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Notes
The portrait of Peter Gilles is in a private collection, while that of Erasmus is part of the Royal Collection, St. James’s Palace.
L. Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print, Princeton, 1993, p. 38. The identity of this book is a matter of some debate, and the connection to Erasmus has been proposed based on a copy of the painting in Antwerp, which labels the book CIS. ERAS. R. The book has been identified by some as The Complaint of Peace (1517). Antibarbari has also been suggested; however, that text was not published until 1520. Gilles is also holding a letter. Jardine identifies this letter as one from More, which More had recently requested be returned to him and which would be published among the prefatory letters in subsequent editions of Utopia. This has led Jardine to hypothesize that the book may in fact be More’s Utopia (1516). Since the painting is intended as a gift for More, it makes sense that he would have a presence, albeit in written form, in Gilles’s painting, alongside that of Erasmus.
Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (n. 2 above), p. 37. Erasmus confirms the identity of what he is writing in a 1519 letter to Gilles (ep. 687), ‘The paraphrase which I had started in our pictures is now finished and has begun to be printed.’ The titles of the books in the background are also confirmed in this letter. Text and translation from R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (trans.), The Collected Works of Erasmus, V.5, Toronto, p. 156. Hereafter The Collected Works of Erasmus will be referred to as CWE. The broader setting of this painting is evocative of depictions of St. Jerome in his study, betraying the degree to which Erasmus self-consciously fashioned himself as a scholar in the mould of Jerome. On this, see A. Gerlo, Erasme et ses portraitistes, Nieukoop, 1969; E. Rice. Saint–Jerome in the Renaissance, Baltimore, 1985; S. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism, Cambridge, 2002, p. 19, and Jardine, 52.
Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? (n. 3 above), p. 44. Goldhill suggests that this is a kind of inside joke between Erasmus and More, the ideal viewer of the painting—only those capable of reading the Greek letters can recognize the work and the book’s presence recreates ‘the insider/outsider network’ that is often on display in Erasmus’s letters.
Only the first few letters of the title of In Praise of Folly are visible: the painting currently reads ‘Hor’ but must have originally read ‘Mor’ for Encomium Moriae. For this hypothesis, see Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (n. 2 above), p. 218.
For a broad discussion of the reception of Greek texts in Italy, see N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy. Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, London, 1992. For a survey of Lucian’s reception in the Renaissance, see K. Sidwell, ‘Lucian of Samosata in the Italian Renaissance’, PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1974; C. Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe, Chapel Hill, 1979; D. Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance, Ann Arbor, 1998; L. Panizza, ‘Vernacular Lucian in Renaissance Italy’, in Lucian of Samosata, Vivus et Redivivus, ed. C. Ligota and L. Panizza, London, 2007, pp. 71–114 and B. Hosington, ‘Compluria opuscula longe festivissima: translations of Lucian in Renaissance England’, in Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Gilbert Tournoy, ed. J. Papy and D. Sacré, Leuven, 2009, pp. 187–206.
On this view of Lucian, see Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (n. 6 above), p. 94.
Panizza, ‘Vernacular Lucian’ (n. 6 above), p. 73.
Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? (n. 3 above), p. 5.
See, for example, Calvin’s assertion that contemporary popes ‘never grasped anything of Christ except what they had learned in the school of Lucian’ (Inst., IV, vii, 27). See also his commentary on Matthew 16:5: ‘And on every hand there now rages an impiety like that of Lucian, a most pernicious leaven, or rather a worse than deadly poison’ (Calvin’s Commentaries, vol. 32.2). Luther, in comparison, directly associates Lucian with atheism as a means of attacking Erasmus in On the Bondage of Will (1534).
On the use of Lucian’s name as a slur, see R. Bracht Branham, “Utopian Laughter: Lucian and Thomas More,” Moreana, 86, 1985, p. 24.
The specific selections are as follows: Dialogues of the Dead 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13,17, 18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26; Dialogues of the Gods 12, 19, 21, 24 and Dialogues of the Sea Gods 1.
These translations appear to have been completed in 1512, but they were not printed until 1514. See R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson (transl.) CWE, V.2, p. 291.
