authoritative
edition, notably ti for me at DDIIr. The most frequently glossed words
are people and places like Pharos and Eidothea (ibid.), but gnomic
statements like theoi panta isasin, ‘the gods know all things’ (ibid.), are
also copied. This reader may have had a particular interest in plants
and agriculture: ‘Dulichium, rich in corn’ and ‘barley-groats, the
marrow of men’ are both glossed, and II I v bears the single, awful
annotation ‘molu,’ the magical plant which protected Odysseus from
the charms of Kirke.
The Batrachomyomachia is annotated once; the remaining hymns,
not at all. Was our annotator already familiar with these shorter texts,
or did he or she simply find them less interesting? Pseudo-Plutarch’s
life of Homer is the only introductory material with consistent annota-
tions, and these overwhelmingly indicate an interest in Homer’s many
names and their origins. Pseudo-Plutarch’s association of the name
“Homer” with blindness did not convince our reader, who wrote,
Homeros poth’? ‘Whence “Homer”?’ in the margin. Perhaps, then, this
reader was particularly interested in “The Homeric Question”, namely
the issues of Homer’s identity and which works can actually be
attributed to him – or her.
Certain marginalia offer glimpses of the reader’s experience of
the poem. A vertical line in the margin marks various passages of the
Odyssey as significant, among which are Penelope’s sententious utter-
ance about good and bad men (around 19.328ff) and many of the
striking passages about bards. The marginalia are clustered around
20
particularly stirring episodes like Odysseus’s homecoming and Demo-

dokos’s song.
Beyond this sketch, there is little one can do to situate the
reader in time or space. The hand is exclusively in Greek, and our
provenance is too sparse to exclude any milieu between fifteenth-
century Florence and the New York dealer from whom Lang acquired
the volume. A note on 23.296 marks the line as “the end of the Odys-
sey, as most people say”; this opinion descends from the Alexandrian
arch-editors of Homer, Aristarkhos and Aristophanes. 17 It was Ar-
istarkhos, Librarian of Alexandria from 181–71 BCE, whose “interpret
Homer from Homer” became a maxim for anti-allegorical readers of
the pagan past. Eustathius’s commentary, which we know
Chalcondyles to have consulted, had already transmitted this opinion
to humanists, but the diffusion of this judgment implied by “most
people,” along with the reliance noted above on at least one other,
more authoritative edition of the text, point to a world of scholarship
at least a few generations more sophisticated than that in which the
editio princeps appeared.
* * * *
Despite the importance of this first edition to the Western re-

ception of Homer, its fame is often eclipsed by that of the 1504 Aldus
(see Felix Szabo’s chapter in this volume). In 1827, Dibdin estimated
that there were fifty copies of the editio princeps in Great Britain and
Ireland alone, though this amends his statement of 1814 that the edi-
tion was “uncommon.”18 Gibbon admonishes us not to forget in the
sight of Aldus’s brilliant edition that “the Florence Homer of 1488
displays all the luxury of the typographical art.” 19 In the line-up of
17 Carroll Moulton, “The End of the Odyssey,” in Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
15, no. 2 (1974): 153.
18 Dibdin, Bibliotheca Spenceriana, 55; Didbin, Introduction to the Classics, 43.
19 Though Dibdin, quoting Gibbon (Dibdin, An Introduction to the Classics, 40), also
laments the quality of the font. The variation in date between 1488 and 1489 is partly
due to the Gregorian calendric reform, in which the new year was moved from March
25th to January 1st. Thus January 1489 in our calendar, the latest month in which the
editio princeps could have been printed, was January 1488 to contemporaries. I prefer to
use the latest possible date of publication, 1489, so as not to imply the volume’s con-
temporaneity with works published in 1488.
21
Renaissance Homer editions, however, the value of Chalcondyles’s

edition will always be primarily symbolic, standing for a confluence of
the necessary conditions—the right Hellenist, the right font, the right
patrons—for ending the Petrarchan deafness and allowing Homer to
speak.20
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beloe, William. Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books. 6 vols. London:

Law & Gilbert, 1807–12.
Bisaha, Nancy. Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and Ottoman
Turks. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
Dibdin, Thomas Frognall. Bibliotheca Spenceriana; or, A descriptive catalogue
of the books printed in the fifteenth Century . . . in the library of George
John Earl Spencer. . . . 7 vols. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees,
1814–23.
———. An introduction to the knowledge of rare and valuable editions of the
Greek and Latin classics: together with an account of Polyglot Bibles,
Polyglot psalters, Hebrew Bibles, Greek Bibles and Greek Testaments;
the Greek fathers, and the Latin fathers. 2 vols. London: Harding
and Lepard, 1827.
Jenkins, Fred W. Review of Homer in Print, edited by Glenn W. Most
and Alice Schreyer. Bryn Mawr Classical Review (2014):
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2014/2014-07-49.html.
Jones, Howard. Printing the Classical Text. Utrecht: Hes & De Graaf,
2004.
Knauer, Georg N. “Iter per miscellanea: Homer’s Batrachomyomachia and
Johannes Reuchlin.” In The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on
the Medieval Miscellany, edited by Stephen G. Nicholas and
Siegried Wenzel, 23–36. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1996.
Most, Glenn W., and Alice Schreyer, eds. Homer in Print: A Catalogue of
the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library.
Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2013.
Moulton, Carroll, “The End of the Odyssey.” Greek, Roman, and Byzan-
tine Studies 15 (1974): 153–69.
20 I am indebted to Glenn Most for steering an earlier version of this chapter clear of
certain errors, and to M. C. Lang for his willingness to discuss this volume’s acquisi-
tion.
22
Nagy, Gregory. “Homeric Scholia.” In A New Companion to Homer,

edited by Ian Morris and Barry Powell. Leiden: Brill, 1997.
Petrarch, Francesco, Epistolae familiares XVIII 2, “Ad Nicolaum
Sygeros pretorem Grecorum, gratiarum actio pro transmisso
Homeri libro.”
http://www.cassiciaco.it/navigazione/scriptorium/testi%20m
edioevo/petrarca/familiares/lettera_XVIII_2.html.
Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the
Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1974.
Sandys, John Edwin. Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1905.
West, Martin L., ed. and trans. Homeric Hymns. Homeric Apocrypha. Lives
of Homer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
23
Chapter 2
Ogilby and the Odyssey
GEORGE D. ELLIOTT
Figure 1. Ogilby, John, Cover of Homer, His

Odysses Translated Adorno with Sculpture and Il-
lustrated with Annotations, 1665, University of
Chicago Special Collection Research Cen-
ter.
John Ogilby had just finished the printing of another one of

his numerous translations by early 1665. By this time he was well
known as a translator and publisher of high-quality volumes of classi-
cal literature. The Odyssey, like the others that came before it, looked as
though it was going to be another success. Beginning in May, Ogilby
started a lottery to help sell this new translation alongside some of his
previous work. The technique was relatively new, but Ogilby’s vol-
umes were popular and such a strategy might well have worked. Yet
May 1665 proved to be an especially poor time to start such a project.
Soon after the lottery began, cases of the plague began to show up in
London. Tens of thousands, perhaps some one-fifth of the city’s pop-
George D. Elliott G
ulation, died during this last great outbreak in England.1 Those who
could fled the city, including most of the elite from institutions like the
College of Physicians and Cambridge.2 London, in short, was a city in
crisis in 1665. Despite this chaos, Ogilby’s lottery continued for
months, finally only stopping for dearth of patrons. The University of
Chicago’s copy is one of these volumes from 1665, though whether
this one was sold during the plague or during Ogilby’s struggles to re-
build his fortunes afterward is not known.3 What is certain is that this
volume represents more than just its original Greek author. It repre-
sents Ogilby. More specifically, this volume represents his ambition,
drive toward perfection, and political cunning, characteristics he de-
veloped throughout his life. It also shows how he made something
enduring through these characteristics, how he spread a book widely in
a competitive, harsh printing world without modern copyright rules or
protections.
AMBITION, PERFECTION, AND POLITICAL CUNNING
The story of Ogilby’s ambition, drive toward perfection, and

political cunning is very much a story of the different careers he had
throughout his life. These careers were numerous and often over-
lapped as his interests wavered from one area to another. At one point
or another, Ogilby was a dancer, playwright, soldier, court poet, au-
thor, translator of classical text, publisher, printer, and cartographer.4
These changes clearly illustrate his varied interests but, more im-
portantly, they show his drive and ambition. In fact, nearly everything
Ogilby did could be in some way tied to his great ambition and arro-
gance. Ogilby was born in a small town likely some forty miles from
1 Stephen Coote, Royal Survivor: A Life of Charles II (New York: St. Martin's Press,
2000), 213.
2 Jennifer S. Uglow, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, 1660–1670
(London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 329.

3 This chapter will focus on the printing of this edition overall, but will refer to specific
idiosyncratic elements of the Chicago volume as well. See John Ogilby, ed. and trans.,
Homer, His Odysses Translated, Adorn'd with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations
(London: Printed by Thomas Roycroft for the author, 1665).
4 Margret Schuchard, John Ogilby, 1600–1676: Lebensbild Eines Gentleman Mit Vielen
Karrieren (Hamburg: Paul Hartung, 1973), 1.
26
Chapter 2 - Ogilby and the Odyssey
Edinburgh but did not admit this when alive. Instead, at the height of
his success he told his friend John Aubrey that he would leave his
birthplace a mystery so that many places would claim him as their
own, like the Greeks did with the great Homer. 5 Besides showing
Ogilby’s immodesty, which was by no means unknown at the time,
this exchange also hints at the ambition of Ogilby. Ogilby came from a
rather poor Scottish family and likely wanted to make his background
disappear in a generally non-mobile society. When he did have to say
his birthplace, he said he was from ‘near Edinburgh,’ a much more
prestigious town than the village from which he likely came. His spin
on this point of personal history clearly worked for quite some time
for even a century later his birthplace was still ‘near Edinburgh’ in the
collection of biographies The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland.6
Ogilby’s first career also illustrates this ambition very clearly.
During Ogilby’s career as a dancer he quickly earned the right to per-
form before the king in London. In order to impress James I during
the masquerade, Ogilby decided to attempt a very high jump. The am-
bitious feat was unfortunately a failure for the young Scotsman. The
Duke of Buckingham described it as an unlucky fall that tore the vein
in his leg. 7 In effect, the injury permanently handicapped him, but
Ogilby’s future activities indicate that this did not even slow him down
physically until his seventies. The fact that Ogilby made the jump nev-
ertheless shows something about his drive, that this poor Scotsman
was willing to put everything on the line to get ahead. It also shows
that he recognized the value of royal acknowledgement. The jump was
a daring gamble, though ultimately Ogilby failed in his attempt. How-
ever, this failure allowed Ogilby to advance in ways he would not have
been able to otherwise. When he was forced by his injury to reevaluate
his circumstances, he ended up moving towards drama as an alterna-
tive. This career still kept him within entertainment, something with
which he was familiar, but allowed him to move into a more influential
5 Katharine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone: Dawson,
1976), 15.
6 Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the Time of Dean
Swift (London: R. Griffiths, 1753), 265.

7 Schuchard, John Ogilby, 16–17.
27
George D. Elliott G
position than just lead dancer. Ogilby was quite ambitious in this new
career as well. Within a decade he had become the “Master of the
Revels in Ireland” under order of the king.8 Although Ireland was a
backwater in comparison to London, the work Ogilby did as a play-
wright in Dublin was still considerably prestigious because of the royal
title and support from nobles that he received.
After working for some time as a playwright in Ireland, Ogilby
fought as a royalist during the English Civil War. During this third
major career Ogilby displayed his cunning and desire for political in-
fluence by supporting and fighting with his patron Wentworth the Earl
of Strafford. Ogilby was a clear royalist throughout his life, under-
standing how royal patronage could potentially support his artistic en-
deavors and further his career. However, Ogilby’s support of the king
did not lead to great rewards for him at the time, although his support
would bear fruit later when the Crown was restored under Charles II.
Instead, during a small skirmish in Ireland, Wentworth was captured
and sent to the Tower and Ogilby was almost killed. With royal sup-
port dwindling in Ireland and no noble left to support him, Ogilby was
left without support for his theater work. He was penniless and with-
out a patron. However, he did not remain so for long. He left Ireland
and traveled to London, first by ship and then by foot for some eighty
kilometers. There he made a radical career change under the tutelage
of his friend James Shirley. At the age of forty-seven, Ogilby learned
Latin, and to an extent Greek. He decided to apply these new language
skills to the translating of classical texts.9 He published his first trans-
lated book in 1649, and by the end of the 1650s, his works had already
gained a reputation for quality, especially among the affluent.10
During this time of his rising fame, Ogilby soon found greater
political influence. In 1660 he gained an enormous boon to his print-
ing career and his influence overall when he was chosen to organize
the coronation parade of Charles II. Always a royalist, Ogilby took this
opportunity to gain favor with the king, planning the parade in great
8 Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times, 22.
9 Schuchard, John Ogilby, 33.
28
detail and with much pomp and flash by drawing on his background in
theatrics. The dirty city streets were cleaned and filled with four mas-
sive hundred-foot-tall arches through which the king would process.11
The parade was a success and Ogilby built on his growing fame with
the printing of his Entertainment of Charles II poem, a volume with sev-
eral impressive illustrations.12 The Entertainment added enormous fame
to a person who was already quite well positioned in the printing
world, but, more importantly, it also greatly strengthened Ogilby’s
connection to the Crown and to the benefits it could afford him. It is
likely that Ogilby recognized this at the time since he later frequently
made use of these benefits. Although Ogilby had had a very tumultu-
ous life up to this point, he had also shown repeatedly his ambition,
drive toward perfection, and political cunning. All of these qualities
developed over a lifetime, and were evident in both the creation of his
Odyssey and Ogilby’s ability to sell such a high-priced item so well.
THE ODYSSEY, ITS MARKET AND SALE
Ogilby’s ambitious translation and printing projects in the

1650s and early 1660s, along with his growing relationship with the
Crown, allowed him to become a major success by the mid-1660s. A
major reason for his success was the quality for which his publications
were known. The University of Chicago’s volume is representative of
this perfection that Ogilby strove for in his printing career. Like Ogil-
by’s other publications, this volume was crafted with high quality pa-
per and includes twenty-six illustrations, or, as Ogilby called them,
‘sculptures.’ One such sculpture is located at the beginning of each
book of the Odyssey and an additional one at the beginning of the vol-
ume before the title page.13 These illustrations throughout the volume
all include the family crest of the patrons who supported each particu-
11 Uglow, Gambling Man, 113.

12 See John Ogilby, The Relation of His Majestie's Entertainment Passing through the City of
London, to His Coronation with a Description of the Triumphall Arches, and Solemnity. By John
Ogilby (London, 1661).
13 To see more on Ogilby’s work with illustrations, see Tali Winkler’s “Illustrating the
Classics and the Self: John Ogilby and his Self-Fashioning Portraits,” within this vol-
ume.
29
George D. Elliott G
lar illustration. This specific volume was rebound recently, though the
original cover would presumably have been made from high quality
calfskin. The volumes from this printing were quite large with ample
margins to allow Ogilby room to include his many commentaries on
the text, some of which he included in the original Greek with his
translations and thorough explanations. The book was physically
printed by Thomas Roycroft, a printer with a reputation for producing
a number of significant, high-quality classics during Ogilby’s time.14
This quality volume would have been part of Ogilby’s market-
ing campaign beginning in May 1665. Although he used subscriptions
and lotteries to sell his books, he also drew on his political influence to
protect his share of the market. The University of Chicago’s copy illus-
trates Ogilby’s technique for protecting himself in a printing market
before modern copyright law. The main feature of this protection re-
volves around the royal privilege issued as a paper document by the
Earl of Arlington, Charles II’s secretary of state. This document
(shown on the next page) demonstrates how helpful Ogilby’s political
connections had become, and also shows his techniques for marketing
such an expensive volume. The document gives Ogilby a monopoly
over not just the printing of his Odyssey but over the Odyssey in general
for a period of fifteen years.15 Ogilby utilized his relationship with the
king, which he had been developing since Charles II’s coronation, to
his benefit with two further royal privileges which protected the rest of
his books for fifteen years.16 This relationship allowed Ogilby to use
the power of the king to deal with the difficulties involved in printing
at that time, namely the practice of copying publications and issuing
them without permission, which ran mostly unchecked outside of roy-
15 “Whereas upon the humble Request of Our Trusty and Wel-beloved Servant, John
Ogilby, Esquire, We were Graciously pleased by Our Warrant of the 25. Of May, in
the Seventeenth Year of Our Reign, to grant him the Sole Privilege and Immunity of
Printing in fair Volumes…Homer’s Odysses” and “grant him farther Licence and
Authority, to have the Sole Privilege of Printing Homer’s Works in the Original…”
Ogilby, Homer, His Odysses Translated, Adorn'd with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annota-
tions.
16 Schuchard, John Ogilby, 50.
30
al privileges, and made profit-making difficult.17 Ogilby clearly recog-

nized this and turned the functioning of this state-market relationship
in his favor.
Figure 2. Ogilby, John. Royal Privilege in Homer, His Odysses

Translated Adorno with Sculpture and Illustrated with Annotations, 1665,
University of Chicago Special Collections Research Center.
17 David J. Shaw, “The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Century,” in A
Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 227.
31
George D. Elliott G
Further, Ogilby also took advantage of a law passed in 1662

which forbid the establishment of new print shops. This artificially
constricted the print market in London, which in 1668 only had sixty
printing presses, as compared to even one printer in Amsterdam who
may well have had twenty-five presses on his own. 18 This kept the
print market small and meant that Ogilby could conceivably dominate
the market with his protected volumes for the duration of the privileg-
es. Even if a few other presses created similar volumes, the small
number of potential rivals made it possible for Ogilby to pull in most
patrons with clever marketing strategies. He did this with both sub-
scriptions and lotteries, such as the one used during the plague in
1665.
Ogilby financed his production of the Odyssey mainly through
subscriptions, as he did with most of his books. He sent out subscrip-
tion proposals to dozens of wealthy families building on his patrons
from previous translations. In these proposals he offered a number of
special deals for those who would support the production of his trans-
lation.19 First, he offered wealthy families the option to pay for an il-
lustration at the beginning of one of the books of the Odyssey in ex-
change for their crest being included within that ‘sculpture.’ Second,
he offered a special deal for individuals who brought in other sub-
scribers. In the case of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which he sold in a
combination subscription, he offered any person who brought in five
other subscribers one free set of the volumes. These subscription
techniques accomplished two things for Ogilby. First, they created a
guaranteed market for the sale of his Homer volumes, which he would
have later cornered further with royal privileges, and second, they al-
lowed him to sell more volumes outside of this group because of the
increased value of his products compared to competing copies. The
addition of so many illustrations in these volumes, like the twenty-six
found in the University of Chicago’s copy of the Odyssey, likely brought
in many other buyers outside of the two-dozen who paid for them.
18Schuchard, John Ogilby, 74.

19Sarah L. C. Clapp, “The Subscription Enterprises of John Ogilby and Richard
Blome, ” Modern Philology 30, no. 4 (1933): 367.
32
Ogilby also used a rather new marketing technique in 1665 to

sell his inventory of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. In the spring of that
year Ogilby obtained a license from the Duke of York and began his
announcements for a lottery. He stated that he had a large supply of
well-illustrated volumes for sale. For instance, he had over 500 copies
of his 1665 Aesop and 225 of The Entertainment.20 Tickets to the lottery
sold for £2 or the approximate cost of one of his Odyssey volumes. The
University of Chicago Odyssey might have been sold at this lottery. The
first drawing began on May 10th, 1665 right at the outbreak of the
plague. The lottery understandably suffered from a dearth of attendees
as thousands of wealthy potential buyers fled the city. The lottery
opened again in April of 1666, but was again interrupted when the
Great Fire burned down most of London. Ogilby himself claimed he
lost most of his stock from the fire and had to wait until 1668 for his
next lottery.21 However, Ogilby did manage to operate other lotteries
with some success starting in 1668, and the University of Chicago vol-
ume may also have been sold there. Overall, these lotteries worked
well for Ogilby when external circumstances were not too harsh and
unpredictable.
The Odyssey was one of many classical texts to receive the at-
tention of the famous John Ogilby. Ogilby, whose life was filled with
ambition, quests for perfection, and political cunning, had already
tackled many classical texts throughout the 1650s and early 1660s be-
fore he approached Homer. 22 These endeavors were in truth more
remembered than his Odyssey, which suffered from difficulties of dis-
tribution during the plague. However, although Ogilby’s Odyssey was
not as memorable a project as his poetic work for Charles II’s corona-
tion parade or the work he did after the Odyssey, it still serves as a pow-
erful representation of the quality work Ogilby’s production had
achieved by this point in his translating and publishing career.23 It also
serves as an excellent representation of the ambition of this Renais-
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., 29.
23 Matthew Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010), 66.
33
George D. Elliott G
sance man who pursued royal patronage with cunning and calculation.
The royal privilege document shown in this chapter from the Universi-
ty of Chicago’s volume is just one example of this aspect of Ogilby’s
character. The way Ogilby’s Odyssey was sold also highlights his mar-
keting genius and ingenuity. It is this ambition and genius that leaps
powerfully from the grand, illustrated pages of the Odyssey when one
holds it in his or her hands, just as Ogilby leapt so dramatically
throughout his many lives.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cibber, Theophilus. The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland, to the
Time of Dean Swift. London: R. Griffiths, 1753.
Clapp, Sarah L. C. “The Subscription Enterprises of John Ogilby and
Richard Blome.” Modern Philology 30, no. 4 (1933): 365–79.
Coote, Stephen. Royal Survivor: A Life of Charles II. New York: St. Mar-
tin’s Press, 2000.
Jenkinson, Matthew. Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–
1685. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2010.
Ogilby, John, ed. and trans. Homer, His Odysses Translated, Adorn’d with
Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations. London: Printed by
Thomas Roycroft for the author, 1665.
———. The Relation of His Majestie’s Entertainment Passing through the City
of London, to His Coronation with a Description of the Triumphall
Arches, and Solemnity. By John Ogilby. London: 1661.
Schuchard, Margret. John Ogilby, 1600–1676: Lebensbild Eines Gentleman
Mit Vielen Karrieren. Hamburg: Paul Hartung, 1973.
Shaw, David J. “The Book Trade Comes of Age: The Sixteenth Cen-
tury.” In A Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon
Eliot and Jonathan Rose, 220–31. Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2007.
Uglow, Jennifer S. A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, 1660–
1670. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.
Van Eerde, Katharine S. John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times. Folke-
stone, UK: Dawson, 1976.
34
Chapter 3
Fancy That: An Essay on Hobbes’ Homer
BLAZE MARPET
Thomas Hobbes concludes the Preface to his 1677 transla-

tions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as follows:
Why then did I write it? Because I had nothing else to

do. Why publish it? Because I thought it might take
off my Adversaries from showing their folly upon my
more serious Writings, and set them upon my Verses
to shew their wisdom. But why without Annotations?
Because I had no hope to do it better than it is already
done by Mr. Ogilby.1
For such a lively thinker as Hobbes, this is hardly an enthusiastic en-

dorsement of the work to follow. If we take the quips at face value, the
implication is that a close examination of the project will not be help-
ful in understanding Hobbes’ larger project. Perhaps the translation
ought to be seen as a frivolous and uninteresting byproduct of a once-
great thinker’s boredom and leisure.
The operative question of this paper is whether we should in
fact take Hobbes’ quips at face value. In other words, this essay exam-
ines what the Homer translations can tell us about Hobbes’ philoso-
phy. I ultimately focus on one theme (the cognitive faculty or intellec-
tual virtue Hobbes calls “fancy”) in one part (the Preface) of his work.
Hobbes’ use of “fancy” is consistent with its development within his
philosophical system, and his view that epic poetry elevates it sheds
1 Hobbes, “Preface to the Reader: Concerning the Vertues of An Heroique Poem,” in Translations
of Homer, trans. Thomas Hobbes, ed. Eric Nelson, vol. 1 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 2012), xcix. All
general references to Hobbes’ works will be to Noel Malcom, Quentin Skinner, and Keith
Thomas, eds. The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes, 27 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2005–). For all citations, the orthography and punctuation are based on that of the text
cited.
Blaze Marpet
light on his materialism. The outline of the paper is simple: first comes
a background of Hobbes’ relevant publication history, followed by
treatments of fancy in his Homer publication and elsewhere in his
philosophical system.
BACKGROUND TO THE WORK
Hobbes’ Homer translations come near the end of a long and

vexed publication career. He died at 91, and was still writing, though
by dictation, until the end. His publications include works on optics
and mathematics, commentaries on contemporary politics, corre-
spondences with luminaries like Descartes, and systematic political-
philosophical treatises. In order to appreciate the significance of
Hobbes’ Homer translations, it will be helpful to briefly survey im-
portant points in his publication career. Doing so will show that
Hobbes’ encounter with Greek texts informed his project throughout.
It will also reveal that the Homer translations served as one of his only
tenable literary outlets late in life.
Though Hobbes was well liked by many who knew him, by
the end of his life he had become one of the most detested intellectu-
als in Europe—and perhaps in the entire history of philosophy. G. A.
J. Rogers, who calls Hobbes “the most maligned philosopher of all
time,”2 puts it well when he says, “One might say that if Hobbes had
set out deliberately to offend his fellow countrymen, it is difficult to
see how he could have been more successful.”3 Most of the hatred
resulted from the publication of the work for which he is now most
famous: Leviathan (English edition published in London in 1651; Latin
edition in published in Amsterdam in 1668). Here, Hobbes provides a
systematic account of the correct foundations for political sovereignty
based on a reductively materialistic conception of human nature. The
treatise’s conspicuous materialism, justification of absolute sovereign-
ty, and theological disputes (which take up over half of the work) were
read as licenses for relativism, hedonism, atheism, and despotism. For
2 G. A. J. Rogers, “Hobbes and His Contemporaries,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s
“Leviathan,” ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 413.
3 Ibid., 425.
36
Chapter 3 - Fancy That: An Essay On Hobbes’ Homer
just one example of the manifest relativism that infuriated his contem-
poraries, consider Hobbes’ definition of “good” and “bad” from the
first section of the work:
Whatsoever is the object of any man’s Appetite or De-

sire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And
the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill. . . . For
these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ev-
er used with relation to the person that useth them:
There being nothing simply and absolutely so.4
In addition to startling passages like this, most important of all was

Hobbes’ Erastianism—the view according to which the only binding
religious law is civil law and independent Episcopal authority is denied.
The themes and structure of the Leviathan had, however, ap-
peared earlier in Hobbes’ political works, and they would continue to
appear. In addition to the Leviathan, two other important systematic
political-philosophical works are Notes on the Laws (a 1640 widely-
circulated manuscript, later published without Hobbes’ permission in
1650 in two parts as Humane Nature and De Corpore Politico) and De Cive
(1642, one part of a systematic trilogy including De Corpore in 1655 and
De Homine in 1658). One important similarity between all these works
is what I will call their foundationalist systematicity: all begin with an
account of the nature of human individuals and deduce from that a
comprehensive view of human social, moral, and political life. (We
can contrast Hobbes’ foundationalist systematicity with, say, the more
fragmentary and meandering works of a Rousseau.) Moreover, each of
these works is what we can call reductively materialistic: human nature,
as the starting point of the system, is explained exhaustively in terms
of the matter and the motion of physical bodies and objects. (We can
contrast this reductive materialism with, say, the metaphysical dualism
of a Descartes.) In each of his major political works, Hobbes begins
with a foundational account of human nature and builds upon it as a
theory of political sovereignty.
4 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, 80.
37
Blaze Marpet
It is quite likely that Hobbes found the inspiration for the

foundationalist systematicity that permeates his works in Greek
thought—especially in Euclid. When Hobbes recounts the first time
he read Euclid, he emphasizes that he was amazed “not so much be-
cause of the theorems, as because of the method of reasoning.”5 It
seems that Hobbes was fascinated by the method of deducing com-
plex theorems from clearly stated first principles, and this geometrical
model became an important one for his philosophy.6 The upshot of
this insight, besides illustrating Hobbes’ familiarity with certain Greek
thinkers, is that it suggests that the Homer translations, which may
seem at first like an idle pastime composed late in life, may have some
systematic connections with his earlier foundational works.
The works of Homer were not the first Greek translations
Hobbes published. In fact, Hobbes’ first printed work was translation
of Thucydides (published as Eight Bookes Of the Peloponnesian Warre
Written by Thucydides . . . Interpreted with Faith and Diligence Immediately out
of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes, in London in 1629).7 Noel Malcom has
recognized this work as important for understanding Hobbes’ literary
activities in two ways.8 First, it is testament to his ability as a classical
scholar; the translation was the first directly into English from the
Greek, and it included a detailed map of ancient Greece, which
Hobbes created from many ancient sources.9 Second, the translation
forced Hobbes to grapple with conflicting political views. One of the
most famous parts of Thucydides is Pericles’ great praise-of-
democracy speech, though Hobbes was anti-democratic and pro-
royalist. Later in life, in his autobiography (composed in Latin verse in
1672, but not published until 1679), Hobbes explains that he was able
to publish Thucydides without feeling a threat to his political views
5 Cited in Noel Malcom, “A Summary Biography of Hobbes” in The Cambridge Companion to

Hobbes, ed. Tom Sorell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21.
6 “Through [reading Euclidean Geometry] he came to an understanding of the notions of proof,
demonstration and certainty that dominate every facet of his philosophy.” Rogers, “Hobbes and
His Contemporaries,” 414.
7 For details on Hobbes’ Thucydides, see Robin Sowerby, “Hobbes’s Translation of Thucydides,”
Translation and Literature 7, no. 2 (1998): 147–69.

8 See Malcom, “Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 20.
9 The map, it should be stressed, is testament to Hobbes’ ability for his time; it was later omitted
from the Molesworth edition on the grounds that it had been rendered obsolete. See William
Molesworth, “Advertisement,” in The History of the Grecian War Written by Thucydides, trans. Thom-
as Hobbes, ed. William Molesworth (London: John Bohn, 1843), ii.
38
because he thought Thucydides documented the downfall and demise

inherent in democracy. To this end, Hobbes calls Thucydides “the
most Politique Historiographer that ever writ.”10 Thucydides’ political
insight was to show “how incompetent democracy is.”11
Nor was the translation of the complete Iliad and Odyssey
Hobbes’ first translation of Homer. In 1673, Hobbes published a
translation of one section of the Odyssey as The Travels of Ulysses, As they
were Related by Himself in Homer’s Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh & Twelfth Books of
his Odysses, to Alcinous, king of Phaeacia. He subsequently published a
translation of the complete Odysses in 1675, the complete Iliads in 1676,
and a joint edition—published as the “Second Edition”—in 1677 (all
in London). The translations were in alternating rhyming pentameters,
and the relatively rapid succession of printings suggests that the book
was popular and sold well. Perhaps the reason for this was that its
convenient size (duodecimo) made the volume appealing and accessi-
ble—especially compared to Chapman’s and Ogilby’s extravagant ver-
sions.12
Even if it was initially commercially successful, Hobbes’ trans-
lation soon met with harsh criticism. Alexander Pope’s review is an apt
and influential example:
Hobbes has given us a correct explanation of the sense

in general, but for particulars and circumstances, he
continually lops them, and often omits the most beau-
tiful. As for its being esteemed a close translation, I
doubt not many have been led into that error by the
shortness of it, which proceeds from his following the
original line by line, but from the contractions above
mentioned. He sometimes omits whole similes and
sentences, and is now and then guilty of mistakes, into
which no writer of his learning could have fallen, but
10 Cited in Sowerby, “Hobbes’s Translation of Thucydides,” 147.

11 See Malcom, “Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 20. For details on Hobbes’ autobiography, see
“The Autobiographies of Thomas Hobbes,” Mind 48, no. 191 (1939): 403–5.
12 See Glenn W. Most and Alice Schreyer, eds., Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Homerica
Langiana at the University of Chicago Library (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2013), 102–
103; Philip H. Young, The Printed Homer: A 3000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the “Iliad”
and the “Odyssey” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997), 106–108.
39
Blaze Marpet
rough carelessness. His poetry . . . is too mean for crit-

icism.13
Hobbes’ pentameters, with a maximum of ten-syllables per

line, offered a compressed version of the poem, which in the original
dactylic hexameter had at least twelve syllables per line and usually
closer to seventeen. Consequently, Hobbes was forced to omit much
of what strikes many as most characteristic of Homer’s verse—such as
the use of descriptive and pictorial character epithets. Perhaps it is be-
cause the final product was “too mean for criticism” that the longest
single work of one of the world’s greatest philosophers (according to
Leibniz, “no other writer . . . has philosophized as precisely, as clearly,
and as elegantly” save Descartes)14 has been ignored.
It is important to note that by the time Hobbes published his
Homer translations, he was virtually banned from publishing his polit-
ical and philosophical works in England. 15 As Eric Nelson explains,
the reason for his virtual ban was the 1662 Licensing Act, which stated
that books on religion, natural philosophy, or anything in the curricu-
lum of arts and sciences had to be pre-approved for publication. All of
Hobbes’ attempts to publish philosophical and political works in Eng-
land were denied license during this period. In 1668, his Latin works
were published in Amsterdam, but it is likely that Hobbes came to see
even foreign publication as dangerous. Nelson points out that the
English laws were repeatedly reevaluated in response to Hobbes; for
example, in 1669, a fellow of Corpus Christi College at Cambridge was
expelled and forced to recant for being a “Hobbsist.”16 It is at the end
of this long fallow publication period, in the face of the censorship
against his explicitly political and philosophical writings, that Hobbes
published his translations of Homer.
13 Cited in G. B. Riddehough, “Thomas Hobbes’ Translations of Homer,” Phoenix 12, no. 2

(1958): 58.
14 Cited in Malcom, “Summary Biography of Hobbes,” 37.
15 See Eric Nelson, general introduction to Translations of Homer, by Thomas Hobbes, ed. Eric
Nelson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008), xix–xx.

16 Ibid., xx.
40
PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
The Homer translations provide an excellent opportunity to

understand the workings of Hobbes in his last years. Since he was vir-
tually banned from publishing his philosophical and religious writings
during this time, his Homer volume provides a unique chance to eval-
uate his thought. Several scholars have recently argued that Hobbes
tried to craft his translations with the end of political and philosophical
persuasion in mind.17 (One might imagine a Straussian or esotericist
reading of the work). A notorious example of Hobbes’ philosophical
views in the work is his translation of “Priam’s bastard son” as “A law-
ful Son where Nature is the Law.”18 In addition to the main text, how-
ever, the Homer translations were published with a preface by
Hobbes—“A Large Preface Concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Po-
em”—and this section is a natural place to look to understand how the
translations might relate to Hobbes’ larger philosophical system. The
Preface allowed Hobbes to address the audience in his own voice and
with his own explicit views, instead of as a mouthpiece for Homer.
Hobbes was able to reach an extremely wide readership, with his
popular translations serving as a vehicle. The concept of “fancy” in the
Preface is a particularly helpful focus, because it highlights the conti-
nuity between this work and Hobbes’ earlier writings.
The Preface contains a serial exposition of different virtues of
a heroic poem: first, discretion, by which Hobbes means each part
conducing to an overall design; second, “perspicuity and facility” of
construction, so as to demonstrate the natural ability of the poet above
contrived labor; third, contrivance, by which Hobbes means the narra-
tion of the characters in the work (as opposed to the poet who com-
poses it); fourth, the elevation of fancy over and above any other intel-
17 For specifically political readings, see Nelson, Translations of Homer, xii–lxxxi; and Paul Davis,
“Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and Anticlericalism in Late Seventeenth-
Century England,” The Seventeenth Century 12, no. 2 (1997): 231–55. For the contrary view and a
response, see A. P. Martinich, “Hobbes’s Translations of Homer and Anticlericalism,” The Seven-
teenth Century 16, no. 1 (2001): 147–57.
18 Hobbes, Translations of Homer, vol. 1, The Iliad, 68, line 465. See also Riddehough, “Hobbes’
Translations of Homer,” 60.
41
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lectual virtue; fifth, the justice and impartiality of the poet;19 sixth the
“perfection and curiosity of descriptions” in images; and seventh, the
amplitude and variety—by which Hobbes means that the poem must
be written on an epic scale. This serial exposition is followed by anal-
yses and comparisons of the different virtues in Homer, Virgil, and
Lucan, with each surpassing the others in certain virtues.
The fourth virtue—the elevation of fancy—provides an illu-
minating lens for understanding what the philosophical implications
and connections of Hobbes’ Homer translations may be. The reasons
for this are manifold. First, fancy and the other cognitive faculties
mentioned find well-defined places within his materialist psychology.
One important question, then, is what light can be shed on Hobbes’
materialism by recognizing that he thought it could explain the im-
portance of classical poetry. Second, psychology lies at the root of
Hobbes’ philosophical system. By focusing on the foundation, we can
gain a better insight into how the different parts of Hobbes’ system
relate.
Here is what Hobbes says of fancy in his Preface:
Men more generally affect and admire Fancie than

they do either Judgment, or Reason, or Memory, or
any other intellectual Vertue, and for the pleasantness
of it, give to it alone the name of Wit, accounting Rea-
son and Judgment but for a dull entertainment.20
Hobbes contrasts fancy with other intellectual virtues, saying that it is

generally more esteemed. Heroic poetry is said to elevate fancy in par-
ticular, over and above the other virtues. Hobbes further says that the
19 A puzzling note: Hobbes says in the Preface that contrivance—the narrative ability of the
characters in the work—is a feature of poetry, not historiography (and presumably he has in
mind here ancient Greek and Roman historiography, such as the Thucydides he translated some
time earlier). Yet he says that justice and impartiality are features of both historiography and
poetry. He clearly has comparisons in mind. What is odd, however, is that ancient Greek history,
and especially the Thucydides with which he worked so closely, contained numerous famous
speeches and stories told by characters in the work—noticeably Pericles’ great speech. As noted
above, Pericles’ great speech was an homage to democracy, a rule which Hobbes opposed. Maybe
his deemphasizing the role of characters’ speeches and stories in history is a means to distance
himself from the praises to democracy contained in Thucydides.
20 Hobbes, “Preface to the Reader: Conerning the Vertues of An Heroique Poem,” xciv.
42
elevation depends upon the proper discretion of the poet, and by dis-
cretion, he means that “every part of the Poem be conducing, and in
good order placed to the End and Designe of the Poet” to promote
the delight of the reader.21 One example of the elevation of fancy is
the effective use of metaphor.22 Lucan is later said to be the greatest
and most admirable exemplar of the virtue of elevating fancy.23
This is nearly all Hobbes has to say about fancy in his Preface.
What’s more, his claim that elevation of fancy depends on the discre-
tion of the poet is fairly uninformative; the reason for this is that he
says that all the virtues of a heroic poem are “comprehended all in this
one word Discretion.”24 If discretion is said to underlie all virtues of a
heroic poem, it is not clear what emphasizing that it underlies the ele-
vation of fancy contributes. Hobbes also does not say much about the
other terms mentioned in connection to fancy—memory, reasoning,
and judgment. Fortunately, these terms appear elsewhere in his work.
As noted before, Hobbes was a foundationalist systematic
thinker, and the foundation for his system was a materialist psycholo-
gy. For instance, his great work Leviathan is written in four parts, each
building on the last. The first, “Of Man” is the materialist and psycho-
logical starting point. The second (and most famous in this history of
philosophy) is “Of Commonwealth” and treats the problem of politi-
cal sovereignty. The final two, “Of a Christian Commonwealth” and
“Of the Kingdom of Darkness” (which were perhaps what brought
Hobbes most of the derision he received during his lifetime), treat reli-
gious and theological problems that follow from his account of politi-
cal authority.
At the root of his system is his materialist psychology, which
establishes his complete understanding of human nature and grounds
his claims about political sovereignty. Key aims of this psychology are
explaining the difference between immediate sense perception and
other cognitive faculties (memory, reasoning, etc.) and the difference
between voluntary and involuntary actions. For Hobbes, all cognitive
faculties begin in sensation, which consists in external objects causing
21 Ibid., xcii.
22 Ibid., xciv.
23 Ibid., xcvi.
24 Ibid., xcii.
43
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sense receptors to move (he calls nerves “strings”) which cause our
mental faculties, both brain and heart, to move (he calls the brain and
heart “springs”).25 Sensation is explained as a quick and direct move-
ment in the brain and heart, and all cognitive faculties besides sensa-
tion are explained as derivative, resultant movements. Of these, fancy
is important because it serves as a blanket term for many derivative
cognitive faculties. (He equates fancy [which he traces back to the
Greek phantasia] with imagination [a synonym which he traces to the
Latin imaginatio]).26 Fancy is the generic term for cognition that is sepa-
rate from sensation, and it includes memory, dreaming, and under-
standing.27 Fancy is also important because it is the source of voluntary
action: “Fancy is sometimes equated with imagination and is then
merely fading sensation and the first motion in the chain that begins a
voluntary motion such as walking or talking.”28 Hobbes contrasts fan-
cy with reason (ratio), which is said to be a faculty of calculation in the
sense of addition and subtraction. 29 The Preface compares fancy to
judgment (judicium), and in the “Review and Conclusion” at the end of
the Leviathan, Hobbes says that a person can possess both fancy and
judgment together if he acquires the ability through education.30
On the whole, Hobbes defines all the words he uses in his
Preface in the Leviathan—fancy, memory, judgment, and reasoning.
The problem, however, is that these terms do not align well with his
usage in the Preface to his Homer translations. In the Preface, fancy
seems to be one intellectual virtue—one opposed to, say, memory. But
in the Leviathan, it is a broad category that has many permutations,
among which are included memory, dreaming, and understanding.
Fortunately, Hobbes provides different definitions and taxon-
omies for these cognitive faculties in later works. For example, in the
25 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 2, 16.

26 Ibid., 26.
27 Ibid., 26–38.
28 As Rogers notes, it is important to recognize that in Hobbes’ psychology cognitive processes
are identical to physical ones, not merely caused by them. This view puts Hobbes at odds with
Descartes, who concedes that mental processes are (or can be) caused by physical events, but
denies that the two are identical. “Hobbes and His Contemporaries,” 416.
29 This may lead us to consider reason (ratio) as somewhat analogous to to logistikon (“the calculat-
ing part of the soul”) in the psychology of Plato’s Republic. See A. P. Martinich, ed., A Hobbes
Dictionary (Blackwell Publishing, 2005), s.v. “reason (ratio).”
30 Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 3, 1132–34.
44
later De Corpore, Hobbes writes of fancy as if it were one cognitive fac-

ulty among many. So fancy is no longer, say, the same faculty as
memory. Rather, fancy consists in the ability to recognize similarities in
conspicuously dissimilar things. He contrasts this with judgment,
which is the ability to see things that are conspicuously similar. Here,
he says that the same person cannot possess both (thus departing with
his view at the end of the Leviathan).31 The picture of the cognitive fac-
ulties in the Preface relates more clearly and naturally to Hobbes’ later
psychological picture; in both works, fancy is one faculty among many,
not the genus of which most other faculties are species. The upshot of
this is that it seems—at least with respect to fancy—that Hobbes must
have consistently developed his view over time. So he can speak of
fancy in contrast to memory in his Preface only because he has distin-
guished the two and abandoned the close connection he posited in the
Leviathan.
But a greater insight can be gleaned from Hobbes’ treatment
of fancy than this developmentalist terminological one. We can recall
that Hobbes’ psychology was reductively materialistic: cognition literal-
ly was movement in the body’s organs.32 When we keep this in mind, it
may seem striking that Hobbes would write of the virtues of a heroic
poem as elevating the capacities of the mind; fine poetry is not often
associated with reductive materialism. More often, such materialism is
associated with crude hedonism. As Rogers notes, in his own day, one
reason Hobbes drew so much contempt was that his moral theory—
based exclusively on his materialistic psychology—was seen as licens-
ing or even promoting vice against the tradition of British morals and
moralists.33 But if we can take Hobbes’ discussion of the virtues of a
poem seriously in the Preface, it shows how misguided these criticisms
may be. Hobbes’ materialism was consistent with—and indeed foun-
dational for—the sophisticated intellectual virtues conferred by read-
ing Homeric poetry. In this sense, we can see Hobbes as one im-
portant figure in the tradition of British moral philosophy who uses a
reductivist foundation to explain what are seen as the finer, higher
31 Martinich, Hobbes Dictionary, s.v. “fancy and judgment (phantasia et judicium).”

32 On this identity relation, see Rogers, “Hobbes and His Contemporaries,” 416.
33 Ibid., 425.
45
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pleasures. In this debate within British moral philosophy, Hobbes may

be able to side with John Stuart Mill, with his dissatisfied Socrates and
satisfied pig, over and above Jeremy Bentham and his pushpin and
poetry.
CONCLUSION
Examining Hobbes’ use of “fancy” in his Preface suggests a

strong connection between his Homer translations and his earlier body
of work. Many scholars note that he engaged with Greek thought at
the beginning of his publication career, and to some extent throughout
it; but it is important to recall that he returned to it at the end. When
his explicit philosophical and political works were banned, his Homer
translations were a natural place for him to turn. The translations al-
lowed Hobbes to reach a wide audience with his Preface.
Seen in this light, Hobbes’ sarcastic quips about why he com-
posed the translations (“Because I had nothing else to do,” “Because I
had no hope to do it better”) read less like an apology and more like a
challenge to the reader—a challenge to see why he composed the
translation and how it relates to his earlier work. And when we take
Hobbes up on this challenge we discover that the connections to his
earlier works are prevalent from the outset of the Preface.
“Fancy” in particular enables us to see the systematic connec-
tions between his last (but neglected) work and his earlier (and widely
famous) publications. The materialism inherent at the outset pervades
till the end. What is curious is that Hobbes’ remarks about the eleva-
tion of intellectual virtues in his Preface make him seem like many
other aristocratic English gentlemen of his time.
46
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“The Autobiographies of Thomas Hobbes.” Mind 48, no. 191 (1939):

403–5.
Ball, Jerry L. “The Despised Version: Hobbes’s Translation of
Homer” Restoration 20, no. 1 (1996): 1–17.
Davis, Paul. “Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and An-
ticlericalism in Late Seventeenth-Century England.” The Seven-
teenth Century 12, no. 2 (1997): 231–55.
Hobbes, Thomas, trans. Eight Bookes Of the Peloponnesian Warre Written
by Thucydides . . . Interpreted with Faith and Diligence Immediately out
of the Greeke by Thomas Hobbes. London: 1629.
———, trans. Homer’s Iliads in English by Th. Hobbes, to which may be add-
ed Homer’s Odysses, Englished by the same Author. London: Printed
for Will Crook, 1676.
———, trans. Homer’s Odysses. Translated by Tho. Hobbes of Malmsbury.
With a large Preface concerning the Vertues of an Heroick Poem. Writ-
ten by the Translator. London: Printed for Will Crook, 1675.
———, trans. The Iliads and Odysses of Homer, Translated out of Greek into
English, by Th. Hobbes Of Malmsbury: With a large Preface concerning
the Vertues of an Heroick Poem; written by the Translator. 2nd ed.
London: Printed for Will Crook, 1677.
———. “Preface to the Reader: Concering the Vertues of an
Heroique Poem.” In vol. 1, Translations of Homer, translated by
Thomas Hobbes, edited by Eric Nelson, xcii–xcix. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2012.
———, trans. The Travels of Ulysses, As they were Related by Himself in
Homer’s Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh & Twelfth Books of his Odysses, to
Alcinous, king of Phaeacia. London: Printed for Will Crook,
1673.
Malcom, Noel. “A Summary Biography of Hobbes.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Hobbes, edited by Tom Sorell, 13–44. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Malcom, Noel, Quentin Skinner, and Keith Thomas, eds. The Clarendon
Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. 27 vols. Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 2005–.
47
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Martinich, A. P., ed. A Hobbes Dictionary. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995.

———. “Hobbes’s Translations of Homer and Anticlericalism.” The
Seventeenth Century 16, no. 1 (2001): 147–57.
Molesworth, William. “Advertisement.” In The History of the Grecian
War Written by Thucydides, translated by Thomas Hobbes, edit-
ed by William Molesworth, vol. 8, The English Works of Thomas
Hobbes of Malmesbury. London: John Bohn, 1843), i–ii.
———, ed. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. 11 vols.
London: John Bohn, 1839–45.
Most, Glenn W. and Alice Schreyer. Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the
Bibliothea Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Library.
Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2013.
Nelson, Eric. General introduction to vol. 1, Translations of Homer,
translated by Thomas Hobbes, edited by Eric Nelson. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2008.
Riddehough, G. B. “Thomas Hobbes’ Translations of Homer.” Phoe-
nix 12, no. 2 (1958): 58–62.
Rogers, G. A. J. “Hobbes and His Contemporaries.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” edited by Patricia Spring-
borg, 413–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Sowerby, Robin. “Thomas Hobbes’s Translation of Thucydides.”
Young, Philip H. The Printed Homer: A 3000 Year Publishing and Transla-
tion History of the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” Jefferson, North Car-
olina: McFarland & Company, 1997.
48
Chapter 4
Literary London: Pope’s Iliad and the Eighteenth-Century

Book Trade
MARGO WEITZMAN
Alexander Pope was an anomaly—in both body and mind.

His bone deformation from Pott’s disease crippled him early in life
and stunted his growth, causing him to grow to only four and a half
feet tall, and left him an asthmatic hunchback. His literary arbiters la-
beled him the “hump-backed toad.”1 Pope transcended his soft voice
and crippled figure through self–education, and became a renowned
poet whose works were not only innovative masterpieces, but also
highly sought after by the social elite. His magnum opus was his trans-
lation of Homer’s Iliad, which took nearly six years to complete. The
first set of books printed in quarto, which was unusual at the time for
a luxury volume, were smaller and cheaper to produce. Pope and his
publisher, Bernard Lintot, agreed to sell the quarto copies via subscrip-
tion. The rest were printed in folio and sold on the trade market at a
lower price.2 Pope’s utilization of engravings was also a new and eco-
nomic solution for illustration, and enabled Lintot to embellish the
pages of the subscription volumes at low cost.
Regardless of Pope’s painstaking translation and innovative
publishing solutions, and even though this particular piece of literature
was well received in eighteenth-century London, Volume I of the Iliad
missed the mark in the book trade and undersold. The lack of success
was largely due to a misunderstanding of London’s newfound literacy
and appreciation for classical texts, and his low sales also revealed to
Lintot how the book fit into the literary culture of London and its
1Academy of American Poets, “Alexander Pope,”

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/alexander-pope.
2 David F. Foxon and J. McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 52–57.

Margo Weitzman M
provinces. 3 At the time the work was published, and despite wide
consideration that it was not only a literary masterpiece but also Pope’s
greatest achievement,4 the market reception was complex and mixed—
an important reminder that a long history of success and reverence can
conceal the struggles of initial public reception.
The first volume of Pope’s Iliad was published in 1715, only
five years after the implementation of the first British Copyright Act of
1710.5 This act both protected the author from piracy and granted sole
publishing power for an initial fourteen years, with an additional four-
teen years of protection afterward if the author was still living. Addi-
tionally, the Act promoted a partnership between the author, publish-
er, and printer in the midst of an expanding book trade. Patronage of
authors was not as widely popular during Pope’s time. Instead, owner-
ship shifted to authors who were now paid for their copyright.6 Pope
took advantage of the Copyright Act by acting as his own patron,
which allowed him the freedom to dictate every aspect of the Iliad’s
physical appearance, 7 including aesthetic decisions such as typeface
and paper, and the printing of six volumes in quarto for subscribers as
opposed to one or two in larger folio.8
To stretch the Iliad to six volumes, Pope increased the size of
the typeface. What resulted was a smaller page with an unusually large
font. He also used two different typefaces to distinguish public vol-
umes from subscription, and only the subscriber copies contained or-
naments and copper letters.9 Printing his subscription books in quarto
marked one of the most influential changes to book production. 10
3 Felicity Rosslyn, introduction to Pope’s Iliad: A Selection with Commentary, ed. Felicity
Rosslyn (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1985), x.

4 Pat Rogers, Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190.
5 John Feather, “The British Book Market 1600–1800,” in A Companion to the History of
the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 235; the
Copyright Act entered at the heels of the Licensing Act of 1662 and the ordinance of
the Stationers’ Company of 1681 dictating that each printed item had to bear the name
and address of the printer or bookseller, which held publishers accountable for their
printed materials.
6 Kirsten Olsen, Daily Life in 18th Century London (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999),
138.
7 Feather, “British Book Market,” 235.
8 Foxon and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 51.
9 Ibid., 52.
10 Ibid., 63.
50
Chapter 4 - Literary London: Pope’s Iliad
Pope moved away from the traditional folio format that was popular
for major works, which made for a more physically manageable
book.11 David Foxon notes that the use of folio for luxury works in
England rapidly declined after the publication of the first volume of
the Iliad—which was a testament to its influence.12 Pope’s introduction
of engravings as illustrations also resulted in the increased popularity
of pictorial headpieces that changed the layout and look of the page.13
The antiquarian George Vertue (d. 1756) engraved the bust of Homer
that adorns the frontispiece in the first volume.
Pope had a partnership with Lintot and his printer, Bowyer,
and agreed to print 660 copies of the Iliad, 200 on writing royal paper
for subscribers and the rest on cheaper printing royal paper for regular
distribution in order to save money. 14 They charged subscribers an
exorbitant six guineas—six times the actual printing cost—and re-
quired payment in advance.15 Lintot only needed to front the funds for
the first printing, and the subscription fees for each subsequent vol-
ume funded the next. This plan seemed to be a promising one given
Pope’s long list of subscribers. Pope worked hard to integrate himself
into the social scene of London’s wealthy. He joined a men’s social
club of authors and lawyers who met to read, converse, and gamble,16
and befriended influential landowners, rural gentlemen, literary men,
clerics, and erudite professionals such as doctors and lawyers.17 It was
through these connections that he began to establish his list,18 which
had no fewer than seventeen dukes, three marquises, forty-nine earls,
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 64.
13 Ibid., 63–71. See Foxon for a detailed account of the different types of headpieces
used in Pope’s translations, as well as others such as Theobald’s Aeneid. The use of
engraving and its variety of pictorial schemas are too complicated to delve into here.
The University of Chicago’s Volume One quarto edition does not have any embel-
lishments, only engravings in the frontispiece, a map, and Greek busts, architecture,
statuary and coins preceding Pope’s essay on Homer.
14 Ibid., 53; Foxon believes Bower’s ledger is the most reliable.
15 Ibid., 99.
16 Olsen, Daily Life, 159.
17 Rogers, Essays on Pope, 137, 166.
18 Ibid., 142.
51
Margo Weitzman M
seven duchesses, eight countesses, as well as members of the army and

clergy, writers, artists, actors, and musicians.19
Despite the Iliad’s innovative design and long list of wealthy
patrons, Lintot did not see the profits he was expecting. Pope’s plan
had several flaws. First, it was difficult to rely on subscribers to fulfill
all orders as some defaulted, died, or changed their minds.20 Second,
building the list was a harrowing experience for Pope, both because of
its demands on his time and the pressures of compiling such a com-
prehensive directory. He ultimately had to resort to utilizing his friends
and mentors to sell subscriptions on his behalf, evidence for which is
in his epistles. 21 The result was essentially a collective patronage. 22
However, there were several discrepancies discovered when copies
were delivered. For example, some subscribers received too many or
too few, or copies were delivered to those who were in default on their
payments, or to people who were never on the list.23 The whole pro-
cess was a web of crossed communication, and Pope’s advocates, up-
on whom he so heavily relied to fill the gaps, were inconsistent in re-
cording and confirming who actually subscribed. In the end, Pope was
not clear enough with Lintot about the sales.
After Pope did not deliver on a full and reliable list, records
and correspondence show that Volume I of the Iliad also undersold in
the trade market.24 Thomas Johnson postulated that Pope undersold
because cheaper, pirated duodecimo copies emerged from Holland
shortly after his publication. However, Foxon refutes Johnson’s
theory, arguing that the London book trade was so centralized that a
Dutch book would have been of little importance, and ultimately
attributes the low sales to Lintot’s own overestimation in his
agreement with Pope. Evidence for his claim lies in the reduction of
copies for later volumes, and in the change in printing methods of
Pope’s translation of the Odyssey six years later. Lintot promptly print-
19 Reginald Harvey Griffith, Alexander Pope, a Bibliography (London: Holland Press,

1962), 41.
20 Foxon and and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 61–63.
21 Ibid., 193–95
22 Ibid., 190.
23 Ibid., 200.
24 Ibid., 53–57.
52
ed a series of cheaper, duodecimo copies of the Odyssey for the general

public immediately after its release despite having no competition
from the piracy market.25 Even more significant is the apparent indica-
tion that Lintot was responding to the needs of the book trade dictat-
ed by his losses from the Iliad. What the non-subscribing public want-
ed was a financially accessible book, and Lintot later found a bigger
market in the middle class who could afford the cheaper copies. The
reasons for this shift lie in the social and economic fabric of London,
and both the Iliad’s success and failure is as much “an example of
collective patronage as a sign of the rise of the man of letters.”26
Pope’s eighteenth century London was a bustling
commingling of classes. By 1716, it was the largest city in Europe, and
eleven percent of England’s population resided there.27 Aristocrats in
the street “rubbed shoulders with the fops, gamblers, whores, mendi-
cants, pickpockets, vendors, and spectators.”28 The cultural and voca-
tional topography was changing, and London’s industry stimulated a
market that required more skilled and educated workers. Growth of
the middle class stemmed from the availability of wider varieties of
professions that allowed for scholars of all kinds to emerge—as school
teachers, tutors, authors, poets. Growing demand for trades required
the education of more workers, and thus the middle class began to
expand, illiteracy slowly declined, and the demand for print grew.
London’s middle class became increasingly learned. By 1700, the na-
tional literacy rate in England was forty–five percent, and it became
common to find a working class citizen who was knowledgeable in
classical literature, including Homer.29 Publications such as Pope’s Iliad
that were translated into the vernacular and circulated among the pub-
lic were making classical literature available to citizens who did not
read Latin or Greek. Even the poor were reading poetry, and for this
reason some publications were dispersed in the street to cater to the
25 Ibid., 57–58.
26 Ibid., 39.
27 Clare Brant and Susan E. Whyman, Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London:
John Gay's Trivia (1716) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.

28 Ibid.
53
Margo Weitzman M
demand.30 However, despite job growth, average Londoners were con-

cerned with their financial security.31 Lower paid workers would not be
buying books to fill their library—not even duodecimos—when they
were struggling to put food on the table.32 Pope was left with the eru-
dite elite and the middle class who were hungry for literature and the
classics, and who also had the means to buy books.
Pope’s Iliad inserted itself into the literary fabric of London
and its provinces in multiple ways: through Pope’s connections with
the wealthy, who had an imprint on the text through their scholarly
feedback and participation in the subscription; through his less wealthy
readers who later purchased cheaper, unembellished quarto editions;
and also through women and their increased literacy.33 Women were
an important part of Pope’s network of patrons. Eight percent of his
575 subscribers were women, and marketing to that demographic was
something that Pope and Lintot navigated correctly. 34 To attract fe-
male readers, Lintot placed an advertisement for the Iliad in the 1714
publication of Pope’s Rape of the Lock—a book of poetry aimed toward
female readers—which suggests an understanding of the market po-
tential.35 While most eighteenth-century English translations catered to
male readers, Pope went out of his way to please his women. For
example, Claudia Thomas notes an important inclusion in Pope’s
preface: “If my author had the wits of After Ages for his Defenders,
his Translation has had the Beauties of the Present for his
Advocates.”36
Acknowledging his female readers openly, as compared to
Dryden who made no mention of women and instead focused entirely
on the male reader in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, is significant.
The eight percent of Iliad sales comprised of women increased to fif-
30 Brant and Whyman, Walking the Streets, 5.

