Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment

Richard Bentley

Richard Bentley Poetry and Enlightenment

p KRISTINE LOUISE HAUGEN

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2011

Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Haugen, Kristine Louise, 1973– Richard Bentley : poetry and enlightenment / Kristine Louise Haugen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-05871-2 (alk. paper) 1. Bentley, Richard, 1662–1742. 2. Classicists—Great Britain. 3. Learning and scholarship—England—History. 4. Civilization, Classical—Study and teaching—England—History. 5. Criticism, Textual—History. I. Title. PA85.B4H38 2011 880.9—dc22 2010034159

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Introduction What Was a Scholar?

1

1 Before Bentley Restoration Cambridge

12

2 London in the 1680s Bentley Begins

56

3 Bentley in Oxford The New and the Strange

81

4 Into the Drawing Room The Public Intellectual

100

5 Rewriting Horace The Force of Reason and the Force of Habit

124

6 The Measure of All Things Vi commodavi

155

7 Bentley’s New Testament The Return of the Repressed

187

8 Interlopers and Interpolators Manilius and Paradise Lost

211

Conclusion Dominating Antiquity

230

Notes Acknowledgments Index

247 321 000

Illustrations

1. Johannes Pricaeus’s index to authors cited in the lexicon of Hesychius

45

2. Bentley’s annotations in his printed copy of Joseph Scaliger’s correspondence

96

3. Bentley’s heavily annotated working copy of Aristophanes (1547)

98

Richard Bentley

Introduction What Was a Scholar?

T

he name of Richard Bentley evokes both loathing and fascination for literary critics today. Students of eighteenth-century literature know Bentley as a repellent character in Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books and Alexander Pope’s four-book Dunciad, whose loud claims to supremacy as a critic rest on the fact that he despises all great pieces of literature. Students of John Milton know Bentley as a flamboyant but embarrassing predecessor, whose interventionist edition of Paradise Lost (1732) has figured as a cautionary example from the eighteenth century through William Empson to the present.1 The noisome Bentley, however, was no ordinary crank. In fact, he was an eminently well-qualified professional scholar, specializing in the poetry of the ancient world—an extraordinarily successful member of that international, Latin-writing mob of erudite men known in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the Republic of Letters. He had been rewarded with high institutional rank, as royal librarian and as master of Trinity College, Cambridge. As a student of classical antiquity, indeed, Bentley shone more brightly than any other contemporary. But not content with the acclaim of his fellow scholars alone, Bentley decided from an early age that he would also pursue a reputation in the English polite world at large. The results were spectacular and, in the case of Paradise Lost, lamentable. Through his overweening ambition and his imperious persona, Bentley precipitated the wholesale clash of worlds that led to his demolition by

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the English satirists. Specifically, Bentley revealed to his polite readers the doings of the professional scholar, even as he adapted his scholarship to anticipate the needs and the deficiencies of the amateur. The horrified and dumbfounded reactions that greeted him show graphically how separate were the spheres of vernacular reading and of professional humanism in England, even so long after the continental Renaissance. The union between these worlds that Bentley craved—with himself, certainly, as the cynosure of both—was not to be achieved in his lifetime, nor indeed can it quite be said that we have reached it today. The case of his Paradise Lost makes a bracing introduction to Bentley’s critical methods; so extreme are its tactics that they resemble a hyperbole or parody of Bentley’s own ordinary procedures. Centuries of invective have by no means exhausted this edition’s strangeness. In an era when editions of English poems were a new and increasingly prestigious vehicle for displaying a critic’s sagacity, Bentley claimed to have detected the traces of egregious textual corruption in Milton’s epic, traces that had apparently gone uncomprehended by every other reader since the poem first appeared in 1667. According to Bentley, the blind Milton had unwisely entrusted the task of proofreading to an audacious associate, who changed, removed, and inserted words and passages to suit his own barbarous taste. But Bentley, fortunately, possessed the necessary qualifications for restoring Paradise Lost to its originary purity. Ridiculing “the Editor” who had enfarced Milton’s poem with “monstrous Faults,” Bentley defended his preferred readings in hectoring annotations: Satan lying in the lake of fire, for example, saw not “darkness visible” but “a transpicuous gloom” (1.85); a heroic simile comparing the great hall of Pandemonium to a medieval jousting field was patently not by Milton at all (1.763–766).2 In a complicated exchange of authority and transgression, Bentley was to make Milton more prestigious by editing his poem, while Milton was to make Bentley prestigious by consenting, as it were, to be edited—yet editing, for Bentley, apparently meant making Milton’s poem into something else altogether. The dangerous “Editor” who played the villain in Bentley’s textual narrative resembled no one more than Bentley himself. The egregious Paradise Lost came quite late in Bentley’s career; he was 70 years old when it was published, and he may or may not have believed all of his own redoubtable claims. Long before this, however, his publications on classical literature had already brought him to the attention of a wide English public, above all his edition of Horace (1712) and his Dissertation on the forged Greek letters of Phalaris (2nd ed. 1699). In those cases too, Bentley’s career was far from free of incident. At every opportunity he courted controversy and outrage, which both his professional readers and

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his polite audiences obligingly supplied. It was Bentley’s classical work, in fact, that motivated the marvelous attacks on him by the satirists Pope and Swift. Pope festooned his Dunciad Variorum with irrelevant and abstruse footnotes, purporting to be by Bentley, quibbling over minutiae and demanding changes to Pope’s text. Bentley himself put in a personal appearance in the poem’s fourth book, swathed in academic robes, surrounded by a clutch of old-fashioned Aristotelians, and not a little inebriated. This Bentley delivered fair warning to poets about the nature of his own literary acumen: Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is vain: Critics like me shall make it Prose again.

Notorious for bold textual revisions, above all in his edition of Horace, Bentley had clearly aroused the ire (and the laughter) of the poet who considered himself the leading critical authority of the time. Even when Bentley was not emending, his scholarly habits continued to fall under censure. Leaving to others any form of polite, useful knowledge of the classical world, he intoned: For Attic Phrase in Plato let them seek, I poach in Suidas for unlicens’d Greek. In ancient Sense if any needs will deal, Be sure I give them Fragments, not a Meal. . . .

Not for Pope’s Bentley the elegant diction of Plato’s Athens: he far preferred to excavate obscure and difficult words from a Byzantine dictionary. And not for Bentley any surviving, complete text when some fragmentary quotation remained to be run to ground. These parts of Pope’s attack, at any rate, were indeed often accurate. That Pope should have cared at all what Bentley did is the mark of Bentley’s substantial success in placing scholarship before the polite world. The same can be said of Swift, who similarly subjected Bentley to ridicule in his Battle of the Books of 1704. The fearsome battle of Swift’s title took place in the Royal Library of England, of which Bentley was curator; it featured Bentley with his friend William Wotton venturing forth under arms to attack all ancient books. Impressively equipped with a flail in one hand and a bucket of manure in the other, the martial Bentley could not restrain himself from upbraiding and insulting the generals of his own side for their timidity and incompetence. Left to his own devices, however, when he found his two archenemies Phalaris and Aesop asleep, he took fright, shrank from

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killing them, and contented himself with tiptoeing away with their armor. Swift’s satire was called forth, in the first instance, by an ongoing pamphlet war, but the literary depiction of Bentley as vituperative, hapless, and ineffectual was his alone. By contrast with the irresistible satires, a large question mark hangs over Bentley’s actual classical scholarship for most readers today. Time has not always dealt gently with early modern writers of Latin, however elegant or learned; nor is it necessarily easy to enter into the vanished intellectual habits of their omnivorously erudite world. To his contemporaries, however, Bentley was a potent cultural and literary force. That he and his fellow scholars studied classical texts rather than English ones only confirms our impression that they commanded what Pierre Bourdieu would call cultural capital.3 English poems were, of course, widely read and admired in the years around 1700, yet they were little taught or studied in  universities and grammar schools.4 Critical writing about them, from Dryden to Dennis to Pope, was couched in an Aristotelian and occasionally Longinian idiom centering on the declamatory praise and blame of plots and characters. Methodological discussion, collaboration, and in many cases connected argument were scarce. By contrast, Bentley and his professional peers enjoyed highly elaborated methods and a large body of what we would call secondary literature. Meanwhile, classical texts stood at the center of elite men’s education, forming a mark of distinction that adults eagerly displayed by amassing classical libraries and dropping classical quotations in speech and writing. Indeed, English literature took considerable time to catch up, so to speak, with the enviable position of classical texts in Bentley’s time. This situation is precisely the reason why Bentley’s foray into the field of English poetry was surprising: the key question, in fact, is not how a hopeless pedant like Bentley could believe he had the right to edit Paradise Lost, but rather why a celebrated classical scholar like Bentley should have bothered to edit Paradise Lost. Meanwhile, although the rhetoric of Pope, Swift, and others has encouraged some writers to depict Bentley as the polar opposite of the genteel and polite English critics of his day, they too participated in the late humanist classical culture that Bentley had mastered as a technical expert. Bentley and his fellow scholars figured as competitors against whom others had to defend their claims to intellectual prestige; Bentley’s very familiarity and proximity motivated both their insults and the anxiety that apparently underlay them. It was not only Bentley’s mercurial and overweening style, then, that made him a prominent and notorious figure. It was the way in which he aimed at a totally new kind of convergence between scholarship and polite literary culture, akin to that of Renaissance Italy or seventeenth-century France. By contrast, seventeenth-century England—that is, the world where

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Bentley grew up—had been radically inhospitable to scholarship that was capable of attracting the attention of anyone but scholars themselves. Arcane, specialized, and often ecclesiastical in its orientation, the traditional brand of scholarship had sought no wide audience beyond the church and universities and frequently found none. Its practitioners, on the evidence, would have surrendered their degrees rather than be caught working on any text familiar to undergraduates. Bentley, however, refused to confine himself to the decent obscurity of a dead language, both figuratively and quite literally. His constantly changing publications embodied the transition. His career began with a punishing and unfinished project to collect the textual fragments of all Greek poetry. He then turned with increasing confidence to the history of ancient poetry, and he ended with actual textual criticism of poetry, driven by loud claims about his own reason and taste: his editions of Horace and Paradise Lost completed Bentley’s incursion into the world of polite letters, assailing the textual integrity of famous poems while attacking the presumed ignorance of their readers. His innovation in the setting of England, then, was precisely to obtrude serious classical scholarship under the noses of readers who had never seen anything like it before. If it is hard for us to see Bentley’s activity as “literary” by the standards of the twenty-first century, nonetheless he transformed scholarship into a sharp instrument to be deployed specifically on the poems that were most universally known to contemporary readers. But Bentley turned scholarship toward the world of cultural fashion not only through his material but also through his methods. Indeed, few more perfect examples could be found of that much-discussed creature, the Enlightenment man. Bentley’s critical methods impressed by their deep commitment to reason and to law, above all when he strove to designate himself as a specialist in poetry rather than a bestrider of all subjects in the style of the seventeenth century. Whether Bentley was insisting that his original conjectures were the best way of correcting Horace or whether he was elucidating the meter of Terence’s verse comedies, Bentley held that reasoned judgment and observation could (and should) take the scholar far beyond the actual evidence before him. At the same time, only a scholar could have aimed to change classical scholarship in this way. Bentley the man of reason emerged, not in spite of traditional erudition, but directly from it. Even the debate that he animated over conjectures and manuscripts, so redolent of the values of the Enlightenment, was actually a product of the sixteenth century; Bentley rescued it from its quiescence so as to create an instant and gripping polemic. Nor did Bentley ever completely lose his old scholarly habits. It was his footnotes, authorities, and argumentative justifications that appeared truly alien to his nonspecialist readers, perhaps even more so than his peremptory judgments and pronouncements of taste. Meanwhile,

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Bentley courted the ire of his fellow scholars, at home and abroad, by both his swashbuckling treatment of his texts and his intemperate treatment of his opponents. Although Bentley cultivated an image of extreme singularity, in one respect his career was utterly traditional: he was a churchman, working in his youth for a future bishop and later tyrannizing over Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became master when he was 38. By one standard, Bentley’s life as an establishment man might appear as yet another hopeless mark against him, even to those who gladly inhabit universities today. In his time, of course, we associate the discussion of poetry with urbane wits inhabiting London coffeehouses, or with the energetic pamphlet wars generated in theatrical circles. Bentley, however, was committed to moving his work out of the college and into the drawing room, even at the same time as he made genuine scholarly contributions on an international scale. The university, for him, was a base of operations from which to invade the polite world, not a haven for reclusive and arcane work. Nor should we forget how broad were the intellectual privileges of a churchman during the eighteenth century, from the Shakespeare critic William Warburton to the satirist Jonathan Swift to the dizzyingly successful Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. Bentley, then, took an active part in making the church and universities themselves more hospitable to secular and purely literary study, prefiguring the rise in the later eighteenth century of  literary dons such as Richard Porson and Thomas Gray. At the same time, Bentley presents himself as a close ancestor for the field of literary criticism today. For if universities and libraries are sites for innovation in the present, we should recognize the large and durable impact of those same institutional settings on the past. The celebrated eighteenth-century coffeehouse added a new location to intellectual culture but was far from erasing the old ones. In another respect, too, Bentley is responsible for shaping what we regard as English literature today. His notorious work demonstrably stood as a fixed star in the rapidly developing universe of English literary criticism, a point of reference for others to approach or avoid in their navigations. Inspired by Joseph Levine’s eloquent account of Bentley as a historical scholar, literary critics like Jonathan Kramnick, Marcus Walsh, and Simon Jarvis have positioned Bentley at the origin of two interdependent accomplishments of the eighteenth century: the consolidation of an English poetic canon, and the rise of the literary critic whose work and identity depended on his mastery of that canon.5 Insofar as these developments still reverberate in professional criticism in our century—in the implacable continuities of curricular practice, if not always in theory—it would ap-

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pear, however alarmingly, that we are Bentley’s descendants. To inquire about Bentley’s career, then, is to initiate a nearly violent dialectic between his alienness and his family resemblance to us.

Many

discrete questions might be asked of Bentley’s story. This book emphasizes the continuous, almost vertiginous changes in scholarly approach that marked each one of Bentley’s successive publications. As a result, no chapter can be totally understood without consideration of the whole. However, it is also easily possible to read groups of chapters on their own. Chapters 1 and 2 give a general account of English scholarship inside and outside the church during the Restoration, a period about which we still know far too little. Those interested in a case study of an early modern scholar in the process of learning his trade might see Chapters 3 and 4. The history of textual criticism is the emphasis of Chapters 5 and 6. Finally, readers who especially want to understand Bentley’s edition of Paradise Lost are urged to read not only Chapter 8, which deals with that edition, but also Chapter 5, on his edition of Horace. For I contend that the Paradise Lost represented yet another bold experiment for Bentley, making it aberrant not only in English criticism of the time but also by the standard of Bentley’s own earlier practice. No well-executed history since the nineteenth century has attempted to address all of Bentley’s major works. Conversely, no one could contemplate an intellectual study of Bentley without the foundation of the great 1830 biography by J. H. Monk. Bentley deserves a book of his own, not only because much remains unsaid but also because he affords us a superbly useful way of surveying the intellectual world of his time. What was the classical scholarship of the period like—which is as much as to say, how was the master discipline of the humanities conducted? How did a scholar become celebrated in this community, or how might he be branded as a nuisance and a bully? How was it that so much scholarship and literary activity took place in the English church and universities, locales that have often been regarded as less than vibrant? Above all, how could a specifically literary form of classical scholarship arise from the apparently rocky soil of seventeenth-century England? Most fundamentally, how did the miscellaneous and omnivorous learning of the Renaissance and the seventeenth century turn into the sharply defined enterprise of literary criticism? To ask any of these questions is to be drawn ineluctably to Bentley.

Chapter 1, “Before Bentley: Restoration Cambridge,” investigates the English scholars of the generation before Bentley’s, especially Thomas Stanley, John Pearson, and Thomas Gale. In these circles, Hellenistic Greek

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was the favored area of study, and little-known and difficult texts were prized. With the exception of Stanley’s edition of Aeschylus’s tragedies, these scholars were more interested in a broad historia litteraria, or cultural history of antiquity, than in studying poetry directly. Their pronounced preference for a novel fragment over a well-known whole, and for communicating with their fellow specialists rather than a broad public, would also define Bentley’s early works—and, it might be argued to some extent, his later ones as well. Chapter 2, “London in the 1680s: Bentley Begins,” looks at the less intellectually serious but highly energetic milieu in which Bentley spent his twenties, in the household of Edward Stillingfleet, then Dean of St. Paul’s. Just as for his time as an undergraduate in Cambridge, we know essentially nothing of his activities. But the deeply polemical atmosphere of the church, and its zeal for publication, make it clear enough where Bentley acquired his taste for pamphlet warfare and for concerted waves of publication by many authors. At the same time, living in the center of London’s book district, Bentley learned of scholars whose publications were in no way ecclesiastical—above all Isaac Vossius, the rather louche Dutch émigré who could boast a direct intellectual descent from Joseph Scaliger. In Chapter 3, “Bentley in Oxford: The New and the Strange,” Bentley himself irrupts onto the scene with his first major publication, the Letter to Mill of 1691; he was nearly 30. An idiosyncratic and highly selective commentary on a Byzantine world chronicle printed at Oxford, this short treatise loudly declared Bentley’s sole interest in ancient poetry, preferably lost. Selecting short passages that dealt with the ancient tragedy, Bentley dealt high-handedly with both his primary source and any other matter that could conceivably be considered relevant, including the opinions of his early modern predecessors. Bentley’s approach formed part of a new movement in Oxford to publish on classical and literary subjects, but his abrasive, confident, and textually interventionist style was his alone. With Chapter 4, “Into the Drawing Room: The Public Intellectual,” we encounter Bentley’s first attempt to place the fruits of scholarship before a polite English audience. Composed, very unconventionally, in the English vernacular, his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris debunked the authenticity of ancient Greek letters attributed to the archaic tyrant Phalaris, thus contributing to an ongoing pamphlet war. While the first edition of 1697 presented a plausible case in a concise and elegant way, when Bentley encountered the pressure of a hostile reply he issued a monstrously expanded second edition in 1699, full of precisely the kind of philological digression and detail likely to repel readers for whom scholarship in general was alien. At the same time, he developed a novel and interesting

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argument about the history of the Greek tragedy, showing his new capacity to discuss literary history in a way that went beyond the fragment and the emendation. Chapter 5, “Rewriting Horace: The Force of Reason and the Force of Habit,” explores Bentley’s best-known work dealing with poetry. It was in this edition (1712) that he delivered his most provocative pronouncements about the superiority of reasoned conjecture over the consultation of manuscripts for correcting a text, and about the presumed ignorance of his audience to grasp that the text was wrong in the first place. Many spectacular and obdurate conjectures backed up Bentley’s contention; they were accompanied, however, with masses of “documentation” in the shape of passages that Bentley claimed were parallel, leaving an impression more of raw accumulative scholarship than of elegant deduction. Contemporaries at home and abroad perceived the Horace as important and deeply irritating in equal measure. Chapter 6, “The Measure of All Things: Vi commodavi,” considers an edition that was possibly even more successful than Bentley’s Horace yet far less famous. His Terence (1726) revived and resolved centuries-old debates over the proper way to understand the meters of the Latin comedy. Not only was a genuine problem in poetic form at hand. For Bentley, an expertise in meter had always been a crucial corollary of his claims to literary taste. Drawing on an idea of Isaac Vossius’s, Bentley introduced the term “rhythm” as an alternative to “meter,” associating this change with the claim that the Old Comedy had been performed to the music of flutes throughout. In treating meter as the criterion for emendation, Bentley implicitly made a much more plausible appeal to conjecture and law than in his Horace. Bentley’s other important metrical intervention came when, in an unpublished project, he inserted the lost letter digamma in the Homeric poems to regularize the meter of hundreds of lines. In Chapter 7, “Bentley’s New Testament: The Return of the Repressed,” we see Bentley attempting to fulfill his destiny as a churchman also renowned for textual scholarship. While angling for the Regius chair of theology at Cambridge, which he captured in 1716, he announced that he would prepare an edition of the New Testament, whose textual probity he had already eloquently defended in the course of a recent pamphlet war. But Bentley never hit on any ruling principle or method for this planned edition. Beyond a few startling and theologically pregnant conjectures recorded in an early hand, the project consisted simply of the accumulation of manuscript readings, largely executed by Bentley’s nephew and assistant. What could have become a scholarly contribution of universal interest was thus left unfinished and inchoate, perhaps precisely because Bentley’s

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signature methods of emendation would have been deeply inappropriate on his own account. Chapter 8, “Interlopers and Interpolators: Manilius and Paradise Lost,” shows us the second of Bentley’s great and ambitious failures, his textual edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost (1732). Claiming that the blind Milton’s poem had been corrupted in several stages, above all by a malicious proofreader, Bentley proposed to excise and correct what he regarded as the interpolator’s unmistakable and tasteless traces. The idea of an interpolator in itself was not illegitimate: it figured in Bentley’s edition of the Roman astrologer Manilius (1739) and in many earlier discussions of classical literature. In the case of Milton, the story of the interpolator provided Bentley, very simply, with a good reason why a textual edition based on conjecture should be attempted at all—a reason never well explained by the contemporary editors of Shakespeare to whom the Paradise Lost was a reply. If the vogue for Shakespeare editing owed much to the example of Bentley’s Horace, he now showed, fearsomely, what a principled and internally consistent edition could actually look like. His final bid to win the attention of a polite, vernacular audience thus became his most bizarre and his most widely read work.

In the end, where should we place Bentley in the history of literary criticism in England? Certainly, he is pleasingly distinct from the Aristotelian or “neoclassical” critics we have been taught to view as the dominant group in his time. Rarely concerned with plot or character and never concerned with “unity,” Bentley also spectacularly refused to participate in the cult of the author and the fulsome praise that pervaded contemporary comments on poetry. To take another eighteenth-century habit, Bentley did not pause to show his reader “beauties,” those notable, quotable passages that other critics felt obliged to point out again and again. What Bentley pointed out, by contrast, were egregious faults: every question of interpretation or aesthetics was transformed in his hands into a question of textual correctness, or rather wrongness. His mode of reading and argument must be called literary simply because Bentley concerned himself almost exclusively with poetry; nonetheless, they severely challenge our preconceptions of what the “literary” might be in his or any other period. For the limitations of his Aristotelian contemporaries, then, Bentley substituted substantial limitations of his own. As to Bentley’s own techniques, two were especially distinctive, both for his contemporaries and by the standards of the present. The first we might call the textual reduction. For example, Bentley’s contribution to the Battle of the Books resolutely avoided the philosophical question of ancients

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versus moderns and concentrated purely on the question of whether the letters of Phalaris were authentic. In his editions of poetry, similarly, Bentley was capable of turning any interpretive question into a problem about the correct reading of the text. In turn, Bentley had a fairly finite repertoire of methods for dealing with texts—quotation, compilation, comparison, and not rarely correction—with the result that virtually any topic could be first textualized, then adjudicated by bracing and summary means. I will suggest, for example, that Bentley addressed current theological controversies in this way in his unfinished edition of the New Testament. Second, Bentley was seemingly incapable of writing in any mode but the competitive and polemical. In his scholarly works, his enemy might be a humanist predecessor, a misguided contemporary, or Milton’s fictive “Editor”; Bentley’s theological writings too were uniformly embattled, excoriating atheists, Roman Catholics, and “free-thinkers.” These fundamental habits persisted throughout Bentley’s intellectual metamorphoses, and they account for much of the distinctly strange impression that his writings leave. At the same time, Bentley’s mode of reading can appear as a plausible ancestor for literary critics today, in part precisely because we no longer engage primarily in the evaluative language of praise and blame. Like the closest of close readers, Bentley could detect vast amounts and vast questions in a single word; like theorists of the death of the author, Bentley explicitly acknowledged the primacy of his own judgment when he encountered a poem. In the eighteenth century, his reliance on linguistic parallels and analogy for his emendations made clear the need for English reference works, like Samuel Johnson’s historical dictionary, that could guide the critic in re-creating a poet’s linguistic world. But Bentley’s real legacy lies with the definition or the idea of a classic text, whether in the ancient languages or in English. Whether he was correcting a poem’s meter or discarding an entire text as a forgery, Bentley assumed that he himself and his entirely real expertise had to serve as the final judge. If this sounds like an Enlightenment doctrine, it also carries a tinge of the postmodern. Indeed, Bentley serves as a particularly awesome test case of the proposition that to become and remain canonical, a poem has to change and be changed over time. What “pleases ten times,” to paraphrase Horace, is very far from always pleasing in the same way—or, in Bentley’s case, from pleasing at all. If Bentley inspired and troubled textual editors for generations after his death, it was because the poetic canon, in his practice, was both taken for granted and deeply subject to question. Bentley deliberately treated the poetry of the past as a reader in the present, content to attack it precisely because he assumed that it could withstand his assaults and endure.

chapter one

Before Bentley Restoration Cambridge

W

e know very little about Richard Bentley’s life between his birth in 1662 and his first major publication, the erudite and pugnacious Letter to Mill, which appeared in 1691. His surviving correspondence begins only in 1689, a few months before he was to leave London for the brief but eventful stay in Oxford that marks the beginning of his public life as a scholar.1 As far as working manuscripts are concerned, only a few remain from the earlier period, largely the relics of projects that he never published. And it was not until 1694, when he became King’s Librarian, that Bentley held a job whose responsibilities we can define with confidence. As a result, it would be tempting to begin Bentley’s story at the point where documentation starts to proliferate—to treat him as a fully formed enfant terrible at his first appearance on the scene, and to understand his career, consequently, as the product of his own singular and inexplicable brilliance. This, in fact, was an impression Bentley himself labored to give, which already makes a compelling reason for not beginning his intellectual biography in medias res. But we will learn a great deal more from investigating the two communities where the young Bentley spent time, as it were, off the record—Cambridge University in the Restoration, and the London church hierarchy of the 1680s. For insofar as Bentley’s early life was a kind of ideal pattern for what might happen to a talented youth with no particular

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advantages from his family—he did well at grammar school in Yorkshire, was understood to have a future in the church, paid his way through St. John’s College as a servant, or “sizar,” and spent his twenties in the nebulous post of tutor in the household of the Dean of St. Paul’s—he can show us with a peculiar clarity how an individual in this period might achieve a distinct intellectual identity even as his professional life revolved completely around institutions. Similarly, we should take stock of the prominent scholars of the generations before Bentley’s, not only in order to appreciate the intellectual status quo ante when Bentley himself began to publish but also to form an idea of what the young Bentley’s ecclesiastical mentors would have urged him to become. We will discover that their world, if it was more provincial and less secular than we have come to expect from the scholarly communities of the late seventeenth century, was also a place where some found it possible to practice classical study on a level that was eminently acceptable by contemporary European standards. The successful classicists of the Restoration felt that they belonged to a coherent field, to participate in which a clear degree of expertise was required. They also felt, with fairly good contemporary reasons, that their work took account of recent progress and itself made new contributions; and they felt that in various senses their research was relevant to the present day. That their specific fields of interest are little known today—indeed, they were rapidly losing currency in England during Bentley’s lifetime— makes it all the more important to recognize why in the seventeenth century they were viewed as important experts to be admired and emulated.

In the 1660s and 1670s, Cambridge suddenly found itself occupied by an unprecedented number of energetic churchmen who aimed not only to investigate the classical and Christian past but also to publish relatively enduring works of scholarship. Political and intellectual developments alike brought about this novel situation. After the restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 and the reestablishment of the national church, the English universities, as clerical institutions, became the object of especially ruthless attention from Anglican leaders. Cambridge, with its reputation for harboring religious dissenters, was felt to be perhaps even more in need of reclamation than Oxford; the existing fellows of colleges could not be ejected unless they refused to swear allegiance to Charles II or conform with the 1662 Act of Uniformity, but an infusion of new personnel rapidly changed the university’s ecclesiastical and intellectual climate. Newly powerful churchmen, like William Sancroft, John Cosin, and John Pearson, returned from the continent or from London to become masters of Cambridge

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colleges; younger allies, such as Robert Creighton and Richard Cumberland, received fellowships and chairs that were apparently understood as way stations en route to more prestigious posts in the church. For complex reasons grounded in part in a selective nostalgia for the era of Archbishop Laud in the 1620s and 1630s, this cadre of churchmen had come during the years of the Commonwealth to identify itself with historical scholarship and textual study. Several of them spent time in exile in the intellectually vibrant settings of The Hague and Amsterdam, where the learned book trade, as well as the presence of Dutch classicists like G. J. Vossius, gave them ample opportunity to follow scholarly developments and even to produce a few scholarly publications.2 Meanwhile, Brian Walton and John Pearson, who remained in London, had organized a large number of their disaffected brethren to produce an enormous Polyglot Bible, which appeared in six volumes in 1654–1657. It was clearly not the case that no one outside the former Church of England cared for philological scholarship, as the examples of Richard Baxter and even John Milton show. Nonetheless, the Anglicans viewed their once and future ascendancy as intellectual as well as institutional; this orientation would only deepen in the years immediately following the Restoration, as they engaged in learned polemics against nonconformists over the form and nature of the restored national church. Yet more than corporate identity was at stake in the surge of scholarly publications that followed the Anglican reoccupation of Cambridge. A change in intellectual fashion had also reoriented scholarly churchmen away from the rambling and splenetic style of polemical argument that had marked the most famous scholarly publications of the Laudian church. The bitter and impenetrable works of Richard Montagu, Joseph Mede, and Lancelot Andrewes, once respected for their overweening ecclesiastical partisanship and their thick encrustment of classical and patristic quotations, found few emulators now. Nor did the early seventeenth century’s theological debates between English Calvinists and their opponents seem relevant or important in the new context. Political controversy now revolved chiefly around the institution of the national church and the treatment that should be given to nonconformists, while personal devotion was conceived as centering on daily life and its proper conduct.3 The new mode among learned churchmen relied not on direct partisan argumentation, but on ostensibly neutral works of scholarship whose bearing on political and spiritual questions, however clear, had to be inferred and applied by informed readers. Thus John Pearson, in the face of Restoration controversies over the reinstallation of Anglican bishops, elected not to compose a learned defense of the principle of episcopacy, as he assuredly would

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have done had he been writing in the 1630s; rather, Pearson devoted 400 pages to a Vindication of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch (1672), a defense of the authenticity of one of the central documents on which defenses of episcopacy had always rested.4 Again, before the Restoration, the young Robert Creighton, exiled with other English churchmen in Utrecht, had published not an original polemical tract against the Roman church, but the first printing of a fifteenth-century memoir by the Greek Orthodox politician Sylvester Syropoulos, which narrated the proceedings at the Council of Florence in 1438–1439 from an anti-Romanist point of view.5 Patristic scholarship, in other words, was turning from an overt ground of controversy into a politically motivated but regular and sophisticated discipline.6 By the standards of the earlier seventeenth century, when Greek textual scholars like Patrick Young, Gerald Langbaine, and Henry Savile had worked in relative isolation amid a wider climate of histrionic controversy, the new intellectual regime was one of measured argumentation and notable self-restraint. This is also to say that during the Restoration, English scholars began in earnest to resemble their late humanist counterparts elsewhere in northern Europe—in the Netherlands, France, and to some degree the Germanspeaking lands. The work of Thomas Stanley, John Pearson, and Thomas Gale in particular bears direct comparison with that of Claude Saumaise, J.  F. Gronovius, Henri de Valois, Pierre Gassendi, Isaac Vossius, and Johann Scheffer, contemporaries whose activity spanned the middle and slightly later seventeenth century. None of these names is well known today to historians of England, with the exception of Saumaise, whose exchange of turgid Latin pamphlets with John Milton over the execution of Charles I showed neither author at his finest hour. But these continental scholars matter because they represent the particular model of work that the English scholars came to find congenial, a model far removed from the fixation on Greek and Roman eloquence and poetry that we associate with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanism, and only occasionally concerned with the antiquarian study of inscriptions, coins, and ruins that many have regarded as the most forward-looking trend among seventeenth-century historical scholars.7 Again telling against any chance for a great reputation today, few of these French, Dutch, and German scholars regarded the textual edition as a particularly important form of publication; the editions they did publish, moreover, were of authors of distinctly specialist interest. Valois’ edition of fragments of Greek historians from Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s collection De virtutibus et vitiis (1634) and Vossius’s edition of the geographical dictionary of Pomponius Mela (1658) immediately became respected standard works for those who wished to use them.8 Yet

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that audience, then as now, was small and tightly knit, and Valois and Vossius did not attempt to broaden the interest of the proceedings by engaging in methodological battles over the relative merits of manuscripts and conjectures for establishing a text. What, then, was their attraction for Stanley, Pearson, and Gale—for the first generation of English classicists who published regularly, who established discrete fields of personal interest, and who lived in an English milieu where historical scholarship had become intellectually and professionally prestigious? Their choice of material formed the most striking parallel. The English classicists directed their energies away from well-known poets, orators, and historians—like Horace, Cicero, or Livy—and toward the periphery of the known world. The ancient texts that fascinated them most were late, not classical; pedestrian, rather than beautiful; and Greek, almost never Latin. Their motives for this study, while easily recognizable to specialist contemporaries, were similarly recondite. It is far from obvious to modernday readers, for example, why Pearson chose to favor the world with an edition of Hierocles—a Neoplatonist philosopher of the fifth century CE best known for his wordy commentary on the Golden Verses of the Pythagoreans.9 Nor do we readily see why Gale should have published a collection of twelve Greek treatises on mythology and poetic allegory in  1671, another five in 1675, and lastly in 1678 the editio princeps of Iamblichus’s formidable treatise On the Mysteries of the Egyptians.10 Educated contemporaries must sometimes have felt a similar perplexity, even though their tastes too might be remarkably broad: John Evelyn lightly annotated a copy of Eusebius’s enormous Ecclesiastical History containing Henri de Valois’ combative printed notes on historical chronology, lost Greek poetry, the Sibylline oracles, and much else.11 As authors, the English scholars were apparently content to have earned a reputation for erudition that did not depend on a great number of people having understood their work. Nothing suggests that they wished to promulgate claims or theories that might galvanize educated people at large. Yet when we open their books, reading these scholars’ notes and reconstructing their arguments, a striking picture of their ambitions slowly emerges. If the texts they studied were usually unfamiliar and strange, the English scholars were actually on the track of things more recondite still. Indeed, in their different ways, Stanley, Pearson, and Gale were perhaps most deeply interested in the history of texts that were not there at all: the lost works of ancient poetry, philosophy, historiography, and scholarship that they knew had spanned nearly a millennium of Greek antiquity but that no one had seen for perhaps as long again. To take the measure of this lost continent—an enterprise in which they were joined by seventeenth-

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century contemporaries across northern Europe—they resorted to methods that were by then standard, if also notably labor intensive. They searched out references in dictionaries and commentaries, discovering the names of lost authors and books, as well as the occasional quotation, garbled or otherwise. They checked the coherence of ancient statements of fact by referring to historical chronology. They asked which of their late and unsatisfactory surviving sources had been copied from one another, and which ones, conversely, might contain something fresh. Finally, where textual criticism was concerned, they assumed as a matter of course that when a passage was faulty but manuscript evidence was unavailable, the scholar should certainly propose a conjecture about the correct reading. All of these methods, along with the principle of the search for the unfindable, had been made famous and practiced to a high standard by Joseph Scaliger in his works of historical chronology, above all in his Thesaurus temporum of 1606, which remained throughout Bentley’s lifetime the standard work from which any inquiry of a certain kind must start.12 In the middle and late seventeenth century, its methods held the field by default. As we will see, some practitioners of this scholarship were more able and perceptive than others, and where specific points were concerned, disputes regularly flared and subsided, sometimes abetted by new evidence. Nonetheless, the scholarly world of Stanley, Pearson, and Gale was fundamentally not marked by sharp differences of method or intellectual principle: rivalries tended to be either personal, as in the explosive feud between Claude Saumaise and Isaac Vossius, or confessional, as in the regular sniping conducted over decades between northern Protestants and the voluble Vatican librarian Leone Allacci. Manifestly, this set the classical scholars apart from the more discordant intellectual scenes that unfolded around them in the seventeenth century, above all in the capacious group of disciplines that were then called philosophy. The classicists signally lacked any combative innovator such as Descartes, Hobbes, or Boyle; although their own work in the history of philosophy had (to their own way of thinking) a clear bearing on contemporary theories of matter and of human nature, this was a felt affinity of content rather than a transforming influence on their own field. The generation of Bentley’s English predecessors worked willingly, then, in what we might call a climate of normal science. They were the models on which the young Bentley’s mentors hoped he would shape his own scholarship, and indeed it was largely their methods—reapplied in surprising contexts, executed with a decisive eye, and made fresh by lashings of truculent polemic—that formed the basis even of Bentley’s most radical provocations.

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Stanley: The History of Philosophy (1655–1662) and Aeschylus (1663) The most intelligible and attractive publication of this generation was also the most deceptively simple. The History of Philosophy that Thomas Stanley published beginning in the 1650s is in fact a strikingly clear example both of their lust after poorly documented events and of their understanding of the strengths and limitations of the extant sources.13 For those who have studied the trajectory of early modern scholarship on the history of philosophy, Stanley’s contribution holds an ambiguous place. His intelligence and industry are not doubted. His judgment, however, has been regarded as questionable or at the least deeply conservative, insofar as he precisely reproduced the structure of the reigning ancient source, Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers, a third-century compilation that Stanley himself frequently showed to be inaccurate or in need of supplementation. Moreover, Stanley accepted the traditional information that in the first era of Greek philosophy, Thales had visited Egypt, while Pythagoras had also traveled to Egypt and perhaps beyond into the Near East. Finally, the suave and calm style of Stanley’s English prose has probably done little to impress those more attuned to the pugnacity of a Francis Bacon or Thomas Hobbes. What, then, is the History of Philosophy’s redeeming facet? By the standards of the seventeenth century, Stanley’s book had several.14 Let us begin with its relationship to Diogenes Laertius, often noticed but rarely explored for its implications. Stanley was far from believing that Laertius was always correct; on the contrary, virtually every page of the History of Philosophy shows Stanley contesting the details of his account or adding further material that Laertius, presumably, either had omitted or had never known.15 Rather, Stanley treated Laertius as a flawed but uniquely privileged predecessor: he was keenly alive to the fact that Laertius had been able to draw on important works of ancient scholarship that were now lost, except in the form of Laertius’s own sometimes inconsistent quotations from them. As a result, Stanley decided that the way forward for the history of philosophy lay in correcting and augmenting Laertius, not in replacing him. In this respect, Stanley’s dealings with Laertius closely resembled Joseph Scaliger’s dealings with the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, the rich but flawed chronological source that Scaliger boldly reconstructed in his Thesaurus temporum of 1606.16 In seventeenth-century England, admiration for Scaliger’s Thesaurus temporum was quite conventional, even mandatory, for students of classical and Christian antiquity.