See for example, C. R. Thompson, The Translation of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More, Ithaca, 1940; E. Rummel, Erasmus as Translator of the Classics, Toronto, 1984; E. Rummel, ‘A Friendly Competition: More’s and Erasmus’ Translations from Lucian’, Erasmus Studies 7, 1985, pp. 49–69, 147–53; M. Pawlowski, ‘Thomas More’s Mis-Translations of Lucian’s Cynic, Menippus, and Tyrannicide’, Moreana 47.1–2, 2010, pp. 85–101. For broader discussion of translation practices in England during the sixteenth century, see P. Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2007; N. Rhodes, ‘Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation’, in Renaissance Paratexts, ed. H. Smith and L. Wilson, Cambridge, 2011, pp. 107–120 and Id., ‘Pure and Common Greek in Early Tudor England’, in The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, ed. T. Demtriou et al., Basingstoke, 2014, pp. 54–70.
E. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Motives of Translation: More, Erasmus, and Lucian’, Hermathena, 183, 2007, pp. 49–62.
For the significance of paratextual elements of a given work, see G. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, transl. J. E. Lewin, Cambridge, 1997.
The idea of narrative theories of translation was developed by M. Baker, Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account, London, 2006. See also Id., ‘Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community’, in Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. M. Tymoczko, Amherst, 2010, pp. 23–41; M. Baldo, ‘Translation as Re-Narration in Italian-Canadian Writing. Codeswitching, Focalisation, Voice and Plato in Nino Ricci’s Trilogy and its Italian Translation’, PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2008 and C. Summers, ‘What Remains: The Institutional Reframing of Authorship in Translated Peritexts’, in Text, Extratext, Metatext, and Paratext in Translation, ed. V. Pellatt, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 9–31.
Summers, What Remains (n. 17 above), p. 9. Summers applies these ideas to Christa Wolf, an east German writer, and discusses the differences between her presentation by German, British and American commentators.
Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters (n. 2 above), p. 30.
CWE 2 (ep.192): neque temere adeo quis suspicetur, eum interpretem subornatum esse ab iis qui Luciano male volunt.
L. Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England, London, 1994, p. 6.
H. Yoran, Between Utopia and Dystopia: Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Humanist Republic of Letters, Lanham, 2010, p. 54. It is unclear whether or not these letters of dedication were seen by their addressees prior to publication.
Erasmus was invited by Giovanni Battista Boerio to travel with his sons to Italy and supervise their studies. He left London in June 1506. References to this trip can be found in eps. 192, 194 and 196.
Earlier translation projects include those by Guarino of Verona, Giovanni Aurispa, Lapo da Castiglionchio, Leon Battista Alberti and Poggio Bracciolini. For a useful list of translators, the respective works translated and the rough dates of translation, see Marsh, Lucian and the Latins (n. 6 above), pp. xi–xii. Lapo da Castiglionchio, for example, praises Lucian’s On Funerals as an antidote to superstition. Later translators, like Peter Mosellanus, also approached Lucian through the lens of moral didacticism. See Goldhill, Who Needs Greek (n. 3 above), p. 47.
Erasmus was not the first person to translate Lucian’s Toxaris into Latin–Giovanni Aurispa translated this dialogue into Latin in 1430. Erasmus makes no mention of this earlier translation, and any sense of competition must be inferred by the reader. On Aurispa’s translation, see Marsh, Lucian and the Latins (n. 6 above), p. 31.
Yoran, Between Utopia and Dystopia (n. 22 above), p. 47.
Text and translations are from Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami V.1.1, Amsterdam, 1969 and Mynors and Ferguson, CWE, V.2 (n. 13 above).
For a discussion of the degree to which this dialogue blends the genres of dialogue and the novel, see K. Ní Mheallaigh, Reading Fiction with Lucian: Fakes, Freaks, and Hyperreality, Cambridge, 2014, ch. 2.
As the prologue to the Eunuch makes clear, Terence’s play is itself an adaptation of the Menandrian original by the same name, such that the example of the Eunuch emerges in the context of Erasmus’s letter as a precedent for Erasmus’s own project.
Yoran has argued that, in contrast to earlier humanist writers whose views are often shaped by their immediate political and cultural context, Erasmus sought to promote ‘a relatively autonomous socio-intellectual space’, a fact that may be reflected in his interest in the cultural exchange on display in Lucian’s text. See Yoran, Between Utopia and Dystopia (n. 22 above), p. 37.
