A PREPARATIVE TO REVOLUTION
TACITUS, Publius Cornelius.
The Works of Tacitus; volume I, containing the Annals, to which are prefixed political Discourses upon that Author [–Volume II: containing his five Books of History, his Treatise of Germany, his Life of Agricola: with political Discourses upon that Author].
London, Thomas Woodward and John Peele, 1728[–1731].
Two vols, folio, pp. [xii], 114, 479, [1]; [20], 145, [1], 391, [1], [40 (Index)]; some slight foxing to the preliminaries in volume II, else a very good, crisp copy in contemporary panelled speckled calf (not quite uniform), joints of volume II cracked but sound; armorial bookplate in both volumes of Samuel Sandys, Baron Sandys (1695–1770), Ombersley Court, shelfmarks in pencil.
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The Works of Tacitus; volume I, containing the Annals, to which are prefixed political Discourses upon that Author [–Volume II: containing his five Books of History, his Treatise of Germany, his Life of Agricola: with political Discourses upon that Author].
First edition of this influential translation by the Scottish-born Thomas Gordon (d. 1750), dedicated to Robert Walpole and the Prince of Wales, each volume prefaced by a long political essay.
Gordon came to London as a young man, where he espoused his trenchant anti-clericalism in the very successful Independent Whig (1719–20) and The Craftsman (1720), and, with John Trenchard, Cato’s Letters (1720–3), which had a long influence on republican thought, especially in the American colonies. After Trenchard’s death in 1723 and his second marriage to Trenchard’s widow, he devoted himself to this edition of Tacitus, which became the standard text until the following century. It is this work upon which Hume rests his arm in the famous portrait by Allan Ramsay, though Gibbon thought it ‘pompous’.
‘Gordon’s Discourses on Tacitus … were permeated with the purest Whig doctrine. He emphasizes, over and over again, the preeminent importance of liberty and virtue and “Royal authority tempered by Laws.” … In general, the Discourses have rather little to do with Tacitus: the Roman historian appears to be convenient peg from which to hang a political essay. Many examples Gordon musters are drawn from English, French, Turkish, and Mahommedan history … ’ (Benario, ‘Gordon’s Tacitus’, The Classical Journal 72:2, 1967–8). Similarly, while Gordon’s translation is largely accurate, Benario offers a slew of examples of ‘loaded’ language that gives the text a Whiggish bias. This did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries: Pope’s Epilogue to the Satires refers to ‘honest Tacitus once talked as big / But now he is an Independent Whig’.
Gordon’s Tacitus was of particular influence in America, where his translation was the most common form in which Tacitus was to be found in libraries both private and public. John Adams owned two copies; Jefferson thought Tacitus ‘the first writer in the world without a single exception’, while Gordon’s translation ‘seems to have been dictated by the similar causticity of his own genius’. ‘Colonial Americans tended to think of Gordon as a champion of liberty; his Tacitus, along with other published expressions of Radical Whig ideology, schooled and condition colonial Americans to fear and abuse the aggrandizement of power by government, and, as such, prepared them for Revolution’ (Benario).
Provenance: the Whig politician Samuel Sandys (1695–1770), who represented Worcester as an MP from 1718 to 1743; initially a supporter of Walpole, he joined the rebellious ‘Patriot Whigs’ in 1725. ‘Government supporters were quick to denigrate Sandys as a man of “republican” sentiment. His espousal of old whig principles concerning the necessity of preserving parliament from executive entrenchment, featured prominently in the country campaign against the ministry, and was given particular attention in the sequence of bills he presented to disable elected MPs who possessed pensions or offices of profit from taking their seats in the house’ (ODNB). Briefly Lord Chancellor after the fall of Walpole, he was granted a peerage in 1743. The two volumes of Gordon’s Tacitus were evidently bought by Sandys as they were issued, three years apart, which explains the similar but not quite uniform bindings.