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Stanley’s project in fact was far more modest in its scope than Scaliger’s, and it could rarely benefit from the discovery of genuinely new sources of the kind to be found in the Thesaurus temporum. Nonetheless, Stanley’s homage to Scaliger reached an extraordinary and unmistakable degree in his attention to Laertius’s historical chronology, a field Stanley pursued to the limits of its explanatory power and, perhaps, beyond. First, Stanley was concerned clearly to establish the dates when Laertius’s philosophers had lived, as well as any other datable events of their lives reported by the tradition. This was a particularly crucial task for the lives of Thales and Pythagoras, for reasons we will see in a moment. At the end of the first volume of the History of Philosophy, and repeated at the end of the third volume, Stanley synthesized all of the chronological information in his book into a “Cronologie” of impressive appearance but relatively modest utility.17 His dedication of the History of Philosophy to his uncle John Marsham, the Cambridge graduate and gentleman scholar who specialized in the comparative chronology of the ancient world, gives a compelling hint about the origin of Stanley’s sustained interest in the subject.18 Here, Stanley not only arranged the philosophers’ births, deaths, dates of activity, and dates of eminence into a series correlating with Olympiad (Ol.) years and Athenian archons, and further (in the revised version in Stanley’s third volume) with separate columns for Olympic victors and the reigns of kings throughout the Mediterranean. In itself, this method of presentation was common in contemporary world chronologies and chronologies of ancient culture. But Stanley also added a further way of measuring philosophical time, entirely of his own invention: an Æra Philosophica (A.P.) that ran forward from year 1 (when “the Attribute of Wise was conferred on Thales and the rest” in Ol.49.3, or 582 BCE) to year 454 (the birth of Carneades in Ol.162.4, or 129 BCE).19 In principle, the Æra Philosophica offered Stanley’s readers a handy way of reckoning the time elapsed, say, between the death of Socrates and the birth of Aristotle (sixteen years, from 183 A.P. to 199 A.P.). But the series of Olympiads would already have allowed any competent reader to do this, albeit with a bit more labor. Stanley’s Æra Philosophica chiefly announced his desire to emulate Scaliger, whose invented “Julian Period,” running forward from year 1 in 4713 BCE, had become widely accepted because of its capacity to describe events in all parts of the ancient Mediterranean, both before and after the beginning of the Greek historical record.20 Stanley’s material, on the other hand, made no such obvious demand for a universal system of reckoning: the philosophers in his table came only from Greece, and they all belonged to the period covered by the Olympiads.21 Nonetheless, Stanley’s application of historical chronology to the individual articles in

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his History of Philosophy did have a clear and important purpose, which we should now examine. Laertius’s compilation was arranged not in a single chronological series from the earliest to the latest philosophers but according to two genealogies that unfolded more or less simultaneously. Stanley would have recognized this as a conventional Alexandrian mode of historical narration: the serial recounting of simultaneous periods of history was the method of Apollodorus’s Library of mythology, for example, and it had also been the form posited by Scaliger for the reconstructed first book of Eusebius’s Chronicle. But Stanley, ever on the lookout for chronological difficulties, perceived that the structure of Laertius’s book posed a major potential problem: could it be correct to say, as Laertius did, that the founding figures in his two philosophical lineages, Thales and Pythagoras, had lived at the same time? As matters stood, the teenaged Pythagoras was said to have been a pupil of Thales in his extreme old age—but if a discrepancy of even a few years could be discovered, the possibility of their meeting would be removed altogether, a result that would have imparted a far deeper and more impressive philosophical meaning to Laertius’s distinction between his two schools. The Ionic school of Thales, in Laertius’s account, had included virtually all the philosophers regarded in early modern Europe as the ancient mainstream: Plato, Aristotle, and their successors down to the New Academy of Carneades and the Stoics Cleanthes and Chrysippus. The Italic school of Pythagoras, on the other hand, served more as a containment cell for a series of nonconformists and dissidents than as any serious attempt at documenting a succession of intellectual influences.22 In this lineage, the lifestyle cult of Pythagoras was followed in time by Zeno and his fellow paradoxical Eleatics, then by the skeptics including Sextus Empiricus, and at last by the atomists Democritus and Epicurus. In the middle seventeenth century, when controversies over the atomic theory of matter and over Descartes’ account of method were often couched in terms of the ancient philosophies that were allegedly being revived, Laertius’s rigorous segregation of philosophers into schools will have been read by many as a provocative judgment about their respective philosophical legitimacy.23 Stanley alluded to the contemporary polemics without declaring a position of his own. Because “so great variety of opinions daily spring up,” Stanley explained, the History of Philosophy would reveal which of these opinions were “but raked out of the ruines of antiquity” and which were genuinely novel.24 Stanley’s actual procedure in his articles revolved strictly around the ancient sources, leaving his own judgments about the philosophers as a matter of inference for the reader. The cases of Thales and of Pythagoras can

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show how Stanley managed nonetheless to present distinctive accounts of the ancient philosophers, even within the boundaries of his self-imposed restraint. After much computation and comparison of sources, Stanley decided that the lifetimes of Thales and Pythagoras had indeed overlapped in the sixth century BCE, and, as a result, that the story about the young Pythagoras as Thales’s pupil could not be rejected. But more broadly, Stanley’s discussion of the biography of Thales shows his characteristic habit of staking out a distinctive historiographical view within the limits of his sources. Out of the many traditions about Thales’s life, some (notably Clement of Alexandria) described him as a Phoenician by birth; some described him as extremely ancient by Greek standards. Diogenes Laertius himself, as emended by Isaac Casaubon in 1583, reported that according to some, Thales had been a companion of Neleus, the founder of Miletus, which would place Thales’s date of activity dramatically early, in the thirteenth century BCE.25 Together or separately, such ideas would have tended to make Thales a protagonist in that well-known Christian narrative of Greek cultural history, the importation of all Greek knowledge from Phoenicia and, ultimately, from the ancient Hebrews.26 But Stanley hastened to remove Thales as far as he felt he could from this putative primal scene. Thales was in no way a Phoenician or an oriental; rather, he had been born and raised in Greek-speaking Miletus as a remote descendant of that city’s Phoenician colonists. Stanley accepted, in fact, that a cultural transfer from Phoenicia to Greece had taken place long before Thales’s time, but he refrained from endorsing the ancient claim that Thales too had learned from the crypto-Jewish Phoenicians: on the contrary, Thales’s “great Learning” was “not owed to any Master.”27 On the other hand, Stanley accepted Thales’s reported visit to Egypt, at a point when Thales was already “in years,” and pinpointed Thales’s studies there as geometry and astronomy. In fact, Thales had made new contributions to the geometry that he learned from his Egyptian hosts, and he had initially won the favor of the Egyptian king Amasis by devising a method of measuring the heights of pyramids by their shadows; he was invited to leave the court, however, after gossips repeated to the king some of Thales’s unrepeatable sayings against tyrants.28 Like a seventeenth-century English aristocrat on the Grand Tour, the ingenious Thales had journeyed abroad with a desire to learn, but also with a serene contentment in the values of his own culture—in this case, that of seventh-century Ionia. On the technical level, we can see in Stanley’s discussion of the date of Thales’s birth a striking instance where he managed to solve a problem already much debated in the seventeenth century by deploying newly

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available evidence. Even after Stanley had removed Thales from the mythical period into the historical period of Greece, a doubt of smaller scale but equal perplexity surrounded the exact year of his birth. Here, not for the first time, Laertius had copied two irreconcilable reports from lost works of ancient scholarship: Apollodorus’s Chronicles told him that Thales was born in the first year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad (640 BCE), while Demetrius of Phaleron said that Thales was “called wise” (that is, had been officially designated one of the Seven Wise Men) during the archonship of Damasias at Athens. The problem here was that Damasias’s archonship, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, had fallen only in the second year of the thirty-fifth Olympiad (639 BCE).29 So unless Thales had been “called wise” at the age of one, Apollodorus and Demetrius could not both be right. On this point, Stanley was able to review several attempted solutions by  several sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors, all of whom he would manage to trump with a recent production of English scholarship.30 These earlier scholars had decided, first, that Demetrius of Phaleron’s report about the archonship of Damasias must really have referred to Thales’s birth, not the date when he was called wise; this produced a discrepancy between Laertius’s reports of only a year. Carlo Sigonio and G. J. Vossius had proceeded to revise the first date supplied by Laertius, so as to place Thales’s birth in Ol.35.2; conversely, J. J. Scaliger, Johann Meursius, and Denis Petau had redated Damasias’s archonship to Ol.35.1, with the result that both reports in Laertius correctly placed Thales’s birth in that year, and that Dionysius Halicarnassus had been mistaken by a year about the archonship. Stanley, on the other hand, did what Sigonio and Scaliger had not been able to do, and what Vossius and Petau had neglected: he consulted the Greek historical inscription known as the Parian Chronicle, which had been printed by John Selden in 1628 and which had since gained a justifiable fame among English scholars, particularly for its uniquely full list of Athenian archons.31 The Parian Chronicle showed, in the first place, that Damasias had been archon in Ol.35.2, confirming the accuracy of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s report. But secondly, and far more importantly for Stanley’s task, it showed that a man named Damasias had also been archon in Ol.48.4: this, Stanley saw, was clearly the way to explain Demetrius of Phaleron’s statement that in Damasias’s archonship, Thales had been called wise. Laertius’s sources were in agreement, and in the story they told, Thales had been born in Ol.35.2 (639 BCE) and “called wise” at age 56 in Ol.48.4 (585 BCE). Among other effects, this clarification helped significantly to make the case that Pythagoras could have been Thales’s pupil. If Demetrius of Phaleron’s testimony was taken seriously in the absence of the information from the Parian Chronicle, and assuming

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that Thales had been even 30 years old at the time he was “called wise,” then Thales must have been 121 years old in the year when Pythagoras was 18—not 91, which was the age Stanley thought correct. Stanley’s solution to the problem of Thales’s birth also counted as a particular triumph for his preferred scholarly method, insofar as it turned not on rejecting ancient sources but rather on showing, through unexpected means, that in fact they were correct. In the case of Pythagoras, especially strange results followed from Stanley’s self-imposed prohibition on rejecting a source merely because it seemed implausible. Here, Laertius had two verbose successors who had said a great deal more than he did about Pythagoras’s life: the thirdcentury Neoplatonists Porphyry and Iamblichus, whose respective biographies of Pythagoras presented him as a spiritual exemplar, mystical prophet, and even political wonder-worker, insofar as Pythagoras and his associates were supposed to have liberated all of Sicily from its tyrants and proceeded to take over its cities’ governments, to universal gratitude.32 Accordingly, after he had carefully examined Pythagoras’s early life up to the time of his voyage to Sicily (Stanley worked out an exact chronology by year for Pythagoras’s earlier travels in Egypt, Babylon, and the Greek-speaking Mediterranean), Stanley passed the narrative baton to the philosopher’s late pagan apologists, translating Iamblichus and Porphyry without comment for pages at a stretch, with their names marked in the margin. In itself, this was entirely routine procedure for Stanley: he regularly amplified Laertius’s accounts by inserting lengthy ancient Anhänge, for example a translation of Alcinous’s (really Albinus’s) handbook of Platonic philosophy at the end of the article on Plato, and the entirety of Aristophanes’ Clouds as an adjunct to the life of Socrates.33 Yet as the later pages of Pythagoras’s putative biography unfolded, with Stanley himself emitting an ominous silence, their tone and incidents progressed from the merely strange to the patently implausible, finishing well into the territory of farce. It was one thing, perhaps, for Pythagoras to win the undying allegiance of the Crotonates by delivering orations on personal and public morality; it was another thing for him to raise his cloak in the middle of the Olympic games and flash his golden thigh at Abaris the Hyperborean, the better to convince Abaris that Pythagoras was a priest of Hyperborean Apollo and required his worship. That Stanley did not bother to check the dates of Abaris and the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris (among others) against the lifespan of Pythagoras—Pythagoras, with his fellow royal houseguest Abaris, was supposed to have overthrown Phalaris as tyrant of Acragas—suggests strongly that he did not regard the late Platonists’ stories as belonging to history at all, properly speaking. Rather, Stanley’s aim in the History of

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Philosophy was to present and reconstruct the contents of the ancient tradition, with as much verification and rectification as he could supply. But where his sources passed out of the realm that could be plausibly addressed by his scholarly tools of comparison and fact-checking, Stanley followed a consistent policy of saying nothing—the equivalent, apparently, of the usual refrain of textual critics of the period, “Let the learned reader be the judge.” Stanley belonged to Restoration Cambridge by affinity rather than by living and working in the university. Having studied at Pembroke College from 1639 to 1643, he spent the civil wars of the 1640s in London, ostensibly practicing as a barrister but more probably living on his own means and associating with a group of poets who for the most part shared Stanley’s royalist sympathies.34 His early publications were translated or original poems of extraordinary skill—an uncle of Stanley’s, he said, had been the translator of Ovid, George Sandys.35 But in the early 1650s, living now in his country house with his companion Edward Sherburne as well as a wife, Stanley turned in earnest toward scholarship of the exacting and Greek variety. Only a gentleman, indeed, would have ventured to publish the History of Philosophy in English as opposed to Latin; Stanley’s Greek and Latin edition of Aeschylus’s tragedies (1663) marked the culmination of a discernibly slow progress toward publications of an unambiguously erudite appearance. In addition to Stanley’s chronologer uncle, John Marsham, the dynamic churchman John Pearson may have encouraged Stanley in the 1650s to pursue large scholarly projects. We know that Pearson would eventually contribute very substantial annotations to Stanley’s Aeschylus.36 And far earlier, in 1651, Stanley had published an English verse translation of the Golden Verses attributed to Pythagoras; Hierocles’ ancient commentary on this poem would be edited by Pearson within a  few years.37 Whatever the case, by the time of Bentley’s youth, Stanley belonged to the small pantheon of English scholars who were fervently admired by Cambridge-educated churchmen. The great book collector John Moore bought several of Stanley’s working manuscripts; Stanley was even credited, wrongly, as the author of a set of manuscript Cambridge lectures on Theophrastus’s Characters that had actually been delivered by James Duport.38 Of Bentley’s predecessors in the seventeenth century, Stanley was by far the most literary in his scholarly inclinations, and in this respect Stanley’s work was the most important proximate model for Bentley’s Greek projects of the 1690s. It was Stanley’s unpublished scholarly manuscripts, specifically his collection of the fragments of Callimachus, that were to intersect most directly with Bentley’s work in the 1690s.39 But his highly thoughtful edition

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of Aeschylus deserves to be compared with Bentley’s Horace of 1711, not least because it reveals that Bentley’s editorial methods were far less revolutionary in the English setting than he, and some of his contemporaries, affected to believe. The Aeschylus project, at least as deeply as the History of Philosophy, showed Stanley’s admiration for the continental scholars of several decades before: his predecessors in editing Aeschylus were few but eminent, notably Francesco Robortello (1552), Pier Vettori and Henri Estienne (1557), and Willem Canter (1580).40 Aeschylus himself remained something of a recondite literary taste—he was the earliest of the three classical tragedians, the least interested in depicting naturalistic dialogue and interactions, and the one whose plots were hardest to accommodate to the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. For Stanley, however, Aeschylus’s stentorian dramatic situations and complicated language seem to have been aesthetic attractions. His Latin translation enthusiastically reproduced the difficult syntax and the fearsome compound words of the Greek, emphasizing the economy and high artifice of Aeschylus’s diction.41 Stanley’s thick commentary, meanwhile, ranged widely in territory that Bentley would later make his own. The history of tragedy, along with Aeschylus’s biography, received prolonged attention, especially on the front of historical chronology (once again, Stanley managed to introduce evidence from the Parian Chronicle where earlier scholars had not done so).42 Poetic meter, mythical history, and comparisons with ancient scholars’ reports of lost poetry also occupied Stanley consistently. On the other hand, the question of the sources of the Prometheus Bound obliged Stanley to resurrect the brand of commentatorial diplomacy that he had perfected in his History of Philosophy. He reported that “some of the Church Fathers” had viewed in Prometheus a type of Christ, bound to a crucifix-like rock after he had imparted wisdom to humanity. And Stanley noted that Clement of Alexandria had made an “ingenious joke” (ingeniose lusit) in comparing Prometheus’s theft of fire with the Greeks’ theft of philosophy from the ancient Hebrews.43 Stanley himself preferred to seek the origins of Aeschylus’s theology within the Greek world and repeatedly proposed parallels with the philosophy of the Pythagoreans, especially in his notes to the Prometheus, the Agamemnon, and the Choephorae.44 Meanwhile, Stanley contributed to the state of knowledge about Aeschylus’s textual history by printing readings from two English manuscripts, both now in the Bodleian Library, and by printing a new set of Greek scholia on two of the tragedies (the “B scholia,” by Thomas Magister) to stand alongside the scholia published earlier by Francesco Robortello and Pier Vettori.45 As a textual critic, Stanley belonged to the normal science of seventeenthcentury Europe in that he felt free to suggest emendations either from

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manuscripts or from conjectures as the occasion arose. No methodological polemic on this point was expected, and none was forthcoming. Stanley did not print any of his chosen readings in his text of the plays; on the contrary, as he announced to his reader with an honesty that was rare in the period, he had precisely reprinted Canter’s text of 1580.46 Nonetheless, in his notes Stanley did not offer his emendations with any show of modesty or uncertainty; he clearly believed that the readings he preferred were actually correct. That is not to say, however, that all of the comments and textual interventions that Stanley presented were original to him. Indeed, recent discussions of Stanley’s edition have focused almost exclusively on its radically collaborative aspect, and as a result, Stanley’s Aeschylus may now be the best documented case of the seventeenth-century English scholars’ relative lack of concern, under normal conditions, for citing their predecessors (and, conversely, for claiming priority for themselves). The copious and incisive textual notes on Aeschylus that John Pearson gave to Stanley form the most gripping instance of this editorship by committee, so to speak.47 But Stanley had other silent partners, none of whom was alive to give his consent. He presented without attribution many emendations that had originally been made, but never printed, by Isaac Casaubon, Joseph Scaliger, and other admired Grecists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These Stanley drew from printed copies of Aeschylus in which the remarks of great scholars had been written in by hand; later, Bentley too would collect and borrow printed books with the transcribed or autograph annotations of his predecessors. As J. A. Gruys has pointed out, it would have been difficult based on these adversaria books for a seventeenth-century scholar to attribute an emendation with confidence to a single predecessor, had the attempt been made; frequently, earlier scholars had recorded the conjectures of others without attribution just as Stanley and Pearson did.48 But we can go beyond the observation that Stanley’s practice was customary and, to some extent, justified by the ambiguity of his possible sources. Whereas Bentley, five decades later in his Horace edition, was highly concerned to demonstrate that he himself was the author of a given conjecture—to the extent of carefully reviewing the conjectures of others and insisting, in cases of duplication, that he had made his conjecture before learning that he had been anticipated—Stanley seems to have been less preoccupied with intellectual ownership in general, on others’ behalf but also on his own. In his notes, Stanley regularly introduced conjectures with the conventional word lego, “I read”—a phrase that we should probably understand, in seventeenth-century usage, to mean “I prefer” or “I choose” rather than “I now propose for the first time.” Thomas Gale, as we will later see, took

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much the same approach in his edition of Apollodorus (1675), writing lego to indicate endorsement of others’ conjectures that were already available in print. Certainly, this way of proceeding was not especially coherent, any more than it was transparent; Stanley and Gale clearly possessed a concept of scholarly originality or authorship, which they brought into play mainly when pointing to the mistakes of others. But the effect of the lego convention, in practice, was to make a scholar’s set of textual notes into a kind of edited compilation or construction—to make the notes, in other words, into a composite entity something like the text of the ancient book that was being edited. This particular sense of scholarly tradition was one of the habits that Bentley, as an editor, would attempt valiantly to escape. Stanley the literary reader of Aeschylus has attracted far less attention than Stanley the textual emender. This is unfortunate. In fact, Stanley’s approach to the tragedies combined linguistic, historical, and poetic concerns in a way that was rare in seventeenth-century scholarship in general, not to speak of England, where Stanley’s Aeschylus was the first large-scale edition of a classical poet ever published. Here, a single example from the Prometheus must suffice to show what Stanley could accomplish when conditions were favorable. Drawing on the circumstances of the dramatic scene in progress, as well as a bold historical willingness to imagine the physical and mental world of Aeschylus and his audience, Stanley would animate a somnolent metaphor into resonant and revealing life. In lines 787–788 of the Prometheus Bound, Prometheus is about to resume prophesying the wanderings that Io, driven by the wrath of Hera, has yet to undertake. With the following words, Prometheus admonishes Io to remember the geographical catalogue that he will unfold: soi; prw'ton ’Ioi` poluvdonon plavnhn fravsw, h{n ejgravfon su; mnhvmosin devltoi~ frenw'n. First, Io, I will show you your perturbed wandering: write it in the unforgetting tablets of your mind.49

Stanley had no emendation to propose, at least to the passage at hand. His note, instead, began by asking what would happen if one took seriously Prometheus’s metaphor of the “unforgetting tablets.” 788: the unforgetting tablets of your mind] See also Aeschylus’ Suppliants, line 187 [now 179]: “preserve my words tablet-wise [deltoumenas].” Emend to deltoumena. In antiquity, tablets for writing were triangular, and books were bound in the same way, so that they resembled the letter D. For that reason they were

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called deltoi. Eustathius, commenting on Iliad 3[.336]: “from delta-shaped books, that is, from writings bound together in the form of a delta.”50 Prometheus might have been referring to travel handbooks and maps. The present tragedy, as well as the lost Prometheus Released, shows that Aeschylus was highly skilled in geography; in this he resembles Homer, whom Strabo makes the first inventor of geography. That notebooks of this kind were in use among the Greeks is shown by Aristotle, Rhetoric I.4: “For legislation, the tours of the world are useful; from them you can gather the laws of the different peoples. But for political counsels, you should consult the histories of those who have written about events.” V. 788. mnhvmosin devltoi~ frenw'n] Et Sup. 187. fulavxai ta[m’ e[ph deltoumevna~. lege deltouvmena. Tabellae ad scribendum aptae antiquitùs triangulares, & libri eodem modo compacti, ad imaginem literae D. inde devltoi dicebantur. Eustath. Iliad. 3. ajpo; tw'n deltwtw'n biblivwn, h[goun ejk tw'n kata; devlta ptussomevnwn grafw'n. Potuit alludere Prometheus ad notitias itinerarias tabulasque Geographicas. Aeschylum ejus rei peritissimum loquitur haec Fabula, & quae periit, Promhqeu;~ luovmeno~, sic Homero similem, quem Strabo primum Authorem facit. Hujusmodi notitiarum libros Graecis in usu fuisse docet Aristot. Rhetor. lib. I. cap. 4. pro;~ me;n thvn nomoqesivan aiJ th'~ gh'~ perivodoi crhvs imoi: · ejnteu`qen ga;r labei`n ejsti tou;~ tw'n e;quw'u novmou~. prov~ de; ta;~ politika;~ sumbouliva~ aiJ tw'n peri; ta;~ pravxei~ grafovntwn iJstorivai.51

The book history with which Stanley opened this comment was less than sound. Eustathius’s Iliad commentary, from the twelfth century, was a slender source indeed for the suggestion that deltoi for writing had been triangular like the letter delta.52 Stanley’s fundamental contention, however, remains arresting: that the “tablets of your mind” in which Io is instructed to write the story of her future journey would have reminded an ancient audience of the maps and travel books they used themselves. The metaphor took on a further precision in that a conventional ancient method of presenting geographical information was in the form of a tour of the Mediterranean, whether in a long narrative (Strabo) or in a telegraphically concise list (Dionysius Periegetes).53 The unfortunate Io was destined, for the moment, to continue her own frenetic tour, and Prometheus’s ensuing speech would effectively deliver her travel diary in advance: here the valence of the metaphor also embraced the ordinary use of wax tablets, for recording personal notes or for conducting correspondence.54 Stanley next pointed out the possibility of a self-referential joke about geographical erudition itself—Prometheus’s, Aeschylus’s, and perhaps Stanley’s own. Earlier in the play, Prometheus had boasted to the chorus about the many sciences he had taught to humanity, which went well beyond his infamous theft of fire: medicine, divination, divine sacrifice, and mining for metals and gems (476–506). Stanley had duly annotated that passage with ancient notices

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of the first (human) inventors of these and other practices; both the Hellenistic inquiry into “first inventors” and the specific fascination with Prometheus as a proto-scholar were entirely standard in the seventeenth century.55 In the speech to Io, Prometheus seemed to propose himself as the inventor of the study of geography as well, and his willfully anachronistic reference to the “tablets” used by Aeschylus’s audience only underlined what they owed to him. Of course, as that audience also knew, Aeschylus himself could well have crafted Prometheus’s geographical speeches out of such reference books, so that Prometheus’s words to Io also constituted a kind of ventriloquized authorial footnote. Finally, Stanley acknowledged the tradition that ascribed the invention of geography to another poet, Homer, whose merits and shortcomings had been debated by ancient chorographers in copious detail.56 In short, Stanley here delivered a complex and authentically literary interpretation of the poetic passage at hand, if also one that depended intimately on the seventeenth-century world of learning.57 Yet Stanley’s remarks on Prometheus’s “tablet” were also, by and large, the sort of comment Bentley excluded from his own great editions of poetry. If Bentley had no emendation to argue for, he almost invariably remained silent. Stanley’s example shows that this policy was in no way a necessity imposed by the mental conditions of English scholarship, but Bentley’s personal choice.

Pearson: Hierocles (1654–1655) and Ignatius (1672) By comparison with Stanley, John Pearson is substantially more difficult to  understand from the viewpoint of modern-day classical scholarship. Today, indeed, we would think of the majority of Pearson’s work as belonging to the study of late antiquity, above all his interest in early Christianity, as well as its pagan opponents. Yet the most challenging aspect of Pearson’s career for us to assimilate is not its content, but rather its social and political location. Pearson was not only an Anglican clergyman. In that capacity, he was also discernibly a leader of political and institutional machinations during the Commonwealth and after the Restoration of 1660, and several of Pearson’s historical publications had an explicit and direct bearing on the theological and political controversies of his own day. As a result, he became probably the most respected scholar in the English church following the death of the biblical scholar Brian Walton in 1661. Particularly in Restoration Cambridge, Pearson set the tone for the erudite but politically engaged scholarship that various church groupings

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in the coming decades would encourage. Chosen the Lady Margaret professor of divinity in 1661, Pearson was also, from 1662 to 1672, Bentley’s predecessor as master of Trinity College—a lucrative as well as powerful post whose incumbents usually advanced directly to a bishopric (Pearson was bishop of Chester from 1672 until his death in 1686). His professional success notwithstanding, Pearson’s personality as it emerges from his writings is elusive. Almost exclusively, his publishing was devoted either to producing authoritative texts (the Hierocles edition of 1654–1655, the collected biblical commentaries of the Critici sacri of 1660) or to defending them against detractors (the Exposition of the Creed, 1659; the Vindication of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, 1672).58 Extended argumentation, it seems, did not come naturally to him. In his publications, Pearson too often chose to assert rather than to teach or explain, while the projects he left behind him in manuscript—on early Christian chronology and on the Greek lexicon of Hesychius—show a mixed record: coherent and focused in his chronology, on Hesychius Pearson evidently never hit on the reigning ideas that could have turned his masses of  notes into a meaningful narrative or a decisive editorial procedure.59 His cool and opaque prose style, both in English and Latin, only adds to the impression that Pearson viewed himself chiefly as a public and even a corporate figure. Certainly, some idea about what constituted suitable studies for a churchman must have been in play in Pearson’s decision to give to Thomas Stanley his own notes on Aeschylus, and perhaps also to lend him the printed Aeschylus with marginal notes by Isaac Casaubon that Pearson himself owned. When Stanley included Pearson’s contributions in his own edition without acknowledgment, he is far more likely to have been honoring Pearson’s wishes than committing a bold theft.60 Pearson forms a part of Bentley’s story because in the milieux where Bentley spent his late teens and his twenties, Pearson’s name commanded an automatic and intense respect. His thick publications studded with Greek quotations were, one suspects, precisely what every prominent churchman in midcareer thought it would be ideal to emulate himself, even if few actually set aside enough time to make the attempt. More clearly, the young Bentley was pushed, by his mentor Edward Stillingfleet and perhaps by others, to take up Pearson-like projects that, in retrospect, had a vanishingly small chance of success. Bentley’s Hebrew notebooks of the 1680s, large but lacking in any direction or result, bear a disheartening resemblance to Pearson’s inconclusive annotations on Hesychius.61 Again, for an alarming moment sometime around 1690, Bentley was apparently instructed to take up a project that Pearson had meditated but then, with good reason, abandoned: a triple edition of Greek dictionaries, encom-

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passing the Suda, Hesychius, and the Etymologicon magnum, to be presented progressively so that the reader could turn to a single page-opening to consult the same lemma in all three.62 This idea surely owed more to the famously complex typography of the English Polyglot Bible (1653–1657) than to any conviction that a single editor could make substantial improvements to the texts of the three lexica in question.63 In other words, the project presupposed the editor as a safe pair of hands—a role that, even by the early 1690s, Bentley was probably unwilling to play. How Bentley managed to evade tasks of this kind while continuing to rise in the church and how Bentley serially reimagined the relationship between his scholarship and his ecclesiastical job are among the crucial stories of his early career. They can be understood only if we begin from the industry, the sense of responsibility, and the paradoxical self-restraint of Pearson. Under the Commonwealth in the 1650s, Pearson lived and published in London, where he belonged, with Brian Walton and many others, to a kind of salon des refusés of scholarly churchmen out of official favor.64 In the field of scholarship, they chose large collaborative scholarly projects centering on authoritative texts, such as Walton’s Polyglot Bible, and the massive compilation of biblical commentaries assembled by Pearson in the Critici sacri (1660). The same orientations, on a far more modest scale, animated Pearson’s 1654–1655 edition of the Greek philosopher Hierocles (fifth century CE). Consisting almost exclusively of the reprinted editions and comments of others, Pearson’s Hierocles nonetheless managed to tell a remarkably revisionist story about an ancient figure who retained the power to fascinate and repel: Pythagoras. At once profoundly multivocal and tending to enforce an acceptable standard view, the Hierocles edition also shows us the breadth of the scholarly interests that Anglicanism, broadly construed, could provoke. The central text in Pearson’s edition was Hierocles’ mammoth commentary on the Golden Verses that Pearson attributed to Pythagoras—a short and surprisingly pedestrian hexameter poem exhorting its readers to remember that “a mean in all is best” and to “know that all men are to die ordain’d,” among other pieces of sententious advice for living and directing the mind.65 The Golden Verses, regarded by other contemporaries as the productions of Pythagoras’s school rather than his own composition, were in any case poorly suited to the mystical view of Pythagoras that had captivated fifteenth-century writers like Johannes Reuchlin and Marsilio Ficino, whose preferred Pythagorean text was the enigmatic and tantalizing Sentences or Symbola. The Golden Verses were equally impossible to connect with Pythagoras’s geometry and astronomy, which continued in Pearson’s time to be regarded as the founding installments in those disciplines:

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throughout the seventeenth century, the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Kepler was routinely called “the Pythagorean hypothesis.”66 Read in this early modern context, Hierocles’ commentary seized on the inherent banality of the Golden Verses and projected it outward on a spectacular scale. The commentary emphasized, among other unexceptionable doctrines, the immortality of the soul, the importance of right reason and the dangers of the passions, a divine providence, and a mixed ethical principle that included the virtues of justice, prudence, and constancy. To Joannes Curterius, whose 1583 preface to Hierocles was the first thing encountered by the reader of Pearson’s edition, it seemed clear that Hierocles belonged to the Stoic sect, and indeed that this constituted Hierocles’ primary virtue as a commentator. Hierocles’ exposition not only held a high practical utility for human life, Curterius explained; it also offered full and satisfying explanations of Stoic (and Pythagorean) doctrines that were recounted only indistinctly in other ancient sources. Moreover, it stood as the single pagan philosophical work that came closest to Christianity with respect to ethics and to the doctrine of providence. As a result—or rather, as a premise—Hierocles’ commentary was “the only one in which we find the true explanation of the verses of the Pythagoreans.”67 Viewed from Curterius’s standpoint, the Hierocles edition belongs to a series of English engagements with Stoic philosophy in the middle seventeenth century, including in particular the edition with commentary of Marcus Aurelius produced by Thomas Gataker, and the annotated translation of Aurelius by Pearson’s associate Meric Casaubon.68 Pearson himself said little about Hierocles’ doctrines in his editorial “Prolegomena” (which appeared only in Pearson’s second volume of 1655), pointing out only some parallels with Plato.69 Meric Casaubon, in textual notes that Pearson had invited him to contribute, tactfully hinted that Hierocles might have been either a Platonist or a Stoic, and praised the Golden Verses commentary for its tendency to promote “right living, that is, a constant and undisturbed tranquility of the mind.”70 But if Pearson cared little for philosophical labels, his editorial choices continued to emphasize the ordinary and even the harmless elements of the ancient tradition. In Pearson’s first volume, Hierocles’ commentary was followed by a short, funny, and mildly baffling book that Pearson recognized was probably not by the Hierocles of the Golden Verses commentary but decided to reprint nonetheless: Hierocles’ Jokes (Facetiae), which subjected philosophy to a lifestyle turn in a very different way.71 Totally devoid of actual philosophical doctrine, Hierocles’ Jokes recount the mishaps and malapropisms of “scholars” (scolastikoiv) who might be Stoics, Pythagoreans, or on the other hand seventeenth-century English dons (“Scholar 1: I saw you in a dream and

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spoke to you. Scholar 2: Forgive me for not listening.”). Their creaking humor put a decidedly human face on the enterprise of philosophy in general, tending to divorce it from the mystical realm and render it so approachable as to border on the trivial. Finally, Pearson’s second volume included on the one hand the long epitome of Hierocles’ On Providence that was partly preserved in Photius’s Library, but on the other hand a further installment in the assault on the mystical Pythagoras. Now Pearson tamed the cryptic and fascinating Sentences of Pythagoras by printing them with the sixteenth-century commentary of Lilio Giraldi—a masterwork of calm and patient deflation with respect to Giraldi’s predecessors Reuchlin, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Clement of Alexandria. For Pico, the symbola “Don’t sit on a wheat-measure” had meant that one should not sit idle—in other words, that one must constantly exercise and direct the rational mind in order to keep it working properly, because too much leisure and pleasure could damage or even eradicate the rational mind. Lilio Giraldi was polite but unconvinced, proposing instead that, “Don’t sit on a wheat-measure” meant that one should not think constantly about food.72 Pearson’s edition, then, could have been read in at least two ways—as a handy reprinting of the standard editions of Hierocles but also as a user’s manual for the writings of Pythagoras. Taken together, Pearson’s editorial decisions gave the Hierocles edition the air of a textbook, an impression supported not only by its reprinting in 1673 (and by Peter Needham’s subsequent Cambridge edition of 1709) but also by a near-contemporary publication that resembled Pearson’s closely: John Fell’s 1667 Oxford edition of the short and prosaic Introduction to Plato’s Philosophy by the Greek philosopher then known as Alcinous (today, we attribute it to Albinus). Fell, a committed and somewhat humorless Aristotelian, explained in his preface that Plato’s dialogues were so confusing, and so filled with formidable bombast like the doctrine of ideas, that they demanded to be read with a summary like that of Alcinous, who had shaped Plato’s opinions into “a kind of scientific Method, and, to some extent, the form of an art.”73 Nonetheless, Pearson’s presentation of Hierocles and Pythagoras stopped short of any clear statement about the nature and value of their philosophy; his “Prolegomena” were devoted to the complicated prosopography of the many ancient writers named Hierocles and to the textual value of the epitome of the De providentia preserved in Photius. In the meantime, important challenges embedded in the material that Pearson reprinted were left unanswered. Theodorus Marcilius, in the 1585 commentary Pearson reprinted, had mounted an argument against the authenticity of the Golden Verses: pointing to a passage that used “we” rather than the

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expected “I,” Marcilius concluded that the poem had been composed not by Pythagoras himself, who could have been expected to speak in the first person, but rather by his disciples after the philosopher’s death. Curterius, in 1583, had already assumed without preliminaries that the Golden Verses were “of the Pythagoreans,” not “of Pythagoras.” In 1651, Thomas Stanley had already pointed out that Marcilius’s objection, in itself, was far from constituting a clear case for deattribution.74 But Pearson’s preface to Hierocles nowhere acknowledged the received wisdom of Marcilius and Curterius, much less attempted to neutralize it; Pearson seems to have proceeded in the hope that the inflammatory pages in their respective comments would simply pass unnoticed.75 The Hierocles edition, then, shows us a complex picture of Pearson’s modus operandi: acting as the impresario and organizer for a publication with a decisively partisan approach to ancient philosophy, he was also remarkably chary of explaining to his readers why the edition mattered. His chief persuasive tactic was to present his material as unexceptionable rather than polemical, and he apparently viewed textual intervention as the least of the editor’s concerns. In Pearson’s most famous scholarly publication—his Vindication of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, published while Pearson was master of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1672—we see him lured for once onto the ground of extended argumentation, with mixed results. The letters attributed to Ignatius, some of which seemed to furnish clear evidence that bishops had been recognized and authoritative already in the Christian church of the second century, had figured prominently for more than a century in European debates over the legitimacy of bishops; controversies over their authenticity had predictably erupted, along essentially sectarian lines.76 But why Pearson, after a long scholarly silence, should have reentered the world of publication in 1672 with a massive tract on Ignatius becomes clear only when we consider his position in the church, along with the habits of polemic promoted by the contemporary Anglican hierarchy. Beginning in 1669, Gilbert Sheldon as archbishop of Canterbury had mobilized a series of pamphlets designed to lobby the Parliament for a stricter law penalizing religious nonconformists; this became a controversy in earnest through a series of replies and counterreplies to the contribution by one of Sheldon’s chaplains, Samuel Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669).77 In this political context, Pearson’s Vindication, which was dedicated to Sheldon, figured as a thundering reinforcement to the orthodox position from the field of church history—a type of argument alien to the Hobbesian climate of the current controversy, yet still deeply valued by Sheldon’s generation. It should not surprise us that Sheldon named Pearson to a bishopric of his own in the same year.

