Herodoti Halicarnassensis liber primus, Clio.

While the 1584 English translation of Herodotus’ first two books by B. R. (maybe Barnabe Riche; see my introduction to the text in this archive) has received a fairly large amount of consideration and study from scholars, not much attention has been devoted to this text, despite the fact that it represents the first ever printed edition of a Greek text of Herodotus in England. It is not difficult to see why. Unlike the translation, which was meant to be accessible for a large, also non-cultivated readership, this is clearly a text devised for a more restricted audience, specifically that of the University at which it was printed, Oxford. This is made clear by the absence of a prefatory letter and a dedication to a patron, as well as marginal glosses. Still, the context concerning its printing deserves examination.   

Joseph Barnes (1549/50-1618), the printer, a former wine merchant and bookseller, received from the University the sum of 100 pounds to become the first director of its press in 1584. Before that date, the only printing houses allowed to exist in all England were those situated in London, which could be easily kept under control by the Crown. However, at the start of the 1580s, the two Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, successfully petitioned to the Privy Council (Oxford, in particular, to Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester, who had been Chancellor from 1564) to obtain permission to print books there for their population of students and academics. Their suit was granted (see Sutton 2024). Due to a lack of information on Barnes’ background and his education, it is impossible to be certain why he was chosen, but I find Dana Sutton’s suggestion likely that his appointment did not happen because of any scholarly stature or interest, but rather because of his skills as a merchant and a seller. Sutton also argues that, in regard to the choices of which texts to print, he was aided by a close collaborator, this time a scholar and an academic; he also suggests that this figure could be no other than William Gager (1555-1622), the poet and dramatist whose career at Oxford had just started around the time the press was founded. Whatever the causes, we know that Barnes remained at the helm of the university press until his death.

The printing of this text marked at a significant point in the history of the press. On the one hand, while it was not the first time Oxford University Press had printed a Greek text, it was the first time a classical Greek author had been printed in his original language at Oxford, as we can appreciate by consulting Kirsty Milne’s table (Milne 2007, 686-7) of the Greek texts printed in Elizabethan England. On the other hand, it happened at a time of significant change of policy by the press in its choice of which texts to print. For the first six years of its existence, as has been highlighted by Sutton, Barnes almost exclusively printed works either of religious tone and content, or of political propaganda to aid Leicester’s imperialist and anti-Spanish agenda (sometimes both). By the beginning of the 1590s, following events such as the defeat of the Invincible Armada and Leicester’s death (both occurring in 1588), the press began to abandon this mainly-political agenda and instead focus on the printing of texts more openly related to scholarly activities and interests. It is telling that Herodotus was the only text printed by Barnes in 1591, after a year (1590) where no new printing appeared, and before another (1592) where eleven new books were printed. It is also telling that, in the rest of the decade, Barnes would print other texts of Greek authors in their language, such as Lycophron’s poem Cassandra (1592), Aristophanes’ comedy Knights (1593) and Demosthenes’ speeches Olynthiacs and Philippics (1597).

The choice of Herodotus as the first classical author to receive this sort of treatment was not a coincidence. The historian had been one of the most widely read Greek authors in English universities for decades, as proved by a letter by Roger Ascham to a former university classmate of his, dated 1542, where the scholar noted with delight how “Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon magis in ore et manibus omnium teruntur, quam tum Titus Livius” (“Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon are now held in the mouth and hands of everyone, than Livy was by then [when we were students]”; Ascham 1865, xxxvii). Such a popularity is also proved by the notable amount of plays, staged either at the universities or in other elite venues such as the court, which we either know or suspect to derive from Herodotus, such as the tragedy about Astiages, king of the Medes, performed at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1568, and the one about Xerxes staged before the Queen by the Children of Windsor in 1575 (both plays are no longer extant; see the information about them in LPD 2024). We may add to this list another extant play, The Warres of Cyrus, written probably by Richard Farrant in the 1580s (cf. Bigliazzi 2024, 72) to be performed by the Children of the Royal Chapel (of which he was Master), and first printed in 1594. While it is technically an adaptation of some episodes from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the characterization of its protagonist (Cyrus the Great) and its people (the Persians) show signs of a clear influence from Herodotus (cf. Grogan 2014, 122-3; Dall’Olio 2024, 204-12). In addition, as I mentioned in my introduction to Barnabe Riche’s translation, in the second half of the 16th century traces can be found of a growing reputation of the historian also among the general audience, thanks to the influence of his work on the vernacular romances tradition. All these factors probably convinced Barnes that Herodotus would have been a good choice.

The same reasoning, however, is probably what led him to decide to print only the first book of the Histories, with no plans to go further (at least, none that we know of). Generally speaking, for Renaissance literary culture (in England as well as abroad) Herodotus was important first and foremost for his account of the history of ancient Eastern empires, especially Persia, while little to no interest was given to the latter part of his work, which centres on the wars between Greece and Persia (unlike what would happen from the 18th century onwards). More specifically for England, as has been conclusively proved by Jane Grogan (2014), the rise of the Persian Empire provided a classic, prestigious model of a ‘barbarian’ people with no previous history of great conquests growing to an imperial position of superiority through their own value: something of great relevance for a nation that was starting, in that period, to nurture political ambitions to rise to a state of great power, capable of dealing with more established imperial realities such as the Roman Catholic Spain. On a more superficial level, all the best-known stories from Herodotus, the ones which were included even in prose anthologies such as William Painter’s Palance of Pleasure (1566), come from Book 1. This is especially true for the story of Solon and Croesus, whose wide fortune in Renaissance literature granted it a proper tradition of its own, separated and autonomous by that of Herodotus’ text as a whole (see Grogan 2014, 6-8; cf. my introduction to William Alexander’s tragedy Croesus in this archive).

