'S SCHOLARSHIP IN PRISON: DISCOVERY AND DISASTER IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY *

By KRISTINE LOUISE HAUGEN

FROM I 627 TO I 633, the mercurial mathematician, chronologer, and Oxford alumnus Thomas Lydiat was confined to debtors' prison. 1 The experience called forth a sustained period of creativity that sharply contrasted with his intellectual quiescence in the several years preceding, during which he had devoted himself to the life of a country clergyman and perhaps, at best, kept up his scholarly notebooks. 2 Inasmuch as he now began eagerly seeking to publish his attractive new works and to gain help from the great, Lydiat's new ambition recapitulated the professional strivings of his youth twenty years before, just as his revived scholarship closely followed the themes of the work he had pursued at that time. Lydiat's grand misfortune was that his pet theory - it involved the monarchy of ancient Persia, which held great fascination for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -was totally wrong, becoming more so with every piece of new and mistaken historical evidence that he adduced. That he managed to conduct original historical research while incarcerated, then, only compounded the regrettable fate of his conclusions. That Lydiat's discoveries were also disastrous was a verdict openly drawn by some of his readers later in the seventeenth century. Indeed, no one could read about his discoveries until later in the seventeenth century,

*1 am extremely grateful to Anthony Grafton for alerting me to Lydiat 's prison work and to Mordechai Feingold for continuous and copious assistance as I researched Lydiat's strange story. Noel Swerdlow kindly discussed historical chronology with me, and Rhodri Lewis, William Poole, and Nicholas Hardy provided valuable help as well; thanks also to a reader for this journal for acute comments. But this project would have been entirely impossible without the generous support of the Renaissance Society of America's Research Grant and the Bodleian Library's Centre for the Study of the Book, which enabled me to visit Oxford and study Lydiat's manuscripts and related materials in the summer of 201 I. Bodleian Library Record for Lydiat's two prison books were printed in Latin only some time after his death, which came in l 646: his large Ca nones chronologici (Chronological lists) at Oxford in 1675, and his Annotationes (Annotations) on the Greek chronological inscription known as the Parian Chronicle in 1676, within an Oxford reprint of the inscription edited by . The gap in this history already alerts us that Lydiat's work was perceived as suf­ ficiently important to be collected by someone following his death, then passed from hand to hand until it reached the Oxford University Press, which in the Restoration was mounting a concerted effort to print works of classical scholarship, as well as works by churchmen active before the Civil Wars. But manuscripts in the Bodleian Library tell us considerably more of the story of Lydiat's own actions and ambitions concerning his prison compositions. Already well known and often exploited is the Bodleian volume of Lydiat's letters; here, it is noteworthy that the letters show Lydiat in the act of pressing his brand-new works into the hands of friends who did not react with the enthusiasm that he perhaps expected. So far not discussed to my knowledge, however, are Lydiat's own English-language translation of the Chronological lists, distributed in multiple copies over a group of several manuscripts, and his multiple copies of the more forbidding and technical Annotations. 3 The numerous copies of these texts indicate that Lydiat intended to disseminate his works relatively widely, even if he had lost hope of immediately printing them; the existence of the English translation of the Lists indicates that he envisaged an audience reaching well beyond the international coterie of his fellow scholars; and lastly, both sets of manuscripts contain small but highly interesting textual passages that are not present in the Latin printed versions. Above all, Lydiat's manuscripts are punctuated with subscriptions of place and date (for example, 'From the King's Bench prison, l April Julian, 1629 A.O.'), which were systematically removed by Lydiat's editors later in the seventeenth century.4 Taken in combination with our understanding of Lydiat's scholarship, especially during the early years of his imprisonment, these subscriptions materially help us to grasp the story of his intellectual aims, his achievements, and his frustrations. We find, to begin with, that Lydiat's intellectual revival started on a very modest scale. His Chronological lists, which eventually became far more complex and combative, started out as a straightforward backbone comprised of simple lists of ancient kings. These lists had everything in common with Lydiat's own 1609 book titled Emendatio temporum (Emendation of times), of which it would be quite right to call the early Chronological lists an abstract or rechauffe. Why would Lydiat prepare anything so boring to himself as well as others? Surely to attempt to 184 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison invade the market for textbooks - a large and even international market, in principle, if one were writing in Latin. The conclusion is strengthened by the retrospective date subscription informing us that this earliest layer of the Chronological lists was completed on 21 January 1626/7, 'Three weekes before mine imprisonment'. 5 It is not a stretch to imagine that Lydiat, knowing that he had co-signed for imposing amounts of debt on his brother's behalf, was belatedly grasping that extraordinary measures might be advisable, even hoping that the publication of a new book might somehow keep him out of prison. In fact, such a small work could probably not have raised even the fifty pounds needed to discharge the personal debt that Lydiat had contracted, to say nothing of the additional one hundred and fifty pounds for which he was responsible along with his brother. 6 The key for us, however, is that already three weeks before going to prison Lydiat had begun the attempt to revive his studies; that he had resolved to pursue historical chronology, a field that had occupied his youth; and that he had undertaken to tread very strictly in the same methodological paths he had earlier laid down. Soon after his arrival in prison, Lydiat became entranced with the idea that, beyond raising actual cash to erase his debts, he might also induce powerful friends to intercede in some way for his release. We know this because of the way in which he treated his second prison work, the one that he both began and ended while incarcerated: his commentary on the newly discovered ancient Greek chronological inscription known as the Parian Chronicle, a publication that was evidently brought to him in prison by some scholarly friend. In the end, this commentary was not printed during Lydiat's lifetime; but when theAnnotations had been freshly composed, he seems to have thought they had the power to conjure music from the stars. He sent copies to the politician , the scholar Patrick Young, and the adventurer William Petty, all men \vho appreciated learning and who stood close to more influential figures. This bore no fruit, except that Young informed Lydiat his notes were too brief to be printed by themselves. 7 Worse, Lydiat apparently incurred the wrath of John Selden, the great oriental scholar who had deciphered and published the Greek inscription for the first time and who resented someone else supple­ menting the commentary he himself had provided in his edition. When Lydiat was finally released from debtors' prison, it was not out of influence, properly speaking, but charity. No great noble whispered in the royal ear on his behalf; rather, highly placed churchmen simply raised the amount of Lydiat's debt and paid it off. Although the consequence was fortunate for him, then, and his prison writings may well have served to persuade this consortium of well-wishers that he was a worthy object for help, Lydiat had 185 Bodleian Library Record neither earned his way to freedom with money nor established any lasting relationship with a single, valuable patron. Meanwhile, however, on the intellectual front, Lydiat's technique had distinctly altered from the supine recopying of his older research that had marked the beginning of his new Chronological lists. And it is precisely this story which the manuscripts, with their inscriptions of date and place, allow us to reconstruct. Although he had with him virtually no books, while in prison Lydiat managed to obtain two newly published ancient Greek sources that bore directly on the same historical questions that had preoccupied him decades earlier. 8The Parian Chronicle was the first, while the forged letters attributed to theAthenian general Themistocles were the second. That is, he was able to draw the same triumphant conclusions as before, but with the aid ofevidence that was completely new to the European scholarly world. Lydiat, with no hint of a joke, referred to this congruence as providential. We might view it instead as the work ofa mischievous angel, for in fact Lydiat was wrong about Persia in the Emendation oftimes nearly two decades before, wrong in his Annotations on the Parian Chronicle, and wrong yet again in his finished Chronological lists. And so, in harmony with that mixture of brilliance and misguided fervour that always characterized his intellectual life, Lydiat's personal renascence in prison turned out to be a renascence oferror; the more he argued his case, the more he compounded the utter impossibility of his claims. Thus far, in summary, the story that will be told in this article. The further details of the story will make a difference for at least two reasons. They bear on both the nature of Lydiat's scholarship, that is, the forbidding but vital field of historical chronology as practised by the seventeenth century, and on the setting of that scholarship, that is, the environs ofOxford both during and after Lydiat's life. As for the nature of Lydiat's scholarship, it was polemical, ambitious, and in fact international in its intellectual scope and aspirations. In that respect, it can teach us, among other things, about the position of in European intellectual life in Lydiat's period, still a subject about which we understand too little. Lydiat's scholarship revealed itself as profoundly local, however, inasmuch as he relied throughout his life on a precarious series of professional positions for his support, among the last of them being the role of prisoner in the Bocardo and King's Bench prisons. But Lydiat's posthumous editors hastened to tidy up the edges of his peripatetic biography, claiming him proudly for Oxford while excising all mention of his time in prison - which was the time, of course, when the works coming to the press had been composed. Lydiat's prison works, lastly, allow us to observe a sort of perverse natural experiment in which a voracious reader was suddenly deprived of virtually all books, while at the 186 Thomas Lydiat 's Scholarship in Prison same moment given great incentives to compose and publish new scholarly works. A pause to review Lydiat's social and intellectual biographies is in order before we examine the bold theories ventilated in his l 609 Emendation of times followed by his two prison works in the order of their completion, the Annotations and the Chronological lists. That Lydiat's prison writings were never printed during his lifetime forms only a single instance of the misun­ derstandings and misfirings that infected his intellectual and professional careers. In general, he spurned what was easy to reach while avidly pursuing whatever was uncertain and difficult. Thus, Lydiat rejected a fellowship in his Oxford college on the grounds that he did not wish to take holy orders; perhaps he perceived, rightly, that entering the church would likely prevent him from pursuing the scientific interests that marked his youth, and he judged that seeking a patron might bring him a more congenial way of continuing his intellectual life. 9 Subsequently, Lydiat left an apparently secure job in Ireland arranged for him by after only two years in post. 10 That is, instead of settling down in any institution of learning, Lydiat, like very few of his contemporaries- formed an exception - attempted to earn a kind of Grub Street living in London by writing and publishing works of scholarship, both through selling books and, evidently, in the hope of winning patronage. 11 The first decade of the seventeenth century, during his middle and later thirties, saw the high point ofLydiat's scholarly activity as expressed specifically in publication: he printed four works in as many years, publishing chiefly on historical chronology but also on astronomy. 12 His ambitions met with success insofar as he gained the title of Cosmographer and Chronologer to Henry Frederick, the teenaged son of James I, but in 1612 his young patron died, leaving Lydiat again in search of an income. 