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If Pearson was willing to join Sheldon’s publication program both through political sympathy and out of scholarly conviction, at the same time it was not clear what genuinely new contribution he might make. The seventeenth century had already witnessed two decisive discoveries about the textual history of Ignatius’s letters. While twelve letters had long been known in a Latin version, it was also well known that Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, in the fourth century, had spoken of only seven letters of Ignatius.78 For Ignatius’s defenders, this raised the possibility that even if some of the letters had been forged, other letters (namely, those known to Eusebius) might still be authentic and that questionable passages in these remaining letters might have resulted from later interpolations.79 In nearly simultaneous publications, James Ussher in 1644 and Isaac Vossius in 1646 presented compelling manuscript evidence to that effect. Ussher had uncovered two manuscripts in England that contained a divergent and more concise Latin translation of six of the letters; in Florence, Vossius had studied a Greek manuscript whose version of seven of the letters was similarly divergent from the usual text.80 It was plausible to conclude (as Ussher and Vossius did) that a later interpolator had added spurious letters to the original corpus while inserting antiheretical passages in the genuine letters.81 Ussher believed that this had happened in the sixth century and moreover that the spurious Ignatius letters bore a marked resemblance, in their theological concerns, to the spurious statement of creed known as the Apostolic Constitutions; in a copiously argued essay, Ussher provided instances of the historical and doctrinal “clumsiness” that he attributed to the forger of both texts. In England, these developments were taken to be definitive, and indeed the legitimacy of the seven-letter corpus is the consensus among patristic scholars today, with very occasional voices of dissent.82 The task of Pearson’s Vindication was very different, to Pearson’s misfortune. In the 1640s, Ussher’s and Vossius’s publications had been met with immediate attacks by the French Protestants Claude Saumaise and David Blondel, who acknowledged the new demonstration that the corpus of Ignatius letters fell into two parts but contended that the earlier part was itself a forgery, which they respectively dated to the early or middle second century and the third century.83 In turn, defenses were rapidly produced by Ussher himself and by Henry Hammond.84 But in 1666, twenty years after this wave of controversy, the Geneva professor Jean Daillé had published a new and voluminous rechauffée of the earlier attacks by Blondel and Saumaise.85 Faced with these recycled arguments, Pearson responded in like manner. To swell his predecessors’ arguments into a book comparable in length to Daillé’s, Pearson amplified his chapters, in the usual style of seventeenth-century polemic, with digressions, ad hominem

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attacks, and mountains of alleged parallel cases. Yet the near impossibility of lighting on any substantially new argument was not the worst of Pearson’s problems. As he himself had apparently recognized in his Hierocles edition, it was by no means clear how a scholar might demonstratively prove that a text was the real production of its attributed author: even the more forthcoming Stanley, writing about Pythagoras’s Golden Verses, had confined himself to rejecting Theodorus Marcilius’s single objection rather than mounting a broad defense. James Ussher, in his pyrotechnic essay of 1644 on the inauthenticity of the late part of the Ignatius corpus, had enjoyed both a freedom and a scope for convincing demonstration that, by definition, could never belong to a defender of the earlier letters. Pearson’s solution to this unsatisfactory situation was, in the circumstances, reasonable if not inevitable. Dividing his exposition into two parts, he first accumulated citations and quotations of Ignatius’s letters by subsequent ecclesiastical writers such as Eusebius, at the same time rejecting Jean Daillé’s argument from silence to the effect that the failure of Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus (for example) to cite Ignatius’s letters indicated that the letters had not yet been in existence by the early third century. This less satisfactory and less conclusive part of Pearson’s book was also the only part in which Pearson presented material not already canvassed by other defenders of Ignatius. Secondly, Pearson set out to demolish the arguments Daillé mounted from internal evidence, taking up in sequence the passages in the short corpus that Daillé had argued could not have been written by Ignatius around the year 100. On both fronts, Pearson followed the established custom of seventeenth-century polemic by writing, essentially, everything that it was possible for a well-informed person to write. He included the good evidence along with the superfluous and the inconclusive, and he propounded questionable or patently circular claims alongside thoughtful ones. No one can know whether Pearson felt real certainty about the contents of every page of the Vindication. We certainly can observe that the project ran counter to Pearson’s more familiar modes of selective, relevant explication (as in his Exposition of the Creed of 1659) and of presenting carefully considered claims with scant or no visible support (as in the Hierocles edition and his posthumously published notes on chronology). The best that can be said for Pearson’s method is that he made it possible for his reader readily to see what evidence he had actually found for each successive point. He generally placed his lists of ancient testimonia near the beginning of each chapter, only then turning to protestations about what the testimonia implied. In other words, the structure of Pearson’s book made possible either an exoteric reading, in which the whole of

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what he wrote was potentially to be taken seriously, or a more selective kind of reading that would focus exclusively on the evidence as he had presented it. Certainly, readers familiar with seventeenth-century scholarly procedure would have perceived that by its nature, Pearson’s book was unable consistently to exploit the method of tracing and evaluating sources that, in nonpolemical works of scholarship, was regarded as standard: on both of Pearson’s argumentative fronts, corroboration contemporary with Ignatius’s life was essentially absent, with the result that it often had to be sought precisely in the realm of witnesses for whom Ignatius’s letters themselves could easily have been a source. For example, when Pearson claimed that Ignatius’s clear distinction between bishops and presbyters corresponded to real practice in the church of the late first century, he could cite only one source contemporary with Ignatius—the Ignatius letters themselves.86 Thus unable to apply to Ignatius and his successors the seventeenth century’s most powerful scholarly method—the critical investigation of sources—Pearson composed his book in the only way that remained, namely, by ignoring the question of sources deliberately and for long stretches. Nonetheless, Pearson managed to include in the Vindication some passages of careful and constructive scholarship, which his contemporaries recognized and appreciated for their accuracy and clarity (if not their originality). We can observe this, for example, in Pearson’s response to what remains perhaps the thorniest passage in the short corpus of Ignatius letters, a potentially anachronistic reference to heresy that in Pearson’s time constituted a genuinely new challenge, having been printed for the first time only in 1644 and 1646 in Ussher and Vossius’s editions.87 This new passage in Ignatius’s letter to the Magnesians was interpreted by Pearson, following Denys Petau, as drawing a simple and chiefly rhetorical distinction between Christ as the eternal word and the ephemeral words of human life: “There is one God, who made himself manifest through Jesus Christ his son, who is his eternal word which does not arise out of silence. (ei|~ H eo;~ ejstin oJ fanerwvsa~ ejauto;n dia; ’Ihsou` Cristou` tou` uiJou` auJ tou`, o{~ ejstin auJtou` lovgo~ aji?dio~, oujk ajpo; sigh'~ proelqwvn.)”88 Claude Saumaise, on the other, saw in the last phrase a direct attack on the metaphysical cosmogony of the heretic Valentinus (middle second century), in which the coupling of the principles of Silence (Σighv) and Depth (Βuqov~) had given rise to the many emanations that formed Valentinus’s perplexing ontological system, among them Word (Λovgo~).89 On Saumaise’s account, then, the passage in Ignatius should be translated something like this: “There is one God, who made himself manifest through Jesus Christ his son, who is his eternal word and did not proceed from Silence.”

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Pearson proceeded to argue on a series of fronts which, as usual in this style of polemic, were designed to serve as safety nets or insurance for one another, rather than to adhere to a consistent line about what the “silence” passage truly meant. Among other advantages, this approach allowed Pearson to recycle all of the defenses of this passage that had already been proposed, more concisely, by Vossius, Ussher, and Hammond.90 Firstly, Pearson claimed, the passage actually constituted an attack on the heresy of the Ebionites, who held that Jesus was purely human—a heresy that was already well known during Ignatius’s lifetime. Secondly, in the metaphysics of the Valentinians, it was Mind and Truth (as opposed to Word) that were the direct offspring of Depth and Silence, whereas Word, at best, was their grandchild.91 Thirdly, the doctrines of the Valentinians had already been held by gnostics contemporary with Ignatius (for this point Pearson mustered especially poor documentation). And finally, a further heretic named Basilides had actually lived contemporary with Ignatius (not later than him, as Daillé had claimed), with the result that the real Ignatius might also have been referring to Basilides.92 Thomas Gale’s reaction to this morass of argumentation, in his 1678 first edition of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, shows arrestingly how a thoughtful contemporary could pluck Pearson’s clear scholarly statements out of their murky surroundings: Gale referred his reader, with no hint of anything other than admiration, to Pearson’s exposition of the Valentinians’ metaphysical hierarchy, which (as Gale rightly observed) formed a loose parallel to the ordering of divine beings that Iamblichus ascribed at one point to the Egyptians.93 Effectively, then, Gale’s publication of Iamblichus had turned up new reasons why Pearson’s gathering of information from the church fathers was important— even though those reasons had nothing to do with Ignatius’s letters and everything to do with the effulgent late antique pagan philosophies that both Pearson and Gale sought to understand historically. Pearson’s Vindication, then, revealed his real qualifications as a scholar, but not by reason of the general structure of his arguments or the greater part of the details he adduced. Rather, Pearson’s book starkly shows how difficult it was, even for the most serious churchmen, to combine confessional polemics with clear and purposive scholarly exposition on the level that the seventeenth century regarded as normal. This vexing problem would animate the scholarly experiments of Bentley, along with many other English churchmen, in the decades to follow. Pearson’s method would also find a direct parallel in the second edition of Bentley’s dissertation on Phalaris (1699), which the pressure of polemic prompted Bentley to enfarce with hottempered digressions and ungainly mounds of information that were evidently meant to impress and intimidate rather than to appear necessary or strictly relevant.

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Thomas Gale: Iamblichus (1678) and Apollodorus (1671) Thomas Gale was in one sense the most energetic of the Cambridge scholars: he corresponded and collaborated with many counterparts on the continent, he eagerly collected and copied Greek manuscripts, and he published regularly, not only on classical subjects but also on Anglo-Saxon history. Like John Pearson, Gale also belonged to the Royal Society of London, and he served twice as its secretary, from 1679 to 1681 and 1685 to 1693. But before moving to London to become master of St. Paul’s School in 1672, Gale had lived continuously in Cambridge for seventeen years, first as a student and later as a fellow and tutor of Trinity College. We have no record of the contacts between Gale and Pearson, who was master of Trinity during Gale’s last ten years there. But they clearly shared a taste for the study of the late Greek intellectual world, and for the history of philosophy, that Bentley’s generation of classicists would dismiss. Even more than Pearson, however, Gale was generally unconcerned to explain to his readers why he believed that a given author or subject deserved attention. As a result, Gale’s evident fascination with Alexandrian literary scholarship (to take one example) is easier to perceive than it is to place securely in any seventeenth-century ideological current. So when Gale published his 1671 collection of ancient Greek mythographers, most of whom specialized in the allegorical interpretation of Homer and other poets as theological, ethical, or physical, any number of purposes might have occurred to contemporary readers.94 For example, Gale’s mythographers could have been exploited for the historical study of late philosophical doctrine, for their euhemerist reduction of legendary history to the real events that were supposed to underlie it, or for the comparison of pagan stories with Jewish history from the Old Testament. But Gale, with a characteristic reticence, declined to say whether he hoped that any or all of these approaches might be furthered by his publication of the primary texts. Far more than Pearson and Stanley, Gale seems to have envisaged an audience composed exclusively of scholars as qualified as himself and sharing his particular interests. That his work is rarely read today is the consequence of his lively but decidedly specialist approach. Gale’s greatest classical publication was his Greek editio princeps of Iamblichus’s treatise On the Mysteries of the Egyptians (1678), a rich and chaotic survey of ancient mystical and magical doctrine which Gale recognized as a piece of Greek Platonic philosophy as well as a series of reports about the mystical theology of the Egyptians. Iamblichus’s book had already been famous for nearly two centuries, as a result of Marsilio Ficino’s

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Latin translation of 1497. But Gale’s Greek edition announced a distinctively seventeenth-century approach. While Iamblichus’s assertions might still sometimes count as true, at the same time they clearly belonged to a late antique philosophical world that ought to be investigated as a historically distinct period in itself. Gale’s copious annotations to the text bespeak heroic labors, not only of evidence-gathering but also of careful and independent thought about Iamblichus’s complicated and slippery doctrines. In fact, Gale had originally planned to edit all the known works of Iamblichus, but it is not surprising that after On the Mysteries, he thought better of this idea.95 As a result, this edition is the most powerful printed evidence we have for the hold that late pagan philosophy exerted on English scholarly minds in the generation before Bentley. At the same time, Gale was no philosophical or historical syncretist, at any rate if we believe that he shared the priorities of his Oxford friend and contemporary Edward Bernard. In a letter to Gale dating from 1672 or before, Bernard urged him to study ancient Egypt precisely because this was a field in which evidence existed and advances remained possible, by contrast with the historiography of the ancient Mediterranean as pursued by some other contemporaries. “Please, I implore you, stay well away from the Phoenician and Babylonian theology; you would only torment yourself. Those peoples don’t merit your work and attention, and nor does Apollodorus with his Hellenism. . . . On the other hand I would point out, indeed I would assert, that the doctrines of the Chaldean and Egyptian theologians have uniformly been transmitted in a confused and disorderly way by Plutarch, Clement, Eusebius, and others. And your Damascius could hardly be any more accurate.”96 Bernard went on to mention that he himself was working on a project concerning the origin of ancient pagan gods—but that he thought previous efforts in that field had been laughable because they relied on absurd etymologies. Like Thomas Stanley, then, Bernard and Gale thought that the study of the ancient Mediterranean must be pushed beyond Greece but also that it must be approached soberly and carefully, through the sources (however inadequate) rather than through speculation. Stanley too evidently shared Bernard’s view of the seventeenth-century etymological enterprise that aimed to connect the ancient Greeks linguistically with the Phoenicians and the Hebrews: he wrote in strained tones in the History of Philosophy that G. J. Vossius “essaies to prove the word Cynosura to be Phoenician.”97 These intellectual differences are fine-grained by the standards of the present day. Yet they let us see, crucially, that contemporaries held clear ideas about what constituted scholarly rigor and what did not. They also show us why the studies Bentley would later reject could have

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seemed both important and promising to the scholars of the previous generation. Gale’s case shows that the Anglican fascination with pagan philosophies could also remain durable because its scope, in creative hands, was extraordinarily wide. Where textual questions were concerned, Gale’s notes were responsible but not expansive; he concisely reported alternate readings from the three manuscripts he had used, and he regularly offered relatively easy conjectures of his own.98 As Bentley would later do, Gale also called attention to conjectures he had made before learning that the same reading was found in a manuscript.99 The philosophical and magical content of Iamblichus’s treatise, on the other hand, inspired Gale’s curiosity intensely. He asked, for example, what might be the relationship between “archangels” of Greek Neoplatonists and the “archangels” of late Judaism, pointing out at the same time that in the Old and New Testaments, we only ever read of an “archangel” in the singular. He noticed the system of “decans” that Iamblichus ascribed to Egyptian astrology and referred his reader to Joseph Scaliger’s edition of Manilius (among other modern publications) for discussion. He hunted for information in unpublished manuscripts, including the world chronicle of Joannes Malalas in the Bodleian, whose text he emended. On the other hand, recent experience could also become relevant. To provide a context for Iamblichus’s claim that divine “inspiration” might be manifested not only by bodily excitation but also by bodily torpor, Gale recorded the history of one Francis Culham, resident in Lambeth, who for more than four years had lain motionless and mute in a grave illness until he suddenly revived, saying “Gloria Deo in excelsis,” on Pentecost of 1675. Clearly, then, Gale viewed the contents of Iamblichus’s treatise as potentially relevant to the present day, and he repeatedly sought to evaluate how and to what extent Iamblichus’s assertions about the physical world might be true. Yet Gale’s approach was not one of simple credulity where either Iamblichus’s philosophy or his historical information was concerned. Apropos Iamblichus’s theurgy, he carefully distinguished between illegitimate demonic magic and the genuine “natural magic” in which, like many other seventeenth-century intellectuals, Gale evidently believed.100 And he openly doubted that Pythagoras had really heard the music of the spheres.101 It was in a different publication that Gale reached his closest point of similarity with the young Bentley’s concerns, specifically in the history of poetry. His 1675 edition of the Library of Apollodorus—published along with four other Greek mythographers—became an occasion for entering a lost continent of ancient poetry and ancient literary scholarship.102 Apollodorus’s compilation, which Gale dated to the second century BCE, had

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no claims to originality in terms of its material; on the contrary, it was well understood to be an ancient reference manual for readers of Greek poetry (a purpose already pointed out by Angelo Poliziano in 1489).103 But despite the modest purpose for which the Library was intended, it revealed substantially more. Apollodorus recounted stories evidently deriving from poetry that was no longer extant: the labors of Heracles in Book 2 were the most substantial example, while Gale was especially captivated by Apollodorus’s catalogue of the Argonauts, which differed in number and in many names from the list in Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica (Arg.). Apollodorus also allowed his readers to glimpse the earlier Greek philological tradition, through his quotations of predecessors such as Pherecydes. And a substantial prestige attached to Apollodorus’s name because of his lost Chronicles of Greek cultural history, frequently cited by Diogenes Laertius and Eusebius, among others.104 In short, Apollodorus’s Library belonged to that great mass of technical works, such as lexica and scholia, that seventeenth-century scholars treated as a central source for historia litteraria, whether of philosophy or of poetry. Their customary approach to such texts—which Bentley too would later exploit—involved indexing, cross-referencing, the collection of quotations or fragments, and the adjudication of conflicting testimonies. Johannes Pricaeus’s printed index to the authors cited in Hesychius, printed with his 1650 edition of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, shows how a scholar’s private notes of this kind sometimes made their way into print to become in their turn a reference tool for others’ use (Figure 1).105 Unfortunately, Gale’s annotations to Apollodorus seem to have been produced in great haste; his telegraphic style left no room for discussing his purpose, his reasons, or his predecessors. We learn from Edward Bernard’s letter to Gale that at one point, Gale had regarded Apollodorus’s Greek linguistic style as a potential witness for the “Hellenistic” dialect of Greek that some contemporaries continued to believe had been distinctive to ancient Greek-speaking Jews.106 But by the time the edition appeared, that idea had apparently vanished from Gale’s concerns. Nonetheless, as a guide to what Gale aimed at and what he accomplished, we have an exceptionally well-qualified witness: the Göttingen classicist C. G. Heyne, a serious admirer of Bentley and an expert in Hellenistic Greece, who published his own editions of Apollodorus in 1782–1783 and 1803.107 From one point of view, in fact, Heyne’s Apollodorus editions constituted a laborious and virtuosic study in the recent history of scholarship, devoted to reconstructing Gale’s textual decisions and inferring his broader questions about the Library. Heyne’s mixed reactions of admiration and exasperation remind us that the classicists of the late eighteenth century did not

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always effect revolutions in the field’s basic approaches and insights; rather, they showed an entirely new willingness to ponder, systematize, and make explicit what earlier generations had passed over in haste.108 As a textual critic of Apollodorus, Gale could easily have made the complaint that Bentley voiced in his Horace edition: that the most important manuscript readings were already known and that the most obvious conjectures too had been anticipated. He collated one manuscript, in Oxford— Heyne remarked that his collation had not been careful—and otherwise relied on the printed reports of a few other manuscripts in the editions of Benedetto Egio (1555) and Hieronymus Commelin (1599), who had used the important Palatinus. As a result, Gale’s most striking interventions, like Bentley’s, came from attempting to judge in a systematic and documentable way whether the received text could be correct, leaving manuscripts aside. One of Gale’s working assumptions, which Heyne would articulate and significantly refine, was that Apollodorus had taken his information directly from ancient poetry, often even using the poem’s distinctive and ornate words before reverting to his customary workmanlike prose style. Where Apollodorus’s likely sources still existed, it seemed obvious to Gale that one should compare these directly with Apollodorus so as to recover, if appropriate, these purplish passages in the Library. For example, when Gale did what he said should have been obvious to earlier editors by comparing Apollodorus’s entire story of Jason and the Argonauts with the account in Apollonius Rhodius’s Argonautica, he came to suspect that the Library’s received text in the following passage had been corrupted in all manuscripts. After the marriage of Jason and Medea, the Argonauts, sailing by night, encountered a violent storm. But Apollo, standing on the ridge of Menoetius, shot his bow and turned them toward the sea. Nearby they beheld an island, which they named “Revealed” from its having appeared by surprise. They dedicated an altar to Apollo the Luminous, and after sacrificing, they held a feast.109 [Library, 1.9.26] plevonte~ de; nukto;~, sfodrw`/ peripivptwsi ceimw'ni. ’Apovllwn de; sta;~ ejpi; thvn Menoitivou deira;n, toxeuvsa~ tw`/ bevlei, eiJ~ thvn qavlassan katevstreyen. oiJ de;,  plhsivon ejqeavsanto nh'son: · tw`/ de; para; prosdokivan ajnafanh'nai prosormisqevnte~, ’Anavfhn ejkavlesan. iJdrusavmenoi de; bwmo;n ’Apovllwno~ AiJglaivou, kai; qusiavsante~, ejp’ eujwcivan ejtravphsan.110

First, Gale noticed that the text was neither interesting nor especially clear in saying that Apollo “turned” (katevstreyen) the Argonauts toward the sea. Changing only two letters, he conjectured a far more colorful possibility: that Apollo had “hurled lightning” (kathvstrayen) into the sea by

Figure 1. Johannes Pricaeus’s index to authors cited in the lexicon of Hesychius, printed in Pricaeus’s edition of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Gouda, 1650). Pricaeus includes his own and others’ conjectures to the names of lost poems. In the entry

for Epiphanius, Pricaeus first notes that according to Isaac Casaubon, Hesychius twice cites Epiphanius; but, Pricaeus confesses, “I have failed to find these passages.” © The British Library Board, shelfmark 1079.k.10.

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shooting his bow. Apollo’s putative epithet “Shining” (ΑiJglaivou) also attracted Gale’s suspicion. Here, a check of the manuscripts turned up only an easier reading, ΑiJgaivou (“Aegean”), found in Gale’s Oxford manuscript and in Hieronymus Commelin’s printed report of the Palatine manuscript. Gale proceeded to conjecture the reading he had evidently had in mind all along, ΑiJglhvtou, “the Illuminator,” which he had found in Apollonius Rhodius’s version of this episode (Argonautica 4.1716). Here Gale cited, with some nonchalance, “Book 4”—he apparently assumed that any serious reader of his edition would already have the Argonautica open to the relevant passage and needed no further direction. His third emendation unfolded along similar lines. The “ridge of Menoetius,” as C.  G. Heyne took the trouble to point out roughly a century later, had never been heard of in any author except for the received text of Apollodorus. With the idea of emending Apollodorus to match the word found in Apollonius’s poem— “the Melantian ridge”—Gale checked his Oxford manuscript but found that it, like others, contained the same problematic name as the received text (ta;~ Menoitivou deirav~). Accordingly, he conjectured again, citing as authorities not only Apollonius and his printed scholiast but also the lexicon of Hesychius and (mistakenly) the geography of Strabo.111 If we reconstitute the passage in Apollodorus with all of Gale’s revisions, the story suddenly takes on a coherence and a poetic justice that turn it from a catalogue of events into an episode: now, the Argonauts, sailing by night, encountered a violent storm. But Apollo, standing on the Melantian ridge, hurled down lightning by shooting his bow into the sea. Nearby they beheld an island, which they named “Revealed” (Anaphe) from its having appeared by surprise. They dedicated an altar to Apollo the Illuminator, and after sacrificing, they held a feast. plevonte~ de; nukt,o;~ sfodrw`/ peripivptwsi ceimw'ni. ’Apovllwn de; sta;~ ejpi; ta;~ Melantivou~ deirav~, toxeuvsa~ tw`/ bevlei eiJ~ thvn qavlassan, kathvstrayen: · oiJ de; plhsivon ejqeavsanto nh'son, tw`/ de; para; prosdokivan ajnafanh'nai prosormisqevnte~, ’Anavfhn ejkavlesan. iJdrusavmenoi de; bwmo;n ’Apovllwno~ AiJglhvtou, kai; qusiavsante~, ejp’ eujwcivan ejtravphsan.

At the same time, Gale was fascinated by the fact that Apollodorus had evidently used other, lost sources in compiling his list of the Argonauts: Gale went to the length of preparing a large table comparing the Argonauts named in Apollonius Rhodius with the Argonauts named in Apollodorus, showing that these two Alexandrian literary scholars had given significantly different accounts, presumably having consulted significantly different earlier works.112 Here as elsewhere, Gale was reluctant to suggest what those lost sources might have been, yet he evidently relished the

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exercise of anatomizing the discrepancies as a means of graphically showing the limits of present-day knowledge. Where no ancient poem existed to which an episode in Apollodorus could be compared, Gale resorted to a criterion of correctness or plausibility that closely resembled Bentley’s later approach. This was Gale’s method by default in the long stretches of the Library dealing with Heracles, whose exploits were not preserved in any ancient poem. For example, Gale detected a provocative and overlooked combatant lurking in Apollodorus’s narrative of the battle between the Giants and the Olympians (1.6.2), in which, according to the received text, “Apollo shot Ephialtes in the right eye, while Heracles shot him in the left and killed Eurytos with a thyrsos of oak” (Εu[ruton de; qursw`/ druo;~ e[kteine). Suspecting the passage, Gale checked printed reports of manuscripts and found that in the Palatinus, Eurytos had instead been killed with the “thyrsos of Zeus” (dio;~): this, he decided, was the mistaken trace of an abbreviation that pointed to the correct reading. “The thyrsos requires that we read Dionysus,” Gale declared.113 In other words, while Ephialtes was being dispatched by Apollo and Heracles, Eurytos was being killed by the otherwise very unmartial demigod Dionysus, whose weapon of choice was the vine-wrapped wand later waved by his ecstatic human devotees. Bentley would later endorse Gale’s reading (in the course of proposing to emend the victim’s name from Eurytos to Rhoitos in order to match a passage in Horace).114 In a different passage, Gale’s conjecture was geographical. Rejecting the information in Apollodorus’s received text that Heracles, en route from Cadiz in Spain to Tyrrhenia in Italy, had visited Abdera in Thrace (“Abdhran) as well as Libya (Libuvhn), Gale instead made Heracles take a direct route through Iberia (’Ibhrivan) and Liguria (Ligustivnhn).115 Beyond Gale’s willingness to conjecture, and his readiness to correct his text based on its content and on ancient parallels, these examples also show how the philological culture of the Restoration included and contained poetry as part of a far broader complex of erudition. The elements in Bentley’s Horace edition of 1711 that struck polite readers as strange and overwhelmingly technical had in fact been the accepted practices in the milieu of Greek scholarship in the late seventeenth century. Only when performed before an uninitiated audience, and in the surprising setting of an edition of canonical Latin poetry, could Bentley’s methods shock and disconcert. In another sense too, and a more perplexing one, it can be said that Gale in his Apollodorus edition was writing for his peers alone. As C. G. Heyne readily detected, Gale regularly advocated conjectural emendations that had already been made by others, perhaps unaware that he had been anticipated (or having forgotten that he had read the emendations in

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others’ textual notes). Tannegui Lefebvre’s edition of 1661 was the most frequent victim of Gale’s failure to cite. Of the conjectures we have just seen, those that were actually made first by Lefebvre are “The Illuminator” (ΑiJglhvtou) and “Dionysus,” while it also seems likely that Gale at some point had read the conjecture of “Liguria” for “Libya” in Philipp Cluverius’s Italia antiqua.116 Yet Gale clearly understood that, at least in principle, conjectures had identifiable authors. After proposing his two original emendations to the passage about the miraculous island appearing to the Argonauts, he remarked, “This passage would have been worthy of some effort on the part of previous editors.”117 Whether Gale truly forgot where his other conjectures had come from or whether he expected his scholarly readers to trace their authorship for themselves, what is striking is that Gale in this edition did not regard it as his task to refer to his predecessors, just as he did not regard it as his task to provide line numbers in his citations of poetry. Conversely, Gale very rarely bothered to announce that a given conjecture was in fact his own—his proud comment about the island passage was an exceptional case. What Gale lacked, as compared to Bentley, was not only an ardent desire to trumpet his own originality but also a disposition to teach his reader both about his own methods and about the nature and previous history of his editorial project. The beginner who picks up Gale’s Apollodorus must turn away not much the wiser about the textual problems and prizes at hand; the beginner who picks up Bentley’s Horace, or the Apollodorus edition of Bentley’s admirer Heyne, is shown a wide and inviting prospect of clearly stated problems and proposed solutions, delivered in a charismatic and authoritative editorial voice. This is surely the chief reason why Gale’s textual editions have been discussed in print only by editors who have repeated his work. It also explains why it came as so utterly unexpected when Bentley resurrected the forgotten persona of the editor as swashbuckling intellectual star.

Erudition and Its Limits Stanley, Pearson, and Gale were the most respected and the most productive scholars of the milieu around Restoration Cambridge. What has their work shown us about the climate in which the young Bentley began to become a classicist? In the first place, the questions and texts that interested these scholars stood far distant from the concerns we associate with the European humanism of the sixteenth century—Latin eloquence, poetic imitation, and political history. Their work was also far removed from the undergraduate curriculum of seventeenth-century Cambridge.118 Bentley,

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as a 16-year-old undergraduate in 1678, acquired a pocket-sized copy of Terence’s Latin comedies with the annotations of the schoolmaster Thomas Farnaby, surely for reading with his tutor; five decades later, as master of Trinity College, Bentley would publish an influential scholarly edition of Terence.119 Yet the Cambridge dons of the 1660s and 1670s would have regarded such a project as inconceivable, and most likely as embarrassingly trivial. For them, as we have seen, it was a matter of pride to operate on the margins of knowledge about the ancient world—a choice that led them to focus on late Greek authors and texts that would have been foreign to many of their educated contemporaries, and that they never attempted to characterize as morally edifying or aesthetically attractive. The Restoration scholars also engaged in substantive and explicit dialogues with recent seventeenth-century works of scholarship, which makes an important contrast to their relative indifference to the authorship of textual conjectures. Joseph Scaliger, Claude Saumaise, Isaac Casaubon, Richard Montagu, William Spencer, G. J. Vossius, Isaac Vossius, Gilles Menage, Athanasius Kircher, and Hermann Conring were among the recent predecessors they cited and, not infrequently, took issue with. In other words, they were conscious of belonging to a national and international group of specialists, who also formed the core of the audience for their own publications. Stanley entered this scholarly world in earnest in his early thirties, having earlier published English poetry for a coterie of a different kind; but with his History of Philosophy and his Aeschylus edition, Stanley wrote for progressively smaller and better-informed audiences. At the same time, the scholarship of Stanley, Pearson, and Gale does not fit easily into many of our received ideas about what was interesting in seventeenth-century erudition. As expansive as their knowledge often was, they surely cannot be said to have held an ideal of encyclopedism or of universal learning, like that of some contemporaries in the German-speaking lands: in general, they investigated difficult points in order to propose new solutions, not to collate and display information for its own sake.120 By the same token, their scholarly projects are hard to understand as manifestations of the “curiosity” that, elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe, inspired an attractively miscellaneous appreciation for unusual objects, texts, and historical events.121 In their orientation toward accomplishing concrete tasks at hand, they had moreover abandoned the habits and the values of earlier humanists, for whom the discovery of recondite facts and textual parallels was an invigorating end in itself.122 Bentley would find this approach of his predecessors’ eminently congenial; indeed, he would carry it vertiginously further, imposing on what he wrote a criterion of relevance that grew more exacting with each of his publications.

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Nor can the scholars of Restoration Cambridge be called antiquarians, among other reasons because they utterly lacked interest in the political history of the ancient world.123 Their abiding interests in the history of philosophy and of poetry were not easy to pursue through any medium other than texts; inscriptions, coins, and statuary were rarely relevant and even more rarely appealed to. This limitation imposed by their subject matter set the Cambridge scholars apart from some of their classicist peers on the continent, who managed to work antiquarian material into a relatively broader range of textual inquiries: for example, J. F. Gronovius (like his predecessor Justus Lipsius) explained many passages in Tacitus by referring to printed Roman inscriptions, while Abraham Berkelius incorporated substantial information from coins and inscriptions into a study of Greek toponyms that took the form of an edition of Stephanus Byzantinus’s De urbibus.124 Among the English classicists, by contrast, it was an exceptional case when Stanley found that the Parian Chronicle could help to settle the year of Thales’s birth; it was exceptional again when Stanley cited John Greaves, the Oxford don who had traveled to Egypt in the 1630s, for proof that the pyramids cast shadows that Thales could have measured in antiquity.125 We can conclude that Richard Bentley’s lack of interest in the material study of the ancient world—except in the polemical setting of his Dissertations on Phalaris—was essentially normal in the milieu of the Cambridge classicists. Again, the generation of the Restoration often showed surprisingly little interest in the interpretation of texts as opposed to inquiry into their textual soundness, the accuracy of their factual reports, and their likely sources. With the exception of Stanley’s Aeschylus, the kinds of exegesis that we would regard as literary evidently struck them as unnecessary, and possibly as an insult to their scholarly readers. At the most, they were concerned to disambiguate the paraphrasable meaning of the texts they studied—in itself a large and unavoidable job in an era when virtually every edition of a Greek text was published with a facing Latin translation. This wholesale rejection of hermeneutics was distinctive to the English scholars: they differed radically, for example, from their contemporaries in Germany, who intensively probed ancient poetry for its philosophical and theological meanings.126 For his part, even as Bentley became more decisively literary in his scholarly interests, he would never abandon the seventeenth-century conviction that it was otiose and elementary to point out poetic “beauties” or to rhapsodize over the appropriateness of a speech or an episode. As a result, Bentley’s attempts to broaden the contemporary audience for classical scholarship brought him into direct collision with an expectation in the wider literary world that a commentator should act as a pleasing poetic cicerone.

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We might say, instead, that the classicists of Restoration Cambridge were engaged in intellectual history, or what the seventeenth century called historia litteraria. In England, that term had been made famous by Francis Bacon, whose call for a narrative history of philosophy Thomas Stanley quoted in his own History of Philosophy; more broadly, the words historia litteraria give us a fitting name for the seventeenth-century enterprise of mapping the contours of each genre of writing in antiquity, through extant texts and lost ones, in poetry, philosophy, and beyond.127 Such studies were already alive and well in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Angelo Poliziano’s first Miscellanea of 1489 gave sustained attention to the lost history of the Greek comedy and especially to the fragmentary poetry of Callimachus; nearly two centuries later, Thomas Gale would cite with approval Poliziano’s translation of a fragment of Apollodorus.128 But in seventeenthcentury Northern Europe, historia litteraria became an increasingly standard approach and increasingly widely applied, not least because it offered a plausible way of understanding the great scholarly works that the seventeenth century regarded as starting points for the study of the ancient world—Scaliger’s Thesaurus temporum (1606), Isaac Casaubon’s editions of Athenaeus (1597–1600) and Diogenes Laertius (1583), and Casaubon’s unfinished Exercitationes against Baronio on ecclesiastical history (1614). In Restoration England, historia litteraria was felt to be particularly expansive in its applications, and particularly useful as an ingredient in contemporary intellectual debate. We have already seen, in Pearson’s Vindication of Ignatius, a florid example of historical argument that was designed to bear directly on real contemporary controversy. And we saw Stanley announce that his History of Philosophy would help readers to judge what parts of the contemporary philosophical scene were new and which were old: Descartes and Hobbes surely fell within these sights, although Stanley left all such comparisons up to his readers. More broadly, the history of natural philosophy formed an eminently fertile ground for the seventeenth century’s complex debates over the nature of matter and the proper method of investigating the natural world: Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and even Richard Bentley in his Boyle Lectures carefully distinguished between acceptable and unacceptable ancient doctrines as a way of articulating their own positions in the present.129 Boyle in particular showed a disposition actively to reimagine the history of philosophy, arguing through his protégé Robert Sharrock that the Greek atomist Democritus had also been a practitioner of Boyle-like experimental science, and presenting an entire treatise (The Sceptical Chymist) as a dialogue featuring the three ancient philosophers Carneades, Themistius, and Philoponus.130 If Boyle’s references to ancient philosophy had a discernibly didactic and persuasive purpose, they also signaled Boyle’s conviction that important insights for the present

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remained to be gained from the study of the ancient world and that ancient philosophical orientations held a direct bearing on contemporary debates. In Cambridge, many agreed with this view. Henry More solved the difficulty of the atheism attributed to ancient atomists by explaining, in his redoubtable poem Democritus Platonissans of 1646, that the first ancient atomist had actually been an unexceptionable theist who taught the immortality of the soul (conveniently, Democritus’s own writings were entirely lost). Ralph Cudworth, showing a far deeper engagement with ancient sources, composed his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) in order to demonstrate that the atomic theory of matter, far from being a relatively recent (and therefore suspect) invention of a few intellectual adventurers marginal to the tradition of Greek philosophy, had actually been held by the honorable majority of the ancients, including Moses.131 Isaac Barrow taught geometry directly from the ancient Greek texts of Archimedes and Euclid, and his printed lectures show how he considered both their textual integrity and the history of geometry in antiquity.132 (Thomas Stanley, pursuing a similarly historical line, had argued in 1655 that Thales had been the true discoverer of at least one theorem attributed to Euclid and that Thales’s priority would have been confirmed if Proclus’s commentary on Euclid’s sixth book were still extant.)133 Meanwhile Isaac Newton, in copious and occasionally repetitive manuscript writings, speculated extensively on the cosmology and the astronomical observations that could be attributed to Hesiod, Eudoxus, and other ancients.134 It would be difficult, then, to justify any view of Restoration Cambridge as divided into two intellectual cultures, with a progressive group taking an interest in natural science and natural theology and a reactionary group devoted to philological and historical study.135 Rather, historia litteraria and the study of ancient texts were enterprises that every intellectual might pursue, and enterprises for which many different uses could be devised. As to the prisca theologia, that marvelous body of originary knowledge that was supposed to have connected the ancient Greeks and Egyptians ineluctably with the truths revealed to the ancient Hebrews, many classicists of the Restoration in fact maintained a telling silence. The astounding effusions of Theophilus Gale’s Court of the Gentiles (1669–1678), or even Edward Stillingfleet’s parallels between the lives of the Greek gods and the lives of the biblical patriarchs in his Origines sacrae (1662), belonged to a genre discrete from scholarship as we have seen that it was practiced.136 Among the most revealing differences was the utter distaste of Stanley, Pearson, and Gale for any kind of grand theory or statement of historiographical method. The imperative demand for coherent historical narrative on the part of the prisca theologia proponents, as well as their radically

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hermeneutic approach to their textual evidence, are likely to have repelled the classicists at least as deeply as the inherent implausibility of the prisca theologia account itself. On the other hand, the university at large apparently remained hospitable to those who would assert ex cathedra the secret dependence of Greek paganism on the ancient wisdom of the Hebrews. Robert Creighton’s lectures on Aeschylus and Aristophanes, dating from his professorship of Greek in 1666–1672, form a florid instance. In an approach that contrasted sharply with Stanley—who had viewed Aeschylus’s theology as Orphic and Pythagorean—Creighton argued on chronological and other grounds that the story of Prometheus was in fact a lightly revised version of the story of Nimrod from the Book of Genesis, concluding that “this fable, like so many other poetic fables, took its original from the Holy Scriptures.”137 Evidently, then, approaches to the ancient world in Restoration England could differ profoundly in their methods and their intent, even among the personnel of the university and the church. That open polemic never broke out over the prisca theologia was perhaps due to prudential concerns, as well as to the manifest impossibility of proving that the account was wrong.