31 Ibid., 6.
33 Ibid., 142. For a more detailed analysis of Pope’s social relationships, see Rogers’
chapter “Pope and the Social Scene.” For details on the importance of female relation-
ships and patronage, see Claudia N. Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century
Women Readers (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994).
34 Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers, 17–26.
35 Ibid., 26.
36 Ibid., 22.
54
teen percent for the Odyssey. Thomas argues that Pope’s success in
pleasing his female Iliad readers may have led to a widening of his cli-
ent base through word of mouth.37 Translations of classical literature
and poetry were of interest to eighteenth-century English women be-
cause reading provided a means to “both pass the time and to enjoy
vicariously the experience denied to [them] by seclusion.”38 It is possi-
ble that if Pope had understood the middle class in the same way he
understood his women patrons as readers, he might have been much
more successful in selling his volumes. These potential customers had
more leisure time and also had the desire to read—and read classics.39
Increased exposure to classical texts within the elite and mid-
dle classes not only created a market for Pope’s Iliad, but also one that
was specifically open to his choice of heroic couplets. In addition to
the demand for classical texts, Pope’s linguistic choices contributed to
how his translation fit into London’s culture. The beautifully crafted
volumes were met with mixed reviews by the public; Pope’s heroic
couplet translation was frowned upon for its difficulty and for straying
from Homer’s original prose, and lauded for its beauty and homage to
the classical text. Pope did not believe that the “recognizable voice of
an individual poet could be used to translate an epic,” 40 and what
resulted was a synthesis of his own prose and common phrases and
language popular to English translations of classical literature. Felicity
Rosslyn notes that Pope emulated some of these more common turns
of phrase that can be found in works such as Dryden’s translation of
the Aeneid.41 She argues that elements of Pope’s language “had been
used with increasing sophistication through the seventeenth century to
translate the Greek and Roman classics,”42 and points to examples of
Pope’s reference to big and little Ajax as “thunderbolts of war,” which
references Dryden’s Aeneid, and the phrase “mountains of the slain”
which can be traced through French and English poetry to the Latin
37 Ibid., 26.
38 Ibid., 41.
39 Feather, “British Book Market,” 239.
40 Rosslyn, Pope's Iliad, xi.
41 Ibid., xii. Virgil also took phrases from Lucretius, which is an indication that imitat-
ing turns of phrase was a common practice even among the ancients.
42 Ibid., xi.
55
Margo Weitzman M
epic.43 Importantly, Pope’s eighteenth-century erudite reader may have

picked up on this, even as subtly as to find something familiar about
his words. 44 Familiar phrases and vocabulary from popular classical
translations allowed for decipherability regardless of the difficulties
posed by Pope’s couplets. Rosslyn also argues that the learned would
have noted any misrepresentation, impolite phrases, or incongruous
references that strayed from the classical standards influenced by
works such as the Aeneid. Readers would have “laughed the translation
into oblivion,” hence Pope’s care in his word and phrase choices and
strategic uses of subtlety.45 Thus, Pope’s translation fit within a specific
expectation of his more learned readers in its imitation of current po-
etic classical masterpieces.46
London’s literate population consumed massive quantities of
texts during Pope’s time, from his poetry to newspapers and scandal
sheets.47 Had Pope better understood London’s readership and literary
climate, he could have established a more confident and efficient plan
that fulfilled the expectations of his initial contract with Lintot.
Subscriptions were popular during the time of Pope’s Iliad, but Pope
and Lintot relied too heavily on their upper-class and elite subscribers
to provide the bulk of the sales in a time of increased readership
among the less wealthy. They failed to recognize that a cross-section
of the middle class could have easily filled the gap, as could libraries in
London and surrounding provinces that provided free books to those
who could not afford the cheaper trade copies. Instead, Pope spent
countless hours of his own labor canvassing and finding readers
among his friends. He relied on their connections to expand the list as
well as his voluminous correspondence to manage the process, and
wound up underselling. Pope was able to use the response to his Iliad
subscriptions to gauge his career, and to place himself somewhere
within the social stratum of London and its provinces. In essence, it
was “an effort to define his audience.”48 Although Pope attained fi-
43 Ibid., xi-xii.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., xiv.
46 Ibid., xv–xvi.
47 Ibid., 160–61.
48 Rogers, Essays on Pope, 197–98.
56
nancial stability and an entirely new social status from subscription and
market sales, his process for doing so lacked foresight and his publish-
er did not fare as well.
In honing his ability to translate a classical epic using his own
style, and in assuming control over the aesthetics of his volumes, Pope
entered the book trade with a completely new product. His design
brought to the public a new way of visually constructing a page, a new
style of illustrations, and a new size of both font and page. The failure
of the business model allowed Pope and Lintot to understand their
market and gain a greater understanding of the book trade and literary
climate of London, resulting in a more profitable sale of the later
Odyssey translation.49 Ultimately, at the beginning of his journey with
the first volume of the Iliad, Pope’s lack of knowledge of London’s
literary world hampered his success. However, his approach to the
translation brought to market an intensely personal interpretation.
Pope’s thoughtful and original achievement infiltrated private and
academic libraries and is still lauded today as an important moment in
literary history for its influence on book aesthetics and its place in the
history of poetry and classical translations. Rousseau notes that
“Pope’s translations, especially the Iliad, are ‘original poems’—in fact
his Iliad has been called the most distinguished long poem of the Au-
gustan Age.”50 In finding his voice, Pope also found his way into the
book trade of London. However, history can become clouded by
praise, and it is important not to forget Pope’s struggle for buyers. The
Iliad’s difficulty in the initial market is as important to its history as the
reputation and admiration that followed; an understanding of its
reception, and of Pope and Lintot’s missteps in its dissemination,
point toward a more complete historical picture of Pope and his Iliad.
49Foxon and and McLaverty, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, 92–101.
50George Sebastian Rousseau, “On Reading Pope,” in Alexander Pope, ed. Peter Dixon
(London: G. Bell & Sons, 1972), 12–14.
57
Margo Weitzman M
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Academy of American Poets. “Alexander Pope.”

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/alexander-pope.
Brant, Clare, and Susan E. Whyman. Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-
Century London: John Gay's Trivia (1716). Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2007.
Feather, John. “The British Book Market, 1600–1800.” In A Compan-
ion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jona-
than Rose, 232–46. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Foxon, David F., and J. McLaverty. Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century
Book Trade. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.
Griffith, Reginald Harvey. Alexander Pope: A Bibliography. London: Hol-
land Press, 1962.
Pope, Alexander, trans. The Iliad of Homer. 6 vols. London: Printed by
W. Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott between the Temple-Gates,
1715–20.
Olsen, Kirsten. Daily Life in 18th-Century London. Westport, CT: Green-
wood Press, 1999.
Rogers, Pat. Essays on Pope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993.
Rosslyn, Felicity, ed. Pope's Iliad: A Selection with Commentary. Bristol:
Bristol Classical Press, 1985.
Rousseau, George Sebastian. “On Reading Pope.” In Alexander Pope,
edited by Peter Dixon, 1–59. London: G. Bell & Sons, 1972.
Thomas, Claudia N. Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women
Readers. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994.
58
Section Two
Translation Practices
GODA THANGADA
No two words are synonyms and no translation can be truly

literal. The four translators—Lorenzo Valla, Lodovico Dolce, George
Chapman, and Thomas Bridges—discussed in this section unabashed-
ly represented their work as creative rather than mechanical. At times,
they argued that taking liberties with Homer’s language allowed them
to remain faithful to his force and meaning. At others, they conscious-
ly imbued the epics with a new orientation appropriate to the condi-
tions of their own time and place.
Manipulations of the translation followed not only from aes-
thetic preference, but the translator’s ideological program and sensi-
tivity to the audience’s affective relations to classical myth. Both the
Florentine Valla and Venetian Dolce laid emphasis on the role of the
Trojans, who were regarded as the legendary ancestors of the Romans
by the Italian public. Beatrice Bradley studies such distortions in both
Valla’s Latin translation of the Iliad, first printed in 1474, and in a later
edition’s printed marginalia and index, appended by an anonymous
editor in 1522. Not only does Valla shift emphases in the epic, he goes
so far as to craft new verses without Homeric equivalents. Bradley
argues that the paratextual materials work in concert with Valla’s trans-
lation to draw attention to the Trojan heroes. Moreover, Valla and the
editor do not conceal their agency, but foreground their creative trans-
lation practices and editorial interventions.
Translation practices were shaped by trends in vernacular lit-
erature and the artistic taste of the audience. Although classical litera-
ture often guided vernacular style and subject matter, the influence was
not unidirectional. Elizabeth Tavella demonstrates that Dolce attempt-
ed to assimilate his 1570 L’Achille et l’Enea, an abridged synthesis of the
Iliad and Aeneid, with the vernacular chivalric romance Orlando Furioso
by using the same format, including allegorical paratexts and wood-
cuts, for the editions of both works printed under his supervision.
Through a combination of visual and verbal techniques, Dolce ad-
vanced a new vision of the epic genre.
Indeed, the license granted to the translator was such that it
was not essential to be fluent in Greek. As Jo Nixon discusses, the
paratextual materials included with George Chapman’s 1611 transla-
tion reveal that he in fact relied on Latin versions. Chapman claimed
that he endeavored to capture the spirit rather than precise language of
Homer, given the linguistic distance between English and Greek. Nix-
on examines at length Chapman’s mistranslation of the noun ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ
as a scarf repurposed as surgical sling rather than the correct transla-
tion of the word as a stone-sling, a weapon. Chapman fancifully con-
cocts the explanation that a squire had carried his lover’s scarf into
battle, which he then used to suspend the wounded warrior’s arm. De-
spite the weakness of his Greek, Chapman directs vitriol at other
translators, with whom he had become well-acquainted by virtue of his
dependence on them.
The most radical translation examined in this section is
Thomas Bridges’ 1772 burlesque rendition of Homer. Angela Parkin-
son situates this work in the context of the period’s satirical literature
and high-brow translations of Homer, including those of John Dryden
and Alexander Pope. Parkinson’s principal interest, however, is in
what she calls Bridges’ use of the paratexts as metafictional parody.
She argues that Bridges anticipates postmodern metafiction by claim-
ing in his preface that he considers his work faithful to Homer, who,
he insists, intended his epics to be burlesque. Such a proclamation be-
fore such an irreverent translation satirizes the pose of those transla-
tors who would profess their loyalty to the original.
The four papers in this section are unified not only by their
focus on translations, but also by their attention to issues of language
and literary style. They offer examples of the forms and degrees of
translational innovation and interference across Italy and England,
from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.
60
Chapter 5
Constructions of Authorship in Valla’s Iliad
BEATRICE BRADLEY
Lorenzo Valla begins his fifteenth-century translation of the

Iliad with an assertion of the text’s literary intent; he informs the read-
er, “Scripturus ego quantam exercitibus Graiis cladem excitauerit
Achillis furens indignatio.”1 From this first sentence, Valla insists that
his prose rendition of Homer will be a written (scripturus) work of his
own creation. The inclusion of ego, the first-person narrator in the
form of Valla, immediately constitutes a departure in the Latin transla-
tion from the original Greek text. Early modern conceptions of au-
thorship understood translation as a fluid and shared endeavor in
which the translator should drastically revise the original text, and Val-
la thus follows the practices of his day to present a thorough rework-
ing of the Homeric epic. First published in 1474, his book achieved
considerable popularity, and in 1522 printed marginalia and an index
were added, increasing the translation’s didactic value. Composed by
an unknown editor many decades after Valla’s death, the paratextual
materials emphasize the translator’s authorial presence and in fact sup-
press the traditional Homeric reading. Providing their own interpreta-
tional lens, the printed marginalia and index at once underscore the
Latinity of the translation and elucidate tensions in the Italian human-
ist’s reception of pagan myth. Although Valla’s translation is often
dismissed as inaccurate or flawed, I posit that we should read it not as
a careful rendition of the original Greek but rather as the paratexts
direct us: as an active reinterpretation of the epic, at once the work of
Homer, Valla, and the editor.2
1 “I will write about how great the wild anger of Achilles was that caused the ruin of
the Greeks.” Lorenzo Valla, trans., Homeri Poetae Clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem
Romanum latina facta (Cologne: Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1522), A2 R. Latin transla-
tions are my own unless otherwise noted.
2 Valla’s translation was criticized as early as George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad
in the late sixteenth century, in which he lambasts the Italian humanist as one who
Beatrice Bradley B
Valla (ca. 1406-57) began his prominent career at the Univer-

sity of Pavia in 1431, where he taught rhetoric.3 His employment at the
University, however, was short-lived, and he left two years later fol-
lowing a series of conflicts with his fellow professors. Throughout his
life, Valla maintained a combative approach to humanist study, and his
willingness to critique the ancients enraged his peers. Most famously,
he engaged in a longstanding and bitter feud with another well-known
humanist, Poggio Bracciolini. Valla’s readiness to find shortcomings in
the poets of antiquity greatly informs his translation style.4 He shows
little reverence for the original text and often eliminates entire passages
or alters them beyond recognition. In 1435, Valla found employment
as secretary to Alfonso V of Aragon, and under the king’s patronage,
he began his translation of the Iliad. The king commissioned Valla to
translate the Greek text in hopes that a more accessible edition of
Homer would better educate the Italian people regarding the Trojan
war. 5 Valla translated the first sixteen books and left the remaining
eight to his pupil, Francesco Griffolini. Although Valla died in 1457,
he had already finished his portion of the translation nearly a decade
earlier, for he promises Giovanni Aurispa in a letter dated 1443, “Fe-
ram ad te preterea sedecim Iliados libros a me prosa oratione traduc-
tos.”6 He does not explain in this correspondence, however, why he
did not finish the translation—perhaps a new project diverted him.
“pervert[s]” the text. See George Chapman, The Works of George Chapman: Homer’s Iliad
and Odyssey, ed. Algernon Charles Swinburne (New York: Chatto & Windus, 1903),
218. More recently, Robin Sowerby deemed Valla’s translation a “failure” in “Early
Humanist Failure with Homer,” pts. 1 and 2, International Journal of the Classical Tradition
4, no.1 (1997): 56–62; no. 2 (1997): 168. Cf. Timothy Kircher, “Wrestling with Ulysses:
Humanist Translations of Homeric Epic Around 1440,” in Neo-Latin and the Humani-
ties: Essays in Honour of Charles E. Fantazzi (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Re-
naissance Studies, 2014), 68.
3 See Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2011), 209–10.

4 See introduction to Lorenzo Valla, Dialectical Disputations, ed. and trans. Brian P. Co-
penhaver and Lodi Nauta, vol. 1, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2012), vii–x.

Library, 2013), 226–28.
6 “I will . . . bring you the sixteen books of the Iliad which I have translated into
prose.” Lorenzo Valla, Correspondence, trans. Brendon Cook, I Tatti Renaissance Library
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), Letter 23, 154–55.
62
Chapter 5 - Constructions of Authorship in Valla’s Iliad
The following years were busy: Valla left the Aragonese court as of
1447 to begin his job at the Curia, and in 1455 he was appointed papal
secretary.7
All printed editions were published after Valla’s death, thus
without his authorial input and under the direction of the editors who
produced them. Immediately popular, the text was published in eight
editions between 1474 and 1550.8 In 1522, the translation was printed
with marginalia and an index at the printing house of Hero Alopecius
in Cologne. The press appears to have specialized in books for the
University of Cologne: other books it printed include the works of
Erasmus and Augustine, as well as histories, classical texts, and rheto-
ric manuals.9 Valla’s translation, published in an octavo, would have
appealed to students for it was both inexpensive and small enough to
carry with ease.
The fact that the edition does not have an introduction, a ded-
icatory epistle, or even a prefatory letter to the reader suggests that the
printer was trying to cut down on costs by using less paper, and there-
fore the index and printed marginalia alone frame the text. The index,
however, is by no means brief or truncated: it contains 611 entries.10
7 See Brian Copenhaver and Lori Nauta’s introduction to Dialectical Disputations, x.

8 Homeri poetarum supremi Ilias per Laurentium Vallens (Brescia: Henricus de Colonia and
Statius Gallicus, 1474); Homeri poetarum supremi Ilias (Brescia: Baptista Farfengus for
Franciscus Laurinus, 1497); Homeri poetae Clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem
Romanum e graeco in latinum translats (Venice: Dexteritate & impensa Ioannis Tacuini de
Tridino, 1502); Homeri poetae clarissimi Ilias (Lipetsk: Per Melchiorem Lotterum, 1512);
Homeri Poetae Clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem Romanum latina facta (Cologne:
Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1522); Homeri poetae clariss. Ilias (Cologne: Eucharius Ceru-
icornus excudebat, 1527); and Homeri poetarum omnium principis, Ilias, per Laurentium Val-
lam latio donata (Lyon: Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1541). Valla’s translation also appeared in
an edition with Raphael Volaterranus’ translation of the Odyssey in 1528; Homeri, poeta-
rum principis, cum Iliados, tum Odysseae XLVIII (Antwerp: Apud Io. Grapheum, 1528).
9 For example, Augustine, Diui Aurelii Augustini de Spiritu et Litera liber unus (Cologne:
Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1527); Adriano Castellesi, De sermone latino, & modis latine
loquendi (Cologne: Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1524); Desiderius Erasmus, Exomologesis
sive modvs confitendi (Cologne: Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1525); Desiderius Erasmus,
Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam (Cologne: Apud Heronem
Alopecium, 1523); Philipp Melanchthon, Philippi Melanchthonis De Rhetorica (Cologne:
Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1520); and Silvius Bartholomeus, Aeneae Silvii (Cologne:
Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1524).
10 Such an extensive index was fairly unusual in the contemporaneous publication of
epic works. More frequently, printers would not provide an index or would provide a
very brief one. For examples of epic texts without indices, see Homeri Odysseae libri
VIII, trans. Franciscus Sabinus Floridus (Paris: Apud Vascosanum, 1545); Homeri
63
Beatrice Bradley B
The creation of such an apparatus requires an intimate knowledge of

the text and, in the case of Valla’s translation, an understanding of Lat-
in. Moreover, the anonymous editor encourages a sense of familiarity
in that he refers to Valla by his first name, Laurentius (Lorenzo). Alt-
hough the identity of the editor is unknown, it is likely that he was
German, perhaps even associated with the University given his skill in
Latin, and that he was editing the text and index primarily for a well-
educated audience of students.11 As the printed marginalia frequent-
ly—though by no means entirely—repeat phrases from the index, it
seems that the same person was responsible for both of the paratextu-
al materials. Moreover, the edition appears to have been respected by
other printing houses: although the index grows more extensive in the
later editions, the 1522 text was likely the basis of subsequent print-
ings, for entries and phrases repeat.12 The long-term authority of the
paratextual materials—in that they shaped decades and perhaps gener-
ations of readers—is indicative of the editor’s influence in composing
the printed marginalia and index. As Valla manipulates his source ma-
terial to provide a reinterpretation of the epic, so the unknown editor
produces his own version of the Iliad. Although the editor primarily
works in concert with Valla’s intentions—that is, he emphasizes the by
Opera Graeco-latina, quae quidem nunc extant, ed. and trans. Sébastien Castellion and Henri
Estienne (Basel: Per haeredes Nicolai Brylingeri, 1567); and Odysseae Homeri libri XXIII,
trans. Raffaello Maffei (Lyon: Apud Seb. Gryphium, 1541). For examples of brief
indices, see Homeri Poetae Clarissimi, trans. Georgio Dartona, Andrea Divus, and Aldus
Manutius, and (Lyon: Per Vincentium de Portonariis, 1538); and Homeri, poetarum prin-
cipis, cum Iliados, tum Odysseae XLVIII, trans. Lorenzo Valla and Raphael Volaterranus
(Antwerp: Io. Grapheum, 1528). For an example of another book with an extensive
index, see Andrea Divus, trans., Homeri Ilias ad verbum (Paris: In officina Christiani
Wecheli, 1538).
11 Lotte Hellinga writes, “In Cologne, one of the first cities where early printers settled,
a multiple of small quarto editions were printed from 1465 onward, many of them
texts that were linked to the traditional curriculum of the university, prepared for pub-
lication by teachers” (214–215). It is likely that octavos were prepared similarly. Lotte
Hellinga, “The Gutenberg Revolutions,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed.
Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), 207–19.
12 For example, the phrase “Iuppiter fata Graecorum & Troianorum in lancibus posita exami-
nat” (Jupiter considers the fates of the Greeks and Romans by placing them on a scale)
appears in the 1522 edition (bb1 R) and is modified in the 1541 edition to read “Iupiter
fata Graecorum & Troianorum qui examinet” (Jupiter who considers the fates of the
Greeks and Trojans); F5 R.
64
then very famous humanist’s interventions—he nevertheless at times

subtly undercuts the translation to provide his own gloss of the epic.
READING VALLA IN THE CONTEXT OF THE 1522 PARATEXTS
The title as it appears inside the 1522 edition, Homeri Poetae Ili-
as per Laurentium Vallensem in Latinum Sermonem Traducta, immediately
indicates the paratextual insistence on Valla’s authorial presence.13 Not
only is his name included in the title, but also the very language sug-
gests sensitivity to Valla’s intentions and knowledge of his corpus, for
the word sermo (meaning “speech” or “talk”) carries immense signifi-
cance in his work. As Valla writes:
Nam et ȜȩȖȠȢ prius orationem sive sermonem signifi-

cavit quam rationem. Quod nisi nollem essse prolix-
us, plurimis testimoniis confirmarem, contentus hoc
solo argumento quod ȜȩȖȠȢ a verbo venit ȜȑȖȦ, quod
significat dico seu loquor, non autem cogito seu rati-
ocinor.14
Brian P. Copenhaver expands upon Valla’s assertions, saying of the

humanist, “Valla’s view was that philosophy always philologizes and
philology always philosophizes because sermo and res, language and the
world, cannot be pried apart” (515). With the word sermonem in the
title—rather than another Latin word meaning speech or language,
such as the obvious choice of lingua—the 1522 edition immediately
situates itself within the context of Valla’s larger philosophical enter-
prise.
13 “The Iliad of the Poet Homer, Translated into Latin Speech by Lorenzo Valla” (A2).
This title appears on the first page of the translation. It is listed differently on the title
page: Homeri Poetae Clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem Romanum latina facta (“The
Iliad of the Most Brilliant Poet Homer, Composed in Latin by the Roman Lorenzo
Valla”).
14 “For ȜȩȖȠȢ also meant ‘speech’ or ‘talk’ before it meant ‘reason.’ I would confirm
this with many examples, only I want not to go on too long, so I am satisfied with just
this one argument, that ȜȩȖȠȢ comes from the verb ȜȑȖȦ, which means ‘I say’ or ‘I
speak’ but not ‘I think’ or ‘I reason.’” Lorenzo Valla, Repastinatio, vol. 1 (Padua: Ante-
nore, 1982), 1.70–1; translated by Brian Copenhaver in “Valla Our Contemporary:
Philosophy and Philology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 4 (2005): 513–14.
65
Beatrice Bradley
The index, as well, carefully attends to the intentions of the

translator. One of the longest entries is comparatio or “comparisons”—
that is, epic similes—an entry which would allow the reader to browse
among various instances of rhetorical device with little attention to the
narrative overall. Such an emphasis on metaphor demonstrates a simi-
lar intention in the editor as in Valla, who writes Giovanni Tortelli that
he is translating Homer “in a rhetorical style” (ad characterem oratori-
um).15 The inclusion of such rhetorical devices in the index supports
the book’s usage as a reference tool, for it facilitates a reader’s non-
contextual quotation. This popular practice in the early modern era
encouraged readers to approach the text at intervals and in a nonlinear
fashion. For example, Erasmus suggests in his De Copia that the reader
should “flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature” so
that he will “acquire an ample supply of examples . . . ready in . . .
pocket.”16 Through the index, as well as the printed marginalia that
allowed a similar form of browsing, the author of the paratextual ma-
terials is able to draw the reader’s attention both to passages that he as
editor believes to be important and to those instances that would most
appeal to the presumed readership.
The editor is clearly catering to the reader’s interests, and thus
his interventions serve not only to assert Valla’s authorial primacy but
also as a marketing tool. The index emphasizes the Latinity of Valla’s
translation in a seeming attempt to appeal to an audience raised on
Virgil’s Aeneid and already familiar with the characters of the epic. De-
spite his minor role in the Iliad, Aeneas is cited twenty-one times in the
1522 index. Although this may not sound substantial, Agamemnon, a
figure who plays a far larger role in the epic, is mentioned in only
twenty-nine citations. This suggests that the editor prioritized Aeneas
in the belief that the book’s readership would be more interested in the
15Valla, Correspondence, Letter 11, 68–69.

16Desiderius Erasmus, De Copia, in Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational
Writings, vol. 2, ed. C. R. Thompson, trans. B. I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toron-
to Press, 1978), 639, 635; cf. Adam Smyth, “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of
Sixteen Traits,” in Women and Writing, c.1340–c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture,
ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (York: York Medieval Press, 2010),
92–93.
66
legendary founder of Rome—a subject of perceived importance to an

early modern Latinate population—than in Homer’s Greek king.
The index and printed marginalia thus do not function to bet-
ter reveal the Greek text to its reader but instead to obscure it in favor
of Valla’s mediating presence—both explicitly through references to
Laurentius, and more subtly in directing the reader to passages ex-
panded upon by the Italian humanist. Where modern audiences might
expect editorial practices to discourage liberties in translation, the 1522
edition in fact emphasizes and highlights Valla’s reworking of the orig-
inal text. We must keep in mind that creative forms of translation were
less unusual in the early modern period, where the translator’s job was
to improve upon the original.17 Renaissance thought distinguished be-
tween ad verbum—a word-by-word translation—and a more paraphras-
tic form of translation, ad sensum, and in fact by and large preferred the
latter. 18 Quintilian, whom Valla claims to “exalt . . . above Cicero”
(preposui…Quintilianum Ciceroni), 19 writes on his own adaptation of
Greek texts, “Sed et ipsis sententiis adicere licet oratorium robur, et
omissa supplere, effusa substringere. Neque ego paraphrasin esse in-
terpretationem tantum volo, sed circa eosdem sensus certamen atque
aemulationem.”20 Given Valla’s praise of Quintilian, it is not surprising
that he adopts a similar approach to translation; however, it is reveal-
ing in regard to early modern conceptions of authorship that a Ger-
man editor, long after Valla died, would treat the text with a similar
liberty. Not only does Valla transform the Homeric epic in his ad sen-
sum translation, but the index and printed marginalia work in conjunc-
tion with the text to revise and reshape the readership’s relation to the
epic.
17 For a discussion of authorial practices in early modern Europe and Valla’s own
approach to translation, see Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of
Eloquence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 4 (1963): 497–514.
18 For a more in-depth discussion of the differences between ad verbum and ad sensum in
early modern literary practices, see Kircher, “Wrestling with Ulysses,” 62.
19 Valla, Correspondence, Letter 17, 110–11.
20 “[W]e may add the vigour of oratory to the thoughts expressed by the Greek poet,
make good his omissions, and prune his diffuseness. But I would not have paraphrase
restrict itself to the bare interpretation of the original: its duty is to rival and vie with
the original in the expression of the same thoughts.” Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, vol.
4, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22),
112–115; cf. Kircher, “Wrestling with Ulysses,” 72–73.
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Beatrice Bradley
BOOK 1 AS INTRODUCTION
As previously mentioned, the 1522 edition contains no intro-

ductory material. For this reason, Book 1 functions in many ways as an
introduction, and the translation’s initial passages underscore the au-
thorial primacy implicit in Valla’s stance and in the choices of the par-
atextual editor. The first sentence at once presents Valla as author and
demonstrates that his rendition of the epic will break from the oral
tradition and focus on the written (scripturus) word. The original Ho-
meric text begins not with an assertion of authorship but with an invo-
cation to the muses asking them to sing: “Rage—Goddess, sing the
rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, / murderous, doomed, that cost the
Achaeans countless losses.” 21 Although Valla eventually calls upon
Calliope and “the other sisters of the muses” (aliae sorores . . . musarum),
his repeated attention to literary authorship reveals his own translation
practices (A2 R). In the first book’s immediate employment of the first
person, we can clearly observe Valla’s method of engagement with the
Greek text.
Valla repurposes the orality of Homer to appeal to the Lat-
inate audience of the Renaissance, who would likely view themselves
as descendants of ancient Rome and thus of Troy. To this end, not
only does he encourage a reading sympathetic to the Trojans, but he
also diminishes the role of the Greek heroes. Within the first few pag-
es of his translation, Valla interpolates an entirely new passage, and the
margins direct our attention to it (A2 R). Instead of beginning the epic
as Homer does with Chryseis already in the possession of Agamem-
non, Valla describes her capture on an island near Troy and her allot-
ment as a war prize. He writes:
Erat euisdem dei sacerdos quidam ex Chrysa insula, &

ipse Chryses nomine, unicae iam adultae pater: quam
& patriae & patris nomine, Chryseidam apellauit. Hanc
Graeci, cum Thebas euerterent, finitimasque; loca diri-
21 Robert Fagles, trans., The Iliad, ed. Bernard Knox (New York: Penguin Books,
1990), 1.1–2.
68
perent, captam, Agamemnoni, ut summo rege dignam,

uel dono uel in suam portionem obtulerunt.22
Valla’s amendment to the book is brief, and he quickly returns to a

closer rendition of the Homeric text. He outlines the scene in which
Chryses approaches the Greek camp and describes the priest as loaded
with gifts that he hopes to exchange for his daughter. In detailing the
appearance of Chryses, Valla is uncharacteristically faithful to the
Greek, for like Homer he mentions the priest’s golden scepter (aureum
sceptrum) and describes him as crowned with the wreath of Phoebus
Apollo (coronis Phoebi uittis; A2 V).
In fact, Valla’s expansion upon Chryseis’ capture could be
easily missed were it not that the editor pointedly draws attention to it.
In the index, an entry explicitly refers to Valla, saying of his interven-
tion, “Chryseis siue (ut Laurentius inflexisse uidetur) Chryseida capitur,
& Agamemnoni datur.”23 Although the parenthetical aside—ut Lauren-
tius inflexisse uidetur—syntactically refers to the fact that Valla has
changed the name of Homer’s Chryseis to Chryseida, it could also ap-
ply to the entire entry. As mentioned, the reference to Laurentius sug-
gests a familiarity in the use of the Italian humanist’s first name, and it
also emphatically positions the translator as distinct from the author of
the paratextual materials. Likewise, the passive use of uidetur produces
a tension between the editorial voice and that of the translator: the
third person passive of the verb uideo, uidere can mean both “is seen”
and “seems.” The statement “Laurentius seems to have changed” is
considerably less assertive than “Laurentius is seen to have changed.”
The author of the index allows for uncertainty in his use of uidetur and
alerts the reader to Valla’s mode of translation, in that the clause un-
derscores the humanist’s willingness to change (inflexisse) the original
epic. Not only does the editor draw our attention to the passage in the
22 “There was the priest of that same god [Apollo] from the island Chrysa, and he
himself was named Chryses. He was the father of one adult daughter, who by the
name of her father and fatherland was called Chryseida. Here the Greeks, when they
sacked Thebes, tore apart the neighboring areas, and they offered to Agamemnon, as
deserving for the highest king, either the captured woman as a present or his portion
[of the spoils]” (A2 V).
23 “Chryseis or (as Laurentius is seen to have changed) Chryseida is captured and given
to Agamemnon” (aa5 R).
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Beatrice Bradley
index, he also emphasizes Valla’s intervention in the printed margina-

lia. The marginalia reads “Chryseis is captured” (Chryseis capitur), and
the present tense immediately indicates a revision of the Homeric text
that begins with her already in the Greek camp (A2 V). The annotation
supports Valla’s interpolation, and at the very least it demonstrates the
annotator’s belief that the passage would be noteworthy—if not out-
right beneficial—to the reader.
There are thirty-one instances of printed marginalia in Book 1,
a large number of which—thirteen annotations—refer to women. The
female characters, however, are rarely identified alone but instead usu-
ally appear modified by a passive verb and thus defined by their inter-
action with men. For example, Bryseis is repeatedly referred to in the
phrase, Aufertur ab Achille Bryseis (“Bryseis is taken from Achilles”), and
although her name is the subject of the clause, it does not appear until
after Achille (B1 R, B2 R). Even Thetis, a goddess, is only cited in the
marginalia as the mother of Achilles. In the scene in which her son
informs her of his grief over Bryseis, the printed marginalia describes
their conversation in three annotations: Achilles matri (“Achilles to his
mother”); Thetis Achilli (“Thetis to Achilles”); and Achilles matri (“Achil-
les to his mother”; B1 V). In part, the editor’s attention to the female
characters as in relation to other male figures constitutes an appeal to
the book’s predominantly male readership. The women, often depicted
as defenseless and passive in the marginalia, subtly emphasize the sex-
ual violence inherent in Homer’s war and thus produce erotic over-
tones.
Nevertheless, despite her passive status as one captured (ca-
pitur), Chryseis is the first name to appear in the printed marginalia,
and in many ways Chryseis capitur functions as a chapter heading for the
otherwise untitled Book 1. This stands in marked contrast to modern
editions of the text that do provide such a chapter heading, such as
Robert Fagles’ translation, which titles Book 1, “The Rage of Achil-
les.” In extending Chryseis’ backstory—and in the paratextual editor’s
interest in the backstory—Valla’s translation delays the introduction of
the Greek hero and diminishes the vocalization of his rage. There is no
mention of his anger anywhere in the index or marginalia, and instead
the author of these materials focuses on Achilles’ conversations,
70
whether with his mother or other epic figures. This editorial choice
mirrors Valla’s own translation: when the Italian humanist does refer
to the soldier’s rage he uses the word indignatio, a word closer to “in-
dignation” than the vivid Greek word ȝોȞȚȞ (“wrath”). It is significant
that indignatio stands as the tenth word in Valla’s text whereas ȝોȞȚȞ is
the first word in Homer’s. Modern translations tend to follow the
Greek precedent: Fagles begins his translation “Rage,” and A.T. Mur-
ray similarly begins the Loeb edition, “The wrath.” 24 In his deferment
of indignatio, Valla in fact reduces Achilles’ role in the first book and in
the epic as a whole.
Working to emphasize the role of the translator, the editor
likewise downplays Achilles in that he avoids drawing the reader’s at-
tention to the Greek hero. Achilles is referenced thirty-three times un-
der his own heading and fifty-eight times elsewhere in the index. In
these citations, his name appears only twenty-two times in the nomina-
tive case, i.e. as a protagonist committing an action. Furthermore, oth-
er, lesser characters are indexed far more thoroughly. I have already
mentioned the frequency with which Aeneas is cited despite the fact
he appears very briefly in the Homeric epic. Hector, the Trojan hero,
is definitely a major figure in the Iliad, but the index exaggerates his
role and even implies that he is of greater importance than Achilles.
The Trojan hero appears in thirty-five entries under his own heading
and in thirty-seven instances elsewhere in the index. Thirty-two of
these are in the nominative case. The fact that both Valla and the au-
thor of the index suppress the role of Achilles and instead highlight
scenes that involve the action of Hector suggests that both the transla-
tor and the editor believed their audience would be more interested in
the Trojan hero and his activities than in the figure of Achilles, the
hero of the entire epic.
EDITORIAL INTENTION AND INTERVENTION
Although the editor often imitates the language of Valla and

explicitly directs the reader to consider the translator’s authorial inter-
Fagles, The Iliad, 1.1–2; and A.T. Murray, ed. and trans., Iliad, vol. 1 (Cambridge,
24
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1.1.
71
Beatrice Bradley
ventions, he also maintains a careful distinction between his notions

and those of Valla. For example, in the index’s other direct reference
to Valla the editor notes, “Litae Iouis filiae, quas Laurentius preces
interpretatur.”25 The annotation refers to Book 9 and Phoenix’s de-
scription of prayers for forgiveness; in the Homeric text, he tells Achil-
les:
We do have Prayers, you know, Prayers for for-
giveness,
daughters of mighty Zeus . . . and they limp and halt,
they’re all wrinkled, drawn, they squint to the side,
can’t look you in the eyes, and always bent on duty,
trudging after Ruin, maddening, blinding Ruin.
(9.609–13, Fagles)
In the editor’s use of interpretatur—a word meaning both translation

and interpretation—he both emphasizes Valla’s role as one who inter-
prets the text and suggests that there might be a difference between
Valla’s translation and that of others. Modern editions tend to translate
the Homeric word ȜȚĲĮȓ as “prayers”—and the Oxford Greek diction-
ary defines ȜȚĲĮȓ as “prayers” or “entreaties”—and thus there seems to
be nothing unusual in Valla’s word choice of preces.26 Nevertheless, the
author of the paratexts calls our attention to the usage of “prayers,”
thereby positioning Valla in a Christian context.
The editor often seems to recognize a textual inaccuracy or
tension in Valla’s translation, but rather than actively commenting on
it, he subtly uses it for what appears to be religious purposes. For ex-
ample, to look again at Book 1, we see the messengers arrive to take
Bryseis from Achilles, and Achilles, as in Homer, meet them on the
beach. Valla writes of the hero, “saluete inquit praecones Iouis atque;
hominum angeli,” which accords with the Greek, but the word he uses
for messengers (angeli) is one that calls to mind Christian angels.27 In
fact, the word angelo is a late medieval addition to the Latin language
25 “The befouled daughters of Jove, which Laurentius translates as prayers” (bb1 V).
26 D. N. Stavropoulos, ed., Oxford English-Greek Learner’s Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004), s.v. “ȜȚĲĮȓ.”
27 “Greetings, he said, heralds of Jove and messengers of men” (B1 R).
72
that bears the primary meaning of angel and only a secondary usage of
messenger. 28 The Greek text reads, “ȤĮȓȡİĲİ țȒȡȣțİȢ, ¨ȚzȢ ਙȖȖİȜȠȚ
਱į੻ țĮ੿ ਕȞįȡ૵Ȟ,” which Fagles translates as “Welcome, couriers! Good
heralds of Zeus and men” (1.394), and Murray as, “Greetings, heralds,
messengers of Zeus and men” (1.334). The two words that Homer
uses, țȒȡȣțİȢ and ਙȖȖİȜȠȚ, are essentially synonyms, meaning herald
and messenger respectively. It is possible that Valla chose the word
angeli to approximate the sound of ਙȖȖİȜȠȚ. However, the Latin word
angarius (“courier”) would produce a similar phonetic effect, and, in
any event, such a translation practice would follow that of ad verbum,
the method Valla has overwhelmingly rejected in his paraphrastic ver-
sion. Furthermore, there are many other words that Valla could have
chosen without such religious connotations, among them the term
frequently used in classical epic, nuntius (“messenger”), or even missus
(“one sent”).
The medieval word angeli stands out as odd in a text that re-
peatedly refers to the ancient Greek gods and is being translated by an
author who has argued against attempts to make classical literature
conform to Christian thought. Valla often attacks his peers for conflat-
ing the two forms of literary expression, deploring in particular their
use of classical Latin in Christian contexts. He writes, “you who could
be called senators of the Christian commonwealth are better pleased to
hear and employ pagan speech than ecclesiastical.”29 Valla frequently
expresses such opinions: as Charles Edward Trinkaus, Jr. explains, “he
consistently and comprehensively emphasized the irreconcilability of
reason and faith, of philosophy and theology, of paganism and Christi-
anity. It is important to emphasize this, despite the fact that it fre-
quently was more of a formally reiterated position than something Val-
la consistently carried out in practice.”30 Valla’s use of angeli is clearly
such an instance in which he breaks from his “formally reiterated posi-
tion,” and the editor appears to notice the tension and emphasize the
28 James Morwood, ed., Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), s.v. “angelo.”
29 Lorenzo Valla, “Dialogue on Free Will,” trans. Charles Edward Trinkaus, in The
Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Her-
man Randall (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 156.
30 Trinkaus’ introduction to Valla’s “Dialogue on Free Will,” ibid., 149.
73
Beatrice Bradley
Christian connotations in the word. In Valla’s line—“saluete inquit

praecones Iouis atque; hominum angeli”—the word atque separates
angeli from the earlier text, thus clearly signifying that hominum modifies
angeli and produces the clause “the angeli of men.” In the index, how-
ever, the same passage is noted as, “Praecones hominum atque de-
orum angeli” (bb4 V). Once more the word atque separates the two
appellations, but here the editor has chosen to attach deorum to angeli:
“the angeli of the gods.” Although this is by no means erroneous or
even a mistranslation, the passage now appears explicitly Christian to
the reader.
CONCLUSION
Early modern conceptions of authorship are famously inexact:

the act of composition was often understood as collective, and human-
ists prided themselves on “improving” original texts. However, as this
paper has demonstrated, we should carefully consider the paratexts
when reading early modern editions. My close attention to the first
book of Valla’s Iliad and indeed to the epic’s first words was prompted
by their indicative value and declaration of intent—Book 1 acts in
many ways as an introduction to the entire translation—but Valla’s
practice and that of his editor function similarly throughout the text
and index. Not only does the author of the 1522 paratexts actively
work to emphasize Valla as author, the editorial formatting of the text
also softens the orality of the original Greek, diminishing the Argive
heroes and downplaying the Greek epic’s violence in favor of the Ro-
man ideal of temperance. Moreover, the paratextual editor at times
subtly challenges Valla’s translation, identifying tensions in the text and
calling the reader’s attention to these inconsistencies. This sort of ma-
nipulation by way of annotation was widely practiced in early modern
literature and scholarship, and we therefore need to read the early
modern textual apparatus with a sensitivity to ambiguity and textual
tensions. In considering the authorship of this translation, we should
understand Valla’s book not as a “failed” attempt to translate Homer
but rather as the collaborative interpretation of myth as put forth by
Homer, Valla, and the edition’s paratextual materials.
74
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Diui Aurelii Augustini de Spiritu et Litera liber unus. Cologne:

Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1527.
Bartholomeus, Silvius. Aeneae Silvii. Cologne: Apud Heronem Alopeci-
um, 1524.
Castellesi, Adriano. De sermone latino, & modis latine loquendi. Cologne:
Castellion, Sébastien, and Henri Estienne, eds. and trans. Homeri Opera
Graeco-latina, quae quidem nunc extant. Basel: Per haeredes Nico-
lai Brylingeri, 1567.
Chapman, George. The Works of George Chapman: Homer’s Iliad and Odys-
sey. Edited by Algernon Charles Swinburne. New York: Chat-
to & Windus, 1903.
Copenhaver, Brian P. “Valla Our Contemporary: Philosophy and Phi-
lology.” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 4 (2005): 507–25.
Dartona, Georgio, Andrea Divus, and Aldus Manutius, trans. Homeri
Poetae Clarissimi. Lyon: Per Vincentium de Portonariis, 1538.
Divus, Andrea, trans. Homeri Ilias ad verbum. Paris: In officina Christiani
Wecheli, 1538.
Erasmus, Desiderius. De Copia. In Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary
and Educational Writings, edited by C. R. Thompson, translated
by B. I. Knott. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1978.
———. Exomologesis sive modvs confitendi. Cologne: Apud Heronem Al-
opecium, 1525.
———. Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam. Co-
logne: Apud Heronem Alopecium, 1523.
Fagles, Robert, trans. The Iliad. Edited by Bernard Knox. New York:
Penguin Books, 1990.
Floridus, Franciscus Sabinus, trans. Homeri Odysseae libri VIII. Paris:
Apud Vascosanum, 1545.
Gray, Hanna H. “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence.”
Journal of the History of Ideas 24, no. 4 (1963): 497–514.
Grendler, Paul. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2011.
Hellinga, Lotte. “The Gutenberg Revolutions.” In A Companion to the
History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose,
207–19. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Kircher, Timothy. “Wrestling with Ulysses: Humanist Translations of
Homeric Epic Around 1440.” In Neo-Latin and the Humanities:
Essays in Honour of Charles E. Fantazzi, edited by Luc Dietz,
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Timothy Kircher, and Jonathan Reid, 61–90. Toronto: Centre

for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014.
Maffei, Raffaello, trans. Odysseae Homeri libri XXIII. Lyon: Apud Seb.
Gryphium, 1541.
Melanchthon, Philipp. Philippi Melanchthonis De Rhetorica. Cologne:
Morwood, James, ed. Pocket Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
Most, Glenn W. and Alice Schreyer, eds. Homer in Print: A Catalogue of
the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana at the University of Chicago Li-
brary. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2013.
Murray, A. T., ed. and trans. The Iliad. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library.
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Quintilian. Institutio Oratoria. Edited and translated by H. E. Butler. 4
vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920–22.
Smyth, Adam. “Commonplace Book Culture: A List of Sixteen
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Sowerby, Robin. “Early Humanist Failure with Homer.” Pts. 1 and 2.
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Stavropoulos, D.N., ed. Oxford English-Greek Learner’s Dictionary. Ox-
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Valla, Lorenzo. Correspondence. Translated by Brendon Cook. I Tatti
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———. Dialectical Disputations. Edited and translated by Brian P. Co-
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———. “Dialogue on Free Will.” Translated by Charles Edward
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———, trans. Homeri poetae Clarissimi Ilias per Laurentium Vallensem

Romanum e graeco in latinum translats. Venice: Dexteritate & im-
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77
Chapter 6
The Editorial and Ideological Project of

Lodovico Dolce’s L’Achille et l’Enea
ELIZABETH TAVELLA
Lodovico Dolce (1508–68) stands out as an exemplar of the

ideal poligrafo, a well-rounded man in the field of human letters. He
worked as an author, an editor, a translator, and a critic, and dedicated
himself to the voluminous production of an extremely versatile num-
ber of literary works.1 Although his contemporaries praised him highly,
his fame has considerably decreased and he has not received as much
attention from scholars in the last century, who have mainly focused
on studying his theatrical production.2 During his life, he collaborated
with several Venetian printers, but the most prolific part of his intense
activity was carried out with Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari, one of the
most important editors of the Cinquecento, with the main purpose to
promulgate humanistic culture to a non-specialized public.
L’Achille et l’Enea, a unique example in its genre, was published
posthumously by Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari in 1570. It was followed
two years later by a second edition to which an oration composed by
1 For detailed biographical information, see Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna, Memorie
intorno la vita e gli scritti di Messer Lodovico Dolce letterato veneziano del secolo XVI (Venice,
Segreteria dell'I. R. Istituto, 1863), 93–200; Ronnie H. Terpening, Lodovico Dolce, Renais-
sance Man of Letters (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 3–24. A complete list
of Dolce’s works can be found in Gaetana Marrone, Encyclopedia of Italian Literary
Studies, vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 639–40.
2 Pietro Aretino, one of his closest friends wrote of him: “era in facoltà sua il divenire
sommo, ovunque egli si fosse preposto di mettere stabilmente la propria industria” (he
had the talent to become the greatest, in any work he did steadily) in Della letteratura
veneziana libri otto, ed. Marco Foscarini (Padua: Stamperia del Seminario, 1752), 450.
Veronica Gambara, in a letter to Pietro Aretino wrote “è un de li principali ornamenti
di questa nostra età” (he is one of the main ornaments of our time) in Rime e lettere di
Veronica Gambara, ed. by Felice Rizzardi (Brescia: G. Rizzardi, 1759), 292. Contempo-
rary editions of Dolce’s tragedies include: Lodovico Dolce, Tieste, ed. Stefano Giazzon
(Turin: Res, 2010); Medea, ed. Ottavio Saviano (Turin: Res, 2010); Didone, ed. Stefano
Tomassini (Parma: Edizioni Zara, 1996). Ernesto Giacomo Parodi affirmed that
“merita l’oblio ch’ebbe in sorte” (he deserves to be forgotten), in Studi di Filologia
Romanza, vol. 2 (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1887), 272. All translations from Italian
are my own.
Elizabeth Tavella
Andrea Menechini, Sopra le lodi della Poesia, et de’ Fautori delle Virtù, was
bound immediately after Dolce’s text. In L’Achille et l’Enea, the poems
of Homer and Virgil are originally condensed into one poem com-
posed of fifty-five canti, of which the first twenty-seven are dedicated
to the Iliad while the rest cover the plot of the Aeneid. Each canto is
introduced by an argomento, a rhymed octave that summarizes the con-
tent of the chapter, followed by a rectangular woodcut that reflects the
exegetic itinerary suggested by the allegoria, which provides an interpre-
tation of various actions and characters, taking into consideration their
virtues and vices. Dolce chose to use ottava rima to translate the dactyl-
ic hexameter of his sources, a meter that was first introduced by Boc-
caccio for his Teseida, Ninfale Fiesolano and Filostrato, but whose origin
may be rooted in the cantari tradition.
The paratextual and intertextual features that characterize this
particular work are the result of a specific editorial strategy. In fact,
Dolce’s ideological and editorial program represents the arrival point
of a critical debate between chivalric romances and epic poetry that
began with Ludovico Ariosto’s publication of the Orlando Furioso. The
author also deliberately elaborates a precise promotional move that can
be traced in his particular translation/rewriting process. Not only did
the production of his “pastiche” represent an attempt to adapt to the
audience’s taste, but at the same time it was meant to respond and re-
act to this critical and historical debate regarding literary genres. In
order to understand and examine the project that shaped L’Achille et
l’Enea, it is necessary to retrace the sequence of events preceding its
publication, starting from the editorial success of the Orlando Furioso
and Dolce’s role in the creation of this famous editorial case.
THE ORLANDO FURIOSO AND THE SUCCESSFUL

PROMULGATION OF ITS MISE EN PAGE
In the sixteenth century, Ariosto’s masterpiece underwent a

process of canonization, which resulted in the establishment of a
modern classic that equaled the greatest ancient heroic poems.3 De-
3Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic. The Canonization of Orlando Furioso (Princeton:

Princeton University Press), 1991.
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Chapter 6 - Lodovico Dolce's L'Achille et l'Enea
spite the controversies among scholars concerning the superiority of

classical Greek and Roman authors over contemporary writers, the
Orlando Furioso managed to reach such a wide audience that it became
possible to claim that “se oggi fusse perduto il Furioso del tutto, non
mancherebbero le schiere degli uomini che lo serbano a mente da capo
a piede di parola in parola.”4
Gabriele Giolito was indeed the central figure that allowed the
consolidation of its prestige since he was responsible for having creat-
ed the first illustrated edition of the Furioso and for introducing two
different book sizes, quarto and octavo editions, in order to reach two
categories of readers: the aristocrats, and the middle and lower classes,
which included students and artisans.5 He also contributed actively to
its success beyond the Alps through the dedicatory letter in his first
Italian edition, addressed to the Dauphin of France, along with the
publication of a Spanish translation in 1553. In order to elevate the
Furioso to a classic, he adopted a specific format that was previously
utilized for the canonical ancient works, and also for the Three
Crowns (Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio).6 Giolito’s editorial strategy
proved to be the key to his supremacy over other Italian editors and
especially to the production of a renowned best-seller.
Lodovico Dolce was one of Ariosto’s first defenders and took
part in several of the literary and poetic polemics that permeated the
Cinquecento. His interest in literary criticism was already perceptible in
4 “Even if today the Furioso were to be completely lost, there would still be people who
could recite it word by word.” Giuseppe Malatesta, Della nuova poesia o vero delle difese del
Furioso del Signor Giuseppe Malatesta (Verona: Delle Donne, 1589), 139. For general in-
formation regarding the controversy between ancients and moderns see Emilio Matti-
oli, “Introduzione al problema di tradurre,” Il Verri 19 (1965): 107–28; Francesco
Sberlati, Il Genere e la Disputa. La Poetica tra Ariosto e Tasso (Roma: Bulzoni Editore,
2001).
5 For a list of the editions of the Furioso see Ulisse Guidi, Annali delle Edizioni e delle
Versioni dell’Orlando Furioso e d’altri lavori al poema relativi (Bologna: Tipografia in Via
Poggiale n. 715, 1861). A series of tables that include percentages regarding the
different editors and editions of the Furioso starting from the princeps in 1516 can be
found in Giancarlo Alfano, “Una forma per tutti gli usi: l’ottava rima,” in Atlante della
letteratura italiana, ed. Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà (Turin: Einaudi, 2011), 31–
57.
6 Daniel Javitch, “Gabriele Giolito’s ‘packaging’of Ariosto, Boccaccio and Petrarch in
the Mid-Cinquecento,” in Studies for Dante: Essays in Honor of Dante Della Terza, ed.
Franco Fido, Pamela Stewart, and Rena A. Syska-Lamparska (Fiesole: Edizioni
Cadmo, 1998), 123–33.
81
Elizabeth Tavella
the preface to his translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica, in which he in-

sists on the importance of considering the nature of the present time
and the diversity of languages, and on a poet’s duty to adjust to these
variations.
The most significant act in the delineation of his position in
this lively critical debate must be identified with his Apologia contra i
detrattori dell’Ariosto, which he wrote in 1535, just three years after Ario-
sto’s death. 7 This apology represents an important document for Ario-
stan reception, since Dolce praised Ariosto’s variety in response to the
diffusion of Aristotelian poetics and the contestations made by the
exponents of neoclassical orthodoxy.8
Dolce also collaborated on many editions and supplementary
Venetian reprintings of the Furioso, demonstrating his philological and
linguistic interest towards this text. He composed argomenti, introducto-
ry letters, commentary, tables of names and places, indexes, and prov-
erbs that accompanied the text and shaped its exegesis.9 In line with
Giolito’s claim of the Furioso’s didactic usefulness, stated in the dedica-
tory letter to the Dauphin of France, Dolce sought to reveal the moral-
izing and edifying character of the text through the combination of
allegories at the head of each canto and the iconographic cycle of im-
ages that frame the text. This particular mise en page, resulting from
Giolito and Dolce’s close collaboration, achieved great success, to the
point that between the years 1542 and 1560 their Furioso was reprinted
twenty-seven times.
Dolce’s admiration towards Ariosto resurfaced in 1536 with
his own poetic contribution, the Primo Libro di Sacripante, a sequel to
the Orlando Furioso, and again when he ventured in the composition of
an epic experiment, Le prime imprese di Conte Orlando, published only in
1572. In this original attempt to contribute to the genre of chivalric
romances, the woodblocks of the Furioso were recycled and reused to
7 This text was first published with the Orlando Furioso (Venice: Pasini e Bindoni) in
1535, just three years after Ariosto’s death. It is reproduced entirely in Sberlati, Il
Genere e la Disputa, 32–34.
8 Daniel Javitch, “The Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in sixteenth-century Italy,” in
The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 53–65.
9 To name but a few, he wrote the octaves of argomento for the 1604 edition by Nicolò
Misserino and edited the 1568 edition printed by Giovanni Varisco.
82
accompany the text, a practice that reveals not only economic implica-
tions but also, more than anything, an ideological link between the two
texts.10
The paratextual features established and rigidly fixed in the
editions of the Furioso were again employed for Dolce’s translation of
the Metamorphoses commissioned by Giolito. Ovid’s poem was con-
formed to the Ariostan model, not only in terms of meter, the ottava
rima, but most especially in its editorial format. This was chosen to
construct and consequently orient a new perception of the text
adapted to a modern context. It was not by chance that Dolce’s Tras-
formationi, first published in 1553, was characterized by the same layout
as that of the Furioso.11 Both works included, for instance, the incipit of
the chapters on the right page, engravings in the exact same size,
summaries of the canti, historiated initials on the first line of each
chapter, and the text distributed into two columns. 12 These features
were meant to direct the readers in a specific direction, promoting the
model of chivalric romance through a visual assimilation between the
two works, presuming that the potential readers would have been the
same ones for both editions. The multiplicity and variety of the poems’
narratives facilitated the association between the two texts, which con-
sequently allowed both texts to reproduce the same recognizable typo-
graphical elements on the page.
Dolce’s attention toward the audience is clearly underlined in
the advertisement to the readers, where he stresses the importance of
satisfying various audience types without disregarding the importance
of pleasure:
10 Luca Degl’Innocenti, “‘Ex pictura poesis”: invenzione narrativa e tradizione figura-

tiva ariostesca nelle prime imprese del Conte Orlando di Lodovico Dolce,” in “Tra
mille carte vive ancora”: Ricezione del Furioso tra immagini e parole, ed. Lina Bolzoni, Serena
Pezzini, and Giovanna Rizzarelli (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2010), 303–320.
11 For a study of the iconographic cycle, see François Glénisson-Delannée,
“Illustration, traduction et glose dans les Trasformationi de Ludovico Dolce (1553): un

palimpseste des Métamorphoses,” in Le livre illustré italien au XVIe siècle: Texte/Image, ed.
Michel Plaisance (Klincksieck: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999), 119–150.
12 Franca Petrucci Nardelli, La lettera e l’immagine. Le iniziali parlanti (secc. XVI–XVIII),
(Florence: Olschki, 1991), 17–33.
83
Elizabeth Tavella
Col disiderio di giovar passando ne i fertili giardini

quando l’uno et quando d’un altro poeta, mi posi a
tradurre dalla favela Romana nel volgare Thoscano i
quindici libri delle Trasformationi d’Ovidio: paren-
domi di poter per cotal via, quasi col far nostre le pi-
ante nate dal terreno altrui, apportare a quelli, che
cognition non’hanno del sermone latino cibi non me-
no utili e soavi, che cari et piacevoli all’intelletto.13
It is clear that Giolito and Dolce intentionally promoted a

specific book layout in order to visually organize these stories under
the same physical and theoretical criteria. This commercial standardi-
zation has economic repercussions that reveal the publishing logistics
that led to it. However, it also highlights important cultural signifi-
cance, since the organization of a unitary format evidently implies ide-
ological consequences. In fact, the specific format through which a
literary work is transmitted holds the power to forge the interpretation
of the reader.
The exact same structure that was used for the Orlando Furioso
and the other aforementioned poems was also incorporated into Dol-
ce’s last translations into the vernacular: an adaptation of the Odyssey, a
complete translation of the Aeneid, and L’Achille et l’Enea that will be
the focus of the upcoming analysis.
L’ACHILLE ET L’ENEA: LODOVICO DOLCE’S

“BELLA INFEDELE” AND ITS AFFILIATION WITH
THE ORLANDO FURIOSO
Dolce’s rewriting does not classify as a word-by-word repro-

duction of the original text in a new language. Instead, the linguistic
13 “Having the desire to delight, walking through the fertile gardens of different poets,
I decided to translate from Latin into Tuscan dialect the fifteen books of Ovid’s Tras-
formationi: in order to give, as if taking possession of those plants that were born else-
where, to those who are not familiar with the Latin language, useful and pleasant, as
much as dear and delightful, food for the intellect.” Lodovico Dolce, Il Primo Libro delle
Trasformationi d’Ovidio da M. Lodovico Dolce in volgare tradotto (Venice, Francesco Bindone
et Mapheo Pasini, 1538), iir–v.
84
aspect of his rifacimento retrieves the etymological acceptation of traduc-

tio, which must be intended as a transfer of structures, concepts, and
forms into a new system. Dolce also clearly evokes the distinction be-
tween orator and interpres proposed by Cicero in his De optimo genere ora-
torum, which has been applied to the theoretical systematization of
translation. His rewriting can be defined as a “bella infedele,”14 a transla-
tion that distances itself from the original. Dolce in fact refuses the
“ufficio di semplice traduttore”15 while preferring to adapt his work to Re-
naissance standards through precise translation choices.
Andrea Menechini’s oration on poetry explains and justifies
Dolce’s liberty in modifying the original text:
Il Dolce merita ogni lode, in aver seguito la strada de’

Moderni, ponendovi per entro alcune coselle di suo,
per farla parer più vaga senza obligarsi alle parole,
non avendo in pensiero, come egli stesso afferma in
principio del Libro, di far una semplice traduttione,
essendo malagevol cosa il ridurre una Lingua in
un’altra di parola in parola, senza accrescimento, o
diminutione.16
The tragic conclusion of the Aeneid, for example, is eliminated

following the common Cinquecento preference of interrupting the
narrative of the Aeneid at its apotheosis. The last two canti of L’Achille
et l’Enea are in fact dedicated to Aeneas’ marriage with Lavinia and to
his ascent to the Latin throne. Dolce also chooses to simplify the Aene-
id’s original ekphrastic elements as well as Virgil’s use of rhetorical fig-
ures, and to reduce the length of the poem, although this affects the
14 “beautiful and unfaithful”

15 “the obligation of simple translator”
16 “Dolce deserves to be praised, for having followed the road of the Moderns, since
he added his own touch, not wanting to, as he himself affirms at the beginning of the
book, to do a simple translation, for it is a wrong thing to translate from a Language
into another one word by word, without adding, nor diminishing.” Andrea Menechini,
Delle lodi della poesia d’Omero, et di Virgilio, in Lodovico Dolce, L’Achille et l’Enea di Messer
Lodovico Dolce. Dove egli tessendo l’historia della Iliade d'Homero a quella dell’Eneide di Vergilio,
ambedue l’ha divinamente ridotte in ottava rima. Con argomenti, et allegorie per ogni canto: et due
tavole: l’una delle Sentenze; l’altra dei Nomi, & delle cose più notabili (Venice, Gabriel Giolito
de' Ferrari, 1572), 42.
85
Elizabeth Tavella
pathos and flattens the linguistic and rhythmic structures.17 If Dolce

seems to abridge the content of the poem in the name of utilità, he also
cultivates the second segment of the Horatian ideal, diletto. He does so
in part by reworking Virgil’s brevitas through amplification and addition
of linguistic adornments, which evoke a typical baroque style that
stresses artificial, non-mimetic sentences.
For the section of the text dedicated to the translation of the
Iliad, Dolce must have worked on a Latin translation since, given the
available biographical information, he was likely not fluent in Greek.18
In the dedicatory letter to Francesco Lomellino, Giolito stresses the
predominance of Achilles’ virtues of the soul over the strengths of his
body, again promoting a moral reading of the text, as had already been
done with the Orlando Furioso. The title of the poem itself, which shifts
its reference from Ilion to the main character, as can be observed in
the title of the Aeneid, significantly moves the attention to the center of
the modernized narration: the two heroes.
Moreover, the typographical layout and format of L’Achille et
l’Enea are indistinguishable from those of Dolce and Giolito’s earlier
works, previously discussed in this paper. The mise en page is carefully
reproduced, from the two columns of octaves on each page, to the
sequence of argument, allegory, woodcut, and historiated initial.
The work even contains another exceptional analogy, the bor-
rowing of the sentenze, a list of aphorisms listed in alphabetical order
that were originally planned by Dolce for the Orlando Furioso. Dolce
also imitates Ariosto’s technique of ending each canto with an address
to the audience, as if they were listening to a rhapsodic recitation of
the poem: “Nel’altro canto ad ascoltar v’aspetto; Con piacer vostro io
qui finisco il canto; Et io per dar men noia a chi m’ascolta, differisco a
17 For some textual comparisons between Virgil’s Aeneid and Dolce’s two adaptations
(Eneide and Achille e Enea), see Luciana Borsetto, “Riscrivere l’Historia. Riscrivere lo
Stile. Il poema di Virgilio nelle Riduzioni Cinquecentesche di Lodovico Dolce,” in Il
Furto di Prometeo. Imitazione, Scrittura, Riscrittura nel Rinascimento (Alessandria: Edizioni
dell’Orso, 1990), 223–255. For other examples of translations of the Aeneid in the
sixteenth century, see by the same author, L’Eneida tradotta. Riscritture poetiche del testo di
Virgilio nel XVI secolo (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1989).
18 For his translation of Euripides’ Giocasta, we are certain that he used a Latin
intermediary. See Pietro Montorfani, “Giocasta, un volgarizzamento euripideo di