13 In the same year, with what feelings one can only speculate, Lydiat retreated from London, became a priest of the Church after all, and took up a living in Alkerton, Oxfordshire, which lay in his family's gift. 14 In the short term, his publications ceased, apart from a polemical 1613 Recensio et explanatio (Review and explanation) of his earlier Emendation of times. Considerably later, in 1620 and 1621, he brought out two new works, one concerning astronomy and one that furthered an old preoccupation of Lydiat's - a repeating chronological cycle lasting 592 years. But mainly, as time passed, Lydiat formed accessory schemes for supporting himself that strike us as baroque, not to say grandiose, in their scale, flourish, and taste for publicity. By l 626, perhaps already feeling pressed by his mounting debts, he was proposing himself as the resident 'scholar' on an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, and again as the resident 'scholar' at a Bodleian Library Record colony he envisaged in equatorial West Africa for acclimatizing English sailors to the otherwise potentially lethal torrid zone. Li By the time of his imprisonment in 1627, then, Lydiat's scholarly career had become quiescent as seen by the naked eye, even if, like many learned men of the period, he probably continued to study and to compile reading notes with no special aim in mind; some of these he brought with him into the prisons, where he used them amid his dearth of printed books in compiling his formidably erudite works. 16 That we know Lydiat's posthumous works were prepared in prison, during a grand recrudescence of the most active period of his earlier life, is in fact owed solely to the manuscripts in the Bodleian. A typical if rather wordy subscription to a section of text reads: I came up with these trifles and communicated them in conversation to a few friends visiting me around the month ofJune, but I committed them to writing around the end of October of the year of the Lord 1628 according to the common calculation, in the Bocardo prison at Oxford, shortly before my removal from there. Tho. Lydyat. 17 The Bocardo, extant until the eighteenth century, was Oxford's university prison, in this case apparently pressed into service for a misbehaving former fellow; after Lydiat was transferred to the King's Bench prison in London, his subscriptions emanated from there. 18 But when his works were eventually published in Restoration Oxford, these subscriptions of date and place were systematically left out. The editors generally did not delete from his texts such phrases as 'widowed of my books', 'in my present calamities', and the like, but a reader completely unacquainted with Lydiat's biography could have failed to understand their import. 19 The practical effect of the editors' decision, then, was to separate their anticipated audience into two classes, of sheep and of goats: those well acquainted with the byways of church history and intellectual history would appreciate Lydiat's work specifically as a feat of prison scholarship, while a wider group might presumably read it without any reference to Lydiat's situation. It is not altogether clear why the Annotations and the Chronological lists were not published during Lydiat's life, unless we suppose that he experienced an understandable torpor after emerging from prison: this, together with the rising public disorder that began with the 164os, and his isolated location in rural Oxfordshire, could well have prevented him from bringing to the press even two works of which he felt proud. That he was proud of them is certainly the implication of his earlier behaviour. In the first place, Lydiat's correspondence shows that he sent hisAnnotations from prison to both the diplomat William Boswell and the royal librarian Patrick Young, surely hoping not only for help in publishing the work but also for 188 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison patronage and even direct help in rescuing him from prison - trial balloons that did not rise high. Boswell, to Lydiat's vexation, immediately passed on his copy to the adventurer William Petty, who stowed it in a trunk and promptly left for France for half a year. Young, for his part, advised Lydiat that he thought the Annotations too short to print by themselves; Lydiat, never able to take a hint, soon wrote back to Young enclosing 'another litle discourse upon the Marble Chronicle ofhalfe a dozen leaues', hoping that the printing of the whole might 'doe mee good, and helpe mee out of this miserable case of imprisonment' .20 But Lydiat was capable of aiming even higher when he had in hand material that he judged to be of more general interest. So, a short essay on the Persian emperor Artaxerxes that Lydiat later incorporated into the Chronological lists bears a dedication to Charles I dated 12 September 1631; the essay, in Latin, was licensed for the press in the year following Lydiat's release, although, for reasons we do not know, this permission to print the work was never followed up. 21 In prison, then, Lydiat revived the grasping, hand-to-mouth professional style that he knew too well from the first decade of the seventeenth century; this time, however, he did not even manage to print his new works, much less find patrons who could help him materially. At some point, which may have been either in prison or following his release, Lydiat decided to go even farther than this in his bid for a potential audience: he translated into English a great amount if not all of his Chronological lists, although not the more specialist Annotations on the Parian Chronicle. Evidently, Lydiatwished to disseminate this prison work beyond an audience that could readily read Latin, probably once again with an eye toward patronage; a similar case in his career came shortly before his imprisonment, in l 626, when he prepared an English-language account of the 592-year cycle that, according to him, underlay all ancient and subsequent chronology, dedicating his text, again, to Charles 1.22 And not only were the Lists translated, both the Annotations and Lists were multiply copied at some time, at Lydiat's instance or that of others: such multiple copies of both works constitute the manuscripts that exist in the Bodleian, most or all of the copies by hands other than Lydiat's. 23 And so Lydiat can be said to have engaged in scribal publication of the prison texts on a modest scale, even if the benefit he may have derived from such publication is unclear or non-existent, depending on the time or times when it took place. It should be stressed that the subscriptions in the manuscript texts correspond with stopping points in the composition of the Latin originals, not with the translation or transcription of the English versions; the hands in the manuscripts are often manifestly continuous before and after a given subscription. Bodleian Library Record Meanwhile, even ifLydiat's intellectual interests over the course of his life were multifarious, the work that he chose to revive in the later I 62os corresponds to a field that has a firm claim on our attention, namely, the study of ancient historical chronology - a field of consuming interest for early modern northern Europeans, although it is still insufficiently investigated by today's intellectual historians.z+ Lydiat, in particular, can demonstrate for us the shared concerns of many erudite scholars of the Bible, even as his own scholarship appears idiosyncratic, not to say strange, even by the standards of his time. Insofar as he bent and tortured the established rules of scholarship, Lydiat can actually reveal to us where they lay, for he never ceased to be regarded as a legitimate scholar during his life or afterwards, as the posthumous publication of his prison works shows. An evaluation of his scholarship must be attempted, and it will be attempted below, although the task is not easy. Lydiat was unquestionably clever, yet he often showed incredibly poor judgement, by the standards both of our time and of his own; moreover, these moments of failed judgement were generally what authorized and provoked his most impassioned arguments. There is no question, however, that he sought out some of the most forbidding tasks and the highest prizes current in his field. It is precisely because Lydiat engaged in controversies that animated many others that he apparently felt pressure to devise proofs and arguments that were ever more novel, even outlandish. If nothing else, Lydiat was not one to lurk solitary in an intellectual corner; his egotism was of the variety that caused him to rush directly into the communal fray armed with a weapon of a kind never seen before. This article would become prolonged, even tedious, if it attempted to supply an adequate prehistory for Lydiat's chronological scholarship. 25 Still, a few important generalizations about his predecessors can be offered. In the first place, they pursued what must be counted as genuine historical scholarship, even when the underlying motivations for their scholarly techniques were theological or otherwise tendentious. As a consequence, they formed a community in which clear-cut and coherent disagreements could erupt. Lydiat, for his part, specialised in bending the received rules of argumentation, and in using historical sources in ways that some readers found eccentric. Others, however - such as James Ussher - set a high value on Lydiat, at least on a general plane. Nor did Lydiat ever cease to be viewed as a member in good standing of the community of scholars massed around the English church and universities - a proposition powerfully demonstrated by the story of his belated release from prison, said to have come as a result of fundraising by prominent figures including Ussher, William Boswell, Robert Pincke of New College, Oxford, and Archbishop Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison . 26 Even his posthumous editors eagerly claimed Lydiat for a scholarly establishment to which his real ties, as we have seen, had always been more tenuous: the title page of his Chronological lists was adorned, in the style of the Restoration, with an engraving of the Sheldonian Theatre, while the half-title to his printed Annotations described him as 'Thomas Lydiat of Oxford' (Thomas Lydiat Oxoniensis). Lydiat, then, for all his singularity, also formed a representative part of the broader rise of phil­ ological scholarship in England in the early seventeenth century. As the discipline of historical chronology expanded from Germany, France, and the to include English scholars as well - figures such as Hugh Broughton and Edward Lively, in addition to Lydiat, were early entrants to the field- English intellectuals found themselves taking part in interna­ tional scholarly enterprises and conversations that might be constructive and purely polemical by turns. 27 Lydiat's own intellectual trajectory will be presented in somewhat streamlined form here for the purposes of understanding his prison works. Above all, the 592-year chronological cycle that he invented received no further treatment while he lay in prison, so that this subject can appro­ priately be left for some intrepid future student. After we begin with an account of Lydiat's 1609 Emendation of times, an omnibus work on the ancient Mediterranean that contained many quite remarkable claims, we shall see how Lydiat prosecuted precisely the same controversial ideas in his two works from prison nearly twenty years later: the Annotations on the Parian Chronicle followed by the Chronological lists, containing what Lydiat regarded as precious insights from the Greek letters attributed to Themistocles. For Lydiat was congenitally single-minded, and not only in the sense of being willing to pursue a single controversy for dozens or hundreds of pages (a quality he shared with all too many of his contem­ poraries). More particularly, Lydiat's signature argumentative technique turned on deploying a single, devastating historical source that, he was convinced, rendered all others profoundly obsolete. He was gifted with a preternatural power for sniffing out the devastating source, and, sometimes unfortunately, with a tenacious brain for keeping hold of that source forever after. In the light of his imprisonment, all of this has a curious result: namely, that Lydiat's intellectual style was already wholly oriented toward exploiting and deeply mining a single book, such as the single books that were able to reach him. During his imprisonment, then, the conditions of his privation happened to bear a distinct family resemblance to what had earlier been his quite normal scholarly practice. Sometimes, an historical continuity is as remarkable and singular an event as a large historical change, and the Bodleian Library Record peculiar resilience ofLydiat's intellectual style from freedom to incarcera­ tion must be counted as such an occasion.

