Politics and Translation: The English Tacitus of 1698

Abstract

In 1698 the London publisher Matthew Gillyflower issued collaborative translation of Tacitus's Annals and Histories, the first English Tacitus in century.' The book reached second and final edition in 1716; thereafter it was remembered only to be dismissed as hurried rendering of Amelot de la Houssaye's Tacite avec des Notes Politiques et Historiques.? Of course, many translations of the Roman historians appeared in the later seventeenth century and have been similarly forgotten, but Gillyflower's Tacitus has number of claims on our attention. Among Gillyflower's contributors was John Dryden, then engaged in series of brilliant translations distinguished no less by their subtle and at times pointed topical allusiveness than by their literary authority. In the Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1693), the Works of Virgil (1697), and Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), the former laureate found repeated occasion to reflect on English politics, to regret the decline of civic ideals, and to deplore the consequences of the Glorious Revolution. And Tacitus provided particularly suitable vehicle for such purposes: his emphasis on deceit and indirection, his suspicion of political motives, his warnings against arbitrary power, his arraignment of courtly hypocrisy and greed: all could be turned against the Revolution and the regime of William III. Even Tacitus's reputation for highminded republicanism would have appealed to Dryden at time when the republican critique of arbitrary power could be thrust against William's government.3 In To My Honor'd Kinsman (1700), work he described as a Memorial of my own Principles to all Posterity,4 Dryden assumes Tacitean detachment and disinterestedness in order to present his cousin Driden as model of republican virtue steering his way