Lodovico Dolce (1549),” in Aevum 80 (2006): 717–39.
86
cantarlo un’atra volta; Ritorni, se gli è grado, un’altra volta, chi questa
historia volentieri ascolta.”19
Given the lack of information on the process of publication
of this work, it is not possible to define Dolce’s role in establishing
these paratextual features with certainty, especially since L’Achille et
l’Enea was published after his death. Yet there is one piece of evidence
that may refer to an earlier stage of the text’s development. In a letter
that Giolito wrote to Antoine Perrenot in 1557, in which he was trying
to obtain a privilege from King Philip II for a list of books, there is
listed a certain “Achille del Dolce.” This information may actually cast
light on the chronology of the composition of this work, and it could
perhaps indicate that the format of the book was already planned by
that date.
CONCLUSION
Translations of Greek and Latin classics underwent a period

of exceptional flourishing due to the revival of epic poetry and the
impressive success gained by the Furioso.20 They were considered the
equal of the new classics written in the vernacular and represented a
vehicle of transmission for works written in languages unknown to the
general public, allowing a much broader pool of potential readers.
Dolce’s main concern was precisely to reach the reader in the
most efficient and unambiguous way and, in order to do so, he con-
sciously intervened and modified the original text. He in fact states
that
Non dee mai il poeta dire oscuramente il suo con-

cetto, in guise, che ‘l lettore sia sospeso, e mas-
19 “In the next canto I will wait for you who listen”(10); “With your permission I will
end the canto here”(20); “And in order to avoid boring whoever is listening, I will
abstain from singing it again”(40); “May whoever listens to this story with pleasure,
return, once again”(534). Dolce, L'Achille et l'Enea.
20 For a series of tables with percentages of translations and editions into Italian of
Latin and Greek classics, see Chiara De Caprio, “Volgarizzare e tradurre i grandi poe-
mi dell’antichità (XIV–XXI secolo),” in Atlante della Letteratura Italiana, ed. Sergio Luz-
zatto and Gabriele Pedullà, vol. 3, Dal Risorgimento a oggi, ed. Domenico Scarpa, (Turin:
Einaudi, 2012).
87
Elizabeth Tavella
simamente in un Poema narrativo e continuato: ove la

narratione dee esser lucida e chiara.21
The combination of intertextual and paratextual elements

demonstrate Dolce’s, as well as Giolito’s, determination to elevate the
classic epic poems to the success achieved by the chivalric romance.
With L’Achille et l’Enea, Dolce responded to the desire of giving a
modern and Renaissance “look” to the Virgilian and Homeric poems,
assembled together in this peculiar vernacularization in a way that vio-
lates the unity of the epic fabula and which contradicts the Aristotelian
principle of mimesis.
Since the beginning of his career as an editor, Dolce had al-
ways been careful to notice changes in readers’ diverse tastes, and to
cleverly adapt to them. At the same time, he was also able to direct
their choices with extremely innovative and intelligent editorial deci-
sions. Through the organization of standardized formatting rules and
literary and linguistic approaches, Dolce established a code that con-
nected writer, editor, and reader. L’Achille et l’Enea became a book that
enclosed a wealth of visual and textual memory that was inaugurated
by the serial production of the Furioso and that stimulated a trend to
publish ancient epics in ottava rima.
After the Furioso was elevated to the level of the ancient au-
thors, and the text and format fixed in the mind of readers through
decades of editorially-identical editions, the fortunate Giolito-Dolce
team reversed this process. They made the ancient authors imitate
the Furioso, producing them in a distinctive historical, philological, and
literary tradition. The reuse of the allegorical framework and the recy-
cling of the illustrations created a unique narrative and visual affiliation
between all the texts that respected the same format.
Unfortunately, Dolce’s compendium never achieved the same
success of its model, since it disappeared completely after being re-
printed only twice. Attempts to produce similar translations with other
21 “Never must a poet say a concept obscurely, so that the reader is kept suspended,
and especially in a narrative and continuous Poem: where the narration must especially
be clear and transparent.” Lodovico Dolce, Modi affigurati e voci scelte ed eleganti della volgar
lingua, con un discorso sopra ai mutamenti e diversi ornamenti dell’Ariosto (Venice: Giovan
Battista e Marchio Sessa Fratelli, 1564), 304r.
88
great poems of antiquity failed miserably, most likely due to the later
popularization of blank verse, which eventually prevailed thanks to its
use in Annibale Caro’s translation of the Aeneid. This would also be
the favored meter for translations of the Iliad for which, in order to
have a complete blank verse translation, one had to wait until the year
1723.
Dolce’s massive rewriting of the ancient epic poems will,
however, echo in another artistic context. L’Achille et l’Enea would go
on to be appropriated by Claudio Monteverdi, who likely relied upon
the Virgilian portion of the text as a mediator for the libretto of his
Nozze di Enea.22
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alfano, Giancarlo. “Una forma per tutti gli usi: l’ottava rima.” In Atlan-
te della letteratura italiana, edited by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabrie-
le Pedullà, 31–57. Turin: Einaudi, 2011
Aretino, Pietro. Della letteratura veneziana libri otto. Edited by Marco
Foscarini. Padua: Stamperia del Seminario, 1752.
Bolzoni, Lina. La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età
della stampa. Turin: Einaudi Editore, 1995.
———. “Parole e immagini per il ritratto di un nuovo Ulisse:
l’invenzione dell’Aldrovandi per la sua villa di campagna.” In
Documentary Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand
I to Pope Alexander VII, 317–48. Bologna: Nuova Alfa
Editoriale, 1992.
Borsetto, Luciana. L’Eneida tradotta. Riscritture poetiche del testo di Virgilio
nel XVI secolo. Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1989.
22 Ellen Rosand, Monteverdi’s Last Opera:.A Venetian Trilogy (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 143–149. The illustrations of Dolce's Ulisse will also be used as
a model by Ulisse Aldovrandi in 1585 to decorate the walls of a fresco cycle in his
villa. He was probably inspired by the synthesis of the poem and the great example of
visual translation. See Lina Bolzoni, “Parole e immagini per il ritratto di un nuovo
Ulisse: l’invenzione dell’Aldrovandi per la sua villa di campagna,” in Documentary
Culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-Duke Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII (Bologna:
Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1992), 317–348.
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———. “Riscrivere l’Historia. Riscrivere lo Stile: Il poema di Virgilio

nelle Riduzioni Cinquecentesche di Lodovico Dolce.” In Il
Furto di Prometeo: Imitazione, Scrittura, Riscrittura nel Rinascimento,
223–55. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1990.
Cicogna, Emmanuele Antonio. “Memorie intorno la vita e gli scritti di
Messer Lodovico Dolce letterato veneziano del secolo XVI.”
In Memorie dell'I.R. Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 93–
200. Venice: Segreteria dell'I. R. Istituto, 1863.
De Caprio, Chiara, “Volgarizzare e tradurre i grandi poemi
dell’antichità (XIV–XXI secolo).” In Atlante della Letteratura
Italiana, edited by Sergio Luzzatto and Gabriele Pedullà, 56–
73. Vol. 3, Dal Risorgimento a oggi, edited by Domenico Scarpa.
Turin: Einaudi, 2012.
Degl’Innocenti, Luca. “Ex pictura poesis”: invenzione narrativa͒ e
tradizione figurativa ariostesca͒ nelle prime imprese del Conte
Orlando di Lodovico Dolce.” In “Tra mille carte vive ancora”:
Ricezione del Furioso tra immagini e parole, edited by Lina Bol-
zoni, Serena Pezzini, and Giovanna Rizzarelli, 303–20. Lucca:
Pacini Fazzi, 2010.
Dolce, Lodovico, trans. Didone. Edited by Stefano Tomassini. Parma:
Edizioni Zara, 1996.
———. Il Primo Libro delle Trasformationi d’Ovidio da M. Lodovico Dolce in
volgare tradotto. Venice: Francesco Bindone et Mapheo Pasini,
1538.
———. L'Achille et l'Enea di Messer Lodovico Dolce. Dove egli tessendo l'his-
toria della Iliade d'Homero a quella dell'Eneide di Vergilio, ambedue
l'ha divinamente ridotte in ottava rima. Con argomenti, et allegorie per
ogni canto: et due tavole: l'una delle Sentenze; l'altra dei Nomi, & delle
cose più notabili. Venice: Gabriel Giolito de' Ferrari, 1572.
———, trans. Medea. Edited by Ottavio Saviano. Turin: Res, 2010.
———. Modi affigurati e voci scelte ed eleganti della volgar lingua, con un
discorso sopra ai mutamenti e diversi ornamenti dell’Ariosto. Venice:
Giovan Battista e Marchio Sessa Fratelli, 1564.
———, trans. Tieste. Edited by Stefano Giazzon. Turin: Res, 2010.
Gambara, Veronica. Rime e lettere di Veronica Gambara. Edited by Felice
Rizzardi. Brescia: G. Rizzardi, 1759.
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Giazzon, Stefano. Venezia in coturno. Lodovico Dolce tragediografo (1543–

1557). Rome: Aracne Editrice, 2011.
Glénisson-Delannée, François. “Illustration, traduction et glose dans
les Trasformationi de Ludovico Dolce (1553): Un palimpseste
des Métamorphoses,” in Le livre illustré italien au XVIe siècle:
Texte/Image, edited by Michel Plaisance, 119–50. Klincksieck:
Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999.
Guidi, Ulisse. Annali delle Edizioni e delle Versioni dell’Orlando Furioso e
d’altri lavori al poema relativi. Bologna: Tipografia in Via Poggiale
n. 715, 1861.
Javitch, Daniel. “The Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in Sixteenth-
Century Italy.” In The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton,
53–65. Vol. 3, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
———. Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
———. “Gabriele Giolito’s ‘packaging’ of Ariosto, Boccaccio and
Petrarch in the Mid-Cinquecento.” In Studies for Dante: Essays
in Honor of Dante Della Terza, edited by Franco Fido, Pamela
Stewart, and Rena A. Syska-Lamparska, 123–33. Fiesole:
Edizioni Cadmo, 1998.
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gnor Giuseppe Malatesta. Verona: Delle Donne, 1589.
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92
Chapter 7
The Thing’s a Sling:

Source Squabbles and Mistranslation in Chapman’s 1611
Iliad
JO NIXON
The fundamentals of translation have drastically changed since

the Renaissance. Coleridge approached the modern conception of Re-
naissance translation when he claimed that George Chapman wrote
“as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth.” 1 As the first complete English translation of
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Chapman’s work has attracted a number of
criticisms and critical responses. In this chapter, I examine Chapman’s
twenty-four-book Iliad, usually dated 1611.2 The paratextual materials
reveal the translation anxieties of Renaissance England as well as the
tools that Chapman believes necessary for the best-equipped transla-
tor. Chapman attempts to prove the merit of his translation—and the
superiority of his Homeric understanding—through an examination
and subsequent rejection of the language of previous Latin translators.
But Chapman’s desire to contend with his predecessors leads him into
errors and interpretations that deviate from the Greek text in ways that
his Latin predecessors—whose words he cites—did not. Thus, this
chapter considers Chapman’s attitudes towards translation and the
manifestation of these attitudes in a particular example from the Book
13 Commentarius.
1 T. M. Raysor, ed., Miscellaneous Criticism (London: Constable, 1936), 231. Quoted in

Millar MacLure, George Chapman: A Critical Study (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1966), 160.
2 I have consulted the book in the Special Collections at the University of Chicago.
George Chapman, trans., The Iliads of Homer: Prince of Poets. Neuer before in any languag
truely translated. With a comment vppon some of his chief places: Donne according to the Greeke By
George Chapman (London, 1611[?]). All the references to Chapman’s Iliad or quire
marks refer to this volume.
Jo Nixon
CHAPMAN’S PROMISED VISION
Chapman’s claims for the validity of his translation begin on

the frontispiece: “The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. Never before
in any languag truely translated.”3 “Truly” signals Chapman’s loyalty to
Homer, a loyalty he unfurls in the prefatory material. He claims “the
originall be my rule,” denying accusations that he translated out of a
French or Latin version.4 Critical examinations of Chapman’s text and
paratextual material refute his claim; scholars conclude that Chapman
possessed limited Greek and relied on a Latin-Greek lexicon, a parallel
Greek and Latin text that Jean de Sponde compiled, and versions by
Valla and Eobanus Hessus.5 The commentary that appears after ten of
the twenty-four books illustrates that Chapman’s unacknowledged
editorial reliance on these Latin translations provided the opportunity
for his English version to shine as an improvement on its literary an-
cestors. Thus, the reality of Chapman’s translation habits and his ex-
plicit denial thereof both aided the actual labor of translation and cre-
ated the opportunity to denounce specific moments from the work of
previous Latin translators that he discloses by name.
The prefatory material professes three central objectives: to
laud Homer, to defend both the specific style of the translation and
the English language at large, and to condemn other translations. The
first of the front matter is the dedicatory epistle to Prince Henry. 6
Chapman presents Homer as the ultimate representative in the mirrors
for princes genre:
[. . .] You should learne these rights

(Great Prince of men) by Princely presidents;
VVhich here, in all kinds, my true zeale presents
To furnish your youths groundwork.7
3 (f)A1r. [Here, (f) refers to the first series of “A” signatures in the volume.]
4 A3v.
5 Chapman wrongly attributes Andreas Divus’ Latin translation to de Sponde. See
MacLure, George Chapman, 171.

6 The epistle comes unaltered from the 1609 version of Chapman’s Iliad. See John A.
Buchtel, “Book Dedications and the Death of a Patron: The Memorial Engraving in
Chapman’s Homer,” Book History 7 (2004): 2.
7 (f)A2r.
94
Chapter 7 - The Thing’s a Sling - Chapmen’s 1611 Iliad
Chapman practically erases himself from this system of poetic

production, appearing subtly through a reference to “my true zeale,” in
three parenthetical asides addressing Henry in the vein of the one in
the quotation above, and in the humbling self-epithet “worst of Po-
ets.” Certainly, Chapman did not want to disappear from the epistle—
his presence was important because Prince Henry was his patron and
had promised £300 as well as “a good pension” for the translation.8
But the subtlety of these reminders maintains the spotlight on Homer;
the epistle refrains from mentioning translation or Chapman’s labor to
highlight the inherent virtue of the Iliad. What Chapman leaves unstat-
ed in the dedicatory epistle—his belief that that his translation ema-
nates this virtue unfiltered, as though Homer were speaking but mi-
raculously in English—he emphasizes in the prefatory poem “To the
Reader” and “The Preface to the Reader.”
Chapman continues the project of praising Homer throughout
the verse “To the Reader” and prose “Preface to the Reader,” begin-
ning the short, prefatory poem with an episode set in Elysium and
ending the Preface with a fanciful biography of Homer. He only devi-
ates from celebrating Homer to defend his own translation and con-
demn others, often simultaneously. His predecessors, he claims, failed
on two fronts. First, they lacked the superiority of the English lan-
guage: “Our Monosyllables, so kindly fall / And meete, opposed in
rime, as they did kissse.”9 Secondly, Chapman believes that the fun-
damental differences between languages requires “reach[ing] the spirit”
of the original rather than relying on a “word-for-word” examina-
tion—“Greeke and English; since as they in sounds, / And letters,
shunne one forme, and vnison.”10 He condemns his predecessors as
“word-for-word” translators and condemns the “word-for-word”
method as awkward at best and productive of prodigious monstrosities
at worst—a spectrum between a “forced Glose” and birthing a camel
from a whale.11 Thus, Chapman’s language for the right translation is
8 Buchtel, “Book Dedications,” 2.

9 A1v.
10 A1r.
11 Ibid.
95
Jo Nixon
both quasi-alchemical and creational—the distillation of the original’s

spirit into the embodiment of the chosen language:
Alwaies conceiuing how pedanticall and absurd an af-

fectation it is, in the interpretation of any Author
(much more of Homer) to turn him word for word;
when (according to Hor-ace and other best lawgiuers
to translators) it is the part of eu-ery knowing and iu-
diciall interpreter, not to follow the number and order
of words, but the materiall things themselues, and
sentences to weigh diligently; and to clothe and
adorne them with words, and such a stile and forme
of Oration, as are most apt for the language into
which they are conuerted.12
He admonishes Valla and Hessus by name, foreshadowing his pointed

critique of their verses in his commentaries.
It should be noted that Chapman’s prefatory material specifi-
cally—and paratextual material generally—reflects the anxieties and
realities of translation in Renaissance England. His focus on the virtue
of Homer’s poetry shows a typical prioritization for the period:
“Where a modern scholar might be interested in a contemporary trans-
lation’s merit and its precision in conveying ideas, for early modern
readers and scholars the justification and the relevance of the transla-
tion are frequently as important, if not more so.” 13 Translators fre-
quently altered the text to reflect the nuances of their contemporary
political climate, “transfer[ring] a text, not only from a foreign lan-
guage, but also from a foreign culture, into the target language and
culture.”14 And formal transformations were not out of the ordinary
12 A4r.
13 S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington, eds., Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Transla-
tion, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), xix.
14 Daniel Russel, “Introduction: The Renaissance,” in The Politics of Translation in the
Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise von Flotow, and
Daniel Russel (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001), 31.
96
either: prose became verse and vise versa. 15 Critics typically recom-
mend that Renaissance translations be read as original works.16 Finally,
anxiety regarding translation into English still permeated England at
the end of the sixteenth century; many considered English a non-
literary language, despite the richness of England’s vernacular literature
by this time.17 But rather than apologizing for his translation, Chap-
man argues for the eminence of English. By promising to correct any
mistakes in the further translations, he postures a commitment to
scholarship.18
Before examining how Chapman implements his vision for
translation in the post-book commentaries, it is worth acknowledging
that the first part of the Book 1 Commentarius—one of the ten post-
book commentaries that also appear after Books 2–3 and 3–19—
continues the conversation about translation that begins in the prefa-
tory material. Chapman states, “I dissent from all other Translators,”
and invites readers to judge for themselves, promising to offer a com-
parison between previous translations and his own.19 In preparation,
he reminds readers that his ability to convey Homer to them in Eng-
lish stems from a special expertise:
For induction and preparatiue to which patience, and

perswasion, trouble your selues but to know this: This
neuer-enough-glorified Poet, (to vary & quicken his
eternal Poem) hath inspired his chiefe persons with
different spirits, most ingenious and inimitable char-
acters; which not vnderstood, how are their speeches?
being one by another, as conueniently, and necessarily
knowne, as the instrument by the sound. If a Transla-
tor or Interpreter of a ridiculous and cowardly de-
scribed person (being deceiued in his character), so
15 Guyda Armstrong, “Print, Paratext, and a Seventeenth-Century Sammelband: Boc-

caccio’s Ninfale Fiesolano in English Translation,” in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads, 83.
16 Neil Rhodes, “Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation,” in Renaissance
Paratexts, ed. Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011), 107.
17 Ibid., 108.
18 A4v.
19 C1v.
97
Jo Nixon
violates, and vitiates the originall, to make his speech

graue, and him valiant: can the negligence and numb-
nesse of such an Interpreter or Translator, be lesse
than the sleepe, and death, I am bold to sprinckle
vpon him?20
Chapman believes he truly understands the epic poem; here,

he clearly shows that the “spirit” he mentions in the prefatory material
breathes from Homer’s epic figures. Chapman’s insistence on the true
nature of the these figures manifests itself, Millar MacLure posits, in
“strictly exemplary” characters—“psychological archetypes as com-
pletely rationalized as his translation and marginal notes and commen-
tary can make them, so that they lose the subtlety and emotional range
which they have in the original.”21 For example, in the commentary to
Book 17, Chapman argues that the translations of Hessus and Valla
misrepresent the true character of Menelaus, which he claims Homer
intended as a ridiculous figure:
Minerua inspired him with the courage of a flie; which

all his interpreters very ridiculously laugh at in Homer;
as if he heartily intended to praise Menelaus by it, not
vnderstanding his Ironie here, agreeing with all the
other sillinesse noted in his character. Eobanus Hessus,
in pitie of Homer, leaues it vtterly out; and Valla
comes ouer him with a little salue for the sore dis-
grace he hath by his ignorance readers laughters; and
expounds the words abouesaid thus: Lene namque eius
ingenium prudenti audacia impleuit: laying his medicine
nothing neare the place.22
Therefore, the claim to the kernel of Homer’s poetry operates

as one of Chapman’s many justifications for the superiority of his
translation. In the commentaries, Chapman fulfills his promise to de-
20 Ibid.
21 MacLure, George Chapman, 184.
22 Z1r.
98
fend his translation against others and reveals that the basis for his
supposed superiority is always foregrounded in the denunciation of
previous translators.
HIDDEN SOURCES, OPEN RIVALRIES
Chapman colors the volume at large with his thoughts and

opinions. Each book contains marginalia that provide summary, char-
acters’ backgrounds, translation defenses, clarifications on characters
designated solely by epithets, dialogue tags, markers for similes and
phrases to be read ironically, and references to Virgil’s adaptation of
the Homeric verse. The post-book commentaries serve to defend his
translation and denounce others. Though connotations of literary criti-
cism certainly surround ‘commentary’ in Chapman’s time, his use of
the Latin ‘Commentarius’ evokes an older meaning, that of a notebook
filled with casual sketchings of ideas.23 This informality is further man-
ifested when Chapman repeatedly claims that he translated the last
twelve books in fifteen weeks. And in the commentaries, Chapman
skips along one stepping stone of the mind to another to justify his
work against a Latin version, hopping from the realms of etymology
and context to broader narrative themes and motifs.
The level of engagement with the Latin sources varies
throughout the text. Chapman divides each commentary into para-
graphs beginning with small Latin letters, which correspond to mark-
ings in the verse. Chapman typically quotes from at least one Latin
translation—most often ‘Spondanus,’ believing, as noted above, that
de Sponde translated the Latin in his parallel compilation—and ex-
plains why he disagrees with the translator. For example, in the com-
mentary to the second book, Chapman takes issue with de Sponde’s
analysis of the bee simile that Homer uses to describe the Greek
troops. De Sponde, Chapman claims, believes that an ideal simile
shows similarity as well as dissimilarity, and thus, “vno pede semper
claudicare” (one foot is always lame).24 Chapman examines the simile
23 A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith, William Wayte, and G.
E. Marindin (1890), s.v. “Commentarius.”
24 D5v.
99
Jo Nixon
and the situation point by point and accuses de Sponde of abuse

against Homer:
But that a Simile must needs halt of one foote still;

showeth how lame vulgar tradition is, especially in her
censure of Poesie. For who at first sight, will not con-
ceiue it absurd to make a Simile; which serues to the
illustration and ornament of a Poeme; lame of a
foote, and idle? The incredible violence suffered by
Homer in all the rest of his most inimitable Similes,
being exprest in his place, will abundantly proue the
stupiditie of this tradition: how iniuriously short his
interpreters must needs come of him, in his streight
and deepe places; when in his open and faire passag-
es, they halt and hang backe so.25
The beginnings of the commentaries for Books 15, 17, and 18

offer instances of increased engagement with his sources. Here,
Chapman offers an original Greek passage and three or four complete
Latin translations before reproducing his own in full. For an example,
consider the commentary to Book 18. He includes the original Greek,
translations from de Sponde, Hessus, and Valla, and then offers his
own: “Mine owne harsh conuersion (in which I will be bold to repeate
after these, thus closely for your easier examination).”26 A further in-
stance of increased engagement occurs when Chapman justifies his
translation through the quotation of a more obscure definition for a
Greek term. In these instances, he quotes directly from a Latin-Greek
lexicon without revealing that he is doing so, as I will show in the next
section. But even as he relies heavily on Latin texts, he advocates for
his own visionary reading of the poem, one that deviates from these
sources.
Thus, the commentaries reveal that Chapman’s project is
much less a delving into the original meaning of the Greek verse than
a strong contention with the very sources he either denies—in the case
25 Ibid.
26 Aa1v.
100
of the Latin translations—or hides altogether—in the case of the lexi-

con. An instance from the Book 13 Commentarius reveals how he
obscures Homer through contention, mistranslation, and a strangely
English vision. This commentary shows the contrast between the clear
Homeric vision that Chapman outlines in his prefatory material and
the reality that appears in the verse.
A SCARF FOR A SLING, A JACK ALSO FOR A SLING
At the ‘c’ and ‘d’27 markers within the Book 13 Commentari-

us, Chapman justifies his translations of ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ and ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ
ਕȫĲ૳ respectively, linking those moments together not for the reason
one might expect—that the expression ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳ appears in
both instances in the Greek28—but because he insists that his Latin
predecessors committed the same translation error in those two mo-
ments. At marker ‘c,’ Chapman misses that ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ—meaning,
among other things, “stone-slinger”29—in the Greek original semanti-
cally clarifies ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳—a phrase literally meaning “well-
twisted wool”—to also signify a “stone-slinger.”30 Thus, his translation
at ‘c’ reveals a limitation of his Greek that compounds further error as
the verse continues. His inability to realize that ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳
refers to ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ causes him to dispute the Latin translation of
ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ as funda (stone-slinger) at ‘c’ and the subsequent translation
of ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳ also as funda at ‘d.’ Ignorant of the correspond-
ence, Chapman condemns funda as a mistranslation by claiming that
stone-slingers are alien to the weaponry of Homer’s soldiers: “there
being no slings spoken of in all these Iliads; nor any such seruice vsed
27 What should be marked ‘d’ in the commentary is also marked ‘c,’ but the corre-
sponding textual moments are marked ‘c’ and ‘d.’

28 For any references to the Greek text, see A.T. Murray, trans., Iliad, ed. William F.
Wyatt, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999), line 600, line 716.
29 The reasoning for my rather periphrastic construction of sling will become clear
later.
30 “Verse 600 explains that ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳ means a sling.” See Richard Janko,
The Iliad: A Commentary; Books 13–16, vol. 4, The Iliad: A Commentary, ed. G. S. Kirk
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 119.
101
Jo Nixon
in all these wars.” 31 Furthermore, he derides the construction of a

wool stone-slinger, not realizing that that is exactly what Homer in-
tended: “And when saw any man slings lined with wooll? to keepe
their stones warme? or to dull their deliverie? and I am sure they
hurled not shafts out of them?”32 He likely comes to this conclusion
because ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ is a hapax in the Iliad’s text.33 But though the word
for a stone-slinger only appears once, the concept appears twice
through the connection between ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ and ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳.
Therefore, careful examination of these moments in the
commentary to Book 13 exposes Chapman’s methodology and neces-
sary inventiveness. That is, in order to be able to argue that funda is a
mistranslation of ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ, Chapman must offer an alternate defini-
tion for the Greek word. He finds these alternate definitions in Johann
Scapula’s Lexicon Graeco-Latinum.34 These new definitions force him to
recontextualize these moments in Homer, to create a rich background
as justification. Chapman’s translations at these markers are as follows:
Atrides dart, of Hellenus, the thrust out bow-hand strooke,

And through the hand, stucke in the bow; Agenors hand did
plucke,
From forth the nailed prisoner, the Iauelin quickly out;
And fairely with a little wooll, enwrapping round about
The wounded hand; within c a scarffe, he bore it; which his
Squire
Had readie for him: yet the wound, would needs he should re-
tire.35
. . . when swift Oileades
The Locrians left, and would not make, those murthrous fights
of prease,
Because they wore no bright steele caskes, nor bristl’d plumes
for show,
31 R4v.
32 Ibid.
33 Janko, Iliad, 119.
34 MacLure, George Chapman, 171.
35 Q6v.
102
Round shields, nor darts of solid Ash; but with the trustie
bow,
And iackes, well d quilted with soft wooll, they came to Troy.36
In the commentary, Chapman claims that he translates

ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ as scarf because of the definition “ornamentum quoddam
muliebre.”37 This is a direct quotation from the lexicon: “A similitudi-
ne ĲોȢ ʌİĲȡȠȕyȜȠȣıĳİȞįȩȞȘȢ, dictum fuit etiam ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ ornamentum
quoddam muliebre.”38 Using ‘scarf,’ Chapman feigns flexibility in his
Greek, and thus he pretends to naturally possess knowledge of alter-
nate and perhaps even obscure meanings that his Latin predecessors
missed. But the translation creates problems. ‘Scarf’ is the only word
that Chapman had in the early seventeenth century to use for a surgical
sling—‘sling’ would not acquire that meaning in English until the
eighteenth century.39 From the quoted passage and from Chapman’s
own note—“skarffe: a fitter thing to hang his arme in then a sling”—
Chapman obviously meant his scarf to operate as a surgical sling. 40
Therefore, the usage of ‘scarf’ creates an error that Chapman could
have avoided if he had used ‘sling.’ Helenus wounds his hand, an inju-
ry that does not typically require the arm’s suspension. Consider this
modern translation: “This then great-hearted Agenor drew out of his
hand, and bound the hand with a strip of twisted sheep’s wool, a sling
that his attendant had carried for him, the shepherd of men.”41 Hele-
nus needs to staunch the bleeding, not to immobilize the limb, and a
woolen stone-slinger serves his purposes nicely. Richard Janko points
out that though ıĳİȞįȩȞȘ means both a surgical sling and a stone-
slinger in Homer’s day, it clearly is a spare weapon at this point.42
Furthermore, Chapman’s mistranslation also comes at the
price of having to explain what a scarf was doing on the battlefield.
This shows his ingenuity—he conjures a story out of medieval ro-
36 R1v.
37 R3v.
38 Johann Scapula, Lexicon Graeco-Latinum (Oxford: Typographeo Clarendoniano,
1820), 1497.
39 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “sling, n.2,” (accessed April 15, 2015).
40 R3v.
41 Murray, Iliad, 45.
42 Janko, Iliad, 119.
103
Jo Nixon
mance, saying “[it is] likely that his Squire carried about him, either as a
fauour of his owne mistresse, or his maisters, or for eithers ornament:
skarffs being no vnusuall weare for souldiers.”43 This Englishing of the
Homeric world, from his use of “squire” to the scarf, continues when
he must translate “well-twisted wool” as something other than funda
again. In the commentary, Chapman first denies what de Sponde (cor-
rectly) notes in his own commentary, that ਥȨıĲȡȩĳ૳ ȠੁઁȢ ਕȫĲ૳ is a
“paraphrasticall description of a sling.”44 Rather, he claims:
It is therefore the true periphrasis of a light kind of

armor called a iacke, that all our archers vsed to serue
in of old: and were euer quilted with wooll: and (be-
cause ਥȨıĲȡİĳİ૙ signifieth as well qui facili motu versatur
& circumagitur, as well as bene vel pulchre tortus) for their
lightnesse and aptnesse to be worne, partaketh with
the word in that sigification.45
Again, Chapman copies “qui facili motu versatur & circumgat-

itur” directly from the lexicon.46 And while his English example mir-
rors the one at marker ‘c,’ he goes even further as he takes this mo-
ment as an opportunity for English pride: “The agreement of the
Greekes with our English, as well in all other their greatest vertues, as
this skill with their bowes: other places of these Annotations shall
clearly demonstrate; and giue (in my conceipt) no little honour to our
Countrie.”47 Thus, he considers his translation to show a unity of Ho-
meric and English military prowess rather than clashing at all with a
true Homeric vision. His desire to dispute previous translators, then,
requires him to speculate and form a tale out of medieval romance
rather than provide a traditional translation.
43 R3v.
44 R4v.
45 Ibid.
46 Scapula, Lexicon Graeco-Latinum, 1481.
47 R4v.
104
CONCLUSION
Thus, Chapman goes to considerable lengths to defend his

translation of a single word and nearby phrase. Though the ‘scarf mo-
ment’ in Book 13 reveals a misunderstanding on Chapman’s part, the
justifications surrounding Chapman’s word choice illustrate the rich
and inventive nature of translation in Renaissance England. Under-
standing this moment requires the context of the ‘argumentative trans-
lator persona’ that Chapman establishes in his prefatory and paratextu-
al materials. Because Chapman did not expect his readership to know
Greek, he offers Latin translations of Greek passages in his commen-
taries “for auoiding the common readers trouble” and founds the au-
thority of his translation on detailed arguments with his predecessors.48
Thus, Chapman’s errors and his ultimately English reading in this in-
stance do not conflict with what he considers to be a true reading of
Homer. Furthermore, regardless of what his readers may know about
Greek or the Iliad, Chapman fulfills his project of examining and re-
jecting his predecessors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, Guyda. “Print, Paratext, and a Seventeenth-Century Sam-

melband: Boccaccio’s Ninfale Fiesolano in English Translation.”
In Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in
Britain, 1473–1640, edited by S. K. Barker and Brenda M.
Hosington, 79–99. Leiden: Brill, 2013.
Barker, S. K., and Brenda M. Hosington, eds. Renaissance Cultural Cross-
roads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640. Lei-
den: Brill, 2013.
Buchtel, John A. “Book Dedications and the Death of a Patron: The
Memorial Engraving in Chapman’s Homer.” Book History 7
(2004): 1–29.
48 A3v.
105
Jo Nixon
Chapman, George, trans. The Iliads of Homer: Prince of Poets. Neuer before
in any languag truely translated. With a comment vppon some of his chief
places: Donne according to the Greeke By George Chapman. London:
1611[?].
Janko, Richard. The Iliad: A Commentary; Books 13–16. Vol. 4, The Iliad:
A Commentary, edited by G. S. Kirk. Cambridge: Cambridge
MacLure, Millar. George Chapman: A Critical Study. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 1966.
Murray, A. T., trans. Iliad. Edited by William F. Wyatt. 2 vols. Loeb
Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Raysor, T. M., ed. Miscellaneous Criticism. London: Constable, 1936.
Rhodes, Neil. “Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation.”
In Renaissance Paratexts, edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wil-
son, 107–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Russel, Daniel. “Introduction: The Renaissance.” In The Politics of
Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Re-
nate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Luise von Flotow, and Daniel Rus-
sel, 29–35. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2001.
Scapula, Johann. Lexicon Graeco-Latinum. Oxford: Typographeo Clar-
endoniano, 1820.
106
Chapter 8
Paratext as Metatext and Metafiction:

Contextualizing Honest Satire in Thomas Bridges’
A Burlesque Translation of Homer
ANGELA LEI PARKINSON
Geographically isolated, England was late in seeing the arrival

of humanistic learning compared with developments in continental
Europe. This delay was certainly true for the history of book-printing
in England: it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that a printing
trade developed that was independent and large-scale enough to enable
literate English citizens to fulfill needs for basic items like “bibles,
prayer books and elementary classical texts” with domestic products.1
Through a complex system of developments, the English book trade
also made for a particularly vital market for satirical literature from the
start. Writers whose work appealed to popular tastes and imaginations
were among the first group of authors that could afford to live on
book revenues. The volume examined in this chapter came to be in
precisely this historical moment.
This single-volume, 1772 edition of Thomas Bridges’ bawdy
A Burlesque Translation of Homer is the third out of a total of four edi-
tions that were published before the work went out of print at the turn
of the nineteenth century.2 Much neglected by both the critics of its
1 David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 187–88.
2 Bridges’ burlesque translation was initially published in 1762, to which was then
added a second volume in 1765 that expanded the text to include the first ten books
of the Iliad. A second edition that grew to include the first 12 books of the Homeric
epic—all that will be published of Bridges’ translation—was again published in two
volumes in 1767, of which the University of Chicago Library Special Collections also
maintains a complete set. The third edition, published in 1771 in a collected two-
volume set, was gathered into the single-volume edition considered in this essay, pub-
lished in 1772. The translation saw another print-run in the single-volume edition in
1774 before it was published a final time, going out of print with a two-volume, fourth
edition set that came out in 1797. See Stuart Gillespie, “Translations from Greek and
Latin Classics, Part 2: 1701–1800: A Revised Bibliography,” Translation and Litera-
ture 18, no. 2 (2009): 195.
Angela Lei Parkinson
day and contemporary scholarship, this work of satire can trace its
genesis to the complex intersection of the burgeoning of a domestic
English book-printing and book-selling industry, the whetting of Eng-
lish appetites for satirical literature in the Augustan period, as well as
the ongoing trend of and debate over the rendering of Homeric works
into the vernacular, particularly the lineage of translations of Homer
into English at the hands of literary juggernauts like John Dryden and
Alexander Pope. In fact, the author of this burlesque translation of the
Iliad claims that it is Pope’s noble rendering of Homer’s epic into the
English language that compelled him to take up the challenge of “put-
ting [Homer] into English dress.”3 In this short chapter, I will make
the case that Bridges’ burlesque rendering of Homer, unjustly ignored
by current scholarship, in fact constitutes an intriguing and retroactive
example of “postmodern metafiction.” As such, this work is able to be
seen as anticipating the feature contemporary literary theorists have
identified in satirical texts that functions by employing imitation as
“repetition with critical difference” through Bridges’ complex and
subversive claim to perform an honest burlesque. 4 That is to say,
Bridges claims his is a work that “express[es] Homer’s meaning [in]
full” in such a way as to transcend Homer’s original Greek language
because even Homer’s own words “perverted the original design of
Homer’s Iliad.”5 In order to make this case, I will begin with a defini-
tion of terms employed in this chapter, specifically the cluster of ge-
neric names for the various kinds of satires and translations at play
when Bridges’ work was published, as well as the theoretical terms
employed to discuss this work. Then, I will give a brief overview of the
literary context of satirical literature into which Bridges’ burlesque was
introduced. And finally, I will discuss how the paratextual materials in
the front matter of Bridges’ 1772 edition functions as metatext, specif-
ically as metafictional parody, via the declaration of authorial intent in
the paratext.
3 Howard D. Weinbrot, “Translation and Parody: Towards the Genealogy of the Au-
gustan Imitation,” ELH 33, no. 4 (1966): 447.

4 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms
(Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 32.

5 Thomas Bridges, A Burlesque translation of Homer (London: Ludgate-Hill, Printed for S.
Hooper, 1772), 3.
108
Chapter 8 - Bridges’ Burlesque Homer
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Before delving in for a closer look at the tradition of English

satire that leads to the volume in question in this essay, it is important
to first clarify two groups of terms that will be used in the rest of our
discussion: 1) the cluster of generic names that would largely fall under
the modern categories of satire or parody, and 2) the theoretical terms
of paratext versus metatext, and post-structural metafiction as a par-
ticular manifestation of metatext.
Satirical literature reached a high point in Augustan England
and spawned a complex system of subgenres. Following Jonathan
Swift’s contribution to la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in 1704 in
the prolegomena of his A Tale of a Tub, authors whose works were
keenly aware of the tension between classical and contemporary learn-
ing flooded the English market with a wide range of works that vari-
ously made use of terms such as burlesque, imitation, translation, dog-
gerel, mock-heroic/epic, parody, travestie/travesty, etc. Indeed, the
volume in question in this chapter, titled A Burlesque Translation of
Homer, was initially published under the title of Homer Travestie: Being a
New Burlesque Translation of the First Four Books of the “Iliad” previously in
four separate printings until it was abridged to the last version of
its title.6 The terms “travestie/travesty,” “burlesque,” and “trans-
lation” were apparently deemed to need no further explication or
demarcation as the issue of generic definition is ignored by Thomas
Bridges.
Likewise during this period, the generic names “imitation”
and “translation” were used somewhat interchangeably with
“[i]mitation as a species of translation,” since the contemporary author
in both forms “modernize[s] his author and put[s] him into English
dress.”7 Bridges’ utilization of the term “burlesque” clearly falls into
this camp. While scholars disagree regarding the precise differences
between the literary genres of burlesque, travestie/travesty, mock-
heroic pastiche, and the various forms that arise from the theory of
free translation spearheaded by seventeenth-century British poets
6 Gillespie, “Translations from Greek and Latin Classics,” 195.

7 Weinbrot, “Translation and Parody,” 434, 447.
109
Abraham Cowley and John Denham, a connecting vein runs through

them all: both popular and subversive, these works enable a more
complete view of the socio-political context in which they were creat-
ed when studied alongside their more high-brow counterparts.8 Thus,
compared with Pope’s mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock, which created
a pastiche of elevated style and wildly trivial events, the particular case
of Bridges’ work is more thoroughly subversive because he burlesques
both the style and the events of the source of his imitation. Howard D.
Weinbrot, an expert on eighteenth-century literature, points out that,
“[s]ince Pope had not modernized Homer, the burlesque authors de-
cided to do the job themselves.”9
As a discussion of the complex issues involved in the dis-
cernment of genres is beyond the scope of this short chapter, I will use
the term by which Bridges has consistently chosen to refer to his own
work: that of a burlesque translation. Further, I will broadly refer to
the body of literature that includes both prose and verse writers such
as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson as satire. The
ecosystem of satirical literature, to which I will also ascribe the various
“lowbrow” translations and imitations of Homeric works, will form
the backdrop against which Bridges’ burlesque is examined.
With regard to the theoretical terms employed in his chapter,
the term “paratext” is defined as that which “directly accompan[ies]
the text…” thereby constituting “the means by which a work is publi-
cally presented and… the site where the terms of the contract between
work and reader are established.”10 This is set against the term “me-
tatext,” of which postmodern “metafiction” is a particular manifesta-
tion. Metatext, by definition, exists apart from the text itself and in-
8 An early twentieth-century scholar defines burlesque thus: “burlesque [covers] too
wide a scope, covering as it does parody, caricature, extravaganza, the mock-heroic

and travesty… [T]ravesty [is] that type of humorous composition which has a model
constantly in mind, retains its characters and much of its subject matter, and systemat-
ically ridicules both. In retaining both subject matter and the characters of its model, it
differs from the mock-heroic and parody; it is more ambitious than caricature, and
more restrained than extravaganza.” Sturgis E. Leavitt, “Paul Scarron and English
Travesty,” Studies in Philology 16, no. 1 (1919): 108n1. Bridges’ translation uses, as men-
tioned above, the terms “burlesque” and “travestie/travesty” interchangeably.
9 Weinbrot, “Translation and Parody,” 441–2.
10 Mario Santana, Foreigners in the Homeland: the Spanish American New Novel in Spain,
1962–1974 (Branbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2000), 65.
110
stead functions to “interpret a work.”11 Metafiction, as a subgenre of

metatext, is interpretive work that is “characterized by intense self-
reflexivity and overtly parodic intertextuality.”12 The paratext of Bridg-
es’ volume is the front matter that comes before the reader encounters
the actual burlesque rendering of Homer’s Iliad, including the preface
(“Something by Way of Preface”) and a note to the reader (“The Pub-
lisher to the Reader”). This chapter will make the argument that, in
this volume, the paratextual materials function as metafiction by taking
a critically self-reflexive stance that is transformative of the original
even as it claims to be an exact imitation. Even as he claims to be
reaching the original intent of Homer, which is supposedly obscured
not only by noble translators like Alexander Pope but also by Homer’s
own Greek language, Bridges is placing a critical distance between his
work and the background text being burlesqued all the while being
acutely aware of the partial and biased nature of his own work. As
such, Bridges is projecting his own limitations onto Homer’s words
and proclaiming an honest burlesque—that is, a joke that is great
enough to get to the truth of the matter of Homer’s great work—in a
way that intriguingly anticipates current scholarship that identifies sa-
tirical texts that function by imitation as “repetition with critical differ-
ence.”13
BRIDGES’ CONTEXT IN AUGUSTAN SATIRICAL LITERATURE
The complex ecosystem necessary to support a robust book

trade with domestic products was slow to take root in England. The
first Greek edition of Homer to be produced by the domestic English
market did not occur until 1591, and the country remained heavily reli-
ant upon imports from the rest of Europe all the way up to the turn of
the seventeenth century.14 The nascent English book market, however,
11 Ibid., 67.
12 Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction,” in Intertextuality and Contemporary
American Fiction, ed. Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Davis (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press), 3.
13 Hutcheon, Theory of Parody, 32.
14 Philip H. Young, The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Translation History of
the Iliad and the Odyssey (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 97; John Feather, “The Brit-
111
nursed a healthy appetite for both noble classical works and so-called
“lowbrow” satires from the start. The honor of being the first to ren-
der any Homeric works into English is claimed in 1581 by Arthur Hall,
who produced a partial translation of the Iliad by working second-hand
from the French version by Hugues Salel. 15 The attempt to write a
burlesque of Homer in English followed soon after in 1664 under the
title Homer à la Mode. Authored by James Scudamore, this translation
included only the first and second books of the Iliad, and swiftly fol-
lowed the first “straight” translation of Homer into English made di-
rectly from the Greek.16
An exemplar of such a straight translation of Homer’s Iliad is
Alexander Pope’s noble attempt, which he began in 1715 as a serial
subscription.17 Writing in the preface to the first of his six-volume se-
rial edition, Pope notes that “[i]t is a great loss to the poetical world
that Mr. Dryden… left us only the first book, and a small part of the
sixth… [H]ad he translated the whole work, I would no more have
attempted Homer after him than Virgil...”18 In the same preface, Pope
also points out that
if [Dryden] has in some places not truly interpreted

the sense, or preserved the antiquities, it ought to be
excused on account of the haste he was obliged to
write in. He seems to have had too much regard to
Chapman, whose words he sometimes copies, and
has unhappily followed him in passages where he
wanders from the original.19
ish Book Market, 1600–1800,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot
and Jonathan Rose (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007): 232–33.
15 Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie, “Translations from Greek and Latin Clas-
sics, 1550–1700: A Revised Bibliography,” Translation and Literature 18, no. 1 (2009): 18.
16 George Chapman published the first seven books of the Iliad in 1598 and subse-
quently the completed work in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Chapman’s
work, copies of which also reside in the University Chicago’s collection, is discussed
by two other chapters in this volume.
17 Cummings and Gillespie, “Translations from Greek and Latin Classics,” 18.
18 Alexander Pope, ed. and trans., The Iliad of Homer (New York: Cassell and Company,
1909), 30.
19 Ibid., 30.
112
We might understand Pope’s commentary on Dryden here as

the younger poet’s preemptive defense of his own attempt to surpass
the inaccuracies of Dryden’s partial translation. Despite his criticism of
Dryden’s inaccuracies and his own presumed efforts to do better,
Pope and his wildly popular opus nevertheless became the target of
Richard Bentley’s sharp and well-known jibe: “It is a pretty poem, Mr.
Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”20 Pope himself, however, rec-
ognized the difficulties of his undertaking; he acknowledged in Homer
“this poetical fire, this vivida vis animi” that burns “in Homer, and in
him only… clearly [and] irresistibly,” but which also made the Greek
almost impossible to adequately translate. 21 In his “Essay of Criti-
cism,” Pope likewise acknowledges the elusive and inimitable element
of any re-rendering of this Homeric fire:
In prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes,

Which out of nature’s common order rise…
But tho’ the ancients thus their rules invade,
(As kings dispense with laws themselves have made)
Moderns, beware! or if you must offend
Against the precept, ne’er transgress its end…
Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,
Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream… (158-
180)22
The date of the release of the first volume of Pope’s Iliad in

1715 coincided with Thomas Tooly’s publication, under the nom de
plume Nickydemus Ninnyhammer, of a short travesty of the first three
books of the Iliad called Homer in a Nut-Shell: Or, The Iliad of Homer in
Immortal Doggerel. In this volume, the author facetiously states that,
though he “had a Maggot come into [his] Head some time ago to
Translate all Homer’s Works,” he instead “had the Pleasure of being
20 Young, Printed Homer, 116.

21 Pope, Iliad of Homer, 14.
22 Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
66.
113
Mortified, by finding the Iliad so incomparably done by Mr. Pope.”23

He would not go on to complete more of this present effort, he adds,
because he “would not therefore be thought to endeavor to prejudice
Mr. Pope.”24 On the title page, Tooly adds a line from Horace’s Ars
Poetica: “Nec verbum verbo curabis reddere, fidus/ Interpres.”25 This
can be interpreted either as an honest expression of the translator’s
intention to faithfully convey the sense of Homer’s epic as Tooly un-
derstood it, or as a tongue-in-cheek excusal of his own admittedly
doggerel verse. This move will be one that is replicated by Bridges
when he publishes his burlesque rendition of the Iliad.
It is in this context that one must locate this 1772 edition of
the burlesque translation of the first twelve books of the Iliad. The
popularity of Bridges’ work can be seen from the increased quality of
the two more editions that came to be published after this volume,
including a fourth “improved” edition that was expanded into a two-
volume, octavo set—a sign of the edition being aimed at more popular
ownership—in addition to featuring twenty-four added illustrations by
copper-engraved plates and gilt edges. After the publication of the
fourth edition of this work, the burlesque seems to have become
somewhat censored, though never banned outright. Bridges himself
likewise faded into obscurity thereafter. Beyond a relatively unknown
novel that he also produced, the single most interesting biographical
detail available to us about Bridges is from a list of “suppressed
books” from 1873, which pointed out that his work is “full of hu-
mour... but... often transgresses the bounds of decency. For writing it
the author was disinherited by his father.”26
Modern scholarship has continued to largely ignore Bridges’
popular burlesque work. Beyond being noted for its shock value, there
is little mention of it even during the spurt of attention paid to Augus-
23 Thomas Tooly, Homer in a Nut-Shell: Or, The Iliad of Homer in Immortal Doggerel (Lon-
don: W. Sparkes, 1715), xxii–xxiii.
24 Ibid., xxiii.
25 Ibid., xxiii.
26 “Suppressed Books,” Pro & Con, A Journal for Literary Investigation 1 (1873): 159.
114
tan satirical literature as a genre in the academy during the early part of
the twentieth century.27
PARATEXT AS METATEXT: BRIDGES’ CLAIM OF

AUTHORIAL INTENT
Thus, this particular satirical text is by no means an outlier in

the trajectory of the spread of Homer into the English reader’s canon.
Indeed, like Tooly’s doggerel translation, Bridges also invokes the
popularity and eminence of the Pope translation as his inspiration.
Bridges’ representation of his authorial intent as a translator locates
this work squarely within the growing English book-printing and
book-selling industry. This work is also part of the ongoing trend of
the rendering of Homeric works into the vernacular, as well the partic-
ular lineage of simultaneously high- and lowbrow translations of
Homer into English. Indeed, as I have demonstrated above, Pope is
hardly the naïve reader of the classics who believed an exact transla-
tion of Homer’s “fire” to be possible, let alone desirable. It seems to
me that the author of the vastly popular and enormously complex The
Rape of the Lock would hardly begrudge another the employment of
satire for laughs or the demonstration of the ridicule just under the
surface of nobility. Instead, I would propose that Pope’s complex and
thoughtful stance toward the Homeric tradition is one that Bridges
would inherit when he employs the paratext of his volume as metatext.
And so, having located Bridges’ work squarely within the
body of English satire, particularly the burlesquing of classical texts
that takes Homer as inspiration, we are now positioned to examine the
most theoretically interesting aspect of Bridges’ burlesque: that of the
multiple layers of authorial and linguistic determination of how the
reader is to orient the whole work. These layers pile up in the paratex-
tual materials that include both the preface and the note to the reader
27See, for example, the series of publications on the topic by Howard D. Weinbrot,
including the one already cited in this chapter; Donna G. Fricke, “An End To Writing
About Swift?” The Journal of General Education (1982): 35–43; Ralph Cohen, “The Au-
gustan Mode in English Poetry,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 1, no. 1 (1967): 3–32.
115
until the reader is unsure whether to take the comic-serious anony-

mous translator seriously.
As mentioned above, despite the fact that recent scholarship
concedes that Bridges’ work was indeed “widely popular,” the text
itself has largely been passed over by current academics.28 One of the
few pieces that does mention the burlesque translation only goes so far
as to note that it was allowed to go out of print for a hundred years
because it “included so much vulgarity… [that] only with serious revi-
sions could keep it within the bounds of Victorian decency.” 29 In
1995, Fritz Senn makes the noncommittal comment that Bridges’
translation is one that “sets his own efforts apart from the standard
eighteenth-century Iliad” even though its “tasteless[ness]… is not un-
precedented at all.”30 While the 1995 essay rightly points out the sec-
tion titled “The Publisher to the Reader” as being especially interesting
and what makes this piece potentially outstanding, the author stops at
pointing out that “the butt of the satire is Alexander Pope’s elevated
system [the nobility of his verse] as well as the general awe of the re-
fined classics.”31
I would argue, however, that though the front matter of this
1772 edition both seem to bolster the straightforward interpretation of
Bridges as skewering Pope’s translation for being pretentious, the par-
atextual stance is much more complex. In the section titled “Some-
thing By Way of Preface,” Bridges’ writes that:
Pope, we all know, to please the nation,

Published an elegant translation,
But for all that, his lines mayn’t please
The jocund tribe as much as these;
For all capacities can’t climb,
To comprehend the true sublime;
And he that’s reading now may be
28 Young, Printed Homer, 120.

29 Ibid., 121.
30 Fritz Senn, “A Note on Burlesque Bloom,” James Joyce Quarterly 32, no. 3/4 (1995):
729.
31 Ibid., 729.
116
Almost a dull a dog as me.

Pope, that fly urchin of a loon,
Could ride the clouds and snuff the moon
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But I, a common mortal wight,
Who never yet could raise my flight,
Above a pamphlet-seller’s shop,
Or chance to reach his chimney top,
Must in plain English be content,
To tell you what Homer meant,
Nor aim a language much to fine,
For your capacities and mine;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My works are for the laughing tribe,
And I expect they’ll all subscribe;
Those these brisk souls I mean to shew,
That… they did in Homer’s day pursue,
And what we sinners practice now.32
From this passage, the case can be made that Bridges is mocking Pope
for being pompous in thinking that he can soar to the heights of clas-
sical greatness by calling him a “loon.” The case, I believe, is more
complex. While the entire work is admittedly written for laughs, the
overtly serious tone of the note “Publisher to the Reader” adds anoth-
er layer of ambiguity.
Whereas the paratext is that which “directly accompan[ies] the
text…” thereby constituting “the means by which a work is publically
presented and… the site where the terms of the contract between
work and reader are established,” metatext, by definition, exists apart
from the text itself and instead functions to “interpret a work.”33 That
the paratext of Bridges’ burlesque translation also functions as a me-
32 Bridges, Burlesque Translation of Homer, 1–2.

33 Santana, Foreigners in the Homeland, 65, 67.
117
tatext is clear from the note presented as being from the publisher to
the reader:
Our author [Bridges] is of the opinion that the dignity

of the Greek language has perverted the original de-
sign of Homers’ Iliad; and that the elegant translation
of Mr. Pope has now fix’d it a serious heroic poem
for ever; but he is certain, Homer’s intent was to bur-
lesque both his Gods, Godesses [sic], and heroes. A
literal translation of their speeches plainly shews [sic],
that they called one another rogue, rascal, and son of
a bitch, very cordially; and the Goddesses talk’d pretty
much in the style of our Covent-garden goddesses34:
so that he is humbly of opinion, with all due submis-
sion to the imitable language and fire of Mr. Pope,
that this burlesque will express Homer’s meaning in
full as well as his excellent translation.35
Thus, this paratextual material is functioning as a metatext

since it is interpreting for the reader the value of Pope’s translation.
While is it certainly true that this note to the reader corroborates
Bridges’ claims in the preface that he seems to derive the responsibility
for undertaking his work from Pope’s work, which had won fame
some four decades earlier, it is not at all clear from the combined con-
sideration of the preface and the publisher’s note that the intention of
this burlesque is to deride Pope himself or the value of his rendering
of Homer. Bridges does assert that he is improving upon the Pope
translation’s claim upon the unified correspondence between the
meaning of the Homeric text as rendered into English and the inten-
tion of the original author. This claim can stand, of course, if the valid-
ity of a translation is judged by the union between the “truth” of au-
thorial intent and the “honesty” of any translation, which is itself no
34 “Covent-garden goddesses” is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English slang

for prostitutes as the London district of Covent Garden was a well-known red-light
district. See R. W. Holder, "Covent Garden," in Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms, by R.
W. Holder (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2008), 139.
35 Bridges, Burlesque Translation of Homer, 3.
118
settled matter. Following the conventions of his time, Pope the author
prides himself on his originality even as he also claims to carry on the
torch of antiquity. We can at least propose that originality and inven-
tion are not virtues that Pope the translator would loudly proclaim.
Indeed, Bridges’ posturing of his hilarity as being profoundly
honest—that is to say, that his words are expressing the true intent of
Homer the man even before it has been befuddled by his own linguis-
tic limitations—is a profoundly theoretically interesting one. In fact,
his is a posture of “metafictional parody as a technique that focuses on
inherent limitations of past forms of writing.” 36 These inherent limita-
tions are in turn transcended by the claims of the burlesque verse to
reach beyond the layers of human and linguistic limitations to reach
the supposedly eternal and stable “original design of Homer’s Iliad.”37
Here, I would venture to retroactively drape the figure of Bridges the
translator as presented in the paratextual front matter of the burlesque
translation with the cloak of postmodernism, as an intriguing example
of what Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction.”38
Several questions arise from this reading of the metatext of
the posture of the translation’s honest hilarity. First, with a poststruc-
tural understanding of the very act of “imitation [as] produc[ing] the
very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imita-
tion itself” and the effect thus becoming, in a way, more real than the
original-as-effect, one can certainly make the case for interpreting
Bridges’ text as a candidate for this kind of metafictional imitation.39
This comparison is apt because the burlesque text is not only purport-
ing to “merely” imitate, but to reveal some kind of truth that is more
fundamental even than the original text itself—that is, truer than truth!
Despite Bridges’ protestations of faithfulness, he adds entire
segments of descriptions that are designed to burlesque and embarrass
36 Hilde Staels, “The Penelopiad and Weight: Contemporary Parodic and Burlesque
Transformations Of Classical Myths,” College Literature 36, no. 4 (2009): 101.
37 Bridges, Burlesque Translation of Homer, 3.
38 Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction,” 3–32.
39 Judith Butler, “Imitation as Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories,
Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 21.
119
the gods and goddess,40 as well as elements of jarring fantasy (goddess-

es riding on broomsticks)41 and anachronisms both temporal and cul-
tural (Apollo tunes King David’s harp),42 in addition to identifying fea-
tures that transpose the events of the poem to a very particular loca-
tion in his England. Of the last feature, there are three specific kinds
of additions: localities, contemporary activities, and contemporary us-
age in English and Cockney. Bridges repeatedly invokes, for example,
Billingsgate, a ward of London that housed a famous historical fish
market, as the location of the events, and has the Greeks and the Tro-
jans sharing Chryses’ bribe of “Yarmouth herrings,” the smoked fish
otherwise known as “Billingsgate pheasant.”43 While this chapter has
focused on the paratext of Bridges’ burlesque Iliad and how it func-
tions as metatext, the features identified in this current paragraph fur-
ther opens up the potential of reading Bridges’ work as a whole as
metafiction because it makes use of the form of imitation to perform a
transformative and transgressive discourse on events contemporary to
the eighteenth-century satire writer.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, Thomas Bridges’ A Burlesque Translation of

Homer is a work that has been unjustly ignored by current scholarship.
By situating this satirical translation in the historical context of transla-
tion into English broadly and in the repertoire of Augustan satirical
literature, specifically burlesques of Homer, this essay provides a lack-
ing context against which scholars can now begin to fully flesh out the
40 See, for example, an entirely invented description of Hera by Bridges near the end
of Book I, after she has been harshly rebuked by Zeus:
Juno, whose face, to own the matter,
Was round and flat, just like a platter,
With three holes in’t for eyes and nose,
And a long nick which did compose
A mouth that reach’d from ear to ear,
From which her voice came fine and clear . . . .
(Bridges, Burlesque Translation of Homer, 43)
41 Ibid., 21.
42 Ibid., 46.
43 Ebenezer Cobham Brewer, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Hertford-
shire: Wordsworth Editions, 2001), 135.
120
implications of this work, both historical and theoretical. This chapter

has taken up the task of delving into its theoretical implications by
characterizing the paratextual materials in the front matter of the book
as metatext and, more specifically, historiographical metafiction. As
such an example, Bridges’ work can be interpreted as an intriguing
phenomenon that anticipates the development of the concept of histo-
riographical metafiction in twentieth-century literary theory.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham. The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fa-

ble. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 2001.
Bridges, Thomas. A Burlesque Translation of Homer. London: Ludgate-
Hill, Printed for S. Hooper, 1772.
Butler, Judith. “Imitation as Gender Insubordination.” In Inside/Out:
Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, edited by Diana Fuss, 13–31.
New York: Routledge, 1991.
Cohen, Ralph. “The Augustan Mode in English Poetry.” Eighteenth-
Century Studies 1, no. 1 (1967): 3–32.
Cummings, Robert, and Stuart Gillespie. “Translations from Greek
and Latin Classics, 1550–1700: A Revised Bibliography.”
Feather, John. “The British Book Market, 1600–1800.” In A Compan-
ion to the History of the Book, edited by Simon Eliot and Jona-
than Rose, 232–46. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
Fricke, Donna G. “An End To Writing About Swift?” The Journal of
General Education 34, no. 1 (1982): 35–43.
Gillespie, Stuart. “Translations from Greek and Latin Classics, Part 2:
1701–1800: A Revised Bibliography.” Translation and Literature
18, no. 2 (2009): 181–224.
Holder, R. W. “Covent Garden.” In Oxford Dictionary of Euphemisms, by
R. W. Holder, 139. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.,
2008.
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Hutcheon, Linda. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Inter-

textuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary Ameri-
can Fiction, edited by Patrick O’Donnell and Robert Con Da-
vis, 3–32. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
———. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms.
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
Leavitt, Sturgis E. “Paul Scarron and English Travesty.” Studies in Phi-
lology 16, no. 1 (1919): 108–20.
McKitterick, David. Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830.
Pope, Alexander. Essay on Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014.
———, ed. and trans. The Iliad of Homer. New York: Cassell and Com-
pany, 1909.
Santana, Mario. Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New
Novel in Spain, 1962–1974. Branbury, NJ: Associated Universi-
ty Presses, 2000.
Senn, Fritz. “A Note on Burlesque Bloom.” James Joyce Quarterly 32, no.
3/4 (1995): 728–36.
Staels, Hilde. “The Penelopiad and Weight: Contemporary Parodic and
Burlesque Transformations of Classical Myths.” College Litera-
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“Suppressed Books.” Pro & Con, A Journal for Literary Investigation, 1
(1873): 159–60.
Tooly, Thomas. Homer in a Nut-Shell: Or, The Iliad of Homer in Immortal
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Weinbrot, Howard D. “Translation and Parody: Towards the Geneal-
ogy of the Augustan Imitation.” ELH 33, no. 4 (1966): 434–
47.
Young, Philip H. The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Transla-
tion History of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Jefferson, NC: McFar-
land, 2003.
122
Section Three
Images
BRENDAN MICHAEL SMALL
This section emphasizes the importance of how images and

imagery may affect one’s interpretation and understanding of the
Homeric text. The authors in this section have worked through an
exegesis of the visual material in order to examine how authorial and
editorial decisions shape reader experience. The essays vary from ideas
related to authorial persona and authorial intrusion, to publication
practices.
Tali Winkler, in her chapter “Illustrating the Classics and the
Self: John Ogilby and His Self-Fashioning Portraits,” explores the
visual and material sensibilities of John Ogilby. Winkler underscores
Ogilby’s sensitivity to the importance of the visual material within
printed texts, noting his extensive use of quality illustrations as a
determining factor of his success in the English printing industry.
Winkler expands her analysis of the visual images within Ogilby’s
publications to examine the evolution of the four frontispiece portraits
that he commissioned throughout his career. Winkler uses the
portraits as evidence to argue that Ogilby was actively trying to
enhance his own public image while simultaneously declaring himself,
as translator, the true author of the Homeric texts.
Hilary Barker also examines the use of illustrations in her
chapter, “Expectation and Image(-ination): The Purpose and Reuse of
Woodcuts in the Books of Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari.” Barker
considers the role of chapter heading images in several publications of
Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, including an Italian epic, Italian translations
of the Odyssey, and a combined edition of the Iliad and Aeneid rendered
into ottava rima: Orlando Furioso (1544), L’Achille et l’Enea di Messer
Lodovico Dolce (1570), and L’Ulisse di M. Lodovico Dolce (1573). The
woodcut illustrations were reused from Orlando Furioso to illustrate the
later editions of the classical epics. Barker’s close analysis of the
illustrations reveals the major role they had in framing the reader’s
experience, and argues that the decision to recycle the illustrations
created specifically for Orlando Furioso disrupted the dynamic of reader
expectation and fulfillment, resulting in a more complex relationship
between image and text.
Javier Ibáñez explores the theme of authorial intrusion in his
chapter, “In Chapman’s Forge: Mistranslation as Ekphrastic
Resistance.” Ibáñez considers how the needs, conventions, and
expectations of a written culture impose themselves onto a work
rooted in an oral tradition. His essay relies on the contemporary
understanding of ekphrasis to assess George Chapman’s treatment of
Achilles’ shield in his translation of the Iliad, published in 1616. Ibáñez
argues that Chapman works against the conventional reading of Book
18, which tends to move away from considering the shield as an object
to thinking about the art depicted on the shield and the narrative
episodes that it represents. Chapman actively works against this textual
imagery to concretize the shield through frequent insertions and
alterations, which are all closely considered in Ibáñez’s analysis.
The final chapter in this section, Goda Thangada’s “Henri
Estienne’s Concepts of History and Poetry,” illustrates the broader
social and cultural climate around which Estienne constructed his 1566
anthology of Greek poetry. The compendium of poems includes, as
Thangada characterizes it, “a motley assortment of partner poets: the
archaic hexameter poet Hesiod; the archaic elegists Theognis and
Solon; the didactic poet Aratus; the Hellenistic poets Callimachus,
Theocritus, and Bion; the work attributed to the mythical poets
Orpheus and Musaeus; and others.” Thangada’s close reading of
Estienne’s approach to textual criticism, which was informed as much
by his interpretation of history as of poetry, underscores why
Estienne’s volume reigned for centuries as the standard Greek edition
of Homer.
The chapters in this section provide insight into the various
ways that texts and images interact, and how authors’, translators’, and
publishers’ contemplation of self and the society around them helped
to influence their work on Homer. All four of these essays grapple
124
with the mediation of ideologies and interpretations, but they are
designed to create new bridges between author and reader and offer a
framework to approach this diverse group of Homeric texts.
125
Chapter 9
Illustrating the Classics and the Self:

John Ogilby and his Self-Fashioning Portraits
TALI WINKLER
John Ogilby’s life was filled with a great variety of ventures,

from dance and theatre to classics and cartography. Although he is
best remembered for his atlases, he first gained his reputation as a
scholar and printer with his translations of the classics. Ogilby’s suc-
cess in the world of books came in significant part from his under-
standing of the importance of the visual and material elements of book
making. This understanding is particularly evident in his utilization of
the frontispiece portrait in many of his published works, which reflect-
ed his active involvement in the fashioning of his own image.
OGILBY AND THE VISUAL ELEMENTS OF PRINTING
John Ogilby (1600–76), was born in Scotland to humble ori-

gins, and was apprenticed to a dancing-master in London as a young
boy.1 His success in dancing led him to perform before King James
and the royal court, but an injury left him unable to dance again.2 De-
spite this setback, Ogilby maintained the connections he had formed at
court. He became dancing-master and manager of the first theatre es-
tablished in Ireland under Thomas Wentworth, the Earl of Strafford.
However, after the Irish Rebellion in October 1641, he returned to
England penniless.3 Ogilby then turned to the classics and began pub-
lishing translations of works into English from their original Latin or
Greek. He was quite successful in this endeavor, utilizing a system of
1 Katharine S. van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Kent: Dawson, 1976),
11.
2 Ibid., 17–19.
3 Ibid., 23–25.
Tali Winkler
subscriptions to his benefit. 4 After the Restoration of Charles II in

1660, he continued to be involved both in publishing and in Irish thea-
tre.5 Eventually he moved away from the classics and towards cartog-
raphy, becoming the Royal Cartographer and Cosmographer near the
end of his life.6
Ogilby’s time as a dancing student, and then as the dancing-
master and manager of a theater, taught him much about ways of suc-
cessfully depicting a scene to an audience. The years he spent working
in the arts laid the groundwork for his attention to the visual, rather
than solely the written, elements in printing. Ogilby took this sensitivi-
ty with him as he entered the book-publishing business. He under-
stood that the incorporation of various material and paratextual ele-
ments could have a profound effect on the reader’s encounter with
and understanding of a book. Thus, like many authors, Ogilby de-
signed his books with the goal of attempting to influence the readers’
understandings and to place his books within the context of earlier
print traditions.7
Ogilby utilized a number of strategies in his attempt to shape
readers’ encounters with his books. First, he used excellent-quality pa-
per. Paper had always been one of the most expensive aspects of book
production. During this period, good-quality paper was not being pro-
duced in England itself, thus forcing printers to import from France or
the Netherlands. An imposed import tax only added to the expense.8
Second, Ogilby left wide margins in his works, giving each page an
impressive look and allowing users the option of taking notes in the
margins. This stylistic decision also added to the cost of printing, as
less text was included on each page and therefore more paper was
needed to complete each copy. Third, he used clear and clean type,
making his works easy and pleasant to read.
4 See George Elliot’s “Ogilby and the Odyssey” in this volume for a fuller biography
of Ogilby and an exploration of his use of subscriptions.