Even

at its most vital period, the intellectual scene around Cambridge remained decidedly local. This makes a final factor that defies our preconceptions about the late seventeenth century—a period when historians have been inclined to see the international Republic of Letters, with its shared values and its culture of exchanging scholarly favors, as the distinctive or indeed the normative type of intellectual community.138 Few of the Cambridge scholars cultivated any ties with their counterparts abroad, or even with their counterparts in Oxford: Thomas Gale makes the one striking exception, as he collaborated with Edward Bernard in Oxford, Isaac Vossius in London and Windsor, Jean Mabillon in Paris, J. G. Graevius in Utrecht, and Marcus Meibomius and Jean LeClerc in Amsterdam. During the Commonwealth, another exception had been Thomas Smith (1624– 1661), eventually the Cambridge University librarian, who could produce (for example) a recondite treasure that was printed in William Spencer’s 1658 edition of Origen’s Contra Celsum: an exchange of letters between Claude Sarrau and Henri de Valois on a difficult passage of the Contra Celsum concerning prophecy, transmitted to Smith by the Paris Calvinist Jean Daillé.139 On the other hand, a further attempt to help Spencer with the Origen project came to nothing. Herbert Thorndike, the splenetic divine who spent the 1650s in London, was apparently advised by Smith that a manuscript Thorndike possessed would be very useful for Spencer’s edition: among other works, it contained the dialogue then attributed to Origen De recta in Deum fide. But Thorndike refused to let Spencer use the manuscript,

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on the grounds that the printer should have chosen some “fit man” like Smith as the editor, rather than “young men whome I knowe not.”140 That Smith himself was acting as a kind of mentor to the younger Spencer seems to have eluded Thorndike; more broadly, the story reminds us that the personal relationships on which the Republic of Letters depended could sometimes work to exclude and to deny. Nor did Restoration Cambridge in general demonstrate any interest in foreigners, despite the recent experiences of some dons as exiles in The Hague or Paris, and despite the respect that had been shown by the church in the earlier seventeenth century to visiting scholars like Isaac Casaubon, Abraham Scultetus, and (at least initially) M.  A. de Dominis.141 For the great majority, apparently, the relevant associates and relevant working materials were always those close to home. No prestige apparently attached to entertaining or aiding scholarly visitors from abroad: even the formidably well-connected Nicholas Heinsius, in his Prudentius edition of 1667, could tell of being denied access to a manuscript in the library of Corpus Christi (then Benét) College, a manuscript that the young Bentley would proceed to collate on the margins of Heinsius’s printed edition.142 This state of affairs would change profoundly by the first decade of the eighteenth century, when Bentley and his rival John Covel, the master of Christ’s, would vie to impress a stream of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian guests. In Bentley’s own youth, however, Oxford was far more famous on the continent than Cambridge, especially by reason of Oxford’s great manuscript libraries, its university press, and the more fluid movement of personnel that such institutions attracted. In fact, the relatively provincial orientation of the Cambridge scholarly scene answered well to the career paths that these individuals, for the most part, were destined to follow. Particularly since college fellows were not allowed to marry, their usual goal was to leave Cambridge and find a more congenial job in the church: especially prized were parish livings in London, cathedral posts such as prebends or deanships, and jobs as chaplains or tutors in aristocratic families or the households of bishops.143 On the other hand, those who did not wish to become priests were also bound to leave Cambridge after relatively brief periods as fellows, due to an almost universal requirement that fellows eventually take orders in the church. (An exception to this rule was famously made, by royal order, for Isaac Newton.) The young Bentley too left Cambridge rapidly, indeed more rapidly than presumably he wished to. A complicated history of donations governed fellowships at his college, St. John’s, and when Bentley finished his B.A. in early 1680, at age 18, two fellows from his home county of Yorkshire were already in post, so that another could not be admitted.144

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This left Bentley in need of respectable work until he became eligible to take orders in the church at age 25. J. H. Monk guessed that from 1680 to 1682, Bentley remained in Cambridge, where he could have worked as an unofficial tutor or as an assistant to some senior don.145 The first official job his college arranged for him, as master of the grammar school at Spalding in Lincolnshire in 1682, was evidently a stopgap.146 His real opportunity came in 1683, again apparently through his old college, when the St. John’s alumnus and fellow Edward Stillingfleet hired Bentley to join his London household with the official title of tutor to Stillingfleet’s younger son.147 Not only was Stillingfleet a powerful churchman, highly political in his dealings and keenly active in patronage and in organizing publications. He was also a firm admirer and promoter of scholarship, which he evidently viewed, just as Pearson had, as an indispensable tool for contemporary polemic and also as a prestigious good in itself to which the church ought to lay a preemptive claim. It was in London, then, that Bentley eventually became a classicist, in an atmosphere compounded of tradition and frenetic activity. Here he encountered massively stocked libraries, a busy book trade, a universal veneration for the departed generation of Pearson, and an endless circulation of ecclesiastical eminences with power on their minds. At the same time, the young Bentley managed to learn things that were not, strictly speaking, on the program. To find out how he progressed—and to find out more about the formation of young scholars in the seventeenth century more generally—it is to London that we should now turn.

chapter two

London in the 1680s Bentley Begins

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hen Bentley entered Edward Stillingfleet’s household in 1683, the London he encountered was that of a dynamic elite of churchmen whose political vigilance on their own behalf was equaled by their incessant efforts to get books of the right kind into print. The church hierarchy felt itself to be embattled throughout the 1680s; in large part, this only perpetuated a sense of crisis that had animated the church, and indeed had come to define its public activities, since its official restoration in 1662.1 Printed polemic against the institution’s perceived enemies was an ongoing, normal enterprise, and so was the imposing display of what the church believed itself to be, both in its present and in the favored account of its past. Bentley’s employer Stillingfleet was a protagonist in all of these enterprises, both before and behind the scenes.2 As an author, Stillingfleet specialized in historical argumentation, about everything from British legal history to the scattering of the progeny of Noah, but he was very far from being an important classical scholar. Nonetheless, he and his associates evidently made a deep impression on Bentley, in a series of ways. Most people who recognize Stillingfleet’s name today know him as the pious provocateur who, in the early 1690s, would attack John Locke’s newly published Essay Concerning Humane Understanding.3 By the 1690s, in fact, Stillingfleet’s influence had been significantly diminished after he lost a contest for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, in 1691, to John Tillotson.4 During the 1670s and 1680s, however, Stillingfleet was a powerful and

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prominent figure, publishing voluminously on polemical subjects and taking part in the closely orchestrated pamphlet waves that the church regularly unleashed. In other words, his impressive personal reputation was intertwined with a talent for making himself valuable to the aims of the group, both as an impresario and as an author of the copiously documented historical tracts that the period favored as a method of justifying Anglican theology and church government. Only rarely can we identify a single figure as the instigator of a particular publication or series of ecclesiastical tracts.5 Much clearer is the way in which senior churchmen in this milieu worked collaboratively as a matter of course. They took orderly and frequent turns at attacking adversaries and defending colleagues; they freely passed manuscripts and working materials among themselves.6 In an era when churchmen regularly reviewed one another’s writings before publication, not only for the official imprimatur but also by private invitation, the impossibility of detecting the fingerprints of any particular actor in such affairs reflected not merely a striving for a unified corporate front but also a strong element of reality.7 In the sphere of church patronage, similarly, Stillingfleet’s personal activity is essentially impossible to reconstruct, although contemporaries regarded it as extensive and formidable. By the 1680s, he belonged to a small group of London churchmen in their middle age who were understood to exert a great, if shadowy, influence on the church’s internal and external affairs. In a handy manuscript guide to London for French speakers, prepared by Henri Justel, the royal librarian of England, it was reported among other pieces of common knowledge that Stillingfleet, along with John Tillotson, John Sharp, Simon Patrick, and Gilbert Burnet, was one of the church’s “very capable persons” (tres habiles gens).8 Intellectually and doctrinally, the priorities of an older generation continued to demand respect during the 1680s, above all in the person of William Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a promoter of scholarship, onetime exile in the Netherlands during the Commonwealth, and Stillingfleet’s own early patron. The genealogy of the church had now been narrowed and abbreviated to center on a small selection of scholarly clerics who belonged, sometimes just barely, to living memory. William Laud’s career was recounted in a pious biography by Peter Heylyn; William Chillingworth’s Religion of Protestants was multiply reprinted, abridged, and, eventually, expurgated of its “personal contests” to the end of making it more “generally useful”; the works of Henry Hammond, John Hales, and Joseph Mede were printed and reprinted with effusive Lives composed, where possible, by each author’s former chaplain.9 In the picture of the church’s history that resulted, nostalgia and novelty were intricately combined.

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Stillingfleet, for his part, made an overt homage to Laud when, in 1679, he published an anti-Catholic dialogue manifestly modeled on Laud’s Relation of the Conference with a Jesuit of 1639, which, in turn, both Stillingfleet and Meric Casaubon had vindicated with original pamphlets in the middle 1660s and which was further reprinted during the Restoration.10 On the other hand, more troublesome parts of history—notably, the church under Elizabeth and in the early Stuart period, full of open and fiery debates over Calvinism—were resoundingly ignored. Little public mention was made at this time, much less were the complete works republished, of the protagonists of the English Reformation such as Thomas Cranmer or Matthew Parker.11 And a bold plan by John Tillotson, said to date to the period shortly before he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691, would have eased the Reformation controversies out of English pulpits through a new Book of Homilies, designed to supplement the original published by Cranmer in 1547. In a manuscript outline for this new set of standard sermons, Tillotson not only chose resoundingly uncontroversial topics (“Of the Virtue & Reasonableness of Faith”). He also, characteristically, imagined in strict detail the typography of the hypothetical new book: “Running Title, Of Faith.”12 Scholarship was regarded in these circles as valuable, but that value was often measured, practically speaking, in the immediate uses to which scholarship might be put.13 In Oxford, exceptionally, a relatively high tolerance obtained for learned publications whose use-value for the church was potential rather than immediate: in the late 1660s, the Oxford University Press had been newly transformed into a learned publishing house capable of printing large and complicated Greek editions, as well as editions of Anglo-Saxon texts relevant to national and ecclesiastical history.14 In London, however, erudition needed to be directly applied in order to earn a substantial professional reward. The most compelling example, on both counts, was John Pearson, the defender of Ignatius’s letters and chronologer of the early Christian church; after Pearson’s death, his manuscripts were apparently passed to various scholarly churchmen for publication and use.15 In the next generation, William Cave wrote a series of works of ecclesiastical history that set out, among other things, to attack the muchdisputed claims of the Roman Catholic scholar Cesare Baronio—a project that placed Cave in a line of English scholarship that had included Isaac Casaubon and Richard Mountagu as well as Pearson. Cave’s early vernacular publications in this vein, his Apostolici of 1677 and Ecclesiastici of 1683, were collections of biographies composed in a leisurely narrative style and modeled explicitly on Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History: this approach, parallel to Thomas Stanley’s treatment of Diogenes Laertius in his

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History of Philosophy, reminds us that the late seventeenth century still regarded the reworking and correcting of an ancient compilation as a convincing vehicle for presenting new conclusions.16 Meanwhile, Richard Cumberland—whose grandson would later marry Richard Bentley’s daughter—published a work on Hebrew weights and measures in which he asserted casually that the Athenians, as colonists from Egypt and Phoenicia, had simply imported and renamed their small coin called the obol from the Egyptian coin known as the gerah (1/20th of a shekel).17 Earlier, Cumberland had composed a heavily documented treatise on the “laws of nature” designed to demolish the claims of Thomas Hobbes.18 By contrast, Thomas Gale, whom we met in Chapter 1, never attained the professional success of these other clerical authors—not to speak of a Stillingfleet, a William Lloyd, or a Simon Patrick. Gale’s first priority apparently was his own scholarship; he may have avoided seeking a more powerful position precisely because he preferred to commune with his books and to be left the freedom to publish on purely classical topics.19 Conversely, Gale’s more successful contemporaries, even though they knew a great deal about the ancient world by today’s standards or their own, also never forgot why that knowledge was thought to be important. This picture of the clergy’s scholarly interests is extraordinary not only because Richard Bentley would soon emerge from their midst. Far more broadly, within a generation the intellectual world of the clergy at large was to change nearly beyond recognition. The satirical pamphlets and irreverent poems of Jonathan Swift were only the leading edge of a transformation that made it suddenly acceptable, even fashionable, for midlevel priests of the Church of England to publish on classical and secular subjects. By the middle eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne could sit peaceably in his Yorkshire parish and compose Tristram Shandy, whose successive installments brought him ever greater wealth and patronage—although not, indeed, any promotions in the church. On the other hand, those who combined a secular subject matter with a manifestly scholarly approach could reap great institutional rewards. William Warburton, the voluble editor of Shakespeare and Pope, advanced to a bishopric, as did his protégé Richard Hurd, the literary critic and early theorist of the gothic in poetry.20 A third bishop inconceivable by seventeenth-century standards was Thomas Percy, whose reputation was made by his three-volume edition of English ballads taken from medieval manuscripts and more recent cheap print.21 Like Bentley, all of these figures also published on pious subjects, the better to show that they remained churchmen as well as gentlemen. Nonetheless, the change in the clerical profession was profound, and Bentley featured in it as both a beneficiary and a protagonist.

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On the broadest level, the polite clergymen of the eighteenth century were only following the changing fashions of the national literary culture at large, indeed often following it at something of a distance. In concrete terms, however, a rapid and discernible change happened in the 1690s, following the deprivation of Sancroft as Archbishop in 1690 and the earlier death of John Fell, the Bishop of Oxford, in 1686. Suddenly, well-established clergymen began to shift their shape. William Lloyd, previously the author of a ponderous series of anti-Romanist tracts and a tendentious history of Christianity in Britain, now drew other notebooks from his desk and began to publish on ancient historical chronology.22 Joshua Barnes, previously the author of sacred poems in Greek, now prepared an edition of the manifestly pagan Euripides.23 Bentley, younger than both of these, began to publish only in the 1690s. For him, as for others of his generation like John Hudson of Oxford, it was a remarkable piece of luck that in the institutional church, which initially had offered simply a good career for a bookish person, literary and classical study were now advancing from the marginal to the admirable. Some churchmen, however, remembered what they saw as the virtues and comforts of the old scholarly regime. Its workings were lovingly described by White Kennett in 1693, in a biography of the industrious but now obscure Anglo-Saxonist William Somner. Kennett’s biography stressed the utility of Somner’s studies, in that they centered on a national church history that Kennett regarded as a legitimation, and as a prescription, for the church of the present.24 But Kennett gave equal prominence to Somner’s role as a collaborator, and sometimes as an employee, of other historians. In the case of Somner’s important dictionary of Anglo-Saxon, published in 1659, Kennett was particularly expansive on the corporate nature of Somner’s project. Encouraged to compile the dictionary in the first place by the churchman Meric Casaubon, Somner later benefited from James Ussher’s intervention to secure for him the Cambridge lectureship in Anglo-Saxon (Ussher persuaded the donor, Roger Spelman, that Somner should work on the dictionary to the exclusion of giving any lectures at all). And the eventual publication of the dictionary was funded by a series of donors including Bishop John Warner of Rochester, William Dugdale, John Marsham, and Edward Bysshe.25 On other occasions, Somner served on complex scholarly teams to which he was recruited by John Selden, Dugdale, and Roger Dodsworth; Kennett also knew that Somner had done specific pieces of research at the request of Archbishop Laud.26 This fluid economy of collaboration, as well as the continuous circulation of unpublished manuscripts, was well exemplified by the very treatise of Somner’s that Kennett’s biography accompanied. This work, on ancient Roman ports and forts in

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Kent, had been preserved in manuscript since Somner’s death in 1669, and Edward Stillingfleet had cited a manuscript copy of it in his Origines britannicae of 1685.27 Kennett, for his part, pointed out several further manuscripts and annotated printed books of Somner’s of which he hoped future scholars would take advantage.28 In Kennett’s portrait, then, Somner not only exemplified the scholar who engaged in research for “public good” (59); Somner also understood himself more generally as a serviceable person, content to contribute to the church as an intellectual corporation rather than seeking celebrity for himself. In another retrospective portrait, this time specifically of the 1680s, autobiography was blended with highly selective memory to produce a sharper sort of nostalgia. John Battely, one of the domestic chaplains of Archbishop Sancroft and later of Tillotson, composed a posthumously published dialogue in which scholarly sociability in the very heart of the church was brought to splendidly idealized life.29 In the dialogue, Battely conversed learnedly in elegant Latin with his fellow chaplains Henry Maurice and Henry Wharton, while they sat looking at Roman coins in Battely’s study (museum): the literary conceit transferred Cicero’s Tusculan villa into an apartment in the dampness of Lambeth Palace. Their disquisitions unfolded along the classic lines of the Sancroft era, with the fictive Battely, Maurice, and Wharton arguing in minute detail over the exact place where St. Paul had landed when he sailed to Britain to evangelize the island (they agreed, roughly, that he had arrived in Kent in the vicinity of Richborough or Thanet). The hundreds of footnotes in which Battely indicated the three speakers’ published and manuscript sources were not the only clue that this scene improved greatly on real life. His speakers were also conspicuously enjoying an interlude of leisure. In reality, the chaplains’ most visible official duty was to issue imprimaturs for publications by the clergy; in Battely’s depiction, their private study of national and ecclesiastical history proceeded from sheer personal pleasure. Tellingly, their employer Sancroft never entered the dramatic scene, nor did his French librarian Paul Colomiès. Much less did the three fictitious chaplains meet and converse in the actual Lambeth Palace Library, to which Sancroft had devoted lavish personal attention for years.30 In effect, Battely’s story insisted stridently that scholarship was not a job and not an obligation. Battely’s own interests ranged broadly: he lent Richard Bentley a manuscript of Horace which Bentley found valuable enough to cite for readings in his edition.31 For that matter, Sancroft himself was no enemy to classical scholarship, as his personal book collection shows; for example, he lent a manuscript of Herodotus to Thomas Gale for Gale’s edition of 1679.32 But Battely’s carefully drawn portrait of intellectual lives in the Sancroft church apparently

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seemed old-fashioned, or even tedious, by the time an abridged English translation of his dialogue was published in 1774.33 The more elaborate and philosophical speeches were rigorously pruned; the Hanoverian reader was thought to be interested solely in Battely’s reams of information about ancient Kent.

Stillingfleet’s Household Bentley rarely applied his learning in the way that Stillingfleet’s generation did. However, some of his later professional habits suggest strongly that he was an avid observer of Stillingfleet’s milieu. Bentley cared seriously, even minutely, about the physical appearance of his printed books. He savored pamphlet warfare, particularly of the complicated variety with many attacks and defenses on both sides. He showed a pronounced taste for institutional power and for the orchestration of scholarly teamwork. Further, notwithstanding his reputation for rude and insulting behavior, Bentley expertly understood the gradations of deference that he paid to the powerful and exacted from everyone else. To his patron of the 1690s, John Evelyn, Bentley was unfailingly warm, attentive, and well-armed with pleasing gossip; he went so far as to ghostwrite a section of Evelyn’s book on ancient coins and then to castigate himself, perhaps disingenuously, for “forgetting” which topics Evelyn was to treat and which ones fell to Bentley.34 On the other hand, also in the 1690s, Bentley knew how to give condescending but impeccably polite treatment to the Huguenot scholar Jean Le Clerc, whom Bentley had recently bested in the patronage contest to become King’s Librarian. Wishing to send Le Clerc a copy of his own Dissertation on the epistles of Phalaris, Bentley had his younger and less successful associate William Wotton send both the initial covering letter to Le Clerc and all subsequent responses from Bentley’s side.35 The only surprise, given Bentley’s early acculturation, was that once in a secure position to act as a patron himself, he rarely managed to hold on for long to any competent protégé—John Walker and his own nephew Thomas Bentley were the two exceptions. To this extent, the mature Bentley was not only an abrasive personality but a somewhat deficient churchman. His years with Stillingfleet would also have cultivated Bentley’s protean flexibility, for his duties in the household were quite amorphous. In the late 1690s, Bentley was accused in print of having been Stillingfleet’s “amanuensis.” Bentley retorted (heavily hedging his bets) that in fact he had served solely as the tutor to Stillingfleet’s younger son—but that in any case, to serve as amanuensis to a bishop in one’s youth was far from a disqualifica-

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tion for high positions in the church.36 As far as history was concerned, Bentley’s argument was plausible. In their youths, for example, John Sharp, Simon Patrick, John Moore, and the late John Tillotson had all served in aristocratic households in the highly fluid post of “chaplain.”37 Educated retainers from outside the clergy were also common at the time: John Locke had lived for years with the first earl of Shaftesbury, while earlier in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes had been employed by the Cavendish family and maintained intellectual relations with them for several generations. Whether or not Bentley was an “amanuensis,” then, his station in Stillingfleet’s household was a fairly typical first step, and it would have been understood as a promising start to his professional career. We should ask now what Bentley’s experiences with Stillingfleet might have taught him, not only as an aspiring churchman, but as a scholar. Bentley did actually serve as a tutor, for at least part of his time, to Stillingfleet’s younger son James. When James entered Wadham College, Oxford, in 1689, Bentley accompanied him during roughly his first year, a fairly usual arrangement for well-born undergraduates. That James did not follow his father and older brother to Eton may have been a decision due to his mother, Stillingfleet’s second wife and apparently a formidable person. During an illness in the course of her son’s childhood—she survived the episode—she wrote down a long set of directions for what her son ought to study and read in the future, ranging from church fathers through classical authors in Greek and Latin down to recent English theology of a Calvinist cast.38 Whatever Bentley actually taught James Stillingfleet, he should have been equipped to get along well with Mrs. Stillingfleet: according to family tradition, Bentley’s own mother had been the person who began his instruction in Latin.39 Much of Bentley’s work as a tutor would have been aimed at developing his pupil’s skill at writing Latin prose and, especially, poetry.40 Under these conditions, Bentley would have maintained or improved his own ability to speak Latin; his aggressively perfectionist approach to poetic meter would also have flourished. And Bentley would regularly have corrected the young Stillingfleet’s compositions—a rare instance in his career as an editor where Bentley undoubtedly knew better than the author he was emending. On the other hand, that Bentley also helped in some way with Edward Stillingfleet’s publications is a natural assumption, if an undocumentable one. Stillingfleet’s associates in the church regularly recruited the help of young research assistants, who in some cases prepared very substantial parts of publications that appeared under others’ names.41 However, Stillingfleet’s most heavily researched publication of the 1680s offered little scope for straightforwardly delegating any part of the work to a helper.

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His Origines britannicae (1685), an energetically argued history of Christianity in Britain, maintained that the island had first been evangelized by the apostle Paul (this obviated any dependence of the English church on Rome), and that the originary English church, complete with bishops, had extended to the entire island (which was to deny any historical claims for an independent church in Scotland). Because a complicated polemic was already in progress over these and related questions, Stillingfleet closely structured his book around previous installments in the controversy, which he repeated, compared, attacked, defended, and elaborated in time-honored fashion. Few if any passages in this dense thicket of contention could have been independently researched and prepared by anyone other than Stillingfleet. Bentley could have done more pedestrian work, such as checking individual facts, transcribing fair copies of Stillingfleet’s drafts, or helping to correct proofs for the press, even though Stillingfleet was apparently not intent on extracting the maximum possible labor from his young employee: the book was printed without an index, which would have been a very easy thing to ask Bentley to prepare. We do know that, in general, Stillingfleet placed great value on the checking of quotations in their original sources. As Bentley would later do, Stillingfleet delighted in catching out his adversaries when they had copied an ancient quotation directly from some recent compilation or pamphlet—the incriminating clue being a factual, orthographical, or citation error that they had inadvertently perpetuated. If Bentley verified some of the thousands of quotations in the Origines britannicae, he got extensive practice in what amounted to textual collation and in a major method of erudite polemic. Bentley’s final real duty in the household was, apparently, as Stillingfleet’s librarian. Stillingfleet owned a large and celebrated collection of printed books and manuscripts, and he could have benefited greatly from an assistant who could fetch and reshelve books, keep track of loans to friends, settle accounts with booksellers, and deal with the bookbinder (a perpetual task in an era when new books were generally sold without covers).42 We do have evidence that Bentley bought rare books on Stillingfleet’s behalf at the book auctions that had recently begun to take place in London, mirroring a highly successful Dutch custom. Each of these auctions was billed as the personal collection of some recently deceased gentleman or scholar; printed catalogues were distributed in advance, precisely so that potential buyers could not only decide what they wanted but also give detailed instructions to an agent.43 In surviving master copies of printed auction catalogues, in which the auctioneer recorded the selling price of each book and the name of its purchaser, “Mr. Bentley” appears from 1686 through the rest of the decade, often buying abstruse and

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expensive historical works that correspond with titles in Stillingfleet’s collection.44 For example, at the sale of the third Earl of Anglesey’s books, Bentley acquired a treatise by Marquard Freher on the ancient town of Ladenburg near Mannheim; a seventeenth-century history of the Franks; Andrea Morosini’s history of sixteenth-century Venice; and an Italian report of contemporary Jesuit missions to Japan.45 The auction catalogues not only show that Bentley already understood the book world as one of business and competition, and that he spent large amounts of time at Stillingfleet’s residence in the City of London (Stillingfleet also owned property in Twickenham).46 The catalogues’ long lists of titles for sale reveal that even the vibrant book district of London remained markedly peripheral from the perspective of European intellectual culture at large. Like the books Stillingfleet already owned, the majority of the books Bentley bought for him had been printed in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and Italy, and so did the majority of books sold at the auctions in general. From the point of view of their contents, too, the books sold at English auctions mirrored both the churchmen’s general admiration for classical study and their unwillingness to engage in it in a sustained way. On the one hand, classical editions and scholarly treatises formed a part of every substantial learned library: at the sale of Thomas Jacombe’s books in 1687, Bentley bought a series of Greek books apparently destined for his own use, including Thomas Stanley’s edition of Aeschylus, Athenaeus’s Deipnosophistae with Isaac Casaubon’s comments, Sigismund Gelenius’s sixteenthcentury edition of Callimachus, and a volume of Hesiod with Greek scholia or annotations.47 But one reason why Bentley was able to buy such Greek books for himself was the very low prices they often sold for at auction. This classical discount, so to speak, was most apparent in the case of mediumformat quarto volumes. For example, the Frankish history that Bentley bought for Stillingfleet cost five shillings, the Jesuit relation from Japan ten shillings. But Bentley’s Hesiod cost him only two shillings sixpence, and his Callimachus with scholia a nearly derisory nine pence.48 Both intellectually and financially, then, at this period the young Bentley fulfilled the strategic precept of the late Sam Walton: “Go where they ain’t.”

London at Large The book world offered Bentley yet a further advantage, however. It brought him into contact with other intellectuals whose interest in classical and literary study was both unabashed and productive. They embodied the kinds of study that would shortly become widespread in the church

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itself, and Bentley came to know them in person and sometimes to benefit from their help. We should explore why their examples mattered and what attractions they held. The primary book district in London lay, very literally, outside Stillingfleet’s front door. As the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, Stillingfleet occupied a house directly inside the cramped neighborhood where the majority of printers, publishers, and booksellers worked.49 For Stillingfleet, this would have meant not only easy access to his own publisher, Henry Mortlock, but also a steady stream of clerical visitors en route to do business with publishers or to buy. For Bentley, Stillingfleet’s unparalleled location allowed an independent entrée into the clerical and genteel social scene that arose around the bookshops and in the coffeehouses that punctuated their rows. Clerics who spent only part of the year in London used their publishers or their favorite booksellers as depots for correspondence, papers, and the transfer of money and even as agents for buying tea; when in London, they met in bookshops by chance or, often, by appointment.50 The young James Boswell’s carefully planned introduction to Samuel Johnson in the bookshop of Thomas Davies, in 1763, was the kind of episode that could just as easily have happened many decades earlier.51 But the constantly revolving cast of personnel in the book district, and the ensuing streams of gossip and information, could foster conflict as well as cooperation. Bentley himself chose the bookshop of Thomas Bennet as his scene for delivering a sneering assessment of the 1695 Oxford edition of Phalaris’s letters; no better method could have been devised for making his point of view instantly and widely known.52 The final allure of the book district, for all concerned, arose from seemingly impeccable intellectual grounds. The incessant polemics in which the church hierarchy engaged, as well as the serial team effort by which pamphlet wars were conducted, meant that the bookshops truly did contain new and timely matter each month, if not each week. If the planned obsolescence of these clerical publications tended to discourage serious original scholarship on the part of their authors, it also must have benefited many in commercial terms; for the consumers of books, it would have tended to convert any latent bibliomania into a florid and chronic affliction.53 Intellectually, the London book world included Stillingfleet’s domain but also extended beyond it. For Bentley, the book district offered the chance to meet gentlemen scholars from outside the clerical world—gentlemen of precisely the kind that his later classical publications envisaged as an audience. On this point, the annotated auction catalogues provide compelling evidence. For example, Bentley repeatedly found himself in the same room with John Woodward, the physician and antiquarian who was captivated

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equally by the geological history of the earth and by material evidence surviving from Roman Britain.54 Bentley was also regularly in the presence of John Evelyn, an enthusiast for historical study of every kind and, by the early 1690s, Bentley’s primary patron.55 The now elderly and querulous Edward Sherburne, formerly Thomas Stanley’s companion and a magpielike hoarder of continental manuscript catalogues, also made frequent appearances in the auction rooms.56 Woodward and Evelyn both had great respect for the church and for sacred studies; Sherburne showed less. All of them, however, took a serious interest in classical study, and Evelyn and Sherburne each had multiple classical publications to his name. Neither Evelyn nor Sherburne was incisive as a scholar; nonetheless, they visibly devoted effort to subjects that, for the majority of churchmen, remained exclusively the province of leisure. A far more complicated and tantalizing example confronted Bentley in the person of Isaac Vossius, the cosmopolitan and sometimes irascible scion of the seventeenth century’s most famous Protestant intellectual dynasty. Like Isaac Casaubon, his own father G. J. Vossius, and his uncle Franciscus Junius, Isaac Vossius had been hired from abroad into a sinecure designed to spur him to pro-Anglican ecclesiastical scholarship.57 This expectation seemed reasonable, not least because Vossius had published the Vatican Greek manuscript of Ignatius’s letters in 1646, and he had also assisted the elder Robert Creighton in his edition of Sylvester Syropoulos’s anti-Romanist memoir in 1660.58 What Vossius chiefly brought to England, however, was a very high international profile combined with an unparalleled library of classical printed books and manuscripts.59 In both of these respects, Vossius became England’s representative of a scholarly tradition that was esteemed on the continent but had so far found few followers in England. Joseph Scaliger was the forefather on whom Vossius’s intellectual pedigree depended: Isaac Vossius’s father, G. J. Vossius, had been the assistant and student of the aristocratic Daniel Heinsius, who in turn had been Scaliger’s favorite pupil in Leiden. In addition to the historical and chronological studies that seventeenth-century English scholars generally associated with Scaliger’s name, Isaac Vossius was also keenly interested in the literary studies that had been pursued by the younger Scaliger and by his successors.60 For Vossius, as for Daniel Heinsius and his son Nicholas Heinsius, this variety of classical scholarship was a refined aesthetic and linguistic pursuit, centering on poetry both celebrated and obscure.61 Like his ecclesiastical colleagues John Moore, Edward Bernard, John Mill, and George Hickes, Vossius made frequent visits to the London book auctions in search of rare and older continental books.62 Vossius’s publications,

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however, combined the ecclesiastical and the classical in a notably different proportion from what was customary in the English church. On the one hand, shortly after his arrival in England in 1670, Vossius composed two brief epistolary defenses of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, which John Pearson published with his Vindication of 1672. On the other hand, in the very next year, Vossius published at Oxford a strident treatise on classical poetic meters, which deplored not only the contemporary pronunciation of classical verse but also the text settings of the contemporary opera. Even less ecclesiastically, in 1684 Vossius printed an annotated edition of the Latin erotic poems of Catullus, a free homage to Joseph Scaliger’s two editions of the same poet as well as a bold choice for a scholar who, at the time, was a Canon of Windsor.63 Vossius’s magnificent personal library also held striking documents for a historiography of seventeenthcentury scholarship along literary and classical lines, in the shape of hundreds of printed books bearing annotations from scholars including Scaliger, Casaubon, Saumaise, and Junius, as well as a large number of anonymous “learned collators” of additional manuscripts.64 Meanwhile, Vossius’s personal associates or clients, lifelong bachelors like himself, only deepened the impression that he came as an emissary from a dynamic but foreign world. Paul Colomiès, a sometime ecclesiastical historian who cited English scholars with fulsome praise at every opportunity, had also published long and extraordinarily helpful notes on the elliptical Table Talk of Joseph Scaliger, while in a broader Collection of Interesting Things (Recueil des particularitez) he extended this approach to include nuggets of gossip about a wide range of seventeenth-century scholars and littleknown manuscripts on the continent.65 Meanwhile, the less industrious but even more colorful Adriaan Beverland took refuge with Vossius in 1680 after being run out of Leiden on justified charges of impiety; Beverland had compiled a series of philological manuscripts, on which Bentley eventually gave him sympathetic publication advice, but his chief skill always remained the grand and mildly shocking gesture, as when he paid the amazing sum of eleven pounds at a book auction for a set of chiefly pornographic engravings.66 If Vossius himself also exuded a somewhat libertine aroma, this did not deter British scholars from recognizing that his library offered them a treasury of unpublished material for philological research. This encompassed not only seventeenth-century notes and collations but also, in particular, hundreds of Greek manuscripts, many of which had belonged to Vossius’s father and to Vossius’s erstwhile employer, Queen Christina of Sweden. As a consequence, Vossius became an esteemed and valuable friend for those English churchmen who did take an interest in classical study. Stanley sent

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Vossius a copy of his new Aeschylus edition during a visit to England that Vossius made in 1664, also asking Vossius about his own manuscripts of Aeschylus, to which Stanley had been alerted by John Pearson.67 Edward Bernard of Oxford also corresponded regularly with Vossius, even though Bernard’s apparent fascination with the literary branch of the Scaliger school never found expression in his own publications.68 Vossius’s library in fact contributed more substantially to the patristic editions that the Oxford University Press emphasized during the 1670s and 1680s: Vossius offered material to John Fell for his edition of Origen and to Henry Dodwell for the study of Irenaeus, and his correspondence with Edward Bernard included long discussions of Bernard’s edition of Josephus.69 In all of these respects, Vossius’s library was a forerunner and model for the great libraries of John Moore and of Edward Harley, second earl of Oxford, which would become celebrated in England in later decades. Like them, Vossius amassed material whose value was made even more lustrous by its prestigious provenance, and although he never intended to publish on the great majority of his own holdings, he let others know what he possessed and opened it to them freely. The young Bentley, for his part, evidently understood Vossius’s library as a resource for classical linguistic and literary study. By the time of his Letter to Mill of 1691, Bentley knew readings from Vossius’s important manuscript of the Greek lexicon of Pollux, and although Bentley may have received these readings from some other scholar, it is equally plausible to think that Bentley visited Vossius before his death in 1689 and studied the manuscript himself. The equally youthful Robert Cannon, born in 1663, transcribed from Vossius’s library a book of Parisian collations of Hierocles made by Etienne Hubert.70 Again, Bentley eventually came to own a manuscript of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata that had been transcribed from a copy in Vossius’s library containing handwritten annotations by Scaliger and unpublished Greek scholia.71 In his proud and public interest in classical studies as equally legitimate with sacred studies, Vossius was a precursor of the intellectual change that would shortly start to overtake the English church as a whole. On the one hand Vossius published chronological and biblical works, generally of a controversial cast: for example, he regarded the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint, as more authoritative than the original Hebrew text, and he assailed the authenticity of the prophecies known as the Sibylline Oracles, viewing them as the productions of ancient Jewish apologists.72 On the other hand, he ventured to publish on the classical subjects that remained strictly an avocation for most churchmen in this period, for example, John Pearson. That Vossius’s brand of literary philology came with an established pantheon of predecessors and

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an established cast of contemporary stars made it, moreover, a tradition that was relatively straightforward for new aspirants to enter. To study and cite the best-known scholars—as Bentley would cite Scaliger, Casaubon, Saumaise, and G. J. Vossius in the Letter to Mill—was to signal one’s membership in at least the lower ranks of the same world. For Bentley, however, and perhaps for other observers, Vossius’s professional success would have been equally striking. Already famous for multifarious pursuits that included classical literary study, Vossius had obtained a comfortable place in the church, then proceeded to publish even more works of classical literary study: in this respect his career differed importantly from those of Bentley’s English predecessors Stanley, Pearson, and Gale. Vossius, too, was the only actor on the scene in the 1680s whose example suggested a more personal lesson: that the church, in felicitous cases, could become the professional foundation not only for a scholar’s classical study but also for international renown and personal notoriety.

The Nachlass While Bentley’s immediate environment was intellectually lively, it also offered no models for anything like what Bentley would eventually publish. His projects from this period, which we can reconstruct from his working materials and from his later testimony, reveal great energy coupled with some serious misunderstandings about what constituted a publishable piece of work. Stillingfleet and others must have encouraged him in a general way, but they seem to have given no sustained or careful guidance. On the one hand, these senior churchmen were evidently willing to see a young person devote time and effort to studies that lacked any obvious application to clerical controversy: their tolerance suggests that they well understood their own polemical publications to be only a part of the universe of possible learning. On the other hand, Stillingfleet and his associates seem to have viewed classical scholarship as a slender and unremarkable kind of enterprise. Insofar as Bentley’s abandoned projects from this period depended heavily on the sheer accumulation of textual material, with argument or intervention only prospectively possible, Bentley’s work perhaps reflected a more widely held assumption that the scholar’s task was essentially one of placid compilation. It also reflected the reality in his milieu that scholarly study of any kind was unlikely to lead directly to publication; in part as a result, the standard ways of recording one’s findings were better suited for personal reference than for composing new works addressed to others. Nonetheless, the efforts of his twenties show

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that some of Bentley’s most distinctive qualities were already being realized. He was exceptionally skilled with languages, even by the standards of the seventeenth century. He was drawn in particular to the study of poetry, although he shared the antipathy to interpretation and literary judgment that had characterized the generation of his predecessors. Perhaps most propitious for his future, Bentley also showed a confident willingness to improvise, to try a new and different project each time the previous one foundered on its own infeasibility. The later Bentley, who reinvented his method and his style with each new publication, was the direct descendant of this earlier, grandly ambitious, and mildly feckless self. Bentley’s least conclusive projects of this period were evidently designed to exploit his skill with Greek and with sacred languages. Essentially lexicographical in their method, they presented him with a succession of small and concrete textual problems which did not, however, lead straightforwardly to any systematic conclusion or theory. During the year when he entered Stillingfleet’s household, Bentley was at work on a biblical compilation of punishing scope, a project designed primarily to examine the relationship between the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and its ancient Greek translations. In a first notebook, Bentley drew up a more or less alphabetical list of Hebrew words in the Old Testament. On columns extending across each page, he correlated each Hebrew word with its ancient translations into Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac, recording more than one equivalent when a word had been rendered differently in different passages. He bothered to cite his biblical passages only when they came from those books that early modern Christians regarded as prophetic of Jesus— Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Job, and the Psalms above all. Then, in a second notebook, Bentley picked out passages where he had discovered discrepancies between the Hebrew and the Greek and attempted to adjudicate them or, at least, to comment.73 Almost certainly this project was suggested to Bentley by Stillingfleet, whose later protégé, Humphrey Hody, in fact published a series of works on the Septuagint and ended his career as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford.74 Bentley’s notebooks, on the other hand, were the product of a learning period in which he grappled with passages one by one, not attempting any overarching analysis or narrative. Moreover, his biblical notebooks, intensively worked as they were, depended very substantially on earlier scholarship done by others. For example, Bentley paid close attention to variant readings in the Septuagint Greek translation—a scholarly problem of long standing that, however, stood to gain even more through a sustained study of the Alexandrian manuscript that had come to England in the 1620s.75 But rather than travel the few miles from Stillingfleet’s deanery to the Royal Library at St. James’s

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Palace to inspect the Alexandrinus himself, Bentley relied for its readings on the printed collations in the English Polyglot Bible of 1657. The English Polyglot also supplied him with collations of three further manuscripts in England, whose printed sigla Bentley duly carried over to his notebooks as O, A, and C.76 In all these respects, Bentley’s biblical compilations belonged squarely to the tradition of notebook scholarship that permeated the English church and universities in the seventeenth century. While it was eminently possible that Bentley might propose a truly new solution for a difficult passage, the notebooks could never have become a publication in themselves, whether of the polemical or of the scholarly variety. The same can be said of Bentley’s early annotations on his printed copy of Hesychius, an ancient Greek dictionary that was particularly fertile for the study of dialects, in addition to classical prosopography, toponyms, and poetic quotations. Bentley annotated this volume over a period of thirty or forty years, in three discrete hands: the result is a graphic record of what Bentley was thinking at a given time, and above all of how he learned.77 John Pearson too had studied Hesychius intensively; his surviving annotated copies and notebooks were meant as preparatory material for an edition of the lexicon, which in the event Pearson never completed. But Pearson’s copious manuscript notes reveal no particular orientation, except for the occasional suggestion that the morphology of some Greek word resembled that of a Hebrew synonym, as well as a series of emendations to Hesychius intended to restore Homeric words corrupted by later scribes.78 In the end, his Hesychius volumes served as customized reference books for himself rather than as instruments of discovery; Thomas Gale, who had apographs made of at least one entire volume of Pearson’s notes on Hesychius, also evidently intended these for his personal use with no view to publishing any continuous part.79 More businesslike approaches to the dictionary were also possible. Richard Thomson, in the earlier seventeenth century, turned the margins of his printed Hesychius into a simple word-index to Greek authors including Herodotus, Aristophanes, and Athenaeus; Gale himself kept three notebooks in which he wrote out miscellaneous textual problems that had prompted him to consult Hesychius.80 Bentley, by contrast, slowly discovered how to make linguistic data into sets of discrete projects and problems, using his printed Hesychius not only as a distinct piece of primary material but as a voluble and charismatic tutor. Unlike Pearson or Thomson, Bentley first encountered Hesychius in a Dutch variorum edition that contained the printed annotations of famous continental scholars, in particular Henri Estienne, Joseph Scaliger, Claude Saumaise, François Guyet, Tannegui Lefebvre, and Jacob Gronovius—a virtual university, not even lacking the occasional clash between