THE EMENDATION OF TIMES (1609) AND LYDIAT'S SINGULAR CLAIMS We are now well prepared for witnessing Lydiat's signature mixture of virtuosity, perversity, and intractable stubbornness-but for one factor that has not yet been mentioned. Unfortunately, a rude surprise for the twenty­ first century reader lurks within Lydiat's works on ancient chronology. As was standard practice for northern European Christians in the early seventeenth century, Lydiat regarded one of the key aims of chronology as the elucidation or reconstruction of the 'seventy weeks' prophesied in the Old Testament book of Daniel, an object of fascination since Christian antiquity. In Lydiat's school of interpretation, this prophecy did not in fact apply to the future, from the seventeenth century's standpoint; it had already run itself out in earlier history. Specifically, the seventy weeks had terminated in the life of Jesus, and the effect of the prophecy (in this Christian interpretation) was to demonstrate that Jesus was the Christ and Messiah spoken of in the Jewish tradition. 28 Actually, little else in Lydiat's life suggests that he took a deep personal interest in vindicating the truth of Christianity by this means against hypothetical assailants - rather, like many other contemporaries, he apparently viewed the seventy weeks as an extraordinarily difficult but quite irresistible technical problem. A very brief overview of the key passage in Daniel (Dan. 9:24-27) is in order. It falls, from a chronological point of view, into three parts. The prophecy states that from the 'going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem' until 'Messiah the Prince', there will elapse sixty-nine weeks, or perhaps seventy weeks or sixty-nine and a half, depending on how one reads the sequence of sentences. For Lydiat's Christian school, as we have already seen, the end of this prophecy, that is, 'Messiah', was correlated with some event in the life of Jesus - his birth, his crucifixion, or his baptism. As to the duration, the 'seventy weeks' was taken to mean seventy so-called 'weeks of years', or a total of 490 solar years. As to the beginning of the prophecy, one obviously desired to identify some important event in the history of the Hebrews with the 'commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem'. When the requisite 490 years were counted backward from the life of Jesus, one landed squarely in the Achaemenid dynasty of the ancient Persian empire. Did any Persian 'commandment' sponsor the restoration ofJerusalem? Here, as it happened, the chronologer faced an embarrassment of riches: the Old Testament reported four such 192 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison edicts, one in the first year of Cyrus' reign, one in the second year of Darius I ('Hystaspis '),and one each in the seventh and twentieth year ofArtaxerxes I ('Longimanus'). One of these edicts, certainly, must be the 'going forth of the commandment'. It was not lost on contemporaries, any more than it is lost on the twenty­ first century reader, that this scheme offered the chronologer a comfortable latitude in defining the beginning, the end, and even the middle (that is, the duration) of the events of these seventy weeks. Room for manoeuvre also arose because of the uncertainties in Persian political history, partic­ ularly real and manufactured difficulties over the lengths of the reigns of various kings: such uncertainties flourished because Persian history was known to Europeans exclusively through Greek sources. Persian history was also uncertain by default because during the later part of the 490 years in question, the prophecy was taken to apply to Roman rulers and Greek rulers whose times were far more accurately known. Thus, the chronologer who wished to change the duration or the beginning of the seventy weeks was faced with the sole option of manipulating the kings of Persia. Any early modern discussion of the 'Persian monarchy', then, is likely to have overt or covert reference to the problem of Daniel's prophecy, and its underlying tone is easily capable of being polemical or revisionist. Now, precisely who was meant to be persuaded of Jesus' divinity by such machinations was rarely specified by the chronologer exegetes. An exception was Heinrich Bullinger, who in his 1565 exposition of Daniel stressed the value of the seventy weeks for the personal devotions of Christians, as well as for spiritual combat against Jews and heretics. 29 But were there any Christians who actually doubted that Jesus was the Christ? And were there really any heretics, or any Jews, who could be converted by this putative link between the Old Testament and the New? Long before Lydiat's time, the task of defining the seventy weeks had meta­ morphosed into an essentially technical problem, a puzzle to be solved for the record but lacking real theological force or necessity. Thus even Joseph Scaliger, a decided innovator in historical chronology, could not resist attempting his own rather radical solution to the seventy weeks, proudly calling this task 'the final ordeal, a Herculean labour'. 30 Scaliger could not know that his friend and ardent admirer Isaac Casaubon would leave ominously untouched virtually all discussion relating to the seventy weeks in Casaubon's printed copy of Scaliger's Emendation o.ltimes, now in the British Library: ordinarily a diligent and attentive annotator of his books, Casaubon was apparently far from agreeing with Scaliger about the importance and interest of Daniel's prophecy. 31 No contemporary, however, went on the printed record to deny that the weeks had signifi-

1 93 Bodleian Library Record cance: practically speaking, active advocacy or silence seem to have been the options at hand for the readers of such chronological work. Among early modern Christians, even more silence generally shrouded a different approach to the seventy weeks that scattered references show they nonetheless knew. In this ancient tradition, advocated by some Jewish writers, the end of the weeks was placed far earlier than the life of Jesus: specifically, in 168 BCE, with the desecration of the temple of Jerusalem under the Greek monarch Antioch us Epiphanes. The lone John Marsham, an English chronologer who belonged to neither church nor university, revived a very similar view in l 672, to the consternation of the Cambridge divine Ralph Cudworth and the silent dismissal of many others. 32 A second quite deflationary position, from a Christological standpoint, was very well known in its general outline because it was reported in the text of Saint Jerome's Chronicle, the Latin translation of a lost Greek original by Eusebius and the de facto foundation for most sixteenth-century study of ancient chronology. In this account, the end of the weeks fell decades later than the life of Jesus: in Jerome, the 490 years began in 433 BCE with the completion of the walls ofJerusalem and ended during the reign of Nero; for the Church father Tertullian, along with a group of Jewish exegetes, the end of the weeks coincided with the Roman emperor Vespasian's defeat of the Jews in the first year of his reign, 69 CE; Joseph Scaliger, in l 583, reverted to a position like Jerome's, placing the end of the weeks during the reign of Nero, in 66 CE. 33 Both of these schools of interpretation, of course, en tailed corresponding discrepancies in the beginning of the weeks as well. For Lydiat himself, however, these Judaeocentric understandings of the weeks were evidently not attractive; he applied his eccentric methods to a mainstream school of thought rather than branching out in a fundamen­ tally controversial or unusual way. And so Lydiat by the first decade of the seventeenth century - not to speak of his time in prison in the l 62os and l 63os - was already working in a highly mature field, one in which much was already established and the problems that remained were sharply defined. In some respects, this situation was well-adapted to his habitual mode of operating, specifi­ cally, his propensity for seizing on a single unusual or novel source and defending it against all comers. Where the solution to the weeks was concerned, Lydiat's personal scheme involved redating the birth of Jesus by two years, positing a duration of only sixty-nine 'weeks' or 483 years between the beginning of the prophecy and its fulfillment, and placing the edict concerning Jerusalem in the twentieth year of Artaxerxes, which was the latest of all of the four plausible candidates. The twentieth year of Artaxerxes had also been chosen by some earlier chronologers, for example

1 94 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison Gerhard Mercator and Joannes Temporarius. 34 But as a consequence they, too, had encountered the problem that now bedevilled Lydiat: such a late date for the edict would cause the duration of the prophecy significantly to overshoot the life ofJesus, unless measures were taken, not just to shorten the time elapsed during the weeks, but to relocate the starting point itself. Mercator and Temporarius, accordingly, took the beginning ofArtaxerxes' actual reign and moved it some number of years earlier, the better to expand the available time between Jesus' life and Artaxerxes' twentieth year. Their technique involved postulating that Artaxerxes had come to the throne in the same year, or shortly before the year, when the Athenian general Themistocles had fled his country and sought refuge in Persia, a synchronization derived from the Greek historian Thucydides. 35 (We will postpone detailed discussion of this sometimes complicated device until we examine Lydiat's Chronological lists.) One important authority whom this position contravened was Jerome in the Chronicle: according to Jerome, Themistocles fled to Persia six years before Artaxerxes ascended the throne, a difference that many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries came to perceive as an error or discrepancy to be solved by more or less bold means. The key to Lydiat's argument was that he too wished to move the beginning of Artaxerxes' reign earlier - in his case, by six years, precisely the same interval as the error that so many early moderns ascribed to Jerome. 36 But in addition to the Themistocles device already deployed by Mercator and Temporarius, Lydiat had a scintillating piece of evidence that no chronologer had used - or, rather, no chronologer had taken seriously - before. In the Emendation of times, the first occasion on which he dealt with the seventy weeks, Lydiat's propensity for infatuation with single sources fixed on the fragmentary and somewhat eccentric historical author named Ctesias of Cnidus. Ctesias, a Greek physician who served in the 5th century BCE at the Persian court of Artaxerxes II ('Memor'), had composed numerous and colourful Greek works of geography and ethnography, including monographs on India and on Persia. Substantial fragments of the Indian and Persian works survive thanks to Photius, that indefatigable and somewhat undiscriminating Byzantine taker of notes. 37 Decades before the first complete editions of Photius' Bibliotheca, which came in Lydiat's lifetime, Photius' excerpts from Ctesias were first published in I 557 and subsequently, beginning in I 566, regularly printed as a supplement to the Greek historian Herodotus, who had heretofore been the major source on Persia for Europeans. 38 Among Ctesias' par­ ticularities, he was a sworn enemy of Herodotus on Persian affairs, and he was known to retail rather incredible stories about India, along the lines of people with the heads of dogs, or people with a single foot that they used to

195 Bodleian Library Record shade their heads.Nonetheless, when Ctesias appeared to offer Lydiat help in the crucial task of establishing the beginning of Daniel's seventy weeks, suddenly Lydiat was convinced that Ctesias must be scrupulously judged passage by passage, and as to Ctesias' claims to have been on the spot at the Persian court and to have consulted official annals in compiling his history, these were to be taken willingly at their face value. 39 Ctesias offered Lydiat two spectacular testimonia that reinforced the old conclusion thatJerome had placed the beginning ofArtaxerxes too late. Lydiat's dealings here would in fact focus not so much on Artaxerxes himself as on his father Xerxes I and his grandfather Darius I. Earlier, chronolo­ gers had unmoored from their place in Jerome's account the times of these emperors also, resorting to a favourite early modern device. Specifically, the chronologers posited that when a Persian king left the country to make war, he appointed his son vice-regent, meaning that the total time elapsed over the course of the two overlapping reigns was less than the sum of the regnal years. Lydiat now, however, brought to bear evidence that he regarded as far more substantive. In the first place, Ctesias informed readers that the reign of Darius had lasted, not thirty-six years as all other sources (including Jerome) reported, but only thirty-one.40 This shortening, obviously, would produce the knock-on effect of bringing Artaxerxes' reign earlier by the same five years. But Lydiat did not have to rest content with a mere numeral for his authority. Ctesias' second key statement allowed Lydiat to execute his favourite and most powerful manoeuvre, that is, to draw a direct temporal connection between the relatively well-known history of Greece and an event from the far more poorly known Near East. Specifically, Ctesias announced that Artaxerxes' grandfather Darius had died very shortly following his defeat by the Greeks at the battle of Marathon, after Darius had returned to Persia and succumbed to a sickness of one month. 41 But it was known that the battle of Marathon fell in the thirty-first year of Darius' reign: we reach the same result as before, and this time from an impressive synchronization between the timelines of two peoples. The lengths of Darius' reign according to Lydiat and according to Jerome are compared in Figure I. Next, one turns briefly to Artaxerxes' father Xerxes, out of whom Lydiat squeezed the further year that he desired in order to bring his total to six. Here, although Lydiat kept the traditional figure of twenty years for Xerxes, he claimed that the reign of Xerxes had overlapped by a single year with that of Darius, with the result that we should count only nineteen years of forward progress for Xerxes' reign. By this fairly arbitrary method - shared, admittedly, with Mercator, Temporarius, and many others - Lydiat caused the beginning ofArtaxerxes to fall in the precise year that he needed, 196 Thomas Lydiat 's Scholarship in Prison