5 Antony Griffiths and Robert A. Gerard, The Print in Stuart Britain, 1603–1689 (Lon-
don: British Museum Press, 1998), 184.

7 See Janine Barchas, “Prefiguring Genre: Frontispiece Portraits from ‘Gulliver’s Trav-
els’ to ‘Millenium Hall,’” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (1998): 260.
8 Griffiths and Gerard, Print in Stuart Britain, 30.
128
Chapter 9 - John Ogilby and his Self-Fashioning Portraits
In addition to these material features, he often included a crit-

ical apparatus of extensive notes and glosses. During the Renaissance,
classical texts could be encountered in any number of settings, and the
reading of the classics could be approached with a number of atti-
tudes.9 Some works would have been read leisurely, for pleasure. Oth-
ers would have been pored over by scholars. The size of the book it-
self and the presence or absence of any accompanying texts would
have been essential in determining the way in which the book was in-
tended to be used. For example, an octavo with no notes would have
been encountered as an object of leisure; this is drastically different
from a folio edition with extensive glosses, which would have been
encountered as an object for serious study.10 Despite the fact that al-
most all of Ogilby’s printed classics were in translation,11 the inclusion
of such an extensive scholarly apparatus, as well as the size of the
works, located his editions within the context of serious humanistic
scholarship and education. Thomas Hobbes, when explaining why he
did not include notes or glosses in his own translation of Homer,
claimed that he could not hope to do it better than Ogilby had done,
and that his readers should consult Ogilby’s editions for their critical
apparatus.12
However, it was his extensive use of illustrations that was
most characteristic of his works and most reflective of his understand-
ing of the book as a medium. His first work, a translation of the works
of Virgil, was printed by John Crook in 1649. 13 This octavo edition
contained a frontispiece portrait of Ogilby, which will be discussed
below, opposite a frontispiece featuring a bust of Virgil. However, it
9 See Anthony Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” in A History of Reading in the West,
ed. Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier, and Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 179–212 for a discussion of various types of reading
done by humanists.
10 While the size and format can indicate the intended use of a book, it obviously does
not ensure that the book was actually used that way, and often the availability of books
could be more relevant in determining use than format. However, the intention of the
author or publisher can certainly be inferred from such decisions.
11 The only exception was his edition of Virgil published in 1658 in Latin.

Library, 2013), 114.
13 John Ogilby, ed. and trans., The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (London: Printed by
Thomas Maxey for Andrew Crook, 1649).
129
Tali Winkler
did not contain any further illustrations, or a critical apparatus of any

kind. Perhaps Ogilby, as he began this new venture, did not have
enough capital to produce illustrations for the text, or perhaps he did
not yet realize the importance that illustrations would come to have in
his printing endeavors.
Ogilby’s second work, on the other hand, included copious il-
lustrations. His translation of Aesop’s Fables was printed by Andrew
Crook, the brother of John Crook, in folio form in 1651. 14 In addition
to a frontispiece portrait, the work contained eighty full-page plates
illustrating each of the fables. Ogilby knew that the illustrations would
be a major factor in the success of the work, and advertised their pres-
ence on the frontispiece opposite his own portrait, below a scene
showing Aesop telling his tales to an audience of men and beasts. He
writes:
Examples are best Precepts; And a Tale

Adorn’d with Sculpture better may prevaile
To make Men lesser Beasts, than all the store
Of tedious volumes, vext the World before.15
The “sculptures,” as he would call subsequent illustrations as well,

rendered the fables more effective, and presumably more enjoyable.
The illustrations in Ogilby’s first edition of Aesop’s Fables were
etched, while all of the illustrations in his subsequent works would be
engraved. In seventeenth-century England, there was a clear hierarchy
of types of illustrations. The woodcut was the least preferred, as the
image it produced was a bit cruder in nature; it was also the cheapest
way to produce images. Etchings were more expensive than woodcuts
and produced an image that was more sophisticated than a woodcut,
but retained a sketch-like quality. Finally, engraving was the most pre-
ferred medium for illustration: this process could create images that
were more complex, and it was also a significantly more expensive
14 John Ogilby, ed. and trans., The Fables of Æsop Paraphras’d in Verse, and Adorn’d with
Sculpture (London: Printed by Thomas Warren for Andrew Crook, 1651).

15 Ibid., Frontispiece. Reproduced and transcribed in Griffiths and Gerard, Print in
Stuart Britain, 185.
130
process. 16 There are numerous contemporary remarks disparaging

etchings in favor of engravings, showing a real aesthetic preference for
the latter.17 Ogilby was presumably aware of this preference, and used
the highest quality illustrations in all subsequent works. Perhaps here,
as he was just starting out in this new trade, he was forced to use the
lesser medium for financial or other reasons. Ogilby also employed
some of the best artists and engravers of his period for the illustrations
in his works. He utilized the services of Wenceslaus Hollar, Francis
Clein, Abraham van Diepenbeeck, and other famous artists of the
time.18
Although Ogilby’s elaborate folio editions were new to the
English book market, they were modeled after various French proto-
types. Michele de Marolles’s 1649 edition of Virgil, for example, was
the inspiration for Ogilby’s 1654 edition.19 As opposed to his first edi-
tion, which only contained the text of Virgil, the 1654 edition also in-
cluded illustrations and a critical apparatus. For the marginal commen-
tary included in this volume, Ogilby relied upon the commentary on
Virgil written by Joanne Ludovico de la Cerda, a Spanish Jesuit, as well
as others. However, Ogilby’s page is far superior to de la Cerda’s in
terms of layout and visual appeal.20 It is interesting to note that Ogilby
was clearly aware of and familiar with the international book market,
and was able to identify various parts of this market, such as a specific
format from France and a commentary from Spain, that he thought
would be appealing to an English market. This selectivity, along with
his sensitivity to the importance of the visual, contributed to Ogilby’s
ability to enter the English book market with a remarkable degree of
success.
16 Griffiths and Gerard, Print in Stuart Britain, 24, 186. I would also like to thank Hilary
Barker for taking time to explain the economic and material factors of this dynamic.
17 See ibid., 186, 189, and 196 for three quotations expressing this sentiment.
18 Ibid., 185–87.
19 Ibid., 184. See John Ogilby, ed. and trans., The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro Trans-
lated, Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations (London: Printed by Thomas
Warren for the author, 1654).
20 For example, the emphasis is on the Virgilian text in Ogilby’s edition, whereas in de
la Cerda’s edition, the commentary overshadowed the text both visually and quantita-
tively. See van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times, 36.
131
Tali Winkler
OGILBY’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF FRONTISPIECE PORTRAITS
One of the many ways in which an author or publisher could

actively shape the reader’s encounter with the book, as well as the re-
ception of the book and its author, is through the frontispiece. Many
types of images can appear as frontispieces, such as depictions of
scenes from the work, busts of classical authors, or contemporary por-
traits. In these portraits, an engraved image of the author often ap-
pears within a masonry frame, along with Latin or Greek inscriptions.
David Piper has located the origins of the frontispiece portrait in the
scrolls and codices of antiquity, conveying the idea that the author is
essentially talking to the reader. 21 Margery Corbet and Ronald
Lightbown point to the medieval tradition of authors including por-
trayals of themselves in presentation copies of their manuscripts.22 The
first English poet to be portrayed in a naturalistic portrait is, fittingly,
Geoffrey Chaucer.23 However, portraiture was slow to establish itself
in England, and there are hardly any portraits other than tomb effigies
that survive from the fifteenth century.24 It is not until the end of the
sixteenth century that portraits spread outside of court circles. 25
George Chapman, who published the first complete translation of
Homer’s works into English, was one of the earliest authors to include
a frontispiece portrait.26 The portrait, which was published during his
lifetime in 1616, shows Chapman’s head surrounded by clouds and a
ring of inscription, with another long Latin inscription below.
The frontispiece portrait emerged as a common feature of
British book production by the seventeenth century. 27 This model,
which Piper describes as the “equivalent in engraving of the sculpted
memorial bust in its niche,” would be repeated formulaically for the
21 David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and Their Portraits (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1982), 8, 20.
22 Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-
Page in England, 1550–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 43.
23 Piper, Image of the Poet, 9.
24 Ibid., 11.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 17. See George Chapman, ed. and trans., The Whole Works of Homer; Prince of
Poetts in His Iliads, and Odysses. Translated according to the Greeke (London: Printed by
Richard Field and William Jaggard for Nathaniell Butter, 1616).
27 Barchas, “Prefiguring Genre,” 261.
132
next two hundred years.28 The portrayal of portraits in print, with its
potential for replication, changed the dynamics of that subgenre of
portraiture.29 While a painted portrait existed in a single copy, a printed
portrait was reproduced hundreds of times, substantially increasing its
likelihood of survival. The function of the printed portrait was conse-
quently altered; instead of hanging a single copy of the subject in a
prominent location, the new goal was to have one’s portrait in as many
English households as possible. Additionally, the technology of en-
graving allowed one to have multiple portraits taken in a single life-
time. It thus became expected that a portrait would represent as recent
a depiction as possible.30
The frontispiece portrait was utilized by various figures: au-
thors, poets, translators of classical literature, medical professionals,31
religious figures, and others. Because the inclusion of an additional
copperplate engraving raised the price of the book, frontispiece por-
traits were usually limited to the works of established authors and
printers who could afford the extra investment and could depend up-
on readers’ willingness to pay more for the book.32 The frontispiece
portrait was an important way in which an author could try to fashion
his own image and place in society. These portraits often exhibit a high
degree of self-composure, as the subject tries to create an image of a
person worthy of the viewer’s respect.33 Such portraits exist in the in-
terface between art and social life, and there is thus a pressure to con-
form to social norms, exposing only those features that will make a
good impression. 34 Specifically for poets, authors, or other creative
thinkers, “looking the part” could be crucial to one’s success in being

29 See Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance
Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially chapter 5 on replicas, for a
discussion of the changing role of images in the age of reproduction technology. He
specifically explores the referential and representational aspects of images in this era.
30 Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 44.
31 Many medical works had portraits of their authors. The importance of “issues of
dignity and status” in the field of anatomy lent itself to the weight given to individual
doctors and their desire to invoke their status in the publication of their works. See
Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2010), 306.
32 Barchas, “Prefiguring Genre,” 261.
33 Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 10.
34 Ibid., 11.
133
Tali Winkler
taken as such by others.35 Images of poets had become public desider-

ata for domestic consumption and thus almost necessary for a poet’s
success.36 The fact that artwork tends to outlive both its makers and its
subjects means that portraits could, and did, affect the image of the
author even after his death; 37 the commissioning of a portrait could
lead to the creation of a visible identity by which someone would be
known for many future generations.38
This self-fashioning was quite conscious on the part of Ogil-
by. While he was unqualified by birth, nature, or activity to become a
courtier, he put great efforts into his upward mobility and the mainte-
nance of the court connections he had cultivated. He thus cared deeply
about developing his image as both a statesman and a lettered poet,
with all the resulting associations and respect. Thomas Hobbes, the
next author to publish an English translation of Homer, included a
frontispiece portrait as well.39 Alexander Pope, who translated Homer
into English in the eighteenth century, was also quite conscious about
his own image; he had 66 portraits of himself produced during his life-
time. In this case, Pope’s impulse to have himself portrayed was inten-
sified by the need to project an image worthy of the mind and spirit
embodied in his poetry, in contrast to the reality of his sickly and de-
formed body. This effort was a highly controlled projection of his per-
son into posterity.40
OGILBY AND HIS PORTRAITS
Ogilby commissioned four frontispiece portraits throughout

his publishing career. The first [see Figure 1] was produced in 1649 by
William Marshall, the most prolific engraver of the Caroline era,41 and
35 Ibid., 121.
37 See Marcia R. Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion Books,
2013), 20.
38 Brilliant, Portraiture, 14.
39 Thomas Hobbes, trans., The Iliads and Odysses of Homer Translated out of Greek into
English (London: Printed for Will. Crook, 1677).

40 Piper, Image of the Poet, 57–58.
41 Marshall was active between the years 1617 and 1650, when he disappears from the
record. Hind catalogues 254 prints produced by Marshall, rendering him the most
prolific engraver of the Caroline era. Half of his prints are portraits, while the rest are
134
included in Ogilby’s first printed work, his translation of Virgil.42 In

the portrait, Ogilby is depicted half-length framed within an oval. He
has long hair and is wearing a cap and gown. In his right hand he holds
a medallion, upon which is a wreathed bust portrait of Virgil and the
inscription “P.V.,” for “Publius Virgilius.” Beneath the portrait is a
suspended curtain with the words “JOHANNES OGILVIUS.” in
larger script and “Guil. Marshall fecit 1649.” beneath it in smaller
script. Ogilby’s expression is determined, perhaps an indication of his
intention to work hard to succeed in this new business venture.43 The
setting of the portrait itself is hardly remarkable. Ogilby is portraying
himself as a poet or scholar, wearing the requisite robes, with his upper
body surrounded by the traditional frame. Ogilby would only use this
portrait as a frontispiece for the volume for which it had originally
been created.
A comparison between Ogilby’s first portrait and the one in-
cluded on the title page of Thomas Hobbes’ translation of Homer [see
Figure 2], published in 1677, reveals some striking similarities.44 Both
authors are facing right, wearing similar gowns with protruding collars,
with shoulder-length hair. Hobbes’ expression also seems serious and
determined. They both exude a scholarly persona. However, there is
one striking difference between the two title pages. Whereas Ogilby is
the sole figure depicted in the frontispiece, Hobbes appears in a small
medallion at the bottom of the page, with a bust of Homer at the top
and two armed men on either side of the title. By using this format,
Hobbes was conforming to the convention of the day. Where a book
was the work of two authors, often in the case of a translation, it was
common to include a portrait of both; the image of the original author
mainly title pages. See Arthur Mayger Hind, Margery Corbett, and Michael Norton,
Engraving in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive Catalogue with
Introductions, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 102.; Griffiths and
Gerard, Print in Stuart Britain, 163.
42 See Ogilby, The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, 1649. I examined the copy in the
collection of the Newberry Library.

43 Opposite this portrait is another engraved scene, featuring a wreathed bust of Virgil
in the center. The bust in the medallion is clearly intended to reference the larger bust
on the opposing page.
44 Hobbes, The Iliads and Odysses of Homer.
135
Tali Winkler
would be at the top and that of the translator at the bottom.45 Ogilby,
however, seems to be taking significantly more credit for the work.
This sentiment becomes much more explicit in his next portrait.
Ogilby commissioned a new frontispiece portrait for his sec-
ond work, the translation of Aesop’s Fables printed in 1651 in folio with
illustrations.46 Richard Gaywood, the most prolific etcher of his day,
made this second portrait.47 In the portrait [see Figure 3], a sculpted
bust of Ogilby is turned to the left and looks out at the viewer. Ogilby
is wearing a cap and cloak, with shoulder-length hair. Beneath the plat-
form upon which the bust is resting, a cartouche with an inscription
reads: “The Fables of Æsop ~ Paraphras’d in Vers and adornd ~ with
Sculpture ~by Iohn Ogilby.” This is the most unusual of Ogilby’s por-
traits, as it portrays him as a bust with a head and upper torso but
without arms. This is in contrast to the other three, where he is depict-
ed at half-length as a live person, rather than a sculpted bust. Ogilby
would use this frontispiece portrait again in a later printing of Aesop’s
Fables.48
The depiction of Ogilby in the form of a sculpted bust sends a
clear message about the role he envisioned for himself in this project.
Humanists collected busts of classical writers and thinkers and dis-
played them in their libraries, in imitation of the parallel Roman prac-
tice; Pliny explains that the display of such busts honors those whose
“immortal spirits” talk to the readers in the library.49 By depicting him-
45 Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 43.

46 Ogilby, The Fables of Æsop Paraphras’d in Verse, and Adorn’d with Sculpture.
47 Gaywood, active between the years 1644 and 1668, was the principal supplier of
portrait etchings (as opposed to engravings) to the London book trade. See Griffiths
and Gerard, Print in Stuart Britain, 169. It is not entirely clear to me why Ogilby would
have commissioned all of the illustrations for the volume in engraving, while his own
portrait was an etching. Perhaps he specifically wanted a portrait by Gaywood, despite
the fact that it was not an engraving.
48 Because the title of the work was embedded within the portrait, it would have been
quite difficult to reuse the image for a different title. However, he was able to use it for
a later printing of the same work in 1672. He used the Lombart portrait, to be dis-
cussed below, in his 1665 edition of Aesop’s Fables. It is unclear to me why he would
have used the Gaywood portrait in the 1672 edition but not the 1665 edition.
49 Jonathan Woolfson and Andrew Gregory, “Aspects of Collecting in Renaissance
Padua: A Bust of Socrates for Niccolò Leonico Tomeo,” Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 58 (1995): 256–57. Quotation from Pliny’s Natural History taken
from ibid.
136
self in the form of a bust, Ogilby is declaring himself one of the great
writers worthy of gracing the libraries of noblemen and scholars. Alt-
hough one could see Ogilby as merely the translator of this work, he is
clearly stating, through this portrait, that he claims full ownership over
this creative production.
For Ogilby’s third publication, the beautiful folio edition of
Virgil with illustrations published in 1654, he commissioned yet anoth-
er frontispiece portrait [see Figure 4].50 This print was made by William
Faithorne, whom Arthur Mayger Hind has called “the first great Eng-
lish portrait engraver.”51 The engraving was done after an original by
Peter Lely, as specified in an inscription within the portrait. While the
previous two portraits did not specify if there was an original from
which the etching or engraving was made, here it is clear that Ogilby
sat for a portrait by Lely.52
Lely (1618–80) is often described as the successor of Anthony
van Dyck.53 Van Dyck (1599–1641) was the leading court painter in
England during his lifetime, especially during the reign of Charles I.
Lely was considered the best portrait painter in England during the
Restoration; he would paint the chief men and women of the Restora-
tion world. Lely’s courtly, gentlemanly existence paralleled Van Dyck’s
lifestyle as court painter as well. Later in his career, because of the high
demand for his portraits, he would only paint the face of the patron;
an apprentice would then complete the body of the patron in accord-
ance with a pre-determined design.
50 Ogilby, The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, 1654.

51 Faithorne, who lived from circa 1620 to 1691, served in the Royalist army, was cap-
tured and held prisoner in London, and was exiled to Paris. His artistic style was influ-
enced by this time in Paris. He returned to London in 1652 and continued to work as
an engraver, specializing in portraits. See Arthur Mayger Hind, A History of Engraving
& Etching: From the 15th Century to the Year 1914; Being the Third and Fully Revised Edition of
“a Short History of Engraving and Etching” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1923),
152–54; Griffiths and Gerard, Print in Stuart Britain, 125–26.
52 We do not know any further information about the details or circumstances of Le-
ly’s portrait of Ogilby. I will discuss a portrait of Ogilby attributed to Lely, which may
or may not be the basis of this as well as the following engraving, below.
53 This was true both in style as well as in formal position: he was granted by the king
an annual pension of 200 pounds as Principal Painter “as formerly to Sr. Vandyke.”
See Oliver Millar and Peter Lely, Sir Peter Lely, 1618–1680: Exhibition at 15 Carlton
House Terrace, London Sw1 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1978), 15.
137
Tali Winkler
In this engraved portrait, Ogilby is depicted in half-length in

an oval with long flowing hair reminiscent of a nobleman’s wig. He is
wearing a gown, the drapery of which is quite voluminous, obscuring
the form of his mid-torso. Beneath the portrait appears a coat of arms,
which encloses the crowned lion of Scotland.54 A panel flanking both
sides of the coat of arms bears the inscription “JOHANNES
OGILVIUS.” On a panel between the portrait and coat of arms, “P:
Lilly Pinxit” and “Guil: Faithorne Sculp” are inscribed. While similar
in general format to the Marshall portrait, the impression of its subject
is significantly altered. Ogilby looks like a gentleman with flowing dra-
pery, rather than a scholar or a classical author. In the first portrait,
Ogilby looked determined; his facial muscles are tense and his eye-
brows are furrowed as he looks past the viewer and off into the dis-
tance. In the second portrait, his raised eyebrow and sidelong glance
almost give an impression of aggression. In contrast, the Faithorne
portrait depicts Ogilby with self-assurance and serenity. The figure
makes eye contact with the viewer and conveys his confidence in his
own self-worth. Through this new portrait, Ogilby has thus re-
fashioned his identity, from that of a scholar to that of an aristocrat,
employing the most popular courtly artist of the time in order to fur-
ther this transformation.
The Faithorne portrait was used in the 1654 edition of Virgil,
which Ogilby later described in the preface to his atlas Africa, as “a
new and taking Beauty, the fairest till then that the English Press ever
boasted.”55 This 1654 edition was also the first time Ogilby used sub-
scriptions in order to finance his publications; the work contained 99
plates, in addition to three preliminary one, making it an expensive
volume to produce.56 This can thus be seen as a time of heightened
effort on the part of Ogilby to recreate himself as a gentleman and to
cement his relationships with aristocrats who would become patrons
55 John Ogilby, Africa (London: Printed by Tho. Johnson for the Author, 1670), C1.
138
of his prints. The portrait was also used in a later edition of Virgil,
which Ogilby published in 1668.57
The fourth and final frontispiece portrait commissioned by
Ogilby [see Figure 5] was also based upon an original portrait drawn
by Lely. However, this one was engraved by Pierre Lombart, consid-
ered “the finest engraver in England” during the Interregnum years.58
In the portrait, Ogilby appears half-length, turned to the right, framed
within an octagonal border. The same coat of arms appears in the low-
er part of the frame. A panel below the coat of arms bears the inscrip-
tion “IOHANNES OGILVIVS.” On a panel between the portrait and
coat of arms, “P: Lilly Pinxit” and “P. Lombart sculpsit Londini” are
inscribed. Ogilby is again seen with long hair with cascading curls and
the flowing drapery of a gown. While similar to the Faithorne portrait
in many respects, Ogilby’s gaze is slightly different; instead of looking
directly at the viewer, he seems to look down and to the left, as if ab-
sorbed in thought or contemplation. The long flowing curls are more
prominent than in the Faithorne portrait as well. Overall, the impres-
sion is still one of a gentleman, gazing out at the viewer with confi-
dence. This portrait was first used in Ogilby’s Latin edition of Virgil in
1658.59 It was subsequently used in his celebrated volume of Homer’s
Iliad, dedicated to the newly restored Charles II.60 The Lombart edition
was also used in Ogilby’s reprint of Aesop’s Fables in 1665.61
57 John Ogilby, ed. and trans., The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro Translated, Adorned with
Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by Thomas Roycroft
for the author, 1668).
58 Lombart was a Frenchman who lived from 1613 to 1682. His main employment was
by Ogilby and other book publishers. See Griffiths and Gerard, Print in Stuart Britain,
166, 178.
59 John Ogilby, ed., Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera per Johannem Ogilvium Edita et Sculpturis
AEneis Adornata (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1658).

60 John Ogilby, ed. and trans., Homer His Iliads Translated, Adorn’d with Sculpture, and
Illustrated with Annotations (London: Printed by Thomas Roycroft, 1660). I examined

the copy owned by the University of Chicago. The University of Chicago’s copy of its
companion volume of the Odyssey, printed in 1655, does not contain a portrait of Ogil-
by, instead portraying Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, set within a large architectural
frame. This could be because the two were seen as a pair, and presumably a single
patron would have little need for two portraits of Ogilby. However, Schuchard, in her
descriptive bibliography of Ogilby’s works, writes that the 1665 Odyssey did in fact
include the Lombart portrait. See Margret Schuchard, A Descriptive Bibliography of the
Works of John Ogilby and William Morgan (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975), 50.
139
Tali Winkler
Finally, there is a painting of Ogilby that has been attributed

to Peter Lely [see Figure 6]. The painting, currently in the collection of
the Bodleian Library, was acquired by the Library in 1662.62 The date
of completion is not known, though it must have been completed be-
fore 1662; it could thus potentially be the basis for one, or both, of the
frontispieces by Faithorne and Lombart.63 This portrait incorporates
many of the elements and themes seen in both of those frontispieces.
Ogilby looks over his shoulder, meeting the viewer’s gaze with confi-
dence. He is wearing a cap and a flowing gown, and his curls frame his
face and fall to his shoulders.
There are many elements about Ogilby’s portraits that are un-
known: the exact circumstances of the attributed Lely portrait; whether
there was another painted portrait that has not survived; or why Ogil-
by commissioned the Lombart portrait, so similar to the Faithorne
portrait produced just four years earlier. However, it is clear that Ogil-
by was, at this point in his career, interested in promoting his image as
an aristocrat, rather than as a middle-class scholar.
CONCLUSION
The fact that Ogilby had four separate engraved or etched

portraits of himself produced as frontispieces for his printed works is
an indication of a man actively concerned with maintaining a certain
public image. Aside from the Marshall portrait, each of the portraits
61 John Ogilby, ed. and trans., The Fables of Æsop Paraphras’d in Verse Adorn’d with Sculp-
ture, and Illustrated with Annotations (London: Printed by Thomas Roycroft, for the au-
thor, 1665).
62 Kenneth Garlick and Rachael Poole, Catalogue of Portraits in the Bodleian Library (Ox-
ford: Bodleian Library, 2004), 241.

63 The Lombart engraving resembles the painting more than the Faithorne does, espe-
cially regarding the angle of Ogilby’s torso. In the painting, Ogilby looks over his
shoulder, while in the Faithorne portrait, the viewer has an almost frontal view of
Ogilby’s torso. Ogilby’s torso is angled to the right in the Lombart engraving, though
not quite as much as in the painting. The portrait’s entry in the Bodleian Library’s
catalogue notes that the attribution to Lely is “not entirely convincing;” see Garlick
and Poole, Catalogues of Portraits in the Bodleian Library, 241. Perhaps the attribution was
based upon the fact that the painting resembles the Lombart engraving, which is in
fact based upon a portrait by Lely, so it was assumed that this was the original Lely
that was being referenced. I would like to thank Dana Josephson, Conservator of the
Portraits Collection at the Bodleian Library, for his help with this portrait.
140
was used more than once, often after a gap of a number of years.
While there may have been many reasons for Ogilby’s decision to use
a specific portrait in each case, the fact that he almost always included
a portrait of himself, and not a bust of Homer or a similar image, is
indicative of his own perceived relationship to these publications; he
clearly thought of himself, as translator, as the true author of these
works.64
In commissioning his portraits, Ogilby sought out the three
printmakers who would dominate the decade of the Interregnum,65 as
well as the most famous court painter of his day. As Ogilby continued
to succeed in the printing business, we see the way in which his self-
image develops. Earlier in his career, he portrays himself as a scholar
and poet, using iconography that signified his importance vis-à-vis the
text. The inclusion of extensive glosses to the text also contributed to
the creation of his public persona. The glosses and images thus
worked together towards a larger project. However, as Ogilby contin-
ued to cultivate his courtly connections, he shifted the way in which he
was depicted, instead showing himself as an aristocrat. Using a combi-
nation of visual sensitivity, court connections, and active self-
fashioning, Ogilby was thus able to ensure his own success in the book
trade while simultaneously contributing towards his own social mobili-
ty.
64 Interestingly, he did not include a portrait of himself in the bible he published in

1660. Apparently this was a genre in which portraits were not considered acceptable.
141
Tali Winkler
APPENDIX: IMAGES
Figure 1: Marshall, William, Portrait of

John Ogilby, 1649, engraving, The New-
berry Library, Chicago. In The Works of
Publius Vrgilius Maro, translated by John
Ogilby. London: Printed by Thomas
Maxey for Andrew Crook, 1649. Photo
courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chi-
cago, Call #Y672.V8764.
Figure 2: Title Page, 1677, etching

and engraving, Wellcome Library,
London. In The Works of Homer, trans-
lated by Thomas Hobbes. London:
Printed by W. Crooke, 1677. Well-
come Images V0002800.
142
Figure 3: Gaywood, Richard, Title Page,

1651, etching, National Portrait Gallery,
London. In The Fables of Æsop, translated
by John Ogilby. London: Printed by
Thomas Warren for Andrew Crook, 1651.
NPG D30175.
Figure 4: Faithorne, William, Portrait of
John Ogilby, after Peter Lely, 1654, en-
graving, National Portrait Gallery, Lon-
don. In The Works of Publius Virgilius
Maro, translated by John Ogilby. Lon-
don: Printed by Thomas Warren for the
author, 1654. NPG D19472.
143
Tali Winkler
Figure 5: Lombart, Pierre, Portrait of

John Ogilby, after Peter Lely, 1658, en-
graving, National Portrait Gallery, Lon-
don. In Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera, by
John Ogilby. London: Printed by Thom-
as Roycroft, 1658. NPG D5387.
Figure 6: Lely, Peter, Portrait of John Ogil-
by, oil on canvas, Bodleian Library, Lon-
don, 1662.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Lely_-_Ogilby.jpg. Accessed August 16,
2015.
144
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barchas, Janine. “Prefiguring Genre: Frontispiece Portraits from ‘Gul-

liver’s Travels’ to ‘Millenium Hall.’” Studies in the Novel 30, no.
2 (1998): 260–86.
Brilliant, Richard. Portraiture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991.
Chapman, George, ed. and trans. The Whole Works of Homer; Prince of
Poetts in His Iliads, and Odysses. Translated according to the Greeke.
London: Printed by Richard Field and William Jaggard for
Nathaniell Butter, 1616.
Corbett, Margery, and Ronald Lightbown. The Comely Frontispiece: The
Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.
Garlick, Kenneth, and Rachael Poole. Catalogue of Portraits in the
Bodleian Library. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2004.
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Century to the Year 1914; Being the Third and Fully Revised Edition
of “a Short History of Engraving and Etching.” Boston: Houghton
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Hind, Arthur Mayger, Margery Corbett, and Michael Norton. Engraving
in England in the Sixteenth & Seventeenth Centuries: A Descriptive
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versity Press, 1952.
Hobbes, Thomas, trans. The Iliads and Odysses of Homer Translated out of
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Carlton House Terrace, London Sw1. London: National Portrait
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brary. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2013.
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1670.
———, ed. and trans. The Fables of Æsop Paraphras’d in Verse, and
Adorn’d with Sculpture. London: Printed by Thomas Warren for
Andrew Crook, 1651.
145
Tali Winkler
———, ed. and trans. The Fables of Æsop Paraphras’d in Verse Adorn’d
with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations. London: Printed
by Thomas Roycroft, for the author, 1665.
———, ed. and trans. Homer His Iliads Translated, Adorn’d with Sculpture,
and Illustrated with Annotations. London: Printed by Thomas
Roycroft, 1660.
———, ed. and trans. Publii Virgilii Maronis Opera per Johannem Ogilvium
Edita et Sculpturis AEneis Adornata. London: Thomas Roycroft,
1658.
———, ed. and trans. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro. London:
Printed by Thomas Maxey for Andrew Crook, 1649.
———, ed. and trans. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro Translated,
Adorn’d with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations. London:
Printed by Thomas Warren for the author, 1654.
———, ed. and trans. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro Translated,
Adorned with Sculpture, and Illustrated with Annotations. 2nd ed.
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Schuchard, Margret. A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of John Ogilby
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Dawson, 1976.
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252–65.
146
Chapter 10
Expectation and Image(-ination): The Purpose and Reuse

of Woodcuts in the Books of Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari
HILARY BARKER
The illustrations have a sophistication and animation

which the earlier ones lacked. In the scene of the arrival of
Roger at Alcina’s isle, or that of the siege of Paris, the
landscape backgrounds show wide vistas even in the small
space available. There is no sense of crowding, but the
compositions are so skillfully arranged that often two or
three episodes are included…1
Philip Hofer’s comments above refer to the woodcut images

made for Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari’s 1542 edition of the Italian epic
poem Orlando Furioso, which were used in the close to 30 editions of
this work that his press published over the next 20 years. The poem,
written by Ludovico Ariosto and first published in 1516, was one of
the most popular pieces of vernacular literature in sixteenth-century
Italy and was printed in hundreds of editions by many publishers in
Italy, France, England, and Germany.2 Divided into 46 canti in its orig-
inal state (an additional 5 were published for the first time in 1545 by
Paulo Manuzio),3 Orlando Furioso is an enormous tale of knightly honor
(and dishonor) and the madness of love, set against the backdrop of a
Saracen invasion of Europe during the rule of Charlemagne. Giolito
1 Philip Hofer, ‘‘Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando Furioso,’’’ in Fragonard Drawings for

Ariosto, by Jean-Honoré Fragonard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1945), 31.
2 Luca Degl’Innocenti, ‘‘‘Ex pictura poesis’: invenzione narrativa e tradizione figurativa
ariostesca nelle ‘Prime imprese del conte Orlando’ di Lodovico Dolce,’’ in ‘‘Tra mille
carte vive ancora.’’ Ricezione del ‘‘Furioso’’ tra immagini e parole, ed. L. Bolzoni, S. Pezzini,
and G. Rizzarelli (Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2010), 303–20; Brian Richardson, Print Culture in
Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 80–122.
3 Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy, 98.
Hilary Barker
became famous for his woodcut illustrations of the text, and he would
later reuse them in four other publications.
Illustrations were one of many auxiliary features a publisher
could add to a bare text to increase its marketability. Brian Richardson
argues that “if the work had been printed before, he [the publisher]
might want to attract purchasers by having some sort of supplement
added.”4 These supplements could take the form of glossaries, indexes,
commentaries, additional texts, linguistic notes, illustrations, or oth-
ers.5 Often publishers would include phrases like “novissamente stam-
pato e corretto” or “novissamente alla sua integrità ridotto” on the title
pages of editions of frequently printed and error-laden texts such as
Dante’s Divine Comedy and Orlando Furioso to assert that their edition
was superior.6 The inclusion of claims of authenticity or ancillary ma-
terial, however, should not be interpreted as merely adding meaning-
less bells and whistles to captivate the gullible shopper, the way catch-
phrases like “New and Improved!” or “Now with 20% MORE!” in
modern advertising are often interpreted. Indeed, Richardson argues
that the appeal of some of these features were that they made texts
“easier to understand and easier to consult”7—in short, they improved
reader experience.
In this essay I will examine the role of chapter heading images
in several publications of Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari: the 1544 Orlando
Furioso, the 1573 L’Ulisse di M. Lodovico Dolce, an Italian translation of
the Odyssey into ottava rima, and the 1570 L’Achille et l’Enea di Messer
Lodovico Dolce, a combined Italian translation of the Iliad of Homer and
the Aeneid of Virgil in ottava rima. The chapter heading images of the
Orlando Furioso were created specifically for that text and each depicts a
specific event or events from the chapter. In the Furioso, the images
work with other ancillary paratextual elements, including plot summar-
ies (argomenti) to create a set of reader expectations for each chapter
that are fulfilled in its reading. Years later, these same images were re-
used to illustrate the chapters, or canti, of Lodovico Dolce’s transla-
4 Ibid., 2.
5 Ibid., 2–3.
6 ‘‘Very recently printed and corrected’’ and ‘‘Very recently restored to its integrity.’’
Ibid., 4. This excellent book focuses on the role of the editor in Italian publishing.
7 Ibid., 3.
148
Chapter 10 - Giolito’s Woodcuts
tions of the great classical epics into Italian. In these two texts, a simi-
lar system of paratextual elements is employed by the publisher in an
attempt to enhance the reading experience and maintain a successful
format. However, because the images do not match perfectly with the
plots of the poems, the system functions less well than in Orlando Furi-
oso. The dynamic of expectation and fulfillment is disrupted, resulting
in a more complex relationship between image and text.
The first thoroughly illustrated edition of Furioso was printed
by Niccolo Zoppino in Venice in 1530. 8 This edition included one
image at the beginning of each canto, an example that Giolito would
follow. As Federica Caneparo has observed, although they have been
much overlooked in art historical scholarship, Zoppino’s woodcuts
created an entirely new iconography. 9 These illustrations do in fact
employ a much simpler style than those of Giolito, in line with that of
images in devotional books, while those used by Giolito are larger,
more detailed, and more complexly composed. They have the appear-
ance of having been designed by a goldsmith.10 Indeed, while Giolito’s
debt to Zoppino must be acknowledged in both the iconography and
partially in the selection of scenes to illustrate, it was Giolito who be-
came famous for his illustrated editions of Furioso. The 46 woodcuts
that appear in his 1542 edition were reused in every subsequent illus-
trated edition published by Giolito, copied by other printers, and even
reused by Giolito himself in other publications.
The house of Giolito, in this period run by Gabriele Giolito,
was one of the preeminent printing houses in Venice during the Cin-
quecento, along with Giunti and Manuzio.11 The incredible success of
the printing industry in Cinquecento Venice was largely due to the
specialization of various printers, which lead to decreased direct com-
8 Hofer, ‘‘Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando Furioso, 28.

9 Federica Caneparo, ‘‘A Look at the Orlando Furioso: The Illustrated Edition by
Nicolò Zoppino,’’ paper presented at the RSA Annual Meeting, Grand Hyatt, Wash-
ington, DC, November, 2014.
10 Hofer, “Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando Furioso,’’’ 30. Note the fine lines and
crosshatched shading.
11 Jane A. Bernstein, ‘‘Printers and Publishers: The Merchants of Venice,’’ in Print
Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),
10.
149
Hilary Barker
petition.12 The Gioliti specialized in vernacular literature.13 Under Ga-

briel Giolito (who inherited the business from his father Giovanni
Giolito de Ferrari), the press was the leading one in Venice in the
1550s, reaching its peak success around 1555, though it continued to
prosper into the 1570s. An increasing demand for texts in the volgare in
the sixteenth century certainly contributed to the staying power of the
Giolito press. In addition, Gabriel Giolito earned a reputation as a
scrupulous and dedicated publisher, so much so that he was praised by
Lodovico Dolce and Ludovico Domenichi, two major translators and
editors active in the Venetian book trade, for his care in printing high
quality texts.14 The great success of the illustrated Furioso, in particular,
is attested by the fact that the first sixteen editions appeared in the
space of a single decade, between 1542 and 1552.15
The woodcuts used by Giolito were in fact so popular, and
deemed so appropriate, that they were “borrowed” by several other
Venetian printers as well as by bookmen in Florence, Lyons, and Par-
is.16 The Giolito illustrations are indeed remarkably sophisticated, of-
ten showing several of the major events from a single canto, each
clearly recognizable to a reader familiar with the plot. The division of
the picture plane into fore-, mid-, and background creates multiple
arenas for narrative so that the inclusion of more than one episode
does not muddy the composition or inhibit the viewer’s comprehen-
sion. The Giolito 1542 edition set the standard for future illustrated
editions of Furioso. Later printers would follow the convention of a
single woodcut per chapter, but would try to fit as many as six scenes
12 After glutting the market for Greek and Latin works in translation in the 1470s, the
bookmakers whose businesses survived responded by increasing specialization and
diversifying the corpus of titles being printed. Ibid., 17.
13 Bernstein, ‘‘Printers and Publishers,’’ 17; see also Angela Nuovo and Christian Cop-
pens, I Giolito e la stampa: nell’Italia del XVI secolo (Geneva: Droz, 2005); Salvatore Bon-
gi, Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferrato, stampatore in Venezia, vol. 1
(Rome: Presso i Principali Librai, 1890).
14 Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy, 3–4; Nuovo and Coppens, I Giolito e la
stampa, 67–94.
15 Bernstein, ‘‘Printers and Publishers,’’ 17–18; Hofer, ‘‘Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlan-
do Furioso,’’’ 30.
16 Hofer, ‘‘Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando Furioso,’’’ 31; Bernstein, ‘‘Printers and
Publishers,’’ 18. Hofer states that although they were copied ‘‘with varying degrees of
plagiarism,’’ the copies ‘‘never seriously competed [with the Giolito originals] on a
basis of artistic quality’’ (31).
150
into each, which, according to Hofer, resulted in confusing and artisti-

cally less meritorious images.17
Giolito’s first edition of the Furioso also set the standard for
his own future publications. It’s much admired woodcuts were reused
in four other titles: the Discorso sopra il principio di tutti i canti d'Orlando
Furioso of Laura Terracina, a verse commentary on the Furioso canto by
canto; the Prime imprese del conto Orlando, a prequel to Orlando Furioso by
poet Lodovico Dolce; L’Ulisse, Lodovico Dolce’s Italian verse transla-
tion of the Odyssey; and L’Achille et l’Enea, Dolce’s translation of the
Iliad and the Aeneid into a single Italian verse work.18 The first of these,
the Discorso of Laura Terracina, began to be published even before
Giolito stopped printing the Furioso in 1560.19 Its reuse of images is
very straightforward: because each commentary poem corresponds
exactly to a canto of the Furioso, the woodcuts likewise correspond
exactly. The other three titles, the Prime imprese, L’Ulisse, and L’Achille et
l’Enea, are all, like the Furioso, divided into canti. They were all written
by Lodovico Dolce in the 1560s and edited and published posthu-
mously by Giolito starting in the early 1570s. It is unclear whether
Giolito bought these texts or acquired them by inheritance after Dol-
17 Hofer, ‘‘Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando Furioso,’’’ 31.

18 Laura Terracina, Discorso sopra il principio di tutti i canti d’Orlando furioso, Di nuovo ris-
tampato, et con diligenza revisto. (Venice: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1557);
Lodovico Dolce, Le prime imprese del conte Orlando, di M. Lodovico Dolce. Da lvi composte in
ottava rima, et nvovamente stampate. Con argomenti et allegorie per ogni canto. Et una tauola
de’nomi & delle cose più notabili (Venice: G. Giolito de’Ferrari, 1572); Lodovico Dolce,
L’Vlisse di M. Lodovico Dolce, da lvi tratto dall’Odissea d’Homero et ridotto in ottava rima, nel
qvale si raccontano tvtti gli errori, & le fatiche d’Vlisse dalla partita sua di Troia, fino al ritorno
alla patria per lo spatio di uenti anni. Con argomenti et allegorie a ciascun canto, cosi dell'Historie,
come delle Fauole, & con due Tauole: una della sententie, & l'altra delle cose piu notabili (Venice:
Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’Ferrari, 1573); Lodovico Dolce, L’Achille et l’Enea di Mes-
ser Lodovico Dolce ; dove egli tessendo l’historia della Iliade d’Homero à qvella dell’Eneide di Vergil-
io, ambedve l’ha divinamente ridotte in ottava rima. Con argomenti, et allegorie per ogni canto, et due
tauole: l’una delle sentence; l’altra de i nomi, & delle cose piu notabili (Venice: Appresso Gabriel
Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1570).
19 Hofer conjectures that Giolito stopped printing the Orlando Furioso because he fore-
saw an increasing demand for classical works in translation as well as for devotional
works following the Council of Trent, even though Orlando remained popular through
at least the 1580s. Perhaps the proliferation of editions, including those with illustra-
tions copied from his own, made the competition too stiff and the profits too small to
continue printing editions of this poem. See Hofer, ‘‘Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando
Furioso,’’’ 31.
151
Hilary Barker
ce’s death in 1568.20 Giolito first recruited Dolce as an editor for the
1542 Orlando Furioso after seeing a previous edition of Ariosto that
Dolce had edited, and continued to employ him until his death.21
In the Giolito editions of Orlando Furioso, L’Ulisse, and
L’Achille et l’Enea, the woodcuts work with a system of other paratex-
tual elements to frame the reader’s experience of the text. These ele-
ments include extensive subject and thematic indexes that appear after
the title page and before the text (called Tavole), short plot summaries
of each canto (argomenti, singular argomento), and explanations of the
major themes and lessons of each canto (called allegorie). The argomen-
ti and the woodcut illustrations always appear at the beginning of the
canto. The allegorie appear at the end in early editions of Orlando Furio-
so,22 while in L’Ulisse and L’Achille et l’Enea they appear at the begin-
ning of the canto between the argomento and the illustration. These
elements greatly enhance the reading experience by making the volume
more navigable and framing the content of the text. Together, the be-
ginning-of-canto paratextual elements create for the reader a series of
expectations for the canto at hand that will be fulfilled in the reading
of it. I will begin my analysis with a close look at Giolito’s 1554 quarto
edition of Orlando Furioso. Since the woodcuts I will be discussing were
made specifically for this book, the system of expectation/fulfillment
is both clearer and more effective.
In a book the size of Orlando Furioso—in this edition over 500
pages—the woodblock images that appear every 10-15 pages have a
very practical purpose. Among the hundreds of pages of precisely
spaced ottava rima, they signal the beginnings of the canti to the reader
looking for a specific passage. They punctuate the start of each canto
by breaking up the otherwise visually monotonous reams of identically
spaced verses.23 As one might flip through a textbook today looking
for the right chapter heading, just so could an early modern reader
have thumbed through his copy of the Furioso marking his progress by

21 Ibid.; Degl’Innocenti, ‘‘‘Ex pictura poesis,’’’ 305.
22 I have been unable to examine editions printed after 1554 to confirm if this re-
mained the practice.

23 They also increase the price and luxury of the book. See Richardson, Print Culture in
Renaissance Italy.
152
passing images. In addition, the woodblock in the first canto sets the
expectation for an easily recognizable “title page” for each subsequent
canto.
As previously mentioned, these images do not function in a
vacuum. In the 1554 Furioso the format of each chapter is the follow-
ing: illustration, argomento immediately below ranging from 4 to 12
lines of text in an inverted pyramid format, canto number, canto text
with historiated initial capital, followed last by the allegorie usually 7 to
10 lines.
First and last pages of Canto 3 of Giolito’s 1554 Or-

lando Furioso
The illustration, argomento, and allegorie each frame the read-

er’s experience in interaction with one another. The images and the
argomenti give visual and verbal indications of what happens in the
upcoming canto. They are narrative precursors to the actual narrative
of the canto. The argomenti mention all of the canto’s most important
plot points and the illustrations depict one to three episodes, usually
ones that are explicitly mentioned in the accompanying argomento.
Each event depicted or mentioned acts like a mile marker as the reader
goes through the canto. They create a pre-familiarity with the material
and a set of expectations of what will happen. Each time the reader
reaches one of these events he or she will experience a moment of
recognition, or even of satisfaction at an expectation met, and these
153
Hilary Barker
recognitions will punctuate the individual canti much the way the im-
ages punctuate the book as a whole. It is the publisher’s job to make
sure that these expectations (which he creates through the formatting
of the book) are met.
The relationship between the pre-canto elements and the can-
to is mirrored in the relationship between the illustration and the ar-
gomento as well. Depending on the reader’s degree of familiarity with
the events of Orlando Furioso before encountering this book, the com-
pressed narratives of the woodcuts might be indecipherable. Upon
reading the argomento, the events depicted will become clear as they
are mentioned. For example, the illustration of Canto 6 provides a be-
wildering array of elements: in the background, a city with onion
domes reminiscent of Islamic architecture; in the foreground a figure
on a winged horse descends from the sky to confront a group of
armed monsters of various animal-human hybrid appearances (includ-
ing one riding a giant tortoise) while to the right a tree with a human
face looks on. The argomento reads:
“Ruggero portato lungo spatio per l’aria dall Hippo-

grifo, dicende in un bellisimo piano; nel quale haven-
dolo legato a un Mirto, e volendo bere a un vicino
fonte, quell Mirto gli favella, è dicegli, che era Astolfo,
reccontandogli, come e quando, e per qual cagione vi
fu da Alcina trasformato, e confortandolo a guardarsi
dale costei fraudi. Obedisce Ruggero, ma viene assal-
tato da alcuni Mostri: da quali non potendosi difende-
re, è sopraguinto da due Damigelle; che lo menane
verso la città di Alcina.”24
24 ‘‘Ruggero, brought a long ways through the air by the hippogriff [the winged horse],
descends to a beautiful field: having tied the hippogriff to a myrtle tree and wishing to
drink from a nearby spring, the myrtle speaks to him and tells him that he was Astolfo
[the King of England], recounting to him how and when and for what reason he was
transformed by Alcina and counseling him to guard himself from her tricks. Ruggero
obeys, but he is assaulted by some monsters from which he is unable to defend him-
self, and is overcome by two ladies in waiting, who drag him towards the city of Alci-
na.’’ Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso Di M. Lodovico Ariosto, Ornato Di Varie Figure,
Con Alcun Stanze. Et Cinque Canti D’un Nuovo Libro Del Medesimo Nuovamente Aggiunti, &
Ricorretti. Con Alcune Allegorie. & Nel Fine Una Breve Espositione, et Tavola Di Tutto Quallo,
154
The image immediately becomes much more decipherable.

Ruggero and the hippogriff are recognized first, then the tree as Astol-
fo transfigured by Alcina, then the monsters who attack Ruggero, and
finally the city in the background. These initial moments of recogni-
tion will be enhanced by the much greater descriptive detail provided
in the canto itself. The more familiar a reader is with the plot of Orlan-
do Furioso the easier it will be to identify the images even without the
help of the argomento, in which case reading the argomento will con-
firm his or her expectation that the events depicted will appear in the
canto, thereby modeling the confirmation of expectation that will
again occur in the reading of the canto. This system works better in
some canti than in others, but even if the reader is unsure exactly what
to expect in the canto based on the image, he or she expects something
that will clarify the image.
Illustration of Canto 6, Orlando Furioso 1554
At the end of each canto in the 1554 Orlando Furioso, the alle-
gorie recap thematically the content of the preceding canto. Giolito
clearly thought this system of illustration, argomento, allegorie, and
text worked well enough for it to be maintained, in varied iterations, in
many of his publications. As expected, because each of the woodcuts
was made to fit the content of the specific canto of Orlando Furioso,
none of them are repeated. Each scene represents a definite point on
the timeline of the text. Even when the scenes are very similar, for
Che Nell’opera Si Contiene (Venice: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1554), 38.
Translation my own.
155
Hilary Barker
example canti 41 and 42 (both scenes with a large tent and some activi-
ty outside), two different woodcuts are produced to indicate that these
are two separate points in time. The pattern of creation and fulfillment
of expectations functions well because the images were designed to
correspond closely to the narrative. This pattern is complicated and
even disrupted when the woodcuts are reused in different contexts.
The 1554 edition of Orlando Furioso includes at the end an ad-
ditional section with the Cinque Canti written by Ariosto and published
after Orlando Furioso as an addendum. These canti use the same format
as the other 46, and are continuously paginated indicating that they
were probably printed at the same time. While the first canto includes
a new woodcut, probably from the same workshop that created the
other 46, new woodcuts were apparently not commissioned for the
remaining 4 canti. 25 The woodcut from Canto 30 of Orlando Furioso
(which depicts a duel between the knights Ruggero and Mandricardo
to settle a dispute over the ownership of a shield) is reused in Canto 2,
Canto 3, and Canto 5 of the Cinque Canti for various scenes of combat.
Its visual elements are appropriate to any number of one-on-one duels:
two knights in armor fighting on horseback while others watch from
the sidelines, a structure that could be the walls of a city or a military
camp in the background, a discarded shield. In the original context, the
shield is highly significant—it is the cause of the duel. When the image
is repurposed however, it is just a shield that has been tossed aside in
the heat of battle.
25It is clear from the specificity of the imagery of the woodcut accompanying the
Canto Primo that it was intended to represent a specific scene: the deliberation of the
Fates, who appear seated in a round building with a coffered domed reminiscent of
the Pantheon in Rome.
156
Illustration of Canto 30 of Orlando Furioso, Canti 2, 3, & 5

of Cinque Canti
In Canto 4 of the Cinque Canti, the woodcut from Canto 10 of

Orlando Furioso has been repurposed. In its original context, the image
represents the knight Ruggero on the hippogriff attacking the Orcus, a
sea monster. In the background is Angelica, who had been tied naked
to a rock to be sacrificed to the Orcus, a sea monster, in an episode
reminiscent of the story of Andromeda in Greek mythology. In Canto
4, this woodcut is used to represent Ruggero swallowed by a whale. In
this adaptive reuse, details like Angelica in the right background be-
come meaningless, and even confusing. The salient features are the
ocean and the sea monster.
Illustration from Canto 10 of Orlando Furioso, Canto 4 of

the Cinque Canti
157
Hilary Barker
Although it is certainly not a perfect match, the iconography

of this scene has enough appropriate details that, once the reader has
read the argomento (which states that, having been attacked by enemy
ships and his own having caught fire, Ruggero jumped into the ocean
and was swallowed by a whale) he or she could surmise what it is in-
tended to represent.26 Still, the lack of perfect correspondence disrupts
the pattern of expectation/fulfillment because the reader had to sift
through the image, using the argomento as a filter to decide what de-
tails matter. This is not even always possible, as in the case of Canto 3
where the argomento mentions several armed conflicts, of which any
(or all) could be indicated. The reused images are then less preparatory
material for reading the canto than conventional features that must be
included in the format of the book. This confusion is amplified when
these woodcuts are used in still other contexts.27 Their reuse in Lodo-
vico Dolce’s Italian verse translations of the great classical epics pro-
vides an interesting case study.
Unsurprisingly given the major historical and narrative differ-
ences, the images from Orlando Furioso do not map clearly onto the
narratives of L’Ulisse and L’Achille et l’Enea. In total, 33 of the wood-
cuts from Orlando Furioso are used to illustrate the 20 canti of L’Ulisse
and the 55 canti of L’Achille et l’Enea. The breakdown of their usage is
as follows:
26 Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 568.

27 Degl’Innocenti, ‘‘‘Ex pictura poesis.’’’ Their presence in Le prime imprese del conte Or-
lando has been studied already by Luca Degli’Innocenti.
158
# Used 2 or
# Used 0 times # Used 1 time
more times in
in L’Ulisse in L’Ulisse
L’Ulisse
# Used 0 times
in L’Achille et 14 6 0
l’Enea
# Used 1 time
in L’Achille et 6 2 1
l’Enea
# Used 2 or
more times in
9 8 1
L’Achille et
l’Enea
16 in L’Ulisse are used only once in that book

2 in L’Ulisse are used more than once in that book
18 Total images in L’Ulisse (20 total canti)
9 in L’Achille et l’Enea are used only once in that book
18 in L’Achille et l’Enea are used more than once in that book
27 Total Images in L’Achille et l’Enea (55 total canti)
12 are unique (used once between the two books)
21 are used more than once between the two books
21 are used in only one book (includes those used twice or
more in L’Achille et l’Enea)
6 are used only in L’Ulisse
15 are used only in L’Achille et l’Enea
12 are used in both
33 of 47 available woodcuts are used in L’Ulisse and L’Achille
et l’Enea
159
Hilary Barker
The fact that only 33 of 47 known woodcuts were used be-

tween the two books, and 21 of these more than once, proves the ob-
vious fact that it was more important to have an appropriate woodcut
to illustrate a given canto than to have a unique pictorial identifier for
each. Especially in L’Achille et l’Enea, where 46 of the canti share an
image with at least one other canto in that book, this multiplication of
images affects the way the system of argomento, allegorie and illustra-
tion frames the reading experience.
The formats of L’Achille et l’Enea and L’Ulisse are identical to
one another, but differ from that of the 1554 Orlando Furioso in several
ways. All three maintain the same format for the main text of the canti
in their quarto editions, with 2 columns of 5 stanzas each per page,
except when paratextual elements intervene. In L’Achille et l’Enea and
L’Ulisse, the argomento, which has been standardized to 8 lines of
verse, comes first, usually at the top of a page, framed by a rectangular
woodcut border. Directly after, comes the allegorie, which tend to be
longer than those in the 1554 Furioso.28 On the next page is the illustra-
tion, also in a woodcut border. In total, only 3 different borders are
used in L’Achille et l’Enea and L’Ulisse for the argomenti and illustra-
tions—two with motifs of cherubs, garlands, and masks, and one with
two small cityscapes, weapons, and a sleeping soldier. The precise fit
of the borders with the woodcuts and text of the argomenti indicate
that they were likely designed specifically to fit these woodcuts and
that the argomenti were adapted to be printable within them.
28 Richardson comments: ‘‘Vernacular editors in Venice in this period [1546–60] ap-

pear to have inserted more and more exegetic items. There was an ever freer use of
linguistic revisions based on editors’ subjective opinions on what the author should
have written.’’ The increasing presence of the editor in vernacular texts in the middle
of the sixteenth century may be part of why the allegorie of these volumes are so
much longer than those in the Orlando Furioso. See Richardson, Print Culture in Renais-
sance Italy, 109.
160
First two pages of Canto 10 of L’Ulisse
This rearrangement compared to the Orlando Furioso has sever-

al effects. First the movement of the allegorie concentrates the par-
atextual material at the beginning of the canto and creates a set of
thematic expectations in addition to the narrative expectations gener-
ated by the argomento. This gives the editor more control over fram-
ing how the reader approaches and understands the text. Whereas in
the Orlando Furioso, the allegorie pointed backwards to the text of the
canto, in L’Achille et l’Enea and L’Ulisse they point forward. In addition,
the concentration of explanatory material before the illustration actually
helps the reader to decipher the image.
Because the woodcuts in L’Achille et l’Enea and L’Ulisse were
made to illustrate Orlando Furioso, they are naturally only partial match-
es for what they are meant to represent in the later volumes. This at
times makes it difficult for the modern reader, and presumably for the
Renaissance reader as well, to decipher them. The images have not
been assigned to canti at random by any means, but the criteria for
matching the two are not very rigorous. A scene might be chosen to
represent a specific canto because of its setting, the number of fig-
ures,29 on account of any number of details, or even just for the tone
as in the case of battle scenes.30
29Degl’Innocenti, ‘‘‘Ex pictura poesis,’’’ 310.