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its august members. Reading and annotating these scholarly comments as attentively as he annotated Hesychius’s dictionary itself, Bentley could quickly grasp the normal methods of Greek philology and ask what new contribution he might make. On a concrete front, one of Bentley’s earliest interventions was to compare his printed Hesychius with a manuscript of Photius’s unpublished Greek lexicon: his aim was to correct the transmitted text of Hesychius by discovering similar words in Photius. If Bentley consulted the Photius manuscript belonging to Thomas Gale and not an apograph—at the time, Gale’s was the only old manuscript of the lexicon known to exist—this would also provide the only indication we have that Bentley knew Gale in London in the 1680s.81 On the systematic level, the young Bentley marked places where the variorum commentators echoed Cornelius Schrevelius’s assertion that Hesychius was a Christian, thus accounting for the biblical words in the lexicon.82 Bentley also ventured a few parallels with Hebrew words, in the style of Pearson and the printed comments of Daniel Heinsius and Johannes Cocceius. It was a truism of the time that Hesychius was the best source for studying the putative “Hellenistic” dialect of ancient Jewish speakers of Greek, and thus for the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament: in this respect, Bentley’s initial engagement with Hesychius may have been designed as a supplement to his biblical philology.83 (By the 1710s, Bentley had come around to the view that Hesychius’s original compilation was entirely classical and that its few biblical elements represented later interpolations.)84 In the Hesychius volume Bentley also encountered scholarly efforts to understand and apply the history of Greek linguistic change: he read hundreds of printed notes that explained Hesychius’s strange lemmata in the context of ancient Greek dialects, whose actual differences had often been magnified enormously in the dictionary by scribes unfamiliar with their forms. In particular, because the Homeric poems—for these annotators as for Pearson— were texts to be reconciled mutually with Hesychius, Bentley could observe Saumaise, Guyet, and others discussing the archaic letter digamma in direct connection with readings and metrical problems in Homer. Bentley’s own bold insertion of the digamma throughout the Homeric poems may or may not have been conceived already in his twenties.85 But at this earliest stage, he had the salutary experience of being shown that a longstanding problem in historical morphology existed, and further, that earlier attempts at explanation had ranged widely in their plausibility and expertise. His approach to Hesychius, in general, shows how fully Bentley had absorbed the normal parameters of seventeenth-century Greek scholarship. That Hesychius’s dictionary existed only in a single manuscript tended to amplify the working assumptions of that milieu: that the best

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tools for decoding and improving the text at hand were conjecture and close comparison with other texts, whereas manuscripts were usually the problem rather than the solution. In other ways too, Bentley began actively to learn about the school of Scaliger. For the moment, some of these remained wholly exploratory. Another very early experience in working with manuscripts came when Bentley took up a copy of Nicholas Heinsius’s edition (1667) of the Christian lyric poet Prudentius.86 Bentley had noticed, or had it pointed out to him, that Heinsius had been frustrated in his attempts to consult a manuscript when he visited Cambridge by the “unreasonable vigilance” (superstitiosa sollicitudo) of the librarian of Corpus Christi.87 Accordingly, Bentley himself now studied the Corpus manuscript and recorded variants that he regarded as interesting on the printed pages of Prudentius; he called this manuscript “B,” although he never bothered to write down what “B” was. Then, in a confusing maneuver that he would never repeat, Bentley looked for variants in a manuscript he called “A,” most likely a Bodleian manuscript that Heinsius had consulted, and recorded those readings adjacent to Nicholas Heinsius’s endnotes.88 Rather than making a thorough collation of “A,” that is, Bentley spot-checked Heinsius’s reports of it, and that not in every case. Again, only in passages that Bentley found interesting did he write “A” to confirm that Heinsius’s report was correct, or to add it as a witness for readings where Heinsius had not cited it. Insofar as his procedure was entirely guided by Heinsius’s questions about the text, and insofar as he made no attempt to assemble complete collations, Bentley was effectively re-creating the high points of Heinsius’s editorial work rather than preparing for a new edition of his own: his working question was whether Heinsius would or should have made different decisions on the basis of the English manuscript evidence that Bentley could study. In fact, Bentley himself rarely expressed a preference when he found different readings in the Corpus manuscript, although he did venture several conjectures, both to Prudentius’s text and to typographical errors he discovered in Heinsius’s endnotes.89 Such early experiments notwithstanding, Bentley himself did not embark on any edition of Latin poetry until his Horace, begun in 1702. In other words, the model of the Scaliger school—elegant, interventionist, and opinionated—may have appeared attractive to him in the abstract, but it was not yet a catalyst for a project of his own. Indeed, conditions in England were not yet likely to inspire any young person to a driving interest in Latin textual criticism. As we saw in Chapter 1, textual editions of any kind in England remained a rare occurrence even as late as the 1680s. Editions that manifested a sustained interest in textual questions were

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even rarer. And the scholarly climate continued overwhelmingly to favor the study of Greek over Latin. Serious scholars still regarded Latin as the province of schoolboys, and to serve that market, perfectly adequate editions of the major Latin poets were routinely and cheaply imported from the Netherlands. As a consequence, virtually no one in England viewed Latin editions as fulfilling a commercial need or an intellectual opportunity. Thomas Farnaby’s modest and shabbily printed Terence of 1651—in fact, a reprint of Daniel Heinsius’s edition, with notes of a pedagogic cast by Farnaby and by Meric Casaubon—showed the paucity of English aspirations in this regard.90 Isaac Vossius’s far more ambitious edition of Catullus, printed in Leiden in 1684 and distributed in London through an English publisher, formed the single striking exception.91 An overt homage to Scaliger, who had edited Catullus in 1577 and again in 1582, Vossius’s edition not only intervened volubly and often in the poetic text; its notes also devoted a fascinated attention to the many erotic and scatological passages that other commentators had left decorously unexplained.92 In this case as in others, the Dutch-born Vossius deliberately took a contrarian position in the English milieu—not only through the open libertinage of his reading of Catullus, but through the very project of publishing a Latin poetic edition. Conversely, Vossius found some of his English contemporaries reticent and indecisive even in Greek textual matters, as we see from a 1679 letter he wrote to the Oxford scholar Edward Bernard. After looking over some printed sheets of Bernard’s edition of Josephus which Bernard had sent for Vossius’s comment, Vossius replied with an admirable tact: “You have been quite sparing in indicating your own opinion in cases of variant readings. This is fine, and in this respect you follow the example of great scholars who preferred, in dubious passages, to wait for their readers’ decision rather than to prescribe one. For prudent people, to suspend judgment is a judgment in itself. And yet, nonetheless, all would not be lost if the edition contained some particularly good ideas and observations.”93 To that end, Vossius proposed that Bernard print as an appendix the conjectures on Josephus by the gifted French scholar Samuel Petit that lay unpublished in the Bodleian Library. Petit’s manuscripts on Josephus had been acquired only in 1670, reportedly for a very high price, and with the express purpose of enriching the Oxford edition that eventually became Bernard’s. Quite incredibly, Bernard declined the suggestion, although he continued to regard Vossius as an ally because Vossius had lent him two Josephus manuscripts whose readings Bernard duly printed.94 Vossius’s response to Bernard not only hinted at the same rhetorical equation of editorial silence and politeness that Bentley’s adversaries would later shake in his face. It also shows graphically the difference between the

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English and continental approaches to classical publication in the late seventeenth century. Around the 1680s, Bentley also made his first annotations in his printed copy of Joseph Scaliger’s letters, a volume that he periodically returned to as he did his Hesychius.95 By the late seventeenth century, the correspondence of many eminent humanists of earlier generations had been gathered and printed: Isaac Casaubon’s far-flung letters had been collected with substantial difficulty and finally printed in 1638, while Paul Colomiès edited the copious and disappointingly banal letters of Isaac Vossius’s father (the edition was printed shortly after the younger Vossius’s death).96 Scaliger’s correspondence, as published in 1627, offered relatively little in the way of gems of information or small and knotty scholarly questions: in this respect it differed substantially from Casaubon’s letters, and even more profoundly from the comprehensive trove of seventeenth-century scholarly letters eventually printed by Pieter Burmann in the 1720s.97 On the other hand, Scaliger’s status as a professorial celebrity in Leiden, and his multifarious dealings with other scholars as a collaborator, an adversary, a friend, and a mentor, were brought emphatically to life. All of this, of course, was activity of a kind that Bentley would already have witnessed regularly during his service to Stillingfleet, mutatis mutandis. Although Scaliger’s intellectual concerns were far more ambitious, and far more classical, than those of the English church hierarchy under Sancroft, Bentley readily saw in Scaliger a fundamentally familiar figure: the intellectual as impresario. At the same time, just as his annotations to Hesychius and Prudentius tended to do, Bentley approached Scaliger’s letters with an eye toward marking a position for England in a largely continental tradition of classical philology: he made note of Scaliger’s English associates, especially Richard Thomson, and of a journey to Cambridge by Scaliger’s protégés Charles and Pierre Labbé.98 As yet, however, Bentley did not respond to these invigorating influences in kind. Instead, his most well-defined project of the 1680s bore a close resemblance to the Greek literary scholarship of his countrymen Stanley and Gale, although its projected scope indicates that the young Bentley seriously underestimated what would be required to surpass them. In 1691, Bentley remarked that he had formerly been engaged on a project to publish the fragments of all Greek poets, with emendations and notes—a “very big book” (grande opus), as he now conceded, and one that, not surprisingly, he never completed.99 Even today no one has attempted a comprehensive collection of Greek poetic fragments. Nonetheless, from Bentley’s soaring idea, from his endless working materials, and from the results that survive, we can understand his first real attempt at combining

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pure information with a sense of original purpose. In this way we will also understand what, to the young Bentley, literary study was—and what for most of his life it would essentially remain. To study the fragments of lost Greek authors was far from a new endeavor by the late seventeenth century. One standard approach was to identify and rectify all the fragments found in one particularly rich source: Isaac Casaubon had done this as part of his commentary on the encylopedia of Athenaeus, and a series of scholars edited the fragments of Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and other Greek historians found in the Byzantine collections attributed to Constantine Porphyrogenitus.100 Alternately, a scholar might collect all the known fragments of a given ancient author, as Willem Canter had done for Sophocles and Aristophanes, or indeed as Thomas Stanley had done again in his edition of Aeschylus.101 And the collection of fragments in itself was an even older enterprise, dating from Angelo Poliziano in the fifteenth century, who studied fragments both of Greek poetry and of archaic Latin. Bentley’s projected compilation, then, implied repeating the work of a very large number of predecessors; perhaps he reasoned that to read through the Greek dictionaries and scholia to excerpt the fragments of all poets was not substantially harder than reading them in search of only a single author. Beyond this sizable appetite for research in itself, Bentley must also have realized early that he was very skilled in discovering conjectural emendations, that is, in finding lexically similar words whose meaning or metrical form he preferred to what was found in the standard texts. Given a few decades’ worth of perseverance, then, Bentley would indeed have been among the best suited of his contemporaries to make inroads on the enormous task. But one should also ask what Bentley’s imagined compilation would have been for. It would, of course, have become a standard reference work for classicists, and in that respect it would have made Bentley’s name. Yet its potential contribution went far beyond offering a handy way to check a newly encountered quotation. Bentley’s collection would also have formed the material for a far more adequate, far more interesting literary history of Greek poetry than anyone had yet attempted. No one, in fact, had seriously undertaken any monographic work about the history of Greek poetry as a whole; even synthetic studies of an entire literary genre were rare, the most admired example being Isaac Casaubon’s thoughtful treatise On Greek Satyrical Poetry and the Roman Satire (1605).102 Meanwhile, the closest thing in print to a full narrative history of classical poetry—the first book of Julius Caesar Scaliger’s well-known Poetics (1561)—was willfully tendentious and conspicuously short on documentation.103 For the most part, early modern scholars confined themselves to the history of poets

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rather than the history of poetry itself; the task of identifying, disambiguating, and dating the many authorial names and titles given by the tradition was already imposing. But even this field was less than vibrant by Bentley’s time: it was widely felt that G.  J. Vossius’s treatises On Greek Poets and On Latin Poets (1654) made scant improvement on the earlier standard treatise on poets by Lilio Giraldi (1545), itself an attractive but mildly confusing and digressive work.104 Of course, even under these conditions, it remained quite possible to chase up and compare fragments for their literary form and for their subject matter. Scholars routinely did this through handwritten guides they prepared for themselves, the most straightforward kind being an index of authors named or quoted in a printed book. An ambitious person could then proceed from this step to the converse kind of list, now listing each author by name and indicating the passages that referred to him. We have such a double collection made by Bentley’s contemporary and associate Humphrey Hody, probably prepared around the same time as Bentley’s abandoned fragments project.105 Hody clearly envisaged his collection as an investment that would yield dividends for many years; he went so far as to have his author list bound up with alphabetical leather tabs sticking from the pages, the better to find a name speedily. Yet even Hody’s prodigious labor was lacking one crucial thing. He never transcribed the text of fragmentary quotations, with the result that his collection, like Giraldi’s and Vossius’s, remained a guide to the history of poets rather than the history of poetry. Other compilations from the period, including the indexes of Bentley’s own that survive, suffered from the same limitation.106 In this context, Bentley’s project aspired to supersede the notebook format that scholars commonly employed—to give its piles of cross-references an important additional result and purpose. Nor would Bentley’s imagined compilation only have made it easier to study Greek poetry in itself. The presentation of actual poetic fragments would also have made it far more straightforward to search for the Greek sources of existing Latin poetry, an enterprise that interested Bentley in his Horace edition just as it had interested generations of earlier humanists, but that had to be pursued piecemeal given the essentially prosopographical nature of the standard reference technology. Bentley’s projected collection, if equipped with word indexes in both Greek and Latin, would have allowed the reader of any passage in Latin poetry to discover its possible Greek antecedents within minutes. Bentley’s idea, then, was a response to long-standing frustrations in the field, and as such it was neither new nor particularly characteristic of the early Enlightenment. Already in the late sixteenth century, the important Dutch scholar of Greek tragedy Willem Canter had undertaken a project

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essentially identical to Bentley’s, which we know of only through his notebooks, now in Oxford. Crucially, Canter transcribed all of his fragments of tragic and comic poetry rather than merely indexing them, but his very early death prevented him from continuing with the endeavor.107 Canter’s admirer Andreas Schott later had some Latin translations and notes transcribed into the manuscript by an amanuensis, but this stage of the project was also never finished. Canter’s notebooks continued passing from hand to hand in the seventeenth century, and J. A. Gruys has suggested that they belonged for some time to Isaac Vossius.108 Yet for all that Canter’s notebooks were treasured, they could serve only as sources for personal reference on the part of their successive owners, rather than a new tool for scholars in general. What we truly discover from the fragments project—and will continue to discover from Bentley’s Letter to Mill in the chapter that follows—is precisely what literary study meant in Bentley’s earliest milieu. Like Stanley and Gale, Bentley was profoundly attracted to the difficult, the poorly attested, and the barely knowable. A printed copy of Pindar that Bentley used for the fragments project shows the strange consequences of this approach.109 Rarely if ever annotating the text of Pindar’s poems themselves, Bentley instead read systematically through the Greek scholia that filled more than half the space on each page, underlining the scholiast’s references to other poets and verbal quotations. His notes in the margins were designed exclusively for rapid indexing of these discoveries: “Homer.” “Bacchylides.” “Callimachus.” Finally, on loose sheets, Bentley compiled a list of these authors with page references, which he apparently kept in the back of the book; he also augmented the printed index of words and topics that had come with the book originally. If aesthetic pleasure had initially motivated Bentley to study poetry, the enterprise had now burgeoned into one where aesthetic experience played a transient and occasional part. Nonetheless, the habits that Bentley formed in the small and arcane crucible of seventeenth-century Greek study made excellent sense in their original context. When the object under study was a fragment presenting an indeterminate meter and excavated from a scholiast, to establish what the poet had actually written was not only indispensable, it was fraught with genuine and difficult questions. To check the text of a passage by comparing it with other sources, rather than by seeking out manuscripts, was a fairly reasonable approach. When choosing which reading was preferable, it was both relevant and useful to ask whether a given fragment was plausible as a sentence and as a proposition. For Bentley the literary historian, then, textual criticism was a means to a necessary end; neither

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he nor his fellow Grecists were interested in discussion of methodological principles, or indeed of practices. Later, however, when Bentley transferred his bold habits elsewhere—first to the format of the Latin textual edition and ultimately to the disastrous arena of Milton’s Paradise Lost—they appeared to many not only alien but profoundly inexplicable. Yet in Bentley’s earliest work, it made some sense to prefer the clear to the vague, the expected to the unexpected, and to focus sharply on a series of individual passages rather than offering discussion of any literary work as a whole. His subsequent career, then, shows us a seventeenth-century Greek scholar boldly claiming swath after swath of novel terrain, inflicting notable casualties in the process. Nonetheless, Bentley marked himself out as a person with distinctly literary interests by comparison with many other scholars during the period. He showed no interest in the history of ancient events; he also paid little attention to the history of philosophy as a topic in its own right. These disinclinations separated Bentley clearly from his English predecessors Stanley, Pearson, and Gale—and so, even more strikingly, did Bentley’s essential lack of interest in historical chronology, which had been a central field of research and a widely used expository method during the seventeenth century. Bentley’s style of literary history relied instead on the intensive study of poetic and linguistic form, an approach that aligned him with much earlier generations of classicists. Isaac Casaubon, Caspar Barthius, and Joseph Scaliger in his early emendations on the Roman tragedy had investigated poetic fragments in precisely this formalist way; for Bentley to revive their research, and to return, more broadly, to the intensely literary priorities of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century humanists, was to journey decisively back to the future.110 We will see Bentley trying mightily in his first publication, the Letter to Mill of 1691, not only to insert himself into this earlier tradition but also to surpass it. His efforts to prove that he was a legitimate member of the club in question will show us much about Bentley’s perceptions, about his abilities, and about what, at this stage, still eluded his grasp.

chapter three

Bentley in Oxford The New and the Strange

I

n 1691, at the end of an extended stay in Oxford with his pupil James Stillingfleet, Bentley was goaded into publishing his work on poetry for the first time. The Letter to the Illustrious John Mill was a copiously detailed essay on the history of the lost Greek drama, although its arguments were based on an improbable and deeply uncongenial source. The world chronicle of the Byzantine scholar Joannes Malalas was now being published for the first time from a Bodleian manuscript, and its editor John Mill invited Bentley to contribute comments, apparently leaving the choice of approach completely in Bentley’s hands.1 Chaotic, hyperactive, and linguistically brilliant, the Letter to Mill was not only Bentley’s first attributed appearance in print; it represented a pronounced triumph for him, personally and intellectually. Under deadline to produce his essay, he finally managed to excavate something publishable out of the dispiriting mass of the Greek fragments project that, by this point, he had already abandoned. Specifically, Bentley showed that one might take Malalas’s cursory chronological notices about the lives and works of ancient playwrights, subject them to literary and linguistic argument, and in the end contribute to the state of knowledge about lost poetry in the classical world. The Letter to Mill proved to be an extremely durable work, which was most certainly thanks to Bentley rather than Malalas: Bentley’s essay was soon read and admired on the continent, and it was regularly cited in print for the length of the eighteenth century.

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Yet the Letter to Mill is more than an example of Bentley’s linguistic brilliance, or even of his occasional obtuseness. It also shows us an early modern scholar in the act of learning, which is to say an early modern scholar not quite fully finished. As to his primary material, Bentley’s discussions were sometimes very ample, sometimes flagrantly digressive, and at other times glaringly incomplete. It was also clear from the first that Bentley rejected the historical-chronological brand of scholarship that might have been reasonably expected in his milieu. His preference for strictly literary subjects would come to define his career. At this moment, however, it meant that Bentley had no obvious scholarly models in his living environment: his exemplars were known to him solely from print and also all happened to be dead. By far the most important predecessor for the Letter to Mill was Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614), whose heroic edition of Athenaeus’s vexing Hellenistic encyclopedia had shown how to identify and emend titles and textual fragments of classical Greek poems. More broadly, half a dozen early modern scholars had composed reference works that included discussion of lost Greek poetry, while the extraction of fragments from Byzantine compilations had been made customary by the publication of the two surviving treatises of Constantinus Porphyrogenitus.2 As he assembled his own essay, Bentley struggled with the task of dealing coherently with such ancestors, often floundering to establish arguments and to document them from the work of some predecessors while distinguishing himself from others. It follows that, even if Bentley found himself in an essentially scholarly environment in the university and the church, the Letter to Mill was largely the work of an autodidact, with all the freedoms and some of the deficiencies that this implies. Like Bentley’s essay, Oxford at large was energetically engaged at this moment in expanding on the heretofore standard forms of scholarship. John Fell and William Sancroft, who together had defined the scholarly mission of Restoration Oxford as essentially patristic and ecclesiastical, had both exited the scene by 1690. The rapidly changing publications of the Oxford University Press can show us at a glance the direction of the ensuing transformation. Although classical and secular studies had occasionally appeared at the press in the decades before 1690—for example, John Wallis’s editions of Greek mathematicians, and publications on pagan chronology by Humphrey Prideaux and Thomas Lydiat—classical poetry, philosophy, and historiography now became the rule rather than the exception.3 Editions of the poets Pindar (1697), Ovid (1696), and Lycophron (1697) supplanted the earlier emphasis on patristic editions, such as Cyprian (1682) and Lactantius (1684). Stoic moral philosophy was now presented via the urbane prose of Cicero (De officiis, 1695) rather than the

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bleak aphorisms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius (1680). Still, as in the decades before, the overwhelmingly favored form of publication remained the textual edition. A small-format edition not only served easily as an undergraduate textbook, it also made relatively light demands on editors. Not infrequently, they openly reprinted the text and annotations of wellknown continental predecessors, adding at best some variant readings from manuscripts in England. Oxford’s sudden efflorescence of classical publications after 1690 was largely possible, then, because the scholarly aspirations of editors and of the press remained as modest as they had generally been during the Restoration.4 On the other hand, Bentley’s essay itself appeared in the context of a publication that was anything but revolutionary. The project of publishing Malalas’s chronicle from the Bodleian Library had begun two generations earlier, when John Gregory planned to edit the text and produced annotations; after Gregory’s early death, Edmund Chilmead prepared a transcript and Latin translation of the Greek manuscript, encouraged by James Ussher. Amid the disorder of the English civil wars, this edition was not published during Chilmead’s or Ussher’s lives, and Chilmead’s manuscript lay untouched for the next several decades.5 The edition that finally appeared in 1691 bore many of the hallmarks of the ecclesiastical publications of the Restoration. Malalas’s history was Christian; it emerged from the Byzantine tradition which the Church of England was keen to appropriate; it belonged to the Baroccian collection of Greek manuscripts, for which Oxford scholars had entertained high hopes since they were acquired by the Bodleian in 1629, and its eventual publication involved multiple scholars as well as the recuperation of unpublished work by an English predecessor. Orchestrated by the biblical scholar John Mill, the edition incorporated not only Chilmead’s explanatory notes at the foot of the text but also a brief new series of notes apparently by Mill himself, a long essay by Humphrey Hody on the dating of the chronicle and the correct spelling of Malalas’s name, and Bentley’s elaborate comments on the lost classical poetry to which Malalas occasionally referred.6 This heterogeneous book, from one point of view, implicitly announced that the aims of Oxford University and of the church remained unchanged since previous generations. But from another point of view, the Malalas edition encompassed two distinct scholarly approaches which, until now, had rarely been seen at close quarters in England. For Chilmead, and also for Mill, Malalas’s chronicle deserved to be studied as a document of Byzantine intellectual culture in its own right. To that end, Chilmead thought it worthwhile in his notes to compare Malalas’s narrative in detail with that of two similar texts, the Chronicon Paschale and the chronicle of

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Cedrenus. Meanwhile, because the Oxford manuscript of Malalas was missing its beginning, Chilmead suggested how Malalas’s chronicle might have begun by printing the opening chapters of a further unpublished Byzantine work, identified in Mill’s edition as the chronicle of George Hamartolus.7 Malalas’s idiosyncratic language also attracted Chilmead’s attention: Chilmead often proposed explanations or emendations for unknown words he found in the chronicle, and Mill brought Chilmead’s linguistic inquiries up to date by preparing a list of words in Malalas that were not included in the ambitious new dictionary of Byzantine Greek by Charles du Fresne, sieur du Cange.8 The publication of Malalas, then, was designed in part to advance the field of Byzantine studies that had begun in the sixteenth century and flourished around 1600, with Bonaventura Vulcanius, Nicolas Rigault, Charles Labbé, Fédéric Morel, Johann Leunclavius, and Johann Meursius among its protagonists.9 If the ultimate aim, in principle, was to comb Byzantine sources for the far more ancient information they might contain—such had been Joseph Scaliger’s method in his Thesaurus temporum, which set the tone for the study of Greek chronology and historiography in the seventeenth century—Chilmead and some other English scholars of his generation, including Edward Bysshe and the elder Robert Creighton, were apt in practice to treat Byzantine texts as scholarly ends in themselves. A more vocal group, however, viewed Malalas purely as a potential vehicle for classical information that was otherwise lost; evaluated by that standard, he rarely shone. Thomas Stanley in his History of Philosophy could quote Malalas’s report that an ancient eclipse predicted by Thales had lasted “many hours”—Stanley was advised of this manuscript testimonium, apparently, by Edward Bysshe, who at the time possessed Chilmead’s transcript and translation—but it was left for Stanley to point out that, in fact, no eclipse could last longer than three hours.10 Far less polite was Henri de Valois, who in 1634 refused to print the excerpts he took to be Malalas’s alongside the other chroniclers he had found in Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s compilation On Virtues and Vices: with the exception of “three or four stories about Minos, Antiope, and Bellerophon—which are conveyed in none too elegant a style—he [Malalas] contains nothing worthwhile.”11 Humphrey Hody, then, was revealing no real secrets when, in the 1691 Oxford edition, he unleashed a torrent of histrionic sarcasm at Malalas’s gaffes concerning the classical world. Malalas believed, among other howlers, that Cicero and Sallust were Roman “poets”—“and I leave untouched the rest of the manure in Malalas’ stables.” Malalas’s ignorance and poor judgment, in fact, served Hody as a central argument that Malalas could not have lived during the relatively civilized reign of Justinian,

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in the sixth century CE; rather, he should be dated far later, to the ninth century, “that most miserable and darkest of all.” Malalas’s barbaric prose, too, demanded a late dating: here, Hody had the support of the wellrespected Edward Bernard, who found Malalas’s language “degenerate.”12 Bentley was not the only young person in Oxford, then, who saw an invitation to contribute to the Malalas edition as an occasion demanding personal damage control in the form of indignant complaint. Bentley began the Letter to Mill with an elaborate personal story which, whether entirely true or not, vividly suggests the atmosphere of collegiality and friendly coercion that defined professional life in the church. On asking to see the sheets of Mill’s new edition of Malalas as they came from the press, Bentley had been answered with a proposition exquisitely calculated to torment him: Bentley could read the chronicle only if he agreed to compose remarks on it for publication. In fact, both Bentley and Hody were well accustomed to executing modest tasks at the suggestion of others. In 1691, they had collaborated in the first edition of a thundering sermon from the Bodleian that they attributed to the thirteenth-century patriarch Nicephorus Callistus. The Greek oration, which exhorted the faithful to accept the authority of whoever happened to hold high ecclesiastical office, bore transparently on the contemporary English situation, in which seven bishops—including Edward Stillingfleet, who would shortly employ both Bentley and Hody as chaplains—had rapidly taken the places of those who had refused to swear loyalty to William and Mary.13 In another case, Bentley supplied Mill with a list of conjectures on the writings of Athanasius, which Mill sent to the Benedictines of St.-Maur for the edition that appeared in 1698; when the chief of the Benedictines, Bernard de Montfaucon, received the sheet of bare conjectures, he asked Mill where the rest of Bentley’s notes were, only to be told that there were none.14 Compelling invitations of this kind were, as we know, pervasive in Oxford as in the church hierarchy at large. What stands out in the case of Malalas is the complete freedom of Bentley’s brief in composing his essay, and the consequent small obligation on him to actually learn anything about Malalas. Bentley presumably did read through the whole of the chronicle at least once, but the experience seems not to have marked him deeply. Indeed, Bentley’s comments on Malalas read like a test case for the outer limits of “relevance”—limits which, in seventeenth-century scholarly practice, were already understood to be wide. At the same time, the chaotic form of the Letter may not have been wholly subject to Bentley’s control. In its raw energy and intelligence, its cascades of information, the relative inflexibility of its methods, and its lurching style of exposition, the Letter makes a close cousin to many M.A. theses produced today in the

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English-speaking world, and to the famous philological Dissertationen of nineteenth-century Germany. The resemblance is no accident. Although Bentley’s age knew no standardized system for training young scholars, much less any university degree to stamp them as qualified, the first philological publication of a young (or youngish) person tended to be selfcontained in its scope, adaptable to greater or lesser degrees of independent judgment on the part of the author, and quite possibly suggested to him by some senior and more experienced friend.15 The Letter to Mill is a collection of vehement, diffuse assaults on extraordinarily small passages in Malalas. Although Bentley managed to enfarce great amounts of digressive and polemical material into his essay, its fundamental structure was very simple. Bentley had picked out a few dozen passages in which Malalas referred to lost classical poetry, above all the drama, and in each case Bentley composed a pungent commentary exposing the mistakes of Malalas and, not infrequently, attacking his own predecessors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The shortest of Bentley’s comments was a few sentences long, while the largest—provoked by Malalas’s bland account of the earliest Greek tragedians—occupied well over thirty pages. Bentley’s choice of material forcefully dramatized his own expertise in the history of tragedy and comedy. It also emphasized for Bentley’s reader that Malalas, considered as an author, had absolutely nothing to do with Bentley’s real concerns. In fact, even the misinformations that Bentley uncovered in Malalas’s text were not the problems that he deigned to treat at length. Bentley took an expansive view of the line-by-line commentary format, which is to say he released himself from any obligation to present a coherent or continuous argument as an explication of any particular passage. Instead, Bentley drew from his notebooks a willfully heterogeneous mass of philological material, vaulting from one topic to the next with a speed that leaves the reader severely shaken, if not mystified—an effect that Bentley may not have wished to avoid. Literary history, and specifically the history of poetry, was the broad theme that connected all of his remarks in the Letter; Bentley’s prolixity seemed to signal that his expertise in this field was so vast as to elude capture by any particular argument or direction. At the same time, Mill’s invitation to compose the Letter presented Bentley with a genuine and serious question. Could he now redeploy the information he had gathered in his fragments project in order to treat specific problems in depth? Could he go beyond the punishing accumulation of fragments and testimonia and proceed to a more narrative, more conclusive kind of literary history? That Bentley aspired to do so is clear; his actual methods reveal both ready competence and, at times, noticeable limitations.

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Below the twists and turns of Bentley’s Letter lay a simple and highly traditional format, suggested or indeed demanded by the kind of information Bentley already had on hand. Whatever his notebooks and indices looked like at this stage, they apparently made it particularly easy to search for a given author and for the list of his attested works. So, for example, Bentley gathered and discussed in turn Malalas’s references to lost dramas by Euripides; he then described one by one the careers of the earliest known tragedians, Thespis, Ion, and Aeschylus. The resulting sequence of articles was patently opportunistic as a way of addressing Malalas’s chronicle, although Bentley, to his credit, never pretended otherwise. Rather, his set of comments fell squarely into the bio-bibliographical genre that the seventeenth century understood as a standard way of handling ancient cultural history, and which Bentley himself traced to the ancient practice of Callimachus, the poet and librarian. Some particularly obvious contemporary parallels included Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy, Joannes Jonsius’s Writers on the History of Philosophy, and G. J. Vossius’s reference book On Greek Poets.16 Yet this method of composition gave no clear opportunities for two things that Bentley also wanted, at least intermittently, to do: to study the history of literary genres on the broad scale and to compare the poetry and the careers of individual poets between one another. To digress was the only way in which Bentley could pursue such discussions, and this Bentley did so often as to place himself in another instantly recognizable subset of early modern publication—the scholarship of grave confusion, as perpetrated in the sixteenth century by Lilio Giraldi and in living memory by Claude Saumaise and Isaac Vossius.17 The fullest and most orderly article in the Letter was Bentley’s account of the tragedian Ion, which Bentley presented as a “specimen” of his now abandoned project to collect the fragments of all Greek poetry. Characteristically, the connection with Malalas’s chronicle was tenuous. The passage that Bentley took as his point of departure contained a series of deeply puzzling statements: “Around the time of the fall of Troy, Themis first became celebrated among the Greeks. He was the inventor of tragic melodies and the first to present dramas. Afterward Minos, and after him Auleas composed tragic choruses for their dramas.”18 None of these poets was mentioned in other sources, excepting a scholium on the Greek life of Aeschylus and a confounding passage in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromata. Bentley’s reply was succinct and unhesitating: “I know nothing of these fantastic people Theomis, Minos, and Auleas; I replace them with ‘Thespis,’ ‘Ion,’ and ‘Aeschylus,’ a conjecture that admits no doubt. Nor did Thespis live at the time mentioned, because he was contemporary with Solon and thus extremely remote from the events at Troy. Nor was Ion older than

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Aeschylus. Nor was Aeschylus the first to use tragic choruses; on the contrary, the chorus had previously sung the entire story in a continuous narrative, and he first introduced dialogue and characters.”19 This clarification was both striking and welcome, yet it hardly demonstrated any specialized knowledge on Bentley’s part. With the exception of the age of Ion—which remained a subject of controversy—the names, dates, and events in Bentley’s version of affairs were utterly standard and could have been supplied by any contemporary classicist who read the chronicle. Nor did Bentley care to address in any coherent way the related question of how the mistake in the chronicle had arisen. At the outset of his article on Ion, several pages after his “conjecture that admits no doubt,” Bentley allowed that the erroneous passage might have been due either to “a mistake in the manuscript” (presumably an error in copying) or to the faulty memory of Malalas himself. His own conjecture, Bentley now specified, was purely that “the first hand” had written “Ion” and “Aeschylus,” not “Minos” and “Auleas.”20 Conventionally, then as now, the “first hand” referred to the first written exemplar of a text or the original scribe of a given manuscript. But the language of palaeography and the descent of manuscripts was poorly suited to Bentley’s meaning here: if Malalas’s faulty memory had led him to write “Minos” and “Auleas,” then those had indeed been the readings of the “first hand.” The real way forward would have been to ask whether Malalas copied the erroneous statements from some other source, a possibility readily suggested by the Aeschylus scholium and the Clement passage that Bentley had already quoted in his article on Thespis. This mildly unsatisfactory episode shows graphically how Bentley’s fragments project had so far conditioned his aims and his habits of thought. Interested only in establishing what information was correct, Bentley spared no time for the interrelations of lost and extant sources or, in the strict sense, for Malalas’s chronicle. And by treating his authors discretely, in separate sections on Thespis and Ion, Bentley relinquished his chance at any sensible explanation for the mistakes that were the pretext for the entire discussion. In itself, however, the article on Ion shows us something like the ideal outcome of Bentley’s Greek fragments project, along with his intermittent interest in thinking in more narrative, comparative ways. The first questions Bentley addressed were prompted by ancient testimonia that did, in fact, bear on Ion’s general place in Greek literary culture. According to Plutarch, Ion had met Aeschylus in person; early modern scholars had also asked whether Ion the tragedian was the performer who converses with Socrates in Plato’s Ion. On the second point, Bentley followed Johannes Jonsius in contending that the two Ions were different—a string of adversaries from

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Lilio Giraldi to Gilles Menage had regarded them as the same. (Here, Bentley seems to have lifted his bibliography from that scourge of seventeenthcentury Protestant humanism, Leone Allacci, who was cited by Jonsius, although there is no reason to doubt that Bentley checked the sources for himself.)21 Jonsius argued that even if one treated Plato’s dialogue as a reliable report of a historical conversation—a naïve procedure, in his view— Ion the tragic poet had lived far too early to be Socrates’ interlocutor, on the grounds that Ion of Chios had already been producing tragedies twenty years before Socrates’ birth. Socrates’ interlocutor must then have been a different Ion, namely Ion of Ephesus, although Jonsius hastened to say that he would reject the identity of the two Ions even if chronology permitted it.22 Bentley began, as it appeared, by reinforcing Jonsius’s argument with a characterological distinction: the tragedian, Ion of Chios, was a wealthy and aristocratic polymath, whereas Socrates’ interlocutor, Ion of Ephesus, lived hand to mouth as a rhapsode and confessed himself ignorant of any poetry other than Homer’s. (Bentley neglected the warnings of Jonsius and others in assuming that Plato’s dialogues depicted real historical encounters.)23 Next, however, Bentley turned on Jonsius, pointing out that both he and G. J. Vossius had erred by forty years in the date when Ion of Chios began to produce tragedies. An error in Aemilius Portus’s Latin translation of the Suda lexicon had caused them to place Ion’s first tragedy in Olympiad 72, whereas the true date in the original Greek was Olympiad 82: the result was that Ion certainly was Socrates’ contemporary, beginning his dramatic career when Socrates was aged 20. This made sudden sense of a passage in Diogenes Laertius reporting that “according to Ion of Chios,” Socrates had visited Samos in his youth. Further, the redating of Ion’s tragic debut to Ol.82 made him undeniably younger than Aeschylus: Aeschylus had died, aged about 70, at least three years before Ion’s first production. This flight of deduction certainly sounded erudite, but Bentley neglected to mention that it was not quite original: the correct date of Ol.82 had already been given by Lilio Giraldi in 1545, and the true point of Bentley’s remarks was to expose the way in which Vossius and Jonsius had relied on the Latin translation of the Suda, failing to check the Greek.24 In fact, chronological reckoning of this kind was somewhat distasteful to Bentley throughout his life, and he evidently viewed a biography in chronological form as an unavoidable part of his “specimen”; the rest of his Letter to Mill conspicuously omitted regular chronological discussion of poets and dramas, except in cases where Bentley confessed to repeating his information from other scholars. At the outer limit of his tolerance, he did present arguments of his own about the date of Ion’s death, tending to treat his

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sources in an impatient and coercive way.25 Once this uncongenial work was done, though, Bentley failed to reach for the rewards that, on any reasonable reckoning, he now deserved to reap. His argument that Ion was younger than Aeschylus might easily have encouraged Bentley to add detailed remarks about literary relationships and the history of the tragedy when he went on to discuss Ion’s plays one by one, a catalogue that formed the great bulk of Bentley’s article. For example, were the subjects of any of Ion’s tragedies modeled on those of his predecessor Aeschylus—or again, what was their relation to those of Ion’s contemporary Sophocles? Did Ion use two actors in his productions, like Aeschylus, or “a third actor and scene-painting,” the elements that Aristotle attributed to Sophocles? (On the traditional assumption that Ion’s career had preceded Aeschylus’s, Ion would in fact have used only a single actor.) Yet barely any hint of such discussion made its way into Bentley’s actual comments on the fragments and testimonia of Ion. Nor did Bentley ask how customary it had been for a fairly prolific tragic poet like Ion to write in the many additional poetic and prose genres ascribed to him, even though Bentley duly discussed these nondramatic works in the later part of his article.26 To the extent that Bentley made any connections of this kind, they were verbal: a striking instance came when he silently emended a passage he quoted from Diogenes Laertius, the better to make Laertius appear to be citing Ion’s historical work on famous “Visitors” to Chios.27 Here as in the Letter to Mill in general, nearly all of Bentley’s remarks turned on the amassing and crossreferencing of fragments considered individually. He did indeed divide his fragments by literary genre and add an initial section of biography. Yet these elements of the traditional bio-bibliographical essay had not, as yet, prompted him to transcend the scholarship of the notebook. Nor did Bentley execute even his brief of accumulation with complete success: his list of Ion’s tragedies left one out, apparently a completely inadvertent mistake.28 The point is remarkable because only a few years later, Bentley’s Dissertation on Phalaris (2nd ed., 1699) inaugurated the kind of literary historiography for which he became famous, the energetically argued history of texts in close connection with the history of genres. For the moment, however, Bentley was capable of arguing on a broader plane chiefly when he was provoked or inspired by others; the polemical mode for which he became notorious was not his invariable way of writing, but in his early years, it was indeed the most interesting one. In the article on Ion, a tangle with two important predecessors allowed Bentley at last to make claims that required literary judgment: Ion’s drama Omphale, attested in the Aristophanes scholia and in Greek lexica, seems to have interested him in the first instance in that it formed an opportunity to contend. Bentley capitalized

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on this piece of good fortune by inserting long passages that (strictly speaking) counted as copious and quarrelsome digressions—another lifelong habit that appeared in the Letter in its purest and most extreme form. Beginning his discussion with a passage in Hesychius’s lexicon that cited a word used in the Omphale, Bentley noticed a conjectural emendation by le Paulmier that he quickly countered with another; he went on to emend numerous words in numerous lexica, none of which happened to have any bearing on any passage in the Omphale itself. This volley was probably assembled purely out of Bentley’s notebooks and indices, since he seems not to have had his annotated Hesychius with him in Oxford.29 But immediately afterward, provoked apparently by an oversight on the part of Isaac Casaubon, Bentley pounced on a far more interesting quarry. If one looked up references to the Omphale by Casaubon, one learned from his early edition of Strabo that this was a satyr play, that poorly known genre that Athenian playwrights customarily appended to each triad of tragedies—in a festival performance, a dessert of vulgarities to follow a day’s worth of difficulty and seriousness. When one did the next logical thing, however, which was to check Casaubon’s later treatise On Greek Satyr Poems and Roman Satire, one found that Casaubon mentioned the Omphale but noted “I find no authorities for this drama being a satyr play.”30 (Evidently, the absence of an index to the chaotic Athenaeus commentary caused inconvenience not only for Casaubon’s readers.) The discrepancy, for Bentley, was irresistible. Bentley proceeded to mount a substantial argument of his own, from purely internal evidence, to the effect that the Omphale was a satyr play. To judge its subject matter from later mythography, Bentley thought, the play would have narrated the penitential sojourn of the hero Heracles at the Lydian court of Queen Omphale; the unhappy guest was obliged to spin wool among the women and risked beating if his tough thumbs broke the thread.31 Bentley plausibly characterized the surviving fragments of the play as further evidence for the satyr-drama theory: “they suggest nothing but parties, carousing, and music.”32 Characteristically, Bentley decided to conjecture in order to make one of these passages support his claim even more clearly. Casaubon had already attacked the odd-sounding quotation from Omphale given in Athenaeus Book 10. “Ion, after dilating on his [sc. Heracles’] gluttony in Omphale, adds: “By way of worship [eujfhmiva~], he swallowed up the logs and coals” (Deipn. 411b).33 To take the place of “worship,” Casaubon had coined a Greek word that greatly heightened the passage’s theme of gluttony while changing only two letters of the original word: Casaubon’s Heracles devoured logs and coals “out of gourmandise [eujfagiva~].” But as Bentley correctly pointed out, this suggestion was

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metrically impossible. Bentley produced a further guess, “ravenous hunger [boulimiva~],” a far more impolite-sounding word which has occasionally been accepted as the true reading.34 Bentley followed up this sustained argument with another one, this time to the effect that the classical term for a satyr play had taken the plural form savt uroi (“satyrs”) rather than the singular savt uro~; this argument too bore directly on the testimonia for the Omphale, although Bentley mustered parallel cases from elsewhere. Finally, Bentley turned to the subject of the Strabo passage that described the Omphale as a satyr play. Grudgingly, he now admitted that Casaubon had known this testimonium (indeed, Casaubon had discussed the passage in his 1587 commentary on the complete Geography of Strabo), although at the outset of his discussion Bentley had misleadingly implied that Casaubon did not.35 As for himself, Bentley insisted that his own arguments about the Omphale, based on its presumed plot and on the fragments, had been devised before he had learned of the Strabo testimonium. This tactic of claiming that an original idea had later been “confirmed” by other evidence would remain one of Bentley’s favorites throughout his career; already in the Letter to Mill, it had become his standard, strident response to the perpetual discomfort of being born too late. In a different case, Bentley took common knowledge as inspiration for a new argument of his own, namely, in his long discussion of the poems attributed to Orpheus that formed the first section of the Letter. Orpheus, the putative monotheist prophet and poet of the oldest times in Greece, had been discredited in learned circles for decades; such mainstream churchmen as Edward Stillingfleet, Ralph Cudworth, and Thomas Burnet acknowledged in print that the Orphic poems, once treated as a weighty support to Christianity, were probably forged.36 This did not prevent Bentley from devoting a seven-page discussion to them, spurred by a series of references in Malalas, in which Bentley spectacularly emended the very oracles that he took to be impostures.37 It evidently made little difference to Bentley whether Malalas himself had erred or whether he had copied from an incorrect source; the sole aim was to restore the passages to their original (fake) form. From this, Bentley turned to an independent argument whose jumpingoff point was the accepted inauthenticity of the Orphic poems. He began by seizing on a decidedly unusual poetic passage that Malalas, along with several church fathers, attributed to the Greek tragedian Sophocles: eiJ~ ejsti qeov~, o}~ oujrano;n e[t euxe kai; gai`an makravn, povntou de; carwvpou oi\dma kai; ajnevmwn biva~.