Even more specifically, the vast majority of Renaissance readers (both cultivated and not) proved to be interested almost exclusively in the rise and fall of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire and protagonist de facto of Herodotus’ first book. For Renaissance culture, he was one of the most eminent figures of an ideal ruler, mostly due to the reverence and high regard they had for Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (universally viewed as a model of an educational text for princes: see Humble 2017, 2020). The rediscovery of Herodotus’ work in this period did bring to a reassessment of such a view (cf. Grogan 2007): the historian does describe Cyrus as a cunning politician able to get his way through deceit and strategy as well as through valour. However, this critical reassessment did not change the premise on which it was founded: he may not have been seen anymore as a paragon of virtue, but Cyrus remained a model of ideal kingship, albeit in a way that now seemed to align more with a Machiavelli-inspired idea of ‘virtue’ rather than the more traditional, Christian-inspired one. This debate over what truly constituted a model of ideal kingship was of great relevance in England in the 1580s, and even made its way in texts devised for a general audience such as Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy Tamburlaine (1587-1588), whose protagonist is characterized as a paradoxical new model of ideal ruler in a way that recalls very closely both Xenophon and Herodotus’ Cyrus (cf. Rhodes 2013, 209-1; Dall’Olio 2022, 246-7).

With his printing of the first book of Herodotus in its original language, then, Barnes was providing Oxford readers with the possibility to read a text whose content was proving to be very relevant in their current political and cultural environment. We have no evidence to assess whether its venture was a success, although the absence of any subsequent reprintings may be seen as hints of failure. Only two copies of the text are still extant according to the USTC (2024), and, as I said before, no great amount of scholarly research has been devoted to this text other than cursorily acknowledging its existence. However, this dearth was perhaps to be expected; after all, Barnes’ edition was intended to provide scholars with something in which a non-cultivated readership of the time was thoroughly uninterested.

Ascham, Roger. 1865. The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, Now First Collected and Revised, with a Life of the Author, vol. 1. Edited by John Allen Giles. London: John Russell Smith.

Bigliazzi, Silvia. 2024. “The Strange Case of the Singing Chorus that Was Not There. On the Authority of Authorities”. In What is a Greek Source on the Early English Stage? Fifteen New Essays (Skené Texts DA 4), edited by Silvia Bigliazzi and Tania Demetriou, 71-108. ETS: Pisa.

Dall’Olio, Francesco. 2024. “An Empire equall with thy mind”: the ‘Persian Plays’ and the Reception of Herodotus in Renaissance England”. In What is a Greek Source on the Early English Stage? Fifteen New Essays (Skené Texts DA 4), edited by Silvia Bigliazzi and Tania Demetriou, 197-222. ETS: Pisa.

— 2022. “‘I know not how to take their tirannies:’ Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the Praise of the Tyrant.” In A Feast of Strange Opinions: Classical and Early Modern Paradoxes on the English Renaissance Stage (Skené DA 1.1), a cura di Marco Duranti and Emanuel Stelzer, 227-56.

Grogan, Jane. 2014. The Persian Empire in English Renaissance Writing, 1549-1622. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

— 2007. “‘Many Cyruses’: Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and English Renaissance Humanism.” Hermathena 183: 63-74.

Humble, Noreen. 2020. “The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse: Cicero and the Reception of Xenophon’s Persia in the Early Modern Period”. In Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe, a cura di Jane Grogan, 29-52. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—2017. “Xenophon and the Instruction of Princes”. In The Cambridge Companion to Xenophon, edited by Michael E. Flower, 416-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lost Plays Database (LPD). 2024. https://lostplays.folger.edu. (Accessed 18 July 2024).

Milne, Kirsty. 2007. “The Forgotten Greek Books of Elizabethan England”. Literature Compass 4 (3): 677-87.

Rhodes, Neil. 2013. “Marlowe and the Greeks”. Renaissance Studies 27 (2): 199-218.

Sutton, Dana. 2024. “Joseph Barnes, the Original Printer to the University of Oxford: A Study in Political Propaganda”. https://philological.cal.bham.ac.uk/gager/appendix.html (Accessed 03 August 2024).

Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC). https://www.ustc.ac.uk/. 2024. https://www.ustc.ac.uk/(Accessed 05 August 2024).

The text in this archive reproduces that of the copy held at the Bodleian Library. It is a copy of good quality, of 164 pages, with no engraved border. The text is easily readable, with no lacunae to speak of. Other than the Greek text of Herodotus’ Book 1, it includes also the historian’s life as presented in the Suda, the 6th-century BC encyclopaedia which provided early modern European culture essential knowledge about the ancient world, along with a poem by an unknown author in honour of Herodotus. The text is written in an Italic type. The pages are numbered, with the number on the upper right angle of the page and signature marks at the bottom.