30For example, the illustration from Orlando Furioso Canto 40 which depicts the attack
on Biserta shows an army storming across a landscape and attacking the walls of a city
161
Hilary Barker
For example, in Canto 7 of L’Ulisse Odysseus washes up on

the shores of Phaeacia, clothes himself in leaves, then is clothed by the
queen’s daughter and led by a disguised Athena to the palace, where he
receives aid from the king and queen. The image accompanying this
canto comes from Canto 31 of Orlando Furioso, and depicts
Brandimarte (a knight) having fallen off the bridge guarded by Rodo-
monte (another knight) after a fight while his lover looks on. The great
monument that Rodomonte built for Isabella is visible in the right
background. In the context of L’Ulisse, the salient details are the man
in a body of water and the large building in the background, which
could be a castle.
Orlando Furioso Canto 31, L’Ulisse Canto 7
The imaginative viewer could identify the woman on the

horse as the princess when she spots Odysseus. But where are her
friends? Why is Odysseus wearing heavy armor that surely would have
drowned him on the open ocean? Why does he have a horse? These
types of inconsistencies between story and image require the reader to
either use his or her imagination to make the images fit or allow for
deviation from the text. It is very possible that in some cases, certain
readers just did not understand why a certain image was used. Other
that is already partially burning. It is used five times within L’Achille et l’Enea: in Canto
5 it represents the capture of Thebes, in Canto 8 and Canto 20 and Canto 28 it repre-
sents various episodes in the battle of Troy, and in Canto 45 it represents Turnus’
attack on the camp of Aeneas during which Turnus burns his enemy’s ships. Its fea-
tures are general enough that it is widely applicable to scenes of war.
162
recurring details that require accommodation on the side of the reader

are the anachronistic armor and clothing, and the hippogriff which
appears in the illustrations from Furioso Canto 33 (L’Ulisse Canto 8,
L’Achille et l’Enea Canto 3 and Canto 31) and Furioso Canto 6 (L’Ulisse
Canto 11).
The images, then, by requiring such accommodation from the
reader, disrupt the pattern of expectation and fulfillment of expecta-
tion that we observed in the original 46 canti of Orlando Furioso. Still,
the publisher and editor clearly did do their best to make the scenes
line up well with the text. The editor does make some accommoda-
tions for historical differences. Whereas in the Cinque Canti the wood-
cut from Canto 30 of Furioso was used 3 times as a generic image of
medieval one-on-one combat, in the classical epics duels on horseback
are far less common. The most famous man-to-man combats in the
Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid take place with both contestants on foot, as in
the case of the famous battle between Patroclus and Hector, or Achil-
les and Hector. The effort to achieve some degree of historical accura-
cy in this matter is clear from the fact that between L’Ulisse and
L’Achille et l’Enea there are 12 scenes of one-on-one fights on foot be-
tween repetitions of the illustrations of canti 18, 24, 27, 33, and 46 of
the Furioso,31 but only 3 scenes of horsed duels.32
Degli’Innocenti has suggested as well that Dolce always in-
tended to publish Le prime imprese with Giolito and that, being familiar
with the woodcuts available, he added in contextual details to make the
relationship between text and image more clear, which would imply
that Dolce had specific woodcuts in mind while writing. 33 This is a
very interesting theory, and could also apply to L’Achille et l’Enea and
L’Ulisse, though any such claim would need to prove that Dolce’s de-
scriptions of scenes are sufficiently different than those of the original
Latin and Greek texts from which he translated and that these differ-
31 The illustration from Canto 18 of Orlando appears 3 times in L’Achille et l’Enea; that
of Canto 24 once in L’Ulisse; that of Canto 27 once in L’Ulisse and twice in L’Achille et
l’Enea; that of Canto 33 once in L’Ulisse and twice in L’Achille et l’Enea; and that of
Canto 46 twice in L’Achille et l’Enea.
32 The illustration of Canto 30 of Orlando appears twice in L’Achille et l’Enea and that of
Canto 35 once in L’Achille et l’Enea.

33 Degl’Innocenti, ‘‘‘Ex pictura poesis,’’’ 309–12.
163
Hilary Barker
ences are targeted at specific images. If this were the case, it would also
be possible that, given that L’Achille et l’Enea were published by Giolito
after Dolce’s death in 1568, such editorial changes were made by the
publisher.
The reuse of woodcuts for L’Achille et l’Enea and L’Ulisse (and
within these texts) does have several productive effects. In L’Ulisse, 2
woodcuts appear more than once. In L’Achille et l’Enea, 18 woodcuts
appear more than once. What results from this intra-textual reuse is a
series of visually cued cross-references. When the reader comes upon
an image used for the second or even third time, he or she will natural-
ly draw connections—connections that will play into his or her expec-
tations of the canto. Furthermore, it is possible that if someone owned
both L’Achille et l’Enea and L’Ulisse (and perhaps even a copy of Gio-
lito’s illustrated Orlando Furioso) he or she would make connections
between as well as within the books, though I would not go so far as
to claim that the editors necessarily intended to make specific, pur-
poseful cross-references between these three texts (or the other two
where these woodcuts were used) based on images.
The role of illustrations in Gabriel Giolito’s intratextual par-
atexts was clearly a major one. The format that he established with his
early printings of Orlando Furioso, which included illustrations to mark
each chapter, argomenti, and allegorie, was maintained and adapted
throughout his tenure as the head of the Giolito press. One result of
this is that the accumulation of paratextual elements structure reading
experience and those that appear at the beginning of a chapter create a
dynamic of expectation and fulfillment for the canto. The woodcut
illustrations give visual clues to plot. They work with the argomenti
and allegorie (with varying degrees of consistency) to influence what
parts of the narrative that readers pay attention to. In addition, the
illustrations visually structure the books, anchoring the beginning of
each canto and increasing the books’ usability by making chapters easy
to find.
The great success of his Furioso with its fine illustrations and
narrative and thematic glosses must have encouraged Giolito to put
the same level of care into other publications. This system was also
used in his imprints of Boccaccio’s Decameron, which had their own set
164
of woodcuts—one for each of the ten “days” into which the book is
divided.34 When Giolito printed Lodovico Dolce’s translations of the
classical epic poems, he decided to continue to use illustrations, ar-
gomenti, and allegorie to frame the reader’s encounter with the text.
Instead of getting 75 new woodcuts made to illustrate each canto of
L’Ulisse and L’Achille et l’Enea, though, he reused woodcuts from the
Furioso and by doing so confused the clear relationship between image
and text, forcing the reader to make mental accommodations for the
inconsistencies. This may be part of why there were fewer editions of
L’Ulisse and L’Achille et l’Enea published by Giolito (L’Achille et l’Enea
was published in 1570, 1571, and 1572, but not again afterwards),
though this also could be a result of changing tastes.35 By the 1570s,
ottava rima was no longer the preferred format for translations of clas-
sical poetry, having ceded its pride of place to verso sciolto.36 In addition,
Counter-Reformation tastes were “less favorable to secular vernacular
and classical literature (including translations).” 37 All these factors
along with Gabriel Giolito’s death in 1578, after which his sons less
successfully continued to print, likely contributed to the decreased
success of the L’Ulisse and L’Achille et l’Enea.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosto, Lodovico. Orlando Furioso Di M. Lodovico Ariosto, Ornato Di

Varie Figure, Con Alcun Stanze. Et Cinque Canti D’un Nuovo Libro
Del Medesimo Nuovamente Aggiunti, & Ricorretti. Con Alcune Alle
gorie. & Nel Fine Una Breve Espositione, et Tavola Di Tutto Quallo,
34 Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone Di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio Con Nvove É Varier

Figvre; Nvovamente Stampato et Ricorretto per Messer Antonio Brvcioli Con La Dichiaratione Di
Tvtti I Vocaboli Detti Proverbie Figvre et Modi Di Dire Incogniti et Difficili Che Sono in Esso
Libro Ampliati in Gran Numero per Il Medesimo; Con Nvova Dicharatione Di Piv Regole Dela
Lingva Toscana Neccessarie a Sapere a Chi Qvella Vvol Parlar O Scrivere (Venice: per Gabriel
iolito di ferrarii, 1563).
35 Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ‘‘Orlando Furioso’’ (Princeton
University Press, 2014), 77.

36 Ibid.
165
Hilary Barker
Che Nell’opera Si Contiene. Venice: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’

Ferrari, 1554.
Bernstein, Jane A. “Printers and Publishers: The Merchants of Ven-
ice.” In Print Culture and Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice, 9–27.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Decamerone Di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio Con
Nvove É Varier Figvre; Nvovamente Stampato et Ricorretto per Messer
Antonio Brvcioli Con La Dichiaratione Di Tvtti I Vocaboli Detti
Proverbie Figvre et Modi Di Dire Incogniti et Difficili Che Sono in Esso
Libro Ampliati in Gran Numero per Il Medesimo; Con Nvova
Dicharatione Di Piv Regole Dela Lingva Toscana Neccessarie a Sapere
a Chi Qvella Vvol Parlar O Scrivere. Venice: per Gabriel iolito di
ferrarii, 1563.
Bongi, Salvatore. Annali di Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari da Trino di Monferra
to, stampatore in Venezia. 2 vols. Rome: Presso i Principali
Librai, 1890.
Caneparo, Federica. “A Look at the Orlando Furioso: The Illustrated
Edition by Nicolò Zoppino.” Paper presented at the RSA
Annual Meeting, Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC, November,
2014.
Degl’Innocenti, Luca. “‘Ex pictura poesis’: invenzione narrativa e
tradizione figurativa ariostesca nelle ‘Prime imprese del conte
Orlando’ di Lodovico Dolce.” In “Tra mille carte vive ancora.”
Ricezione del “Furioso” tra immagini e parole, edited by L. Bolzoni,
S. Pezzini, and G. Rizzarelli, 303–20. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi,
2010.
Dolce, Lodovico. L’Achille et l’Enea di Messer Lodovico Dolce ; dove egli
tessendo l’historia della Iliade d’Homero à qvella dell’Eneide di Vergilio,
ambedve l’ha divinamente ridotte in ottava rima. Con argomenti, et alle-
gorie per ogni canto, et due tauole: l’una delle sentence; l’altra de i nomi,
& delle cose piu notabili. Venice: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’
Ferrari, 1570.
———. Le prime imprese del conte Orlando, di M. Lodovico Dolce. Da lvi
composte in ottava rima, et nvovamente stampate. Con argomenti et alle-
gorie per ogni canto. Et una tauola de’nomi & delle cose più notabili.
Venice: G. Giolito de’Ferrari, 1572.
166
———. L’Vlisse di M. Lodovico Dolce, da lvi tratto dall’Odissea

d’Homero et ridotto in ottava rima, nel qvale si raccontano tvtti gli errori,
& le fatiche d’Vlisse dalla partita sua di Troia, fino al ritorno alla pa-
tria per lo spatio di uenti anni. Con argomenti et allegorie a ciascun can-
to, cosi dell'Historie, come delle Fauole, & con due Tauole: una della
sententie, & l'altra delle cose piu notabili. Venice: Appresso Gabriel
Giolito de’Ferrari, 1573.
Hofer, Philip. “Illustrated Editions of ‘Orlando Furioso.’” In Fragonard
Drawings for Ariosto, 27–40. New York: Pantheon Books, 1945.
Javitch, Daniel. Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of “Orlando Furio-
so.” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Nuovo, Angela, and Christian Coppens. I Giolito e la stampa: nell’Italia
del XVI secolo. Geneva: Droz, 2005.
Richardson, Brian. Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the
Vernacular Text, 1470–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Terracina, Laura. Discorso sopra il principio di tutti i canti d’Orlando furioso.
Di nuovo ristampato, et con diligenza revisto. Venice: Appresso Ga
briel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1557.
167
Chapter 11
In Chapman’s Forge:
Mistranslation as Ekphrastic Resistance
JAVIER IBÁÑEZ
George Chapman produced the first complete English transla-

tion of the epic poems attributed to Homer. He began publishing his
work in installments in 1598 and in 1616 published the Iliad and the
Odyssey in a single volume under the title The Whole Works of Homer.
The present chapter focuses on Chapman’s treatment of the episode
of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad. I analyze Chapman’s
frequent mistranslations and largely subtle intrusions as manifestations
of his resistance to the ekphrastic tenor of the passage, and argue that
this resistance stems from a rejection of the incidental and from a lack
of interest in pictorial description whose semantic referentiality seems
limited or non-existent.1
The reader will recall that towards the end of Book 18 of the
Iliad, Thetis asks Hephaestus to make a new armor for Achilles. In
addition to a breastplate and a helmet, the god forges a shield, which
he decorates with a number of images, the description of which takes
up 130 lines (18.478–608). In the original Greek, the episode follows a
fairly consistent syntactical and lexical pattern, which is consonant
with the formulaic character of the epic genre. Every verse paragraph
1 Generally speaking, “ekphrasis” refers to a sustained literary description of a work of

art. Particularly in classical and Renaissance literary theory, it is a vaguely defined and
slippery term. See Claire Preston, “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words,” in Renaissance Figures
of Speech, ed. Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 116. For this reason, I prefer to rely on modern
scholars. Heffernan provides the following definition: “Ekphrasis is the verbal repre-
sentation of visual representation.” James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poet-
ics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3.
Mitchell uses the same formulation and implies the same definition when he writes,
“In so far as art history is a verbal representation of visual representation, it is an ele-
vation of ekphrasis to a disciplinary principle.” W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays
on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 157.
Javier Ibáñez
save for one (ll. 509 ff.) opens with a reference to Hephaestus as the
subject of a verb of making (ʌȠȚȑȦĲİȪȤȦ, both meaning “to make,” or
ʌȠȚțȓȜȜȦ, meaning “to fashion”) or of placing (ĲȓșȘȝȚ, meaning “to
set,” or “to put”), foregrounding the shield as the physical work of an
artificer. However, for the most part, the text then goes on to deal ex-
clusively with visual description of the picture portrayed on the shield
or with the narration of the story illustrated by this picture. In this way,
Hephaestus tends to recede into the background along with the mate-
riality of the shield. The original text, in other words, tends constantly
to move away from thinking about the shield as an object to thinking
about the art depicted on the shield and the loose narrative episodes
that it represents.
Chapman’s frequent insertions and alterations, however, hin-
der the reader’s ability to become immersed in this picture. For exam-
ple, in the description of the besieged city, Chapman writes,
The Queene of martials,

And Mars himselfe conducted them; both which be-
ing forg’d of gold,
Must needs have golden furniture: and men might so
behold,
They were presented deities. The people, Vulcan
forg’d
Of meaner metall.2
The phrase “forg’d of gold” translates the single word ȤȡȣıİȓȦ,3 mean-
ing “golden,” which is ultimately a reference to the material Hephaes-
tus is using to create the picture, but which in context may conceivably
be read as simply indicating color. Chapman’s translation works to
eliminate any possible ambiguity (material/color) in the phrase and to
emphasize the material over the visual. Further, “must needs have
golden furniture” implies a material constraint, almost as if Chapman
2 George Chapman, The Whole Works of Homer; Prince of Poetts (London: Nathaniel But-
ter, 1616), Z6v.

3 A. T. Murray, ed. and trans., The Iliad, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1963), 18.517. I cite the Greek text in this edition by book
and line number, while a page number indicates Murray’s translation.
170
Chapter 11 - In Chapman’s Forge
were saying that, because Hephaestus is using gold to forge the image
of Mars and Athena, it follows that their garments will be golden col-
ored. This implication is absent from the original, which simply tells us
that the gods were clad in golden garments (“ȤȡȪıİȚĮ į੻ İ੆ȝĮĲĮ
ਪıșȘȞ”4), a statement requiring even less of a reference to the material
than the adjective modifying the gods themselves earlier in the line.
Lastly, the mention of Vulcan, the second occurrence of “forg’d,” and
the reference to metal are all Chapman’s own insertions. The original
simply reads, “ȜĮȠ੿ įૃ ਫ਼ʌȠȜȓȗȠȞİȢ ਷ıĮȞ,”5 a clause containing no refer-
ence to making, maker, or material, and which Murray faithfully trans-
lates, “the folk at their feet were smaller.” 6 In this passage, then,
Chapman insistently pulls the reader away from the visual picture and
back to an awareness of the shield as material object.
A more elaborate example occurs towards the end of the epi-
sode, where Chapman writes,
Then in a passing pleasant vale, the famous Artsman

fed,
(Upon a goodly pasture ground) rich flocks, of white-
fleec’t sheepe;
Built stables, cottages, and cotes; that did the sheap-
heards keepe
From winde and weather.7
This is a particularly interesting case. “Fed” is Chapman’s rendering of

ʌȠȓȘıİ,8 the third person singular aorist indicative active of ʌȠȚȑȦ.9 It is
an exceptional choice, as Chapman usually translates this verb fairly
literally as “forg’d,”10 “built,”11 or “carv’d.”12 It could be argued that
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 18.519.
6 Ibid., 327. Murray’s remarkably literal translation provides a useful contrast to
Chapman, and helps make his idiosyncrasies more salient.

7 Chapman, Works of Homer, Aa1r.
8 Murray, Iliad, 18.587.
9 In Homeric Greek, it is not infrequent for aorist verbs to occur without an augment.
See Andrew L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (Oxford: Oxford
10 Chapman, Works of Homer, Z6r.
171
Javier Ibáñez
since “fed” has the effect of recursively placing Hephaestus inside the
picture he is producing and in this way concealing his role as artificer,
the resulting passage is actually more visually immersive than it was in
the original. However, not only is this one exceptional instance not
quite enough to counterbalance the effect of all the previous verbs of
making that Chapman has faithfully reproduced, but “Built,” which is
Chapman’s own insertion in the third line quoted above, problematiz-
es our reading of the passage. The word is ambiguous in context: on
the one hand, it follows the pattern of “fed” in that it could be read as
inserting Hephaestus into the narrative picture; he fed the flocks and
built the stables. On the other hand, however, “Built” is yet another
verb of making. In fact, as mentioned above, it is one of the possible
translations of ʌȠȓȘıİ, the very word Chapman has just ignored by
rendering it “fed.” In other words, Chapman ends up using a verb of
making where the original had none. The original opens with ʌȠȓȘıİ
and simply omits the verb in subsequent clauses that are understood
elliptically to be objects of it as well:
ਥȞį੻ȞȠȝઁȞʌȠȓȘıİʌİȡȚțȜȣĲઁȢਕȝĳȚȖȣȒİȚȢ
ਥȞțĮȜૌȕȒııૉȝȑȖĮȞȠੁ૵ȞਕȡȖİȞȞȐȦȞ
ıĲĮșȝȠȪȢĲİțȜȚıȓĮȢĲİțĮĲȘȡİĳȑĮȢੁį੻ıȘțȠȪȢ.13
In Murray’s translation, the lines read as follows: “Therein also the

famed god of the two string arms wrought a pasture in a fair dell, a
great pasture of white-fleeced sheep, and folds, and roofed huts, and
pens.”14 This kind of syntax is unavailable to Chapman because his
choice of the verb “fed” instead of his usual “forg’d” or “built” or
“carved” forces him to use a different verb in the following clause,
since an elliptical reference back to the same verb would render the
sentence nonsensical. Whatever the reason for his choice of “fed,”
therefore, the passage not only ends up having the usual verb of mak-
ing, but because of the necessity imposed by the new syntax of the
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., Aa1r.
13 Murray, Iliad, 18.587–9.
14 Ibid., 333.
172
sentence to restate the verbal unit (“fed,” “Built”), Chapman reiterates

the implicit invocation of the verbs’ subject (Hephaestus), and in this
way refuses to let the subject be forgotten—along with the materiality
that it signals—at the beginning of the sentence.
Even on the few occasions in which the Greek does zoom out
from ekphrasis to speak materially about the shield in places other
than the formulaic openings of verse paragraphs, Chapman still man-
ages to display his general method by seizing the opportunity and plac-
ing more emphasis on materiality than the original would seem to al-
low. In lines 18.548–9, for example, ȤȡȣıİȓȘ (“golden”) and ĲȑĲȣțĲȠ
(“made” or “built”) are the only words making direct material refer-
ence to the shield. Murray translates, “And the field grew black behind
and seemed verily as it had been ploughed, for all that it was of gold;
herein was the great marvel of the work.”15 The point seems to be to
note the skilled execution of the work, manifest in the fact that gold
appears black, and this point, moreover, is secondary to and depend-
ent on the more important one of the verisimilitude of the picture it-
self. In other words, the only reason for zooming out of ekphrasis is to
point out one of the ways in which the picture being described is visu-
ally realistic. In contrast, Chapman writes:
The soyle turnd up behind the plow, all blacke like

earth arose,
Though forg’d of nothing else but gold, and lay in
show as light,
As if it had bene plowd indeed; miraculous to sight.16
ȋȡȣıİȓȘ, which Murray simply and literally translates “of gold,”

Chapman turns into “forg’d of nothing else but gold.” By moving
ĲȑĲȣțĲȠ (his “forg’d”) to the front of the phrase, Chapman once again
eliminates ambiguity, precluding any possibility of even a momentary
non-material reading of ȤȡȣıİȓȘ. Moreover, the clause, “and lay in
show as light,” is entirely Chapman’s own and further contributes to
removing the reader from the visual narrative and eliciting an aware-
15 Ibid., 329.
16 Chapman, Works of Homer, Z6v.
173
Javier Ibáñez
ness of the material presence of the shield. This is because the only
possible subject of the verb “lay” is the shield itself rather than any
element of the fictional picture, and both “show” and “as light”(i.e., it
was not light, but gold) work against the production of a contained
diegesis by calling attention to the picture’s representationality. This is
also the general effect of the phrase “miraculous to sight.” The prepo-
sitional phrase “to sight” is also Chapman’s addition, and the introduc-
tion of the gaze of the viewing subject puts everything at a greater re-
move from the picture than the original, more impersonal—and there-
fore more pictorially self-contained—formulation does.
The question, of course, is how are we to interpret Chapman’s
pattern of resistance to ekphrasis? A hint may be provided by another
idiosyncratic rendering. Chapman’s description of the forging of the
shield reads thus:
And first he forg’d, a strong and spacious shield

Adornd with twenty severall hewes: about whose
verge he beate,
A ring, three-fold and radiant; and on the backe he set
A silver handle; five-fold were, the equall lines he
drew
About the whole circumference: in which his hand
did shew,
(Directed with a knowing mind) a rare varietie.17
This is inaccurate for a couple of reasons. The original reads,
ʌȠȓİȚį੻ʌȡȫĲȚıĲĮıȐțȠȢȝȑȖĮĲİıĲȚȕĮȡȩȞĲİ
ʌȐȞĲȠıİįĮȚįȐȜȜȦȞʌİȡ੿įૃਙȞĲȣȖĮȕȐȜȜİĳĮİȚȞ੽Ȟ
ĲȡȓʌȜĮțĮȝĮȡȝĮȡȑȘȞਥțįૃਕȡȖȪȡİȠȞĲİȜĮȝ૵ȞĮ
ʌȑȞĲİįૃਙȡૃĮ੝ĲȠ૨਩ıĮȞıȐțİȠȢʌĲȪȤİȢĮ੝Ĳ੹ȡਥȞĮ੝Ĳ૶
ʌȠȓİȚįĮȓįĮȜĮʌȠȜȜ੹ੁįȣȓૉıȚʌȡĮʌȓįİııȚȞ.18
17 Ibid., Z6r
18 “First fashioned he a shield, great and sturdy, adorning it cunningly in every part,
and round about it set a bright rim, threefold and glittering, and therefrom made fast a
silver baldric. Five were the layers of the shield itself; and on it he wrought many curi-
ous devices with cunning skill” (323). Murray, Iliad, 18.478–82.
174
As James Heffernan points out, “For all that has been written about
the presumed circularity of the shield and its pattern of concentric cir-
cles, nowhere in the 130 lines on its making does Homer call it circu-
lar.”19 This absence of textual evidence does not, of course, necessarily
preclude the possibility that the shield might nevertheless be circular.
The detail of the concentric circles, however, seems to be textually
inadmissible. As Walter Leaf has pointed out, “It seems necessary to
take Į੝ĲȠ૨, on account of its combination with ‘ıȐțİȠȢ,’ in a different
sense from Į੝Ĳ૵Ț, the former meaning ‘the shield itself,’ i.e. the body
as opposed to the surface, while the latter is used in the weak anaphor-
ic sense ‘in it.’”20 This distinction between Į੝ĲȠ૨, meaning the shield
itself, and Į੝Ĳ૵Ț, meaning the surface of the shield, is maintained in
Murray’s rendering, which reads, “Five were the layers of the shield
itself [i.e., Į੝ĲȠ૨]; and on it [i.e., Į੝Ĳ૵Ț] he wrought many curious de-
vices with cunning skill.” 21 Chapman’s translation is wrong, but it
points towards what he is trying to find in the text, namely, overarch-
ing structure and meaning.
The Homeric episode is digressive, seemingly aimless, and in-
cidental to the main narrative. Heffernan states the problem clearly:
unlike other instances of ekphrasis in the poem, “the scenes wrought
in metal on the shield do not seem […] to mirror the action of the
poem. Nor do they open a window on the past of the major charac-
ters.” Indeed, “The fact that the making of the shield plays a crucial
part in developing the action of the poem does not by itself explain
what the scenes on the shield contribute to our understanding of the
poem.”22 This digressive impulse is a generic feature of the oral epic.
Particularly in a poem about the brutality of war, incidental digression
serves a role similar to that of comedic relief in modern film: on the
one hand, it allows the audience a break from the demand for sus-
tained attention that the main story makes upon them, and, on the
other, as Kenneth Atchity puts it, “the shield of Achilles is a suspen-
sion of the narrative momentum, a respite from the brutal reality of
19 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 12–13.

20 Walter Leaf, Commentary on the Iliad (London: Macmillan, 1900), 18.481.
22 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 10.
175
Javier Ibáñez
the battle […], a time of re-creative detachment […] from the pres-
sures of reality.”23 Chapman, however, wants the episode to have sig-
nificance for the work as a whole; he wants it to mean something.24
For him, then, the surface of the shield is marked with five concentric
circles (“the equall lines”), yielding something similar to a typical medi-
eval or early modern diagrammatic representation of the hierarchical
structure of the cosmos, and tacitly exemplifying in this way a frequent
interpretation of the passage, namely, that the shield is intended to
function as a microcosm.25 Read in this way, the shield recursively in-
scribes the whole story within itself, becoming a sort of framework for
it and providing a familiar cosmic structure within which its particulars
may be fixed and placed in significant relationships with one another.
This concern with overarching meaning and structure also
manifests itself in Chapman’s handling of one of the many hapax le-
gomena in the Iliad. A hapax legomenon is a word that occurs only once
in a particular work, or in the body of work of a particular author, or
in the extant written record of a language—in which case, the word is
termed a “singularity.” Due to their rarity, hapax legomena can pose
particular difficulties for a translator, but they can also become sites of
relative freedom from the perceived authority of the text. In the de-
scription of the besieged city discussed earlier, we encounter the word
ਫ਼ʌȠȜȓȗȠȞİȢ, 26 which appears to be a Greek singularity. 27 Chapman
translates the relevant passage thus:
23 Kenneth John Atchity, Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1978), 160.
24 The question as to whether and how images (and consequently their descriptions)
mean is a complex one whose long history lies outside the scope of this chapter, as
does the only slightly less complex question as to whether the episode of the shield of
Achilles is meant to convey a coherent meaning and if so what this meaning might be.
I do not intend to weigh in on either side of either of these questions. The point is
merely that it is difficult to determine what, if anything, these particular pictures mean
in the context of the larger work, and that Chapman is attempting to deal with this
difficulty. For a good overview of the problem of the meaning of images, see Stephen
Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2008), chapter 1 passim. On the digressiveness of ekphrasis as potentially dis-
ruptive of meaning, see Preston, “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words,” 119–20.
25 For the idea of the symbolic structure of the cosmos in the English Renaissance and
its relation to notions of macrocosm and microcosm, see E. M. W. Tillyard, The Eliza-
bethan World Picture (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), particularly chs. 2 and 7.
26 Murray, Iliad, 18.519.
176
The Queene of martials

And Mars himselfe conducted them; both which be-
ing forg’d
of gold
Must needs have golden furniture: and men might so
behold
They were presented deities. The people, Vulcan
forg’d
Of meaner mettall.28
“Meaner” is Chapman’s rendering of ਫ਼ʌȠȜȓȗȠȞİȢ, but the word actually

means “Smaller than and under something else.”29 Murray therefore
translates, “Goodly were they and tall in their harness, as beseemeth
gods, clear to view amid the rest, and the folk at their feet were small-
er.”30 As we saw earlier, Chapman here refuses to describe the picture
on the shield and concentrates instead on the materiality of the shield
itself. What our attention to his treatment of the hapax legomenon
adds to this account is a possible motivation. “Meaner” introduces a
value judgment (which, in this case, seems ultimately to imply a moral
judgment) into a passage that was initially concerned exclusively with
visual detail. Homer’s ਫ਼ʌȠȜȓȗȠȞİȢ helps us visualize the picture: the
people are “smaller” because they are presented to us relative to the
size of the gods next to whom they are standing. But Chapman seems
to be interested in visuality only insofar as it may function as evidence
of the relationships between signifiers. The original, as we saw, moves
quickly back from material description to ekphrasis: “but the rest were
faring forth, led of Ares and Pallas Athene, both fashioned in gold,
and of gold was the raiment wherewith they were clad.”31 The refer-
27 Michael M. Kumpf, Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena (Hildesheim: Georg
Olms Verlag, 1984), 198. Kumpf considers Homeric hapax legomena for which nei-
ther Liddell and Scott nor Pape and Benseler have given a single other literary use to
be Greek singularities (20).
28 Chapman, Works of Homer, Z6v.
29 Richard John Cunliffe, A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect (Norman: University of Okla-
homa Press, 2012), s.v. “ਫ਼ʌȠȜȓȗȦȞ.”

31 Ibid.
177
Javier Ibáñez
ence to the metal is brief and gold immediately goes from being that
from which Hephaestus fashioned the figures on the shield to being
the color of the garments of the gods. But Chapman sustains the ref-
erence to materiality as long as he can, because the materials that the
shield is made of function for him as semantic markers in a way that
the picture on its own does not. This is emphasized by the formula-
tion, “and men might so behold / They were presented deities,” which
essentially suggests that, because the figures are fashioned in gold, the
viewer ought to be able to recognize that they are deities. Were they
not, they would have been made out of meaner metal. Chapman’s
“meaner,” then, takes us outside of the realm of non-signifying visuali-
ty and into that of relational meaning and structure.
All of Chapman’s authorial intrusions examined here seem,
then, to signal a struggle against the circumstantiality of ekphrasis. Of
course, Chapman’s efforts must meet with the resistance of the text, as
the intention of the passage as a whole seems to be almost exclusively
ekphrastic. In spite of this, where possible, Chapman attempts to (or
perhaps cannot help but, in the case of the hapax legomenon) redirect
the episode to the concrete (the actual shield) and the symbolic (the
meaning of the images), and away from the purely visual and descrip-
tive. This impulse, as I have suggested, may be read as symptomatic of
a larger issue in Homeric translation more generally: the imposition of
the needs, conventions, and expectations of a written culture onto a
work rooted in an oral tradition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atchity, Kenneth John. Homer’s Iliad: The Shield of Memory. Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.
Chapman, George. The Whole Works of Homer; Prince of Poetts. London:
Nathaniel Butter, 1616.
Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2008.
178
Cunliffe, Richard John. A Lexicon of the Homeric Dialect. Norman: Uni-

versity of Oklahoma Press, 2012.
Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from
Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Kumpf, Michael M. Four Indices of the Homeric Hapax Legomena. Hildes-
heim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1984.
Leaf, Walter. Commentary on the Iliad. London: Macmillan, 1900.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representa-
tion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Murray, A. T., ed. and trans. The Iliad. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.
Preston, Claire. “Ekphrasis: Painting in Words.” In Renaissance Figures of
Speech, edited by Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Kat-
rin Ettenhuber, 113–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Sihler, Andrew L. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995.
Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. Harmondsworth, UK:
Penguin, 1966.
179
Chapter 12
Henri Estienne’s Concepts of History and Poetry
GODA THANGADA
The prolific Genevan editor and printer Henri II Estienne

(1531–98, known in Latinized form as Henricus Stephanus) produced
a lavish anthology of Greek poetry in 1566.1 The volume included not
only the complete Iliad and Odyssey, but ancient supplements to Homer
and the following seemingly motley assortment of partner poets: the
archaic hexameter poet Hesiod; the archaic elegists Theognis and So-
lon; the didactic poet Aratus; the Hellenistic poets Callimachus, The-
ocritus, and Bion; the work attributed to the mythical poets Orpheus
and Musaeus; and others. In the title of this edition, Estienne desig-
nates all these poets as working in the genre of the heroici carminis, or
epic poetry, a genre for which he does not proceed to set parameters
in his preface. 2 My aim is to account for Estienne’s decision to situate
Homer in this vast constellation of poets as well as his strategy for
amending the Greek text. I argue that Estienne’s approach toward the
textual criticism of poetry is informed by his approach to reading his-
tory. Estienne recognized a kinship between the methods of history
and poetry that the ancients had rejected. 3 In the Poetics, Aristotle
claims that history is inferior to poetry because “poetry states more
universal things whereas history states particular things” and that his-
tory recounts what has passed while poetry gestures towards the prob-
able.4 I begin with a discussion of Estienne’s Traité preparatif à l’Apologie
pour Hérodote, also published in 1566. In this work, Estienne exhibits an
1 Estienne came from a family of printers that included his grandfather Henri and
father Robert. In this paper, I will use “Estienne” to refer to Henri II.
2 The editio princeps of the Iliad and Odyssey was itself an anthology, albeit one in which
all materials directly pertained to Homer.

3 Boudou discusses the Renaissance stance of the relationship between history and
poetry at length. See Bénédicte Boudou, Mars et les Muses dans L’Apologie Pour Hérodote
d’Henri Estienne (Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 2000), 489–491.
4 Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Stephen Halliwell, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1995), 1451b.

Goda Thangada
interest in the reconstruction of cultural systems rather than in event

history and skepticism about the possibility of historical certainty. I
will then compare Estienne’s orientation to reading and writing history
with statements in the preface to his anthology and in his annotations
to the text of the Iliad.
HOW TO READ HISTORY
To defend Herodotus against his ancient and modern detrac-

tors, Estienne issued in 1566 both a French preface to his edition of
Herodotus (known as the Traité preparatif à l’Apologie pour Hérodote) and
a Latin treatise, Apologia pro Herodoto.5 It is the French treatise that in-
terests me for its programmatic statements on the relationship be-
tween antiquity and modernity. Herodotus had been subject to criti-
cism well before the Renaissance. It is to him that Thucydides implicit-
ly responded by crafting a new historical methodology rooted in
firsthand observation. In the French Apologie, Estienne diagnoses the
modern stance on Herodotus as the consequence of erroneously judg-
ing his reports according to modern norms and reasoning: Herodotus
seemed to lack verisimilitude “pour estre hors coustume ou vsage, ou
pour estre contraire à nostre ratiocination, c’est à dire, à nostre dis-
cours fondé sur telles ou telles raisons.”6 Estienne’s strategy for the
defense is to draw parallels between the world of Herodotus and his
own so as to render aspects of modernity as unfamiliar and absurd as
the events and descriptions in the ancient text. As Boudou describes,
“Les histoires étranges doivent aider le lecteur à se débarrasser de pré-
jugés et d’habitudes mentales afin d’opérer un renversement de pers-
pective. Au moment où l’élargissement de l’univers contribue à doter
de réalité l’extraordinaire lointain, la redécouverte de l’histoire antique
5 The Latin Apologia went through twelve editions in the lifetime of Estienne himself.
It achieved a new popularity in the first half of the eighteenth century in the context of
the critique of French absolutism. See Geoffrey Atkinson, “Henri Estienne et Les
ideés du XVIII Siècle,” Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 13, no. 3 (1951): 336–41.
6 “…for being foreign to custom or habit, or for being contrary to our reasoning,
which is to say, to our discourse grounded in such and such reasons.” Henri Es-
tienne,”Traité preparatif à l’Apologie pour Hérodote,” in La France des Humanistes: Henri II
Estienne, Éditeur et Écrivain, ed. Judit Kecskemeti, Bénédicte Boudou, and Hélène Cazes
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 181.
182
Chapter 12 - Henri Estienne’s Concepts of History and Poetry
a révélé aussi des faits que seul l’éloignement temporel faisait appa-
raître comme étranges.”7 Estienne’s advocacy of cultural relativity in
the reading of history followed from his status as a Protestant refugee
in Geneva. Though born in Paris, the adolescent Estienne migrated to
Calvinist Geneva with his father in the wake of the Reformation.
Caught between his French cultural heritage and Protestant religion,
Estienne did not pit dogma against dogma but instead embraced cau-
tion and flexibility in the formation of judgments.
A relationship between Estienne’s views on historical judg-
ment and his work on languages has already been posited by Boudou.
She adduces as evidence Estienne’s Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, for which
he drew from the corpus of Greek texts he had himself edited. In this
project Boudou remarks that Estienne attempted to “combiner la dé-
marche pratique et le raisonnement logique.”8 Estienne assembled his
examples both through collation and by deducing novel formulae from
the patterns he observed. Furthermore, Boudou observes that Es-
tienne was interested in language as a point of access to an entire cul-
ture. Regarding his treatise Projet de précellence du langage François, she
comments, “Il se livre à l’examen systématique et comparatif des ex-
pressions et des proverbes, il étudie leur évolution dans le temps et il
déchiffre les informations que la langue fournit sur l’historie des
mœurs.”9 In the final part of the paper, I will attempt to discern these
strands—the combination of empirical and logical methodology as
well as the attention to the relationship of culture to language—in Es-
tienne’s textual critical approach on the basis of the vision of history
espoused in the Apologie.
Estienne’s effacement of a personal agenda can be detected
on the title page of his anthology. Though Estienne styles himself on
this page as the typographus of the wealthy businessman Ulrich Fugger,
7 “Unfamiliar histories should be able to help the reader disengage himself from preju-
dices and mental habits by an overturning of his perspective. In the same period in
which the expansion of the world helped endow reality with extraordinary spatial dis-
tance, the rediscovery of ancient history also revealed facts which only temporal dis-
tance caused to appear as strange.” Boudou, Mars et les Muses, 506–7.
8 “…combine a practical approach and logical reasoning.” Ibid., 507.
9 “He engages in a systematic and comparative examination of expressions and prov-
erbs, he studies their evolution in time and he uncovers the information which lan-
guages furnishes about the history of customs.” Ibid., 511.
183
Goda Thangada
he does not designate any dedicatees and neglects to mention Fugger

in his preface.10 Estienne further dissociates the text from the circum-
stances of its production by failing to mention that the text was print-
ed in Geneva. The title page also bears the printer’s mark of the Es-
tienne family, a man reaching for the higher branches of a tree and the
motto, Noli altum sapere. This injunction recalls the saying purportedly
affixed at the entrance to Delphi, Gnothi seauton. Both mottos caution
the individual against striving to know too much, as certainty eclipses
the capacity of any one individual. The stance represented in this
printer’s mark, which Estienne inherited from father and grandfather,
accords with the skeptic and relativist ideology that emerges in Es-
tienne’s treatises and, I argue, textual criticism.
Such an embrace of human limitations may appear to contra-
dict the optimism of humanism, but in fact it permits the critical atti-
tude characteristic of humanists. The Renaissance art historian Erwin
Panofsky describes humanism as twofold in nature: it is the “revival of
the classical antithesis between humanitas and barbaritas, or feritas,” as
well as “a survival of the medieval antithesis between humanitas and
divinitas”11 Humanitas could be cultivated only by means of a glance
backward because the study of man is intrinsically the study of the
records of man accumulated in history. However, the study of history
need not be the study of chronology and genealogy. In the Renais-
sance, it took the form of a study of a temporally disjunct culture.
Panofsky describes a shift in historical perspective in the Renaissance
such that classical antiquity becomes a culturally coherent world dis-
placed from the present. Similarly, Arnaldo Momigliano reflects on the
difference in methodology between cultural and event history. He de-
fines antiquarianism as the study of culture in opposition to history
written in chronological order; antiquarians “showed how to use non-
literary evidence, but they also made people reflect on the difference
10 In contrast, Estienne dedicates his Thesaurus to “the Holy Roman Emperor, the
King of France, the Queen of England, the Elector Palatine, the Duke of Saxony, the
Margrave of Brandenburg and, for good measure, the nine principal universities in the
realms of these potentates.” John Considine, Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicog-
raphy and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 84.
11 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City,
NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955), 2.
184
between collecting facts and interpreting facts.” 12 Though Estienne

cannot quite be characterized as an antiquarian, his use of eclectic tex-
tual evidence to determine readings and his attempts to juxtapose texts
rather than print them in isolation are reminiscent of the collective
approach of antiquarians. Moreover, his stake in providing accurate
and comprehensive versions of ancient texts is the utility of such re-
sources for the study of culture. For Estienne, the rigorous empirical
discipline of philology is thus akin to antiquarian history and serves as
a precursor to interpretation.
HOW TO READ POETRY
Estienne’s approach to textual criticism is informed as much

by his interpretation of poetry as his interpretation of history. His
preface to the anthology reflects the currents of interpretative Homer-
ic criticism in the sixteenth century. Some scholars have observed that
Estienne’s remarks may even be paraphrases of Jean Dorat (1508–88),
the scholar who was mentor to the Pléiade consortium of poets and
poeta regius to King Charles IX. 13 In his unpublished lectures, Dorat
adopted an allegorical approach to Homeric criticism reminiscent of
Neoplatonists such as Porphyry, whom Estienne included alongside
Homer in his anthology.14 Philip Ford argues that Homeric criticism
in sixteenth-century France alternated between two strands. Repre-
sentative of the first generation was Guillaume Budé who sought mor-
al lessons in Homer.15 In the middle of the century, Dorat, a teacher of
Estienne with close ties to the monarchy, searched instead for meta-
physical truths.16 The selection of authors in Estienne’s anthology re-
flects the influence of Dorat, who favored the Hellenistic poets Cal-
limachus and Bion, and who placed Homer alongside the divinely in-
12 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Journal of the Warburg
and Courtauld Institutes 13, no. 3/4 (1950): 286.

13 Rudolph Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1976), 106.
14 Philip Ford, “Homer in the French Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 1
(2006): 16.
15 Ibid., 10.
16 Dorat spent time in the household of the Estiennes. See Considine, Dictionaries of
Early Modern Europe, 57.
185
Goda Thangada
spired mythic poets Orpheus and Musaeus.17 The authors Ford sur-
veys in detail are for the most part Catholic. In contrast to Ford’s divi-
sion between ethical and metaphysical Homeric criticism, Marc Bizer
structures his overview of Homeric criticism as a division between
Catholic and Protestant reading practices. Bizer is particularly interest-
ed in the political implications of Homeric criticism. He aligns Budé
and Dorat as royalists who were both were “moving beyond philologi-
cal commentary by using Homer to instruct the king.”18 He describes a
distinctly Protestant strand of Homeric criticism that used the epics to
contest the authority of the monarchy or contested the authority of the
epics themselves. For instance, Bizer writes that the Protestant Jean de
Sponde “tended to focus instead on Agamemnon and Achilles, who
represented for him the poles of abusive power and its victims” by
“incorporating Protestant theological principles on resistance to an
unjust monarch.”19 Estienne himself refrains from adopting such an
overtly polemical stance in his reading of Homer, aiming instead to
edit the text in such a way as to transcend Homer’s political utility.
Whilst articulating an allegorical reading of Homer, Estienne
is no less attentive to the aesthetic matter that constitutes poetry. Es-
tienne begins his preface with a personal account of the pleasures af-
forded him by Greek poetry from his youth. He employs as a meta-
phor the episode in the Odyssey in which Odysseus ties himself to a
ship’s mast so that he can hear the songs of the Sirens without falling
prey to their seduction. He writes, “A quo tempore tam altas in animo
meo radices studium poesews egit, ut illa non secus ac Sirenum
cantibus delinitus & antea videri potuerim, & nunc quoque fortasse
videri possim.”20 Bizer indicates that Dorat considered the Sirens an
allegory of knowledge while Budé considered them emblematic of
17 Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 104.

18 Marc Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford
19 Ibid., 13.
20 “From that time, the study of poetry drove roots into my soul so deep that I seemed
to be captivated by the songs of the Sirens, and now perhaps I seem this way also.”
Henri Estienne, “Henrici Stephani in suam poetarum graecorum editonem praefatio in
qua laudes poeticae attingit,” in Hoi tes heroikes poiseos proteuontes poietai, & alloi tines (Ge-
neva: Excudebat Henricus Stephanus, illustris viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typographus,
1566), 4.
186
pleasures.21 Estienne argues that it is the aesthetic qualities of poetry

that render its content morally and intellectually useful. Nevertheless,
the qualities of poetry can be translated into other media. Estienne
proceeds with a disquisition on the relationship of music and painting
to poetry. He writes, “Multi profecto extant versus, quos qui legit, is
iucundissimam musicae harmonium audit, is pulcherrimam picturam
intuetur.”22 He characterizes music and painting as complementary but
subordinate to poetry. Of painting, he writes: “Sed & ipsa . . . artificia,
suaque adeo archetypa excellentissimos pictores ab excellentissimis
poetis mutuatos esse constat.”23 This evokes statements Dorat himself
likely had made about the influence of poetry on contemporary arts.
Dorat had been guiding music, painting, and the composition of new
poetry.24 Ford suggests that the Galerie d’Ulysse at Fontainebleau was
directly influenced by the readings of Dorat.25 Pfeiffer suggests that
Greek poetry could have been set to music only in the circle of Do-
rat.26
Because the content of poetry is inseparable from its form,
Estienne considers the study of poetry empirical as well as interpreta-
tive. The empirical matter of poetry is not only verbal, but historical
and cultural. The universals transmitted through poetry lie underneath
a surface of particular cultural references and conventions. Indeed, for
Estienne, poetry demands the sort of interpretation that he himself
refrains from providing. He adds that such interpretation must be the
task of those outside the tradition: “Quidni vero poetarum figmenta
bonam in partem interpretemur, quum nulli ex ethnicis scriptoribus
aeque pie reuerenterque de suo numine et senserint et loquuti sint, ac
praesertim Graeci, et quidem inter eos antiquissimi?”27 Estienne’s own
21 Bizer, Homer and the Politics of Authority, 60.

22 “Indeed many verses exist, such that the one who reads them hears the very pleas-
ant harmony of music and looks at a very beautiful painting.” Estienne, “Praefatio,” 7.
23 “But also, the arts themselves are such that excellent painters borrow models from
excellent poets.” Ibid., 9–10.

24 Dorat had been the mentor of the Pléiade group.
25 Ford, “Homer in the French Renaissance,” 18.
26 Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, 105.
27 “Why indeed should we not interpret the figures of poets in a good sense, when
none of the native writers piously and reverently perceived and spoke about their di-
vinity, which is the case especially with the Greeks, and indeed, with the most ancient
among them?” Estienne, “Praefatio,” 16.
187
Goda Thangada
interest is in the concrete conditions and matter of the text rather than
its hidden or extending meanings. Crucially, for Estienne, poetry
serves as a vehicle of not only meaning and affect, but information.
Despite the necessity of interpretation to discover the truth embedded
within poetry, Estienne does not disregard the variety of styles and
content in the poetry of different civilizations. He remarks that the
early function of poetry was to provide a cross-temporal medium of
recording information in civilizations lacking widespread literacy:
“barbarae etiam gentes, litterarum plane rudes, multarum historiarum
memoriam in patroparadotois quibusdam cantilenis per annos multos
conseruasse comperiantur.”28 Estienne is no less interested in the col-
lection of facts than in their synthesis into meaning.
HOW TO EDIT POETRY
To summarize, Estienne’s approach to history consists of a

tendency to aggregate information so as to apprehend culture as a
whole and a willingness to maintain skepticism so as to refrain from
prejudice. His approach to poetry entails a commitment to verbal form
and cultural significance as well as to its abstract meaning. Estienne
deploys the sort of logical operations used for the interpreting the
meaning of poetry to determine the probable form of poetry. In this
section, I will give three examples in which Estienne’s concepts of his-
tory and poetry work in concert in his textual criticism.
The empirical evidence upon which Estienne draws is other
manuscripts, editions, commentaries, and translations of Homer as
well as the entire corpus of classical literature at his disposal. In the
second part of his preface, in which he summarizes his editing process,
Estienne performs the convention of pronouncing earlier editions of
the texts in the anthology inadequate. Of the numerous printed edi-
tions Estienne consulted, he claims “nemo mihi unquam persuadere
potuisset.”29 He then undertook a search for those manuscripts inter
28 “…barbarous people, clearly primitive in letters, are found to have saved the
memory of many histories for many years in certain ancestral songs.” Ibid., 15.
29 “No one ever had been able to persuade me.” Ibid., 18.
188
minus malas, 30 namely those in Rome and Florence. Alongside these

manuscripts, he consulted the commentary of the twelfth century Byz-
antine bishop Eustathius of Thessalonica. Estienne expresses disbelief
that errors defying common sense could have survived generations of
textual editing. He applies a vivid metaphor to describe the harm done
by careless handlers of the text: “Mendosum certe librum in temerarii
et indocti professoris vel interpretis manu, gladio qui sit in manu
furentis comparare posse mihi videor.” 31 Some of his most vicious
criticism is directed towards the edition of Lorenzo Valla (1407–57).
At other points in his career, Estienne attempted to distance human-
ism from Italian influence.32 Nevertheless, there are moments at which
Estienne sets aside this patriotic orientation and upholds Valla’s trans-
lation over others.
Although Estienne sets more store in Eustathius than in other
manuscripts, he does not blindly follow him and on occasion diverges
from him by incorporating evidence from other parts of Homer or
from other editions. Estienne begins his annotations on the text of
Homer with a discussion of the clause, Į੝ĲȠઃȢ į੻ ਦȜȫȡȚĮ Ĳİ૨Ȥİ
țȪȞİııȚȞȠੁȦȞȠ૙ıȓĲİʌ઼ıȚǻȚઁȢįૃਥĲİȜİȓİĲȠȕȠȣȜȒ (Iliad 1.4–5). 33 The
first issue is the number of lambdas in ਦȜȫȡȚĮ. Estienne claims, “Non
dubitavi, cum Eustathio, de hac altera scriptura ਦȜȜȫȡȚĮ vetustissimi &
optimi exemplaris autoritate fretus: tamen margini apposui: alteram
autem ਦȜȫȡȚĮ in textu retinui: quam habent editions Florentina Aldina,
Germanica & Gallicae omnes, quae ad manus quidem meas per-
venerunt.”34 Estienne cites instances of the noun ਪȜȦȡ, another term
30“…among the less bad.” Ibid., 18.

31 “I seem to be able to compare an amended book in the hand of a bold and un-
learned scholar or interpreter to a sword which is in the hand of a madman.” Ibid., 20.
32 For a survey of Estienne's attitudes towards Italians, see Louis Clément, Henri Es-
tienne et son oeuvre française (Paris: A. Picard, 1899), 107–41.

33 “They made them spoils for the dogs and all the birds, and fulfilled the plan of
Zeus.”
34 “I did not doubt, along with Eustathius, the alternate reading ਦȜȜȫȡȚĮ, relying on
the authority of the oldest and best example: nevertheless I placed it in the margin: I
retained the alternative ਦȜȫȡȚĮ in the text: which the Florentine, Aldine, and all Ger-
man and French editions that came to my hands have.” Henri Estienne, “Eiusdem H.
Stephani annotationes in suam poetarum Graecorum editionem” In Hoi tes heroikes
poiseos proteuontes poietai, & alloi tines (Geneva: Excudebat Henricus Stephanus, illustris
viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typographus, 1566), iv.
189
Goda Thangada
for spoils, elsewhere in Homer to support his inclusion of the reading

with a singleȜ. In the next line, however, Estienne must tackle a varia-
tion in grammatical inflection that has implications for the sense of the
line. For the accusative plural ȕȠȣȜȒ, he has the alternate reading of the
instrumental dative singular ȕȠȣȜૌ. Estienne attempts to determine
whether this noun refers to the fates or to the will of Zeus. He turns to
analogous expressions in Latin epic poetry but is unable to discover
definitively from these examples the meaning of the term in Homer.
Citations of Latin poetry are frequent in Estienne’s annotations; he
regards these as part of a cohesive cultural tradition capable of closing
gaps in texts separated by centuries. His inclusion of a critical appa-
ratus immediately beside the text of Homer indicates his openness to
allowing readers to form their own judgments.
In another instance, Estienne aligns himself with the Latin
translation of Valla on the basis of logical reasoning. Idomeneus chal-
lenges Deiphobus, “਷ ਙȡĮ įȒ ĲȚ ਥǸıțȠȝİȞ ਙȟȚȠȞ İੇȞĮȚ Ĳȡİ૙Ȣ ਦȞઁȢ ਕȞĲ੿
ʌİĳȐıșĮȚ ਥʌİ੿ ıȪ ʌİȡ İ੡ȤİĮȚ Ƞ੢ĲȦ įĮȚȝȩȞȚૃ ਕȜȜ੹ țĮ੿ Į੝ĲઁȢ ਥȞĮȞĲȓȠȞ
੆ıĲĮıૃਥȝİ૙Ƞ੕ĳȡĮ੅įૉȠੈȠȢǽȘȞઁȢȖȩȞȠȢਥȞșȐįૃੂțȐȞȦ”(Iliad 13.446–7).35
Estienne expounds at length on whether the question is expected to be
answered in the affirmative or negative. Here, he upholds the transla-
tion of Valla, “Num tibi videtur esse par, tres hostes interemisse: quod
ego feci: atque unum, quod tu fecisti, daemonie.”36 Another translation
of this line printed afterwards in Basel reads, “Non videtur aequipol-
lens esse tres pro vno occidisse…” which anticipates an affirmation.
Estienne, however, reasons that Idomeneus could not have intended
this statement to be affirmed because he immediately negates his as-
sessment of the fairness of the exchange by challenging Deiphobus
himself to fight: “Posterior autem plane negat quod affirmandum est,
quum dicit, Non videtur aequipollens esse…”37 The Greek itself does
not specify whether the answer is an affirmation or negation.
35 “Do we deem it worthy to have killed three for one; since you are now boasting in
this way. No, but good sir, stand before me yourself so that you know the sort of son
of Zeus I am…” Estienne, “Annotationes,” xii.
36 “Surely it does not seem to you to be fair, to have killed three enemies, which I did:
for one, which you did, sir.” Ibid., xii.

