THOMAS HOBBES, Translations of Homer, ed. Eric Nelson

Abstract

THOMAS HOBBES's translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, composed in the 1670s, were the philosopher's last major work, and his single most extensive undertaking. Hobbes's address ‘To the Reader: Concerning the Vertues of an Heroique Poem’, prefixed to his Odysses (1675) is familiar to historians of literary criticism and of the epic, partly by virtue of its inclusion in J. E. Spingarn's widely-used Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century (1908). But the translations themselves have attracted little attention, and even less admiration. The present edition is the first since Sir William Molesworth's English Works of Hobbes (1839–45), and the secondary literature on Hobbes's Homer amounts to a mere handful of articles, plus cursory mentions in general books on Hobbes, or in works on other seventeenth-century translators. Hobbes himself made light of his translations, declaring that he had composed them because he had ‘nothing else to do’, and had published them in order to draw his enemies’ fire from his ‘more serious Writings’. Dryden described Hobbes's Homer as ‘bald’ and asserted that Hobbes had studied poetry ‘as he did mathematics, when it was too late’. Pope repeated the charge of ‘baldness’, describing Hobbes's versions as ‘too mean for Criticism’, and declaring that several passages ‘would have done very well’ if ‘they had been writ on purpose to ridicule’ Homer. Later commentary has largely followed these early leads. Historians of translation have generally castigated Hobbes's versions for their inaccuracies, omissions, vulgar diction, and clumsy versification. And philosophers have accepted the author's casual attitude to his Homer at face value, deeming it far less integrally connected with the main body of his thought than his earlier translation of Thucydides.