Hesiod goes Augustan: An Early English Translation of the Theogony

Hesiod was the object of one of George Chapman’s English versions of the classics as early as 1618, but Chapman’s labours extended only as far as the Opera et Dies. The Theogony had to await its first English translator until the eighteenth century. An excerpt was undertaken by William Broome as ‘The Battle of the Gods and Titans’, published in 1727. William Cooke, also known as the translator of Bion and Moschus, then issued his comprehensive translation of Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogony, in 1728. Cooke’s is the first complete English rendering of the latter poem we know of, as well as the last to be published in the eighteenth century, going through a number of editions.¹

But it is not as isolated as it seems. In a manuscript in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng misc e. 240, is found another verse rendering, dating to only six or seven years later, but showing no awareness of Cooke’s publication. This manuscript volume in a uniform hand running to 337 numbered pages is described on a flyleaf as having been ‘written in Exeter College by Penrose father of J. Penrose who was elected fellow of that society in 1774 & grandfather of Th.^s Penrose who was elected in 1815’. This makes the writer John Penrose (1713–76), the author, much later in life, of the Letters from Bath, 1766–7, who according to his ODNB entry matriculated at Exeter College in 1732 and graduated BA in 1736.

The manuscript is a highly organized fair copy or series of fair copies, with subsequent minor corrections in the same hand, under the Cowleyesque title ‘Essays in Prose and Verse’. Unlike Cowley’s essays, however, it takes the form of a numbered and dated sequence of entries (‘No. 196. Monday, July 7’), under each of which appears an item or ‘essay’ varying in length from one or two lines to two or three pages of verse or prose. These items may be serious or mildly frivolous, topical or classical, personal or otherwise. There are brief translations from and allusions to major classical authors such as Virgil, Ovid, Martial, Horace, Catullus, Lucretius, Sallust, and Musaeus; regular mentions of mainstream English literary figures such as Pope, Swift, Cibber, and Curll; and responses to contemporary authors such as Trapp and Stephen Duck. The material overall draws its flavour and inspiration from contemporary periodical literature, which explains the number and date sequence: the entries are meant to resemble the presentation of material in journals like The Tatler and The Spectator, as they appeared from week to week. However, no more than a single piece of prose or verse is present in any individual ‘issue’ here. The manuscript volume’s first item (‘No. 1’) is dated Thursday 15 August 1734, and its last (‘No. 220’) Monday 18 August 1735.

No. 53 proposes to satisfy the curiosity of readers who are ‘inquisitive to know the name and character of Him, who pretends to entertain them in the Spectatorial way’. ‘Something concerning this’, it goes on, ‘ought to have been said at our first appearance in public.’ Readers should know ‘that ’tis not the Brain of one alone that gives birth to these Speculations; but that they are formed by a society of men’, currently numbering four, ‘the senior of whom is always stiled President’, who ‘at the same time that they are endeavouring to improve themselves in the art of well-writing’, wish ‘to improve the morals of their countrymen’. The reference to an ‘appearance in public’ may suggest some intention to publish the material, but none of it seems to have left any trace in the publication record; more likely these remarks form part of a whimsical fiction of a real periodical being composed and published. The ethos throughout is youthful and academic, the geography Oxford-centred: we find ‘An Epistle from Mr Burroughs at Somerton, just after his leaving the University’, or a composition ‘On the Horse-Races at Woodstock’.

The comments in No. 53 seem to mean we cannot know who was responsible for individual items...