37 “Afterwards he plainly denies what must be affirmed when he says, ‘It does not
seem equivalent.’” Ibid., xii.
190
In the final case I will describe, Estienne has conviction in a

reading that diverges from Eustathius, but provides this reading in the
margin rather than the main body of the text. When Patroclus is about
to enter battler, Zeus is described as the force that impels him: ੖Ȣ Ĳİ
țĮ੿ ਙȜțȚȝȠȞ ਙȞįȡĮ ĳȠȕİ૙ țĮ੿ ਕĳİȓȜİĲȠ ȞȓțȘȞ ૧ȘȧįȓȦȢ ੖Ĳİ įૃ Į੝ĲઁȢ
ਥʌȠĲȡȪȞૉıȚ ȝȐȤİıșĮȚ ੖Ȣ Ƞੂ țĮ੿ ĲȩĲİ șȣȝઁȞ ਥȞ੿ ıĲȒșİııȚȞ ਕȞોțİȞ (Iliad
16.689–91).38 Estienne writes that he prefers ਥʌȠĲȡȣȞİȚ ȝĮȤȑıĮıșĮȚ (the
former in the present and the latter in the aorist middle) and ੒Ĳ੻
(“sometimes”) over ੖Ĳİ (“when”). This allows for the sense, “Sed quis
Iovis voluntati &decreto resistat, qui iniecto pavore viro alioqui forti
&strenuo, ei victoria propemodum e manibus eripit: contra vero
quemcunque vult ad pugnam animat ut hunc videmus ab eo animatum
ad eam pugnam fuisse a qua abstinere debuerat.”39 The reading ੒Ĳ੻
introduces a circumstance distinct from the action described in the
prior clause, while ੖Ĳİ further qualifies that action. The conventional
translation, however, uses the reading ੖Ĳİ: “Sed semper Iovis validior
mens quam hominum, qui fortem virum terret, &abstulit victoria fa-
cile, quum tamen ipse iubeat pugnare.”40 Still, Estienne relegates his
reading to the critical apparatus. Additionally, he notes that Eustathius
found lines 689 and 690 missing in some manuscripts. Estienne sus-
pects that these lines originated elsewhere in Book 16, but nevertheless
includes them here, likely because their sense accords with the sur-
rounding lines.
CONCLUSION
I have sought to characterize Estienne’s historical and poetic

sensibilities and to demonstrate how both manifest in his textual criti-
38 “Who both scares away masculine strength and easily takes away victory, when he
impels someone to fight: and who then takes away the courage in his breast.”
39 “But Jupiter snatches victory from the hands of the one who resists his will and
decree, by injecting fear into some strong and brave man; on the other hand, he incites
whomever he wishes to fight so that we see a person can be driven by him to fight,
from which he ought to have abstained.” Ibid., xv.
40 “But the mind of Jupiter is always stronger than that of men, who frightens a brave
man and who removes victory easily when he himself impels him to fight.” Ibid., xvi.
191
Goda Thangada
cism. The merit of this methodology did not go unrecognized. Es-

tienne’s edition was by no means flawless, but it was considered the
most carefully done edition of Homer to date and reigned for centu-
ries after as the standard Greek edition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by Stephen Halliwell. Loeb Classical Library.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1995.
Atkinson, Geoffrey. “Henri Estienne et Les ideés du XVIII Siècle.”
Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 13, no. 3 (1951): 336–41.
Bizer, Marc. Homer and the Politics of Authority in Renaissance France. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Boudou, Bénédicte. Mars et les Muses dans L’Apologie Pour Hérodote
d’Henri Estienne. Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 2000.
Clément, Louis. Henri Estienne et son oeuvre française. Paris: A. Picard,
1899.
Considine, John. Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the
Making of Heritage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008.
Estienne, Henri. “Eiusdem H. Stephani annotationes in suam poeta-
rum Graecorum editionem.” In Hoi tes heroikes poiseos proteuontes
poietai, & alloi tines, iv–xxvii. Geneva: Excudebat Henricus
Stephanus, illustris viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typographus, 1566.
———. “Henrici Stephani in suam poetarum Graecorum editonem
praefatio in qua laudes poeticae attingit.” In Hoi tes heroikes
poiseos proteuontes poietai, & alloi tines, 3–20. Geneva: Excudebat
Henricus Stephanus, illustris viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typogra-
phus, 1566.
———. “Tes Homerou Iliados.” In Hoi tes heroikes poiseos proteuontes
poietai, & alloi tines, 1–410. Geneva: Excudebat Henricus
Stephanus, illustris viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typographus, 1566.
———. “Traité preparatif à l’Apologie pour Hérodote.” In La France
des Humanistes: Henri II Estienne, Éditeur et Écrivain, edited by
Judit Kecskemeti, Bénédicte Boudou, and Hélène Cazes, 174–
95. Turnhout: Brepols, 2003.
Ford, Philip. “Homer in the French Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly
59, no. 1 (2006): 1–28.
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Momigliano, Arnaldo. “Ancient History and the Antiquarian.” Journal

of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13, no. 3/4 (1950): 285–
315.
Panofsky, Erwin. Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955.
Pfeiffer, Rudolph. History of Classical Scholarship. 2 vols. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press, 1968–76.
193
Section Four
Nationalism and National Identity
ANGELA LEI PARKINSON
Spanning almost three millennia, beginning with one of the

earliest print editions of Homer published at the turn of the sixteenth
century in Italy and ending with the fashioning of a proud Scottish
national identity in the late eighteenth century, this last grouping of
essays deals with how renditions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have
been used to create, bolster, and promote identities centered around
distinct locales, cultures, and languages all over Europe. The authors in
this section identify the ways in which editions and translations of
Homeric texts were used to transform these disparate national and
civic identities, from the southern Neapolitan court to the northern
Celtic shores, as well as to examine the complex way in which the
Homeric texts and historical realities such as the geopolitical ad-
vantages of a certain polity, civic and national identity, and nationalistic
pride mutually influence one another.
While an earlier chapter in this volume’s first section discusses
an example of the editio princeps of Homer published in Florence in
1489, a better-known Greek edition would be printed by the famed
Aldine Press of Venice beginning in 1504. Felix Szabo’s chapter,
“Homer, Venice, and Byzantium: Aldus Manutius’ First Edition of the
Iliad,” examines one precious volume from the Venetian printing press
and attempts to answer why the pioneering print owner did not con-
sult the tenth-century Byzantine manuscript known as Venetus A. This
manuscript was presumably easily accessible to Aldus due the fact that
it happened to reside in Venice in the same period. Szabo answers this
question by pointing out Aldus’ many advantages since the city had
almost a monopoly on the ability to read Greek in Western Europe at
the onset of the sixteenth century. In addition to the advantages pro-
vided by Venice’s close ties to Byzantium, the literary and cultural cli-
mate at the time of publication is examined. Szabo concludes that the
humanist did not consult the Byzantine source because it was unneces-
sary. The intellectual climate of Venice was such that Aldus must have
consulted sources that are now lost to us. And so, the city itself was a
kind of civic resource that contributed to the making of one of the
most significant moments in the transmission of Homer into the mod-
ern world.
The second chapter in this section, Camille Reynolds’ “Alfon-
so, Valla, & Homer: Poetry and Politics in Renaissance Naples,” pre-
sents a much more utilitarian example of the interaction between civic
identity and Homeric renditions. While the 1502 copy of Lorenzo Val-
la’s Latin translation of the Iliad predates the Aldine printing by two
years, it represents a reverse of the Venetian example, in which the
city’s resources clearly informed the production of the Homeric text.
Commissioned by the Spanish king, Alfonso the Magnanimous, in the
mid-fifteenth century, Valla’s translation is instead used by the mon-
arch to fashion both himself and the Neapolitan community into a
bastion of humanistic learning. As such, this sixteenth-century manu-
script functioned as a tool through which Aragonese ambition pro-
moted the rebirth of Naples to the rest of the Mediterranean world,
much in the same way that Petrarch hoped to witness the remaking of
Florence.
Contemporaneous to the appearance of these two aforemen-

tioned examples of Homer in Greek and Latin in the sixteenth centu-
ry, editions of Homer rendered into vernacular languages began to
appear all over Europe, where local populations could now read the
Homeric epics without any humanist training. Brendan Small’s chap-
ter, “The Language Question: Cultural Politics of the Medici Dynasty,”
contemplates such an example by examining the influences of the
Tuscan dialect upon a translation of the Iliad as well as how the publi-
cation project as a whole fits into the larger picture of the Medici fami-
ly’s steering of Florence by means of cultural policy in Girolamo
Bacelli’s 1582 publication L’Odissea D'Homero Tradotto in Volgare Fioren-
tino.
The next chapter is Ji Gao’s “Translating Homer in the

French Renaissance: The 1584 French Verse Translation of the Iliad,”
196
which finds a close connection between the project of strengthening
nationalist pride and this particular translation of Homer into the ver-
nacular. In this case, the rendering of the Iliad bolstered French na-
tional identity and the political reputation of two sixteenth-century
French monarchs, Francis I and Henry III. This edition, a composite
effort by Hugues Salel and Amadis Jamyn, is particularly notable for its
use of the myth of Trojan origin that was popular in France at the
time. Gao argues that, by playing up the mythical genealogy of the
Franks as descendants of Trojans, Salel was able to create a counter-
weight to the influence that Italian culture wielded in the sixteenth
century even beyond the immediate boundaries of continental Eu-
rope—indeed, the efficacy with which Petrarch’s own project accom-
plished the goal of the revitalization of Florence just two centuries
after his rediscovery of Cicero’s letters might have surprised even the
Florentine poet himself.
Finally, the last chapter in this section presents a volume that,
despite being a temporal outlier among the previous four sixteenth-
century productions, nevertheless marches in lockstep with the current
theme of nationalism. The volume in question here is the 1773 transla-
tion of the Iliad, an explicitly political project undertaken by Scottish
poet James Macpherson. A subscriber to the brand of primitivism
popular in the eighteenth-century intellectual circles to which he be-
longed, and known for his invention of the persona of the ancient
Celtic bard Ossian, Macpherson puts his purportedly verbatim transla-
tion of Homer to the service of strengthening Scottish pride at a time
when English cultural hegemony exacted a particularly heavy toll.
Noor Shawaf shows that, despite the license that the Scottish poet
allowed himself, in fact, Macpherson emphasized that he was produc-
ing a literal translation of Homer’s words and was able to do so pre-
cisely because the classical Gaelic culture had a genius on par with that
of the Greeks.
And so, the editions of Homeric texts examined in this sec-
tion, wonderfully varied in five different languages—Greek, Latin, Ital-
ian, French and (Scottish) English—all influenced and were influenced
by the wide range of cultures under which those editors and translators
lived. This cultural movement was undoubtedly both aided by and
197
contributed to the “rediscovery” of Homer in the sixteenth century in
addition to being a continuation of the clarion call sounded by Pet-
rarch in the fourteenth century for his beloved Florence to grow
strong again by reviving its proud classical heritage.
198
Chapter 13
Homer, Venice, and Byzantium: Aldus Manutius’ First

Edition of the Iliad
FELIX SZABO
The tenth-century Byzantine manuscript known as Venetus A

is one of the oldest surviving complete copy of Homer’s Iliad. It is
without a doubt a scholar’s edition of the text—in addition to the po-
em itself, the manuscript contains copious commentary known as
scholia compiled and derived from ancient scholars. Like so many
Byzantine artifacts, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman
Turks in 1453 the manuscript eventually came to reside in Venice. Not
long after the manuscript’s arrival, Venice would become the epicenter
of yet another important Homeric development: Aldus Manutius’ first
edition of the Iliad was printed in Venice in 1504. Though this was not
the first printed edition of Homer’s poems, due to the name and fame
of its publisher it would become one of the most influential develop-
ments in Homeric scholarship since the poems were first recorded in
writing in the sixth century BCE. Given this close association of mate-
rial, time, and place, it is natural to assume that Aldus must have con-
sulted the Venetus manuscripts for the preparation of his printed edi-
tion. Yet evidence seems to indicate that this was not the case. How,
then, could Aldus have managed to produce such a successful edition
of Homer without consulting the Venetus A? This chapter will investi-
gate this question through a series of historical contextualizations: first,
by exploring the relationship of Venice and Byzantium; then, by exam-
ination of the literary and cultural climate surrounding the 1504 Iliad’s
publication; and then, finally, by briefly considering the implications of
the Aldus-Venetus disconnect.
VENICE AND BYZANTIUM
Of all the Italian city-states which remained tied to Byzantium,

perhaps nowhere was this relationship more important than Venice.
Felix Szabo
Venice was the only one of the Italian maritime republics—the most
powerful of which, aside from Venice, were Genoa, Amalfi, and Pi-
sa—to maintain major ties to Constantinople throughout the medieval
period, keeping relatively good relations with the eastern Emperor and
amassing a comparatively rich wealth of Byzantine artifacts, from pre-
cious reliquaries and enamels (like those on the Pala d’Oro) to books
and manuscripts (including the famous Venetus manuscripts of
Homer).
This relationship would persist even after the Fourth Crusade, when
Venice would become one of the major stopping points of Byzantine
émigrés before and after the Turkish conquest of 1453. Venice’s
unique status would eventually lead to its establishment as one of the
major centers of Greek learning in the early Italian Renaissance, as we
shall see illustrated here in this chapter in the first (1504) edition of
Aldus Manutius’ Iliad.
The relationship of Venice and Byzantium go back almost to
the near-mythical origins of both cities. During Late Antiquity, Raven-
na and Aquileia were two of the most important Byzantine cities in
Italy; it was from Ravenna that the general Narses oversaw the newly
reconquered peninsula after successfully concluding the Gothic War in
Justinian’s favor,1 and it was again from Ravenna that the Ostrogothic
kings ruled as the emperor’s viceregents. Constantine VII Porphyrog-
enitus (r. 913–59) was remarkably knowledgeable about the history and
topography of this distant, theoretically subject Italian city.2 Early his-
torically-attested Dukes of Venice commonly bore Byzantine honorific
titles, such as protospatharios, hypatos, and magistros, 3 some of which
would go on in later centuries to be used as family surnames. Even
when the Venetians turned on Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade,
they at least seemed to appreciate the value of their ill-gotten gains:
their spoils decorated the most important of the city’s civic spaces, the
facade of Saint Mark’s Basilica. Venice’s insidious role in the Fourth
1 Donald M. Nicol, Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cultural Relations
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 2–3.
2 Ibid., 20–21. For an example of Constantine’s encyclopedic knowledge of the distant
western city, see De Administrando Imperio, ed. G. Moravcsik and trans. Romilly Jenkins
(Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967), 28.
3 Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, 50.
200
Chapter 13 - Homer, Venice, and Byzantium
Crusade notwithstanding, there was probably a respectably-sized

Greek community in Venice as early as the late thirteenth century,
comprised of individuals from all social classes. 4 Venetian art met
Florentine “Roman-oriented visual language” with its own Byzantine
responses.5 During the fifteenth century, this relationship would con-
tinue to grow and evolve, especially as Venice gained—and exer-
cised—substantial prestige and power in the arena of Italian politics.
Venice had pursued this goal for much of the preceding cen-
tury. Michele Steno, crowned Doge in 1400, had overseen the sub-
sumption of Verona, Vincenza, and Padua into the Venetian Republic.
Over the course of the fifteenth century, Venice would furnish the
Holy See with three Popes: Gregory XII, Eugene IV, and Paul II. De-
spite menaces from France, Turkey, and Milan, Venice remained inde-
pendent and militarily capable throughout this tumultuous century—
even enduring the employ of three of the greatest (and occasionally
most mercurial) condottieri in Italian history, namely, Francesco Bus-
sone, the Count of Carmagnola, Erasmo of Narni (Gattamelata), and
Bartolomeo Colleoni. Shortly after the publication of the first Aldine
Homer, she would see most of the powers of Western Europe united
against her in the first stages of the War of the League of Cambrai
(1508–10).
This is the context in which Aldus Manutius began his print-
ing enterprise. Ever the pragmatists, the Venetians naturally realized
the immense potential for profit to be derived from their near-
monopoly of Greek knowledge in Italy. Venice represented a trinity of
resources for this purpose: elite interest, plentiful knowledge, and co-
pious source material. Not only was the city copiously supplied with
rich and interested elites, it was also home to, or within relatively easy
letter-writing distance of, a significant population of Greek intellectual
notables such as Demetrius Chalcondylas, Arsenius Apostolis, and
Cardinal Bessarion. Venice was one of the largest repositories of Byz-
4 Vera von Falkenhausen, “Greeks in Italy at the Time of Dante (1265–1321),” in
Dante and the Greeks, ed. Jan M. Ziolkowski (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Re-
search Library and Collection, 2014), 389.
5 Debra Pincus, “Venice and the Two Romes: Byzantium and Rome as a Double Her-
itage in Venetian Cultural Politics,” Artibus et Historiae 13, no. 26 (1992): 106.
201
Felix Szabo
antine manuscripts in Western Europe.6 To this day, many of the most

important extant Byzantine manuscripts are located in Venetian librar-
ies: the Menologion of Basil II (Biblioteca Marciana MS Gr. 17), an illu-
minated copy of Pseudo-Callisthenes’ Alexander Romance (Ms. Marci-
anus Graecus 408), and the Venetus manuscripts of Homer, commonly
known as Venetus A (Marcianus Graecus Z. 454 [=822]) and Venetus B
(Marcianus Graecus Z. 453 [= 821]). These manuscripts, then as now,
form an indispensable basis for textual scholarship and criticism—
particularly, in the case of the Venetus A and B, Homeric criticism.
THE VENETIAN CULTURAL MATRIX
Yet Homer had been lost to the West since the loss of Greek.
At least one Antique attempt at translation seems to have existed, and
even persisted into the medieval period: the so-called Ilias Latina, a
straightforward but rather unchallenging paraphrase of which we know
only the author’s name. Though attributed in the Middle Ages to
Homer (and sometimes even to Pindar of Thebes) the opening and
closing lines of the poem form an acrostic, which declares “Italicus
wrote this” (“ITALICVS SCRIPSIT”).7 Italicus seems to have relied
minimally on the Greek original for his translation, apparently operat-
ing from his own memory of the poem’s events.8 Nevertheless, this
poem was read in Carolingian schools and even beyond.9 After the Ilias
Latina, an extremely rudimentary interlinear translation the Iliad by
Leontius Pilatus appears in the second half of the fourteenth century
(1368). With the help of his pupil Boccaccio, Pilatus eventually secured
a position teaching Greek at the University of Florence, the first such
position held in Western Europe since Antiquity, but the quality of his
translation left much to be desired.10 In the following century Lorenzo
Valla, humanist and Latinist par excellence, would be commissioned by
6 Nicol, Byzantium and Venice, 420.

7 George A. Kennedy, introduction to The Latin Iliad: Introduction, Text, Translation, and
Notes (Fort Collins, CO: George A. Kennedy, 1998), 9.
8 Ibid., 11.
9 Ibid., 13.
10 Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
202
the King of Aragon to translate the Iliad into Latin prose. Valla’s trans-
lation, completed in the 1440s, would only be printed in 1474.
The tenth-century manuscript of Homer’s Iliad, now known as
Venetus A, is first known to have belonged to Cardinal Basil Bessarion.
Bessarion had played a major role in the Council of Ferrara (1438) and
the Council of Florence (1445), the last major attempts at Byzantine-
Latin reconciliation prior to the Ottoman conquest. After the fall of
the Constantinople, Bessarion (as Latin Patriarch of the city) played a
major role in exporting Byzantine culture to the West in hopes of pre-
serving it. His library, donated in 1468 and constituting an important
nucleus of what is now the Biblioteca Marciana, was dedicated to the
Republic of Venice with the hope that it would serve Bessarion’s fel-
low expatriates as a repository of Greek culture outside of Greece.11
How well the Republic lived up to Bessarion’s hopes for managing his
library is a matter for debate as it evidently was left in the boxes in
which it had been delivered for well over fifty years, and Aldus—
though practically next door to where it was being kept—seems to
have never actually consulted the Venetus MSS of Homer. The implica-
tion of his original donation sends a clear message. Whether or not the
library would actually go on to be curated according to his wishes,
Bessarion certainly expected that it would be used.
The manuscript itself is a large (390 x 290 mm), high-quality
work, probably executed in Constantinople during the height of the
so-called Macedonian Renaissance. 12 Though tension occasionally
arose between the juxtaposition of Christian and pagan values, the role
of Homer was constantly and centrally important in Byzantine cultural
and intellectual life. Although theoretically Roman, Byzantium pre-
served little of the Latin literary canon. Latin itself seems to have be-
come mostly extinct at least by the time of Heraclius (r. 610–41), if not
earlier.13 In the absence of Virgil, whose role in education is attested by
11 Marino Zorzi, foreword to Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the
Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, ed. Casey Dué (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic
Studies, 2009), ix.
12 Susy Marcon, “Introduction: A Lovely Edition of the Iliad of Homer, on Parch-
ment,” in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, xiii.

13 Walter Kaegi, Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), 22, 30, 35.
203
Felix Szabo
numerous Pompeiian graffiti, children learned to read on Homer and

the Psalms.14 Even girls, who typically were educated on the Psalms
alone, could (as Anna Comnena did) sneak it into their education by
the entreaty of sympathetic courtiers and teachers.15 Exclusive court
circles made their own Homeric inside jokes, as the eleventh-century
historian Psellus vividly records in his Chronographia:
One day, when we, the imperial secretaries, were all

together, the empress’ retinue was taking part in a
procession. Zoe [Porphyrogenita] herself and her sis-
ter Theodora walked in on this procession, followed
by the Augusta, a new title granted [to the mistress of
Constantine IX Monomachus, Helena] Sclerena by
the empresses, at the instigation of Constantine. As
they were on their way – the route led them to the
theatre, and this was the first time the ordinary people
had seen Sclerena in company with Zoe and Theodo-
ra – one of the subtle flatterers softly quoted Homer’s
‘It were no shame . . .’ [Iliad 3.156–7: ‘It were no
shame for Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans if for
long time they suffer hardship for a woman like this
one,’ i.e., for Helen of Troy] but did not complete
the lines. At the time Sclerena gave no sign of having
heard these words, but when the ceremony was over,
she sought out the man who had uttered them and
asked him what they meant. …As soon as he told her
the story in detail, and the crowd showed its approval
of his interpretation of the anecdote as well as of the
Homeric reference, she was filled with pride and her
flatterer was rewarded for his compliment.16
14 Cecily Hennessy, “Young People in Byzantium,” in A Companion to Byzantium, ed.
Liz James (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 87.

15 Robert Browning, “Homer in Byzantium,” Viator 6 (1975), 16.
16 Michael Psellos, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers [Chronographia], trans. E. R. A. Sewter (Bal-
timore: Penguin, 1966), 6.61.
204
Nor did this tendency decline after Psellus’ time. Anna Comnena, her-
self Psellus’ student, bases many of her idolizing, ekphrastic compari-
sons of her parents to Achilles (representing Alexius, naturally) or even
Athena on Homeric sources. These descriptions in turn provided his-
toriographical justification for their superiority, whether over attempt-
ed internal usurpations or external threats, such as the Normans,
against which Alexius almost constantly fought. 17 The Odyssey re-
mained known and read, if less frequently than the Iliad.18 An intro-
duction to Homer was almost de rigeur for the foreign empresses im-
ported to Byzantium with such frequency, and formed a major part of
their cultural initiation to Byzantium particularly under the Comneni.19
Homeric reception and scholarship suffered, but continued, under the
Latin empire, 20 and would eventually crystallize―as we will shortly
see―in the work of Cardinal Bessarion.
Bessarion had already restored certain portions of the manu-
script himself by the time of its arrival in Venice, but several interest-
ing if incompletely-executed folia (including a Vita Homeri, Proclus’
Chrestomathia, and a series of illustrations) remained unbound. 21 The
Venetus A is “the oldest complete text of the Iliad in existence,”22 yet it
represents the pinnacle of Byzantine scholarly acumen. The manu-
script includes copious scholia, marginal commentary on the text of
the poem taken from ancient and late antique authorities.23 Each book
of the poem is introduced by a line of dactylic hexameter outlining its
content, from alpha (“Alpha: prayers of Chryses; plague among the
army; enmity of the leaders”) to omega (“Omega: Achilleus, having
taken a ransom, gives Priam the corpse of his son”).24 The Venetus A
provides the basis for most modern editions of the Iliad.25 Both Vene-
tus manuscripts, for example, are listed among the sigla of the Oxford
17 See, for example, Alexiad 1.10, 2.10, 5.7, and elsewhere.

18 Browning, “Homer in Byzantium,” 17.
19 Ibid., 27.
20 Ibid., 29.
21 Marcon, “Introduction,” xiv.
22 Christopher W. Blackwell and Casey Dué, “Homer and History in the Venetus A,”
in Recapturing a Homeric Legacy, 1.

23 Ibid., 6–9.
24 Ibid., 10–12.
25 Casey Dué, “Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad,” in Recapturing a Ho-
meric Legacy, 26.
205
Felix Szabo
Classical Text edition of the poem.26 Yet, it seems that the Venetus A
was not well-known by the early publishers of the Iliad like Demetrios
Chalkondylas, and that Aldus Manutius—despite close physical and
social proximity to the manuscripts—never actually consulted them.27
What, then, could have made Venice so attractive as a poten-
tial venue in which to publish books in Greek? The most obvious so-
lution is that of demographic appeal. Not only was Venice home to
one of the largest communities of the post-conquest diaspora, it had a
significant printing industry from which to draw labor and the afore-
mentioned great libraries of the Venetian state from which to draw
material. 28 A pre-existing community of Italian Hellenists and wide-
ranging trade connections further enhanced its appeal. 29 Printing
Greek was not as easy as printing Latin; after the text itself had been
established—itself a long and laborious process—it had to be set,
proofed, and finally reread by someone “not only skilled in the tech-
nical aspects of typography but also familiar with the style of the au-
thor in question.”30 Yet Aldus surely recognized the immense potential
of operating a Greek press in such a Hellenophilic environment. After
setting up his press, he had established his own personal Academy, the
Neaccademia, whose members were required to speak in Greek and
reportedly had to pay a fine if they misspoke. 31 Nor could he have
been blind to the appeal of Homer, the greatest of the ancient poets—
praised by Dante, agonized over by Petrarch, and eagerly chased after
by Boccaccio. By the time of Aldus Manutius, Italy no longer had only
the desire to engage with the Greek classics, a desire that in one form
or another had remained constant since Antiquity. Instead, thanks to
the work of Byzantine émigrés like Manuel Chrysoloras, Demetrius
Chalcondylas, and Marco Musuro, the Italy of Manutius’ day now also
26 David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen, introduction to Iliad, Books I–XII, vol. 1,
Homeri Opera, Oxford Classical Texts, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Classical Press, 1920),
xx.
27 Dué, “Epea Pteroenta,” 27.
28 Deno Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination of Greek Learn-
ing from Byzantium to Western Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962),
117–118.
29 Geanakoplos, Greek Scholars in Venice, 119.
30 Ibid., 119–120.
31 Alessandro Marzo Magno, Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book,
trans. Gregory Conti (New York: Europa Editions, 2013), 55.
206
possessed the knowledge and means with which to engage with these
texts. This potential was realized, in no small part, by the first Aldine
edition of the complete works of Homer. Now, in the final portion of
this essay, we will examine a copy of this edition and in doing so con-
textualize many of these high-level cultural and philological develop-
ments.
THE ALDUS-VENETUS DISCONNECT
This copy of the first Aldine edition of Homer is a testament

to the Aldine mission as a whole. Printed in Venice in 1504, this par-
ticular copy survived a number of later collectors and annotators (in-
cluding one whose notes were taken in a script that remains unknown)
but remains in fairly good condition. It is the first volume of two
printed by the Aldine press, which between them contain all the works
traditionally ascribed to Homer: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric
Hymns, and even the Batrachomyomachia, the fanciful and parodic “War
of the Frogs and the Mice.” In addition, this edifying material is sup-
plemented by a variety of introductory works, including a dedicatory
letter from Aldus himself along with several ancient lives of Homer,
from Herodotus, Plutarch, and Dio Chrysostom. Each volume con-
tains (though not in the same place) the famous Aldine printer’s de-
vice, a fearsome and rather sinuous dolphin entwined around an an-
chor, all encapsulated by Aldus’ name.
Aldus’ Homer was not the first edition of Homer to be print-
ed in Italy. That honor went to Chalcondylas, whose editio princeps of
the Iliad was published in Florence in 1488. Nor was it even the first
work of Homer to be printed in Venice—the Batrachomyomachia had
been published nearby in Murano at the monastery of Saint Peter the
Martyr in 1496.32 Aldus himself would eventually publish an edition of
Chrysoloras’ Erotemata in 1484, in addition to a Constantine Lascaris’
Grammatica, in 1495. The typeface in which he does so is based on the
handwriting of his friend Marco Musuro, engraved in Bologna by
Francesco Griffo.33
32 Magno, Bound in Venice, 113.

33 Ibid., 120.
207
Felix Szabo
The first Aldine edition of Homer is perhaps most striking, in

comparison to its medieval ancestors or even many of its incunable
predecessors, for its size. The book itself is relatively small: it’s fairly
substantial in heft (286 sheets, or 572 pages as we would think of them
today), but is only 17 centimeters tall. Compared to such tomes as the
Venetus A, this smaller and infinitely more affordable format offered
scholars economy and portability with which no manuscript could
compete. Manutius was the first printer to offer such small editions of
the classics—let alone the Greek classics—and the book’s portable size
(the precursor to modern trade paperbacks) helped to offset the con-
siderable, though no longer astronomical, expense of its purchase. 34
Once a potential scholar of Homer had learned Greek, with this book
in hand he would no longer be tied to the library of a particular city or
noble family. This meant greater freedom to travel throughout Italy or
even throughout Europe, which in turn facilitated the exchange of
scholarly thought throughout the West. The resulting positive feed-
back loop led to an explosion of scholarship, laying the foundations
for much modern Homeric scholarship in turn.
None of this explains the disconnect between Aldus’ excellent
scholarly edition and his apparent non-use of the Venetus manuscripts.
The Venetus A was one of the best copies of Homer’s works available
at the time, so why didn’t Aldus consult it? Yet upon further consider-
ation, this disconnect may not be so strange after all: there may simply
not have been any need to do so. Given Venice’s longstanding Byzan-
tine inheritance, there may have been source manuscripts available of
sufficient quality that Aldus may not have needed to consult the Vene-
tus A. Thus, Aldus’ sources for the 1504 Iliad must have been contem-
porary – and, in themselves, a fascinating glimpse into the philhellenic
culture of Renaissance Venice.
34 Ibid., 54–55.
208
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blackwell, Christopher W., and Casey Dué. “Homer and History in the
Venetus A.” In Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights
from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, edited by Casey Dué,
1–18. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2009.
Browning, Robert. “Homer in Byzantium.” Viator 6 (1975): 15–33.
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus. De Administrando Imperio. Edited by
G. Moravcsik. Translated by Romilly Jenkins. Washington,
DC: Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies, 1967.
Dué, Casey. “Epea Pteroenta: How We Came to Have Our Iliad.” In
Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and Insights from the Venetus
A Manuscript of the Iliad, 19–30. Washington, DC: Center for
Hellenic Studies, 2009.
Falkenhausen, Vera von. “Greeks in Italy at the Time of Dante (1265–
1321).” In Dante and the Greeks, edited by Jan M. Ziolkowski.
Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and
Collection, 2014.
Geanakoplos, Deno. Greek Scholars in Venice: Studies in the Dissemination
of Greek Learning from Byzantium to Western Europe. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.
Grendler, Paul F. The Universities of the Italian Renaissance. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Hennessy, Cecily. “Young People in Byzantium.” In A Companion to
Byzantium, edited by Liz James, 81–92. Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010.
Kaegi, Walter. Heraclius: Emperor of Byzantium. Cambridge: Cambridge
Kennedy, George A. Introduction to The Latin Iliad: Introduction, Text,
Translation, and Notes. Fort Collins, CO: George A. Kennedy,
1998.
Magno, Alessandro Marzo. Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the
Dawn of the Book. Translated by Gregory Conti. New York:
Europa Editions, 2013.
Marcon, Susy. “Introduction: A Lovely Edition of the Iliad of Homer,
on Parchment.” In Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and In-
209
Felix Szabo
sights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, edited by Casey

Dué, xi–xiv. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies,
2009.
Monro, David B., and Thomas W. Allen. Introduction to Iliad, Books
I–XII. Vol. 1, Homeri Opera. Oxford Classical Texts. 3rd ed.
Oxford: Oxford Classical Press, 1920.
Nicol, Donald M. Byzantium and Venice: A Study in Diplomatic and Cul-
tural Relations. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Pincus, Debra. “Venice and the Two Romes: Byzantium and Rome as
a Double Heritage in Venetian Cultural Politics.” Artibus et
Historiae 13, no. 26 (1992): 101–14.
Psellos, Michael. Fourteen Byzantine Rulers [Chronographia]. Translated by
E. R. A. Sewter. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966.
Zorzi, Marino. Foreword to Recapturing a Homeric Legacy: Images and In-
sights from the Venetus A Manuscript of the Iliad, edited by Casey
Dué, vii–x. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies,
2009.
210
Chapter 14
Alfonso, Valla, & Homer: Poetry and Politics in

Renaissance Naples
CAMILLE REYNOLDS
In the early Renaissance, the kingdom of Naples suffered

from numerous civil wars during the formative years of humanism.
Alfonso the Magnanimous, the king of Aragon, Sicily, and Naples,
consolidated his grip on the region in 1436, and only then did new
cultural expressions of humanist thinking enter into the feudal system
of medieval Naples.1 Alfonso was a learned man and a generous bene-
factor of Renaissance libraries, as well as a great appreciator of the lit-
erary arts. As a patron, he was especially interested in classical poetry
and always had an entourage of humanists gathered in his court, in-
cluding Lorenzo Valla.2 Valla, an already celebrated humanist, became
well known for his textual critique of the Donation of Constantine, an
imperial decree supporting the political authority of the papacy, which
Valla published during his tenure as royal secretary. The subject of this
paper, Valla’s translation of Homer’s Iliad, however, is less celebrated.3
The limited scholarly discussion of Homer in early Renaissance Italy
has generally termed Latin translations as an unsophisticated apprecia-
tion of the Greek poet, as most investigations into this period have
been colored by George Chapman’s critical opinion of Latin transla-
1 The monarchial government of Naples retained its connection to imperial Spain in a

manner that did not resemble the political landscape of any other Italian polity. See
Aurelio Musi, “The Kingdom of Naples in the Spanish Imperial System,” in Spain in
Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500–1700, ed. Thomas James Dandelet and John A.
Marino (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 75.
2 Alfonso of Aragon also made strides in civic architecture, with the construction of a
triumphal arch at the entrance of the Castel Nuovo, ichnographically and structurally
similar to triumphal arches of Roman emperors. See K. J. Garlick, “The Later Renais-
sance in Naples,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 122, no. 5216 (1974): 517.
3 According to Valentina Prosperi, the longing to know the voice of the father of po-
etry and the predecessor of Vergil, fostered a reemergence of Homer in early modern
Italy. See, Valetina Prosperi, Iliads without Homer - The Renaissance aftermath of the Trojan
legend in Italian poetry (ca. 1400–1600) (Master’s Thesis, Università di Sassari, 2012), 67.
Camille Reynolds
tions and his English seventeenth-century translation.4 Scholars have

paid little attention to Valla’s translation as a notable contribution,
mostly became textual sources are silent on its reception. This paper
offers two important conclusions: the evidence of documents, and the
literary impact of Valla’s translation, refute the argument that Latin
translations were crude and unpopular.5 And, based on the historical
evidence, the king’s desire to translate Homer served a diplomatic
function for his courtly politics. The translation emerged not only
from literary interest, but was also used as a tool of political influence
as Alfonso transformed himself from a Spanish monarch into a Re-
naissance Italian king.
In 1440, the king commissioned his royal secretary, Valla, to
write an elegant Latin prose version of the Iliad. The commission is
lost, but two documents found in the Curia Siciliae, the Aragonese ar-
chives in Spain, confirm Valla’s translation of Homer.6 Alfonso, clearly
impressed with Lorenzo’s rhetorical skill and aware of his secretary’s
difficultly with the Greek language, displays his excitement at the in-
troduction of Homer into his Neapolitan court. He entreats the Maes-
tro Racional, Lucovico Sachano, the head of the Aragonese treasury at
Messina, to bring a copy of a Greek lexicon on his arrival to Naples. A
copy belonged to Sachano as well as to the monastery of the Holy
Trinity in Messina.
Cum sepenumero apud omnes fere scriptores in-

veniamus Homerum poetam in testimonium, in aucto-
ritatem, in ornamentum assumi, eundem tantopere in
omni sapientie genere laudari, eundem antiquissimum
non modo poetarum verum eciam scriptorum esse,
4 In her two articles, Robin Sowerby has offered the most critical and comprehensive
opinion on Homeric reception in the early Renaissance, with other scholars, including
Valentina Prosperi, using her work as a source for secondary discussion on Homer in
early modern Italy.
5 Robin Sowerby, “The Homeric Versio Latino” Illinois Classical Studies 21 (1996): 165.
See also Robin Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure with Homer (I),” International Journal
of the Classical Tradition 4, no. 1 (1997): 61–64.
6 ACA, reg. 2893, fol. 63 & ACA, reg. 2893, fol. 65. See also, Juan Ruiz Calonja, “Al-
fonso el Magnánimo y la traducción de la Ilíada por Lorenzo Valla” Boletin de la R.

Acad. De Barcelona 23 (1950): 114.
212
Chapter 14 - Alfonso, Valla, & Homer
eundem denique magnum illud et diuturnum bellum

trojanum describere, cupido nobis incessit hunc tan-
tum poetam cognoscendi et ab eo audiendi trojanum
bellum, quod apud latinos etsi vulgatissimum tamen
nulli pene est notum. Itaque Laurencio Vallensi uni de
Secretaris nostris, viro ad hanc rem in primis y doneo
negocium dedimus ut hunc auctorem et hoc opus
quod Ilias dicitur nobis e grego transferret. Is decem
libros transtulit, quos eum vidimus vehemencius ad
amorem reverenciamque auctoris sumus incensi; quo
magis interpretem ipsum ut pergeret ac maturaret
jussimus. Ceterum hic ait unam sibi rem esse impedi-
mento, non tam ad pergendum maturandumque quam
ad elimandum et expoliendum opus, quod caret libro
de vocabulis grecis. Audisse autem illud penes te esse.7
The second request is almost an exact replica of the first, urgently re-
questing the use of the Greek-Latin dictionary.8 The king stated that
purpose of the translation was the restoration of Homeric poetry to
the West. Leonzio Pilato had already completed a Latin translation in
the fourteenth century, but this edition had been poorly received. Al-
7 “When in almost all authors we often find the poet Homer being taken as a witness,
cited as an authority and [his poetry] held to be of exemplary beauty, the same figure
being praised so greatly for every kind of wisdom and being not only the most ancient
of poets but even of writers as well, and finally the same author that describes that
great and long-lasting Trojan war, a desire came over us to become acquainted with
this great poet and to hear his account of the Trojan war, which despite being an event
generally known about is nevertheless virtually unknown in any detail among the Lat-
ins. And so we gave Laurentius Valla, one of our secretaries and a man supremely
fitted to this task, the job of translating for us this author and that work which is called
the Iliad from the Greek. This man has translated ten books and when we saw them
we were more ardently inflamed to love and revere the author; and on that account we
have ordered him to continue and bring his translation to completion soon. For the
rest he says that there is only one matter that is impeding him, not so much in the
speed of completion as in the polishing up and refining of the work, namely that he
lacks a book of Greek vocabulary. But he has heard that there is one with you (ACA,
reg. 2893, fol. 63). For translation, see Sowerby “Early Humanist Failure,” 62.
8 In the second letter Alfonso states that the book would be much better guarded with
the Maestro Racional than if it were delivered by some other mode of transportation:
“Eo quidem magis quod tucius illum tu ipse portabis quam alteri crederes et hic cus-
todies fidelius quam forsitan ab altero custodiri putares” (ACA reg. 2893, fol. 65). See
also Calonja, “Alfonso el Magnánimo,” 115.
213
Camille Reynolds
fonso took great pains to ensure a proper and polished translation, as

well as to refine the books that Valla had already finished. In reality,
Valla created a Latin, paraphrased version of the first sixteen books of
Homer’s Iliad, and left the remainder of the translation to his pupil,
Francesco Griffolini, to complete after his departure from Naples.
In the medieval period, some Trojan stories survived from the
Greek epic cycle, but these tales were not connected to the Homeric
epic, and humanist interest in the illustrious Greek poet did not gain
major significance until the fourteenth century. 9 Scholarship on
Homer in the Early Renaissance is limited and understudied, as work
on other classical authors has been more thoroughly examined. One of
the scholars to draw attention to Latin translations argues for the Ital-
ian Renaissance’s “failure” to fully appreciate Homer. Lack of readabil-
ity in Greek led to a cultural impediment for early humanists and led to
translations that did not accurately reflect Homer’s metric style.10 Pila-
to’s fourteenth-century edition of Homer is known in this period, but
was considered poorly written.11 Petrarch tried to learn the language
under the tutelage of a Calabrian monk, but his efforts were unsuc-
cessful. In fact, one of his epistles acutely describes his agony over his
inability to read Homer as he awaited Boccaccio’s copy of Pilato’s
translation.12
Modern scholarship is highly critical of this renewed interest
in Homer: “Given the difficulty of Homer and the prevailing igno-
rance of Greek in the West, [Pilato’s] translation met a real need
among the early . . . it is remarkable that, although the version was
much despised for its general barbarity, it was a hundred years before
there is evidence of a better one in circulation.”13 Valla’s Latin transla-
tion in the 1440s is acknowledged elsewhere, but its exclusion in this
9 Igancio Uribe Martinez, “Las nubes homéricas como representación de lo divino en
el Renacimiento,” Ágora. Estudos Clássicos em Debate 13 (2011): 89. See also Sowerby,
“Early Humanist Failure,” 61.
10 Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure,” 39.
11 Ibid.
12 Petrarch, Epistulae Familiares 24.12.
13 Sowerby, “The Homeric Verso Latino,” 165.
214
passage suggests that Valla’s Latin prose edition is not considered a

notable contribution to the Homeric literary tradition.14
Despite humanist ambivalence towards Greek, Alfonso’s let-
ters to Sachano, which request a dictionary to ensure an accurate and
refined translation, prove that the Homeric reception in Renaissance
was much more nuanced than an Italian “failure” at Homeric transla-
tion. Moreover, some Latin translations did not intend to be a word-
for-word reflection of the grammar. In his commentary on Latin, Ele-
gantiae Linguae Latinae, Valla comprehensively discusses the grammar,
syntax and morphology of late classical authors, arguing that the right
usage of words means it is grammatically correct and, more important-
ly, rhetorically effective: “Elegantia stand[s] for semantic precision and
refinement rather than for stylishness. Good Latin is even more im-
portant than good grammar—a distinction which Valla derives from
Quintilian.”15 Since Valla supported a rhetorical style in Latin, it is like-
ly that he would dismiss a word-for-word Latin translation from Greek
in favor of a prose edition that captured the artistic essence of the po-
etry. This is not a matter of “crudity” in Latin composition as it is an
editorial choice made by the editor. A translation that reflects the liter-
ary styles of its translator is a stylistic decision that is acceptable when
one considers the politics behind all modern translations.
It has been also proposed that Alfonso’s request for a lexicon
signified Valla’s ambivalence toward this translation project, but this is
historical speculation. Valla’s transfer of the project over to his student
was most likely a practical strategy, considering the humanist’s difficul-
ty in reading Greek.16 Francesco Griffolini, tasked with completing the
Homeric translation of the Iliad after Valla, and later responsible for
the translation of the Odyssey, conveyed his own frustration at inter-
preting and reproducing the text: “Over so many centuries I think no-
body has yet been found, or if such a one existed his work is not ex-
tant, who has translated this most eloquent poet with any elegance and
14 Sowerby, “Early Humanist Failure,” 61–64.

15 Lodi Nauta, “Lorenzo Valla and the Rise of Humanist Dialectic” in The Cambridge
Companion of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 196.
16 Ibid., 61.
215
Camille Reynolds
not made him almost childish.”17 Griffolini’s comments confirm that

this fifteenth-century translation was purposely commissioned to su-
persede the earlier Latin editions of Homer, which were considered
much less eloquent in their style and composition.
The printing history of this translation indicates some positive
reception to Valla’s publication. Eight extant editions of Valla’s trans-
lation exist, dating from 1474–1512. Three originated from Hain,
Germany, one from Brescia in northern Italy, one from Colonia, an-
other in Barcelona, and one sixteenth-century reproduction from a
Venetian publisher in 1502.18 These publications are a testament to the
enduring influence of Valla’s translation efforts in the early Renais-
sance. 19 While recent scholarship is invaluable to understanding the
origins of early modern Italian interest in Greek poetry, the argument
that the translations were a failure oversimplifies humanist perceived
antagonism to Homer, and does not take into account the Italians'
personal efforts to refine their translations.
The last question unanswered is whether Alfonso’s commis-
sion had any political significance. As a Spanish king, Alfonso tried to
reinvent himself among an Italian populace once he seized power in
Naples. Alan Ryder comments that “in all he did, Alfonso scrupulously
respected Neapolitan institutions, seeking neither to impose offices or
practices from elsewhere nor to flood the administration with Span-
iards and Sicilians.”20
Valla’s service to Alfonso began when the king first surround-
ed himself with an imported humanist circle in the 1430s. He attracted
to his court Lorenzo Valla, Antonio Beccadelli, and Bartolomeo Facio,
along with other major figures. Leonardo Bruni, famous for develop-
ing the relationship of humanism to modern political theory, visited
Alfonso’s court in 1440 with a copy of Aristotle’s Politics in hand.21
17 Ibid., 63.
18 Calonja, “Alfonso el Magnánimo,” 112.
19 Calonja admits that the print run for Valla’s translation was not as popular as his
translation of Aesop’s fables, but it was certainly not a publication failure and note-
worthy enough for Sowerby to have contextualized its influence. See Ibid., 112.
20 Alan Ryder, Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples and Sicily, 1396–1458 (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 254.

21 Jerry Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), 329.
216
Valla served the Neapolitan ruler for over ten years (1435–47), and as
a royal secretary and court historian the humanist enjoyed some of the
most successful and productive years of his career. Not surprisingly,
Valla’s brash nature, his arrogance, lack of diplomatic skills, and his
polemic writings led to numerous difficulties between him and the
other humanists-in-residence. The scholars competed for the rights to
draft the king’s imperial biographies, and Facio detested Valla to such
a degree that he penned four invectives against his rival.22
A number of Valla’s work reflected Alfonso’s own literary in-
terests and political aspirations, including his most famous critique on
the Donation of Constantine, in 1440. Valla’s textual criticism helped to
justify Alfonso’s diplomatic opposition to Pope Eugene IV, who had
previously interfered in Neapolitan affairs by favoring a rival faction
which contended for the kingdom of Naples during Alfonso’s con-
quest of the region. This controversial work directly supported Alfon-
so’s political campaign against the papacy. This is the political land-
scape that existed when the king requested Valla to produce a copy of
the Iliad. Alfonso had already appropriated humanist writings to criti-
cally engage with political affairs; it is reasonable to ascertain that he
would also use Valla’s literary genius to help aid his cultural transfor-
mation as a Renaissance monarch.
Alfonso’s efforts to have Valla’s translation be widely received
met with some success. First and foremost, his patronage proved suc-
cessful in motivating other patrons to desire Latin translations. Ac-
cording to J.R. Calonja’s study of the papal libraries, Pope Nicholas V,
who requested a translation of Thucydides from Valla, offered ten
thousand golden coins for a translation of Homer.23 Griffolini trans-
lated more of the Iliad and the Odyssey on the orders of Pope Pius II,
for its incorporation into his personal library. 24 Interestingly, these
aforementioned popes both had harmonious relations with the Arago-
nese court: Alfonso had strong relations with Pope Nicolas V, and
Alfonso’s heir, Ferrante, had diplomatic success with Pope Pius II in
22 Ryder, “Alfonso the Magnanimous,” 256.

23 Calonja, “Alfonso el Magnánimo,” 112.
24 Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples, 327.
217
Camille Reynolds
repelling French invasion. 25 The same leaders that shared a political

relationship also enjoyed the cultural exchange of humanist writings.
This is notable, considering Alfonso’s contentious relationship with
several papal figures— as demonstrated by the king’s support of the
treatise against the Donation of Constantine. It is unclear whether this is
evidence of political diplomacy or cultural rivalry, nevertheless, Alfon-
so’s patronage of Homeric translation made a positive impression on
other political and cultural figures in Italy, solidifying his status as a
Renaissance king. Furthermore, Alfonso’s court attracted more cultur-
al attention. Milanese humanist Pietro Candido Decembrio offered to
translate the remaining books of the Iliad for Alfonso when he visited
Naples in 1451, although this work was never completed.26
This cultural campaign also had influence on the emergence
of humanism in Spain, as Pere Miguel Carbonell, a royal Spanish ar-
chivist at Aragon, enthusiastically praised Alonso for his artistic pat-
ronage: “For these we are all in the debt of King Alfonso who has, as
it were, awakened us from sleep and shown us the way to appreciate,
understand, and grasp such goodly treasure as are these sciences, espe-
cially the arts of oratory and poetry.” 27 These sources confirm that
Alfonso’s benefaction attracted much needed cultural dominance to
the Neapolitan kingdom, and by extension, its leader. Alfonso in-
creased his prominence with the help of politically controversial and
subversive figures like Lorenzo Valla. Moreover, his renewed interest-
ed in a relatively undervalued author helped to set a literary precedent
and to promote Naples as a cultural rival for humanist innovation.
Naples was almost a century behind in the formation of the
humanist movement, as the region was embittered with multiple civil
wars during the fourteenth century. Alfonso’s reign added political
stability to the city, as well as an opportunity for other cities to witness
the “rebirth” of Naples. With the introduction of a new kingdom, Al-
fonso had a chance to place Naples on equal footing among other Ital-
ian states. He imported and welcomed humanists from various parts
25 Paul Dover, “Royal Diplomacy in Renaissance Italy: Ferrante D’aragona (1458–

1494) and his Ambassadors” Mediterranean Studies 14 (2005): 63.
26 Ryder, “Alfonso the Magnanimous,” 329.
27 Ibid., 306.
218
of Italy to support his cultural campaign and reformation. His support

of Greek poetry, with a previous Florentine translation by Pilato—
poorly translated and even more poorly received—provided a perfect
opportunity.28 Greek poetry, among other important sources, helped
Alfonso undergo the political metamorphosis of a Spanish ruler trans-
forming into an Italian prince, and actively endowed his newfound
persona with humanist allure and political significance that outshined
his former self, a tradition continued by his heirs: “[Alfonso] was one
in a long line of Aragonese kings that had acquired first-hand
knowledge of all his lands, had learned the shape of Italian politics—
the key to Mediterranean diplomacy—and had opened new perspec-
tives to Aragonese ambition.”29
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atlas, Alan W. Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1985.
Bentley, Jerry H. Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987.
Calonja, Juan Ruiz. “Alfonso el Magnánimo y la traducción de la Ilíada
por Lorenzo Valla.” Boletin de la R. Acad. De Barcelona 23
(1950): 109–15.
Dover, Paul. “Royal Diplomacy in Renaissance Italy: Ferrante
D'aragona (1458–1494) and his Ambassadors.” Mediterranean
Studies 14 (2005): 57–94.
Garlick, K. J. “The Later Renaissance in Naples.” Journal of the Royal
Society of Arts 122, no. 5216 (1974): 516–31.
Martinez, Igancio Uribe. “Las nubes homéricas como representación
de lo divino en el Renacimiento.” Ágora. Estudos Clássicos em
Debate 13 (2011): 83–95.
Musi, Aurelio. “The Kingdom of Naples in the Spanish Imperial Sys-
tem.” In Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion, 1500–1700,
28 Ibid., 313.
29 Ibid., 254.
219
Camille Reynolds
edited by Thomas J. Dandelet and John A. Marino. Leiden:

Brill, 2007.
Nauta, Lodi. “Lorenzo Valla and the Rise of the Humanist Dialectic.”
In The Cambridge Companion of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by
James Hankin, 193–210. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Petrarch. Epistulae Familiares. Translated by Aldo Bernardo. New York:
Italica Press, 2014.
Prosperi, Valentina. Iliads without Homer: The Renaissance Aftermath of the
Trojan Legend in Italian Poetry (ca. 1400–1600). Master’s Thesis,
Università di Sassari, 2012.
Ryder, Alan. Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples and Sicily,
1396–1458. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Sowerby, Robin. "Early Humanist Failure with Homer." Pts. 1 and
2. International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4, no. 1 (1997):
37–63; no. 2 (1997): 165–94.
220
Chapter 15
The Language Question:

Cultural Politics of the Medici Dynasty
BRENDAN MICHAEL SMALL
Scholars have well established that the Tuscan dialect was an

integral factor in the formation of the standardized national language
of Italy.1 By the early sixteenth century, theorists began assessing and
regulating European vernaculars, and in 1525 Pietro Bembo (1470–
1547) wrote his canonical treatise Prose della volgar lingua [Writings on
the Vulgar Language]. Bembo’s work expressed what would become
the dominant notion regarding Italian language, that the Italian ver-
nacular represented a natural continuation of Latin.2 Prior to Bembo,
humanist scholars like Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) and Paolo Cortesi
(1465–1510) had laid the groundwork for applying classical textual
scholarship to texts written in regional dialects. According to Christo-
pher S. Celenza, “all that remained—and this was the task to which
Bembo set himself—was to regulate the vernacular, to create out of
many local and temporal variants one language that was suitable for
high literature.”3 It was a complex and multifaceted process that schol-
ars still debate today. However, within the debates surrounding la ques-
tione della lingua [the language question], scholars generally agree that
the Tuscan dialect was more influential than other regional dialects.
There were other prominent dialects and models that may
have been selected as the paradigmatic model for a standardized na-
tional language. Castiglione (1478–1529) championed the lingua cor-
tegiana, the language used by the intellectuals and administrators in the
main Italian courts. Machiavelli (1469–1527) favored a colloquial spo-
1 See Paola Manni, Il Trecento Toscano: La Lingua di Dante, Petrarca E Boccaccio (Bologna:
Il Mulino, 2003); see also, Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies, ed. Gaetana Marrone
and Paolo Puppa (2007), s.v. “Linguistics.”
2 Christopher S. Celenza, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin's
Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 144.

3 Ibid., 145.
Brendan Michael Small
ken language. Bembo, in Prose della volgar lingua advocated for a vernac-
ular humanism. Powerful leaders like Lorenzo Il Magnifico (1449–92)
and Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74) preferred the Florentine vernacu-
lar. They appropriated the language to promote Tuscan in a cultural
project that linked the dialect to the political standing and intellectual
prestige of the Florentine state.4 I propose that it was the Medici dyn-
asty’s program of cultural politics and propaganda that resulted in
Tuscan being favored above all other dialects and models.
THE ODYSSEY TRANSLATED IN THE FLORENTINE VERNACULAR
In 1582 the Florentine printer Bartolomeo Sermartelli pub-

lished L’Odissea D’Homero Tradotta in Volgare Fiorentino da M. Girolamo
Baccelli [The Odyssey by Homer translated in the Florentine Vernacular
by M. Girolamo Baccelli]. The eight-volume work was the first com-
plete Odyssey ever printed in the Florentine vernacular.5 The book in-
cludes a flowery dedication to the second Grand Duke of Tuscany,
Francesco I de’ Medici (1541–87), and a woodcut title page that has an
intricate printer’s device featuring the Medici coat of arms (Fig. 1).
That the Grand Duke requested a Florentine translation of Homer
bespeaks the broader cultural milieu of Italy in this period. Eugene
Rice explains that, “among men who needed to read, write, and calcu-
late in order to manage their businesses and conduct civic affairs, there
was a large and ready market for printed books.”6 Publishers tried to
satisfy the unremitting enthusiasm of the bourgeoisie for edification
and self-improvement by printing books in a more accessible language.
The result was a steady stream of vernacular translations throughout
the sixteenth century; this was a crucial development in printing, since
those classical texts were now able to reach a much broader audience
4 Giovanna Summerfield and Federica Santini, The Politics of Poetics Poetry and Social
Activism in Early-Modern through Contemporary Italy (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, 2013), 14.
5 Dizionario Biografico – Treccani, s.v. “BACCELLI, Girolamo.”
6 Eugene F. Rice, The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559 (New York: Nor-
ton, 1970), 6.
222
Chapter 15 - Cultural Politics of the Medici Dynasty
than was possible in the original Greek and Latin.7 The Italian transla-
tions were more intelligible to the middle class than Latin or Greek,
but they were not universal. The Italian language was dominated by
regional dialects: Tuscan, Lombard, Neapolitan, Sicilian, etc. In 1582,
after decades of debate and dialogue, spurred by Bembo’s treatise, a
standardized national language still did not exist. Thus Baccelli trans-
lated the Odyssey into a distinct regional dialect, the volgare fiorentino.
Baccelli's choice reflected the complexities in creating a stand-
ard Italian language during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As
sixteenth-century Italian humanists attempted to establish linguistic
norms and codify the Italian language, the literary Tuscan, as used by
the great writers of the Trecento, particularly Boccaccio and Petrarch,
prevailed as the dominant influence on what would become a more
homogenous literary language. 8 The Tuscan of the three crowns––
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio––presented a natural model for writ-
ers who wished to break free from the confines of their regional dia-
lect. Before the thirteenth century, a uniform, standard language can
scarcely be said to have existed on the Italian peninsula.9 Nonliterary
material, when not written in Latin, was buried in regional dialects.
The same was true, to a slightly less degree, of consciously literary
works. For example, the stylized Sicilian of the Scuola Siciliana, the Cen-
tral Italian of the Ritmo Cassinese, the Lombard of Bonvesin da la Riva,
etc., as contrasted with the Tuscan of Dante and his contemporaries.10
The problem facing any writer of the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-
ry who hoped to reach beyond a local audience was to find a mode of
speech understandable to all. In the fifteenth century Latin was adopt-
ed as the lingua franca of the humanists, but the distinct regional dia-
lects remained the dominant language of the bourgeoisie and less well-
educated classes. The Medici family, in an effort to link the Florentine
language with the golden ages of antiquity, helped ensure that the Tus-
can dialect would have a prominent place in the discussions surround-
7 Philip H. Young, The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Translation History of
the Iliad and the Odyssey (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), 96.
8 See Manni, Il Trecento Toscano, 115–71.
9 Robert A. Hall, “The Significance of the Italian ‘Questione Della Lingua,’” Studies in
Philology 39, no. 1 (1942): 1–10.

10 Ibid., 3.
223
ing the formation of a universal Italian language. The Tuscan dialect

championed by the Medici had already been infused with the language
used by earlier Florentine writers. This created a literary language
shaped by the vernacular language used by Tuscan authors, in addition
to the Latin of the humanists, as evidenced in Baccelli’s translation of
the Odyssey.
THE LITERARY LANGUAGE OF BACCELLI’S TRANSLATION
In Book XXIII of Girolamo Baccelli’s 1582 translation of

Homer, the use of the word cotal reveals the influence of Dante and
Boccaccio. This is the moment in the story when the nurse Eurycleia
tells Penelope the news of Odysseus’s return. Cotal [this, that] is an
adjective written in contemporary Italian as questo. Here the translator’s
choice to use cotal reflects how the sixteenth-century literary language
was infused with a mixture of the Trecento Italian of Dante and Boc-
caccio. Baccelli writes, “Ella le gambe e i piè robusti e forti/ Haveva,
onde fermossi presso al capo/Di lei, e le parlava in cotal forma.”11 Co-
tal comes from the Latin eccu(m) talis. But by the fourteenth century the
original Latin had been transformed from eccum talis into the vulgar
Italian cotali, as evidenced in the fifth canto of the Inferno. Dante writes,
“Cotali uscir de la schiera ov’é Dido.”12 And in volume two of the
Decameron Boccaccio also uses the word: “Calandrino gl’invitó a cena
cotale alla trista.”13 By consequence of Dante and Boccaccio’s univer-
sal renown, their writing style and word choices crept into all of the
regional dialects, thus making cotal a natural word choice for Baccelli.
However, Trecento Italian was not the only style to influence the ver-
nacular.
11 “She had strong and nimble legs, and so she went up to her and bent over her head
to speak to her in this way.” Baccio Baccelli, trans., L'Odissea D'Homero, Tradotta in
Volgare Fiorentino Da M. Girolamo Baccelli (Florence: Appresso Il Sermartelli, 1582), 623.
All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
12 “Thus issued, from that troop where Dido ranks.” Emma Cusani, Il Grande Viaggio
Nei Mondi Danteschi: Iniziazione Ai Misteri Maggiori (Rome: Mediterranee, 1993), 140.
13 “Calandrino apathetically invited them to dinner.” Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Comento
Di Giovanni Boccacci Sopra La Commedia Con Le Annotazioni Di A.M. Salvini: Preceduto

Dalla Vita Di Dante Allighieri Scritta Dal Medesimo, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Firenze: Le
Monnier, Felice, 1863), 475.
224
When humanists like Niccoló Niccoli (1364–1437), Poggio

Bracciolini (1380–1459), and Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) set out to
recover classical literature and bring ancient authors into the continu-
um of contemporary culture, they irrevocably altered the Italian lan-
guage and played a fundamental role in establishing a standardized
national language.14 The humanists’ enthusiasm for the Latin of Cice-
ro, Virgil, and the ancients had a powerful effect on the spelling, syn-
tax, and vocabulary of the vernacular. According to Robert A. Hall,
“there was a lag of nearly a century between the rise of humanism at
the beginning of the Quattrocento and the re-assertion of the value of
the vernacular towards the end of that century and the beginning of
the Cinquecento.”15 Thus, by the second half of the fifteenth century,
most writers were using a language that was influenced by the Trecen-
to Tuscan of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, by their own regional
dialects, and by the Latin of classical literature.
Again, Book XXIII of Baccelli’s 1582 translation provides fur-
ther evidence of those various influences. His translation reads,
“Poscia ch’Vlisse quince si partio…” 16 The word Poscia [then, after]
confirms that Latin, the Trecento authors, and the local dialect influ-
enced Baccelli’s translation. Poscia is Florentine and comes from the
Latin word postea, meaning then or after. The thirteenth-century Flor-
entine troubadour Guido Cavalcanti, who greatly influenced succes-
sors like Dante, Boccaccio and Poliziano, originally popularized the
use of Poscia.17 Cavalcanti transformed the Latin postea to poscia to mim-
ic the spoken Florentine dialect, as he believed the soft sound of the
14 The earliest generations of humanists laid claim to Dante’s cultural prestige while
simultaneously repurposing his literature and ideology into new forms and contexts.
The treatment of Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch by this generation of humanists has
led scholars to examine how they transposed the ideologies of classical literature and
these prominent authors on to a civic template in order to create an ideal model of
active and politically committed Florentine citizenship. “Civic humanism” is a com-
plex and multifaceted reading of humanist activity, however an in depth digression
would be extraneous to the aims of this essay. But it worth noting that even the earli-
est proponents of humanism, such as Bruni, published texts in the vernacular. See
James Hankins, “Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo Bruni,” in Hu-
manism and Creativity in the Renaissance, ed. Christopher S. Celenza and Kennteh
Gouwens (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006),11–29
15 Hall, “Significance of the Italian ‘Questione Della Lingua,’” 5.
16 “After which Ulysses departs from here…”Baccelli, L'Odissea D'Homero, 624.
17 Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Guido Cavalcanti, Biography - Italian Poet.”
225
spoken word was agreeable for the language of literature as well.18 In

other parts of Italy poscia would typically be written as poi, or dopo. Bac-
celli’s choice to use poscia is a direct result of the desire to have litera-
ture reflect the way people spoke, and continues the tradition began by
Cavalcanti.
Although the vernacular texts of authors like Cavalcanti, Dan-
te, and Boccaccio were influential, the literati of Italy exalted Latin
texts above all other forms of literature for most of the 1400s. As Hall
noted, it took nearly a century before attitudes began to shift to the
view that vernacular literature could become a worthy alternative and
successor to humanistic Latin literature. Eventually writers strove to
learn and recreate the vernacular language to the highest point of its
tradition. 19 Many humanists naturally looked to the literature of the
three crowns, and Lorenzo de’ Medici eagerly supported efforts to
elevate the language of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch to the status of
the great classical authors. “The Italian peninsula was subject to con-
stant political instability in this period, and recourse to either religious
or imperial ideologies became increasingly problematic.”20 With such a
precarious hold on power, rulers in Italy sought out new ways to legit-
imize their authority. Humanism provided the ruling class families like
the Medici in Florence, the Este in Ferrara, cardinals and popes in
Rome, and Alfonso of Aragon in Naples with a strategy that would
enable them to present their dynasties as heir to the Roman political
tradition.21 These families gathered teams of humanists whose princi-
ple function was to represent the ideal image of their patrons in the
newly acquired Latin and associate them with ancient virtue. Among
those prominent families it was Lorenzo de’ Medici and his heirs who
had the foresight to push the functionality of humanists further.
18 Ibid.
19 Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text,
1470–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi
20 Maurizio Campanelli, “Languages,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renais-
sance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 140.