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There is one god who created the heaven and the wide earth, the swell of the gray sea and the power of the winds.38

The speakers, evidently supposed to be a tragic chorus, go on to observe that their own polytheistic worship of statues is therefore mistaken and useless. Bentley’s first intervention on this passage was textual: he slightly altered its wording to regularize the meter and to make it agree with quotations of the same lines by Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, and other church fathers.39 Bentley was evidently not interested in the possibility that Malalas had actually written down the passage in a divergent form; instead, his priority was to correct the text by making it correspond with other citations and with the laws of tragic versification—despite his belief that the passage was not really by a tragedian. Bentley next argued against the passage’s authenticity on four grounds. In the first place, why was the passage quoted in antiquity only by church fathers, and never by pagans like Plutarch, Porphyry, or Stobaeus? The church father Clement of Alexandria had openly admitted to finding the passage in a book by the Jewish historian Hecataeus, a known promulgator of a Hebraeocentric account of world history, and not in any actual play by Sophocles. Bentley concluded that both Clement and Justin took the passage from Hecataeus and then became the sources for subsequent church fathers who quoted it: Bentley thus turned a string of seemingly irreproachable patristic attestations into evidence of the passage’s inauthenticity. In the second place, Bentley pointed out, the language of the passage was incompatible with the Attic dialect and the tragedy. Third, he doubted very much that Sophocles would have dared to present this text on the stage during a polytheistic religious festival, even if he had been a monotheist himself.40 Finally, Bentley claimed that he saw Hebrew-derived syntax and phrases in the “Sophocles” passage that appeared nowhere else in Greek literature except for one of the Sibylline oracles—but according to Bentley, this oracle too was a forgery by Hecataeus or some other overeager Jewish apologist.41 Notwithstanding the pride with which Bentley produced this account, his attack on the “Sophocles” passage was not especially overbold or unexpected in the English church of the period. Not to mention the accepted inauthenticity of Orpheus, in 1684 Humphrey Hody had published a tract aimed at demolishing the Letter of Aristeas, traditionally taken as the guarantor of the accuracy of the Septuagint biblical translation but already frequently attacked during the seventeenth century beginning with Joseph Scaliger.42 Meanwhile, in 1680, Henry Dodwell had attacked the Phoenician History attributed to Sanchuniathon, which “revealed” the monotheism

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and quasi-Judaism of the ancient Phoenicians. As to the “Sophocles” passage, matters were slightly different. Bentley’s older friend Edward Bernard would take offense at Bentley’s attack, defending the learning and probity of the church fathers; Ralph Cudworth, too, had defended the “Sophocles” passage, which indeed may have supplied an incentive for Bentley to argue against it.43 Protesting that he was indeed in line with contemporary scholarship, Bentley pointed out that Joseph Scaliger had earlier doubted the authenticity of the Sophocles passage, following a suggestion in Philo Judaeus: here as in the case of Casaubon and the satyr drama, then, Bentley chose to present a full and novel argument to back up an existing idea, not unlike a modern academic article inspired by a single footnote in someone else’s publication. Sometimes, on the other hand, Bentley emphasized the distinctively literary and poetic orientation of his work. Take, for example, his reaction to Malalas’s statement that “the poet Euripides presented a drama about Pasiphaë,” the daughter of Helios who, to her misfortune, fell in love with a bull. This drama was not actually titled Pasiphaë, Bentley argued, but rather Cretans, and moreover not Cretan Women, a distinct and very different lost play whose title Hugo Grotius had mistakenly attached to the drama about Pasiphaë. (Bentley found this information in the scholia to Aristophanes, one of his usual sources in the Letter.) Spurred by a quotation from Porphyry, however, which Bentley decided was a fragment of the Cretans, Bentley quickly leaped to a different and much flashier subject (in his hands), that of poetic meter. One word in Porphyry’s passage, he said, was not only totally unattested, it was also impossible on grounds of meter: an anapestic dimeter brachycatalectic line could not be directly followed by a paroemiac line. This led Bentley to his real intervention, which, however, at the outset had nothing to do with Greek: he now criticized Hugo Grotius’s Latin verse translation of the Porphyry fragment, in which Grotius had included an anapestic line in which the fourth and final anapest was substituted by a tribrach. This was impossible, Bentley pointed out, as it would also be to substitute a trochee or cretic; Bentley claimed that in an anapestic line in Greek or Latin, the final place could only be supplied by a foot four beats long like all the others.44 In other words, it was wrong to assume that the last syllable of an anapestic line could be reckoned as long or as short indifferently: “Grotius made this mistake in common with Joseph Scaliger, Florent Chrestien, and (I believe) all others who in this and the previous century translated Greek tragedies into Latin or composed new ones of their own. . . . If these characters had published their plays in ancient Greece or Rome, they would have been driven from the stage with hisses and hoots.”45 As it happened, Bentley was correct; in

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fact, he was the first scholar to point out this synapheia, or continuous connection, of anapestic lines. His note on “Pasiphaë” quickly rushed onward with a dizzying train of further emendations to the fragmentary quotation in Porphyry. The basic reason for this note on “Pasiphaë” was that Bentley was in the course of writing a series of eleven notes about references to Euripides in Malalas; there was as yet no systematic collection of Euripides fragments in print. However, it was distinctively Bentleian to turn this note into a question of literary sensitivity, and also to assail one of the most honored of his predecessors, Joseph Scaliger. The attack was especially perverse, or deceptive, because Bentley’s scholarly approach throughout his life was shaped by the legacy of Scaliger and his admirers. On the one hand, beginning with the Letter to Mill, Bentley showed himself reluctant to engage with the Scaliger familiar to seventeenth-century English scholars, the author from whom all studies of historical chronology must begin; Bentley’s assaults on Hellenistic forgeries in the Letter formed an important exception to this general distaste. At the same time, Bentley recuperated as his model the polite, literary Scaliger, the editor of Catullus and Manilius and the author of many verse translations, from the Latin version of Sophocles’ Ajax which Bentley critiqued to a Greek version of a section of Petrarch’s Trionfo d’Amor. Perhaps closest to the Letter to Mill in its philological task was Scaliger’s set of youthful annotations on the Roman grammarian Varro, whose explanations of abstruse Latin words prompted Scaliger to flurries of quotation and emendation of Latin and Greek poetry. For Scaliger, this became an occasion both to proclaim the excellence of his literary taste and to present the study of meter as an unquestionable corollary of that taste.46 It followed that Bentley’s somewhat prideful pronouncements about his own competence in meter (the Letter to Mill contains many more) placed him in a direct competition with Scaliger, of whom Bentley would concede years later that “in the field of meter, no one is more expert than Scaliger.”47 And it was for this reason, presumably, that Bentley in the Letter showed a particular glee in catching Scaliger out. Still, the rivalry evidently proceeded from a close knowledge of Scaliger’s career, not from any fundamental difference in aim. Both in his youth and in later years, Bentley carefully annotated his copy of Scaliger’s printed letters, for example, identifying scholars whose names had been struck out by the editor and paying special attention to any references to England (Figure 2).48 Throughout the Letter, in fact, Bentley labored to present himself as a man of expertise and taste combined. What really held together his powerful treatise was neither a firmly unified subject matter nor a deeply considered

Figure 2. Bentley’s annotations in his printed copy of Joseph Scaliger’s correspondence (Leiden, 1627). In his youthful hand, he identifies “Manilius” as the project that Scaliger complains is taking a long time to print. In a later hand, Bentley notes that Franciscus Junius is the critic “who doesn’t even know Latin, far less does he understand astronomy.” © The British Library Board, shelfmark 1086.b.1.

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set of scholarly methods. Instead, a striking rhetorical and literary persona burgeoned out of every page of the Letter: abrasive, prideful, frequently sarcastic, and invariably calculated to impress and intimidate. Bentley’s trenchant abuse of Malalas formed the most obvious vehicle for such shows of mastery. But in countless other settings, too, he was capable of elevating his style to a febrile, even opprobrious intensity. Particularly when dealing with his scholarly predecessors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Bentley could indulge in a verbose and hyperornamented polemical rhetoric, creaking with benighted attempts at humor, that was sharply distinctive to the English Restoration. For all the theatricality of many of his subsequent works, Bentley (to his credit) never repeated exactly this kind of presentation again. Here, to take one representative case, he began his note with a swingeing attack on Malalas: P. 214. Stesichorus and Bacchylides, who were inventors of the dance and poets. Say what? Clearly we were misinformed, because we thought you were born at Antioch. At least according to Lucian, the Antiochians should have known better about dancers than anyone else. You, however, along with all the other arts, we find grossly ignorant of this one. May I ask, you most lazy of men, did you never peruse the Holy Scriptures? Is there not frequent mention of dancing long, long before Stesichorus was born? So? Did you never look at Homer even “through a lattice”? Well, you might as well hear him now: Dancing and music, which are the delights of a feast. God gives to one man the deeds of battle, To another dancing, to another the lyre and song. But I know what drove you to your imposture: the name of Stesichorus, as though he were the first who estesato chorous [“instituted choruses”], and further, certain poems of Bacchylides called Dancing Songs, which are quoted by Stobaeus and also in Athenaeus book 14: “In the hyporchematic, the chorus dances while singing: at any rate Bacchylides says ‘Chairs we need not, nor preludes.’ ” The passage appears in somewhat fuller form in Dionysius of Halicarnassus: “Chairs we need not, nor preludes, but she of the golden aegis [i.e., Athena]: we must go to the well-wrought temple of [Athena] Itonia and perform something graceful.” The meter is cretics, except for one foot resolved into a paeon, so that as I read this passage, I seem to see them before my eyes dancing and leaping. However, Bacchylides was not even the originator and inventor of dancing songs; rather, as some say, it was Pindar, or as others claim, Xenodamus. See Clement, Athenaeus, and Plutarch’s On Music.49

The assault on the adversary, the impressive citations, and the mildly overripe display of himself as a man of aesthetic discernment remained Bentley’s most favored rhetorical maneuvers until the end of his life. But over the

Figure 3. Bentley’s heavily annotated working copy of Aristophanes (Basel, 1547), which he mined for quotations of lost poetry. In the massive scholia that surround the text of the comedy, Bentley underlines the names of authors cited (“Plutarch,” “Aristotle,” “Cratinus”). In the margins, his youthful hand notes several of the words that are discussed in the commentary. At the top of the page, Bentley’s older hand records a conjecture. © The British Library Board, shelfmark 676.h.13.

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same span of time, the agility and the transmutations of his Latin style impress on us that for Bentley and many of his contemporaries, Latin remained an eminently living language, always the same yet always available for highly personal use. As Bentley himself put the case in his Phalaris Dissertation, “by being Dead, it’s become Immortal.”50 By all accounts, he spoke Latin as readily as he wrote it, an attainment that in theory was expected of all university men and in some cases was actually achieved. At every point, Bentley writing in Latin sounded much like Bentley writing in English: often formal and polished in the later 1690s, pungent and quick in the subsequent decades, and by the 1720s comparatively calm, even avuncular. On the other hand, he never showed any sign of interest in another striking contemporary style—the suave, concise, and beautifully measured Latin of native French speakers such as Jean Le Clerc. Bentley might easily have said of himself what Angelo Poliziano proudly claimed two centuries before: that in writing Latin, “I am not Cicero. Yet I do express myself, I think.”51 But whatever Bentley’s style at a given moment, his displays of selfassurance were brutally hard-won. Even a brief glance at the Letter’s actual sources shows precisely why the distance from Bentley’s notebooks to Bentley’s arguments was so long to traverse. The British Library holds Bentley’s copy of a printed Aristophanes with full scholia, which he annotated systematically in his earliest hand (Figure 3). On each page, a few lines of Aristophanes in large Greek type are surrounded and in danger of suffocation by the Byzantine commentary in smaller type, not unlike the visual presentation of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695–1697). Infrequently, Bentley annotated the text of Aristophanes itself, usually with proposed variants. Always, however, he paid close and exhaustive attention to the scholia, noting in the margin each word discussed in the commentary, and underlining every citation of an ancient poet or work. Yet even though Bentley’s annotations dealt exclusively in poetry, it would be very hard to think of this method as literary reading. From the point of view of his own aims, it becomes clear, in the first place, why Bentley in the 1680s could have regarded a comprehensive fragment collection as a viable project: to hunt for the fragments of one Greek poet was to search the sources of them all. We also see graphically why Bentley’s presentation of himself as an expert on poetry was so ambitious and, to many contemporaries, so implausible. In preferring the lost to the known, the barely comprehensible to the aesthetically inviting, Bentley remained unquestionably a scholar of the seventeenth century, even as he tentatively superposed on this the fashionable identity of a man of taste. The same struggle would mark nearly all of Bentley’s publications, not least his Dissertation on the Epistles of Phalaris.

chapter four

Into the Drawing Room The Public Intellectual

I

n the 1690s, Bentley became a public figure in London, attracting ever more attention, to his benefit and sometimes to his detriment. In his sermon series known as the Boyle Lectures, he deployed classical learning and contemporary science in a fashionable argument against atheism. As the primary agent for the Cambridge University Press, he struck a deal with a respected literary publisher to bring out a series of editions of the bestknown Latin poets. And in his post as keeper of the Royal Library, he dreamed of establishing a new society for humanistic scholarship comparable to the Royal Society and of refounding the Royal Library itself on a magnificent scale. For six years following the Letter to Mill Bentley published nothing, apart from his sermon series. He spoke of working on new projects, such as editions of Philostratus and Manilius, but nothing appeared except a collection of the poetic fragments of Callimachus, which he executed at the invitation of his Dutch correspondent J.  G. Graevius. It took the armtwisting of a pamphlet war to call forth Bentley’s next scholarly publication, his Dissertation on the letters of Phalaris (1st ed. 1697). The controversy at hand is known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, a polemic that first arose in the previous decade in France, then migrated to England during the 1690s. The side onto which friends attempted to recruit Bentley pointed to the excellence of modern knowledge, daring to compare it directly, sometimes even favorably, with the learning current in

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classical antiquity. Bentley’s actual contribution, however, was a minutely detailed scholarly essay devoted to proving the inauthenticity of a very strange Greek work, a set of letters attributed to the archaic tyrant Phalaris. Bentley’s original edition of this Dissertation managed to be suave, even elegant, as it retailed the telling minutiae of impossible dates, place names, even the names of ancient drinking vessels. But after becoming the target of a hostile reply, Bentley retaliated in the best tradition of the seventeenthcentury pamphlet war, with a grossly expanded and miscellaneous new edition. This second Dissertation (1699) resembled the Letter to Mill in the copiousness of its arguments and its occasionally tenuous relevance to the issue ostensibly at hand. At the same time, because it was composed in English, the second Dissertation made it possible for a vernacular audience to see what seventeenth-century Greek scholarship was really like, bringing Bentley’s trade out of the restricted circle of Latinists and into the world at large.

Pious Learning: The Boyle Lectures Bentley was chosen as the first of the churchmen who were to fulfill a provision in the will of Robert Boyle, the chemist and prominent figure in the early Royal Society of London. Boyle had endowed an annual series of sermons, or “lectures,” which were specifically supposed to avoid doctrinal controversy among Christians and instead to assail “notorious Infidels, viz. Atheists, Deists, Pagans, Jews and Mahometans.”1 For Bentley, the injunction to polemic was apparently welcome: in addition to atheists and deists, his sermons excoriated Epicureans, Cartesians, Aristotelians, and others whom he characterized as wholesale rejectors of religion. At the same time, Bentley injected novelty into his theme by drawing extensively on contemporary science in his many proofs for the existence of a creator God. The stakes were comparatively high, for this sermon series was directed not merely to a London audience but to a discernibly privileged London audience. Bentley’s eight monthly sermons in 1692 were delivered alternately at St. Mary-le-Bow, a church in the City of London frequently used for ceremonial occasions, and at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, until recently the parish of Thomas Tenison, which stood in extremely close proximity to the court. All were delivered on Mondays, which excluded from the audience anyone with a regular job, and by 1714 the Boyle Lectures were invariably delivered at ten o’clock in the morning.2 Many of these listeners would have been people of cultivation; nonetheless, Bentley already faced the problem that would burgeon over his work in the coming

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decades. How was he to present the fruits of his learning for an audience that included not only the expert but also the fashionable? Like other proofs for the existence of God, Bentley’s lectures were potentially interesting for their means rather than their ends. The most famous element of Bentley’s Boyle Lectures, one that has inspired much published comment over the last decades, is his recourse to Isaac Newton’s Principia, published in Latin only five years earlier in 1687. In one of his final sermons, devoted to the “confutation of atheism from the origin and frame of the world,” Bentley seized on Newton’s notion of gravitation and corralled it into his own theological scheme.3 Claiming that gravity could never be inherent in matter itself, Bentley instead ascribed its operation to a direct divine “energy and impression.” More than this, Bentley thought that the continual action of gravitation implied God’s continuous activity in the cosmos: “an immaterial living Mind doth inform and actuate the dead Matter, and support the Frame of the World.”4 Newton, in fact, had not drawn this conclusion in the Principia; indeed, in a letter, he pointed out to Bentley that he had left for the judgment of readers whether the “agent” causing gravity were “material or immaterial.”5 Accordingly, what Bentley propagated publicly through this sermon was not so much a familiarity with the Principia itself as a decisive inference about Newton’s actual beliefs. At the same time, much as Bentley’s Boyle Lectures were widely read and reprinted, it is an open question whether Bentley’s sermons incorporating astronomy were an attraction for all contemporary readers. Their Latin translator, Daniel Jablonski of Berlin, went so far as to apologize in his dedicatory letter in case the final sermons should seem “somewhat arid” to readers not versed in mathematics.6 The novelty of their material aside, Bentley’s sermons also partook deeply of the corporate ethos of the Restoration church. In response to his new public setting, Bentley abandoned the hectoring, mercurial tone of his Letter to Mill of the previous year. Rather, the lectures’ comparatively polished and simple style was that of the sermons of Stillingfleet and of John Tillotson, whose printed sermons were best sellers by this time (and, one assumes, widely pillaged by parish clergy). His arguments for the existence of God were no more original at their foundation. Bentley’s mentor Stillingfleet had also appealed to the argument from design in the third book of his Origines sacrae, a treatise arguing in favor of the Hebrews as the founders of all human culture, and in fact Bentley read Stillingfleet’s work carefully as he was composing his Boyle Lectures. For example, the four atheistic accounts of the origin of humanity which Bentley argued against in his third, fourth, and fifth sermons were lifted (with one modification) from a similar list in Stillingfleet.7 Most likely Stillingfleet would have understood

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Bentley’s borrowings as an homage, since Stillingfleet himself had promoted Bentley as a candidate to give the first course of lectures.8 But Stillingfleet was not the only senior churchman on whom Bentley drew. Bentley’s first sermon, The Folly of Atheism, bore a very close resemblance to a sermon delivered before the queen the previous year by Thomas Tenison, A Sermon Concerning the Folly of Atheism, on the identical biblical text (Ps. 14:1: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God: They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doth good”).9 And indeed the entire structure of Bentley’s Boyle Lectures corresponded to a planned sermon sequence found in the papers of John Tillotson, created Archbishop of Canterbury in 1691, in which a total of thirty-three sermons explicated the Apostle’s Creed line by line. Tillotson’s plan, in addition to “the Evil and unreasonableness of Infidelity” once again, called for sermons on “the Being of God proved from the Frame of the World” and “the Being of God proved from the Frame of Human Nature”—the topics that occupied the last five of Bentley’s eight Boyle Lectures.10 Far from being a plagiarist in our sense, however, Bentley in this case was a highly competent organization man in the style of the Restoration church, willing and able to participate in the ongoing dissemination of official viewpoints as a single (and junior) member of a wider group. Bentley’s sermons were also erudite in the humanistic mode, a phenomenon that in the seventeenth century was in no way unusual. The “atheists” under attack frequently turned out to be the ancient philosopher Epicurus and his admirer the poet Lucretius; indeed, Bentley referred rarely to early modern adversaries, naming “the Cartesians,” Girolamo Cardano and Andrea Cesalpino, only in passing.11 This was of a piece with the seventeenthcentury English habit of referring all modern doctrines to ancient ones, along the lines of Thomas Hobbes being called a “gnostic” or the ancient atomist Democritus being redescribed as an irreproachable theist in order to show the compatibility of atomism and Christianity in the present.12 Bentley allowed himself to include Greek words in his text and to refer (to take a few examples) to authors such as Isocrates, Lucian, Philostratus, and Aristophanes without the least hint of who they were; it is hard to gauge whether less educated members of his audience, particularly women, would have regarded such references as irritating or as simply inevitable.13 However, Bentley clearly attempted to stratify his printed sermons into a less demanding version and a more demanding one by including many patristic and classical quotations in the margins in their original languages. A reader could thus tackle Bentley’s sources or ignore them according to inclination. Quotations from Lucretius were by far the most frequent, but Bentley introduced a host of other sources for the history of ancient

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philosophy and science, in the most egregious case explaining the Cartesian doctrine of animals as automata with a reference to the statues of Daedalus drawn from Zenobius and the Suda.14 At the same time, Bentley was perfectly willing to abandon his specialist knowledge when the rhetorical moment demanded it, in a series of cases where his own philological expertise would have suggested that he should hold his fire. For example, in the Boyle Lectures Bentley was as unable as most of his contemporaries to abstain from using the well-worn metaphor of the world as book: like a text, the world was complex yet legible, and it pointed ineluctably to the existence of its author.15 Bentley rang many changes on this metaphor: the human body was “the great Dramatic Poem of Nature,” like the Aeneid or Ennius’s Annales, but it was also like a Roman coin or ruin, or like Mount Athos carved Rushmore-like into a statue of Alexander the Great (an unexecuted plan of the sculptor Dinocrates).16 Whichever the case, Bentley claimed, no one could deny that the body was conceived of and produced by an intelligent agent, any more than they could suppose that a monkey might write Hobbes’s Leviathan out of pure chance.17 Now Bentley’s use of these well-worn tropes is remarkable because it makes matters seem simpler than he as a philologist knew they were. Bentley’s own fascination with textual forgery finds no parallel in the sermons, for obvious reasons; nor did he speak of the Aeneid, Ennius, or even the Leviathan as texts that were subject to copying, corruption, interpolation, or critical revision. Indeed, the simple argument that every text plainly manifests its author is one that Bentley himself was shortly to deride in the controversy over the letters of Phalaris, when Sir William Temple had claimed that the forged letters attributed to Phalaris must be authentic on the grounds that they so perfectly reflected their supposed author. In calling on the world-as-book metaphor, then, not only was Bentley content to present an argument that was more or less a petitio principii, he was also prepared to suppress his complex expert knowledge in the service of an argument that was at once attractive and deceptively simple. Here, Bentley the churchman and Bentley the scholar were two discernibly different creatures. This, perhaps, is no surprise: more generally, Bentley’s theological writing was essentially divorced from his real work as a scholar, undertaken as a quite separate enterprise and solely on occasions when he might gain patronage and reward. The Boyle Lectures, for example, were manifestly a chance for Bentley to prove himself not only before the church hierarchy but also before the gentleman scholar John Evelyn, who would become an important patron for Bentley in the 1690s. Decades later, Bentley’s sudden announcement that he planned to edit the New Testament came at a moment

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when he expected the rich Regius chair of theology at Cambridge to fall vacant (it duly did, and Bentley duly captured it). Such episodes show us that however determinedly secular and literary Bentley might have made himself in his scholarly life, his professional and social ambitions occasionally imposed their own forms of ecclesiastical duty. Conversely, Bentley’s theological projects remind us of the great chasm he succeeded in opening between what he was expected to become and what he did in fact become: a mark of the great change at work in the contemporary church and in Bentley’s own career.

The Royal Library and the Cambridge University Press In the middle 1690s, Bentley the scholar set out to transform both the Royal Library and the Cambridge University Press, two projects that proceeded from a single insight: that intellectual communities and physical books were mutually dependent. Bentley was made Keeper of the Royal Library in 1693 and keeper of the king’s other libraries the following year, in succession to Henri Justel.18 Bentley’s new job enabled him to move out of Stillingfleet’s house and into an apartment in the palace of St. James in London, directly above the library itself. In 1695, Bentley was also appointed a chaplain in ordinary to the king, strengthening his foothold in the court; this job involved being in attendance one month out of the year, and he would hold it until his death.19 The librarian’s post apparently involved no particular qualification other than Bentley’s being a scholar familiar with manuscripts and, of course, his political connections. Librarianship was not thought of in the seventeenth century as a profession that required special training, or as a calling incompatible with other intellectual pursuits. Isaac Casaubon had been keeper of the Royal Library of France, for example; Isaac Vossius was briefly the librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden, and G.  W. Leibniz was keeper of the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel.20 Like Borges in the twentieth century, these seventeenth-century scholars sometimes found that their day jobs were all to the good for their own writing. Bentley’s contemporaries did, of course, recognize that it was possible to organize and stock a large library more or less well. Gabriel Naudé had published a treatise on the subject in 1627, which was translated into English by Bentley’s friend John Evelyn.21 But Bentley already knew the ways of early modern libraries, having spent more than a decade among Edward Stillingfleet’s thousands of books; his primary responsibilities would have been to maintain

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the Royal Library manuscripts and to deal with visitors, since the library made relatively few acquisitions during his tenure.22 Beginning in 1719, he had an assistant, David Casley, who ran personal errands for Bentley and apparently for Bentley’s associates; for example, he collated manuscripts for Bentley’s edition of the New Testament, and he acted as an agent for Bentley’s student John Walker in Walker’s attempts to sell off manuscripts he had acquired in France.23 Casley later prepared a catalogue of the King’s Library, a separate establishment from the Royal Library, which Bentley also oversaw.24 About 1735, Bentley replaced Casley with his own son Richard, who eventually succeeded Bentley as royal librarian as well. By the end of 1697, Bentley was publicizing an ambitious plan to move the Royal Library, as well as himself, squarely into the public eye in England and in Europe. He printed a proposal calling for an act of Parliament to construct a new library building in St. James’s Park, to increase the collection to 200,000 volumes, and, most importantly, to open the library to the scholarly public.25 Bentley’s friend John Evelyn approached members of Parliament with the proposal and distributed copies of it to his house guests, who he assured Bentley were suitably impressed.26 Unfortunately, the plan was never brought to fruition in Bentley’s lifetime, although the Royal Library was given to the new British Museum by George II in 1757. But Bentley’s proposal acutely shows how he perceived England’s place in the Republic of Letters: the library he imagined would have been a center of learning both for the nation and for the international community of scholars. In the proposal, Bentley painted the library’s present situation in desolate colors. He complained that the library’s room in the palace was small and poorly maintained, no foreign books had been acquired since before the civil wars of the 1640s, and there was no money to bind even the domestic books that the London stationers were obliged to deliver to the library gratis. Bentley called for the construction of a new library building on the south side of St. James’s Park, to be decorated with ancient inscriptions and “Basso Relievo’s,” and not omitting “a competent Dwelling for the Library-Keeper.” To finance this construction as well as a yearly budget for acquisitions, Bentley proposed a “very small” tax on imported paper, with the revenue to be directed straight to the library; paper produced in England was to be untaxed. This system was supposed to replace the enormous current taxes of 40 percent on imported paper and 20 percent on domestically produced paper, which had made it difficult for Bentley and others to print their works in England during the 1690s.27 In addition to regular acquisitions, Bentley proposed that the library should purchase entire private libraries when the opportunity arose; he suggested the great

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libraries of Jacques de Thou and Marquardus Gudius, although in the event the Royal Library obtained neither one.28 The suggestion shows, if nothing else, that Bentley had good access to news from the international book world. Gudius’s library had been potentially available since his death in 1689, but much of de Thou’s library had been purchased in 1680 by Jean-Jacques de Charron, marquis de Menars, who was now apparently trying to get rid of his acquisitions (he sold them sometime after 1701 to the future cardinal de Rohan). To finance such large purchases, Bentley proposed that the library’s curators might, in effect, issue bonds against future revenue from the paper tax.29 Bentley had clear ideas about who would use this new library and how. He pointed out, in the first place, that the Royal Library established at St. James’s Palace by James I had been “designed and founded for publick use,” implying that in his own day, by contrast, few people actually used the library unless they required a specific or unique document.30 In referring to the “publick use” he planned to encourage, Bentley did not literally mean that he proposed to welcome anyone in Britain through his portals; no doubt he simply intended that the library should be open at regular times to anyone with scholarly interests, roughly like the modern British Library. The term “public” was used this way in Bentley’s time for the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge—each being commonly called “the public library” of its university, and each admitting scholars from outside the university after more or less harassment. Prominent among the Royal Library’s hypothetical new public were young travelers, whom Bentley believed the new building would draw from all over the civilized world as they sought to further their erudition and their skills in English conversation. In a moment of special prescience, Bentley predicted that “more Money will be annually imported and spent here by such Students from abroad, than the Whole Charge and Revenue of the Library will amount to.” At the same time, Bentley hoped that his own countrymen would converge on the new library, and not only to look at the books. He imagined a library that would serve as an official scene of erudite conversation for English scholars and notables. Bentley envisaged “Societies . . . that shall meet, and have Conferences there about matters of Learning”—societies that sound much like the philological Académie Française and the antiquarian Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (at this time called the Petite Academie) in France.31 Bentley did not mention these French societies in his proposal, but he did mention the Royal Society of London as a model for his new organizations. The effect of mentioning the Royal Society was simultaneously to associate his own plan with the Royal Society’s prestige and to point out discreetly that the Royal Society of the 1690s was increasingly

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focused on natural philosophy, to the detriment of the antiquarian and philological topics that had appeared so often in the early decades of its journal, the Philosophical Transactions.32 The project for an alternate learned society or societies is likely to be what Bentley had in mind when he announced to John Evelyn that he was conducting regular meetings in the King’s Library, attended by Isaac Newton, John Locke, Christopher Wren, and others.33 And Newton, Locke, Wren, Evelyn, and Bentley himself were already members of the Royal Society. So Bentley’s plan for new societies should alert us, and not for the first time, to the danger of assuming that seventeenth-century natural philosophy was a uniquely progressive and modern enterprise, or that natural philosophy as a discipline possessed some exclusive or even overdetermined right to a national learned society under royal patronage.34 Bentley would hardly have made his suggestion if he believed that humanistic studies had nothing more to accomplish, or that humanistic studies were best conducted by cloistered individuals without any need for publicity and the exchange of ideas. As usual when he did or said anything ambitious, Bentley had a model in mind for his library plan: in this case, it was the Royal Library of France. Beginning in 1686, a great project had begun to move the French library from the rue Vivienne to a new building on the Place Louis-le-Grand, which would also house the Imprimerie Royale, meeting rooms for the various French academies, and exhibition spaces for antiques. The construction was abandoned in 1691 on the death of Louvois, the minister in charge; the library was eventually moved to the former hôtel de Nevers, on the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, beginning in 1721.35 Meanwhile in 1692, the Abbé de Louvois, the library keeper and nephew of the minister, began opening the library to the public for two days a week and invited a group of scholars to dine and converse with him on the same days. The Académie des Sciences also met in the library on days when it was not publicly open, which was doubtless the source of Bentley’s plan to house new English societies in his building.36 But if the ultimate aim was to turn London into a mandatory destination for cultivated travelers—analogous to Paris— Bentley never succeeded, even if he received many scholarly visitors every year, especially from Germany and Scandinavia. The best he could seriously hope to do was to construct a kind of second Oxford, that place where a scholar might study manuscripts, meet erudite people of all ages, and print his books. Had the library scheme been carried out, it would have provided Bentley himself with a highly visible post in which he could plausibly spend many years in an active role. At the same time, Bentley hedged his bets as to his professional future. By 1697, Stillingfleet had apparently petitioned

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Thomas Tenison, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to make Bentley the next master of Trinity College, which Bentley eventually became in early 1700.37 In anticipation of a job in Cambridge, Bentley participated, apparently as the key figure, in the ambitious restructuring of the Cambridge University Press that began in 1696.38 Before this restructuring, the “Cambridge University Press” was little more than a name used by a series of private printers in Cambridge, who confined themselves to printing small jobs and books of mediocre quality for the university and the student market in Cambridge. Under the new scheme, the university itself acquired the presses and a printing house and administered the press’s business through a board of syndics. The ultimate goal was to promote the printing of scholarly books and editions, particularly by authors associated with the university; in anticipation of this, the syndics acquired a new set of Greek types.39 Still, the new organization was not a university press in the modern sense, in that it did not finance its publications but served only as a high-quality printing establishment. This required that London publishers be persuaded to contract with the press for the printing of new books, or alternately, that authors finance their own publications through subscriptions or from their own resources. Bentley was ambitious in arranging contracts for the press with publishers, notably for a series of editions of Latin poetry to be published by the London house of Jacob Tonson, and (most likely) for a new edition in 1701 of Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae, financed by Henry Mortlock, the longtime publisher of Stillingfleet’s works who had also published Bentley’s Boyle Lectures of 1692.40 For a brief time, he also planned to publish his own projected edition of the Greek lexicon of Hesychius there; Bentley soon abandoned this project for himself, but he did have his protégé Ludolf Kuster publish his edition of the Suda at Cambridge in 1706, and probably planned to do the same with the Hesychius edition that Kuster left incomplete when he died in 1716.41 In Chapter 5, we will see in more depth how Bentley used the press for his own publications and as an instrument of patronage after he moved to Cambridge in 1700. Bentley’s efforts for Cambridge’s university press were clearly designed to turn Cambridge into a center of learned printing like Oxford, where Bentley had firsthand experience of the scholarly community fostered by the Bodleian Library and the University Press.42 Bentley was not the only contemporary who found Cambridge deficient in this regard: in the geographical description of the Republic of Letters published by the Abbé Bordelon in 1699, the only two cities in the British Isles that rated a mention were London and Oxford.43 Undoubtedly, political factors were also at work in the attempt to raise the scholarly profile of Cambridge through its

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press. Oxford in the 1690s was strongly Tory, and as Cambridge became the university where Whiggism was accepted, if not yet prevalent, Bentley and his party naturally sought to raise the stature of the institution where they had power.44 At the same time, Bentley’s efforts on behalf of Cambridge were surely designed to lay a groundwork for his personal future: by the time he finally arrived in some official post in Cambridge, he would already be an influential figure in the university. In Bentley’s plans for the Royal Library and the Cambridge University Press taken together, then, we can see several of his habitual strategies at work. He was interested in belonging to and promoting major institutions, he relished deal making and strategizing, and he was unabashedly willing to adapt existing models to his own ends. Further, he saw no contradiction in pursuing several professional avenues at once, displaying a bricolage of opportunism and pragmatism that would mark many of his scholarly publications as well.