472 BCE (01. 77. I). Yet Lydiat's triumph on this front left him with a rapidly encroaching problem, which had to do with the entire succession of reigns in the Persian empire including and following Artaxerxes'. The problem was that the ending point of the entire Persian dynasty, in 33 I BCE, was perfectly well known: a datable lunar eclipse had been reported at the battle

~Darius Ii Xerxes D Artaxerxes

Lydiat

Fig. r. The lengths of Darius' reign according to Lydiat and according to Jerome. of Gaugamela (or Arbela), when the last Persian emperor was defeated by Alexander the Great. But if, according to Lydiat, Artaxerxes' reign began six years earlier, the whole dynasty would also end six years too early unless further adjustments were made. Lydiat hastened to the task, decisively if nothing else: he simply added six years to the reign of Artaxerxes, with the result that Artaxerxes' reign ended at the customary time and everything afterward followed in the traditional way. Thus, for Lydiat just as for Jerome, the three reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes together occupied exactly ninety-six years. Perhaps not surprisingly, Lydiat had far less warrant for the last of these interventions. In fact, Ctesias was again able to offer Lydiat some half­ hearted help when it came to expanding the length of Artaxerxes' reign, but not as much help as Lydiat needed. Once again supplying a unique figure, Ctesias claimed that Artaxerxes had reigned for forty-two years, whereas it was the convention to give him forty.~ 2 But this, clearly, took care of only two of the six years that Lydiat required, so that he was forced simply to conjecture the remaining four. It is worth noting the curious methodological melange that resulted: Lydiat abandoned the traditional

197 Bodleian Library Record dates from Jerome, swore allegiance instead to a very unusual source, then abandoned that source again when Ctesias did not offer enough for Lydiat's needs. Remarkably, Lydiat did not name Jerome at all in connection with the Persian monarchy in the Emendation of times, presumably because he regarded Jerome as such an obvious target, and perhaps by way of suggesting also that Jerome carried little authority. For Darius' reignLydiat did briefly name Herodotus, in line with his usual practice of choosing the oldest extant or fragmentary sources he could for discussion and censure. We see, at any rate, that the consistently negative tone ofLydiat's arguments applied not only to other early modern chronologers but also, and a fortiori, to all of the ancient sources that did not serve Lydiat's purposes. By a pair of coincidences that defy explanation, Lydiat while he sat in prison beginning nineteen years later would discover that two further ancient sources appeared to abet his idiosyncratic argument from Ctesias: the newly published Parian Chronicle and the equally new letters attributed to Themistocles. This good fortune allowed Lydiat to return to the chronology of the seventy weeks and continue working as if the intervening time and events had never happened. To examine the way in which Lydiat pursued his Daniel scholarship in prison, then, is to witness a potent historical continuity. A continuity, to be sure, that has its dispiriting side, in that Lydiat apparently never paused to ask whether his putative evidence were too good to be true. And if his subject matter was resolutely unchanging over the decades, so too was his approach to historical sources. His methodological habit, so to speak, was to drop all of his eggs into a single basket from a dangerous height - in principle perhaps a reasonable wager when dealing with a respected source such as the Parian Chronicle, in reality a disaster when dealing with the forged letters attributed to Themistocles. Lastly, it is easy to forget, because it is somewhat hard to comprehend, that these enthusiasms of Lydiat's were (at least in theory) mobilized in the service of explaining the meaning of the Bible. His ability to discover the seventy weeks in the most unlikely places forms the final stroke in our tableau of his real competences and his often seriously wasted effort.

THE PARIAN CHRONICLE: DARIUS DUPLICATED In 1628, a genuinely remarkable new historical source was printed from a Greek inscription in England. This was the famous chronological inscription known as the Parian Chronicle, named for Paros, the Greek island on which it was discovered; it belongs to the collection known as the Arundel Marbles, now housed in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.+1 As the oldest chronological table known to us from the Greek tradition, 198 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison the Chronicle continues to command great respect among students of the ancient world, even if it contains a few demonstrable errors - including, regrettably, in places that Lydiat regarded as crucial for his own purposes. In l 62 7, it was John Selden who was given the task, by the Earl ofArundel, of deciphering, transcribing, commenting on, and printing the inscrip­ tions from these stones: the resulting volume appeared in 1628.+1 Gerald Toomer has evaluated this work as 'a stupendous achievement', explaining that 'Selden ... correctly analysed and laid out the structure and chrono­ logical background of a document of a kind completely unknown before, which is poorly preserved, and ... illuminated many of its factual details by adducing other ancient sources'.+5 Indeed, the most casual reader of Selden's edition cannot fail to appreciate Selden's heroic labour in filling in the inscription's many lacunae, getting the numerals to work out correctly, and the like. Without censuring Selden, however, it can be pointed out that he did not entirely share the values of the ancient chronicler. In particular when we compare his printed notes with those that Lydiat subsequently prepared, we perceive that Selden simply did not care a great deal about the dating of many individual events, such as, for example, the death of the Persian emperor Darius. In general, Selden did not very consistently ask how the inscription's information fit into the existing body ofchronological knowledge or tradition, even though we know that Selden briefly nourished a plan for a far broader chronological work with the Parian Chronicle as its prized centrepiece.+6 So Lydiat was not being especially perverse or contrarian, then, when he undertook his own set of notes on the Chronicle; Lydiat's notes were indeed deeply concerned with the times when events had taken place. He was working on them by October of l 628, when the first part of these notes is dated in his manuscripts -just months after Selden's original publication.+; Although Lydiat's notes were of course not printed until l 676, three decades after his death, at the time of their composition they evidently had the feel of great immediate interest, even, perhaps, of urgency; we know from Lydiat's correspondence that he sent them to potentially influential people from his prison cell, attempting to have the notes printed either for money, to obtain some favour or patronage, or both.+8 But how can the purely pagan Parian Chronicle belong to our story about Lydiat's chronological exegesis of the book of Daniel? The inscription could not, of course, be correlated with Biblical chronology in its entirety. Here, as in his Emendation oftimes, Lydiat showed great versatility, and not only of the mental variety; the notebooks he had in prison were evidently crammed with very miscellaneous matter, above all excerpts from Greek historians, that Lydiat must have gathered with no clear or immediate

1 99 Bodleian Library Record use in mind. His tiny prison library also seems to have included a copy of Joseph Scaliger's Thesaurus temporum (1606), which contained an edition ofJerome's Chronicle to which Lydiat often referred, along with Scaliger's notes. With these aids, Lydiat produced long quotations from Greek sources, corrected the information in accepted authorities (for example, Suidas), and even suggested repeated conjectural emendations to the text of the inscription.+9 He also plunged fearlessly into what was commonly known as the 'mythical' period of Greek history, seriously pondering the dates of the legendary Athenian king Cecrops and the rape of Proserpine (for example) while also noting the Parian Chronicle's markedly anomalous dating for the Trojan War. Such interests in no way set Lydiat apart as more credulous than many of his contemporaries, although they did mark him out as more patient and more omnivorous than John Selden, whose annotations hurried over the mythical period in what looks very much like irritation. At the same time, Lydiat's ability to make the Chronicle's new data relevant to Daniel's seventy weeks was both powerful and self-conscious. Lydiat demonstrated this by actually beginning his notes on the Chronicle with a brief essay on the weeks, followed by several pages of discussion of the tyranny of Gelo at Syracuse in Sicily which, according to Lydiat, also bolstered his argument about the dates of Darius.5° For the purposes of Daniel, Lydiat's great excitement about the Greek inscription came about because it happened to corroborate what had previously been the unique claims of Ctesias about the reign of Darius I of Persia. Not only did the Chronicle place the beginning and end of Darius' reign thirty-one years apart, as Lydiat desired - five years shorter than the customary span. The Chronicle also, like Ctesias, placed Darius' death shortly after the battle of Marathon: in the following year, to be precise. 51 In other words, once again the exact times of this important Persian reign could be determined by reference to a Greek event that was far better known. Today, by way of explanation, these notices about Darius in the Chronicle are regarded simply as mistakes; the Chronicle's modern editor, Felix Jacoby, did not even venture to form a positive guess as to why they match with those in Ctesias.52 Nor did Lydiat offer any explanation of how the Chronicle and Ctesias, alone among all ancient witnesses, came to be right: contrasting with his earlier care in delineating Ctesias' special position at the Persian royal court, he now was content to declare the Chronicle correct and withdraw from the field. Before moving onward, one should briefly reflect that by no means every scholar in Lydiat's day would have viewed the Parian Chronicle as a source ofinformation about the arrival of the Messiah. One might compare 200 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison John Selden. The Cambridge divine Ralph Cudworth later pointed out, surely with justice, that Selden never noticed that Darius and Gelo might be relevant to the prophecy of Daniel, and that if Selden had noticed it, he would not have cared. 53 What Lydiat did with the Parian Chronicle was to assimilate it very readily into a much older, indeed patristic, Christian method of elucidating prophecy with as many scholarly resources as one could muster. One strove to be rigorous; one aimed to choose one's authorities with care; along the way, one exercised license to take an interest in a wide variety of different subjects. This is to say that with Lydiat, the Chronicle, for all its novelty, and for all that its material form presumably inspired a heightened degree of credence, was very far from inaugurat­ ing a thoroughgoing change in historical method or historical thought. Certainly, it did not turn him overnight, or even over decades, into an 'antiquarian', if we construe an antiquarian as one who relies on material evidence to the gradual exclusion of texts. s+ Rather, the Chronicle for Lydiat slid effortlessly into an existing frame of reference; for the duration of the Annotations it may have been first among equals, but it would never have occurred to Lydiat to propose doubting or eradicating the equals. Still, however useful, the Chronicle's evidence suffered from the same defect as that displayed earlier by Ctesias' testimony: it dealt only with Darius of Persia, whereas Lydiat's real object for securing the date of the seventy weeks was Darius' grandson Artaxerxes. But soon enough, the letters of Themistocles, which Lydiat would begin studying in earnest by May of I 630, were to solve this problem by their striking chronologi­ cal proximity to Artaxerxes himself. Not only did these letters directly describe the historical beginning of Artaxerxes' reign: they also, crucially, purported to date from that same time as a set of historical documents. Under such pressures and temptations, Lydiat's powers of reason and judgement about his historical sources - to the extent that they had ever operated-would abandon him to his own worst instincts.

