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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2025
Although it is largely overlooked, Thomas Hobbes spent the final years of his life translating Homer’s epic poetry. Despite an overwhelmingly popular extant English edition of the Iliad by George Chapman, Hobbes chose to proffer his own account, often taking great liberties with the source material. Juxtaposed against Chapman’s translation, we see that Hobbes implicitly critiques the political philosophy it commends—a philosophy which disrespects kingly power, misunderstands sovereign authority, and abdicates human virtue. Hobbes sees these elements as corrupting the poetic imagination of England, precipitating much of the unrest we see in the seventeenth century. In correcting and reframing these tales for a new world, Hobbes provides a moral scaffolding for his political philosophy through one of the most widely read classical texts of his time.
1 Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War in 1629 and Homer’s Iliad in 1676.
2 Steinmetz, Alicia, “Hobbes and the Politics of Translation,” Political Theory 49, no. 1 (2021): 84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Hobbes, Thomas, “To the Reader: Concerning the Vertues of an Heroique Poem,” in Translations of Homer, vol. 1, The Iliad, ed. Nelson, Eric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xcixGoogle Scholar. While Hobbes’s claims are often ironic, his contemporaries would frequently adopt the disposition he expresses above. “The best that his critics would say about his interest in Homer is that it kept him out of mischief.” Mintz, Samuel L., The Hunting of Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 19 Google Scholar.
4 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Curley, Edwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1994), 496 Google Scholar. See also Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 31.41: “I recover some hope that, one time or another, this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign who will consider it himself (for it is short, and I think clear) … and by the exercise of entire sovereignty in protecting the public teaching of it, convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice.”
5 Martinich, A. P., “Hobbes’s Translations of Homer and Anticlericalism,” The Seventeenth Century 16, no.1 (2001): 147–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Nelson, Eric, “Translation as Correction,” in Why Concepts Matter: Translating Social and Political Thought, ed. Burke, Martin J. and Richter, Melvin (Leiden: Brill, 2012)Google Scholar. See also Steinmetz, “Hobbes and the Politics of Translation.”
7 Eric Nelson, general introduction to Translations of Homer, in Iliad, xxii. See also Catanzaro, Andrea, Politics through the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”: Hobbes Writes Homer (New York: Routledge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Condren, Conal, “The Philosopher Hobbes as the Poet Homer,” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 1 (February 2014): 71–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Plato, The “Laws” of Plato, trans. Pangle, Thomas L. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 722dGoogle Scholar.
9 Welch, Anthony, “Epic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War,” Modern Philology 105, no. 3 (February 2008): 570–602 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Nelson, Eric, ed., Translations of Homer, vol. 1, The Iliad, and vol. 2, The Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
11 Catanzaro, Politics through the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”
12 Ball, Jerry L., “The Despised Version: Hobbes’s Translation of Homer,” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 20, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 1–17 Google Scholar; Riddenhough, G. B., “Thomas Hobbes’ Translations of Homer,” Phoenix 12, no. 2 (Summer 1958): 58–62 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfe, Jessica, “Hobbes’s Homer and the Idols of the Agora,” in Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Condren, Conal, “The Philosopher Hobbes as the Poet Homer,” Renaissance Studies 28, no. 1 (February 2014): 71–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Davis, Paul, “Thomas Hobbes’s Translations of Homer: Epic and Anticlericalism in Late Seventeenth-Century England,” The Seventeenth Century 12, no. 2 (1997): 231–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martinich, “Hobbes’s Translations of Homer and Anticlericalism.”
13 For a robust exploration of Hobbes’s relationship to poetry throughout his works, see Raylor, Timothy, “Hobbes on the Nature and Scope of Poetry,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 603–23Google Scholar.
14 Nelson, Iliad, xxvi.
15 Skinner, Quentin, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 Nelson, Iliad, xxvi.
17 Fay, H. C., “George Chapman’s Translation of Homer’s ‘Iliad,’” Greece & Rome 21, no. 63 (1952): 104 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Chapman’s translation was later immortalized in John Keats’s sonnet, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
18 Nelson, Iliad, xxx.
19 Scholars often highlight the disjunct between Hobbes and his predecessors, with particular reference to his apparent antagonism toward ancient philosophy. See Stauffer, Devin, Hobbes’s Kingdom of Light (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ryan, Alan, “Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” in Cambridge Companion to Hobbes, 208–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strauss, Leo, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Kraynak, Robert P., “Hobbes on Barbarism and Civilization,” Journal of Politics 45, no. 1 (February 1983): 86–109 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Hobbes, Leviathan, 495.
21 Cooper, Kody W., Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018), 14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis original.
22 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 6.35; chap. 12.4.
23 Ibid., chap. 21.9. See also Hobbes, Thomas, Behemoth, ed. Seaward, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 137 Google Scholar.
24 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 12.20.
25 Hobbes allows for democratic government, properly conceived, as a legitimate expression of sovereign power. Ibid., chap. 19.1. For an analysis of how Hobbesian philosophy might be incorporated into a democratic regime, see Pope, Thomas R., Social Contract Theory in American Jurisprudence (New York: Routledge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Hobbes, Behemoth, 110, emphasis added.
27 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 21.9.
28 Ibid., chap. 13.1.
29 Ibid., chap. 29.14.
30 Ibid., chap. 29.1. See also his account of why “no great popular commonwealth was ever kept up” at ibid., chap. 25.16.