21 Ibid., 140–42
226
THE MEDICI DYNASTY AND THE FLORENTINE VERNACULAR
Lorenzo de’ Medici masterfully employed culture and art as

politics by unusual means.22 His grandfather Cosimo Il Vecchio (1389–
1464) had embarked on a cultural program that produced unparalleled
wonders for the city of Florence, such as Brunelleschi’s dome, the
Medici Palace, and Donatello’s David. Upon his death the city govern-
ment of Florence conferred upon him the title Pater Patriae [Father of
his Country]. Lorenzo was aware of how successful his grandfather’s
cultural program had been and sought to expand on it. He wanted to
have Florence recognized as a new Rome, and as its de facto leader
Lorenzo would be the city’s Augustus. His grandfather’s title was not
enough for Lorenzo; he wanted to be recognized as the apex of nobili-
ty, and in fifteenth-century Florence that meant being noble in the
classical Roman sense.
It was not easy to champion the Tuscan dialect in the human-
ist climate of quattrocento Florence given the dominance and prestige
of Latin among the literati of the city. However, in the 1460s and
1470s the vernacular played an increasingly important part in the cul-
tural and ideological strategies for Florence under the Medici. Lo-
renzo’s efforts linking the contemporary Florentine culture and his
family’s rule to the ancient Romans culminated in Cristoforo Lan-
dino’s (1424–98) commentary of 1481, wherein he celebrated Florence
and its society through the vernacular of Dante. He presented the
Comedy as emblematic of classical and contemporary values.23 Landino
was the tutor of Lorenzo de’ Medici and a member of the Platonic
Academy in Florence, and he was not alone in his promotion of the
vernacular in this period.
22 “Culture and art as politics by other means” refers to the all-important role culture
and art played in propagating the Medici dynasty. Without a dominant military force or
a legitimate noble title, the Medici family employed art and culture in order to maintain
control of Florence. The Medici had poured tremendous economic resourced into
massive building projects and works of art for the city of Florence. The famous axiom
“war is politics by other means,” did not apply to the Medici, as they did not have a
standing national army. They did however have money, and with that money they
enacted a cultural program as a rational instrument to attain their social and political
ends.
23 Summerfield and Santini, Politics of Poetics Poetry and Social Activism, 14.
227
Another respected humanist, Angelo Poliziano, collaborated

with Lorenzo to create a codex known as the Raccolta Aragonese. The
original text of the Raccolta is not extant, but "later copies indicate that
it was a compendium of vernacular poetry, which contained some 480
compositions across a span of 200 hundred years, from the Sicilians
and [Guido] Guinizzelli to the poets of the Certame, and on to contem-
porary Tuscan poets, including Lorenzo himself.”24 Poliziano was one
of the finest classical scholars of his time, and his editorial contribu-
tions to the Raccolta reverberated throughout humanist circles. In the
preface to the work he applied techniques of classical textual scholar-
ship to vernacular works by presenting the first great Tuscan authors
as worthy successors of the classical poets.25 The implication was ob-
vious: the poets, humanists, scholars, and artists in Lorenzo’s Florence
were producing works to rival those of antiquity. Lorenzo was at-
tempting to make the Tuscan dialect an equivalent to the revered Latin
and Greek languages of the golden ages of antiquity. Under the Medi-
ci, Florence was realizing a cultural vibrancy not seen since the times
of Ancient Rome, and Lorenzo was doing everything in his power to
ensure that everyone was aware of it. Based on his patronage for
works like Landino’s commentary, his support and involvement with
the Platonic Academy, and his intimate connection with the Raccolta
Aragonese, it appears that Lorenzo did not elevate the ancient world
above his modern one. He tried to create a public cultural program to
restore and redefine the antique in contemporary terms and for mod-
ern purposes, thus paving the way for a fruitful dialogue between clas-
sical and vernacular scholarship that included scholars like Bembo,
Machiavelli, and Castiglione.
The influential humanist scholar Pietro Bembo wrote, “first
let us set out to imitate the best; then imitate, endeavoring to reach
him; finally, once we have reached him, let us direct all our efforts to-
24 See Giuliano Tanturli, “La Firenze laurenziana davanti alla propria storia letteraria,”
in Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo tempo, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini, (Florence: Olschki,
1992), 27–34.
25 Summerfield and Santini, Politics of Poetics Poetry and Social Activism, 14–15.
228
wards surpassing him.”26 Bembo was referencing Cicero’s use of Latin,

but he was also interested in creating a standard vernacular language, a
sentiment shared by Poliziano in the preface to the Raccolta. Published
in 1525, Bembo’s Prose della Volgar Lingua was one of the first historical
Italian grammars. It championed the work of Petrarch and Boccaccio,
but also advocated for a literary language that was distinct from the
spoken one. Bembo was a Venetian, after all, and still valued regional
dialects, especially his own native one. While Bembo was codifying
Italian grammar, Niccolò Machiavelli presented radical new political
philosophies in his Il Principe, published in 1532, and written in a collo-
quial style. In 1528, Baldassare Castiglione published his immensely
popular Il Libro del Cortigiano, written in the lingua cortegiana. Due to ad-
vances in printing, these books were able to reach an exponentially
greater number of people than had been possibly only a generation
before. Instead of writing in the kind of sophisticated Latin that only
the best-educated members of society could understand, the authors
and print shops responsible for production turned to the regional dia-
lects in order to significantly broaden their audience. In the dedication
of Baccelli’s translation, he expresses to Don Francesco de’ Medici the
importance of using the vernacular to harness the power of classical
literature: “l'età nostra non l'accetterebbe se non ne ritornelli delle can-
zoni basse e volgari…E noi che men sottili siamo, e più sdegnati, le
sdegnamo nelle graui scritture.” 27 The vernacular would help make
classical literature more accessible to the masses, a proposition that
would have seemed very risky only a century earlier.28
In the first decades of the 1500s there was still no unified na-
tional language in Italy (indeed there was no unified nation of Italy),
but humanists like Bembo, Machiavelli, and Castiglione were laying the
26 This specific comment was in regard to Cicero and the Latin language, but it is ger-
mane to his view on the vernacular as well, and language in general. For details, see
Campanelli, “Languages,” 152.
27 “Our age would only accept the recurring lowbrow and vulgar pieces of rhyme of
the poems… And we who are less refined [than the ancients], and are more scorned,
spurn the great literary works.” Dedication to Baccelli, L'Odissea D'Homero.
28 The church was especially skeptical of giving the lower classes access to classical
literature. They were afraid the texts would easily corrupt individuals who were not
educated enough to understand the nuances of ancient texts and reconcile what the
ancient pagan authors wrote with the Church’s Christian doctrine.
229
foundation for a standardized Italian. The analysis of Baccelli’s lan-

guage in Book XXIII of the Odyssey demonstrated how the Tuscan and
Trecento Italian of the three crowns influenced his translation. It
seems logical that Baccelli would be inclined toward the Tuscan dia-
lect, seeing as he was a Florentine citizen, publishing with a Florentine
print shop, dedicated to the Grand Duke of Florence. It is less obvi-
ous why Tuscan became so prominent in the rest of Italian literature––
the printing mecca of Venice had their own regional traditions, the
courts of Papal Rome were filled with an international consortium of
powerful and influential men, and the Sicilians had long and proud
literary customs in their own right. Yet each center eventually looked
to the Tuscan dialect as a model for writing.
Sixteenth-century papal Rome offers insight into why the
Tuscan language continued to be so influential. After the death of
Lorenzo, the Medici family continued to support the Tuscan dialect
and advance its spread throughout Italy. Bembo and Machiavelli both
worked under the patronage of Medici popes. Pope Leo X (1475–
1521) supported Bembo’s endeavor to codify Italian grammar. And
Bembo dedicated Prose della Volgar Lingua to Pope Clement VII (1478–
1534), Leo’s cousin. Clement also supported Machiavelli’s controver-
sial publication of Il Principe. The popes actively perpetuated the
longstanding family tradition that used cultural policy to strengthen
their own positions. The scholars and artists under the patronage of
the Medici popes show how the vernacular had begun to take hold and
spread throughout Italy, aided as it was by the explosion of printing
and the continued guidance of Medici patrons. Despite Lorenzo’s im-
pressive efforts, and the tremendous sway the Medici family held over
scholars and humanists, the variation in the literary language of Bem-
bo, Castiglione, and Machiavelli clearly demonstrates that even though
the literary Tuscan was going to be integral in creating a unified ver-
nacular language, it was by no means a singular model. All three of
these men championed some sort of vernacular that had elements of
the Tuscan dialect combined with components from different linguis-
tic sources.
By the time the Medici duchy had been established in 1532
under the control of Alessandro de’ Medici (1510–37), the influence of
230
his family and the city of Florence in Italy had begun to wane. In fact,
republican-backed supporters assassinated Duke Alessandro in 1537,
and the years of turmoil in Florence between the death of Lorenzo
and the assassination of Alessandro caused many talented artists,
scholars, and even printmakers to flee the city. Venice was a great ben-
eficiary of the exodus, and by the 1530s had become the Italian epi-
center of printing. Venice even attracted long-established Florentine
printers like the Giunti press, who temporarily abandoned their opera-
tions in Florence in favor of Venice.29 The fact that Venice was the
epicenter of printing in the 1530s did not deter the new Medici ruler in
Florence from promoting the Tuscan language and culture.30 After the
assassination of Alessandro, Cosimo I de’ Medici ascended to power
to become the first grand duke of Tuscany. Relying on the proven
model inherited from his ancestors, he embarked on a cultural pro-
gram to strengthen his authority and legitimize his duchy. Using his
vast network of resources he managed to wipe out any vestiges of re-
publican spirit, and he adeptly transformed the Republic of Florence
into a Medicean state. Once the city was firmly under the control of
Grand Duke Cosimo, printers, artists, and scholars returned to Flor-
ence and there was a great revival of the intellectual activity that had
dramatically declined following the death of Lorenzo. Bernardo Giun-
ta (1487–1551), the prominent printer, returned to the city for the last
few years of his life. 31 Vasari published his canonical Vite the same
year Giunta died. In 1540 Cosimo founded the Accademia Fiorentina
[Florentine Academy], which was the heart of the intellectual commu-
nity in Florence and became the main cultural organ of the Medicean
state.32 The Florentine academy under Cosimo was deeply invested in
the study of vernacular. The scholars were continuing the distinctive
tradition of careful collation of early vernacular sources, carrying on
the legacy of Angelo Poliziano. According to Brian Richardson, “such
studies were a potential source of great prestige to the Florentine state,
29 Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy, 213–24.

30 It was not the influx of talent alone that secured Venetian dominance in printing. As
a port city with established trading partners, Venice had distinct advantages over other
Italian cities when it came to book distribution.
32 Mediateca Di Palazzo Medici Riccardi, s.v. “The Medici.”
231
and they were actively encouraged by the Medici family, in particular

by Cosimo and, after his death in 1574, by his son Francesco.”33 Mak-
ing classical literature accessible to the masses would have been a scary
proposition just a century earlier, but, by the time Cosimo rose to
power, the threat posed by the classics no longer concerned him. This
was a testament to how successfully the humanist movement had
permeated Italian society and culture. When Sermartelli printed his
edition of the Odyssey, he did it without any annotations or indexes.
The editor and printer both assumed that their readership would be
familiar enough with Homer and the story of the Odyssey that par-
atexts were not necessary, and wealthy patrons were confident that the
rising middle class would be able to interpret the classics as their social
betters intended. Baccelli’s dedication even praises Homer for illustrat-
ing how the passions of the princes can impact the life of the people.
The dedication to the Grand Duke underscores how, in the Odyssey,
the Prince is in control of his own destiny, and how Homer places
virtue in the hands of men, not gods.
The Church, however, was cognizant that books might begin
to corrupt their readers. Many kinds of texts were censored by the In-
quisition during the sixteenth century. As the rulers of Florence, the
Medici were in charge of overseeing censorship, and even the beloved
Boccaccio was not safe. One particularly influential member of the
Florentine academy, Leonardo Salviati (1540–89), edited the Decameron
in a way that made it clear that those who went against Christian mo-
rality were to be shunned. The copy of the Decameron he produced
transformed all of the churchmen into lay people; more than anything
else, Salviati thought books should be linguistic references for modern
writers. The Academy edited a panoply of books that were named in
the Inquisition’s list of banned books, and, while editing for content,
their editors would fix the grammar and spelling of the work according
to the Academy's own standards. Editors, especially Salviati, took it as
axiomatic that writing had to follow pronunciation. He believed in the
principle that “one should avoid spellings which [do] not correspond
to the way Tuscans spoke…Tuscan pronunciation avoids effort and
232
harshness.” 34 While editors expurgated texts to appease Rome, they

simultaneously altered word division and used the apostrophe more
and more in order to clarify the sense. Salviati saw works like the
Decameron as linguistic texts, and believed they should be edited to at-
test to the glory of our vernacular.35
Salviati was highly influential within the academy. He no
doubt had an effect on Girolamo Baccelli, who also grew up as a
member of the Accademia Fiorentina. Baccelli’s attitude toward pronun-
ciation has already been discussed in regard to his choice to use the
word poscia. However, the complete couplet from book XXIII refer-
enced earlier reads “Poscia ch’Vlisse quince si partio/Per veder Troia
misera e’nfelice.”36 E’nfelice is used to connote e in felice [and in happi-
ness], demonstrating how the composition was improved to be, as
Salviati asserts, “piú agevole para alla lingua e all’orecchie piú dilettevo-
le assai.”37 Baccelli’s translation is a result of his education within the
Florentine academy, and, by extension, the century-long influence of
the Medici family over the perception and use of the Tuscan dialect.
The dedication of this text is to Don Francesco Medici, Cosimo’s
brother and a distant relative of Il Magnifico (Fig. 2), and the Medici
coat of arms appears boldly and elegantly on Sermartelli’s device from
the title page (Fig. 3). A tortoise supports a sail on its back, on which a
lily is plainly seen––the lily symbolizes the city of Florence, and the
turtle and sail illustrate the motto, Festina lente [make haste slowly]. This
ancient Latin proverb calls to mind the quote from Julius Caesar about
military strategy, but it is also a testament to the brilliant cultural poli-
tics of the Medici family. Aldus Manutius, the renowned Venetian
printer and publisher, was known for using the motto festina lente; the
printer’s device was unsubtly suggesting that they too produced great
texts in Florence. Traditionally, the tortoise has been recognized vari-
ously as a symbol of wisdom, prudence, vitality, longevity, and even

35 Leonardo Salviati, Degli Avvertimenti Della Lingua Sopra Il Decamerone (Venice: Priuie-
gio, 1584) 144.
36 “After which Ulysses happily departs to see the miserable Troy.” L'Odissea
D'Homero, 624.
37 “it seems easier to the tongue and far more pleasing to the ear.” Leonardo Salviati,
Degli Avvertimenti Della Lingua Sopra Il Decamerone (Venice: Priuiegio, 1584), 209.
233
immortality—presumably qualities to which printers and dynasties

alike might aspire.38
This edition, in a way, can be seen as the culmination of the
cultural policies started more than a century prior to its publication.
The Medici tactics were tremendously successful, in that they culmi-
nated with the book’s being dedicated to Grand Duke Francesco de’
Medici. The cultural policies used as politics by other means had ulti-
mately proven effective, and the descendants of the man who was
awarded the title Pater Patriae by the republican government of Flor-
ence now ruled the city as absolute monarchs. Standardization of the
Italian language were shaped by the cultural program of the Medici
family. In fact, 1582, the year the first edition of the L’Odissea
D’Homero Tradotta in Volgare Fiorentino da M. Girolamo Baccelli was pub-
lished, coincides with the founding of the Accademia della Cruscia
[Academy of the Bran]. The Accademia della Cruscia was a Florentine
linguistics institution that went on to play a critical role in the for-
mation of a unified national language. The fact that the institution was
founded in Florence under the control of the Medici family ensured
the scholars and philologists overseeing the task of standardizing the
national language would promote the Tuscan dialect. Ultimately a
group of academics working at the Accedemia della Cruscia would be
charged with answering la questione della lingua, and they affirmed the
prominence of the Tuscan dialect. Without the continued support of
generations of Medici rulers, and their concerted effort to champion
the Florentine language and culture, the Tuscan dialect would not have
figured so prominently into the formation of the standardized national
language of Italy.
38 Janet E. Scinto, “The Cover Design,” The Library Quaterly: Information, Community,
Policy 78, no. 3 (2008), 315–17.
234
APPENDIX: IMAGES
Figure 1. Sermartelli, Bartolomeo, Title Page of

L’Odissea D’Homero Tradotta in Volgare Fiorentino
da M. Girolamo Baccelli, 1582, Wood-engraving,
University of Chicago Special Collection Re-
search Center.
235
Figure 2. Sermartelli, Bartolomeo, Dedication to the second

grand duke of Tuscany, Francesco de’ Medici, 1582, University
of Chicago Special Collection Research Center.
Figure 3. Sermartelli, Bartolomeo. Sermartelli printers device, wood-

engraving, 1582, University of Chicago Special Collection Re-
search Center.
236
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baccelli, Baccio, trans. L'Odissea D'Homero, Tradotta in Volgare Fiorentino

da M. Girolamo Baccelli. Florence: appresso il Sermartelli, 1582.
Boccaccio, Giovanni. Il Comento Di Giovanni Boccacci Sopra La Commedia
Con Le Annotazioni Di A.M. Salvini: Preceduto Dalla Vita Di
Dante Allighieri Scritta Dal Medesimo. Edited by Gaetano Mil-
anesi. Florence: Le Monnier, Felice, 1863.
Campanelli, Maurizio. “Languages.” In The Cambridge Companion to the
Italian Renaissance, edited by Michael Wyatt, 139–63. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Celenza, Christopher S. The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Histori-
ans, and Latin's Legacy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2004.
Cusani, Emma. Il Grande Viaggio Nei Mondi Danteschi: Iniziazione Ai Mis-
teri Maggiori. Rome: Mediterranee, 1993.
Hall, Robert A. “The Significance of the Italian ‘Questione Della Lin-
gua.’” Studies in Philology 39, no. 1 (1942): 1–10.
Hankins, James. “Humanism in the Vernacular: The Case of Leonardo
Bruni.” In Humanism and Creativity in the Renaissance: Essays in
Honor of Ronald G. Witt, edited by Christopher S. Celenza and
Kennteh Gouwens, 11–29. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006.
Manni, Paola. Il Trecento Toscano: La Lingua di Dante, Petrarca E Boccaccio.
Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.
Rice, Eugene F. The Foundations of Early Modern Europe, 1460–1559.
New York: Norton, 1970.
Richardson, Brian. Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the
Vernacular Text, 1470–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994.
Salviati, Leonardo. Degli Avvertimenti della lingua sopra il Decamerone. Ven-
ice: Priuiegio, 1584.
Scinto, Janet E. “The Cover Design.” The Library Quaterly: Information,
Community, Policy 78, no. 3 (2008): 315–17.
Summerfield, Giovanna, and Federica Santini. The Politics of Poetics Poet-
ry and Social Activism in Early-Modern through Contemporary Italy.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.
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Tanturli, Giuliano. “La Firenze laurenziana davanti alla propria storia

letteraria.” In Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo tempo, edited by Gian
Carlo Garfagnini, 27–34. Florence: Olschki, 1992.
Wyatt, Michael, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance.
Young, Philip H. The Printed Homer: A 3,000 Year Publishing and Transla-
tion History of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Jefferson, NC: McFar-
land, 2003.
238
Chapter 16
Translating Homer in the French Renaissance:

The 1584 French Verse Translation of the Iliad
JI GAO
The 1584 translation in French verse of Homer’s Iliad, printed

in Paris by the publisher Abel L’Angelier, is a compilation of the works
of Hugues Salel and Amadis Jamyn. Hugues Salel (1504–53), “human-
ist, poet, translator, lay abbot, courtier, patron and protector of men of
letters, chamberlain-in-ordinary, and royal almoner,”1 was valet de cham-
bre of King Francis I, who commissioned the translation of the Iliad;
the first ten books were published in Paris in 1545.2 Nearly three dec-
ades later, Amadis Jamyn (1540?–93) took over this task. By 1577, all
twenty-four books of the Iliad were available in French verse.3 This
complete Salel-Jamyn translation of the Iliad, later revised and correct-
ed by Jamyn, saw republication in 1580. Two years later, in 1582,
Jamyn published his translation of the first three books of the Odyssey.
He then added these books to the previously edited Salel-Jamyn Iliad
and integrated them into one volume that saw subsequent publication
in 1584, 1599 and 1605. The 1584 edition, which was the last Homer
edition published during Jamyn’s lifetime,4 is perhaps the most inter-
esting one to discuss given its context of French nationalism and the
ways in which it was translated. In the light of the methods of transla-
tion, the translators and their literary circles, as well as the context of
French nationalism, this article aims to offer a detailed study of the
edition’s cultural, historical and political background in order to fully
appreciate the specificity of this volume.
1 Howard H. Kalwies, Hugues Salel: His Life and Works (Normal, IL: Applied Literature
Press, 1979), 1.
2 Hugues Salel, Les Dix premiers livres de l’Iliade d’Homere, Prince des Poetes: Traduicts en vers
Francois, par M. Hugues Salel . . . (Paris: Vincent Sertenas, 1545).

3 Theodosia Graur, Un disciple de Ronsard Amadis Jamyn, 1540(?)–1593: Sa vie, son œuvre,
son temps (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1929), 217–19.

4 For a detailed list of Jamyn’s translations, see Graur, Disciple de Ronsard Amadis Jamyn,
xi–xiv.
Ji Gao
The 1584 Homer edition is referred to as a “compilation”

because it marks a very clear distinction between the three major parts:
Salel’s translation of the Iliad’s first eleven books, Jamyn’s translation
of its remaining thirteen books, and the first three books of the Odys-
sey. Between them are inserted prefaces and poems written either by
Salel and Jamyn or by other men of letters, notably by Pierre de Ron-
sard (1524–85), all of which provide us with useful information on
their purpose and method of translation as well as on their reception
within the literary circle. To facilitate the reader’s understanding of the
story’s outline, there is an “argument” or a brief summary of the plot,
before each book. In addition, for the three books of the Odyssey, there
is the occasional insertion of notes in the margins, which resulted in
the significantly smaller size of the font of the main text. These details
are an indication of the translator and editor’s efforts to make the edi-
tion more accessible to readers. The difference in method and style
between the two translators will allow for further analysis in the subse-
quent parts of this essay.
France saw the publication of numerous Homeric transla-
tions in the sixteenth century. 5 The Parisian publishers Chrétien
Wechel and his son André printed partial or complete versions of
Homer in the 1530s and 1550s, and the complete translations of the
Odyssey and the Iliad came to be available respectively in 1541 and
1554.6 Salel’s partial translation of the Iliad, published in 1545, was nev-
ertheless highly significant as it was the very first in French verse.7 Due
to the enormous difference between the Greek and French languages,
such an undertaking was for Salel both courageous and risky, as a
clumsy rendering of Homeric verse alongside existing Latin and
French translations could possibly ruin the translator’s reputation. Ul-
timately, it turned out that the quality of Salel’s verse earned wide-
spread praise from the king and the literary circle, and contributed
greatly to the influence of Homer in the French Renaissance. The rep-
utation of Salel’s translation also explained why his master Pierre de
5 Philip Ford, “Homer in the French Renaissance,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 3
(2006): 1–28.
6 Ford, “Homer in the French Renaissance,” 4–5.
7 Howard H. Kalwies, “The First Verse Translation of the Iliad in Renaissance
France,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 40, no. 3 (1978): 597–607.
240
Chapter 16 - Translating Homer in the French Renaissance
Ronsard urged Jamyn to continue Salel’s translation instead of starting

a new version.
METHODS OF TRANSLATION
In this 1584 edition, Salel’s translation of the Iliad is preceded

by a long poem entitled “Epistre de Dame Poesie, Au Treschrestien
Roy François, premier de ce nom: Sur la traduction d’Homere, par
SALEL.”8 This epistle, written by Salel himself in 1544, appeared in
each of the eleven French editions of Salel’s translation (including
those combined with Jamyn) from 1545 to 1605, with the exception of
the 1554 edition.9 The speaker in the poem is the fictive Dame Poesie
(Lady Poetry). Through her voice, Salel, when speaking to the king,
tries to praise his own translation and to reaffirm three propositions as
well. First, King Francis I is a powerful protector of letters, second,
Homer is the source of all knowledge and all poetic grace, third, that
the slanderers are wrong to blame Salel’s translation because it lauda-
bly makes the knowledge of antiquity accessible to the reader.10 While
fully recognizing the difficulty of the translation by offering the com-
parison: “Tirer des mains d’Herculés invincible / La grand’ massue,
encore plus d’oster / L’horrible fouldre au grand Dieu Juppiter,” 11
Salel proposes his own method of translation, “non vers pour vers,”12
but “Il souffist des poëtes / La volunté ester bien entendue / Et la
8 “Epistle of Lady Poetry, To the Very Christian King Francis, first of this name: On
the translation of Homer, by Salel.” Hugues Salel and Amadis Jamyn trans., Les
XXIIII Livres de l’Iliade d’Homere, Prince des Poëtes Grecs. Traduicts du Grec en vers François.
Les XI premiers par M. Hugues Salel Abbé de Sainct Cheron, et les XIII derniers par Amadis
Jamyn, Secretaire de la chambre du Roy: tous les XXIIII reveuz et corrigez par ledit Am. Jamyn
avec les trois premiers Livres de l’Odyssee d’Homere Traduicts par ledit Jamyn. Plus une table bien
ample sur l’Iliade d’Homere, (Paris, 1584), a ijr. All the references to Salel and Jamyn’s
translation refer to this volume, and all translations are my own.
9 Hugues Salel, Œuvres poétiques completes, ed. Howard H. Kalwies (Geneva: Droz, 1987),
73.
10 Hope Glidden, “Hugues Salel, Dame Poésie, et la traduction d’Homère,” in La
génération Marot – Poètes français et néo-latins (1515–1550): Actes du colloque international de

Baltimore, 5–7 décembre 1996, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1997), 503.
11 “Pull from the hands of the invincible Hercules / The big club, moreover to take
the horrible lightening from the great God Jupiter.” Glidden, “Hugues Salel,” 86.
12 “not verse for verse.” Ibid., 85.
241
Ji Gao
sentence avec grace rendue.” 13 Arguably, Salel, in his translation of

Homeric verse, opts for a more flexible approach.
This rationale of Salel could be reformulated as such: first,
translation is more an interpretation of the general meaning than a
meticulous rendering of the minute details; second, that the translator
ought to place more emphasis on the grace of the result than on the
fidelity to the original. These principles of translation were by no
means uncommon at that time. In La Maniere de bien traduire d’une langue
en aultre (The Way to Translate Well from One Language to Another),
published in 1540, Etienne Dolet also suggested that “en traduisant il
ne se fault pas asservir jusques à là que l’on rende mot pour mot.”14
There had been doubts, due to the rather loose rendering of details in
the translation and the fact that Salel went to school when Greek edu-
cation was not yet popular, as to whether Salel based his translation on
a Greek version, or whether he relied on various Latin translations
readily available in his time. It has since been proven by Valentin
Burger 15 that Salel had indeed relied primarily on an original Greek
text.16
In Jamyn’s time, there came to be a greater demand for fidel-
ity in content and style among the humanists.17 As a result, Jamyn’s
translation presents characteristics different from those of Salel. Salel
chose to translate Homer in decasyllabic couplets, “the French meter
still associated with noble undertakings at mid-century,”18 according to
Rothstein, which wereale less capable of faithfully rendering Homer’s
hexameters. Whereas Jamyn opted for the alexandrine verse that had
found acceptance in the 1570s, that Ronsard regretted not using in La
13 “It is enough to hear the will of the poets well to render the maxim with grace.”
Ibid., 86.
14 “while translating one should not subjugate to the point as to practice the word for
word.” Etienne Dolet, La maniere de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre (Lyon: chez Dolet
mesme, 1540), 13.
15 Valentin Burger, “Die französische Iliasübersetzung des Hugues Salel vom Jahre
1545, verglichen mit dem Original,” (Dissertation, University of Wützberg, 1926).

16 Marian Rothstein, “Homer for the Court of François I,” Renaissance Quarterly 59, no.3
(2006): 738.
17Kalwies, “First Verse Translation of the Iliad,” 600.
18Rothstein, “Homer for the Court of François I,” 740.
242
Franciade19 and that, along with his supreme command of Greek and
his attention to exactness, allowed more space for the rendering of
descriptive elements.20 Unlike Salel, who aimed at the overall meaning
and stylistic effect in French verse, Jamyn, who learned Greek as a
child, sought in most cases to be as literal and accurate as possible. He
strived to render Homeric images vividly, yet this emphasis on accura-
cy, as shown by Graur, has also made some parts of his translation
redundant.21 In all, as Graur concludes, the overall quality of Jamyn’s
translation is clearly superior to that of his predecessor.
The 1584 edition is thus the curious combination of the
works of two radically different translators, which allows us to observe
the stark contrast, both in poetic style and translation method, be-
tween the first and second halves of the century. While Jamyn has
demonstrated his talents in brilliantly completing the endeavor and
carefully reviewing the entire volume, it should also be acknowledged
that the great reputation of Salel’s earlier translation contributed to the
overall popularity of the edition, which would see many reprints until
1605.
SALEL, JAMYN, AND THE LITERARY CIRCLE
In the 1584 edition of Homer, a poem written by Ronsard

under the large letters “Pierre de Ronsard aux manes de Salel” comes
immediately after Salel’s epistle and before the text. “Manes” or in lat-
er orthography “mânes” designate in ancient Roman religion the souls
of the deceased loved ones, considered as divinities. In Ronsard’s Oeu-
vres complètes, this poem appears as “Epitaphe de Hugues Salel.” With a
detailed commentary by Ronsard on Salel’s life and work, this poem
provides us with a clear indication of Ronsard’s attitude towards this
forerunner of the Pléiade.
In the poem, besides the habitual abundance of mythological
references, Ronsard dedicates the most essential part of the poem to
19 Pierre de Ronsard, “Preface sur la Franciade touchant le poeme heroique,” in
Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Jean Céard, Daniel Ménager, and Michel Simonin (Paris:
Gallimard, 1993), 1161–86.
20 Graur, Disciple de Ronsard Amadis Jamyn, 209–14.
21 Ibid., 211–16.
243
Ji Gao
the description of Salel’s translation of the Iliad under the patronage of

the King Francis I. This translation, for Salel who, in the eyes of Ron-
sard, would “t’en allas joyeux / Rencontrer ton Homere es champs
delicieux,”22 is presented as the greatest achievement of the translator.
We could easily tell from Ronsard’s appreciation that the Iliad of Salel
was for him “un de ses livres de chevet,”23 a book that Ronsard had
read or perhaps re-read and was highly familiar with.
In the volume that is scrutinized in our study there follows
after Ronsard’s poem a very brief à la mémoire written by Etienne
Jodelle (1532–73), poet and playwright of the French Renaissance,
signed “Est. Iodelle,” which relates how much of his life he owes to
Salel and the Iliad translation. With “Quercy m’a engendré” and “Ho-
mere m’eternise,” Jodelle placed a great deal of importance on the in-
fluence that Salel (who was born in Cazals-en-Quercy) and his transla-
tion had on him. Such an attitude is hardly surprising. In another son-
net addressed to Salel, Jodelle referred to Salel, “qui tant par ses vers
me peult plaire,” as the person who plucked and spread “le beau fruyt”
from the “jardin Grec” and who virtually made himself “un Homère
second.”24 The praise for Salel here is the highest that a literary figure
can ever hope to earn.
A two-fold interpretation could be made of this. On the one
hand, these laudatory texts of Ronsard, Jodelle, as well as of other men
of letters of the same period25 are certainly an unequivocal indication
of how Salel’s translation was widely acclaimed within the literary circle
and how it contributed to Homer’s prominent role in the French Re-
naissance. On the other hand, by inserting such texts between the var-
ious translations, the publisher consciously had in mind marketing
purposes that consist of using the recommendation of these renowned
22 “you went joyfully / To meet your Homer of lovely fields.” Ronsard, Œuvres com-
plètes, vol. 1, 983.

23 “one of his bedside books.” Hugues Vaganay, “Un ami de Ronsard: Hugues Salel.
Son épitaphe par Ronsard,” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 28 (1905): 129.
24 “who by his verse could please me so much,” “the beautiful fruit,” “the Greek gar-
den,” “a second Homer.” Louis-Alexandre Bergounioux, Un précurseur de la Pléiade -

Hugues Salel de Cazals-en-Quercy (1504–1553) (Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 1969), 298.
25 Hélène J. Harvitt, “Hugues Salel, Poet and Translator,” Modern Philology 16, no. 11
(1919): 160–61.
244
literary figures to promote the volume, the small in-12 format of which
allowed it to be widely circulated.
In the study of Salel and the literary circle, we should also take
into consideration Salel’s friendship with several poets of the group
called “La Pléiade” (The Pleiades). In a sonnet addressed to Ronsard
and Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), Salel expressed his admiration for
their poetic talent, and invites them to help him: “Et de vos vers
dignes d’estre adoréz / Vostre Salel à present secourez, / Chantant
pour luy ce qu’il ne pourroit dire.”26 As Salel, who was almost twenty
years older than Ronsard and Du Bellay and who lived to see his repu-
tation well established, had no reason to request help from these
young men who were only starting their career, these lines are not a
sign of false modesty but most likely mark a sincere and genuine ap-
preciation for their talents. We might thus say that on the one hand,
Salel, being a forerunner of the Pléiade, had considerable influence on
poets of the younger generation thanks to his translation of the Iliad.
Yet on the other hand, Salel recognized in the young poets promising
literary qualities superior to those of his own, and was more than will-
ing to maintain a cordial relationship with them.
This was however not the case for Jamyn. A generation
younger than the poets of the Pléiade, we know that Jamyn served in
his adolescence as the young servant boy of Ronsard in 1554 at the
latest, when Ronsard mentioned in his Bocage a certain “Corydon,”
who was none other than Jamyn.27 Although it is not clear whether it
was he himself or Ronsard who first took the initiative in continuing
the verse translation of Homer, it was nevertheless certain that Ron-
sard had been a life-long master and mentor for Jamyn and had exert-
ed a huge influence on his literary career. Thus it is not at all surprising
to find in the 1584 edition an ode written by Ronsard that precedes the
text of the thirteen books translated by Jamyn.
This “Ode par Monsieur de Ronsard” is essentially a warm
praise offered to Homer, whom he calls “Poete des Dieux,”28 and to
26 “And be adored for your worthy lines / Help your Salel now / By singing for him
what he could not say.” Bergounioux, Précurseur de la Pléiade, 323.
27 Graur, Disciple de Ronsard Amadis Jamyn, 13.
28 “Poet of gods.” 221r.
245
Ji Gao
the translator Jamyn, whom Ronsard puts in juxtaposition with Homer

himself as “deux soleils / Patrons des Muses sans pareils.”29 Although
this ode might seem exaggerated and pompous to the modern reader,
it nevertheless reveals the increasingly fervent admiration that Ronsard
and his generation had for Homer, as well as their eagerness for a
high-quality translation in French verse. It is worth emphasizing that in
this gradual process of bringing Homer to preeminence in the age of
the French Renaissance, in addition to Jean Dorat’s significant contri-
bution as teacher and mentor of the early Pléiade poets, Salel’s transla-
tion had played a crucial role,30 without which Jamyn’s continuation
would have been inconceivable.
Another noteworthy point is that towards the end of the
“Ode,” Ronsard explicitly said that what he admired most about
Homer were his representations of wars against foreigners, which
Ronsard, who thought of himself as a contemporary Homer, was also
probably interested in. In this context, Ronsard was clearly referring to
the devastating religious warfare between Catholics and Huguenots
that was then ravaging France. While expressing his admiration for
Homer, Ronsard naturally projected his own aspirations onto the past.
Jamyn first published the translation of five books, from the
twelfth to the sixteenth, in 1574. Curiously enough, despite the fact
that Salel had already translated the eleventh and twelfth books in the
1550s shortly before his death, Jamyn chose to re-translate the twelfth
book. Was it meant to demonstrate the superiority of his translation?
Was it due to certain flaws of the twelfth book? The reason for this
deliberate choice remains unclear, although, as demonstrated earlier, a
comparison between the different renderings of the twelfth book al-
lows us to notice that its version of the young translator is in general
more brilliant in its accuracy and its loyalty to the original Greek
verse. 31 What is known for sure, however, is that these five books,
published under the title of La Continuation de l’Iliade d’Homere, were
then extremely well received within the literary circle,32 and this en-
29 “two suns / Patrons of Muses without equal.” 221r.

30 Ford, “Homer in the French Renaissance,” 14–15.
31 Graur, Disciple de Ronsard Amadis Jamyn, 207–11.
32Ibid., 217–18.
246
couraged Jamyn to translate the remaining part and to publish Les

XXIII Livres de l’Iliade d’Homere Prince des Poetes Grecs in 1577. Through a
careful examination of the various texts inserted between the transla-
tions, it is evident that both Salel and Jamyn were closely associated
with major literary figures in the Renaissance, notably with Ronsard.
HOMER AND FRENCH NATIONALISM IN THE RENAISSANCE
It is well known that King Francis I commissioned Salel’s

translation of Homer, and that Salel, upon finishing each book (chant)
of the epic, would send “a carefully executed manuscript” to the
king.33 By the time Salel’s translation was published in 1545, the king,
having already read or probably re-read the translation, offered his
praise of the work in the privilege:
L’utilité, richesse, et decoration que nostre langue Francoise

recoit aujourdh’huy, par ceste traduction de laquelle nous a ja
este presentez les neuf premiers livres; don’t la lecture nous a
este si agreeable, et nous a tant delecté.34
It is clearly shown here that the king himself sincerely appreci-

ated the stylistic qualities of the language used in Salel’s translation.
Behind the celebration of the French language and the active royal
support, there is in the translation of Homer an additional political
dimension—a sense of French nationalism.
In the case of the Iliad, this nationalist sentiment was inextri-
cably related to the myth of Trojan origins, a myth highly popular in
medieval and Renaissance France, according to which the Franks were
distant yet direct descendants of the Trojans.35 This particular use of
antiquity, although certainly a pure invention of scholars, found many
33Kalwies,“First Verse Translation of the Iliad,” 598.

34 “theusefulness richness, and honor that our French language receives today by
means of this translation, of which he has already presented the first nine books which
we have read with such satisfaction and which so delighted us.” Rothstein, “Homer
for the Court of François I,” 732.
35 R. E. Asher, National Myths in Renaissance France (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1993), 1–43.
247
Ji Gao
firm believers in the sixteenth century, as it corresponded perfectly to

the increasing need for national pride. The powerful influence of Ital-
ian culture and the anti-Italian sentiment in France made it even more
urgent to establish a French national identity independent from Rome
and thus from Italy. In such a context, there appeared works like Illus-
trations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye by Jean Lemaire de Belges (1473–
1514?) or, later on, Ronsard’s La Franciade, which, among many others,
consciously referred to this legend.
Salel was of course perfectly aware of the Trojan mythos. In
his opening “Epistle” in the 1584 edition, while speaking through
Dame Poesie, he made sure to suggest this French-Trojan connection:
Je m’abstiendray pour l’heure à declairer,

Comme les dieux l’ont voulut decorer
De prophetie, en ce qu’il a predit
L’autorité, le regne, et le credit
Que les Troiens, apres leurs grans dangers,
Auroyent ung jour ès païs estrangers.36
While in the 1540s, the Trojan myth, although still extremely

popular, began to be understood in an increasingly figurative manner,37
Salel, by this passing reference, seemed to demonstrate to the king his
familiarity with the Trojan myth, as if it were a recognition of the
French royal legitimacy. Three decades later, while people generally no
longer took the Trojan myth literally, Jamyn nevertheless continued to
refer to it. In our volume, after the cover page of his translation of the
Iliad and before Ronsard’s ode, there is a short epigram written in Lat-
in followed by a French translation, in which Jamyn, in explaining the
purpose of his translation, explicitly referred to “la race troyenne, qui
fut de / la Françoise origine ancienne.”38 It is difficult to imagine that
Jamyn, writing in the 1570s, firmly believed in the Trojan myth in a
36 “I will abstain for the moment from declaring / how the gods wanted to grant him
/ prophetic powers, by which he predicted / the authority, the reign, and the respect /
that Trojans, having survived great dangers, / would one day have in foreign lands.” a
ivv. See also Salel, Œuvres poétiques complètes, 79.
37Rothstein, “Homer for the Court of François I,” 735.
38“the Trojan race, that was the ancient origin of the French (race).” 219v.
248
strictly literal manner. The almost simultaneous publication in 1572 of

Ronsard’s La Franciade, an unfinished epic poem by which the poet
intended to “give birth to France,” 39 showed that the Trojan myth,
either held to be factual or not, became an integral part of the national-
ist discourse, and that the writing of epic in the Renaissance was in
itself a national project. In this light, Salel and Jamyn’s translations of
Homer both had a strong nationalist signification, and the inclusion of
the Trojan myth seemed a clear nod to the political climate of their
time.
This is better understood if with the royal patronage taken
into consideration. Jamyn, like Salel, had a royal patron in mind—
King Henri III. Following the epigram in the 1584 volume is an “ode
du traducteur au roi,” ode from the translator to the king, in which
Jamyn, while addressing to the king, underlined Homer’s importance
with: “Il faut Homere aprendre / Qui pour sa belle voix / Fut chevet
autrefois / Du monarque Alexandre.”40 Jamyn made the recommenda-
tion of Homer to Henri III by explaining that it was the favorite book
of Alexander the Great, as if the reading of Homer would be helpful
for the French king to become a great monarch. Again, the value of
Homer is closely associated with its political implications. Due to the
specificity of the Trojan myth and its relationship with French royal
power, it’s possible the revival of Homer accompanied the rise of
French nationalism and in fact became a certain vehicle of the latter.
I’m choosing to underline the specificities of the 1584 Homer
edition by interpreting it from the perspectives of the translation
method, the translators and their literary circle, as well as French na-
tionalism. Through a close study of the translators’ rendition of
Homer, and especially of the various texts related to their translations,
we have attempted to trace the outline of the historic background in
which they presented their work. It could be seen, from the example
of this single volume, how translation methods, poetic style and Greek
education varied in the first and second halves of the sixteenth centu-
39 François Rigolot, “Ronsard’s Pretext for Paratexts: The Case of the Franciade,” Sub-
Stance 17, no. 2 (1988): 33.
40“One ought to learn from Homer / Who for his beautiful voice / Was in the past
the bedside (book) / Of the monarch Alexander.”223v.
249
Ji Gao
ry, how the translation of Homer, being a major event in introducing

Homer to Renaissance France, provoked multiple and diverse reac-
tions within the French literary circle, and moreover, how the transla-
tion of the Homeric epic Iliad, being a national project closely related
to royal power, also constituted an integral part of the discourse of
nationalism, prevalent at that time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asher, R. E. National Myths in Renaissance France. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

Bergounioux, Louis-Alexandre. Un précurseur de la Pléiade Hugues Salel de
Cazals-en-Quercy (1504–1553). Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1969.
Burger, Valentin. Die französische Iliasübersetzung des Hugues Salel vom Jahre
1545, verglichen mit dem Original. Dissertation, University of
Wützberg, 1926.
Dolet, Etienne. La manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre. Lyon:
chez Dolet mesme, 1540.
Ferguson, Gary. “Reviving Epic in Renaissance France: Ronsard,
Jamyn, and other Homers.” In (Re)Inventing the Past: Essays on
French Early Modern Culture, Literature and Thought in Honour of
Ann Moss, edited by Gary Ferguson and Catherine Hampton,
125–51. Durham: University of Durham, 2003.
Ford, Philip. “Homer in the French Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly
59, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 1–28.
Glidden, Hope. “Hugues Salel, Dame Poésie, et la traduction
d’Homère.” In La génération Marot: Poètes français et néo-latins
(1515–1550): Actes du colloque international de Baltimore, 5–7 dé-
cembre 1996, edited by Gérard Defaux, 501–11. Paris: Honoré
Champion, 1997.
Graur, Theodosia. Un disciple de Ronsard Amadis Jamyn 1540(?)–1593: Sa
vie, son œuvre, son temps. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1929.
Harvitt, Hélène J. “Hugues Salel, Poet and Translator.” Modern Philology
16, no. 11 (1919): 595–605.
Jamyn, Amadis. Les œuvres poétiques: Livres II, III et IV (1575). Edited by
Samuel M. Carrington. Geneva: Droz, 1978.
———. Les œuvres poétiques: Premières poésies et livre premier. Edited by
Samuel M. Carrington. Geneva: Droz, 1973.
250
Kalwies, Howard H. “The First Verse Translation of the Iliad in Re-

naissance France.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 40, no.
3 (1978): 597–607.
———. Hugues Salel: His Life and Works. Normal, IL: Applied Litera-
ture Press, 1979.
Rigolot, François. “Ronsard's Pretext for Paratexts: The Case of the
Franciade.” SubStance 17, no. 2 (1988): 29–41.
Ronsard, Pierre de. Œuvres complètes I㸤II. Edited by Jean Céard, Daniel
Ménager, and Michel Simonin. Paris: Gallimard, 1993.
Rothstein, Marian. “Homer for the Court of François I.” Renaissance
Quarterly 59, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 732–67.
Hugues Salel, Les Dix premiers livres de l’Iliade d’Homere, Prince des Poetes:
Traduicts en vers Francois, par M. Hugues Salel. . . . Paris: Vincent
Sertenas, 1545.
———. Œuvres poétiques complètes. Edited by Howard H. Kalwies. Ge-
neva: Droz, 1987.
Salel, Hugues and Amadis Jamyn trans. Les XXIIII Livres de l’Iliade
d’Homere, Prince des Poëtes Grecs. Traduicts du Grec en vers François.
Les XI premiers par M. Hugues Salel Abbé de Sainct Cheron, et les
XIII derniers par Amadis Jamyn, Secretaire de la chambre du Roy: tous
les XXIIII reveuz et corrigez par ledit Am. Jamyn avec les trois pre-
miers Livres de l’Odyssee d’Homere Traduicts par ledit Jamyn. Plus une
table bien ample sur l’Iliade d’Homere. Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1584.
Silver, Isodore. Ronsard and the Hellenistic Renaissance in France. Vol. 1,
Ronsard and the Greek Epic. St. Louis: Washington University
Press, 1961.
Vaganay, Hugues. “Un ami de Ronsard: Hugues Salel: Son épitaphe par
Ronsard.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 28
(1905): 125–29.
251
Chapter 17
“Too Much of a Modern Beau”: Macpherson’s Iliad and

the Nationalist Epic
NOOR SHAWAF
James Macpherson translated Homer’s Iliad in 1773 “verba-

tim,” as he claims in his preface, in an attempt to do justice to the epic
and to “render [this] version useful to such, as may wish to study the
original, through an English medium.”1 Macpherson emphasizes the
value of a literal translation to recover the “original” epic, and so reacts
against translations that no more than “paraphrase” Homer, for the
benefit of the “less learned part of mankind” whose curiosity stems
from Homer’s “high reputation.”2 He felt that modern taste in poetry,
too enamored of florid stylistics, was an impediment to a good transla-
tion of Homer and sacrificed the work’s “magnificent simplicity”––a
veiled censure of Pope’s Iliad. Macpherson justified his criticism on the
grounds that “the best translators have not, in short, occupied the
whole ground…They have rendered the father of poetry, in a great
measure, their own: And in stripping him of his ancient weeds, they
have made him too much of a modern beau.”3 Such a provocative
thrust marks the historical and political relevance Macpherson as-
signed to poetry (his poetic project being centered on establishing a
Scottish literary tradition), and the exertions he felt necessary to re-
store poetry. What is obscured in Macpherson’s remarks, however, is
the extent to which his translation of the Iliad was an effort to vindi-
cate the misrepresentations and poetic project encompassed by his
Poems of Ossian, wherein Macpherson transformed himself into the per-
sona of the ancient Celtic bard Ossian by clothing himself in “ancient
weeds.” The rejection of modernity and its fripperies and the need to
grasp “the whole ground” produced an Iliad that eschewed English
1 James Macpherson, trans., The Iliad of Homer (London: Printed for T. Becket and P.A.
De Hondt, 1773), xix.
2 Macpherson, Iliad, xiv–xv.
3 Ibid., xvi.
Noor Shawaf
literary convention in favor of the “original.” The context of Macpher-

son’s Ossianic “originals” is necessary to understand his undertaking
of the Iliad.
Macpherson purportedly completed his translation of the Iliad
in a few months using Samuel Clarke’s 1729 edition of the Greek text,
having studied Greek at Marischal College and Aberdeen University.4
This edition of the Iliad was published in two volumes with a preface
but without notes or “critical dissertations,” as Macpherson states in
the his own remarks, because Homer is “sufficiently clear” and other
authors have “exhausted” further commentary.5 Although the edition
sold well, it was not well received by critics whose curiosity and suspi-
cion was piqued by the scandal of the Poems of Ossian.6 The critical re-
sponse prompted Macpherson to release another edition in the same
year which included Greek and English on facing pages, as well as ex-
cluding thirteen books of the Iliad to make room for a Latin translation
and Samuel Clarke’s notes in an effort to enhance the edition’s peda-
gogical use while also defending his translation. However, the primary
significance of presenting the work unadorned bespeaks Macpherson’s
investment in the primitivism popular among eighteenth century Scot-
tish intellectual circles, evidence of the influence of his Aberdeen pro-
fessor Thomas Blackwell’s theory of epic origin. In his Enquiry into the
Life and Writings of Homer, written in 1735, Blackwell claimed that poet-
ry is “the natural language of primitive man…and only among primi-
tive men was genius to be found.”7
For the primitivists, who believed modern corrupt society dis-
tanced man from his natural and more benevolent state, a historicist
approach to literature through the “rhetoric of primitive language and
the recovery and rehabilitation of ‘primitive’ literatures via antiquarian
research”8 was put to the service of nationalism. As a socio-political
approach, primitivism could make the claim that if genius could be
4 Paul J. deGategno, James Macpherson (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 140.

5 Macpherson, Iliad, xx.
6 deGategno, James Macpherson, 140.
7 Robert Folkenflik, “Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great Age of Literary
Forgery,” The Centennial Review 18, no. 4 (1974): 384.

8 Dafydd Moore, “The Ossianic Revival, James Beattie and Primitivism,” in vol. 2, The
Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, ed. Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan
Manning, and Murray Pittock (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007): 91.
254
Chapter 17 - “Too Much of a Modern Beau” - MacPherson’s Iliad
found in ancient Greek culture, then other primitive cultures, as with

the Celts, might have produced genius equally worthy of praise; David
Hume crystallized this idea in his essay “Of National Characters”: “our
island has produced as great men, either for action or learning, as
Greece or Italy has to boast of.”9 The English accusations of Scottish
backwardness, then, could be construed as a lack of appreciation for
such genius. 10 Establishing, or rather re-establishing, Scottish tradi-
tional culture was of paramount importance in the face of England’s
forceful suppression, such that in 1760 Macpherson was commis-
sioned by a group of intelligentsia, led by Hugh Blair, to trek the High-
lands in order to collect and record Gaelic verse and ballads, “old he-
roic poetry…as an attempt to repair some of the damage of the High-
lands sustained in the wake of the Jacobite Risings.”11 It was assumed
that the oral customs he was meant to document, ostensibly unbroken
for centuries, were the products of an observed Highland “veneration
for age and tradition” that was in keeping with “antiquarian spirit of
the classicists.”12
The results of the expedition lead to the publication of the
poems Fingal and Temora, considered together as the Poems of Ossian,
and Macpherson presented them as translations from ancient Gaelic of
an epic poem composed by Ossian, “a Celtic Homer––a blind bard of
the third century, whose great epic described the successful defeat of
an invading army.”13 Ossian, in fact, was an affectation of Macpherson
and his “translations” were interpretations of the fragments he collect-
ed and then interwove into an imaginative, cohering epic. As Fiona
Stafford explains in The Sublime Savage, “for Macpherson, ancient po-
etry was painfully separate from contemporary literature, and should
9 David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis:
Liberty Fund, 1994), 208.

10 Hume’s ideas in “The Rise of the Arts and Sciences” (1742) on the kinds of society
that historically fostered cultural advancement had a great impact on the political aspi-
rations of the primitivists.
11 James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and related works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edin-
burgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), x.

12 Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, xi.
13 Ibid., xiii.
255
Noor Shawaf
be brought into the modern world with a suitably dignified style.”14 By

dint of his adherence to the primitivist contention of disparate but
similar noble ancient cultures, Macpherson believed, echoing Hume,
that “Celtic society… was very similar to that of Ancient Greece, so
why shouldn’t Caledonia have had her Homer?” 15 Ossian, then, as
Macpherson’s alter ego, is a narrator of unblemished wisdom and ef-
fective but simple artistry. Macpherson assumed that the fragments he
found must have been remnants of an epic so that he viewed his task
as “sympathetic restoration” to the supposed original, “rather than as a
painstaking translation of the miscellaneous mass.”16 Some passages of
The Poems of Ossian borrowed from the Bible, from Milton, and even
from Pope’s translation of the Iliad, which Macpherson would go on
to criticize, and the whole composition follows many characteristic
plot points of the Iliad; the work is not in verse but in an unorthodox
“measured prose” intended to suggest the sound of the Gaelic.
The Poems of Ossian, published over the years 1761 and 1763,
achieved instant popularity in Scotland and soon across Europe. 17
Their instant popularity reflected Macpherson’s effective representa-
tion of archaic heroism and “uncorrupted civic practices,”18 which fed
into the growing desire for the adventure and imagination of ancient
poetry that emerged at the end of the Enlightenment. This widespread
resurgence of interest in Greek antiquity was heralded by Pope’s Iliad,
such that, “in Scotland, ‘the Grecian Taste’ held sway [exemplified by]
Hume’s early preference for Demosthenes over Cicero.”19 Macpher-
son was self-conscious of this influence in his prefatory dissertation to
Temora: “If…in the form of his poems, and in several passages of his
diction, [Ossian] resembles Homer, the similarity must proceed from
Nature, the original from which both drew their ideas.”20 The primitiv-
14 Fiona J. Stafford, The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the Poems of Ossi-
an (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 86.
15 Stafford, Sublime Savage, 97.
16 Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, xiv.
17 An Italian translation was published in Padua in 1763, followed by translations into
several other languages. See Stafford’s introduction to Poems of Ossian, v–viii.

18 Adam Potkay, The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994), 192.

19 Potkay, Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, 195.
20 Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, 206.
256
ist urge to view all ancient cultures in the model of classical Greece
necessarily allied the epic form with the virtues of originality and liber-
ty, elevated Scotland’s cultural claims, and also foreshadowed the be-
ginnings of Romanticism’s fascinations with classicism and national-
ism. National sentiments were central to the debate the Ossianic epic
stirred, for “the English were reluctant to credit the ‘discovery’ as sig-
nificant in any way; the Scots were too eager to see it as significant in
every way.” 21 The Poems of Ossian were championed by William Duff,
William Hazlitt, and even Napoleon22 but they also courted swift con-
troversy over the authenticity of the “translations.” Hume, an early
supporter of Macpherson, came to consider the epic an “impudent
forgery,” and the clamor of skeptics prompted Macpherson to stop
responding to inquiries and to refuse access to his source manu-
scripts.23
The dispute culminated in Macpherson choosing to issue a
new edition of The Poems of Ossian in 1773, shortly before he published
this translation of the Iliad, with a revised sequence of poems and a
new preface that highlighted the work’s popularity and attributed all
criticisms to politically-motivated bias against the Scots:
When rivers define the limits of abilities, as well as the

boundaries of countries, a writer may measure his suc-
cess by the latitude under which he was born. It was to
avoid a part of this inconvenience that the author is
said by some to have ascribed his own productions to
another name. If this was the case, he was but young
in the art of deception. When he placed the poet in an-
tiquity, the translator should have been born on this
side of the Tweed.24
21 Elizabeth Kraft, “James Macpherson (27 October 1736–17 February 1796),” in

Eighteenth-century British Poets: Second Series, ed. John Sitter (Detroit: Gale Research,
1991), 206.
22 Napoleon praised the Poems of Ossian as having “the purest and most animating prin-
ciples and examples of true honor, courage and discipline, and all the heroic virtues
that can possibly exist.” See Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, vi.
23 Kraft, “James Macpherson,” 206.
257
Noor Shawaf
Macpherson’s stubborn insistence in the authenticity of Ossian reflects

the cultural stakes of poetry in the eighteenth century as part of socio-
political identity, for a culture with its own Homer could not suffer to
be hegemonized by the English. Furthermore, the task of the transla-
tor in this context is predicated on preservation of “the original.”
Macpherson delineates the role of the translator as steward in the 1773
preface when claiming “genuine poetry, like gold, loses little, when
properly transfused; but when a composition cannot bear the test of a
literal version, it is a counterfeit which ought not to pass current…A
translator, who cannot equal his original, is incapable of expressing its
beauties.”25 This contradictory conception of the translator as conduit
to the original and, at the same time, as alchemist exposes Macpher-
son’s duplicity in his “translations” of The Poems of Ossian. His transla-
tion of the Iliad, by the same token, suffers too much from “transfu-
sion.”
Macpherson’s impetus for translating the Iliad was to quiet his
detractors by proving himself, and thereby his Ossianic sources, up to
the task of a “literal” translation; he also wanted to validate the primi-
tivist assertion of commonality between ancient citvilizations. As in
The Poems of Ossian, Macpherson chose to employ “measured prose”
for his translation, and, so as to avoid the “cadence of English heroic
verse…he has measured the whole in his ear…guided by the sound of
the original Greek.” He also used the notation invented for The Poems
of Ossian to aid the sonic qualities: “To bring the eye of the reader to
the assistance of his ear, where the pointing does not occasion a stop,
the fall of the cadence is frequently marked, with a short line.”26 De-
spite his fastidious efforts, Macpherson was charged with producing
an Ossianic Iliad that, “violated the spirit of Homer’s poetry; and by
trusting in current poetic diction, he doomed his experiment to fail-
ure.”27 Any comparison between the two texts shows the similarities of
syntax, diction, metaphoric structure and reductive tendency:
25 Ibid., 412.
26 Macpherson, Iliad of Homer, xviii.
258
Wide, in Caracha’s echoing field, Carmal had poured

his tribes. They were a dark ridge of waves; the grey-
haired bards were like moving foam on their face.
They kindled the strife around with their red-rolling
eyes.––Nor alone were the dwellers of rocks; a son of
Loda was there; a voice, in his own dark land, to call
the ghosts from high.28
The wrath of the son of Peleus,––O goddess of song,

unfold! The deadly wrath of Achilles: To Greece the
source of many woes! Which peopled the regions of
death,––with shades of heroes untimely slain: While
pale they lad along the shore: Torn by beasts and birds
of prey: But such was the will of Jove!29
Hume reacted to Macpherson’s Iliad in a letter to Adam Smith, saying,

“it is hard to tell whether the attempt or the execution be worse.”30
Macpherson’s “design” as stated in the preface, “to give Homer as he
really is: And to endeavor, as much as possible, to make him speak
English, with his own dignified simplicity and energy,”31failed as he
renegotiated the terms between author and translator, “original” and
modernity.
Macpherson both challenges and lauds Homer in his preface.
He praises Homer for having combined “the gravity of the historian
with the dignity of the poet, and the orator’s arguments,” as if to frame
Homer via the primitivists’ literary-national project. He admires
Homer for showing “Nature, rather characteristically, than adorned:
And when he ascends to the sublime, he chuses to shine, with an as-
semblage of great ideas, rather than with the picturesque attitudes of
magnificent objects.” 32 Macpherson judges that what “still keeps
Homer on the throne of epic poetry, lies in the judgment of his com-

29 Macpherson, Iliad of Homer, 1.
30 Letter 491, Hume to Adam Smith, 10 April 1773, in The Letters of David Hume, vol. 2,
ed. J.Y.T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 280.