THE LETTERS OF THEMISTOCLES: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FIGMENT It was not inherently surprising that in his Chronological lists Lydiat should treat the Persian monarchy, that is, the time period supposed to be referred to by the beginning of the prophecy of Daniel. The explicit plan of this work was to provide king lists covering the full ancient Mediterranean and later western Europe, from Adam through the Hebrew patriarchs through the fifteenth-century Byzantines and sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperors, followed by a comprehensive account of Roman consuls and triumphs.Butsurroundingsomeofthesekinglistsinparticular,appendices

201 Bodleian Library Record and annotations flourished. Darius and Artaxerxes, as one would expect from Lydiat, received special discussion on an extensive scale. 55 In fact, these supplemental annotations might be viewed as the most significant contribution of Lydiat's prison work on the Lists, for essentially all of the matter that went into the tabular king lists (although not the accompanying compilation on Roman consuls and triumphs) had already been furnished in his Emendation oftimes in 1609. In this way, Lydiat's second prison work also hewed as closely as possible to the scholarly lines that he had laid down decades before. As we have already seen from the manuscripts, the first incarnation of the Chronological lists was nothing more than a simple set oflists extracted from Lydiat's Emendation of times. After Lydiat's incarceration, however, he added new matter in at least three stages. Firstly, he prepared 'Insertions' dated from the Bocardo in 'l 628', almost surely meaning the first months of 1628/ 29; these are substantially longer than the initial text of the Lists. 56 He also added polemical passages that appear in the printed Lists but that survive nowhere in the manuscript translations; these may or may not have been prepared during the prison period. Finally, and apparently imbuing Lydiat with the greatest sense of purpose, the sudden appearance of the Parian Chronicle in 1628, together with the publication of the alluring letters of Themistocles in l 629, led him to compose a new and closely argued essay about the times of Artaxerxes and, hence, the seventy weeks. The combination of the letters and the Chronicle - the first forged, the second erroneous-allowed Lydiat to reinforce his earliest theory about the Persians, giving the impression that he had been powerfully right before his time. Lydiat will not have had contact in prison with John Selden, who was also confined on political charges beginning in l 629 but held in the Tower of London and elsewhere.57 Nor did he necessarily have visits from many learned friends, although his correspondence, naturally, cannot reveal personal visitors who did not write extended letters. At any rate, the new Greek source that Lydiat chiefly exploited in the Lists was not brought to him by any personal friend, which made its appearance seem all the more fateful. To hear Lydiat tell the story, A month or two ago, I requested a Thucydides from a bookseller, particu­ larly so that I could reread and subject to a fresh examination the history of Themistocles and, above all, the time of his flight. And here is what I ascribe once more to providence and the divine dispensation: the bookseller sent a copy of Themistocles' own letters, very recently published at Frankfurt out of the library of Elias Ehinger of Augsburg. Not only did I not ask for anything of the kind nor expect it, I did not contemplate it or even dream of it. 58 202 Thomas Lydiat 's Scholarship in Prison While the Artaxerxes essay itself is dated 14 May 1630, we can be more specific concerning the time when Lydiat received the letters of Themistocles: it was at a point when his annotations on the Parian Chronicle were almost or already complete, for he dropped into those annotations a brief reference to a minor detail in the letters. 59 But at that time-and he completed the Parian Chronicle notes in December l 629-he remained far from appreciating the full scope of the letters' use to him. 60 Sometime during the next six months, however, Lydiat discovered that the Themistocles letters held a truly novel key for his theory of the seventy weeks. That Lydiat could be without an author so fundamental as Thucydides after nearly three years of imprisonment underscores not only the thor­ oughness of his deprivation but also the prodigious weight of data that must have lain in his notebooks so as to allow him earlier to work on the Parian Chronicle. Moreover, his choice of Thucydides at this juncture confirms what is already apparent, that Lydiat remained especially preoccupied with the period of history covered by the Persian monarchy. But the letters of Themistocles, as Lydiat suggested, were a source that he did not even know he ought to seek out. It is, perhaps, a measure ofLydiat's comparative isolation both in prison and in wider intellectual terms that he did not hear of the Themistocles letters sooner: in fact, the first edition of the letters had appeared not in 1629 but at Rome in 1626, and Lydiat's associate Patrick Young, as we know from a surviving letter, possessed a copy of this l 626 edition by the middle of 1628.61 Apparently Young, while he treated Lydiat as a friend to some degree and may have been responsible for alerting Lydiat to Selden's publication of the Parian Chronicle, did not feel obliged to abet Lydiat's scholarship at every turn. In any event, once Lydiat had the Themistocles letters in hand, he hastened to prepare his free-standing essay on Artaxerxes, completed on 14 May l 630, which, in proportion to the slenderness of the testimonia on which it rested, displayed a substantial scale and splendour. 62 It was this essay, in Latin, that he dedicated to Charles I in l 63 l and had licensed for the press in l 634. 63 From one point of view, Lydiat's arguments in this essay about the beginning of the seventy weeks simply confirmed everything he had already said on the subject in the Emendation and in the Annotations. His method, too, was similar, in that the Themistocles letters, like the Parian Chronicle, had the effect of synchronizing a number of Greek and Persian events, tending to prove once more Lydiat's theory about the beginning of Artaxerxes' reign. But the underlying character of these two sources was so radically different that it is somewhat painful to watch Lydiat treating them in the same way. For unlike the Parian Chronicle, a genuinely precious 203 Bodleian Library Record source that happens to contain mistakes, the Themistocles letters are a literary forgery dating from later antiquity. It is worth evaluating the extent to which Lydiat might have been expected to recognize this fatal problem. The conclusion, to be brief, will be that the standards of his time in no way condemned Lydiat to the credulity that underlay the proudest moments of his Lists. His opinion was Lydiat's alone. Forged letters similar to those attributed to Themistocles had circulated widely in the Renaissance, and they had already become the object of serious doubt long before Richard Bentley exploded the entire genre in his Dissertations on the letters of Phalaris and others in 1697. Themistocles' letters were a typically rich offering, often characterized by high emotion and lofty events. As Bentley would eventually complain, concentrating first on their language and then on their subject matter: 'Tis almost impossible for a Sophist not to betray himself. Nothing will relish and go down with them, that is ordinary and natural. Then they applaud themselves most, when they have said a forced, extravagant thing. If one speaks of any Civility; the complement must be strain'd beyond all Decorum. Ifhe makes a Resolution; he must needs swagger and swear, and be as willful as a Mad man. The Subject of many of the Letters is Common place; mere Chat, and telling a Tale, without any Business; an Errand not worth sending to the next Town, much less to be brought from remote Countries some hundreds of Leagues. 6+ Yet even in this stirring piece ofinvective, as usual the greatBentleywas only amplifyingmagnificentlya sound that could already be faintly heard. Even at the time of the first printing of the Themistocles letters, from a Palatine manuscript in the Vatican in r 626, their editor Joannes Caryophilus felt the need to defend them against unnamed detractors who had already attacked their authenticity. 65 When Lucas Holstenius in 1628 sent copies of this edition to Patrick Young in England, asking Young to donate one of them to the Bodleian Library, Holstenius discussed the matter of authenticity in some detail. Claude Saumaise and 'other French erudites', Holstenius wrote, believed that the letters were 'concocted by the sophists of a later age, who were very skilled in this art': Holstenius himself, however, could in no way agree, as the Palatine manuscript housed in the Vatican was in his judgment a thousand years old. 66 Now in fact, it is entirely consistent to say that the letters were authored by a sophist and that the letters dated to a thousand years before Holstenius; either Holstenius' position was delib­ erately obtuse or he believed that Saumaise and his unnamed associates were ascribing the composition of pseudonymous letters to the Byzantine era instead. But the larger point is that Lydiat, at least in principle, was

204 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison actively making a decision to trust and to rely on the Themistocles letters in furtherance of his hermeneutic aim. The inducement to do so, certainly, was extremely clear. For the Themistocles letters did not merely offer one more opportunity to specify the dating of Daniel's seventy weeks via the dating of Darius: they afforded direct access to the dating ofArtaxerxes himself, whose twentieth year, after all, Lydiat still wished to find so as to fix the beginning of the weeks. In this respect, the Themistocles letters were decisively superior by comparison with the Parian Chronicle or even Ctesias. Here as in his Annotations on the Parian Chronicle, Lydiat would home in on Artaxerxes by comparing Persian events with Greek, which he treated, quite boldly in this case, as a point of reliable reference. The first year of Artaxerxes' reign, Lydiat now believed, was 4 7 I BCE, or the second year of the 77th Olympiad. (Tellingly, Lydiat always expressed these Persian dates in Greek Olympiad years.) Lydiat would ratify this conclusion by combining an old insight with compelling new evidence, drawn both from the letters ofThemistocles and from the Parian Chronicle, the latter now viewed in retrospect. The old insight from which Lydiat began was as follows. When Thucydides in his first book narrated the adventures of Themistocles after that general had been driven from his native Athens, he specified that Themistocles sent a letter 'to Artaxerxes, who was newly reigning'. 67 Soon enough, Themistocles would indeed enter the Persian emperor's service as governor of Magnesia, but Themistocles' subsequent life was of far less interest to the chronologer than the information that his flight was correlated with Artaxerxes' accession - assuming, that is, that one could fix the date of Themistocles' flight. It was Johann Funck, writing in I 545, who had first noticed Thucydides' statement about the synchrony of Themistocles' flight and the beginning of Artaxerxes and applied it to the chronology of Daniel. This connection held promise, but also a significant problem, for the following reason. The Chronicle of Jerome, among the quite miscellaneous matter it purveyed, actually happened to contain an entry for the flight of Themistocles to Asia, yet Jerome placed seven years between this event (in 4 72 BCE) and the accession ofArtaxerxes (in 465 BCE). (See Fig. 2.) Funck wished to date the beginning of the seventy weeks from the seventh year ofArtaxerxes - not the twentieth, like Lydiat-and, conse­ quently, Funck needed to place the beginning ofArtaxerxes' reign as late as possible so that the duration of the seventy weeks could reach to the desired point in the life of Jesus. Was Jerome correct about Artaxerxes, then - or must Artaxerxes be moved seven years earlier in order to correlate with Themistocles' flight, directly counter to Funck's purpose? Referring to the beginning of the weeks, Funck explained:

