Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Polybian studies, c. 1975–2000
- HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL PAPERS
- POLYBIUS AS A HISTORIAN
- POLYBIUS ON ROME
- TRANSMISSION OF POLYBIUS
- 19 Polybius, Mr Dryden, and the Glorious Revolution
- 20 Polybius through the eyes of Gaetano De Sanctis
- Bibliography
- Indexes
19 - Polybius, Mr Dryden, and the Glorious Revolution
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Polybian studies, c. 1975–2000
- HISTORICAL AND GEOGRAPHICAL PAPERS
- POLYBIUS AS A HISTORIAN
- POLYBIUS ON ROME
- TRANSMISSION OF POLYBIUS
- 19 Polybius, Mr Dryden, and the Glorious Revolution
- 20 Polybius through the eyes of Gaetano De Sanctis
- Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
Retirement is well known to be a time for making excursions. And though indeed we all know that Wilhelmina Jashemski has not retired in any real sense of the word (nor is likely to do so), nevertheless, as my contribution to her Festschrift I invite her to tear herself away from Pompeii (and from the Garden Library at Dumbarton Oaks) and to accompany me on a brief voyage of exploration into late seventeenth-century England, where I shall try to expose the connections between Polybius' fortunes, the career of Mr John Dryden, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Already by the fifteenth century Polybius was known in England, where a Latin translation of his work is mentioned among the books in John Shirwood's library in 1471–2. But until well into the eighteenth century only three English translations of the historian had appeared. In the first two of these Polybius was not well served. In 1568, under Elizabeth I, Christopher Watson of St John's College, Cambridge, produced a self-indulgent volume in which, after inveighing against ‘tearing time and blinde ignorance, capital foes to vertue and good literature’, he printed an indifferent rendering of Book I and, for no very good reason, filled out the rest of the volume with an account of ‘the Victorious Actes of King Henry Fift’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Polybius, Rome and the Hellenistic WorldEssays and Reflections, pp. 295 - 309Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002