31 Macpherson, Iliad of Homer, xx.
32 Ibid., xi.
259
Noor Shawaf
position, and in the masterly preservation of his characters. He seems

to have comprehended, at one view, his whole subject, before he en-
tered, upon his narration.”33 While the modern epic poet fails to “have
graspt, in one thought, the whole fabric of his design,”34 narrative and
primarily structural unity is the test of poetic purity, recalling Macpher-
son’s simile likening poetry to gold in his 1773 preface to The Poems of
Ossian, as well as the ethos behind his decision to unify the ancient
Gaelic fragments he gathered into a cohesive epic. However, despite
Homer’s position as “father” seated on the “throne of epic poetry,”
Macpherson saw fit to enumerate his faults in the Iliad: “[Homer’s]
fancy, though great, is still less than his good sense and judgment”;35
“he is sometimes too minute and talkative…his battles, though varied,
are too long”;36 “his gods are frequently introduced, without a suffi-
cient cause: And they seem, sometimes, to be employed only to deliver
the poet himself, from difficulties.”37 Macpherson defends his claims
of Homer’s fallibilities by reminding the reader that “we ought to re-
member, that our Author was only a man: Had he committed no er-
rors, we should cease to admire.” 38 Macpherson’s fashioning of
Homer, as “an untutored singer who embodies the grandeur of his
age,”39 is incongruous with his attempt to instate Ossian as a true bard
and not a figment.
As such, the substance of Macpherson’s challenge to Homer,
and thereby the history of epopoeia, is based not on the perceived
problems with the Iliad but with Homer’s station as “the almost undis-
puted monarch of verse.”40 Macpherson lamented that all subsequent
poetry has endeavored to emulate Homer such that he has had a heg-
emonic effect on literature, “an unrivalled despotism…is the regions
of poetry,”41 which he attributed to Homer’s fame born not only of
merit but his lack of biography and “his judicious flattery of all the
33 Ibid., x.
34 Ibid., viii.
35 Ibid., xii.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., xiii.
38 Ibid., xiv.
40 Macpherson, Iliad of Homer, ii.
41 Ibid., ii-iii.
260
states of Greece [which] induced them to join, in his praise.”42 Thus, it

is Homer’s statelessness and supposedly intentional evasion of nation-
alist allegiance that Macpherson finds insidious. Macpherson rebukes
the Romans, “the greatest, the most imitative of all nations…prudent
in all their policy,” who in their embrace of Homer had “destroyed
that originality of composition, for which even their own native force
and elegance have scarce made amends,” rendering Virgil “an imita-
tor.”43 What Macpherson characterizes as the Roman imitation of the
Greeks was so distasteful to him because he equates imitation with the
restriction of the possibility of a regional literary heritage. He held to
the belief of literature as an indispensable political and cultural tool,
and certainly as a record of cultural history, such that the poet’s ambi-
tions must be self-edification over imitation. Macpherson’s vehemence
on Homer’s inflated stature contradicts his efforts to legitimize The
Poems of Ossian by equating the fictional Ossian to Homer, and yet
seems to correspond to his effort to produce a “verbatim” translation–
–if the translation fell anywhere short of literal, it would be imitative
and ahistorical. Macpherson’s coupling of political history and poetry
leads to a configuration of the poet as ersatz statesman and the transla-
tor as ersatz historian, despite the incredible license that he took with
The Poems of Ossian (which he never avowed to), so that the creative
impulse must be to both originality and preservation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blair, Hugh. A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal.
London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1763.
deGategno, Paul J. James Macpherson. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.
Folkenflik, Robert. “Macpherson, Chatterton, Blake and the Great
Age of Literary Forgery.” The Centennial Review 18, no. 4
(1974): 378–91.
42 Ibid., iii.
43 Ibid., iii-iv.
261
Noor Shawaf
Gaskill, Howard. “Introduction: The Translator’s Ossian.” In Transla-

tion and Literature 22, no. 3 (2013): 293–301.
Hume, David. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F.
Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994.
Hume, David. The Letters of David Hume, vol. 2. Edited by J. Y. T.
Greig. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
Kraft, Elizabeth. “James Macpherson (27 October 1736–17 February
1796).” In Eighteenth-century British Poets: Second Series, edited by
John Sitter, 204–13. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991.
Macpherson, James. The Poems of Ossian: And Related Works. Edited by
Howard Gaskill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1996.
Moore, Dafydd. “The Ossianic Revival, James Beattie and Primitiv-
ism.” In vol. 2, The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, edited
by Ian Brown, Thomas Owen Clancy, Susan Manning, and
Murray Pittock, 90–98. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2007.
Potkay, Adam. The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1994.
Sher, Richard. “'Those Scotch Imposters and Their Cabal': Ossian and
the Scottish Enlightenment.” In Man and Nature: Proceedings of
the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by
Roger L. Emerson, Gilles Girard, and Roseann Runte, 55–63.
London, ON: University of Western Ontario, 1982.
Stafford, Fiona J. The Sublime Savage: A Study of James Macpherson and the
Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988.
262
Conclusion
Homer Among the Shades
NICHOLAS BELLINSON
The moderns were giving a lavish reception for the ancients,

and all the important guests had arrived. Cicero was delivering orations
to Erasmus and his circle, who sat, spellbound, at his feet; Vergil was
helping Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno rearrange the furni-
ture with his magic staff; Horace and Ben Jonson sulked in the corner
while Shakespeare and Ovid inched, arm-in-arm. toward the refresh-
ments; Machiavelli and Livy gossiped in the corner. Even Phalaris and
Hermes Trismegistos, disguised by large, fake beards, had snuck past
Valla and Casaubon who stood guard at the door. But one guest, the
guest of honor, had yet to arrive. Petrarch grew anxious. Finally, the
unmistakable sound of sung Greek reached the partygoers’ ears, the
doors swung open, and a few scruffy Byzantines stumbled in, support-
ing the singer––a blind man. Having transferred his weight to Pet-
rarch’s eager shoulders, the Byzantines mumbled something in a lan-
guage nobody understood and beat a hasty retreat.
Homer had arrived; the room buzzed with excitement. The
moderns had been talking about this moment for centuries, and the
ancients had given them every reason to keep their expectations high.
All wisdom came from Homer, Macrobius had announced to the
guests before falling asleep in the next room, and Vergil, like a dutiful
pupil, had spoken of the sublimity of his predecessor. The crowd's
palpable admiration for Homer soon turned to awkwardness, however,
as he was rough and rude: he uttered long words that no one under-
stood, blasphemed the gods, and frequently repeated himself. Some
thought him an impostor, and knowingly whispered that the real
Homer was out there somewhere, and might even be a woman; others
set more store by his reputation and pointed out that such babblings
were known to be vatic. Getting him to the party had demanded so
Nicholas Bellinson
much time and labor from everyone in the room––but once he was
there, no one knew quite what to do with Homer.
Homer did indeed come late to the classical reception that was
the Renaissance, and, when he arrived, his reputation, which preceded
him by centuries, seemed unjustified to many early modern Europe-
ans. Faced with the disjunction between the ideal and the real Homer,
philologists emended him to make his language smoother, often using
Vergil’s work rather than his own as their guide; allegorists explained
the crude behavior of the Gods as a mask for the esoteric truths which
their readings of Plato, the ancient scholiasts, and even Cicero encour-
aged; translators argued that their competitors had butchered the beau-
ty of the original, and that they alone held the key to Homer’s elo-
quence. Confronting Homer as he was proved quite uncomfortable.
Nonetheless, the fact that nobody quite knew what to do with
him did not, as the essays in this collection show, stop early modern
readers from putting his works to all sorts of creative uses. In this
sense, the reception of Homer in early modern Europe is an instruc-
tive case study in the difference between theory and practice. In par-
ticular, the project of translating Homer engaged some of the most
eloquent writers and scholars of modernity. I discuss in my essay how
Petrarch and Boccaccio collaborated to squeeze a Latin Homer out of
the Greek scholar Leontius Pilatus. Beatrice Bradley writes about Lo-
renzo Valla’s Latin Iliad of 1474 with an eye to the many interventions
of its translator and unknown editor––a collaboration which remained
in print as a cheap and useful student edition fifty years later and had
gone through eight editions by 1550; Camille Reynolds looks at Nea-
politan court politics under Alfonso of Aragon and suggests that Al-
fonso may have commissioned Valla’s translation in order to re-
fashion himself as an Italian prince of letters. In the same vein, Bren-
dan Small shows the first Italian Odyssey, Bacelli’s L’Odissea D’Homero
Tradotta in Volgare Fiorentino of 1582, to be part of the Medicean pro-
motion of Florentine culture––“politics by other means”. Elizabeth
Tavella uses Lodovico Dolce’s 1570 L’Achille et l’Enea, a fusion of
Homeric and Vergilian epic, to reconstruct his position in contempo-
rary debates about literary genre. Hilary Barker discusses illustrations
in works published by Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, including the creative
264
Conclusion: Homer Among the Shades
repurposing of images from the 1554 Orlando Furioso for the 1570 and
1573 Dolce translations of Homer’s works. Ji Gao demonstrates the
connections between the French translation of Homer by Salel and
Jamyn in 1584 and the nationalistic projects of the Parisian literati.
Other essays scrutinize the motives and methods of anglo-
phone translators. George Elliott and Tali Winkler illuminate the per-
sonal and professional ambitions of the Scotch dancer-scholar John
Ogilby through his Homer, while Javier Ibanez and Jo Nixon give two
such different accounts of George Chapman’s mistranslations as patri-
otism and “ekphrastic resistance.” Blaze Marpet defends Hobbes’s
Homer, the only remaining intellectual conduit of a great political phi-
losopher whose means of speaking directly had been systematically
banned. Margo Weitzman takes a close look at the initial reaction to
Pope’s much celebrated and criticized Iliad of 1715, and suggests that
its eventual success was far from obvious at the time, ultimately de-
pending on a highly complex subscription system and Pope’s appeals
to his personal connections. Noor Shawaf shows that James Macpher-
son’s somewhat disparaging translation of Homer served to challenge
the bard’s established monopoly on epic and make room for his own
invented bard, Ossian. A different challenge was issued by Thomas
Bridges’s burlesque Homer, in which Angela Parkinson sees a coun-
terweight to the gravitas of Pope’s translation and a precursor of twen-
tieth-century historical metafiction.
The rest of the essays examine the parallel transmission of
Homer’s Greek text. I discuss the editio princeps as it bears on the re-
covery of Greek in the early modern West and the creative interven-
tions which two readers have made in the Lang copy; Felix Szabo dis-
cusses Aldus Manutius’s Iliad and its relation (or non-relation) to the
Byzantine manuscript Venetus A, in the process illustrating the cosmo-
politan print culture of Venice around 1500. Goda Thangada reveals
the protestant historical and critical methodologies around which Hen-
ri Estienne constructed his 1566 anthology of Greek poetry.
Indeed, Homer was anthologized, illustrated, mistranslated, al-
legorized, deprecated, appropriated by cultural politicians, made a
mouthpiece for early modern philosophies and religions––and above
all, read. Few of the difficulties which these early modern readers of
265
Nicholas Bellinson
Homer confronted have been solved in our own time. The scope of
these essays does not include the august hexameter translation of Jo-
hann Heinrich Voss or the nineteenth-century tradition of mock-
Homeric epic, nor do they document the heroic achievements of
Richard Bentley, who fixed many of Homer’s faulty lines by restoring a
long-lost letter and broke others in the same way. Notwithstanding,
the volumes in the Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana offer an abbreviat-
ed history of the manifold ends to which Homer––this invited yet of-
ten unwelcome guest––was repurposed, and of his central role in the
European classical revival.
I close with two snapshots from the period in history at which
the animus against Homer was most vigorous––the seventeenth-
century Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. A common genre for staging
this debate over the relative achievements of the ancients and the
moderns were so-called “dialogues of the dead” in imitation of the
ancient writer Lucian. Holding a somewhat medial position in the de-
bates, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle authored the most famous of
such dialogues, among which one reports a conversation between
Homer and Aesop.
Homer: Il faut que vous ayez eu beaucoup d’art pour

déguiser ainsi en petits Contes, les instructions les
pluse importantes que la Morale puisse donner, &
pour couvrir vos pensées sous des images aussi justes,
& aussi familieres que celles-là.
Aesop: Il m’est bien doux d’être loüé sur cet Art, par
vous qui l’avez si bien entendu.
Homer: Moy? je ne m’en suis jamais piqué.
Aesop: Quoy, n’avez-vous pas prétendu cacher de
grands mysteres dans vos Ouvrages?
Homer: Hélas! point du tout.
Aesop: Cependant tous les Sçavans de mon temps le
disoient; il n’y avoit rien dans l’Iliade, ny dans
l’Odissée, à quoy ils ne donnassent des Allégories les
plus belles du monde. Ils soûtenoient que tous les se-
crets de la Theologie, de la Physique, de la Morale, &
266
Conclusion: Homer Among the Shades
des Mathématiques mesme, estoient renfermez dans

ce que vous aviez écrit. Veritablement il y avoit quel-
que difficulté à les déveloper; où l’un trouvoit un sens
moral, l’autre en trouvoit un physique; mais à cela
prés, ils convenoient que vous aviez tout sçeu, & tout
dit à qui le comprenoit bien.1
Though Aesop refers to allegorists of his own time, the barb

is obviously directed at Fontenelle’s contemporaries. The evident col-
lapse of any conceptual approach to fiction became a precondition for
a purely literary approach: when Aesop asks whether Homer’s gods
could possibly have been “good without allegory,” Homer responds,
“Why not? You imagine that the human mind seeks only the True;
disillusion yourself. The human mind and the False sympathize ex-
tremely.”2
This opening of the modern European mind to literature as
literature sometimes seems to anticipate the post-modern. In a second
compilation of “dialogues of the dead”, François de Salignac de La
Mothe Fénelon staged a dialogue between Homer and Achilles, in
which the bard meditates on the contingencies of fame. Only his own
poetry, he claims, saved Achilles from the obscurity of the unremem-
bered dead; without Homer, the Trojan War would have had no more
significance than (in the words of Tom Stoppard) “a minor redistribu-
tion of broken pots”. When Achilles characteristically loses his temper,
Homer reminds him that violence would be vain: “Tu ne suis que
1 “H: You must have had great skill for so disguising the most important lessons
which moral philosophy can give in little stories, and for concealing your thoughts
beneath images as fitting and as familiar as those. A: It is very sweet to me to be
praised on this skill by you, who understood it so well. H: I? I never prided myself on
it. A: What, you didn’t claim to hide great mysteries in your works? H: Alas! Not at all.
A: Meanwhile all the sages of my time said that; there was nothing in the Iliad, nor in
the Odyssey, to which they did not give the most beautiful allegories in the world. They
maintained that all the secrets of theology, physics, moral philosophy, and even math-
ematics were sealed up in what you had written. To be sure there was some difficulty
in elaborating them; where one person found a moral sense, the other found a physical
one; but that aside, they agreed that you knew everything, and said everything to him
who understood well.” Bernard de Fontenelle, Nouveaux dialogues des morts (Paris: C.
Blageart, 1683), 54–56.
2 Ibid., 59.
267
Nicholas Bellinson
l’ombre d’Achille, & moi je ne suis que l’ombre de Homere.” 3 But

Homer’s shade was substantial, and took many forms in the early
modern European imagination––as these essays attest.
University of Chicago, May 2015
3 “You are nothing but the shade of Achilles, and I, I am nothing but the shade of
Homer.” François de Fénelon, Dialogues des morts anciens et modernes, avec quelques fables,
composez pour l'éducation d'un prince (Paris: Florentin Delaulne, 1718), 25.
268
Appendix
Catalog Descriptions
HOMER EDITIONS
SECTION I : PUBLICATION, BOOK-MAKING, BIOGRAPHY
(Nicholas Bellinson) Homer [‘Η τοῦ Ὁμήρου ποίησις ἅπασα.

Ed. Demetrius Chalcondyles, Bernardus Nerlius, Nerius Nerlius, and
Demetrius Damilas. Printed in Florence, perhaps by Bartolomeo de'
Libri, before 13 January 1489. Editio princeps includes a dedicatory letter
(in Latin) from Bernardus Nerlius to Pietro de’ Medici], a letter from
Demetrius Chalcondyles to the readers [first page missing], Pseudo-
Herodotus’s “Life of Homer”, Pseudo-Plutarch’s “On the Life and
Poetry of Homer”, Dio Chrysostom’s “On Homer”; [the Iliad, the Od-
yssey α-β], the Odyssey β-ω, the Batrachomyomachia, the Homeric Hymn to
Apollo, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes[, and the rest of the Hymns]. Folio.
Signatures: [AI], AII–DI4, EI–V9, [F–Z, AA, BBI,] BBII–III5, CCI3,
DD-FF, GGI–IV7, HH, II I–III6, KK–XX, YYI–IV7, [15f.]. 192 folia
of a possible 440; 384 of 880 original pages, but re-bound with new
front- and endleaf. Paper.
(George Elliott) Homer. John Ogilby, translator. His Odys-

ses translated adorno with sculpture and illustrated with annotations
by John Ogilby, Esq, Master of His Majestie’s Revells in the Kingdom
of Ireland. Printed by Thomas Roycroft, for the author, 1665. Signa-
tures: A-Yy6. Title page printed in red and black with one illustration
for each of the 24 books of the Odyssey with an additional for the piece
as a whole. Piece in overall good condition with small amount of dis-
coloration on edges. Bound in contemporary English calf. Donated to
the University of Chicago by M.C. Lang.
John Ogilby’s translated works were considered excellent
choices for the wealthy because of their overall quality. His Odyssey
translation was printed on high-quality paper and included detailed
Homer Editions
illustrations by Hollar and other renowned engravers. Ogilby used his

marketing skills to persuade local wealthy families to finance these il-
lustrations in exchange for their family crests inclusion in the images
themselves. The work also includes a proclamation by theking forbid-
ding anyone from using the illustrations for at least 15 years, an early
version of copyright.
(Blaze Marpet) Hobbes (Thomas), trans. The Iliads and

Odysses of Homer. Translated out of Greek into English, by Tho:
Hobbes Of Malmsbury. With a large Preface concerning the Vertues
of an Heroick Poem; written by the Translator. Printed for Will.
Crook, at the green Dragon without Temple-Barre, 1677, SECOND
EDITION, 12mo (A–Z, Aa–Kk, A–B6, C–O10).
In 1673, Hobbes published a translation of one section of the
Odyssey as The Travels of Ulysses, As they were Related by Himself in Homer’s
Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh & Twelfth Books of his Odysses, to Alcinous, king of
Phaeacia. He subsequently published a translation of the complete Odys-
ses in 1675, the complete Iliads in 1676, and a joint edition—published
as the “Second Edition”—in 1677 (all in London). This second edition
included a Preface by Hobbes and an essay on the life of Homer. The
translations were in alternating rhyming pentameters. The relatively
rapid succession of printings suggests that the book was popular and
sold well. Perhaps the reason for this was that its convenient size (du-
odecimo) made the volume appealing and accessible—especially com-
pared to Chapman’s and Ogilby’s versions.
(Margo Weitzman) Homer. The Iliad of Homer, Translated

by Alexander Pope. The | Iliad | of | Homer.|Translated by Mr.
Pope. | Te Sequor, O Graciæ gentis Decus! Inque tuis nunc | Fixa
Pedum pono pressis vestigia signis: | Non ita Certandi cupidus, quàm
propter Amorem, | Quòd Té imitari aveo — | Lucret. | London: |
Printed by W. Bowyer, for Bernard Lintott be- | tween the Temple-
Gates, 1715.
Latin epigram from Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. London:
Printed by W. Bowyer for Bernard Lintott, 1715–1720, vol. 1 of 6. The
inside cover includes a C.H. Wilkerson book plate; engraving by
270
Appendix
George Vertue; title page, and permissions page written by James

Stanhope [A, 1–4]; Preface B-L, [5–42], omits choir J, pullout map of
Homer’s Greece include in choir L; 2 pages of engravings [A, 1–4];
“An Essay on the Life, Writings and Leaning, of Homer” B-P [1]-55,
[56], omits choir J; “The First Book of the Iliad” with argument on the
verso, no choir or page number, text A-I, 1-36, omits choir J; “Obser-
vations on the First Book,” no choir or page number, omits choir A,
text runs [B, 1–3], C-L, 5–40; “The Second Book of the Iliad” included
in choir L of the previous section, text runs A-N, [2–3], 4-50, omits
choir J and mis-numbers pages 2–3 as 34–35; “Observations on the
Second Book” text runs [Aa], Bb–Ff, 1–24, G–I, 25–35; “A Geo-
graphical Table of the Towns, &c. in Homer’s Catalogue of Greece,
with the Authorities for their situation, as places on this Map” includ-
ed in choir I of the previous section, I-K, 36–40, omits choir J; “A
table of Troy, and the Auxiliar Countries,” L, 41; “The Third Book of
the Iliad” title included in choir L of the previous section, choirs reset
and text runs from A-G, 1–27, [28]; “Observations on the Third Book
of the Iliad” text runs from Aaa-Ddd, [1–2], 3–16, E-H, 17–30, [31–
32]; “The Fourth Book of the Iliad” with argument on the verso in-
cluded in choir H of the previous section, choirs then reset and text
runs A–H, 1–30, [31–32]; “Observations on the Fourth Book” title
included on page [31–32] of the previous section, choirs reset and text
runs A–F, 1–22, [23–24].
Volume One contains the first four books of the Iliad, and in-
cludes brief synopses and expanded commentary for each. This 1715
volume is one of six, the last of which was published in 1720. The
choirs are cloth bound and the plain leather cover is imprinted with a
filigree box on the front. The print throughout is black, and choir let-
ters reset after each section. There are several engravings depicting
Greek busts, statuary and coins, and a pullout map of Homer’s ancient
Greece that is referenced by an indexical chapter. The engravings were
used to replace illustrations, which was also a new and less costly prac-
tice. George Vertue, an English engraver who was particularly interest-
271
Homer Editions
ed in antiquarian history and research, produced the large bust of

Homer in the frontispiece.1
Pope frequently consulted his predecessors’ work while trans-
lating Homer, regardless of the fact that he often criticized their trans-
lations for errors and negligence.2 Pope’s Iliad has been both lauded
and chided for its challenging rhyming heroic couplets, but admiration
of the volumes has continued to the present.3
SECTION II : LITERARY PHILOLOGICAL TRANSLATION PRACTICES
(Beatrice Bradley) Homer. Homeri Poetae Clarissimi Ilias

per Laurentium Vallensem Romanum Latina Facta. Cologne: Apud
Heronem Alopecium, 1522, ornamental woodcut border depicting
angels, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus on title page, large woodcut letters
begin each book, index, and errata sheet at end, original tan calf bind-
ing with decorative design, a bit worn at corners, front binding becom-
ing loose from spine, with contemporary marginal notes in Latin, in-
cluding a couple textual corrections, in red and brown ink, very good;
sig. 8°: A–T8, V8, X–Z8, a–l8 (–l8), aa–bb8, cc.1
This prose edition of the Iliad is translated in part by the fa-
mous Italian Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla. He translated the
first sixteen books from the original Greek into Latin, and his pupil,
Francesco Griffolini, translated the remainder. This copy is of particu-
lar interest not only because of Valla's literary reputation, but also for
its influence on George Chapman's later translation of the Iliad into
English.
(Jo Nixon) Homer. The Iliads of HOMER Prince of Poets.

Neuer before in any languag truly translated. With a Coment vppon
some of his chiefe places; Donne according to the Greeke By Geo.
Chapman. At London: Printed by Nathaniel Butter, [1611?], Sculp. By
William Hole. Sig.: 1 leaf; A, in 6’s; A–Z, in 6’s; Aa–Ff, in 6’s; Gg, in
1 Glenn W. Most and Alice D. Schreyer, eds. Homer in Print: A Catalogue of the Bibliotheca
Library, 2013),118.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
272
Appendix
10’s. pp. [26], 1–45, 64, 47–77, 68–69, 80–219, 226, 221, 236, 235–
287, 208, 289–332, 327, 334–341, [25], 8vo.
Homer. Homer’s Odysses. Translated according to ye Greeke
By. Geo. Chapman. At London:Printed by Rich. Field, for Nathaniel
Butter. Sig.: A–Q, in 6’s; R, in 8’s; S–Z, in 6’s; Aa–Hh, in 6’s; Ii, in 7’s;
2 leaves. pp. 1–55, 60, 57–76, 75, 78, 81, 82–153, 156, 155–193, [3],
195–274, 257, 258, 277–326, 325, 328–349, 352–376 [6], 8vo.
This volume consists of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey bound to-
gether. In addition to prefatory dedications at the beginning of both
works and the end of the Iliad, Chapman also offers commentary on
his translation interspersed throughout the marginalia and after most
of the books of the Iliad.
(Angela Parkinson) Homer. [BRIDGES (Thomas)] A Bur-

lesque Translation of Homer. Printed for S. Hooper, 1772, engraved
frontispiece, missing signatures page, a little light spotting, pp. [ii], iv,
2, [4], a-a1, b-b4 through i-i4, k-k4 through u-u4, x-x4 through z-z4, Aa-
Ii4, Kk–Uu4, Xx–Zz4, Aaa–Iii4, Kkk–Uuu4, Xxx–Zzz4, 4A–4A2, 547,
[1]p., plate; folio-sized 4to, contemporary sprinkled calf, spine with
five thick raised bands, gold lettering on red background on spine,
ownership inscription of Douglas Grant (1947) made in pencil, very
good condition.
This is the first single-volume, quarto edition of a satirical
translation of the first twelve books of the Iliad by Thomas Bridges (fl.
1759-1775). Dedicated to the “laughing tribe,” Bridges’ translation was
originally published in 1762 under the title Homer travestie and the
pseudonym “Caustic Barebones” in two-volume sets. The Special Col-
lections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library also
houses the 1967, two-volume edition of this translation in 12mo. This
much more luxurious 1772 production is a well-preserved copy with
little damage save for wear on the bottom right-hand corners of pages
from regular use; it provides an opportunity to enjoy this biting single-
volume edition of Homer. The translator inserts many contemporary
phrases into the translation, making the text a clear commentary on
273
Homer Editions
eighteenth-century English life despite the front matter's claim to “ex-

press Homer's meaning full.”
(Elizabeth Tavella) Dolce (Lodovico), L’Achille et L’Enea.

Dove egli tessendo l’historia della Iliade d’Homero à qvella dell’Eneide
di Vergilio, ambedve l’ha divinamente ridotte in ottava rima. Con ar-
gomenti, et allegorie per ogni canto: et due tavole… FIRST EDI-
TION. Printed in Venice by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari for Filippo
d’Austria Re Catholico in 1570. Bound with Menechini (Andrea) Delle
lodi della poesia D’Omero et di Virgilio in Venice by the same printer
in 1572. pp. [18], 544, [44], 8vo, a-d4, e6, A-2L8, a-d4, e8. Richly illus-
trated with woodcut initials and headpieces.
Lodovico Dolce (1508–68) was an extremely prolific writer
and translator who had a decisive role in the dissemination of culture
in the Cinquecento. His collaboration with the printer Giolito de’ Fer-
rari was the most productive of the Venetian presses, especially in the
decade 1550–60. In this book, composed of 55 canti, the author has
woven the story of Homer’s Iliad to that of Virgil’s Aeneid, and reduced
both into octaves. Each chapter is preceded by an argomento, a brief
summary of the relevant book, and allegories, explanations designed to
provide a broad context of the action to the reader.
SECTION III : IMAGES
(Hilary Barker) Homer. L’Ulisse | di M. Ludovico Dolce |

da lui tratto | dall’Odissea d’Homero | et ridotto in ottavia rima | nel
quale di raccontano tutti gli | errori, & le fatiche d’ Ulisse dalla partita
sua di Troia, fino al ritorno | alla patria per lo spatio di venti anni. |
Con argomenti et allegorie a ciascun | canto, cosi dell’Historie, come
delle Favole, et con due Tavole: una | delle sententie, et ‘altra delle
cose piu notabili. [Translated into ottava rima by Ludovico Dolce].
Venice: With privilege by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1573. xvi, 186+2,
[*4, A–I4, K–L4, M3] 8vo.
Title page includes a typographic header and a large printer’s
device (an eagle sitting on a flaming orb reaching to the sun’s rays in a
cartouche decorated with grotesques); Black letter, with catchwords
274
Appendix
and woodcut initials for each chapter; Each canto begins with the “Ar-
gomento” within a woodcut border and a single woodcut scene within
a decorative border; Register is printed on the recto of last page, a
printer’s mark on the verso. Slight discoloration in first 40 pages of the
book; wormholes in bottom outside corner throughout--in margin,
does not effect the text; in latter half of the book corners have been
restored; page 103 bottom corner torn off; page number on page 28
upside-down. Pencil inscription on back flyleaf, illegible. Bound in
brown leather, embossed; front cover is detached; includes a pink rib-
bon bookmark.
(Javier Ibanez) George Chapman (1559?–1634). “THE |

WHOLE WORKS | OF | HOMER; | PRINCE OF POETTS | In
his Iliads, and | Odyses. | Translated according to the Greeke, | By |
Geo : Chapman. | De Ili : et Odyss : | Omnia ab his; et in his sunt
omnia: | Sive beati | Te decor eloqui, seu rerū pondera | tangunt. An-
gel : Pol :” Printed in London for Nathaniel Butter, [1616]. Title page
within large woodcut representing Homer, Achilles, and Hector, as
well as two unidentified figures, large woodcut portrait of Chapman on
the verso, woodcut initials, typographic head - and tail - pieces, un-
signed and engraved separate title page for the Odyssey, marbled cover
and edges. 4to. Sig.: 6 leaves; A*, 6 leaves; A–I, in 6’s; K–T, in 6’s; V, 6
leaves; X–Z, in 6’s; Aa–Ff, in 6’s; G, 7 leaves; A–I, in 6’s; K–Q, in 6’s;
R, 8 leaves; S–T, in 6’s; V, 6 leaves; X–Z, in 6’s; Aa–Hh, in 6’s; Ii, 7
leaves; pp. [xxvi], 1–45, 64, 47–77, 68–69, 80–219, 226, 221–233, 236,
235–287, 208, 289–332, 327, 334–341, [21], 1–55, 60, 57–76, 75, 78–
79, 78, 81–153, 156, 155–193, [3], 195–274, 257–258, 277–285, 289,
287–326, 325, 328–349, 352–376, [2].
This 1616 volume is a collected edition of Chapman’s transla-
tions of Homer, which he began publishing in 1598. Chapman’s trans-
lation is the first complete English rendition of the Iliad and the Odys-
sey, and the work was highly successful and widely influential. This
copy is very well maintained and includes the separate title for the Od-
yssey, which is absent from most copies.
275
Homer Editions
(Goda Thangada) Hoi tes heroikes poieseos proteuontes

poietae kai alloi tines. Homeros, Hesiodos, Orpheus, Kallimachos,
Aratos, Nikandros, Theokritos, Moschos, Bion, Dionysios, Kolouthos,
Tryphiodoros, Mousaios, Theognis, Phokylides, Pythagorou chrysa
epe. Poetae graeci principes heroic carminis et alii nonnulli. Homerus,
Hesiodus, Orpheus, Callim., Aratus, Nicand. Theocrit. Moschus, Bion,
Dionysius, Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Musaeus, Theognis, Phocylides,
Pythagorae aurea carmina. Fragmenta aliorum. [Geneva]: Excudebat
Henricus Stephanus, illustris viri Huldrichi Fuggeri typographus, Anno
M.D. LXVI [1566], minor spotting and small holes, pp. 20, LXXII,
781, LVII, 489, folio, *6, 2*4, a-D8, E4, a-2b8, 2c6, 2A10, 2B–2Y8, 2Z6,
3Z4, a-g4, 2A-3R6, 3S-3T4,paper, note on flyleaf signed Leonard L.
Mackall 1933, and addressed to R.R. Donnelly and Sons, leather worn
on ridges of spine and edges of cover, good.
The title page of this edition does not disclose the place of
publication. However, the editor, Henri Estienne, a Huguenot refugee,
was reportedly based in Geneva for the majority of his career. This
massive volume includes not only the works of Homer, but of several
Greek poets and ancient materials related to Homer. There are multi-
ple sets of pagination in both Roman and Arabic numerals. The first
set of Roman numerals and the second two sets of Arabic numerals
include ancient Greek texts. The edition also includes a preface by the
editor and a set of annotations, both in Latin.
(Tali Winkler) Homer. Homer |his |Iliad translated

|adorn’d |with |sculpture |and |illustrated with |annotations |by
|John Ogilby. |London, |Printed |by |Thomas Roycroft and are to|
be had at the Authors House in Kings-head Court |within Shoe-Lane,
MDCLX [1660]. Folio: [1+4] a-d2 d*-f*2 e-f2 [g2] B–I2 [2] K–Q4 R–
S4+1 T4 [1] U–Y4 Z4+1 2A–2C4 2D4+1 2E–2I4 2K4+1 2L-2P4 2Q4+1 2R–
2T4 1 2U–2Z4 3A4+1 3B4 3C4+1 3D–3E4 3F–3G4+1 3H4 3I4+1 3K4
3L4+2 3M–3Q4 3R4+1 3S4 3T–3U4+1 3X–4A4 X2. Deviations from the
standard 4-leaf quire are likely due to the addition of an illustrated
plate. Pages also paginated: [46] 518 [4]. [Frontispiece and 20 leaves of
plates, 27.5x42cm.]
276
Appendix
Engraved portrait of John Ogilby opposite title page. Prefato-

ry materials include: a dedication to King Charles II, an essay on “the
Life of Homer,” an essay on “the Countrie & Time of Homer,” a dis-
cussion of previous editions of Homer’s works, and “Epigrams upon
Homer.” In the main text, the Iliad is in a central column, with annota-
tions in the outer and lower margins. First page of each chapter usually
has woodcut initial, as well as decorative panel along the top margin.
Full-page panels interspersed throughout the text, engraved by Wen-
ceslaus Hollar. Ogilby used subscription publishing extensively and
subscribers could have their names, coats of arms, and titles included
on one of the full-page panels. Book in good condition, some minor
tears that have been taped together. Brown leather binding, spine let-
tered in gilt: “Homer’s Iliads.” Ogilby subsequently published Homer’s
The Odyssey in 1665.
SECTION IV : NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
(Ji Gao) Salel (Hugues, translator), Jamyn (Amadis, transla-

tor), Les XXIII livres de l’Illiade d’Homere, Prince des Poëtes Grecs.
Paris : Pour Abel L'Angelier, au premier pilier de la grand’ salle du Pa-
lais [1584]. Traduicts du Grec en vers François. Les XI premiers par
M. Hugues Salel Abbé de Sainct Cheron, et les XIII derniers par Ama-
dis Jamyn, Secretaire de la chambre du Roy : tous les XXIIII reveuz et
corrigez par ledit Am. Jamyn avec les trois premiers Livres de
l’Odyssee d’Homere Traduicts par ledit Jamyn. Plus une table bien
ample sur l’Iliade d’Homere. There are scribbles on the title page of
the Iliad. The font of the three books of the Odyssey is much smaller
than that of the preceding books of the Iliad. [12] preliminary leaves;
490 leaves; 15 cm.
King François I commissioned poet Hugues Salel to translate
the Iliad into French verse. The first ten books were published in 1545.
Until his death in 1553, Salel completed two more books, which were
then edited and published in 1554. Poet Amadis Jamyn completed
Salel’s work and published a complete French edition of the Iliad in
1577, which contained Salel’s translation of the first eleven books.
277
Homer Editions
In this edition, immediately after the title page, there is an

“epistre” addressed to the King François I written by Salel, a long po-
em in praise of Salel by Pierre de Ronsard, and a short one-page note
in memory of Salel by Estienne Jodelle. These constitute the 12 pre-
liminary leaves before the beginning of the pagination.
This expanded 1584 edition also contains a separate title page
and text for Les Trois Premiers Livres de L’Odyssee d’Homere. Mis du Grec en
François, avec Certaines Notes sur les Principales Matieres., which is Jamyn’s
rendition of the first three books of the Odyssey. Their font is much
smaller than that of the books of the Iliad.
(Camille Reynolds) Homer. Homeri poetae clarissimi Ilias

per Laurentiu[m] Vallensem Romanum e Graeco in Latinum translata:
& nuper accuratissime emendate, Venice: Ioannis Tacuini de Tridino,
1502, pp. 192, LXXXXVI leaves, signatures A8, B–P6, Q4, old vellum,
spine decorated with golden leafing, a blank page followed by some
light spotting on the title page, black initials and lettering, decorative
imprinting at the start of each book, inscription on the colophon,
“Impressum opus hoc emendatissimum Venetiis, accuratissima dexter-
itate, & impensa Ioannis Tacuini de Tridino, anno a Natali Christiano
MCCCCCII die xxv Februarii,” light marginalia in Latin; Bibliotheca
Homerica Langiana, good condition.
This Latin edition of Homer’s Iliad, published in 1502 Venice,
was translated by the famous humanist Lorenzo Valla. There is little
prefatory material in this volume, except a brief dedication page
penned by Valla in Latin and block illustrations at the beginning of
each book. Alfonso the Magnanimous originally commissioned Valla
to produce a Latin prose translation in the 1440s. Valla only translated
the first 16 books, while his protégé, Francesco Griffolini, completed
the Iliad and the Odyssey in the 1460s under the patronage of Pope Pius
II.
(Noor Shawaf) Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Translated by

Jamees Macpherson, Esq; in two volumes. London: Printed for T.
Becket and P. A. De Hondt in the Strand; and sold also by T. Cadell in
the Strand; J. Robson, in Bondstreet; Brotherton and Sewell, in Corn-
278
Appendix
hill; and E. and C. Dilly, in the Poultry. MDCCLXXIII. 4to. 2 vols.;

vol. i: pp. xx, 375; Sig.: a, A–Bbb; vol. ii: pp. 443; Sig.: A–Kkk, Lll4.
Prose translation by Scottish poet and politician James Mac-
pherson, printed in 1773. Two further editions published the same
year. Without dedication or commentary; preface emphasizes Homer’s
work as the model for all epic poetry.
(Brendan Small) Homer. L'Odissea D'Homero, Tradotta in

Volgare Fiorentino da M. Girolamo Baccelli. Florence: Sermartelli,
1582, titled in gilt on spine, slight worm holing on cover, engraved title
page, browning and spotting, decorative design on front inside and
back covers, pp. [vi], 678, 8 vo, a-v, 2A–2V.
This notable work was the first complete version of the Odys-
sey to be translated into the Florentine vernacular. The translator, Giro-
lamo Baccelli, was born in Florence in 1514, and was a member of the
Florentine Academy. His translation reflects his education, especially
in certain descriptive passages where the translator diverges from the
original Homeric Greek in favor of an Italian tradition that follows a
late humanistic style.
The edition, published in the vernacular of Volgare Fiorentino,
also reflects the changing landscape of the printing industry, as the
dissemination of printed books in this period became more wide-
spread and reached broader audiences. The title page is embellished
with the printer's device of Bartolomeo Semartelli (fl. 1563–1600).
One finds an engraving with a turtle and the Latin motto FESTINA
LENTE. The image of the turtle and the sail resembles the impresa of
Grand Duke Cosimo I of the Medici family. The title page is followed
by a flowery dedication to the Second Grand Duke of Tuscany, Don
Francesco Medici.
(Felix Szabo) Aldo Manuzio (1449/50–1515). ੘ȝȒȡȠȣ੉ȜȚਕȢ

੗įȪııİĮ ȕĮĲȡĮȤȠȝȣȠȝĮȤȓĮ ੢ȝȞȠȚ Ȝȕ = Homeri Ilias, Vlyssea, Batra-
chomyomachia, Hymni XXXIII. Venice: Aldus, 1504. Octavo. 2 vols.
(294 pp., 338 pp.) Volume 1: A–Z8, AA–LL8, MM6 (MM6 blank).
Volume 2: AA² a³8 b-z8 A–G8 H¹0 ¹-78. Both volumes contain annota-
279
Homer Editions
tions: Volume 1 in Greek and Latin, and Volume 2 in Greek, French,

and an as-yet unidentified script.
This volume represents the first Aldine edition of Homer,
based on the editio princeps of Demetrios Chalcondyles (1488) and vari-
ous manuscripts only available in Venice, with numerous corrections.
It is dedicated to Jerome Aleander, a contemporary Venetian human-
ist. The Aldine cursive type is based on contemporary cursive manu-
script, rather than the classicizing hand found in Chalcondyles. Several
previous owners' signatures and bookplates are noted within the front
cover of the first volume, and Aldine devices are present on the title
pages of both.
280
Index
Aesop, 33, 130, 136, 139-40, 143, Bentham, Jeremy, 46

145-6, 216, 266-7 Bentley, Richard, 20, 113, 266
Alexander the Great, 249 Bessarion, Basilios, 15, 201, 203, 205
Alexandria, Library of, 21 Bible, 17, 22, 107, 141, 256
Alfonso V of Aragon, 9, 62, 196, 211- Bion, 124, 181, 185, 276
13, 215-20, 226, 264, 278 Bizer, Marc, 186-7, 192
Alighieri, Dante, 81, 91, 148, 201, Blackwell, Thomas, 254
206, 209, 221, 223-7, 237 Blair, Hugh, 255, 261
Divina Commedia, 148, 224, Boccaccio, Giovanni, 14, 81, 91, 105,
227, 237 164-6, 202, 206, 214, 221, 223-6, 229,
allegory, 16, 86, 186, 267 232, 237, 264
Alopecius, Hero, 63 Decameron, 164-6, 224, 232-
ambiguity, 74, 117, 170, 173 3, 237
anachronism, 120 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 257
Apostolis, Arsenius, 201 book trade, 6-7, 12, 31, 34, 49-50, 52-
Aratus, 124, 181, 276 53, 57-8, 53-4, 107, 111, 136, 141, 150
Ariosto, Lodovico, 80-2, 86, 88, 90-2, subscription, 12, 30, 32, 34,
147, 152, 154, 156, 158, 165, 167 49-52, 54, 56-7, 112, 128,
Orlando Furioso, 8, 59, 80-4, 265, 277
86-88, 90-1, 123-4, 147-58, Boudou, Bénédicte, 181-3, 192
160-7, 265 Bowyer, William, 51, 58, 270
Aristarchus of Samothrace, 21 Bracciolini, Poggio, 62, 225
Aristotle, 82, 91, 181, 192, 216 Bridges, Thomas, 1, 8, 59-60, 107-11,
Aristophanes of Byzantium, 21 114-21, 265, 273
Atchity, Kenneth, 175-6, 178 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 227
Aubrey, John, 27 Bruni, Leonardo, 216, 225, 237
Augustine, 63, 75 Bruno, Giordano, 263
Aurispa, Giovanni, 62 Budé, Gillaume, 185-6
authorship, 7, 12, 61, 67-8, 74 Burger, Valentin, 242, 250
Bussone, Francesco, 201
Baccelli, Girolamo, 9, 196, 222-5, Byzantium, 9, 195, 199-205, 209-10
229-30, 232-35, 237, 279
Barlaam, 14 Caesar, Julius, 233
Basil II, 202 Callimachus, 124, 181
Beccadelli, Antonio, 216 Calonja, J. R., 212-13, 216-17, 219
Beloe, William, 15, 17-8, 22 Cambridge, University of, 26, 40
Bembo, Pietro, 221-3, 228-30 Caneparo, Federica, 149, 166
Bennet, Henry, 1st Earl of Arlington, canon, 80-1, 91, 115, 165, 167, 203,
30 221, 231
Index
Carbonell, Miguel, 218 Cowley, Abraham, 110

Caro, Annibale, 89 Crook, John, 129-30
Casaubon, Isaac, 263
Castiglione, Baldassare, 221, 228-30 Da la Riva, Bonvesin, 223
Catholicism, 186, 246 Damilas, Demetrius, 17, 269
Cavalcanti, Guido, 225-6 Darnton, Robert, 3
Celenza, Christopher S., 221, 225, 237 Dauphin of France, 81-2
censorship, 40, 114, 232 De la Cerda, Joanne Ludovico, 131
Chalcondyles, Demetrius, 15-6, 17-8, De Sponde, Jean, 94, 99-100, 104, 186
20-2, 269, 280 Decembrio, Pietro Candido, 218
Chapman, George, 8, 39, 59-62, 75, dedicatory epistles, 16, 81, 86, 94-5,
93-106, 112, 124, 132, 145, 169-78, 207, 269
211, 265, 270, 272-3, 275 Degl’Innocenti, Luca, 83, 90, 147,
Charlemagne, 147 152, 158, 161, 163, 166
Charles II, King, 26, 28-30, 33-4, 128, Delphi, 184
139, 277 Demosthenes, 256
Charles IX, King, 185 Denham, John, 110
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 132 Descartes, René, 36-7, 40, 44
Cheeke, Stephen, 176, 178 Dibdin, Thomas, 16-8, 21-2
Chicago, University of, 2, 7, 11, 16, Diepenbeeck, Abraham von, 131
18, 22, 25-6, 29-34, 39, 48, 51, 62, 76, Divus, Andreas, 64, 75, 94
93, 107, 112, 129, 139, 142, 145, 235- Dolce, Lodovico, 8, 59-60, 79-92,
6, 268-9, 272, 273 123, 147-8, 150-2, 158, 163-66, 264-
Christianity, 16, 43, 72-4, 203, 229, 63, 274
232, 241 Dolet, Etienne, 242, 250
Chrysoloras, Manuel, 6, 20, 206-7 Domenichi, Ludovico, 150
Chrysostom, Dio, 16, 18, 207, 269 Donatello, 227
Cicero, 5, 67, 85, 197, 229, 256, 263-4 Dorat, Jean, 185-7, 246
Clarke, Samuel, 256 Dryden, John, 54-55, 60, 108, 112-3
Clein, Francis, 131 Du Bellay, Joachim, 245
Clement VII, 230
Clément, Louis, 189, 192 ekphrasis, 124, 169, 173-79
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 93 Elizabeth I, Queen, 93, 179
Colleoni, Bartolomeo, 201 England, 5, 26, 40-1, 47, 51, 53, 60,
Cologne, University of, 63 93, 96-7, 105, 107, 109, 111, 120, 127-
Comnena, Anna, 204-5 8, 130, 132, 135, 137, 139, 145, 147,
Constantine VII, 200, 209 154, 184, 255
Constantinople, 6, 199-200, 203 London, 7, 12, 25-9, 32-3,
Copenhaver, Brian P., 62-3, 65, 75-6 36, 38-9, 49-58, 118, 120, 120, 127,
copyright, 12, 26, 30, 50, 270 136-7, 142-44, 270, 275
Copyright Act of 1710, 50 great fire of, 33
Corbett, Margery, 132-33, 135-36, 145 English Civil War, 28
Corpus Hermeticum, 14 engravings, 4, 49, 51, 81, 94, 105, 130-
Cortesi, Paolo, 221 33, 135-37, 140, 142-45, 235-36, 270-
282
Index
71, 279 Gaelic, 197, 255-6, 260

epic similes, 66, 40, 99-100 Gaywood, Richard, 134, 136, 143
Erasmo of Narni, 201 Gaza, Theodore, 15
Erasmus, Desiderius, 20, 63, 66, 75, genre, 8, 60, 79-80, 82, 94, 109-111,
263 115, 128, 132-33, 141, 145
Este, House of, 226 epic, 9-11, 16, 35, 41-2, 47,
Estienne, Henri, 8-9, 64, 75, 124, 181- 55-6, 57, 59-69, 71, 73-5,
92, 265, 276, 278 80, 82, 87-9, 98, 107-9, 114,
etching, 130-31, 136-37, 142-43, 145 123, 147, 149, 158, 163,
etymology, 99 165, 169, 175, 181, 186,
Euclid, 38 190, 196, 214, 247, 249-50,
Eugene IV, 201-217 253-57, 259-60, 264-66, 279
Eustathius of Thessalonica, 15, 21, parody, 60, 108-11, 119,
189, 191 122
romance, 59, 80-83, 88, 104
Facio, Bartolomeo, 216-7 satire, 8, 107-10, 112, 115-
Fagles, Robert, 1, 68, 70-3, 75, 6, 120
Faithorne, William, 137-40, 143 Germany, 147, 216
Fénelon, François, 267-8 Cologne, 63-4
Ferdinand I (Ferrante), 217-9 Hain, 216
Ferrandus, Thomas, 16 Gibbon, Edward, 21
Ferrari, Gabriele Giolito de’, 8, 79, 85, Giunta, Bernardo, 231
90, 123, 147-8, 150-1, 155, 165-7, 264, Giunti, Filippo and Bernardo, 149,
274 231
Ferrari, Giovanni Giolito de’, 150 Graur, Theodosia, 239, 243, 245-6,
Ficino, Marsilio, 14-5 250, 252
Florentine (dialect), 201, 219, 222-3, Greece, 6, 38, 203, 255-7, 259, 261,
225, 227, 234, 279 271
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 266 Greek, 1, 3-6, 8-9, 13-7, 20-3, 26-8,
Ford, Philip, 185-7, 192, 240, 246, 30, 36, 38, 42, 44, 46-7, 51, 53, 55, 60-
250 2, 64, 67-74, 76, 81, 86-7, 93-5, 99-
Foxon, David, 49-52, 57-8 109, 111-13, 118, 120-1, 124, 127,
France, 81-2, 128, 131, 147, 182, 184- 132, 134, 145, 150, 157, 163, 169-71,
6, 192, 197, 201, 240, 246-51 173, 176-7, 179, 181, 183, 186-7, 190,
Lyons, 150 192, 195-7, 200-3, 206, 208-9, 211-6,
Paris, 1, 137, 147, 183, 239, 219, 223, 228, 240, 242-4, 246, 249,
265 254-5, 258, 261, 263-5, 270-3, 275-6,
Francis I, King, 197, 239, 241, 244, 279-80
247 Gregory XII, 201
French, 9, 55, 94, 112, 131, 139, 182- Griffolini, Francesco, 62, 214-7, 272,
3, 185, 187, 189, 192, 196-7, 218, 139- 278
44, 246-50, 265, 277, 280 Griffo, Francesco, 207
Fugger, Ulrich, 183-4, 186, 189, 192, Guinizzelli, Guido, 228
276
283
Index
Hall, Arthur, 112 229-34, 237, 248, 255

Hall, Robert A., 223, 225-6, 237 Amalfi, 200
hapax legomena, 176-7, 179 Aquileia, 200
Hazlitt, William, 257 Bologna, 207
Heffernan, James A. W., 169, 175, Brescia, 16, 216
179 Florence, 5-6, 14-5, 21, 83,
Henri III, King, 249 89, 150, 189, 195-8, 202-3,
Heraclius, 203, 209 207, 226-8, 230-4, 269, 279
Hermes Trismegistos, 263 Genoa, 200
Herodotus, 16, 18, 182, 207, 269 Milan, 201, 218
Hesiod, 124, 181, 276 Naples, 9, 17, 196, 211-2,
Hessus, Helius Eobanus, 94, 96, 98, 214, 216-20, 226
100 Padua, 15, 201, 256
Hind, Arthur Mayger, 134, 135, 137, Pavia, 62
145 Ravenna, 200
historiography, 39, 42, 111, 119, 121- Rome, 67-8, 89, 156, 189,
2 201, 210, 226-8, 230, 233,
Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 11-2, 35-48, 134- 248
5, 142, 145, 265, 270 Sicily, 211, 216, 220
Hofer, Philip, 147, 149-51, 167 Venice, 9, 149-50, 160, 166,
Hollar, Wenceslaus, 131, 270, 277 195-6, 199-203, 205-10,
Horace, 82, 114, 263 230-1, 265, 274, 278, 280
Hume, David, 255-7, 259, 262 Verona, 201
Hutcheon, Linda, 108, 111, 119, 122 Vincenza, 201
Ireland, 21, 27-8, 34, 127, 269
illustration, 8, 29-30, 32, 49, 51, 57, Dublin, 28
83, 88-9, 91, 100, 114, 123-4, 129-31, Irish, 127-8
136-7, 147-50, 152-55. 157, 161, 163- Irish Rebellion of 1641, 127
5, 205. 264, 269-71, 278
imitation, 55-6, 71, 86, 88, 101, 108- Jamyn, Amadis, 197, 239-43, 245-51,
11, 119-22, 136, 228, 261, 266 265, 277-8, 197
interpretation, 16, 18, 21, 38, 47, 57, Janko, Richard, 101-3, 106
61, 64, 67, 72, 74, 84, 93, 96-8, 100, Jodelle, Etienne, 244, 278
111-2, 114, 116-9, 121, 123-5, 148, Johnson, Samuel, 110
174, 176, 185. 187-9, 204, 232, 242, Johnson, Thomas, 52, 138, 145
244, 249, 255 Jonson, Ben, 263
Italian, 5-6, 8-9, 15, 59, 61-2, 67, 69, Justinian, 200
71, 75, 79, 81, 87, 89-91, 123, 147-9,
151, 158, 189, 197, 199-202, 206, 209, Kumpf, Michael M., 177, 179
211-2, 215-6, 219-21, 223-6, 229-32, L’Angelier, Abel, 239, 251, 277
234, 237-8, 248, 256, 264, 272, 279 Landino, Cristoforo, 227-8
Italy, 5-6, 9, 11, 14-5, 60, 82, 91, 147, Lang, M. C., iii, 2, 18, 21-2, 265, 269
150, 152, 160, 165, 167, 195, 200-1, Lascaris, Constantine, 17, 207
206-9, 211-2, 216, 218-9, 221-2, 226, Latin, 1, 5, 7, 14-7, 22-3, 28, 36, 39-
284
Index
40, 44, 53, 55, 59-62, 64-8, 72-3, 75-6, 232, 234, 236, 279
84-7, 93-4, 99-101, 103, 105, 107, 109, Lorenzo de’, 15, 222, 226-
112, 121, 127, 129, 132, 139, 150, 163, 8, 230-1, 238
171, 179, 181-2, 190, 196-7, 202-3, Piero de’, 17
205-6, 209, 211-7, 221, 223-9, 233, Menechini, Andrea, 80, 85, 274
237, 240-2, 250, 254, 264, 269-70, metaphor, 43, 66, 189, 258
272, 276, 278-80 Mill, John Stuart, 46
Leaf, Walter, 175, 179 Milton, John, 256
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 40 mimesis, see imitation
Lely, Peter, 137, 139-40, 143-5 Miniato, Gherardo di Giovanni di, 17
Lemaire de Belges, Jean, 248 mise en page, 80, 82, 86
Leo X, 230 Mitchell, W. J. T., 169, 179
Licensing Act of 1662, 32, 40, 50 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 184, 185, 193
Lightbown, Ronald, 132-3, 136, 145 Monteverdi, Claudio, 89, 91
Lintot, Barnaby Bernard, 49, 51-4, 56- Murray, A. T., 71, 73, 76, 101, 103,
8, 270 106, 170-3, 174-7, 179
literacy, 16, 49, 53-4, 188 Musaeus, 124, 181, 186, 276
Livy, 263 Musuro, Marco, 206-7
Lombard (dialect), 223
Lombart, Pierre, 136, 139-40, 144 Narses, 200
Lomellino, Francesco, 86 Neapolitan, 195, 196, 212, 216-8
Lucan, 42-3 Neapolitan (dialect), 223
Lucian, 266 Nelson, Eric, 35, 40-1, 47-8
Nerli, Bernardo & Nerio, 15-6, 269
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 221, 228-30, Netherlands, 128
263 Amsterdam, 32, 36, 40
MacLure, Millar, 93-4, 98, 102, 106, Niccoli, Niccoló, 225
Macpherson, James, 9, 197, 253-62, Nicolas V, 217
278
Macrobius, 14, 263 Ogilby, John, 7-8, 11-2, 25-35, 39,
Malcom, Noel, 35, 38-40, 47 123, 127-32, 134-46, 265, 269-70, 276
Mann, Nicholas, 4-6 Orpheus, 124, 181, 186, 276
Manutius, Aldus, 6, 9, 21, 64, 75, 195- orthography (spelling), 35, 225, 232,
6, 199-201, 203, 206-8, 233, 265, 279 243
Manuzio, Paulo, 147, 149, 279 Ovid, 83-4, 263
Marolles, Michele de, 131 Metamorphoses, 83
Marshall, William, 134-5, 138, 140,
142 Padua, University of, 15
Medici, 9, 14-5, 17, 196, 221-4, 226-7, Pala d’Oro, 200
229-34, 269, 279 Panofsky, Erwin, 184, 193
Alessandro de’, 230-1 paratext, 4, 8, 59-61, 64-70, 72, 74, 80,
Cosimo de’, 222, 227, 231- 83, 87-8, 93-4, 96-7, 105-11, 115, 117-
3, 279 21, 128, 148-9, 152, 160, 164, 249,
Francesco de’, 222, 229, 251
285
Index
annotation, 7, 20, 25-6, 31, philology, 4, 7, 32, 34, 65, 75, 82, 88,
34-5, 70, 72, 74, 104, 131, 110, 185-6, 207, 223, 234, 237, 244,
139-40, 146, 182, 189-90, 250, 264, 272
192, 232, 269, 276-7, 274 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 14,
argomenti, 82, 85, 90, 148, 263
151-3, 160, 164, 166 Pilatus, Leontius, 14, 202, 264
commentary, 15, 21, 50, 58, Pindar of Thebes, 202
82, 94, 98-104, 106, 113, Piper, David, 132-4, 146
131, 151, 175, 179, 186, Pius II, 217, 278
189, 199, 205, 215, 227-8, piracy, 3, 50, 53,
243, 254, 271, 273, 279 plague, 25-6, 32-3, 205
epistle, 52, 214 Plato, 14, 44, 264
dedicatory epistle, 16, 63, Pliny the Elder, 136
81, 86, 94-5, 105, 207, 222, Poliziano, Angelo, 14-5, 221, 225,
229, 232-3, 236, 241, 243, 228-9, 231
248, 269, 273, 277-9 Pope, Alexander, 7, 11-2, 39, 49-58,
frontispiece, 8, 51, 94, 123, 60, 89, 108, 110-9, 122, 134, 255-6,
127-30, 132-7, 139-40, 145, 265, 270, 272
272-3, 276 Porphyry, 185
index, 7, 59, 61, 63-4, 66-7, Preston, Claire, 169, 176, 179
69-72, 74, 82, 148, 152, Proclus, 205
232, 271-2 pronunciation, 232
marginalia, 7, 11, 20, 59, 61, Protestant, 183, 186, 265
63-4, 66-7, 70, 99, 273, 278 Psellus, Michael, 204-5
prefatory material, 2, 15, Pseudo-Callisthenes, 202
35, 41-7, 54, 63, 60, 82, 94- Pseudo-Herodotus, 16, 18, 271
98, 101, 105, 111-2, 115-6, Pseudo-Plutarch, 16, 18, 20, 269
118, 138, 181-2, 184-6, 188,
228-9, 240, 243, 253-4, 256- questione della lingua, 223, 225, 234, 237,
60, 270-1, 273, 276-79 239
patron, 9, 15, 22, 26, 28-9, 32, 34, 50, Quintilian, 67, 76, 215
52, 54-5, 94-5, 105, 137-9, 210, 217,
226, 230, 232, 239, 246, 249 Reeve, Michael D., 5-6
patronage, 15, 28, 34, 50, 52-5, 62, Restoration of 1660, 26, 34, 128, 137
217-8, 228, 230, 244, 249, 278 Rice, Eugene, 222, 237
Paul II, 201 Richardson, Brian, 147-8, 150, 152,
Pericles, 38, 42 160, 165, 167, 226, 231-3, 237
Perrenot, Antoine, 87 Rogers, G. A. J., 36, 38, 44-5, 48
Petrarch, 5, 7, 12-4, 22-3, 81, 91, 196- Rogers, Pat, 50-1, 54, 56, 58
7, 206, 214, 220, 223, 225-6, 229, 263- Romanticism, 257
4 Ronsard, Pierre de, 239, 241-9, 251,
Pfeiffer, Rudolph, 185-7, 193 278
Phalaris, 263 Rosslyn, Felicity, 50, 55-6, 58
Philip II, King, 87 Rothstein, Marian, 242, 247-8, 251
286
Index
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 37 Tillyard, E. M. W., 176, 179

Ryder, Alan, 216-8, 220 Tooly, Thomas, 113-5, 122
Tortelli, Giovanni, 66
Sachano, Ludovico, 212, 215 Trinkaus, Charles Edward, Jr., 73, 76
Salel, Hugues, 112, 197, 238-49, 250, Turkey, 201
265, 277-8 Tuscan (dialect), 9, 84, 196, 221-5,
Salutati, Coluccio, 5 227-8, 230-4
Salviati, Leonardo, 232-3, 237 typography, iv, 15, 21, 83, 86, 103,
Scapula, Johann, 102-4, 106 206, 274-5
scholiasts, 16, 264
Scotland, 127, 138, 256-7 Valla, Lorenzo, 7, 9, 59, 61-77, 94, 96,
Edinburgh, 27, 254, 262 98, 100, 189-90, 196, 202-3, 211-20,
Scudamore, James, 112 263-4, 272, 278
Senn, Fritz, 116, 122 Van Dyck, Anthony, 137
Sermartelli, Bartolomeo, 222, 232-3, Vasari, Giorgio, 231
235-7, 279 Venetus A, 195, 199-200, 202-3, 205-
Shakespeare, William, 263 10, 265
Shirley, James, 28 vernacular(s), iv, 7, 53, 59, 84, 87-8,
Sicilian, 216, 228, 230 97, 108, 115, 147, 150, 160, 165, 167,
Sicilian (dialect), 223 196, 221-2, 224-31, 233, 237, 279
Sigero, Nicola, 13 Vertue, George, 51, 271
Smith, Adam, 259 Virgil, 7, 42, 54-5, 66, 80, 85-6, 88-90,
Socrates, 46, 136, 146 99, 112, 129, 131, 135, 137-9, 143-4,
Solon, 124 146, 148, 203, 225, 261, 274
Spain, 110, 122, 131, 211-2, 218-9 Aeneid, 7, 51, 54-6, 59, 66,
Aragon, 9, 62-3, 196, 203, 80, 84-6, 89, 123, 148, 151,
211-2, 216, 218-20, 226, 264 163, 274
Barcelona, 212, 216, 219 Voss, Johann Heinrich, 266
Spanish, 81, 110, 122, 131, 196, 211-2,
216, 218-9 Wechel, Chrétien, 240
Stafford, Fiona, 255-6, 262 Weinbrot, Howard D., 108-10, 115,
Stationers’ Company, 50 122
Steno, Michele, 201 Wentworth, Thomas, 1st Earl of
Stoppard, Tom, 267 Strafford, 28, 127
Stuart, Henry Frederick, Prince of women, 54-5, 58, 66, 70, 76, 137
Wales, 94-5 woodblocks, 82, 152-3
Swift, Jonathan, 109-10, 115, 121 woodcut(s), 4, 8, 59, 80, 86, 123, 130,
Switzerland, 147-52, 154-61, 163-65, 222, 272,
Basel, 190 274-5, 277
Geneva, 181, 183-4, 276
Terracina, Laura, 151, 167 Zoppino, Niccolo, 149
Theocritus, 124
Theognis, 124, 181, 276
Thucydides, 38-9, 42, 47-8, 182, 217
287

Homer Among Moderns

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HOMER AMONG THE MODERNS

The Bibliotheca Homerica Langiana

at the University of Chicago

Online Publication Manager Hilary Barker

Supervising Editor Ada Palmer

© The several contributors 2015

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced

Limited edition of 80 copies, printed by Blurb in San Francisco, USA.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & PREFACE iii

INTRODUCTION. Homer Among the Moderns 1

SECTION I: PRINTING AND PUBLICATION

SECTION II: TRANSLATION PRACTICES

SECTION IV: NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY

CONCLUSION. Homer Among the Shades

APPENDIX & INDEX 269

Homer Among the Moderns

THE BIBLIOTHECA HOMERICA LANGIANA

This volume is especially unusual in that all of its scholarship

a 1489 incunable Greek edition to a 1773 English translation of

THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK

In emphasizing the book as artifact, the authors of this vol-

tory 4, no. 4 (2007): 495–508.

and more extant editions today than resulted from a lesser-known

HOMER AND HUMANIST STUDY

Scholars have long debated how to define “humanism,” and

It involves above all the rediscovery and study of an-

and the creative arts. Grounded in what we would

6 Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renais-

sance Humanism, 21–22.

the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras to teach at the University

12 Reeve, “Classical Scholarship,” 33–34.

ion to the History of the Book, 207.

ABOUT THIS VOLUME

This volume exists in four sections, divided for the reader’s

cal Project of Lodovico Dolce’s L’Achille et l’Enea,” emphasizes the

da seeks to understand Homer’s place in the collection. She argues that

invested in the translations of Homer’s texts, and it embodies the wide

This volume asks the reader to consider the many renditions

Printing and Publication

Necessarily, most essays in a collection about volumes of

First Impressions: The Editio Princeps of 1489

THE HIDDEN TREASURE: FROM PETRARCH TO PRINT

Donant aurum quidam vel argentum, concupiscibilem

sepe illum amplexus ac suspirans dico: ‘O magne vir,

Frustration marked simultaneous efforts to bridge this distance

2 Ibid. Quoting Macrobius.

the Nerli brothers themselves.

He has shewn himself equal to the work of editing

have not even yet been so entirely exhausted, as that

ANATOMY OF A VOLUME: BIBLIOTHECA

In its entirety, the 1489 edition in folio consisted of 440 leaves,

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 235.

a. 1.1–2.220: invocation of the Muse; council of the Gods, ex-

b. 2.376–3.70: Eurukleia swears not to tell Penelope of

The coincidence of the missing sections with discrete narrative epi-

The volume also contains Greek marginalia, probably by an-

particularly stirring episodes like Odysseus’s homecoming and Demo-

Despite the importance of this first edition to the Western re-

Renaissance Homer editions, however, the value of Chalcondyles’s

Beloe, William. Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books. 6 vols. London:

Nagy, Gregory. “Homeric Scholia.” In A New Companion to Homer,

Ogilby and the Odyssey

Figure 1. Ogilby, John, Cover of Homer, His