205 Bodleian Library Record this is the single point that has exercised even the most learned men to no small extent: and for me, although I am not worthy to count myself in their number, it has occasioned more labor than the entire rest of my Chronology, so much so that more than once I despaired of uncovering the truth. 68 At last, however, 'labor improbus omnem uicit dijficultatem' (enormous labour defeated every difficulty). What Funck meant was that he had decided, based on independent calculations that he regarded as authoritative, that he ought indeed to take Jerome's report about Artaxerxes as correct. Contra Jerome, and in

478 BCE: Hiero reigns at Syracuse 4 7 5 BCE: After Gelo, Hiero exercises tyranny at Syracuse 4 72 BCE: Themistocles flees to the Persians 465 BCE: Artaxerxes reigns alone, for 40 years Fig. 2.Jerome's Chronicle agreement with Thucydides, Themistocles had indeed fled to Persia in the same year as Artaxerxes' accession, namely, 465 BCE. In speaking of his 'enormous labour', Funck certainly meant the complicated calcula­ tions concerning the dates of Themistocles' life that allowed him inde­ pendently to place Themistocles' flight in 465. Specifically, Funck took from Plutarch the information that Pericles was made ruler at Athens after Themistocles' ostracism and that Pericles held power for forty years; returning to Thucydides and calculating, with the aid of Xenophon, that Pericles died in 426 BCE (01. 88.3), Funck counted backward forty years to place Themistocles' flight and hence Artaxerxes' accession in 465 BCE (01. 78-4). In Funck's estimation, therefore, Jerome had been correct about the year of Artaxerxes' accession, and this could be demonstrated via Greek sources even when Jerome was mistaken about Themistocles. (Funck was in fact correct about Artaxerxes; we know this from Ptolemy's king lists, which we trust whereas Lydiat did not.) In this case, at any rate, patristic authority was vindicated by the pagan sources on the truly important point. The elegance ofFunck's intervention won him not only admirers but also, predictably, rivals who aimed to appropriate his technique while improving his results. That is to say, Funck's successors accepted the importance of making Thucydides' two events match by contrast with Jerome's account, but they felt at liberty to discard Funck's specific claims about Themistocles' biography. So in r 569 Gerhard Mercator, the celebrated geographer and mapmaker, synchronized the flight of Themistocles and the beginning of Artaxerxes' reign and added an ingeniously invented caveat, namely, that Artaxerxes had already been named vice-regent 206 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison during the lifetime of his father Xerxes, so that we should actually count Artaxerxes' first twenty years beginning from a point nearly three years before Themistocles' flight: this Mercator placed a year after Jerome's account, in 471 BCE (01. 77.2). 69 An essentially similar approach was taken in l 596 by Joannes Temporarius, who also placed the beginning of the weeks in Artaxerxes' twentieth year. Temporarius first took the date 471 BCE (01. 77.2) for Themistocles' flight - that is, again, a single year later than Jerome's testimony - and then asserted that the reigns of Artaxerxes and his father had overlapped by 'one or two years', so that Artaxerxes had begun reigning along with his father around the beginning of 4 72 BCE or 01. 70 77. l • This, of course, was the date of Themistocles' flight in Jerome, and even more compatible with Thucydides' information that Artaxerxes was 'newly reigning' at the time. The obvious potential for arbitrary manipula­ tion inherent in this device of the overlapping reigns was censured, only a year after Temporarius wrote, by Edward Lively, professor of Hebrew at Cambridge and a voice of comparative reason and moderation during a time of histrionic and unlikely theories about Daniel and the Persians. Pointing to Mercator and Temporarius by name, Lively spoke of their manoeuvre as a 'shift' that was both 'bad and sillie', and even more candidly as a 'great errour' lacking any foundation in ancient authors. 71 From our standpoint, of course, the entire enterprise of calculating the seventy weeks perhaps resembled such an exercise in massaging the numbers. But Lively's complaint shows that for thoughtful contemporaries, rules of method and plausibility did indeed apply in the field, and that a given solution might be judged as better or worse. With the Themistocles letters Lydiat brought a new sort of weapon to this discussion: a document purporting to emanate from the very time and the very person most concerned in the events being narrated, not unlike the Old Testament books of Ezra and Nehemiah. What Lydiat found in the letters was a single crucial testimonium which again synchronized two events relating to Artaxerxes, and equally intriguingly, which synchronized two events that stood some distance apart in Jerome's Chronicle. Lydiat's specific discovery turned on an eccentric, seemingly impossible piece of information contained in the Themistocles letters - in fact, information of the sort that a different scholar might have taken as a historical error proving the letters' inauthenticity. For Lydiat, however, the new synchro­ nization had the force of revelation, not least because - again, for reasons that modern scholars cannot securely explain - it happened to have the evidence of the newly discovered Parian Chronicle to back it up. 72 Not without justice did the first editor of the Themistocles letters acknowledge, in defending the authenticity of the letter that was crucial 207 Bodleian Library Record to Lydiat's purposes, that 'you will find [in this letter] many details that are either not mentioned at all in the histories or that are related there in a different or even contrary manner'.73 Just such a detail was contained in Themistocles' account of what happened after the island of Corcyra - modern-day Corfu-became inhospitable to him: 'I decided to sail to Gelo in Sicily, for at that time he ruled Syracuse; and he sympathized not a little with us, and he would not hearken to the Athenians'.7+ This proposition in itself would have come as a moderate surprise to anyone who consulted Jerome's Chronicle. For if one placed Themistocles' flight, with Jerome, in 472 BCE, Gelo of Syracuse should have been long since dead by this date, having been succeeded as tyrant by his brother Hiero. Vexingly, Jerome in fact provided two years for Gelo's death and Hiero's accession, in 478 BCE and 475 BCE; these presumably stemmed from two different ancient sources, with no way for the reader to adjudicate between them. But their import was the same: Gelo should in no way have been alive in 472 to sympathize with Themistocles. At this point, however, a noteworthy thing proceeded to happen. Just as Themistocles was about to embark (the letter continued), a messenger informed him that Gelo had just died and his brother Hiero had been installed as ruler by a great crowd. Themistocles, as a consequence, redirected himself to E pirus. This is to say that yet a third date was proposed by the letters for the accession ofHiero, namely, 4 72 BCE, and that this date was rigorously synchronized with Themistocles' flight. Lydiatwas presumably aware that he might be accused of arbitrary dealing in preferring the letters over Jerome (as well as Diodorus, who gave the date 478); and in fact, Lydiat refrained from praising the unique evidentiary weight of the letters, although he might well have done this on the grounds that they conveyed the contemporaneous, autobiographical testimony of Themistocles himself. If Lydiat laid little reliance on methodological pleading, though, he had at hand what he took to be impeccably authorita­ tive empirical evidence: the Parian Chronicle. 75 Through the lens of the key Themistocles letter, Lydiat now per­ ceived very great value in a quite idiosyncratic series of reports in the Parian Chronicle. The Chronicle happened to convey several pieces of information about the government of Syracuse - most interestingly to us, the accession of Gelo and the accession ofHiero-and as Lydiat had already noted at length in his Annotations, these reports were seriously at odds with all other witnesses. Also already in the Annotations, apparently without a special motivation from any wider chronological scheme, he had hotly defended the Chronicle's unique statements.76 Most important of all for Artaxerxes, the Parian Chronicle placed the accession ofHiero in 472 BCE (01. 77. r)-which was, of course, the very year in which Jerome had placed 208 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison Themistocles' flight, thus matching perfectly with the account in the Themistocles letter. In this way, the Parian Chronicle (and this alone) made sudden sense out of what would have appeared to be sheer nonsense and error on the part of the Themistocles letters. Reciprocally, the Chronicle perfectly supported and offered new grounds for the idea thatThemistocles fled in or around that year: that is, the Chronicle's date for Hiero now guaranteed that Lydiat was correct in moving Artaxerxes' accession earlier, rather than moving Themistocles' flight later, in order to match those events as Thucydides required. The resulting sequence of closely timed events was as graceful, harmonious, and intricately interwoven as a chronologer might wish: Hiero acceded, Themistocles fled, and Artaxerxes acceded all around the same time, quod erat demonstrandum. Actually, it happens that Lydiatplaced all of these events notin471 BCE(Ol. 77.2) ratherthan472 BCE (01. 77. 1), thus partly negating the testimony of the Parian Chronicle, among other effects - but the important principle of synchronization remained the same. 77 So Lydiat's two newly discovered sources worked in tandem to offer, not a conclusion about Artaxerxes that had never been heard of, but rather a new and striking degree of certainty about a hypothesis that had earlier been experimental, unusual, and poorly sub­ stantiated. Scholarly rigour would have been Lydiat's special contribu­ tion to the conversation on Daniel, then, had his method not been founded solely on erroneous reports in the Parian Chronicle and pure fantasies plucked from the letters of Themistocles, not to mention the puzzling eccentricities of Ctesias. In the Chronological lists Lydiat modified his dating of these events slightly as compared to his claims in the Emendation oftimes, although these changes should not detain us for long. We have already seen how, in the first place, he now adjusted the beginning of Artaxerxes' reign by only five years ratherthan six, placing it in 472 BCE (01. 77.2) rather than 471 BCE (01. 77. 1). This went hand in hand with a new length for the reign ofArtaxerxes' father Xerxes: Lydiat now believed that Xerxes had reigned for a total of twenty-one years, yet he still claimed that Xerxes' reign had overlapped by one year with that of Darius, leaving twenty years of actual time elapsed attributable to Xerxes alone. One reason for this change may have been a newfound respect for the king list of Ptolemy, first printed by Joseph Scaliger in 1606 but conspicuously ignored by Lydiat in the Emendation of times. (Having provoked Scaliger in a 1605 chronological tract On various forms ofthe year [De variis annorum formis ], Lydiat had suffered Scaliger's stinging ridicule before a European audience when Scaliger rebuked him in the introduction or Isagogici canones to Scaliger's Thesaurus temporum, an experience that may have soured Lydiat on that entire publication for some 209 Bodleian Library Record period in his youth.) In the Chronological lists, however, Lydiat unproblem­ atically cited Ptolemy's figure of twenty-one years for Xerxes, even though he continued to ignore crucial evidence in the form of the actual date that Ptolemy supplied for the beginning of Artaxerxes' reign: year 283 of Nabonassar or 464 BCE. 78 No deep methodological reason can be detected for these changes; they were likely motivated by completely different parts ofLydiat's work on the seventy weeks. Not for the first time, we are probably witnessing Lydiat's unfortunate but characteristic mixture of the potentially interesting use of sources and naked argumentative expediency. Even given Lydiat's willingness to approach his material creatively, however, at some points the entire complex of alleged events was not easy to hold together. The letters of Themistocles themselves offered Lydiat a substantial challenge - at any rate, he should have acknowledged that they offered him a substantial challenge-in that a rather troubling passage arose in the very same letter that he used, following several further incidents in the narrative. Specifically, in this letter, when Themistocles eventually arrives at a Persian garrison, he addresses his entreaties not to the emperor Artaxerxes, but to his father Xerxes. That is, this putative letter of Themistocles contravenes the testimonium from Thucydides that allowed Lydiat to synchronize Themistocles and Artaxerxes in the first place by specifying that Themistocles had written to Artaxerxes 'who was newly reigning'. Lydiat in the Chronological lists at first glossed over this point by speaking simply about the 'connection' and 'fitting together' of Hiero, Artaxerxes, and Themistocles' flight; but on another occasion, he seemed to suggest that this passage in the letter was actually a mistake. 79 The perils of this approach need not be stressed. However, that conspicuous and open contradiction only stands for the tenuous and precarious character of Lydiat's whole complex line of argument. His method relied centrally on causing different events to happen at the same time; this was the only technique he could devise for elucidating fragmentary Persian history from the Bible by reference to the much fuller history of Greece; and this, in itself, would indeed appear to be a constructive strategy in the light of the total absence of Persian sources. But Greek history itself was permeated by uncertainties, above all for this early period in the early fifth century, and what Lydiat was really doing was exploiting errors in the record, not excavating pearls of truth from the muck of ignorance. To state the case in Platonic terms, he preferred the one to the many, seeming to suspect that the truth in general was hidden and that only superior minds such as his own were qualified to bring it forward. And so, where a later reader of Lydiat such as Richard Bentley was prepared to dismiss anomalous details of the Parian Chronicle as simply mistaken, for