31 Ibid., chap. 29.14, emphasis original.
32 Behemoth’s Third Dialogue provides ample examples of the hazards of indiscriminate substitutions.
33 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 29.14, emphasis added.
34 Ibid., chap. 12.13.
35 Ibid., chap. 12.16.
36 Ibid., emphasis original.
37 Remarkably, Hobbes will ascribe the echoes of this very omnipotence to his sovereign, replacing the transcendent with the immanent. Leviathan, chap. 18.5–6; chap. 29.6, 9.
38 Examples include the claim that God is corporeal (chap. 12.7), that justice only exists within civil society (chap. 13.13), and that Moses is a personification of God (chap. 16.12).
39 Hobbes suggests that the “Spiritual Darkness” of his time has been caused by (1) abusing scripture through ignorance, (2) “introducing the demonology of the heathen poets” (belief in incorporeal substances governing nature and the actions of men), (3) mixing Greek philosophy and religion with Christianity, and (4) adopting false or uncertain traditions. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 44.3.
40 See Strauss, Leo, Hobbes’s Critique of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 56.Google Scholar
41 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 46.14. See also Hobbes, Behemoth, 161–64.
42 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 5.5.
43 Chapman, George, Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)Google Scholar, book 1, line 1. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
44 Hobbes, Iliad, ed. Nelson, book 1, line 1. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
45 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18.6.
46 As Nelson notes, Hobbes declines to translate “king” when we see Agamemnon behaving badly or demonstrating weakness in his Iliad. Nelson, Iliad, 14n28.
47 Chapman, Iliad, 23.
48 As one other representative example, C: “The Jove-kept kings, about the kings all gatherd…” (2.381); H: “And then the Princes…” (2.385).
49 Other examples include H 1.383 and H 2.340.
50 Hobbes is explicit in this language of “right” at H 1.135.
51 C 1.229; “But fools they are that are ruled by you” (H 1.219).
52 H 2.174; compare to C 2.166: “he is kept of Jove and from Jove likewise spring / His honors…”
53 “For there is no covenant with God but by mediation of somebody that representeth God’s person, which none doth but God’s lieutenant, who hath the sovereignty under God.” Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18.3. “I conclude, therefore, that in all things not contrary to the moral law (that is to say, to the law of nature) all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law which is declared to be so by the laws of the commonwealth. Which is also evident to any man’s reason; for whatsoever is not against the law of nature may be made law in the name of them that have the sovereign power; and there is no reason men should be the less obliged by it when it is propounded in the name of God.” Ibid., chap. 26.41.
54 “Another doctrine repugnant to civil society is that whatsoever a man does against his conscience is sin … because the law is the public conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided.” Ibid., chap. 29.7 (emphasis original).
55 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 14.4.
56 Ibid., chap. 25.13.
57 Ibid., chap. 25.12.
58 Ibid., chap. 25.11.
59 Ibid., chap. 32.9. Kinch Hoekstra emphasizes the lengths to which Hobbes goes to disentangle the apocalyptic predictions of his time which saturated the minds of those possessing political power. Hoekstra, Kinch, “Disarming the Prophets: Thomas Hobbes and Predictive Power,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 59, no. 1 (2004): 97–153 Google Scholar.
60 H 1.104. Chapman’s translation notes that the prophecy is undesirable, but there is no suggestion that it is false (C 1.103).
61 Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 2.8.
62 Ibid., chap. 32.6.
63 Ibid., chap. 16.4.
64 Ibid., chap. 18.12; chap. 17.13.
65 Ibid., chap. 36.19.
66 Ibid., chap. 14.5.
67 Ibid., chap. 14.33.
68 Hobbes downplays their excesses, but the Olympians remain questionable figures in his account.
69 For further discussion of Hobbes’s consideration of political virtue among the ancients, see Campbell, Chris, “The Rhetoric of Hobbes’s Translation of Thucydides,” Review of Politics 84, no. 1 (2022): 1–24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Campbell argues that Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides rhetorically positions Pericles as an exemplary sovereign educator, while Alcibiades, unable to unite his interest to that of the city, is cast as a failed sovereign. Pericles’s virtue of self-interest directed to the public good is later mirrored in his Agamemnon. Similarly, one can see an affinity between the selfish yet individualized orientation of his Alcibiades and his Achilles.
70 Peter Hayes, “Hobbes’s Bourgeois Moderation,” Polity 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1998): 53–74.
71 For Hobbes, “rage” is a form of madness. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 8.19.
72 Smalley, Donald, “The Ethical Bias of Chapman’s ‘Homer,’” Studies in Philology 36, no. 2 (April 1939): 170 Google Scholar.
73 For more on Chapman’s broader democratic impulse, see Huntington, John, “Virtues Obscured: George Chapman’s Social Strategy,” Criticism 39, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 161–84Google Scholar.
74 Sukic, Christine, “Ample Transmigration: George Chapman, English Translator of Homer,” Études anglaises 60, no. 1 (2007): 3–14 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Noting the impact of translation on the public: “For after the Bible was translated into English, euery man, nay euery boy and wench that could read English, thought they spoke with God Almighty and vnderstood what he said.” Hobbes, Behemoth, 135.
76 Oakeshott, Michael, “ Leviathan: A Myth,” in Hobbes on Civil Association (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1975), 159–60Google Scholar.