War, What Is It Good For? Sixteenth-Century English Translations of Ancient Texts on Warfare

WAR, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF ANCIENT TEXTS ON WARFARE Fred Schurink It is a commonplace that humanism and war are opposites. Yet, as C.H. Conley noted as long ago as 1927, many classical translations from the Tudor period have a military subject matter and, what is more, claim to instruct their readers in military skills.1 This is a particularly common fea- ture of translations of histories and, not surprisingly, military manuals, but the same applies to works from a variety of genres, ranging from biography to epic. The comments in the preface to Thomas Stocker’s translation of books 18 to 20 of Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca historica, supplemented by Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, are typical. In Diodorus’s work, Stocker claims, “may be sene the Stratagemes and pollicies in the facts of war, togither [with] many sundry and diuerse battailles, sieges and enterprises, verie pleasaunt to read and heare: wherein may also be lerned many things apperteyning to that arte.”2 The attitudes of Tudor translators of the classics are neatly summed up by Ben Jonson, who wrote in a prefatory poem to the 1609 edition of Clement Edmondes’ translation of, and commentary on, the works of Caesar, Obseruations vpon Cæsars Comentaries (first published in 1600 with the revealing subtitle “setting fovrth the practise of the art military, in the time of the Roman Empire … for the better direction of our moderne warres”): WHo, Edmondes, reades thy booke, and doth not see What th’antique Souldiers were, the moderne be? Wherein thou shew’st, how much the latter are Beholden, to this Master of the Warre: And that, in Action, there is nothing new, More then to varie what our Elders knew.3 1 C.H. Conley, The First English Translators of the Classics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), 45–48. 2 A righte noble and pleasant History of the Successors of Alexander surnamed the Great, taken out of Diodorus Siculus: and some of their liues written by the wise Plutarch. Translated out of French into Englysh. by Thomas Stocker. (London: Henry Bynneman, 1569), A4r (STC 6893). 3 Clement Edmondes, Obseruations vpon Cæsars Comentaries (London: n. pub., 1609), A3v (STC 7490.7). 122 fred schurink Such claims no doubt overstate the case, but they are not completely empty either. Military historians and historians of ideas have shown how the early modern theory and practice of warfare were shaped by the study of the classics.4 Edmondes himself reports how Sir Francis Vere offered Prince Maurice of Nassau advice on tactics by citing an example from Caesar’s Commentaries at the battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600.5 Maurice, in fact, played a key role in the reform of the Dutch army on the model of the ancient Romans.6 While histories of war and of ideas can account for the popularity and translation of genres and authors in general terms, they often do not explain why a particular text was translated, and equally importantly published, at a particular point in time by a particular transla- tor or printer. As Brenda Hosington has recently noted, much remains to be discovered about how printing, the book trade, and patronage impacted on translation.7 If we are to understand the nature and purpose of translation in early modern England, such issues deserve to be studied in much greater detail. Nor are we as well informed as we might like to be about the specific uses that translations served and the kinds of events and circumstances to which they responded. Ancient texts with a military subject matter not only contributed to changes in military thought and practice in a general way; they were also, in the phrase of Jardine and Grafton, “studied for action,” that is, read (and, I argue, translated) in preparation for activity in the specific circumstances of Tudor England.8 Moreover, the conjunctions between translations of the classics and their application to specified goals are often surprising. As we shall see, the uses of ancient texts on war extended far beyond warfare alone. The potential rewards of a more contextualized reading of the translation of Roman history are demonstrated by the scholarship on Henry Savile’s 1591 The ende of Nero and beginning of Galba. Fower bookes of 4 See, for example, Henry J. Webb, Elizabethan Military Science: The Books and the Practice (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965); Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitta Oestreich and H.G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); J.R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies (London: Hambledon, 1983); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth- Century Europe, International Library of Historical Studies, 3 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1995); Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 Stephen Porter, “Edmondes, Sir Clement (1567/8?–1622),” ODNB. 6 See Oestreich, ch. 5. 7 Brenda M. Hosington, “Commerce, Printing and Patronage,” in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1550–1660, ed. Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 45–57. 8 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action:’ How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78..

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