The Phalaris Dissertation Bentley’s Dissertation on Phalaris, like his Letter to Mill, was called forth by a compelling invitation on the part of a more senior patron. Before Bentley entered the scene of the celebrated Battle of the Books, the state of the question was this.45 In 1690, an elderly baronet named Sir William Temple had published an eccentric essay holding the clear superiority of antiquity over the modern age. Temple further specified that even during classical antiquity, the oldest of everything was the best. Why anyone should have bothered to argue against these claims is an open question, but William Wotton, an associate of Bentley’s and a fellow protégé of John Evelyn, did precisely that in a very long treatise dating from 1694.46 Dutifully, Wotton enumerated the many fields in which modern Europe had achieved new knowledge since the Renaissance; with particular earnestness he focused on the sciences, especially mathematics and medicine. A second edition of Wotton’s essay appeared in 1697, augmented with a Dissertation in which Bentley argued against the authenticity of the letters of Phalaris, one of the ancient works specifically pointed to by William Temple as superlatively good. It is hard not to suspect the hand of Evelyn in Bentley’s contribution, at the very least, and likely in Wotton’s initial pamphlet as well. That Bentley took this occasion for bringing out a genuinely scholarly work, explicitly disavowing any interest in the controversy over ancients and moderns, may thus be a measure of his independence as well as his good sense.47 On a single page in his rambling treatise, William Temple had avowed that Phalaris, the tyrant of Acragas in Sicily who reigned during the sixth

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century BCE, had written the finest letters extant in the history of humanity. This argument was debatable, even leaving aside the matter of their authenticity, but for the moment, Temple’s pyrotechnic praise of antiquity and defense of Phalaris’s letters ask to be absorbed in full: The two most ancient, that I know of in Prose, among those we call prophane Authors, are Æsop’s Fables, and Phalaris’s Epistles, both living near the same time, which was, that of Cyrus and Pythagoras. As the first has been agreed by all Ages since, for the greatest Master in his kind, and all others of that sort, have been but imitations of his Original; so I think the Epistles of Phalaris, to have more Race, more Spirit, more Force of Wit and Genius than any others I have ever seen, either antient or modern. I know several Learned Men (or that usually pass for such, under the Name of Criticks) have not esteemed them Genuine, and Politian with some others have attributed them to Lucian: But I think, he must have little skill in Painting, that cannot find out this to be an Original; such diversity of Passions, upon such variety of Actions, and Passages of Life and Government, such Freedom of Thought, such Boldness of Expression, such Bounty to his Friends, such Scorn of his Enemies, such Honor of Learned Men, such Esteem of Good, such Knowledge of Life, such Contempt of Death, with such Fierceness of Nature and Cruelty of Revenge could never be represented, but by him that possessed them; and I esteem Lucian to have been no more Capable of Writing, than of Acting what Phalaris did. In all one Writ, you find the Scholar or the Sophist, and in all the other, the Tyrant and the Commander.48

Temple’s claim that Phalaris’s letters were manifestly “Original” was, of course, soon to become the primary target of Bentley’s attacks. Bentley believed, like most scholars at the time and all scholars now, that Phalaris’s letters were forgeries written long after their supposed author’s death.49 Yet even if Temple’s argument was knowingly contrarian—elsewhere in his Essay he showed a propensity to shock and to provoke—it was not an argument from which a determined advocate could ever be forced to climb down. Nor, as Bentley immediately saw, was it an argument that could reasonably be met with simple counterclaims about the letters’ style and general contents; Temple’s taste could never be proven wrong just by the declarations of Bentley’s taste. The challenge for Bentley was compounded in that the controversy in progress was taking place in the English language, heretofore an unusual tongue for scholarly works in England. Thus Bentley must attempt to sound like a polite and suave public intellectual at the same time as he delivered a scholarly argument that was necessarily technical in its basic content.50 In fact, the letters attributed to Phalaris are a tour de force of late Greek rhetoric, exuberantly impersonating the archaic tyrant with all of the sententious, heavily stylized diction characteristic of the period of the Roman Empire. “Phalaris” frequently complains of the difficulties of a tyrant’s life

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and mounts eloquent defenses of his own character—rich stuff for a king best known for stuffing his enemies into a hollow brass bull, lighting a fire under it, and roasting them alive. In a freely embellished English translation from 1699, Phalaris sounds above all like one of Jonathan Swift’s satires as he excoriates the stupidity and fickleness of the mass of people: I had rather be the Hissing of the unthinking Multitude than their Idol. For as for their Hatred, ’tis as soon Laid as Rais’d. Their Passions, as they take fire at nothing, so ’tis but letting them alone, and they dye of themselves: a meer Clap of Thunder, a Flash and a Noise, and all’s over: or if the Grumbling hold for some little time, there’s no great danger in it. But Banishment, Death, Confiscation, or something else as bad or worse, is the Consequence of the very Opinion of one’s being Deep in their Affections. . . . The People! That is, a Number of Fools joyned together in one Herd; Senseless, Helpless, Faithless; Fickle, Fierce, False; a Voice and that’s all; good for just nothing in the world; pufft forward backward with the Blast of a mans Breath; Pleased they know not why, and Displeased at they know not what; in their Aversions and in their Fondnesses equally Unreasonable. . . . So that to take the Measures of ones conduct from the Humours of the people, and strive to Please the Multitude, is but Inviting them the more Scornfully to Insult one.51

That Angelo Poliziano attributed the Phalaris letters to Lucian of Samosata was surely not only because Lucian had composed two discourses both entitled Phalaris; it was also because the Phalaris letters are very funny.52 At least one modern classicist has doubted that the letters were ever meant to pass as authentic at all.53 These considerations notwithstanding, Temple’s essay sparked demand not only for a new English translation (Temple himself could have read an earlier translation from 1634) but also, more momentously, for a Greek edition of Phalaris that appeared at Oxford in 1695.54 As usual in the New Year Book series at the Oxford University Press, the Phalaris edition was attributed to a well-born undergraduate, in this case the Honorable Charles Boyle (later Earl of Orrery), a nephew of Robert Boyle, the chemist and founder of the Boyle Lectures. Although there is no reason to think the young Boyle took no part whatsoever in the edition, it would also be naive to believe that he executed the project without considerable help. In light of the controversy that shortly broke out, it is remarkable that the Oxford editors expressed (at best) no opinion about the letters’ authenticity: “It’s less useful to ask who wrote them than it is pleasing to give them a try, for they are worth reading.”55 Nonetheless, the Phalaris edition contained a provocation directed at Bentley, who as keeper of the Royal Library had lent out its manuscript of Phalaris to be collated for the Oxford project.56 When Boyle’s assistant had reached the fortieth letter (so the edition

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reported), Bentley asked for the manuscript back because he was on his way to the country—presumably to Worcester, where he held a benefice as well as serving Stillingfleet as chaplain. This demand for the manuscript was characterized as the product of Bentley’s “singular humanity” (pro singulari sua humanitate), a stock phrase in the polite Latin of the day, here sarcastically turned to attack Bentley’s alleged rudeness.57 When Bentley was later asked to prepare his Dissertation on Phalaris, he evidently contemplated either an assault on the Oxford edition or a revision of it, collating the Royal Library manuscript on the margins of his printed copy and adding many conjectures.58 But in the end, fortunately, he saw that disputing over the readings of the printed text would be a peculiar rhetorical move if he also argued that the letters were fake. In this respect Bentley’s methods had advanced since the period of the Letter to Mill. Like that earlier essay, Bentley’s Dissertation on the Phalaris letters dealt with tiny passages of a very long work, virtually never commenting on the impression given by the text as a whole. Specific, empirical details were at the heart of Bentley’s assault. For example, the letter-writer “Phalaris” referred to the wrong kind of currency; he mentioned a drinking cup named after a man who lived after Phalaris’s death; he referred to the city of “Messana” when in Phalaris’s day it was known as Zancle; he quoted proverbs not yet invented in his own time. While impressive, these proofs were not quite as magically ingenious on Bentley’s part as they might first appear. Any reader of the ancient encyclopedia of Athenaeus, which Bentley had thoroughly pillaged for poetic fragments, knew to his cost that a very lengthy part of that text dealt with table implements and specifically the many kinds of drinking cups mentioned in earlier literature. Again, Philip Cluver’s standard work on ancient Sicily mentioned in its very table of contents that the city of Messana was originally called Zancle; Cluver obligingly supplied references to Thucydides, among others, that made the date of the change unambiguously clear.59 Ancient weights, measures, and currency were well known from early modern reference works. Bentley’s Dissertation was thus a spectacular application of compiled collective learning rather than an original piece of research in itself. Similarly, the exposure of forgery was a venerable scholarly practice reaching back to antiquity, even if in Bentley’s hands it inevitably savored of Enlightenment and the swashbuckling triumph of reason over tradition.60 At the same time, the Dissertation was infinitely more elegant than the Letter to Mill, savoring more of the Boyle Lectures than of that spiny first production. Only seventy-eight pages long, it contained sixteen concise sections totally devoid of the digressive emendations and polemics of which Bentley was capable. This time, too, Bentley managed to be genuinely witty,

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for example when he demolished the way in which “Phalaris” used the phrase “lovers of boys”: in the letter in question, the phrase was clearly supposed to mean a father who loved his children, but in classical Attic, it could only refer to pederasts.61 In one respect, however, Bentley’s instinct for publicity failed him seriously. Just as though he were writing in Latin for his peers, he offered up copious quotations in Greek, most without any translation. That this would end in trouble was predicted even before the publication by the contemporary churchman Thomas Burnett: “I’ve advised Mr. Bentley to make his work suited as much as possible to the taste of all kinds of readers, but I fear it will unavoidably contain too much Greek for an English book.”62 In the event, Bentley was indeed attacked on the grounds that he had acted the “pedant.” But a more serious problem also confronted Bentley’s entire project, in that no reader could be literally forced to accept Bentley’s conclusions, no matter how copious and detailed his evidence. Because the Phalaris Dissertation must have served so many English readers as an introduction to the practice of scholarship in general, the quantity of its information may well have seemed overwhelming despite its utter simplicity by Bentley’s own standards. More, readers accustomed to the disingenuous displays of knowledge so common in the pamphlet wars of the period may have seen no reason to accept Bentley’s argument, as well documented as it was. On the first occasion when he presented his scholarship to a wide public, then, Bentley faced local and practical difficulties as well as the basic epistemological problem that no reader’s belief could be compelled. His methods were chosen to mitigate this difficulty as well as they could, even if scholarly conventions and scholarly necessity led him to focus on “Proofs” rather than persuasion. Bentley’s usual procedure in the Dissertation was, inevitably, to compare small passages of Greek one against another. For example, “Phalaris” used the phrase “the other spirit” to mean bad luck, but Bentley suspected that the letters’ author had really been quoting from Pindar or, even more likely, Callimachus; the only way to make this argument was simply to lay the respective passages before the reader. To collate bits of Greek in this way had been unexceptionable in the Letter to Mill—indeed, the Letter to Mill’s reason for existing was to correct words in one source on the basis of another. In the Phalaris Dissertation, however, Bentley’s aim was to compel the qualitative, holistic conclusion that the letters were fake. Yet no predetermined number of arguments could actually force a given reader to accept Bentley’s claim, even though Bentley averred that “the Nature and Force of my Proofs” ought to convince every reader until the end of time. In a bracing display of what it meant to Bentley to write for a wide audience, he added that he had accumulated

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copious proofs so as to “affect the most slow Judgments, and assure the most timid or incredulous.”63 Yet as he composed the first Dissertation, Bentley knew from previous experience that the simple accumulation of discrete proofs did not lead ineluctably to argumentative conviction. A letter he wrote in 1693 shows graphically that he understood the problem yet could do little to solve it. The Oxford scholar Joshua Barnes, who was preparing an edition of Euripides, had written to Bentley because he had heard that Bentley believed Euripides’ letters to be inauthentic: could Bentley explain his reasons?64 Bentley replied in a long letter supplying proofs based on specific passages of Euripides’ letters, much like the arguments in the Phalaris Dissertation. Yet he explicitly acknowledged that the sum of his proofs did not necessarily add up to a conviction of the letters’ falsity for all readers. He knew as much, in fact, because Barnes had apparently informed him that he intended to argue for the letters’ authenticity, regardless of any arguments Bentley might make. Bentley explained: “That the epistles which are ascribed to Euripides are supposititious, I ever believed since I first read them, and ’tis likely shall continue to do so still; but, as for arguments to prove them spurious, perhaps there are none that will convince any person that doth not discover it by himself: ’tis always so, when there are no external proofs and testimonies to be had; but the verdict must be given from the instrinsic [sic] evidence, then every man passeth his own judgment according to his genius and proficiency: and there can be no final determination of such matters without an infallible judge.”65 Bentley went on to mention the Phalaris letters as a similar case, with exasperated references to Temple’s Essay. But his apparently conciliatory conclusion was noticeably double-edged. Was it simple politeness to concede that “every man passeth his own judgment”? Or was it a malicious snipe to add that each reader judges “according to his genius and proficiency”? The implication, surely, was that Barnes was lacking in both, and indeed relations between Bentley and Barnes for the rest of their lives remained cool. Bentley never hesitated to distinguish between competent readers and incompetent ones: in his Horace edition, he offered a similar account, claiming that his emendations ought to be intuitively obvious to experts but that they could not convince the many unless he presented long documentation and argument.66 Meanwhile, in private, he explained to friends that an argument based on the style of the Phalaris letters would have been enough to persuade “the judicious”; it was only for the sake of less skilled readers that he must assemble “a kind of demonstration by chronological proofs that cannot be contested.”67 But it was precisely those proofs that his opponents took up, rejecting them one after another on hastily

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concocted grounds. As G.  W. Leibniz described the opponents’ strategy (he quoted Horace), “In these matters, it’s often easy for a man of spirit like Mr. Boyle to evade the proofs by attacking each one separately. It’s like  ‘Take away one, take away one more, until the opponent collapses under the falling heap.’ ”68 No matter how many proofs Bentley might supply, a reader might always demand (and reject) just “one more.” In reality, it was the letters’ florid rhetorical style that convinced Bentley that they were fake; he was not shy to confess this even in print. Admitting that even the great could be mistaken, however, he promised at the outset of the Dissertation to confine himself for the most part to empirical arguments.69 But later in the treatise, after his chronological “proofs” were largely finished, Bentley did allow himself some summary pronouncements of his own. First, Bentley claimed that to anyone with as thorough a knowledge of Greek as his own, the letters’ style made it patently obvious that they came from a late period. Yet Bentley had pointed out only a handful of stylistic “marks and moles,” saying that he could have listed many more had he wished to: he explained, with more than a touch of pompousness, that no one was likely to see the light on the basis of a stylistic analysis if their own knowledge of Greek had not already told them the letters were late.70 Second, Bentley denied that the Phalaris letters possessed the intuitive feeling of humanity, authenticity, and presence which Sir William Temple had ascribed to them. Claiming powers of ethical intuition of his own, Bentley argued that when the real letters of ancient or modern statesmen were compared with the Phalaris letters, “you feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some dreaming Pedant with his elbow on his desk; not with an active, ambitious Tyrant, with his Hand on his Sword, commanding a Million of Subjects.”71 Not for Bentley the “Race,” “Spirit,” and “Force of Wit and Genius” that Temple had purported to discover in Phalaris’s letters; his own empirical command of Greek was what truly authorized Bentley to deliver judgment about this clear yet decidedly nonempirical matter. The most important attack on the Dissertation, published by Francis Atterbury in 1698 under the name of his former pupil Charles Boyle, attempted to demolish one by one Bentley’s particular arguments against the Phalaris letters.72 In this respect, Atterbury’s pamphlet showed that, as Bentley had predicted, it remained eminently possible to disagree with him about Phalaris, and to do so with arguments taken from the toolbox of the seventeenth-century scholar. Sometimes Atterbury’s claims were monumentally wrong, as when he quoted Theocritus’s fifteenth idyll as evidence for currency values in the Sicilian city of Syracuse—the poem is actually set in Alexandria in Egypt, as Bentley gleefully pointed out.73 But at other times

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Atterbury’s speculations were impossible to refute, because they expressly did not depend on documentation. For example, Atterbury pointed out that the passages Bentley had censured as impossible, perhaps even the entire letters in which those passages occurred, could conceivably all be later interpolations in a fundamentally authentic text. Even the Ionic dialect of the letters as a whole could be explained as the result of manuscript copying in an age when the Ionic dialect was privileged. In the second edition of his Dissertation, Bentley had no coherent answer to these objections. In fact, under different circumstances, he himself had been quite willing to argue that problematic passages in ancient texts were interpolations rather than proof of wholesale forgery. By this time, Bentley had already worked extensively on his edition of Manilius (published 1739), in which he argued precisely that many passages in Manilius’s astrological poem were mistaken or linguistically unacceptable and therefore interpolated. It seems that regardless of how many proofs against Phalaris Bentley found, ultimately the matter stood as he had said in his letter to Barnes, a question for each individual to decide. Atterbury repeatedly attacked Bentley as a “pedant,” and in his second edition Bentley apparently responded to this charge, attempting to make his treatise more accessible to nonexpert readers. The 1699 edition converted quotations into italicized English, relegating original Greek and Latin passages to marginal notes. Bentley also added running heads across the top of his pages to help his readers keep track of his progress through the letters. But these were half measures in light of the gargantuan length of the new Dissertation: where the first edition lasted 78 pages, the second was fully 540 pages long, even though all of Bentley’s newly added material was presented in smaller type below the original sections of the treatise. With its concise, calm story running across the top of the page and its glut of notes and citations at the bottom, the new Dissertation resembled Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695–1697), in which the “main” entries were overwhelmed by Bayle’s lengthy, quotation-ridden, and sometimes polemical annotations. Unlike Bayle, however, Bentley had no ironical intention, deploying this bloated form out of necessity rather than as a literary device. Abrasive, taunting, and splenetic, Bentley’s spectacularly expanded Dissertation nonetheless managed to improve substantially on his Letter to Mill. Gone were his wildly disorienting digressions and strings of textual emendations: the great bulk of the work was made up of discussion at least motivated by Bentley’s own arguments or motivated by Atterbury’s charges against him. If the second Dissertation managed to range widely, it was essentially because of the rambling, gratuitous attacks that had provoked

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it. For example, when Bentley had to defend his argument about “Thericlean” cups—his claim, based on Athenaeus, was that the Thericles for whom these cups were named lived more than 120 years after Phalaris—he had also to deal with Atterbury’s show of shock at Bentley’s treatment of his predecessors both in this section of the first Dissertation and in the Letter to Mill. In the first Dissertation, Bentley had rejected a textual conjecture by Isaac Casaubon relating to the Thericlean cups; where the Letter to Mill was concerned, we have seen how Bentley gleefully abused Hugo Grotius and Joseph Scaliger for failing to recognize the synapheia, or connectedness, of anapestic lines. Exploiting the scholar’s perpetual problem of dealing with earlier generations of humanists, Atterbury began by charging that Bentley had copied directly from Casaubon; Bentley now pointed out that far from relying supinely on his predecessor, he had taken occasion to criticize him. On the other hand, and not entirely consistently, Atterbury censured Bentley for his rough dealings with “great men” in the Letter to Mill. Next, Atterbury digressed: attempting to prove Bentley’s metrical rule wrong, he brought a string of examples in which a line apparently ended with a shorter foot. In rejoinder, Bentley not only emended away all of the problems in Atterbury’s passages, he presented his own list of apparent exceptions missed by Atterbury, proceeding to emend and correct these too. As a result, even in the context of this essentially antiquarian discussion of ancient material culture, Bentley’s old project on poetic fragments and his literary expertise became crucial rhetorical devices; they also contributed real evidence and support for his metrical rule on a level that he never provided in the Letter to Mill. In fact, the majority of Bentley’s proofs were conducted as essentially literary and linguistic argument, even more prominently in the second Dissertation than in its brief predecessor. More than once, the utterances of “Phalaris” foundered directly on the rock of Bentley’s project on poetic fragments: the real author of the letters had apparently quoted lost poetry that Phalaris himself could never have read. For example, “Phalaris” intoned, “It is not fitting for mortals to hold immortal anger,” a weighty maxim that sent Bentley directly to his notebooks.74 He discovered, first, an anonymous iambic fragment quoted by Aristotle, “Do not preserve immortal anger, for you are mortal.”75 Lest anyone assume this was simply a common idea that Phalaris might have thought of spontaneously, Bentley had an even hotter smoking gun on hand: a quotation from Euripides’ lost tragedy Philoctetes that went, “Just as our body is mortal by nature, so it is not fitting to hold immortal anger.”76 The sophist who composed this letter, Bentley claimed, “had this very passage” of Euripides “before his eyes”; he pointed specifically to the similar words “fitting” and “hold.” Finally,

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Bentley noted that Euripides’ Philoctetes was not performed until 120 years after Phalaris’s death, demolishing the last conceivable explanation that could have been brought to defend Phalaris’s authorship. In the second Dissertation, this argument about Euripides received a twenty-page expansion that took Bentley’s approach into entirely new territory. Provoked by his opponent, eventually Bentley not only produced the equivalent of a monograph on the history of the comedy and tragedy, he presented a surprising new theory of his own that managed to combine the oldest literary history with, again, actual Greek poetic fragments. In the section about Euripides, firstly, Atterbury had rejoined that the iambics found in Aristotle might indeed be old enough to be the source for the genuine Phalaris; he first proposed attributing them to the lyric poet Archilochus, then proposed that they might be by the oldest attested comic poet, Susarion, who lived (according to Atterbury) between 610 and 489 BCE, making them certainly old enough to be cited by Phalaris. Lastly, Atterbury suggested that Susarion had not even invented the comedy, properly speaking, but had merely mounted dramas onstage for the first time, removing them from their rude origins in Greek villages; thus even before Susarion’s lifetime the “Phalaris” fragment might have been composed.77 In response, Bentley composed a history of the comedy in which he genuinely innovated by emending the Parian Chronicle, the Greek chronological inscription in Oxford that had been known to scholars only since the early seventeenth century.78 To begin, Bentley denied that the earliest dramas were written in iambics; he also denied that Susarion’s comedies were ever written down, notwithstanding some verses attributed to him in a manuscript in England’s Royal Library.79 He also pointed out that importantly, Aristotle never mentioned any play by Susarion, which Aristotle as a serious student of the drama ought to have done had he known of any. Finally, Bentley transformed a notice about comedy in the Parian Chronicle into an exact parallel for the history of tragedy. He knew from Horace’s account that the first known Greek tragedian, Thespis, hauled his performers between villages on “carts,” plaustris.80 A conjecture earlier in the seventeenth century had made Susarion, in the Parian Chronicle, set up his performances on a “stage.” Bentley, having asked John Mill to check the marble in Oxford itself, discovered that several key letters in the passage were in fact illegible, allowing him to conjecture “Since Comedies were carried in Carts by the Icarians, Susarion being the Inventor.”81 For reasons we are about to see, Bentley took the conjectured “carts” to mean that these comedies were extemporaneous choral performances, demonstrating once more that even if Susarion were the true inventor of comedy (which Bentley also doubted), Phalaris could not have known his plays. Bentley’s

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emendation here demonstrated for his readers both his prowess in conjecturing and his seriousness as a scholar, for Bentley characteristically claimed that he had already conjectured “carts” before Mill checked the inscription. Moreover, the marble itself sat in Oxford, yet Atterbury had consulted solely a printed edition rather than inspecting the inscription firsthand. The condemnation, though unspoken, was clear. Bentley’s next opportunity to discuss the drama came rapidly, when “Phalaris” accused one Aristolochus and one Lysinus of writing tragedies “against him.” In the first Dissertation, Bentley had claimed that this was impossible: the inventor of the tragedy had been Thespis, who did not present his first play until more than twelve years after Phalaris’s death. Conscious that this margin of error was small, in the second Dissertation Bentley went one better: Thespis had never written his tragedies down, Bentley now claimed, and all of the dramatic fragments attributed to him were forged. Specifically, according to a notice Bentley found in Diogenes Laertius, the Aristotelian philosopher Heraclides of Pontus had composed tragedies of his own that he then attributed to Thespis.82 Accordingly, Horace’s reference to Thespis’s performers in “carts” was a reference to a purely oral form of poetry, directly comparable (so Bentley claimed) to the comedies of Susarion. Thus, as in the case of Phalaris himself, Bentley argued here that the putative earliest contributor to a literary genre was in fact a sheer mirage. Bentley’s oral theory of tragic composition, so to speak, was not entirely new. Isaac Casaubon had argued a century earlier that Homer had never written his poems down; in that case too, a scholar drew a concrete conclusion from an ancient testimonium known to many.83 Where tragedy was concerned, Bentley was abetted not only by Diogenes’ suggestion about Heraclides of Pontus but also by an extremely well-known passage in Aristotle’s Poetics, which asserted that at first the tragedy was “extemporaneous.”84 Earlier, in his discussion of Susarion, Bentley had emphasized that as a result, neither the early tragedy nor the early comedy would have been written down for Phalaris to read. Rather, “like the Entertainments of our Merry-Andrews on the Stages of Mountebanks,” early dramas “were bestow’d only upon the present Assembly, and so forgotten.”85 His final argument was derived from Plutarch’s statement that before Phrynichus and Aeschylus, all tragedies were satyr plays: this implied that all of Thespis’s productions were satyr plays as well.86 But, Bentley pointed out, none of the dramas ascribed to Thespis actually were satyr plays, again casting doubt on his alleged writings. Bentley acknowledged that Casaubon had earlier made this last observation, but he insisted, characteristically, that he had hit on the idea before consulting his predecessor.87

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Here was a genuine argument in literary history of the kind that Bentley had clearly aspired to but rarely achieved in his Letter to Mill. In the Letter to Mill, in fact, Bentley actually had dealt with the fragments of Thespis immediately before discussing Ion’s, but his account was extremely cursory and manifestly disinterested. At the same time, only a genuine scholar could have produced Bentley’s argument in the Dissertation about forgery, for it involved directly applying testimonia to concrete poetic fragments of the kind Bentley was used to dealing with up close.88 On the level of detail, his arguments sometimes had considerable support, sometimes less. The most extensive Thespis fragment, quoted by Clement of Alexandria, was a series of anapestics clearly designed for the single purpose of incorporating nonsense words that, put together, used each letter of the Greek alphabet exactly once. As Bentley had pointed out in 1691, alphabetical nonsense words of this kind were relatively conventional, and Platonists, such as Porphyry, took them to have mystical significance. But in 1691, it seemed completely natural to Bentley to attribute these verses to Thespis; he treated them as a fragment to be noted and emended like any other.89 In the second Dissertation, Bentley argued that the very nature of this passage made it impossible to attribute to Thespis: the Greek alphabet did not yet have twenty-four letters in Thespis’s time. As for Bentley’s second and third Thespis fragments in the Dissertation, drawn from Plutarch and Pollux, his arguments against them depended completely on the presupposition that the real Thespis had written only satyr plays. He objected to the content of the Plutarch fragment, which described Zeus as first among gods, as unsuited to a satyr play. Pollux’s fragment he attacked as to its title, Pentheus, named for the king of Thebes who was torn to shreds by frenzied worshippers of Bacchus including his own mother. This too, Bentley thought, must have been a bona fide tragedy and could never have been the title of a satyr drama. A farrago of further learning was crammed into the 100 pages that constituted Bentley’s Susarion note and Thespis note combined. In total, Bentley’s remarks about the drama here represented a decisive step forward from the Letter to Mill. His exposition was organized and clear; in the main, he presented continuous arguments rather than digressing and emending to no immediate purpose. Surely Bentley’s development toward becoming a public intellectual in the 1690s had something to do with this, in that he was newly conscious of the need to bring his audience along with him rather than leaving them in the dust. But the history of scholarship also offered him constructive models that, in the Letter to Mill, he had been too preoccupied with polemic to emulate. Above all, Isaac Casaubon’s monograph On Greek Satyr Drama and the Roman Satire (1605), which Bentley cited

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repeatedly in his Dissertation, showed the way to combine a great deal of information and argument in a well-ordered and comprehensible manner. None of this, however, solved the basic epistemological problem that also faced the Dissertation as a whole, for Bentley’s argument about the forgery of Thespis’s plays was fundamentally just another case that must be judged independently by the “genius and proficiency” of the reader. One simply believed Bentley’s claim or one did not, regardless of whether Bentley produced “proofs” in the shape of the demolition of the fragments. A determined reader could always reject such proofs or, at the least, make indefinite demands for one more. But it was on far less sophisticated grounds that Bentley incurred the worst public-relations damage in the controversy. Both his scholarship and his character in general were maligned by Atterbury in disingenuous but delightfully funny ways. First, Atterbury revived the plangent complaint about Bentley’s “singular humanity” in connection with the Royal Library’s manuscript of Phalaris that had been partially collated for the 1695 edition. As for the Dissertation on Phalaris itself, Atterbury portrayed Bentley’s scholarly technique as automaton-like, derivative, and boring, in short, “pedantic.” Bentley’s apparently great learning, Atterbury charged, was taken solely from the reading of indices and dictionaries; he also claimed that Bentley had stolen two parallels to a passage in Phalaris from Boyle’s own edition.90 Atterbury proceeded to supply his readers with a lengthy anatomy of the pedant (“the Subject is fruitful”), defining pedantry in such a way as to describe Bentley as closely as possible. A pedant used obscure words in his English prose and often quoted needlessly in Greek and Latin; a pedant paid too much attention to petty matters of spelling and accentuation in the texts he discussed; a pedant was quick to quarrel on any grounds, to express his claims in “an Assuming and Positive way,” and to attack his opponents personally in an uncivil fashion.91 Like William Temple, Atterbury assumed for the sake of his polemic that the way in which someone wrote embodied something fundamental about the writer: to Atterbury, pedantry was “Written Illbreeding,” the textual embodiment of low social origins and bad social habits.92 Finally, in an expertly handled comic appendix, it was calmly argued that Bentley was not the author of the Dissertation circulating under his name: the Dissertation’s rustic use of English, its bad manners, and its pedantic learning could not be fathered on a famous scholar and library keeper without insult. The case was reinforced with long quotations from the 1697 Dissertation itself in which the name “Dr. Bentley” was substituted for “Phalaris.” The transformation of Bentley into a public intellectual was clearly not a process completely of his own making; later in his career he would court controversy

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in other publications, but never did they lead to skewering as severe and uncompromising as this. Bentley’s problems, and the entirety of the quarrel, were compounded by an ongoing and bitter controversy in the Church of England, in which both Bentley and Atterbury were priests. At precisely this time, the highchurch party, out of power and counting Atterbury as an enthusiastic member, was attempting to neutralize the bishops whom it opposed by demanding rights for a prospective “convocation” or general assembly of the clergy. Conversely, the latitudinarian party in power, with which Bentley and William Wotton were aligned, aimed to preserve decision-making in the hands of the bishops and mustered historical arguments against the authority of convocations. Atterbury discharged pamphlets on the subject in both 1697 and 1700, again engaging with a single representative from the opposition (in this case William Wake), and again being totally defeated on the merits of his historical case.93 The Phalaris controversy, or at any rate its gross efflorescence, was thus in part a proxy war for a contemporary political issue of very serious implications. This fact must have encouraged general interest in the quarrel; it would also have created a ready-made audience sympathetic to the case against Bentley. Not least because of this partisan divide—it certainly lay behind Jonathan Swift’s satirical Battle of the Books (1704) at least as much as did Swift’s loyalty to William Temple, his late employer—it is hard to gauge real contemporary reactions to Bentley’s Dissertations. Certainly, many anecdotes suggest that in the court of public opinion at large, Bentley lost.94 What we do know is that after his Dissertations, Bentley essentially stopped publishing on Greek subjects; only once did he do so again, in a pamphlet on the fragments of the comic poet Menander, in 1710. He turned instead to what was perhaps the ultimate work of polite classical literature, entering territory that would have been unthinkable to scholarly churchmen only a few decades before: an edition of Horace, commonly viewed as an indispensable piece of knowledge for gentlemen (on the one hand) and as an easy book for grammar-school boys (on the other). Not only did the Horace project establish Bentley very firmly as a critic of poetry and continue to define him as a scholar who aspired to an audience beyond his fellow scholars. It also perpetuated the fundamental problem that afflicted all of Bentley’s arguments in the Phalaris Dissertation. How could Bentley convince his readers that the judgments of his genius and taste were correct? Where poetry was concerned, what was proof itself?

chapter five

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hereas earlier he was concerned with his reputation as an individual—brilliant, flashy, and original—in the early years of the 1700s Bentley expanded his aspirations to become a leader of a new scholarly community in Cambridge. As he assembled a group of mostly younger people—both Cambridge fellows and a clever German import, Ludolf Kuster—he shaped a scholarly style distinct from that of Oxford and more like that of the continent. Keenly oriented toward publishing at the Cambridge University Press, Bentley promoted a method of work that closely resembled what would become his own. The textual edition was the dominant form, its editor provided no literary or historical commentary, and it was generously supplied with discussion of textual matters and proposed conjectures. Bentley contributed his own conjectures and remarks to the editions of his protégés, aiming both to enrich their merit and to increase their vendibility; by the first decade of the 1700s he clearly saw his own name as famous and in demand. His calculation was the same as to his edition of Horace, which appeared in 1712 after many delays.1 It was this project, Bentley’s first experiment in publishing a work devoted to a single author and an entire text, that made Bentley’s reputation as a critic of poetry, signally to readers such as the Shakespeare editors Alexander Pope, Lewis Theobald, and Samuel Johnson. It was not only Bentley’s scholarly method that made an impression on these and other readers; his hectoring pronouncements about his own excellence

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were equally prominent in the Horace edition and equally susceptible to criticism and attack. Loudly, Bentley trumpeted his distaste for writing helpful commentary, his right to make conjectures, and his innate literary genius and taste. In fact, in these assertions Bentley was merely stating aloud the conventions and assumptions already followed by the Dutch critics such as Nicolaas Heinsius and Isaac Vossius, who could trace their intellectual lineage directly to Joseph Scaliger. In England, however, where the textual edition itself was a new kind of publication to many readers and where extravagant Bentleian conjecturing was altogether new in the field of Latin poetry, Bentley’s self-justifications were not otiose, but they were highly inflammatory. Meanwhile, in some respects Bentley’s older habits died hard. Throughout his edition, Bentley oscillated between the poles of scholarship—amassing parallels to Horace and engaging in his trademark technique of digress-and-emend—and of genteel criticism, delivering his verdicts as a self-proclaimed man of taste. His scholarly readers responded in kind, on the one hand replying to Bentley on the level of manuscripts and on the other hand protesting with some justification that he had established himself as a despot in the Republic of Letters.

The Impresario In 1700, at the young age of 38, Bentley was chosen master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a college both wealthy and prestigious, then as now. For the next forty-two years until his death, Bentley abused his power at Trinity along a spectrum that ranged from misrule to a positive reign of terror, a period copiously and masterfully documented by his biographer J.  H. Monk. Bentley coerced fellows into making extortionate donations for the renovation of the college chapel; he caused the college to buy grain at high prices out of his own tithes, including one season when the malt was infested by weevils, compelling the college to drink bad beer. An initial lawsuit against him failed, but a second resulted in his being removed from the mastership, even though he continued illegally to occupy the master’s lodge for the next eight years. In the interim, he was stripped of his degrees, which were eventually restored. If Bentley had come to maturity closely observing the institutions of the church and the universities, once in power he proved himself an almost total failure as an organization man, a difficulty that also had direct ramifications for his attempts to build a collaborative intellectual program. In the early years, Bentley appeared as something of an educational reformer. He instituted more rigorous entrance examinations for Trinity

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undergraduates; he encouraged the teaching of science, building an astronomical observatory over the college gate and fitting out a chemistry laboratory where Giovanni Francesco Vigani delivered lectures. But Bentley’s most ambitious and most visible experiment, which worked for some time, was to promote serious classical publication in Cambridge. Not only did this mean a far greater quantity of Cambridge publications than before, on a scale designed to rival the Oxford University Press. It also required the exploitation of new scholarly resources. Cambridge had nothing to compare to the riches of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, but it could boast unique materials nonetheless. Bentley’s associate John Moore, Bishop of Norwich and subsequently of Ely, offered up to the new enterprise his personal collection, rich in early printed books and in volumes holding collations and annotations by famous scholars.2 Moore, a scholar in the seventeenth-century fashion, never published anything but devotional works in his own right, but he knew well when one of his holdings might make a novel contribution to a given classical author or field: it was thus easy for him to suggest a worthwhile project to a willing younger scholar. Another senior figure, Joshua Barnes, the Regius Professor of Greek, continued the series of publications he had begun with his Cambridge Euripides of 1694; he brought out the lyric poems of Anacreon in 1705 and a complete Homer in 1711. And in a project that savored more of the middle seventeenth century than of the eighteenth, Barnes in 1705 published a Christian Anacreon, containing Anacreontic parodies composed by himself that transformed Anacreon’s hymns to wine into Barnesian hymns to Christ. Richard Bentley never took him seriously, but Barnes and his extemporaneous Greek compositions formed a memorable part of the new sociability around the press and its authors.3 But it was younger people in their twenties and thirties, recruited both by Bentley and by Moore, who produced the bulk of the new work and thus formed the university’s nascent reputation as a center for publishing. Bentley fostered among them what we might call a Cambridge scholarly style, readily distinguished from Oxford’s. On the one hand, virtually all Cambridge classical publication in Bentley’s time took the form of editions, that is, of entire and usually famous ancient texts; this was the signature method of Oxford and, with a few exceptions such as Barnes’s Euripides, quite new to Cambridge. But by comparison with the typical Oxford edition, the new Cambridge editions featured substantially more intervention and comment from the individual editor. Not only were variant manuscript readings presented, their merits were also explicitly discussed, and not infrequently conjectures were proposed as well. The editors’ notes were also sharply focused on questions of textual criticism rather than histori-

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cal or interpretative commentary. In other words, the Cambridge classical editions under Bentley presented themselves not as reference books but as original pieces of research executed by articulate, sometimes voluble individuals. In the setting of England this method was new, for a more conservative style had characterized the first Cambridge University Press editions of Latin poets arranged by Bentley and published by Jacob Tonson beginning in the middle 1690s. When Bentley moved to Cambridge, his emphasis changed from recruiting learned churchmen in general to recruiting college fellows who were physically in Cambridge, allowing Bentley to collaborate with them more or less closely. The beginnings of his program were very Greek and very erudite. Within a few years of Bentley’s arrival, two Cambridge fellows who had never published before brought out editions at the Cambridge University Press, John Davies’ edition of Maximus of Tyre’s philosophical discourses in 1703 and, in 1704, Peter Needham’s edition of the Geoponica, a Byzantine compilation on agronomy that had not been printed in Greek since 1539.4 Davies used no manuscripts, but Needham took from John Moore’s library a manuscript fragment of the Geoponica as well as a printed copy annotated with collations by Isaac Casaubon. Similar choices could easily have been made in Oxford; indeed Humphrey Wanley, the manuscript hunter and librarian long associated with Oxford, had made large preparations for a Geoponica edition of his own.5 What is distinctive about Davies’ and Needham’s editions is that these projects evidently served as scholarly apprenticeships: Davies and Needham were each 24 years old when their first editions appeared. By a long-standing continental tradition (echoed wishfully in the New Year Book series at Oxford), a young person’s first project was typically a textual edition, that is, a self-contained piece of work that was also a palpably real piece of scholarship.6 The young scholar also worked closely with a mentor: for Needham, this was clearly Moore, and for Davies it may have been Bentley. Insofar as an edition was a serious piece of work, being recruited for one could easily bemuse or terrify a young person, as happened in Oxford in the case of the 28-year-old Thomas Tickell, later known as a poet. Chosen by the imposing Arthur Charlett to produce an Oxford edition of Lucan, Tickell had the task of writing for help to Humfrey Wanley, keeper of Robert Harley’s library. For an edition he was “concerned in,” Tickell explained, he would appreciate the loan of Harley’s Lucan manuscript which, Tickell was told, had never been collated; he also wished he knew how to “come at” some manuscripts belonging to Bentley.7 Despite this coaching from Charlett and, subsequently, from Wanley as to where to find his material—and despite having collated Harley’s manuscript and found “Readings . . . which considerably add to

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the Elegance of Expression, & Beauty of Thought in the Poet”—Tickell never finished his edition and printed only a partial translation of Lucan’s fourth book in the following year.8 The completion of an edition, then, represented a by no means assured triumph, not only for the editor but also for his mentor or Doktorvater. Bentley also imported talent in the form of Ludolf Kuster, a German scholar who had studied at Leiden with Bentley’s correspondent J.  G. Graevius; Kuster arrived in Cambridge perhaps as early as 1701, when he was 31 years old.9 His first project was evidently chosen by Bentley: an edition of the mammoth Byzantine encyclopedia known to contemporaries as “Suidas” and to us as the Suda. For Bentley, Greek lexica had been of long-standing interest, whether he mined them for poetic fragments and literary history or whether he conjectured emendations to arcane words; Bentley himself, in his twenties, had been encouraged to undertake a synoptic edition of several Greek lexica.10 Even as Bentley’s own work turned to the Latinate and the polite, that is, he fostered the work of a younger scholar who closely resembled Bentley himself in the 1680s, devouring dictionaries and dealing daily with Greek fragments and conjectures. For Kuster, Bentley must have arranged a living space and some sort of payment; someone also supplied Kuster with the more than 120 books he used in preparing the edition.11 We know that Bentley provided Kuster with an unpaid assistant, the sociable queen’s fellow Joseph Wasse, then in his early thirties. Earlier, Wasse had helped Joshua Barnes with his edition of Anacreon and contributed notes to Davies’s edition of Maximus, and later he would be given a printed copy of the Suda worth three pounds in exchange for helping Kuster with his proofreading.12 But the Suda edition was collaborative in even more obvious ways than these: it contained copious conjectures by Bentley himself, and in some sense Kuster was assisting Bentley on a massive scale in turning his emendations into a proper edition. The fruit of their joint work did not make a thundering noise in the outside world—copies of the Suda remained in the press’s warehouse until 1752—but it shows the grand scale on which Bentley aimed to work as well as the initial success of his Cambridge équipe.13 Kuster and Bentley also shared an interest in Aristophanes, whom Kuster would eventually edit in 1710. Bentley not only lent Kuster his apograph of Isaac Vossius’s manuscript of Lysistrata, which contained scholia that were printed for the first time in Kuster’s edition.14 Bentley also sent manifold conjectures to Kuster and corrected Kuster’s suggested emendations as well.15 However, Kuster had left Cambridge for Amsterdam shortly after the Suda was published, and despite Bentley’s entreaties for him to print his Aristophanes at Cambridge (“I can hardly believe that those skinflint booksellers will pay you more than Englishmen”), he never returned and was not replaced.16

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Bentley also contributed to other projects by his protégés. For example, when John Davies turned to editing Cicero’s philosophical works beginning in 1708 when he was 29 years old, Bentley supplied him with numerous conjectures, which were prominently advertised on the title pages of the printed volumes.17 Bentley also contributed conjectures to Peter Needham’s edition of Hierocles, a reworking of one of John Pearson’s projects, in 1709.18 Later, when Needham decided to print in his edition of Theophrastus’s Characters a set of Cambridge lectures on them from the library of John Moore, Bentley informed him that the lectures could not be by Thomas Stanley, as they were attributed in the catalogue of Moore’s library; on internal evidence, the lectures had been delivered by a Regius Professor of Greek resident in Trinity College during the civil wars, meaning that they must have been by James Duport, professor from 1639 to 1654.19 After his Horace edition appeared, finally, Bentley enlisted his nephew Thomas Bentley to produce a small, schoolbook-sized version of Bentley’s Horace, containing all of his preferred readings and a few notes by Thomas.20 At this stage of his career, Bentley himself was not yet exploiting research assistants as he would later do in connection with his edition of Terence and his planned editions of the New Testament and Homer. (Thomas Bentley, John Walker, and David Casley would become his primary helpers.) It is possible that in the first decade of the 1700s, Bentley so far lacked money and likely candidates to assist him. But a simpler reason is that the text of Horace was far shorter than any of these others, meaning that Bentley could and willingly did handle all of the collations himself. Over time, while they lasted, the Cambridge editions became less obscure, more Latin, and more palatable to readers at large. Davies’ series of Cicero’s philosophical works and Needham’s edition of Theophrastus form obvious examples. Joseph Wasse, starting his independent publishing career somewhat belatedly in 1710, brought out not a Greek work or a Christian work but an edition of the Roman historian Sallust, borrowing early printed editions from John Moore. As an indication of the accessibility of this new material—and of its serviceability for teaching undergraduates— Davies’ Cicero editions were multiply reedited and reprinted in Cambridge, while Sallust as well as Hierocles appeared on the reading list of the undergraduate Ambrose Bonwicke in the early 1710s.21 Roughly speaking, then, Richard Bentley’s personal trajectory from difficult Greek to elegant Latin and to texts of wide interest became that of the press and its milieu as well. This system suffered from imperfections even from the beginning. On the front of publicity, it seems to have occurred to no one to send free copies of the Cambridge publications to the major review journals on the

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continent, as John Hudson of Oxford routinely did. J. B. Mencke of the Leipzig Acta eruditorum (Achievements of the Learned) spent years asking John Covel, president of Christ’s, for review copies in exchange for the free Acta that Mencke had long been sending to Cambridge. But after sending Kuster’s Suda of 1705, Covel sent nothing more until a particularly insistent letter from Mencke shook loose copies of Bentley’s Horace and Barnes’s Homer in 1712.22 More fundamentally, the entire enterprise seems to have relied excessively on the two personalities of Bentley and John Moore. Moore died in 1714, while Bentley evidently became too preoccupied with his legal troubles to attend to the fostering of the press—his own next edition, of Terence, had to wait fourteen years until 1726. Without the generosity and benign pressure of these two figures, philological publication rapidly dried up following the early 1710s. Although John Davies continued his editions of Cicero, Peter Needham never published again, despite making plans for an edition of Aeschylus; Joseph Wasse waited twentyone years until he brought out another edition, a Thucydides that he did not even print at Cambridge but in Amsterdam.23 Even Joshua Barnes hung up his hat following his Homer of 1711, apart from repeated reeditions of his Anacreon in furtherance of a heated rivalry with William Baxter of London. By the time Bentley’s long-delayed Horace appeared in 1712, then, the milieu to which it was meant to be a dazzling and exemplary contribution was already on the point of being gone. Still, it is clear that in the Horace edition Bentley aligned his own aims in a very novel way with the aims of his institution: his challenge was to become first among equals in producing rigorous, focused work on texts that could interest the world far beyond the circle of professional scholars.