210 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison Lydiat the sudden discovery of the Chronicle and ofThemistocles' letters while he lay in prison appeared as something close to divine providence. 80 These two world views were, obviously, not easily to be reconciled. The period ofLydiat's serious readership, however, seems to have lasted only a few decades, as the delay in the publication of his works simultane­ ously saw the waning of the Renaissance's consensus about what counted as important in matters oflearning. Following the posthumous appearance of the Annotations and the Lists, Lydiat certainly did encounter readers who grasped the import of his claims about Daniel's weeks, among them Henry More and Ralph Cudworth in England. More, who found it convenient to agree with Lydiat, seems also to have been content with a relatively superficial reading of his work, while Cudworth, who disagreed passion­ ately with Lydiat, wrote literally reams of paper analyzing the alleged faults of his claims. 81 However, Lydiat seems to have fallen out of style in the English church and universities with the end of the era of Archbishop William Sancroft, who was deposed in l 690; at this time, the field ofBiblical chronology was rapidly drained of its population, and perhaps the most prominent chronologer of the new age, Isaac Newton, declined to engage with virtually any predecessor, including Lydiat, in any way. 82 Already in the 1670s, when Lydiat's prison works were printed, his editors exhibited toward him a curious mixture of pride and discretion. Pride, especially in that the Lydiat publications belonged to a rising fashion for publishing or republishing scholarly works dating from before the Civil Wars: the Golden Remains of John Hales, the Works of Joseph Mede, many reprints of Chillingworth 's Religion o.f Protestants and of Richard Hooker's Works, and par excellence Peter Heylyn's biography of Archbishop William Laud. Lydiat too was a clergyman, even if he had been reluctant to take orders in his youth, so that his chronological books could ride this wave of respect for the recuperated works of an earlier generation. At the same time, as we have seen, Lydiat's editors excised the subscriptions that marked his prison texts and that would have alerted the reader to the circum­ stances of his deprivation; again, they chose to exclude from his printed Chronological lists a particularly weak section of discussion found in the manuscripts in which Lydiat conveyed little more than reading notes from Herodotus and Thucydides.83 Not even the biographical notice on Lydiat at the beginning of the Chronological lists divulged the information that he had ever been in prison. In this refusal to convey to the reader the most striking fact of Lydiat's biography - and, simultaneously, in presenting a brief and somewhat formulaic life of Lydiat rather than delving into the polemical arcana of his actual works - his editors showed a certain Restoration taste for elevating the splendour of the public figure at the cost

21 l Bodleian Library Record of any distinct information about him. On the other hand, Lydiat himself, a scholar belonging to a more candid age, had been eager to publicize and memorialize his life's most disturbing experience, inseparably inscribing the dates and places of his imprisonment on the actual pages of his works of scholarship. What that record shows, in fact, is that it is not certain this scholarship would even have been composed if not for the stress ofLydiat's imprisonment, which combined strong motives to attract attention and money via new works, the coincidental appearance of a very small number of new books that matched Lydiat's established scholarly interests, and, of course, free access to paper, ink, and time. The boost in productivity that is supposed to be given to twenty-first century scholars by institutions such as the travelling library or academy fellowship, we conclude, was supplied to Lydiat by a comparable but divergent experience; how significant the difference was may be left for the reader for judge.

1 I have found no general biographical discussion of Lydiat apart from P. Sherlock, 'Lydiat, Thomas (1572-1646)', in O.tjord Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H. C. G. Matthew and B. H. Harrison, 61 mis. (Oxford, 2004), xxxiv, 848--9 and A. F. Pollard, 'Lydiat, Thomas (1572-1646)', in Dictionary of National Biography, eds. L. Stephen and S. Lee, 66 vols. (London, 188 5-1901 ), xxxiv, 316-18, with the references therein. 2 On the often surprisingly lenient conditions of the early modern debtors' prison, sec M. C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 109-51, although cases of more punitive treatment are noted by P. Woodfine, 'Debtors, Prisons, and Petitions in Eighteenth-Century England', Eighteenth­ Centurv Life, 30 (2006 ), 1-31. 3 Letters in Bodleian Library, MS. Bodi. 313; chronological works in Bodleian Library, MSS. Au ct. F. 6. 22, Bodi. 662, Bodi. 666, Bodi. 670. -I This subscription comes from the Annotations, which Lydiat did not translate into English; 'Julian' refers to the chronological period invented by Joseph Scaliger: 'E regio Banco carcere. 1. 0 dieAprilisJuliani. A.D. 1629' (MS. Auct. F. 6. 22, fol. 31 '). 5 MS. Bodi. 666, fol. 45'; the corresponding text is at fols. 22c'-45'. 6 For the amount of debt, Christopher Potter to William Boswell, n.p., 28 March 1632, MS. Bodi. 313, fol. 24', and on fol. 24 ', draft letter of Thomas Lydiat to William Boswell, King's Bench prison, 4April 1632. 7 These efforts are discussed below. 8 Loss of his personal library: Thomas Lydiat, Annotationes in chronicon marmoreum (hereafter Annotations), in Marmara oxoniensia, ed. Humphrey Prideaux (Oxford, 1676), p. I, etc. 9 On the self-censorship of the scientifically inclined clergy, M. Feingold, 'Science as a Calling? The Early Modern Dilemma', Science in Context, 15 (2002), 79-119, with specific discussion ofLydiat at 96. Ill For the post in , Lydiat to Thomas Chaloner, Chester, 24Junc 1611, MS. Bodi. 313, fol. 28'. 11 !\fordechai Feingold kindly called my attention to the professional similarity between J ,ydiat and Pell. On the vexed history ofLydiat's publications and attempted publications, A. Hunt, 'Thomas Lydiat and the Perils of Publishing', unpublished conference presenta­ tion, conference on the Jacobean Printed Book, September 2006.

