The famous hystory of Herodotus

The Famous Hystory of Herodotus represents the first English translation of Herodotus’ Histories. It was printed for the first time in 1584, three years after the printer (Thomas Marsh) had received official permission to do so: according to The Stationers’ Register,, the printing of the book had been “tollerated . . . by the wardens” on 13 June 1581 (SRO 1234). It is a translation of only the first two books of the work. From a sentence from the Preface, it would look like as if this volume was meant to be the first instalment of a complete translation of Herodotus’ text: “We have brought out of Greece into England two of the Muses, Clio and Euterpe . . . As these speede so the rest will follow” (Aiiiv). However, we have no evidence either this project existed, nor that it was ever brought on; in fact, it would not be until 1709 that a complete English translation of the Histories would be printed. It is possible that the enterprise was abandoned because of poor sales, or that the author was only ever interested in translating those two books.

As for the identity of said translator, who is only identified on the frontispiece as ‘B.R.’, scholars usually suggest Barnabe Riche (or Barnaby Rich). Born in ca. 1540, he is better known for his military career, which saw him fight in the Low Countries and in Ireland against Catholic forces, rising to the rank of captain. In the latter part of his life, he settled in Ireland, dying in Dublin in 1617. In between his military duties, he pursued a rather fertile literary career, with twenty-four literary works ascribed to his name. By and large, these texts belong to two genres. Some of them are fictional texts written in the literary tradition of the romances, telling exotic and exciting stories set in distant, fabulous Eastern lands; while others are pamphlets mainly regarding the situation in Ireland and the trouble it posed to England on both a political and military level. His best-known work is Riche his Farewell to Militarie Profession, printed for the first time in 1581. While the title seems to allude to a memorial or a poem concerning his life, the text is actually an anthology of eight novellas, “gathered together for the onely delight of the courteous gentlewomen, bothe of Englande and Irelande” (Riche 2011, 1), some translated from Italian authors such as Matteo Bandello, while others are of his own making. At the beginning of the first story, he presents the text as the work of a soldier come to the end of this career and now forced to reinvent himself as a writer of tall and strange tales: “Souldiors were forgotten, Captaines were not cared for . . . and suche were preferred in their romes, as had any facultie in them tending to pleasure and delight, . . . suche as can devise to please women, with newe fangles, straunge fashions” (24).

In 1924, Leonard Whibley, in the introduction of his modern edition of the Herotodus translation, denied the identification with Riche (xxi-xxii), claiming that “there is little ground to justify the identification and many reasons against it” (xxi). He argued that:

• Riche was too busy writing other books;
• He does not appear to desire to conceal his authorship in the other published texts;
• His books in those years were published by another printer (Robert Walley) and dedicated to another patron (Christopher Hatton; the translation is dedicated to Robert Dormer, and we know of no relationship between them);
• While there are “certain resemblances in the use of colloquial language and proverbs” (xxii) between the translation and Rich’s Farewell, those are “common to the age”, whereas the differences are more marked;
• Finally, Riche was a soldier, not a literate, and since the translation bears traces of being derived from Valla’s Latin text, it is unlikely Riche knew Latin.

Later scholarship, however, has insisted on the identification, on some occasions debunking Whibley’s affirmations. Jane Grogan has pointed out that Riche’s first literary work, A right excellent and pleasaunt dialogue between Mercury and an English Soldier (1574) not only “borrowed the story of ‘Solon’s happiness’ [i.e. the dialogue between Solon and Croesus and his moral about Fortune’s fickleness]” but also “pursued as its principal theme . . . another recurring theme of Book 1 of the Histories . . . the ‘effeminisation of men’” after the conquest of an empire (Grogan 2014, 79) – a theme that, as we saw, also recurs in Rich’s Farewell. She also underlines how Richard Dormer was an “undistinguished stepson to the notorious Sir William Pelham under whose controversial rule Riche had served in Ireland in 1579-80, and whose irritation with military service to a queen Riche seems to have shared” (ibid.). On that note, it should be borne in mind that the first French translator of Herodotus, Pierre Saliat, whose complete rendering of the stories would appear in the 1550s in two different editions (1552, comprising only the first three books; and 1556), had affirmed in the preface to the second edition that in reading Herodotus one would “gain a narrative of military matters that have direct contemporary applicability” (Earley 2016, 127). It would not be too far-fetched to suggest that Riche knew of this view of Herodotus as useful for military applications. As for Riche’s education, we do not know enough about it to exclude a knowledge of Latin; on the contrary, given how common the teaching of Latin was even at a medium level of education (as can be seen in the organisation of the grammar schools of the time) it is far from unlikely that he did know the language even if he was not an academic. Finally, the doubts which arise from the different dedicatee and printer and the concealment of his authorship may be explained with the hypothesis that Riche initially contacted different patrons and printers at the beginning of his career, and in doing so he offered Marsh the rights of his translation. Later, after settling definitely with Hatton as a patron and Walley as a printer, he decided to distance himself from this work. To conclude, then, there is not enough evidence to question the identification of B. R. with Riche (and Whibley did not provide an alternative); therefore, for the purposes of this introduction, I shall accept it.

