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The Annales … The Description of Germanie. [–The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba. Foure Bookes of the Histories … The Life of Agricola. The fourth Edition] …

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Third collected edition of the Annals translated by Richard Grenewey, first published in 1598, and of The End of Nero, Histories and Agricola, translated by Henry Savile, first published in 1591; this is a paginary reprint, with the same unusual title-page, of the edition of 1604/5.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the ‘historian of princes’ Tacitus was ranked foremost among Roman historians, important for the Machiavellians of Florence as for the courtiers (and playwrights) of Elizabethan London. Savile’s translation of the Historiae was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth (who was to attempt her own version of the Annales, recently identified as MS 683 at Lambeth Palace Library), Greneway’s Annales to the Earl of Essex. ‘In Agricola, [Tacitus] was concerned to celebrate the valour of his father-in-law in the conquest of Britain. But this Roman alone was the subject of praise. He lamented the corruption of previous colonial administrations in Britain. The Romans are represented as luxurious, avaricious and oppressive. He admired the British tribes for their courage and industry … perhaps the dominant understanding of Tacitus was one of nostalgia for a lost civic virtue … Early modern promoters of English colonies made comparisons between Ancient Britons and Native Americans in the context of the second, nostalgic, reading of Tacitus’ (Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America).

Henry Savile (1549–1622), scholar, mathematician, and translator, tutor in Greek to Queen Elizabeth, was one of the most accomplished men of his age, and the only non-clergyman to work on the translation of the King James Bible; by contrast Grenewey (Greenway?) is almost entirely unknown.

For Henry Savile James I evidently had high regard, though he steered him towards patristic scholarship over ancient history. For Tacitus his regard was not so high, at least on the evidence of a conversation he had with Isaac Casaubon in 1610; they both thought the Roman historian over-rated as a source of political wisdom. James did however refer to Tacitus in Basilikon Doron, and the Agricola was read by his son Prince Henry. It is also interesting to note that in the secret negotiations for Elizabeth’s succession, the then James VI of Scotland had been given the code name ‘Tacitus’.

ESTC S117625; STC 23646.

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