For a comparison of the respective styles of Erasmus’s and More’s declamations, see E. Rummel, ‘A Friendly Competition: More’s and Erasmus’ Translations from Lucian’ (n. 14 above).
It is worth noting here that Erasmus’s use of the phrase ‘tum morum mira festiuitas’ represents an early instantiation of the pun on More’s name and the Greek for fool (μώρος) that Erasmus made famous with the title of In Praise of Folly (Encomium Moriae). Erasmus dedicates In Praise of Folly to More and in the letter that introduces the work, he offers the following explanation of this pun: ‘In the first place, it was your own family name of More, which is as near to the Greek word for folly, moria, as you are far from it in fact, and everyone agrees that you couldn’t be farther removed’ (Primum admonuit me Mori cognomen tibi gentile, quod tam ad Moriae uocabulum accedit quam es ipse a re alienus; es autem uel omnium suffragiis alienissimus, ep. 122). Similarly, Erasmus may have intended More to hear Erasmus’s own name with his use of the verb “desyderes.”
Cf. Horace, Ars Poetica, 343.
Translation adapted from Marsh, Lucian and the Latins (n. 6 above), p. 170.
For a recent discussion of Old Comedy and Lucian, see R. Rosen, ‘Lucian’s Aristophanes: On Understanding Old Comedy in the Roman Imperial Period’, in Athenian Comedy in the Roman Empire, ed. C. W. Marshall and T. Hawkins, London, 2015, pp. 141–62 and I. Storey, ‘Exposing Frauds: Lucian and Comedy’, in ibid., pp. 163–80.
As with other genres of Greek literature, the plays of Aristophanes resurfaced in the 15th century and became more widely available after the publication of the Aldine editio princeps in Venice in 1498. This edition included all extant plays except the Lysistrata and Themophoriazusae, which were published almost two decades later in 1516 in Florence. For a discussion of Old Comedy’s reception in the early modern period, see K. Lever, ‘Greek Comedy on the Sixteenth Century English Stage’ CJ, 42, 1946, pp. 169–73; V. Giannopoulou, ‘Aristophanes in Translation before 1920’, in Aristophanes in Performance 421 BC–AD 2007: Peace, Birds, and Frogs, ed. E. Hall and A. Wrigley, London, 2007, pp. 209–42; R. S. Miola, ‘Aristophanes in England, 1500–1660’, in Ancient Comedy and Reception: Studies on the Classical Tradition of Comedy from Aristophanes to the Twenty-First Century, ed. S. D. Olson, 2014, Berlin, pp. 479–502 and N. Wilson, ‘The Transmission of Aristophanes’, in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Comedy, ed. M. Fontaine and A. Scafuro, Oxford, 2014, pp. 655–66.
This is made further evident in the prefatory letter to More that introduces In Praise of Folly (1509). There, Erasmus imagines that his critics will accuse him of reviving ‘Old Comedy or Lucian, carping and complaining about everything.’ In response to this imagined criticism, Erasmus reminds More and the subsequent readers of In Praise of Folly that Lucian is only one of the many ancient authors (Vergil, Seneca, Ovid and Favorinus) who could be accused of frivolous writings.
For a discussion of how letters can emphasize the absence of their author, see O. Hodkinson and P. Rosenmeyer, Epistolary Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, 2013, Leiden, pp. 11–12.
Erasmus had sent his translations to Badius for publication in 1512, but the volume did not appear until 1514, at which point was attached the letter of dedication to William Warham.
An extremely brief initial letter is part of the published version.
Cf. Horace, Sermones, 2.6.33–4.
See Hesiod, Theogony, 40.
A useful discussion of Lucian’s reception in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy can be found in Panizza, ‘Vernacular Lucian’ (n. 6 above).
Text and translation from C. R. Thompson, The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, V.3.1, New Haven, 1974.
Branham, ‘Utopian Laughter’ (n. 11 above), pp. 24–5. See also Rhodes 2014, ‘Pure and Common Greek’ (n. 14 above), p. 56.
L. Venutti, ‘Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities’, in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. S. Bermann and M. Wood, 2005, Princeton, p. 178. See also, id., The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London, 2005.