Riche could not have chosen a better time to translate Herodotus. In between the 1560s and the 1590s, the popularity of the historian and his work registered a notable increase in the literary landscape of Elizabethan England. Numerous stories from Herodotus had become the subject of many plays staged in private, cultured venues such as the court or the universities (see Dall’Olio 2024, 206-7): we have news of a tragedy about Astiages, king of the Medes, performed at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1568, and of one about Xerxes staged before the Queen by the Children of Windsor in 1575 (both plays are lost; see the information about them in LPD 2024). Both were preceded by Thomas Preston’s tragedy Cambises (1560-1561, printed 1569), which staged the story of the infamous Persian tyrant from Herodotus’ Book 3 in a version that, while not directly derived from Herodotus, still bore marks of his influence (see Dall’Olio 2020). William Painter also included stories from Herodotus’ first book, like Gyges and Candaules or Croesus and Solon, in his anthology The Pallace of Pleasure (first printed 1566). The Herodotean-inspired depiction of Persia was reprised and expanded upon in English romances of the 1580s such as Anthony Munday’s Zelauto (1580) or William Warner’s Pan his Syrinx (1584), as well as in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-1596). Finally, in 1591, the Greek text of Herodotus’ first book would be printed in Oxford as part of a ‘first wave’ of printed Greek text in England (see Milne 2007, 686-7; the text is also present in this archive). All these elements reinforce the picture of a cultural interest in the ancient Persian empire as described by Herodotus that explains why Riche would have thought that a complete translation of Herodotus would have been a successful endeavour.

There were also other significant reasons for Herodotus’ cultural relevance. One was religious: as the most ancient text about the history of Persia and Egypt, Herodotus had been understood by some notable Protestant historians such as David Chytraeus and François Baudouin as a “secular continuator of the writings of the Old Testament” (Earley 2016, 138), a God-sent completion of the universal history present in the Bible. It did help, in this sense, that Herodotus’ work chronologically starts with the rise of the Persian empire in the second half of 5^th-century BC thanks to Cyrus the Great, the same man cited in the Bible as the Persian king who delivered the Jews from their exile in Babylon and allowed them to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. Translating Herodotus into English thus gave readers access to a historian who, though a pagan, was seen as a relevant source of knowledge for the Christian faith. It may also explain why the translation did not proceed further: since at the time interest in Herodotus was more connected to his account of the ancient Eastern empires in connection to the Bible rather than to the Persian wars, the first two books were technically all that interested to Renaissance England readership.

Another reason of interest in Herodotus was political, and was directly connected to the already-mentioned figure of Cyrus the Great. The founder of the Persian empire was seen, at the time, as a traditional model of perfect kingship. This was due mainly to the Humanist admiration and love for Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, the fictional biography of Cyrus seen as a model of an educational text for princes (see Humble 2017), in which Cyrus was depicted as an ideal sovereign. The text had enjoyed a large diffusion and become a model for an entire literary genre (see more on the introductions to William Barker and Philemon Holland’s translations, as well as the 1613 printed edition of the Greek text; all texts are included in this archive). By the 1580s, however, his reputation had somewhat dwindled in England, and an alternative interpretation of Cyrus was on the rise (cf. Grogan 2007), one which found in Herodotus’ text its textual and historical basis. In Book 1 of Herodotus’ Histories, the rise of Cyrus is described not as the result of a thorough education designed to make him a perfect ruler, but as a series of stratagems and strategies devised by an ambitious prince first to deliver the Persians, from subjection to the Medes, and then to enlarge his conquest out of pure ambition. This ‘negative’ interpretation of Cyrus had already been advanced in regard to Xenophon by some notable Renaissance thinkers such as Machiavelli (see Newell 1988, 118-21), but now the rediscovery and the new popularity of Herodotus had given it greater momentum. This view of Cyrus better suited the cultural interest of 1580s England and its ambition in creating an empire, as well as the development of European political theory of the time, which saw the progressive abandonment of the Humanist idea of the ideal ruler as a virtuous man and more and more championed the idea of the ideal ruler as the one able to do what is necessary to satisfy his ambition – an ideal that, on the English tragic theatre, would find a powerful incarnation in the titular character of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587-1588).

