A Restoration Suetonius: A New Marvell Text?

In 1672 there was published in London a new, anonymous translation of Suetonius's History of the Twelve Caesars. The publisher was John Starkey, in whose bookshop were also advertised for sale at this time John Milton's Paradise Regained (and Samson Agonistes), Accedence of Grammar, and Tetrachordon. Starkey would reissue the History in 1677, showing that there was a considerable market for such a work. His own career suggests that these items on his list were not entirely coincidental but instead early instances of a program of publishing the political thought of the Whigs and the views of religious Dissenters. Starkey, himself a Dissenter, was a member of the Green Ribbon Club, the most infamous (from a Tory perspective) of the political clubs of London that formed around Buckingham in 1675. In 1683, having participated at some level in the Rye House Plot against Charles II, he would flee to Amsterdam to avoid the consequences of having, in particular, reprinted Nathaniel Bacon's antimonarchical Historical Discourse, not to return until after the Williamite Revolution. ¹

Suetonius had, of course, been translated before, in 1606 by Philemon Holland, and would be retranslated, "by several hands," in a 1688 volume, reissued in 1698. In the later seventeenth century this classical text acquired much the same recycled value as did Tacitus toward the end of Elizabeth's reign and Lucan just before and during the civil wars of the 1640s. With or without benefit of translation, Suetonius served as a resource for those debating and disputing the values of monarchical or imperial power, its account of Augustus's exemplary regime counterbalanced by the scandalous histories of Tiberius, Caligula, and especially Nero. Against the Augustanism of Dryden and other court writers, the critics of Charles and his government adduced the later Roman emperors as proof of the disastrous consequences of unlimited or arbitrary government. In 1660, when Edmund Ludlow began his Memoirs after his escape to Geneva, he noted that several of the regicides had been executed "at the place where Charing Cross stood (as well to revenge the wrong done to that secret relique, as to gratify Nero with the sight of that tragedy, the shedding the blood of those eminent servants of the Lord)." ² He thereby recalled Suetonius's life of Nero, section 37. Nathaniel Lee, who was patronized by Buckingham, published his play The Tragedy of Nero, Emperour of Rome, in 1675, and although he sentimentalized it absurdly, the analogy between Nero and Charles was unavoidable. Algernon Sidney frequently cited Suetonius in his republican Discourses Concerning Government, the writing of which directly contributed to his execution. At his trial he inquired with disbelief, "They have proved a Paper found in my Study of Caligula and Nero, that is Compassing the Death of the King, is it?" ³

The anonymous translation of 1672 is far from uninteresting in its own right. While he clearly consulted Holland, the translator saw as his project the reinscription of Suetonius in the idiom of the English Restoration, whereas Holland had written in the style, now almost comically archaic, of a late Elizabethan. The contrast between the 1606 and 1672 translations, therefore, offers us one linguistically based and foolproof way of doing cultural history, of observing changes in a society's assumptions, preoccupations, and habits. But the 1672 History becomes doubly important by its association with another famous name. It was attributed to Andrew Marvell in a seventeenth-century hand in a copy in the Bodleian Library (Art. 8 J 43). The basis for the ascription, presumably, was that Marvell had been working closely with Suetonius in 1672 and 1673. In both parts of the Rehearsal Transpros'd he had offered a series of precise analogies between Nero and Caligula and Samuel Parker, his opponent in the debates over enforced conformity versus religious toleration. It was just such arbitrary power that Parker argued Charles should wield over his Nonconformist subjects, Marvell...