This connection to Horace is further reinforced by a poem that the printer Ascensius adds just before More’s translation of the Tyrannicide: ‘Other men will praise the famous Erasmus with the sweet lyre and grandiose trumpet; but were they to celebrate you, More, in poetic verse, then Horace and Vergil himself would be drenched with sweat.’ (Laudabunt alii clarum vi laudis Erasmum/Dulcisonaque lyra, grandisonaque tuba./At te, si merita celebrarent, More, camoena/Multum sudarent Flaccus et ipse Maro). This is my own translation.
T. Whitmarsh, Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism, Los Angeles, 2013, pp. 63–74.
The most recent discussion of this aspect of Lucian’s literary style is that of D. Richter, ‘Lucian of Samosata’, in The Oxford Handbook to the Second Sophistic, ed. D. Richter and W. Johnson, New York, 2017, pp. 327–44. Richter surveys the history of approaches taken to these characters.
N. Wilson, ‘The Name Hythlodaeus’, Moreana, 29, 1992, pp. 33–44.
While questions have surrounded the authenticity of the Cynic, it is clear that More takes it to be a work of Lucian. For a defence of Lucianic authorship, see J. Bridge, ‘On the Authorship of the Cynicus of Lucian’, TAPA, 19, 1888, pp. 33–9. Cf. M. D. Macleod, Lucian, V.8, Cambridge, MA, 1967, p. 379, which presumes the dialogue was written as a response to Lucian’s portrayal of Cynic philosophers.
See Branham ‘Utopian Laughter’ (n. 11 above), p. 26.
This is perhaps not surprising, given the fact that More had just recently rejected an ascetic lifestyle when he left the Charterhouse, a Carthusian monastery, where he had lived from roughly 1501–1504. See A. Fox, Thomas More: History and Providence, New Haven, 1983, pp. 35–44. Branham ‘Utopian Laughter’ (n. 11 above), pp. 26–8 also notes that More misses the ironic tone of the original dialogue.
More, as Travis Curtright has discussed, tends to be discriminating when it comes to pagan writings, embracing those that can be easily harmonized to Christian doctrine, while eschewing those that are incompatible. See T. Curtright, The One Thomas More, Washington, D.C., 2013, p. 19. While Josh Avery has recently tried to suggest that More appreciated the irony of Lucian’s Cynic, this reading is not supported by More’s statements, and the language that Avery cites as evidence about rejecting ‘foolish confidence and superstitious dread’ is in fact from More’s discussion of the Lover of Lies and cannot be applied to the Cynic. See J. Avery, ‘Raphael Hythloday and Lucian’s Cynic’, Moreana, 54.2, 2017, pp. 227–8.
See Pawlowski, ‘Thomas More’s Mis-Translations’ (n. 14 above), p. 88, n. 2, and Thompson, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, V.3.1 (n. 44 above), p. 141.
G. Wegemer, Young Thomas More and the Arts of Liberty, Cambridge, 2011, p. 63.
J. Relihan, Ancient Menippean Satire, Baltimore, 1993, pp. 103–18.
Wegemer, Young Thomas More (n. 56 above), p. 67.
In a letter to Erasmus written in December 1516, Thomas More describes a dream he had in which he was the king of the Utopians. See CWE 4, ep. 499. On these paratextual letters and the ways in which they influence how we approach Utopia, see E. Aretoulakis, ‘The Prefator/Postscript Letters of St. Thomas More’s Utopia’, Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 3, 2014, pp. 91–113.
Text and translation are from E. Surtz and J. H. Hexter, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, V.4, New Haven, 1965, p. 13.
S. Smith, ‘Literary Designs: Thomas More’s Utopia as Literature’, Thomas More Studies, 1, 2006, pp. 39–40.
For further discussion of this, see K. Ní Mheallaigh, Reading Fiction with Lucian (n. 28 above), ch. 3.
Pawlowski, ‘Thomas More’s Mis-Translations’ (n. 14 above).
See S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare’, Chicago, 1980, p. 63.
See Panizza, ‘Vernacular Lucian’ (n. 6 above), p. 73.
See Thompson, The Translation of Lucian by Erasmus and St. Thomas More (n. 14 above), p. xxiv.
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Peterson, A. Dialoguing with a Satirist: The Translations of Lucian by Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. Int class trad 27, 171–192 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0487-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-018-0487-5