Indeed, in the preface Riche does seem to suggest Herodotus to be a better reading than any other historians previously known in England, and especially useful for the building of an empire. While presenting his work to the reader, Riche does evoke traditional examples of the usefulness of history as a way to learn how to achieve fame and glory:

It is lefte to memory of Scipio Africanus a noble Gentleman of Rome,that seeking to ensue the example of Cyrus which was fayned by Xenophon, he atchieued that fame of wisdom and valure as fewe had attayned before him. The lyke happened to selimus prince of the Turkes, whose auncetours hating stories, he caused the actes of Caesar to be drawne into his mother tongue, and by his example, subdued a great part of Asia and Africa. And Cæsar himselfe had neuer aspired to the type of so great renown, but by following of Alexander, reading whose victories, he brast out into teares, forsomuch as at the same age whereat Alexander had subdued the whole worlde, himself had done nothing woorthy memory. (Aiiv-Aiiir)

To the traditional example of Scipio reading Xenophon and Caesar being inspired by Alexander’s deeds, Riche adds another example from Eastern history, that of an Ottoman sultan, suggesting an “intersection of ‘barbarian’ history and European history” and “a vision of global imperial history actively enabled by the reading the histories of ancient near east” that was quite new for the time (Grogan 2014, 80). Only then he affirms that Herodotus “of all other [he] most excelleth, both for the pleasant course of the story, and the plentifull knowledge cōteyned therein”. The progression is a thoroughly calculated one: the superiority of the ‘new’ Herodotean history, for the first time available to English readers, is thus strongly affirmed over that of old models such as Xenophon (the only other historian here mentioned by name).

In the course of the translation itself, Riche emphasises the point even more by writing numerous notes on the side of the pages. Some of them are merely a survey of the content of the text or an explanation of some particular passages, but others do offer a moral and/or religious take on the text. “By so much the greater is their folly that fight for women, by how much the greater their liberty is to be wel ridde of them” (Biir), he comments on the famous passage in which Herodotus affirms that several kidnappings of women were the first causes of enmity between Greece and Asia. This is only the first of many similar misogynistic remarks present in all the translation, clearly meant to influence the way the reader would interpret the text. In a similar way, the oracle of Delphi is identified in its first appearance as “the diuill in old tyme a disposer of kingdomes & since the Pope” (Biiir). This note is not just a declaration of “a sound Protestant faith” (Whibley in Herodotus 1924, xxiv) which one would expect from a soldier who spent years fighting against the Catholics; it is also an allusion to the ultimate fate of Croesus, the king who waged war against Persia trusting in a deceitful oracle. Not coincidentally, when the tale of Croesus’ fall begins, Riche comments that “he is somewhat to hastly that leaps ouer the stile before he comes at it” (Cviv). It is, however, true that such comments decrease progressively, and the notes become more pointers helping the reader to distinguish and separate the different sections of the text than a way for the translator to impose his own interpretation.