212 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison

12 On Lydiat's science, see M. Feingold, The Mathematicians' Apprenticeship: Science, Uniursities and Societ1• in England, 1560-1640 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. qS-52; a reader for the Record also points to the valuable W. H. Donahue, 'A Hitherto Unreported Pre­ Keplerian Oval Orbit',Journa l ofthe Hist or)' ofAstronomy, 4 ( 1973), l 92-4. 13 For a relatively modest monetary payment to Lydiat from Henry Frederick, L. Parsons, 'Prince Henry (1594-1612) as a Patron of Literature', Modern Language Review, 47 ( 1952 ), 503-7 at 507. On this milieu in general, R. Strong, Henrv Prince of vVitles and England's Lost Renaissance (London, 1986). 1+ On Lydiat as a clergyman, A. Hunt, The Art ofHearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 270-6. 15 Lydiat to Sir Henry Martin, Sodesyreth, 17 October 1626, MS. Bodi. 313, fol. 35'; Lydiat to 'the Gouerner and Committies of the East lndie Companie of London Merchants', Sodesyreth, 22 November 1626, MS. Bodi. 313, fol. 32'.A reader forthe Record kindly points outthat Lydiat had precedent for this idea of a qualified scholar advising naval expeditions, in the shape of the Elizabethan polymath John Dee: William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writings in the English Renaissance (Amherst, 1995), pp. 148-200; for the Northwest Passage, p. 181. 16 The matter in MS. Bodi. 662 is likely representative ofwhat Lydiat brought with him, particularly the extensive and undigested excerpts from Greek authors. Some of the pieces of this notebook date from the prison period or later, including a dated English tract on Lydiat's 592-year chronological period and fragmentary notes on the Parian Chronicle. 17 l\1S. Auct. F. 6. 22, fol. 24': 'Haec nuginatus sum, paucisque amicis meo instantibus sermone comm uni ca vi circa mensem Junium, scripta autem tradidi circa finem Octobris vulgaris anni Domini 1628, in Bocardo carcere Oxonij, sub meam inde amotionem. Tho. Lydyat.' 18 The earliest document dated from the King's Bench prison that I have found is a letter ofLydiatto Patrick Young accompanying a copy of his Annotations, dated 13 February 1628/ 9: MS.Auct. F. 6. 22, fols. 21H 19 On the other hand we do find the occasional deletion, for example a remark in the English translation of the' Insertions to the Chronical Canons' (MS. Bodi. 666, fol. 65') that a citation of a certain Olympiad year derives from Clement ofAlexandria 'if my mcmorie fail mee not, hauing bene now two years kept a widower from my books'. No equivalent language appears on p. 74 of the printed Canones chronologrci (hereafter, Chronological lists; Oxford, 1675). Incidentally, since the 'Insertions' are subscribed from the Bocardo, 1628 (fol. 75'), we are probably to take this as meaning 1628/ 9, Lydiat having been imprisoned in the first months of 1627. 20 lnMS. Bodi. 313, William Boswell to Lydiat, Whitehall, 15 May l 632, fol. So'; Patrick Young to Lydiat, St James' Palace, London, 24 February 1628/ 9, fol. 46'; Lydiat to Patrick Young, King's Bench prison, London, 1 April 1629, fol. 56'. Further relevant correspon­ dence in MS. Au ct. F. 6. 22, fols. 21 ', 93'. 21 The Latin version of the Artaxerxes essay: MS. Bodi. 666, fols. 86,.-go ',with authorial subscription from the King's Bench, 14 May 1630 on 90', dedication to Charles I dated 12 September 1631on85', and licence for printing dated 22 November 1634 on 85'. 22 For the apparently unfinished tract, MS. Bodi. 662, fols. 5'-17'; for the date of the dedicatory epistle to Charles -Alkerton, 1626- fol. 5'. Lydiat first described the 592-year cycle in Tractatus de variis annorumformis (London, 1605). 23 Copies of the Annotations: MS. Auct. F. 6. 22, fols. 2J'-g3'; MS. Bodi. 670, fols. 21'-92,.; incomplete copy in MS. Bodi. 662, fols. 134d,.-87'. Copies of the Chronological Lists, in English unless otherwise noted: MS. Bodi. 666, fols. 22c'-45' (basic outline for Lists), 47'-75' (later 'insertions' for the Lists), 1'-13', 91'-9' (reading summaries of Herodotus and Thucydides, omitted from the eventual publication of the Lists), 15'-21 ',

213 Bodleian Library Record

79'--84r (duplicate copies of an essay on Artaxerxes in English), 86'-90' (the same essay on Artaxerxes, in Latin, with dedication to Charles I on fol. 85'); MS. Bodi. 662, fols. 24r--9 ',a further copy of the Artaxerxes essay in English. 2+ The closest we have to works of general scope are A. T Grafton, ]oseph Scaliger: A Study in the History ofClassical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1983--93) and]. Barr, 'Why the World Was Created in 4004 B.C.: Archbishop Ussher and Biblical Chronology', Bulletin ofthe ]ohn Rylands Library, 67 ( 1984-5), 575--608; see also, for a figure who ostentatiously ignored his predecessors, ]. Z. Buchwald and M. Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2012). 25 An incomplete idea of Lydiat's predecessors in chronology can be formed from the works discussed below together with the magnificent sample in D. Rosenberg and A. Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History ofthe Timeline (New York, 2orn), pp. 27-89. On Lydiat's intellectual context more broadly, see Nicholas Hardy's forthcoming D.Phil. thesis on British criticism in the first half of the seventeenth centurv. 26 Anthony aWood,Athenae Oxonienses, 4 vols. (London: I 813-20 ), iii, l 85--

39 For Lydiat's fullest defence ofCtesias, Chronological lists, p. 56. 40 On Darius, Lydiat, Emendatio temporum, pp. 66-7. For the testimonium, see Stronk, Ctesias' Persian History, p. 330 (frag. 13 §23). 41 Stronk, Ctesias' Persian History, ibid. 42 Stronk, Ctesias' Persian Historv, p. 344 (frag. 14 §46). 43 The text is available in F Jacoby, Das Ma rm or Parium (Berlin, 1904). H John Selden, Marmara Arunde!liana (London, 1628). 45 G. J. Toomer,John Selden: a life in scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009), i, 366. 46 Toomer, Selden, i, 364; further discussion inJ. Z. Buchwald and M. Feingold, Newton and the Origin ofCii-ilization (Princeton, 2012). 47 Subscription dated October 1628: MS. Au ct. F 6. 22, fol. 24r. 48 His correspondence with William Boswell and Patrick Young is discussed above. 49 Lydiat, Annotations, e.g. pp. 57 (quoting from a notebook); 57, 66 (Suidas); 66, 67 (textual conjectures). I cite Lydiat's prison works in their printed Latin versions throughout this article as they are the first versions he composed, they are the versions his readers have encountered over the centuries, and their manuscript English translations are extraordi­ narilv close in sense. so· In Lydiat, Annotations, 'Annotationes primae ad Chronicon Marmoreum, de Morte Darii Hystaspis, &c. ', pp. l -2; 'Disquisitio de tempore Dynastiae, & Mortis Ge Ion is Syracusani, in quo Marmoreum Chronicon Arundelianum septennio differt a Diodoro Siculo, & communi opinione', 2-10 . .il For Lydiat's remarks on these notices, Annotations, pp. 56-8. 52 Jacoby, Marmor Parium, p. 175 (on the Chronicle's notice of Darius' death), pp. l 72-3 (the possibility that the Chronicle's author drew on Ctesias or a source influenced by him) . .i.1 Ralph Cudworth, commentaries on Daniel's seventy weeks, British Library, Add. MS. 4987, fol. 365r. 54 On this subject, the article that launched a thousand ships is A. Momigliano, 'Ancient History and the Antiquarian', in Momigliano's Contributo alla storia deg!i studi c!assici (Rome, 1955), pp. 67-106; for recent discussions of ambitious scope, see P. N. Miller, ed., Momigliano all{/ Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto, 2007). 55 Lydiat, Chronological lists, pp. 52-64. 56 l\lS. Bodi. 666, fols. 47'-75', subscribed on fol. 75' 'Bocardo prison in Oxford, the vulgar year of our Lord, 1628'; forthe date, note 19 above. 57 Paul Christianson, 'Selden, John (1584-1654)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, xlix, 694-705, esp. 698--

215 Bodleian Library Record 62 For the date 14 May 1630, MS. Bodi. 666, fol. 21'. The essay appears in the printed Chronological lists at pp. 54-64, from 'Anni jam plures sunt exacti' to 'veritas fortis est & praevalebit'. 63 See above. 64 Richard Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and Others; and the Fables ofAesop (London, 1697), pp. 82-3; on the controversy in progress, K. L. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2011), pp. I 10--23. 6 ; Themistoclis epistolae ex vetusto codice Bibliothecae f/{1ticanae nunc primum erutae (Rome, 1626); see, e.g., the argumentum or plot summary to letter 20. 66 Holstenius to Young, Rome, 28 May 1628, in Kemke, Patricius Junius, p. 61: 'De Themistoclis epistolis hoc te monebo: Salmasio aliisque doctis viris in Galiis spurias eas videri, confictas a posteriorum seculorum sophistis; qui miri in hoc genere artifices fuere. Ego tamen ipsorum judicio neutiquam accedo; nam codex Palatinus, unde editio expressa est, tantae vetustatis est, ut ante mille annos scriptum existimem'. A copy of the l 626 printed edition with a collation of the Vatican manuscript by Holstenius is Bodi., MS. D'Orville 337. 67 Thucydides 1. 137. 68 Johann Funck, Chronologia (Nuremberg, 1545), 'Commentaria', fols. 21f-\: 'Atquehic unicus locus is est, qui doctissimos quosque non mediocriter exercuit, ac mihi quidem, quamuis indigno ut corum numero asscribar, plus facessit negotij, quam reliqua tota Chronologia, ita ut non semel de inuestiganda ueritate desperarim. Sed cum omnino animum induxissem, quid certi ea de re constitui, si tamen aliquo modo id fieri posset, inuestigare, tandem labor improbus omnem uicit diffi.cultatem ... '. 69 Mercator, Clmmologia, sigs. a6'-b1 '. 70 Temporarius, Chronologicae demonstrationes, pp. 199-200. 71 Edward Lively, True Chronologie ofthe Times ofthe Persian Monarchie (London, 1597 ), pp. 193, 194; full discussion, pp. 193-200. 72 The letters' editor Norman A. Doenges suggests that the author of the letters and the author of the Chronicle may have shared a common source: The Letters of Themistokles (New York, 1981), pp. 367-8. 73 Themistoclis epistolae, p. 58 (argumentum to letter 20): 'multas hie minutias reperias, quarum vel nulla mentio fit in historiis, vel di verso aut etiam contrario modo fit'. 74 In Doenges, ed., Letters ofThemistokles, pp. 210--12 (letter 20 ). 7 ; The sources are surveyed in Jacoby, Marmor Parium, pp. 178-80. 76 Lydiat,Annotations, pp. 63, 2-5. 77 For his manoeuvres along with precise dates, Lydiat, Annotations, pp. 75, 62, 63. 78 Ptolemy's Canons \Vere first printed in Joseph Scaliger, Thesaurus tempo rum (Leiden, 1606), 'Isagogici canones', p. 291, and are readily available in G.]. Toomer, ed. and tr., Ptolemv 'sAlmagest ( 1984; Princeton, 1998), p. l 1; see Lydiat, Chronological lists, p. 75. 79 Lydiat, Chronological lists, pp. 58, 60. 80 Bentley, Dissertation, pp. 85-6 (the Chronicle's dates for Gelo and Hiero). 81 Henry More, A Plain and Continued Exposition of the Seurat Prophecies or Dii-ine Visions ofthe Prophet Daniel (London, 1681 ); Ralph Cudworth, commentaries on Daniel's seventy weeks, British Library, Add. MSS. 4986-4987. 82 Isaac Newton, Obsen.:ations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocal)1pse of St. John (London, 1733). On the ecclesiastical and patristic scholarship of the old regime, J.-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity; The Construction of a Confessional Iden ti~)' in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009). 83 Discussion of Herodotus and Thucydides: MS. Bodi. 666, fols. 1'-13' and 91 '-9'.

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