Sir Richard Morison: An Early Reader of Cassius Dio in Tudor England?

International Journal of the Classical Tradition https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-022-00620-y ARTICLE Sir Richard Morison: An Early Reader of Cassius Dio in Tudor England? C. T. Mallan1 Accepted: 11 May 2022 © The Author(s) 2022 Abstract Scholars have suggested that Cassius Dio’s Roman History was among the Greek sources used by the 16th century polemicist Sir Richard Morison in two of his treatises from the 1530s. This short article shows that this is not the case. Rather, Morison can be seen to be borrowing from Seneca’s De Clementia and Politian’s Latin translation of Herodian’s History of the Empire after Marcus Aurelius. This conclusion may cast some further light on the provenance of the booklist contained in British Library Add. MS 40,676 (ff. 110r-116r), and its attribution to Morison. The reputation of the propagandist and diplomat Sir Richard Morison (1513–1556) as a classical scholar has solidified in recent years.1 Particular attention has been paid to Morison’s engagement with Greek authors of the classical and imperial periods.2 Morison was not only a keen collector of Greek books,3 but, as noted by one recent commentator, his ‘reliance on Greek histories, which were not as widely printed or read as Latin ones, marks him out as unusual’.4 Of the authors that have been named among Morison’s Greek sources used in his early political writings is the third-century historian Cassius Dio.5 1 I would like to thank my colleagues, Dr Kirk Essary and Prof. Yasmin Haskell, for their comments on an earlier draft of this article. Similar thanks are due to this journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions and to Prof. Jill Kray in her capacity as editor of IJCT. 2 E.g. D. S. Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship and Public Order: Two Tracts against the Pilgrimage of Grace by Sir Richard Morison, Washington DC, 1984, pp. 61–80, 258–73; J. Woolfson, ‘Morison, Sir Richard’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2015; T. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison, c. 1513–1556, Oxford, 2010, pp.14–40. 3 Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship (n. 2 above), pp. 62–3; cf. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform (n. 2 above), pp. 246–7. 4 Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform (n. 2 above), p. 32. 5 Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship (n. 2 above), p. 64; Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform (n. 2 above), p. 33. * C. T. Mallan 1 School of Humanities, Classics and Ancient History, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Australia 13 Vol.:(0123456789) C. T. Mallan Dio was not a well-known or well-studied author in England during the middle decades of the sixteenth century.6 Prior to the publication of the editio princeps of Dio’s Roman History in 1548, and that of his chief epitomator, Xiphilinus, in 1551 (which furnished the remnants of Dio’s narrative from Claudius to Severus Alexander), knowledge of his work in England was seemingly confined to the partial Italian translation of Niccolò Leoniceno (first printed in 1533), which covered the period from Pompey to Claudius, and the selections of Xiphilinus’s Epitome which covered the ‘lives’ of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian translated into Latin by Giorgio Merula (first printed between 1490 and 1493).7 Yet mid-sixteenth-century readers of Dio’s Roman History and the Dionian tradition in England have been detected with varying degrees of conviction. Morison’s contemporary, Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577), certainly owned and annotated Merula’s translation of Xiphilinus’s Epitome.8 A little later in the century, perhaps around 1580, Smith’s younger friend, Gabriel Harvey (1552/3–1631), seems to have been familiar with Dio’s work, if not its content.9 Humphrey Llwyd (1527–1568) cites Dio (and tacitly Xiphilinus’s Epitome) in his unfinished and posthumously published (in 1572) Commentarioli Britannicae descriptionis fragmentum, a work which was subsequently translated by Thomas Twyne as the Breviary of Britain. Scholars of Richard Morison’s works have identified traces of Dio’s Roman History in two of his tracts from the 1530s: the Remedy for Sedition; Wherin are Conteyned Many Thynges, concernyng the True and Loyall Obeysance, that Comme[n]s Owe unto Their Prince and Soueraygne Lorde the Kynge (hereafter: Remedy), published in 1536; and An Invective ayenste the Great and Destestable, Vice, Treason, published in 1539 (hereafter: Invective).10 These borrowings have added weight to Morison’s reputation as a scholar of Greek. But what is particularly remarkable is the dates of these publications, as they predate the first major Greek-Latin editions of Dio and Xiphilinus by a decade or more; and in the case of the Invective, it contains material not preserved in the printed texts then available, including 6 See, e.g. the tables in P. Burke, ‘A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450–1700’, History and Theory, 5.2, 1966. pp. 135–52 (136–9). 7 For the editio princeps of Dio’s Roman History, see M. Bellissime, ‘Le Parisinus graecus 1689 et l’édition princeps de l’Histoire romaine de Cassius Dion’, in Cassius Dion: nouvelles lectures, ed. V. Fromentin et al., Bordeaux, 2016, pp. 33–8. For a summary of sixteenth-century editions of Dio and his epitomators, see Cassius Dio, Historiarum Romanarum quae supersunt, ed. U. P. Boissevain, Berlin, 1955, pp. lxxxix–xciv. Leoniceno’s Italian translation was confined to Books XXXVI–LX, i.e. those books preserved in the direct MS tradition of Dio’s history. 8 This volume is Erasmus’s Historiae Augustae Scriptores (= H. Adams, Catalogue of Books Printed on the Continent of Europe, 1501–1600, in Cambridge Libraries, Cambridge, 1967, S 2024), a composite edition comprising Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Merula’s translation of Xiphilinus’s epitome of Dio’s narrative of the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian, followed by the Historia Augusta and other minor late antique texts dealing with Roman imperial history. Smith’s copy was part of his bequest to the Queens’ College library. 9 V.F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey: His Life, Marginalia and Library, Oxford, 1979, p. 151. 10 The key work of scholarship on this topic is Berkowitz, Humanist Scholarship (n. 2 above). Many of Berkowitz’s conclusions about Morison’s engagement with the classical sources have been adopted by Sowerby in her exemplary study of Morison’s career: Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform (n. 2 above), pp. 31–5. 13 Sir Richard Morison: An Early Reader of Cassius Dio in Tudor… Leoniceno’s translation. This raises an obvious question: how can we account for these supposed borrowings? Before we go down the path of assuming that Morison had access to a Greek manuscript of Dio or one of his epitomators, perhaps gained during his Italian travels in the 1530s, we should ask how secure is the evidence for Morison’s use of Dio in the first place. As we shall see, these supposed references to Dio are phantoms of modern scholarship; and, by banishing these ghosts, we may get a better picture of Morison’s (...truncated)