As for the translation itself, Riche’s work follows what had by that time become a proper tradition. Since its first vernacular translations in Italian by Matteo Maria Boiardo (1474-1491), Herodotus’ work had become widely admired for his vivid description of the ancient East and its most exotic aspects, not to mention his qualities as a narrator of pleasant and sometimes even moral tales. Boiardo already played up this aspect of the text in his translation (cf. Looney 2016, 247-51), and subsequent translations followed his lead in perpetuating a ‘romance-like’ rendering of the text. Riche is no exception to this (cf. Whibley in Herodotus 1924, xxviii-xxx; Looney 1996, 65-70). Many times his interventions expand and build upon the original text rather than simply retelling it. This goes both for the description of the way characters react to the historical events and the description of some geographical and cultural elements of the distant Eastern lands. In the first case, the expansion is meant to enhance the reaction of the character, making it more intense and ‘pathetic’; in the second, it emphasises the fabulous aspects of those lands. The reader is thus immersed in a tale of mythical proportions, set in faraway lands and times, in a way that makes the text similar to those of the afore-mentioned contemporary romances (which Riche, as we saw, was very interested in, even though he claims only become it was the fashion of the time). This operation also includes another type of textual interventions, one that, using the terminology provided by Lawrence Venuti (2008), can be viewed as a ‘domesticating’ practice. The purpose of such interventions is to rephrase some elements of Herodotus’ world in a way closer to the expectations of the audience. It may then happen that Atys, Croesus’ son, laments that his father keeps him away from any “exploits of chivalry”, or that the Egyptian priests of Vulcan are presented as “the Chaplaynes of god Vulcan”. The translator is also keen to avoid any linguistic choice that may seem too high-brow, rather choosing to employ an everyday style, comprehensible to uneducated readers (including also the use of some proverbs). It is clear, in a nutshell, that he wanted his text to be accessible to a vast readership, not just to readers already familiar with Herodotus’ work. 

However, it does not seem to have been a fortunate experiment. Not only was the translation never completed, but we also know of no reprints of this work, nor any direct quotation survives in all Elizabethan literature, not even in some historical texts which could have used Riche’s translation as a source, such as Walter Ralegh’s History of the World. No copy of Riche’s translation is known to have been in the possession of any private collector; on the contrary, it seems that the cultured readers of Renaissance England preferred either to read one of the innumerable editions of Lorenzo Valla’s Latin translations or Pierre Saliat’s French text. In fact, it was not until the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century that Riche’s work was reprinted, first in 1888 (edited by Andrew Lang) and then in 1924 (the aforementioned edition by Leonard Whibley). And it is only in the last two decades, thanks to the rise of a new scholarly interest in the presence and influence of the ancient Persian empire in Renaissance England literature, that the work has once again been studied and analysed by scholars as part of the more general history of the reception of Herodotus in Renaissance England.

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.

— 2020. “‘In King Cambyses’ Vein’: Reconsidering the Relationship between Thomas Preston’s Cambises and Herodotus”. Erga/Logoi 8 (2): 109-31.

Earley, Benjamin. 2016. “Herodotus in Renaissance France”. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond, edited by Jessica Priestley and Vasiliki Zali, 120-42. Leiden-Boston: Brill.

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.

Herodotus. 1924. The Famous Hystory of Herodotus. Translated by B. R., with an introduction by Leonard Whibley. London: Constable and Co. Ltd.

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

Looney, Dennis. 2016. “Herodotus and Narrative Arts in Renaissance Ferrara: the Translation of Matteo Maria Boiardo”. In Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond, edited by Jessica Priestley and Vasiliki Zali, 232-53. Leiden-Boston: Brill.

— 1996. Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State 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.

Riche, Barnabe. 2011. Rich’s Farewell to Military Profession, 1581. Edited by Thomas Mabry Cranfill. Austin: University of Texas Press.

SRO. 2024. Stationers’ Register Online. https://stationersregister.online/ (Accessed 24 July 2023).

Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility. London-New York: Routledge.

The text in this archive reproduces that of the copy of the 1584 Quarto edition at Christ’s College Library, Cambridge. It was donated to the college’s Old Library by William Henry Denham Rouse (1863-1950), a former student of that college, later headmaster of the Perse School in Cambridge. He was one of the most renowned translators and editors of Greek texts in his time, not to mention co-founder of the Loeb Classical Library, for which he personally translated the Homeric poems.

It is a copy of good quality, of 119 pages, and with an engraved border. The text is easily readable, with no lacunae to speak of. For this reason, I did prefer it over the copy preserved at the Henry E. Huntington Library, who had been the base for the edition present in other online archives. Unlike the Cambridge copy, that text is in part ruined and does present some very notable lacunae. The text of the translation is written in a typical Renaissance blackletter, a font that has been rendered in the diplomatic edition as bold; the dedicatory epistles are instead in an Italyc type, as it is typical of such texts in the period. No hand-written notes are present.

On those very few occasions in which the text resulted difficult to read I relied on Whibley’s old-spelling edition as a term of comparison; such occurrences are signalled in the text.