Skelton’s English Diodorus and the 1481 Edition of Poggio’s Latin Translation

Abstract

Evidence is that, for his English translation, the Tudor laureate John Skelton (c. 1460–1529) more likely used the Venice, 1481, edition of the Florentine eminence Poggio Bracciolini's Latin translation (1449) of the Greek universal historian Diodorus Siculus (fl. 60–30 BCE), rather than any of the other printed editions available by the date. A terminus ante quem for Skelton’s version is supplied by William Caxton’s reference to it in the prologue of his own Eneydos, printed in 1490, where Skelton’s Diodorus is mentioned in company of a Cicero-translation also said to be the laureate’s doing: ‘For he hath late translated the epystlys of Tulle and the boke of Dyodorus Syculus’.1 Moreover, the auto-encomiastic sections of Skelton’s later Garland of Laurel2 claim the same two translations, both the ‘Diodorus Siculus of my translacyon | Out of fresshe Latine into owre Englysshe playne’ (Garland 1498–99), as well as the Cicero, although, unlike Caxton’s phrase, ‘the epystlys of Tulle’, Skelton’s reference, scholarly-precise, specifies which of the collections of Cicero’s epistolography he had translated, namely, the Ad familiares: ‘Of Tullis Familiars the translacyoun’ (Garland 1185). Both translations, predating Caxton’s reference, probably also predate Skelton’s entry into royal service in 1488, when he began dating his writings by means of his idiosyncratic annual-calendar.3 Use of the calendar does not occur in the surviving Diodorus-version, which may well be as early as the early to mid-fourteen-eighties, when Skelton was a working grammarian, nearer his student-days.