Horace: Authority and Genius How could a Latin school poet become the vehicle for serious scholarship? And how could a serious scholar prosecute his arguments before an audience to whom scholarship and even textual editions were unfamiliar? These questions were inevitable because the Horace was Bentley’s most daring experiment yet in making scholarship matter to a wider group of literary readers. More than any other ancient poet at this time, Horace meant gentility, as well as masculinity, on the part of those English readers who had mastered his texts. Anyone with pretensions to polite learning would have to make himself aware of Bentley’s work—and there were many with such pretensions. Horace had been one of the most canonical school texts for learners of Latin since medieval times, with the result that many thousands

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of European readers knew a group of his poems by heart for the rest of their lives, or at least could be shocked into recalling them when confronted with a printed text. But from about 1680 until the middle of the eighteenth century, Horace had become unprecedentedly popular even among adult readers under no visible compulsion: an extraordinary number of editions and translations appeared in England and in France, beginning, significantly, with André Dacier’s translation of the entire oeuvre into French with explanatory notes.24 Even an apparently democratizing production like Dacier’s translation, however, could work to reinforce a sense of privilege on the part of those who could read Horace’s Latin for themselves. The Oxford don William King wrote with ostensible regret but evident satisfaction that his female friends and relatives who read Horace in English, French, and Italian translations found the poems unutterably boring.25 The frustration of these readers points to a key reason why Horace’s poems were so well suited to their role as a mark of social distinction. Horace is, in fact, the archetypal master of the artfully expressed commonplace—even William King conceded that there was “nothing extraordinary” in Horace’s “thought or sentiment”—and few readers can ever have paid minute enough linguistic attention to find the poems compelling except under the dire necessity of the schoolroom. Horace owed his privileged position in Bentley’s world to his deeply entrenched place on the syllabi of grammar schools and private tutors, amplified by an impressive fashionability among adult readers and collectors of books. Bentley’s contemporaries displayed their devotion to Horace in many ways. William King complained of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s habit of incessantly quoting Horace in conversation—in King’s view, Shaftesbury “often discovered his want of skill in the Latin tongue, and always his want of taste.”26 Yet King himself was curious enough to visit the Horace library of James Douglas, a London physician attempting to collect every edition of the poet since the beginning of printing, and who eventually commissioned a protégé to make an edition and translation of the text using Douglas’s assembled spoils.27 An alternate way of demonstrating one’s gentility was to imitate Horace, either in vernacular poetry, as did Pope, Swift, and others, or in Latin verse, like the Oxford fellow Anthony Alsop.28 Like Shakespeare on the Restoration stage, Horace was often venerated precisely in order to be modernized: many poetic imitations treated subjects of the present day, even referring to recognizable contemporaries under Latin pseudonyms.29 To belong to the cadre of Horace’s admirers, however, was above all to recognize that in the nature of things, most people did not and could not share one’s taste. Here lay the first offense (though

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not the last offense) that Bentley was to commit in editing Horace. Bentley’s conspicuous lack of personal gentility, already a frequent charge against him during the Battle of the Books, was now underscored by the improbable gap between his unremarkable origins and habits and the social exclusivity that constituted much of Horace’s contemporary raison d’être. The Horace-loving Earl of Shaftesbury wrote confidently to Jean LeClerc that Bentley’s edition, as yet unseen, would be “the most elaborate monster that the learned world ever saw produced”; LeClerc was more circumspect, but no less disapproving, in the review he eventually published in his widely circulated Bibliothèque choisie.30 From one point of view, then, Bentley’s Horace signaled that the pedantic, ill-bred barbarians were now within the gates of genteel culture. Not surprisingly, Bentley himself encouraged a different interpretation: in his account, he edited Horace because he had really been genteel all along. In the long and somewhat tortured preface to the edition, Bentley was at pains to demonstrate that he, too, belonged to the elite group who read Horace’s poems for personal pleasure. He chose to edit Horace, he claimed, because he needed some relaxing and agreeable poet to work on in his spare time, and some project that could be interrupted and resumed at will.31 His edition, in other words, was the product not of labor but of leisure. Bentley even tried to convert his operose textual annotations from an evidence of his erudition to a record of his impetuous genius: the notes, he said, had been dashed off during several summers and sent to the press with the ink literally still wet.32 This narrative of hasty inspiration was, among other things, a form of damage control, because in reality Bentley had begun announcing he would publish Horace as early as 1702, ten years before it eventually appeared. Even then, he had represented his Horace as a new and genteel kind of project, writing to J. G. Graevius that he planned to edit an entire series of Greek and Latin poets “to relax my mind in my spare time”; he would give the finished series as gifts to the students of his college.33 Although no such series ever materialized, and Bentley only ever gave free copies to influential adults, the entire plan sounds very much like a one-man version of the New Year Books produced in and around Christ Church, Oxford, Trinity’s counterpart and rival—we should recall that Charles Boyle’s edition of Phalaris, which Bentley had attacked in his Dissertations of the late 1690s, belonged to this Oxford series.34 Bentley even planned originally for the Horace to appear in a modest octavo size, suitable for use as a school text, rather than the grossly overburdened quarto that eventually emerged.35 In imitating the publications of his former opponents, and in portraying himself as a polite Horace enthusiast, Bentley effectively conceded that he had suffered a public relations

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defeat in the Phalaris controversy: the way forward lay not in defeating the genteel, but in joining them even more completely than before. None of this is to say that the actual tone of Bentley’s edition was emollient, decorous, or even minimally polite. He began it with a thundering and infamous preface in which he pugnaciously defended his methods and their rationale—a preface stuffed with purple passages that were no doubt meant to be quoted (and still beg to be quoted today). What Bentley defended, above all, was the extent to which his approach to editing Horace resembled his earlier, quite unrestrained approach to Greek fragments and to the letters of Phalaris. He manifestly saw that the canonicity of Horace’s poems conferred on this project the means of failing, as well as the means of succeeding, in the judgment of others. In his own rhetoric, of course, any failure of understanding would be solely attributable to others. For example, expressing an idea familiar to us from the Phalaris Dissertation, Bentley claimed that his expected population of inexpert, recalcitrant readers had forced him to present his arguments on a level (and of a bulk) suited to their incapacity. To readers who objected to Bentley’s emendations on the grounds that they already knew Horace inside and out, who felt themselves accused whenever Bentley assailed Horace’s text, “I would attack outright their prejudice and resistance. In my annotations, I have drawn out many points diffusely and at great length, contrary to my custom. Even if they grow angry and struggle, I will overwhelm them with the weight of my reasons and the number of my examples, until at last I drag them by the neck into agreement with me.”36 If Bentley as the textual physician professed to heal the damaged body of Horace (a favorite metaphor of his), these physically violent encounters with his own contemporaries were described with what looks suspiciously like relish. Such reactions could be anticipated in particular because the most passionate argument of Bentley’s preface was on behalf of conjecturing in textual criticism. In reality, conjecture had been accepted, indeed admired practice among humanists since the earliest Renaissance; only in England, and only outside the circles in which Greek scholars emended their puzzling and poorly attested texts could it appear novel or menacing for a critic to insert a reading he had thought up himself. In full consciousness of this domestic audience, Bentley mounted an inflammatory and histrionic case in which his own preternatural skill at conjecture also became the mark of reason, certainty, Enlightenment. Plain scholarly knowledge and erudition were fine and indispensable things, he conceded, but you also need an incredibly keen judgment; you need sagacity and shrewdness; you need what the ancients ascribed to Aristarchus, a certain

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faculty of divination and prophecy. These can be acquired by no quantity of labor or length of life, but they come purely as the gift of nature and by happiness of birth. This is why although in other disciplines one’s results answer to one’s labors and prayers, in this arena of Criticism, out of so many who have rolled this stone their entire lives, making themselves old with books and study, there have been so very few who have managed to attain the reputation they hoped for among their successors. And yet, if you don’t already know it, it’s far, far harder today than it was in earlier times to compose emendations. For all the readings that obviously and willingly offered themselves when a Manuscript was collated have already been captured and anticipated: there is virtually nothing left but what you can excavate from the force of the meaning and the form of the language, solely by means of your genius (ingenium). Therefore in these Horatian notes I will produce more emendations from conjecture than from the help of Manuscripts, and, unless I am totally wrong, the greater part of them more certain. For when there are variant readings, authority itself often makes a fool of us, soothing the mistaken itch of those who would emend. On the contrary, when we propose conjectures against the authority of all Books, timidity and shame pull us by the ear, and solely reason, and the light of the meaning, and necessity itself can get the upper hand. Say you squeeze out of one or two Manuscripts a reading different from the others: you’re wrong if you think you can create faith in one or two witnesses against a hundred—unless you fortify yourself with so many arguments that even on their own, without the testimony of manuscripts, they would virtually suffice to prove the matter. Therefore, don’t venerate Scribes alone, but dare to be wise for yourself; measure every word by the flow of the speech and the genius of the language, and so at last pronounce and render your verdict.

The lasting power of this self-portrait lies in the way in which Bentley’s claimed personal qualities (his genius, ingenium) are seamlessly expanded into a claimed methodology (the preference for conjecture over manuscripts). Such a mind as Bentley’s could only have produced such an edition as his Horace, and vice versa. The most famous passage from Bentley’s annotations is famous because it performs precisely the same sleight-ofhand: “To me, reason and the thing in itself (ratio et res ipsa) count for more than a hundred manuscripts, especially when the old Vatican manuscript agrees with me.”37 We are allowed to suspect that within the limits of the rhetoric, Bentley’s reason counts more than manuscripts primarily because it is Bentley’s reason. Yet even before we examine Bentley’s actual practices in the edition, there are good reasons to question this account. We have seen some general ways in which Bentley tried to make his new Horatian kind of scholarship seem genteel, modern, and nonpedantic. Here, his rhetorical emphasis on the fashionable language of conjecture, reason, “criticism” (Critica)

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and ingenium actually seems like a further installment in this line of argument. But more specifically, Bentley’s emphasis on conjecture and ingenium constituted an argument for his own personal authority—an authority that tended, in Bentley’s annotations, to be virtually elided with Horace’s poetic authority, as Bentley claimed that he (perhaps only he) could infallibly identify “what is Horace.” By purporting to rely on his own ingenium as a means of direct communion with his author, Bentley was appropriating a critical rhetoric we have met before, in the self-contented pages of Sir William Temple’s “Essay of Ancient and Modern Learning.” We saw in Chapter 4 that in the Dissertation on Phalaris, Bentley too made some tentative forays into this more authoritarian and personal kind of argument, claiming point-blank that “you feel” the “emptiness and deadness” of the letters attributed to Phalaris. In the Horace edition, by contrast, Bentley was ready to argue from his personal judgment at every turn. At the same time, we will see that he combined these fearless assertions with extraordinarily detailed technical arguments which, if Bentley truly had become a critic in the mode of William Temple, he should have considered quite superfluous. As it happens, not even Bentley’s claim about emending more often from conjecture than from manuscripts was quite true: as H. R. Jolliffe showed, Bentley more often departed from what he identified as the received reading on the basis of a manuscript, even though the entire distinction in Bentley’s case ought to be treated with caution.38 Yet the importance he placed on conjecture dictated even the basic technology of his edition: before collating any manuscripts or older editions, Bentley filled the margins of a printed Horace with his conjectures in the evident hope that he might find his conjecture confirmed by a manuscript or anticipated by a venerated older critic. He also carefully signed and dated the book so that there could be no doubt of his conjecturing independently; at the same time, Bentley knew well that the volume was liable to be passed about as a collectible after his death.39 But even while he engaged in these theatrics, Bentley was also positioning his edition in a serious way that fellow scholars would recognize: his preface effectively declared him a member of the Dutch school of poetic criticism that had grown up in the generations after Joseph Scaliger. Scaliger himself had edited Catullus and Manilius; his followers continued to favor Latin poetry of the most canonical kind, the world into which Bentley was now suddenly stepping. For example, Ovid and Vergil were each edited by both Daniel Heinsius and his son Nicolaas; Isaac Vossius edited Catullus as a successor to Scaliger’s edition; Daniel Heinsius had edited Horace with an interventionist hand before Bentley. J. G. Graevius, the editor of Cicero, Bentley’s correspondent, and Isaac Vossius’s onetime assistant, could easily

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be counted in this group as well. The Dutch critics freely conjectured, although like Bentley, they also made use of manuscripts—a mixture of methods that had also been characteristic of Scaliger the textual critic.40 Most distinctively, perhaps, the Dutch style involved commenting purely and solely on textual matters, avoiding historical or explanatory remarks about the poetry at hand. Bentley announced up front that he too would take this line, dispensing faint praise to those who had already composed historical commentaries on Horace (“they certainly have done useful work”) and announcing that “in Our kind of criticism,” by contrast, historical information “holds the lowest and most preliminary place, purely that of preparation.”41 Here Bentley may have been thinking not merely of printed Horace commentaries but of the massively erudite general philological compilations that at this time issued en masse from the continent, above all contemporary Germany.42 But such refusal to help the reader in basic ways was not taken kindly to by all. Jean Le Clerc complained of Graevius’s edition of Cicero’s orations that Graevius “cares more about giving the correct text, based on the manuscripts and the conjectures of the Learned, than he does about making it understandable to those not versed in Roman Antiquities. The notes belong almost entirely to this Criticism which addresses the purity of the Text, but which doesn’t in the slightest open the way that must be followed in order to solve difficulties.”43 To Bentley, however, nothing could have been more congenial: throughout his life, he declined to comment on any matter unless he could offer an emendation in connection with it. If seventeenth-century England had usually venerated Scaliger the historical chronologer, Bentley now announced that the Scaliger he followed was the brilliant student of poetry who suffered no fools. Bentley did more than simply indicate the affinity of his methods with those of Dutch colleagues; he actively entered their cult of personality, in ways also clear from his preface to Horace alone. Beginning with the Nachlass of Joseph Scaliger, Dutch scholars had eagerly passed back and forth the annotated books of their predecessors, which might contain manuscript collations but were prized above all for the handwritten conjectures they contained in the margins. The library catalogues of the departed were even used to instruct students in the bibliography of the period’s omnivorous learning.44 From Graevius, Bentley had learned of a printed Horace annotated by Nicolaas Heinsius which also, as a great bonus, contained conjectures by Claude Saumaise. After Graevius’s death, his protégé Pieter Burmann lent the actual volume to Bentley, who made frequent use of it in the Horace edition, crowing in particular when he found that one of his own conjectures had been anticipated by the great Saumaise.45 To those who understood Bentley’s explanation of this transaction in his preface to Horace, he was unambiguously announcing his entry into this honored

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lineage. He was also, incidentally, announcing a willingness to engage in a more collaborative, respectful mode of work than his otherwise pugnacious language would suggest. Just as Bentley had contributed conjectures to Kuster’s Suda and to the Cicero editions of the young John Davies, Bentley himself now took the role of the student ready and willing to be assisted. But if the Dutch critics had long been accustomed to combining serious scholarship with the study of canonical poetry, the physical presentation of Bentley’s big book underscored the difficulty that the synthesis still posed for him. On roughly the first 300 pages we find Horace’s text, attractively presented with large type, ample spacing, and very generous margins; then, in a further 450 pages, we find Bentley’s annotations, in cramped type that seems to have been chosen in a losing attempt to keep the annotations from becoming longer than the text. In looking at the edition, we will necessarily be reading the text and notes together. But we should begin by noticing just how disparate they are. The pages of the printed text call attention above all to Bentley’s personal work, and they present that work as markedly interventionist. Horace’s poems are printed incorporating the readings Bentley argues are correct, and the apparatus on the page has the sole purpose of telling us how many arguments are being made in the process: below the text stands a list of readings labeled “Vulg.,” vulgatae lectiones or “common readings,” where Bentley notes the more customary readings for which he has inserted substitutions. The great regularity with which Bentley’s uncommon readings appear—rarely does a page pass without at least one proclaimed departure from the customary text— raises the suspicion that Bentley found it important to appear to be intervening continuously. It seems equally telling that what counted as a “common reading” was often, in practice, a matter of Bentley’s discretion. Usually his “common readings” prove to be the readings of Denys Lambin’s standard second edition of 1567, but occasionally Bentley “restored” to Horace a reading that was already in Lambin, dethroning a “common reading” taken from some other source. This strategy obviously tended to increase the apparent number of Bentley’s interventions. At the same time, Bentley had a second strategy for softening the shock of his more surprising emendations: if two manuscript readings were known and Bentley had inserted a new reading from conjecture, Bentley chose as the “common reading” the manuscript reading that resembled his conjecture more closely. The printed text, then, was carefully calibrated to make Bentley’s work seem both as astonishing and as plausible as possible. Bentley’s annotations not only look radically different from this—they are usually long, digressive, and filled with quotations—but they were also composed after Bentley had finished preparing the text of the poems, and indeed after the text had been printed. The records of the Cambridge

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University Press show that Bentley had the text printed first, from 1703 to 1706 or 1707, and only then composed his notes, which were printed between 1708 and 1711.46 In the course of preparing the notes, in fact, Bentley changed his mind about several readings which were already printed in the text, something he explained in his preface.47 In effect, Bentley’s annotations were written after the fact, even if we can suppose he had some idea what he would argue when he first made each emendation. Now it was entirely normal practice at the time for editors to write up their notes only after their texts had been printed: so much is clear from the many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions in which the editor’s endnotes refer to page numbers in the printed text. But it is also clear that we cannot regard Bentley’s Horace text itself as an ideal form established in advance and merely explained in the notes. Like Bentley’s famous preface to Horace, then, his notes were above all a piece of self-justification: we should read them as rhetorical, theatrical texts intended to produce an effect of persuasion or compulsion upon readers, not as transparent documents of Bentley’s way of discovery. Taking the annotations together with Bentley’s self-conscious presentation of the printed text, the entire Horace edition should be understood as a single long train of argument on behalf of its contents and on behalf of its protean editor. For Bentley’s annotations too—in an important sense, the real work of the edition—stage a pyrotechnic confrontation between the man of literary taste who straightforwardly “pronounces and renders his verdict” and the scholar who diligently, almost compulsively overwhelms readers with “the weight of his reasons and the number of his examples.” This was the case whether Bentley set out deliberately to shock, as he often did in the early part of his edition, or whether he was handling relatively routine decisions, including working with manuscripts. Both his conjectures and his unwieldy masses of notes projected Bentley as an overweening personality—surely one of the fundamental factors that impressed and repelled his detractors. And nowhere did Bentley provoke them more sorely than in one of the earliest notes in the edition, on the third of Horace’s Odes. The first man to sail a ship must have been fearless, according to the poem in the received reading: What footstep of death did he fear who could see with dry eyes [siccis oculis] monsters swimming, the turbulent sea, and the infamous rocks of Acroceraunia? (Ode 1.3.17–20)

Bentley’s taste informed him that this passage was “remarkable” (egregius), full of spirit and art as was the rest of the poem: “yet either I’m totally

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wrong, or an ugly fault is taking cover under the attractive skin.” It was completely senseless, he explained, to remark that the first sailor had “dry eyes,” “for I claim that even a timorous man, even a woman, could see these things without tears. In the midst of such terror she could not weep even if she greatly wished to; we are all formed by nature in this way. Now in the presence of pity, or love, desire, shame, some minor present danger, or the memory of some great danger in the past, tears do spring even into unwilling eyes. . . . Everyone knows this; we have learned it from the school of life and experienced it in ourselves. What then is so great or wondrous if a brave man saw with dry eyes what even the most timid persons can see in no other way?”48 Bentley’s appeal to the universalities of human nature was backed up in this case by literary authority as well: not even the lachrymose epic heroes of Homer and Vergil ever wept when confronted with a storm at sea. Bentley’s conclusion, however, was not that Horace had written out of ignorance, but rather that Horace’s text was corrupt despite the unanimous agreement of all manuscripts. Bentley advocated the surprising correction “with unwavering eyes” (rectis oculis), a proposal that he proceeded to defend at astonishing length using his new signature method, the list of passages from other ancient poetry. Seneca, Suetonius, and Cicero had used precisely this same phrase, “with unwavering eyes,” to refer to an intrepid or audacious man; others had used similar words such as “with unwavering face” or “looking unwaveringly”; Sophocles, Theocritus, Arrian, and others had used the Greek phrase directly equivalent to “unwavering eyes.” Once the subject of Greek had arisen, meanwhile, Bentley allowed himself his old habit from the Letter to Mill of digressing and emending: by conjecture, he regularized the meter of a line from Oppian that Julius Caesar Scaliger had defended as an example showing that a cretic foot could be substituted in a dactylic hexameter. As for the most obvious point at hand, Bentley did not even state it directly: his new idea had no manuscript support, meaning that here Bentley was presenting one of the “more certain” conjectures he had advertised so loudly in his preface. In this case, even Bentley admitted after a fashion that his conjecture might or might not be the actual solution, although even this was truculently done, with a particular eye to his presumed incompetent readers: “But enough already. I think that by now I have adequately and abundantly proven that either Horace wrote ‘unwavering eyes’ or at any rate he should have written it: if you deny the first, you have no idea what Horace is, and if you deny both, I’m afraid we know very well what you are.”49 Yet despite the exceptional boldness and pugnacity of this annotation, it perfectly embodied the habits in which Bentley indulged throughout the Horace edition. Structured as the unfolding story of a critic’s mind at

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work, it began with Bentley’s consternation at “discovering” the problem; it elaborated on the gravity of the problem at some length; it proposed a solution, and finally, it defended the solution with more than a dozen examples drawn from other ancients. It went unremarked by Bentley, although not by his readers, that these parallel passages raised one question irresistibly: why must Horace have written just as other poets did? For that matter, how many parallels could Bentley have found for the received reading, “with dry eyes,” had he tried? In Bentley’s critical approach, the exceptional was generally the enemy to be vanquished by the principle of analogy, diametrically opposite to our post-Romantic theories of how poetry ought to work (and to Bentley’s own practice on some occasions when he preferred a more difficult and rare word to an easy one). And this will to correct continued beyond the linguistic form of the passages Bentley scrutinized, extending to their basic and literal meaning as well: as Bentley put it here, “The meaning (sententia) is such as to overturn all the credit and authority even of two hundred copyists.” The semantically correct utterance, undergirded by a multitude of correct “parallels,” must be the correct word that Horace himself had actually written. And the very canonicity and celebrity of Horace’s poems was what shielded Horace from having written anything incorrect: as he would later do, even more spectacularly, in his edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, here Bentley was inclined to attribute to Horace’s scribes everything whatsoever that he disliked. If all of this seems like the apotheosis of Bentley’s remarkable faculty of conjecturing, in reality his argumentative habits remained much the same when he had to defend a reading drawn from a manuscript. In his annotation on Epode 11.2, which involved a choice between two manuscript readings, Bentley again managed to claim both that his choice depended on the subtlety of his own taste and that his choice was necessary based on the nature of the world and Latin linguistic usage. What we should recognize now is that this double form of argument also entailed a double posture for Bentley as a critic. In a kind of discursive whiplash that may constitute the signature gesture of the Horace edition, he oscillated between the stance of the man of reason and the stance of the indefatigable scholar and erudite. The readings at issue in this passage actually differ by only a single letter. Incorporating what Bentley calls the common (“Vulg.”) reading, the opening of the 11th epode (with an eighteenth-century translation) reads: Petti, nihil me, sicut antea, juvat Scribere versiculos, amore perculsum gravi; Amore, qui me praeter omnis50 expetit Mollibus in pueris aut in puellis urere.

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O Pettius, I take no more pleasure, as formerly, in writing Verses, being so cruelly smitten by Love: Love, which renders me so sensible to the Charms of young Boys and Girls.51

In the second line, however, Bentley rejected the word perculsum, “smitten,” in favor of the alternate manuscript reading percussum, making the speaker “struck” by love. The distinction is small enough, but Bentley treated it quite seriously, and his annotation presented the choice between readings as a difficult, even dramatic task. Bentley began his annotation in an essentially scholarly mode, listing the readings of several manuscripts and fifteenth-century printed editions. Perculsum (smitten) was the most widespread reading, appearing in one of the fifteenth-century editions, most subsequent printed texts, and all of the oldest manuscripts Bentley inspected; percussum (struck) made a poorer showing, with only two manuscripts Bentley saw, three more reported in Laevinus Torrentius’s edition of 1608, and two fifteenth-century editions. Had percussum been the majority reading, Bentley might well have made that fact into an argument in its favor: as matters stood, his next move was to try to undermine the importance of the manuscript evidence in general. First, he castigated his fellow editors for failing to notice and report what he believed must be many further instances of percussum in manuscripts. Then, not entirely consistently, he claimed that scribes habitually confused these two words in any case. Finally, ancient grammatical writers who quoted Epode 11.2 gave it in both forms, sometimes within the same grammatical text.52 Bentley’s rapid-fire display of knowledge up to this point produced a markedly self-destructive effect. He had devoted considerable energy to surveying the manuscripts but far more energy to complaining that these manuscripts were nearly worthless. His scholarly persona had come to an embarrassing impasse, and his defeat became the cue for an abrupt shift of register. In expansive tones, Bentley now remarked that the truth could be discovered only by a different sort of critic, or as Bentley put it, an “elegant contemplator of the forms who can choose out the more poetical [venustiorem]” of the two readings. Unfortunately, grammatical writers offered the critic no help in this lonely task. According to Agroetius and Bede— two medieval writers on grammar whose names Bentley tossed out casually—percussum was used of blows to the body, and perculsum of blows to the mind. But this was a mistake: in reality, said Bentley, both words referred literally to the body and metaphorically to the mind. The actual distinction lay in the degree of violence involved: “percellere means something more than percutere, to wit, to percutere with so much force that you overturn the object and prostrate it on the ground.” Bentley quoted three

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passages using percellere from Terence, Cato, and Vergil—a brief blast of erudition—and rendered his verdict: “Thus we see that when the subject is serious and dire, perculsus is the more appropriate word: we constantly read in authors phrases like perculsus by terror, fear, trepidation, fighting, ruin, punishment, or discord.”53 Since Horace’s subject was love, he had necessarily used percussus instead. To reinforce this redoubtable conclusion, Bentley ended his note by descending into quotations again, demonstrating that “percussus by love” was a conventional phrase in poetry, particularly Vergil’s. Much of the general strangeness of Bentley’s edition arises from the jarring dialogues like this that play out, with slightly varying plot lines, over the whole series of his annotations; at such moments, Bentley appears as a virtually authorial figure, a composer of ancient poetry as much as a student of it. It is Bentley’s conjectures, however, that ensured his edition’s enduring fame. Leaving aside his crowing over his personal ingenium, they show an unsurpassed linguistic facility and, often, a legitimately aesthetic sensibility that demands respect whether they are accepted or not. Three of his conjectures to the twenty-fourth ode of the third book form excellent examples on both counts. First, Bentley took on the phrase “if dire Necessity plants adamantine nails at the height of your roof,” that is, if you are invincibly obstructed at the height of your fortunes. si figit adamantinos summis verticibus dira Necessitas clavos (Ode 3.24.5–7)

To Bentley’s mind, a more vivid word than “dire” was in order to describe “Necessity,” and he changed a single letter to arrive at dura, “hard.” He briefly argued that “hard necessity” was an accepted phrase and that dirus and durus were frequently mistaken for each other in manuscripts, but the real advantages of his reading are readily evident. “Hard” Necessity continues the physical metaphor of the “adamantine” nails, amplifying the idea of implacability and constraint, and it also introduces the Horatian device of applying an epithet to one word where it really fits another. A second conjecture also had the aim of matching a word more vividly and intimately to its context: here, Horace’s speaker is calling for generalized moral reform at Rome and argues that “too soft minds should be shaped by rougher pursuits.” . . . tenerae nimis mentes asperioribus formandae studiis. (Ode 3.24.52–54)

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Bentley evidently regarded the word “shaped” (formandae) as bland, and in its place he proposed firmandae, “strengthened” or “toughened,” a word that harmonizes well with “rougher pursuits” while neatly forming a near-opposite to the “softness” of Roman minds. In effect, the emendation pulls together the entire phrase into a single metaphor yet does so without seeming excessively literal-minded. The objection might be raised that firmandae creates a superfluity of i sounds in lines 53 and 54, but on the whole, it is reasonable to think that if firmandae stood in the manuscripts (and, for that matter, if dura stood in the manuscripts), the reading would not be questioned. Sometimes, however, Bentley’s approach overreached, as a third conjecture shows. Horace’s complaint at this point is that greed for money leads Romans to undertake every peril, including traveling to “the farthest expanse of the North and snows hardened on the ground”: . . . nec Boreae finitimum latus durataeque solo nives (Ode 3.24.38–39)

“On the ground” (solo), Bentley thought, was jejune and redundant (“where else would snow be lying?”), and he proposed the surprising reading gelu, “snows hardened into ice.” This usage of gelu was so widespread in Latin poetry, he claimed, as to be a near-cliché, and he also protested that the paleographical difference between solo and gelu was by no means too remote to be plausible: “The sleepy scribes often admitted a greater change.” Even if we accepted the paleographical argument, however, Bentley’s reading is unsatisfying precisely because it does embody such an obvious idea. Where it was reasonable to amplify the idea of hardness in the passage about “adamantine nails,” and for that matter in the passage about “soft minds,” here what seems jejune and redundant is the Bentleian information that hardened snow is known as ice. Bentley’s method, in other words, began with finding relatively vague words that he disliked and ended by making them more lively and exact; in the middle, however, he occasionally failed to ask whether his alternative in itself was sensible and pleasing. One of Bentley’s trademark methods since his youth was the cascade of similar emendations in divergent passages and divergent texts, and this Bentley did in his Horace conjectures as well. Systematically, for instance, he proposed to change the received porrectus (“stretched out”) to projectus (“cast forth” or “laid low, prostrated”). In the tenth epode, Horace’s speaker gleefully imagines his enemy Maevius as the victim of a shipwreck and proceeds to elaborate his fate:

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opima quod si praeda curvo litore porrecta mergos iuveris (Epode 10.21–22)

(“if you, stretched out on the curving shore, give pleasure to gulls as a rich prey”). Bentley’s emendation to projecta—“if you, cast forth on the curving shore”—not only connects this abject image directly with the shipwreck mentioned in the line immediately before. It also transforms Maevius’s condition from the merely passive to the actively suffering and beaten down (“laid low” or “prostrated”). Bentley, for his part, took the line specifically to mean that Maevius by this point was dead but unburied and undisposed of, a condition that projecta might describe equally well. What we see here again is Bentley seizing on a relatively undistinguished word and making it more striking, more active, and more closely linked to its context. He made the same emendation in the tenth ode of the third book, this time in a speech from the mouth of a despairing lover accusing his beloved of intransigence: “yet you would grieve to hand me over, stretched out at your cruel door, to the inhabitants of the north wind.” . . . me tamen asperas porrectum ante fores obicere incolis plorares Aquilonibus. (Ode 3.10.2–4)

In this case, making the lover instead projectus (“prostrated”) not only added the idea of quasi-physical abuse, it suited well the lover’s tone of histrionic self-pity throughout the poem. In a third instance of porrectus, however, Bentley changed his mind about his emendation between printing his text and composing his notes—justly so. He originally took the phrase “sooner will the heaven sink below the sea with the earth stretched out above” priusque caelum sidet inferius mari, tellure porrecta super (Epode 5.79–80)

and changed the word porrecta, again, to projecta.54 But in this image nothing is added if we think of the earth as laid low or prostrated, which would be the result of Bentley’s conjecture: on the contrary, it is the heaven that sinks low, and indeed in this passage it makes positively good sense for the earth to be “stretched out” above. In the case of porrectus and projectus, then, we see Bentley’s Enlightenment taste for system and law meshing seamlessly with the habits he learned as a seventeenth-century scholar of Greek: one conjecture not only led to another, it was perhaps paradoxically

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taken to provide additional support. In not a few of his conjectures, too, we see Bentley introducing a somewhat more difficult reading—a difficilior lectio—to prefer which was an old principle newly canonized in Jean LeClerc’s Ars critica of 1697. How does Bentley compare with the seventeenth-century Dutch scholars he admired and who were his most natural predecessors? Certainly, they too favored conjecture. They too adduced parallel passages in support of their preferred readings, although they were generally content with fewer—and, crucially, they rarely reproduced their parallel passages in full, giving only citations instead. If this made for a less immediate persuasive effect, it also avoided the shockingly long notes that Bentley often produced. Perhaps the most telltale sign of Bentley’s allegiance, though, was his vivid imagination for the way in which medieval scribes had worked (or rather, misbehaved). True, Bentley found no great dislocations in Horace’s text of the kind that Joseph Scaliger found in Manilius or Daniel Heinsius professed to find in Aristotle’s Poetics. He ejected a Horace passage as an interpolation only once, on the grounds of meter; compare this with the many passages that Joseph Scaliger had rightly identified as interpolations in Manilius, or with Nicolaas Heinsius’s branding of most of Ovid’s Heroides as spurious (he proceeded to emend them anyway). Bentley did take a sustained interest in identifying letters that were habitually transposed through scribal error, a frequent topic in Nicolaas Heinsius’s Ovid, which Bentley had read with an attentive hand.55 For the most part, however, what Bentley partook in was the Scaliger school’s gleeful excoriation of the stupidity of scribes, which had begun with the great man himself (“Nugae!”—“nonsense!”) and been eagerly taken up by his followers. For example, Daniel Heinsius asserted in his 1611 treatise On the Tragedy that an editor who would be truly pious toward the memory of his author would not shrink from supplying missing words by conjecture; Sophocles, he claimed, did not commit “the blots and absurdities of grammarians,” yet many of these were to be found in the received text, inserted “by a wicked hand” (a mala manu).56 For his part, Bentley assumed that the transmission of Horace’s poems had been regularly distorted by interventionist figures much like himself, who operated in malevolent isolation or in organized gangs. We saw that as he weighed the readings percussum and perculsum in Epode 11.2, for example, Bentley pointed out that Bede’s and Agroetius’s medieval grammars instructed the reader to use perculsus to refer to mental (as opposed to physical) blows, and he assumed that medieval scribes would have “corrected” the text in accordance with what they thought was their knowledge. Now given this level of skepticism, we might ask Bentley why these

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scribes, if they were so eager to emend, confined themselves here and in most other passages to changing just a letter or two. Bentley had an answer that was diabolical in its elegance and its implications. In his note to Ode 1.3.18, as he argued for the reading rectis oculis (“with unwavering eyes”) over the unanimous manuscript reading siccis oculis (“with dry eyes”), Bentley remarked that “the difference between the words is not so great that our daring friends the scribes would not have permitted themselves the crime” of inserting siccis.57 Bentley apparently assumed that medieval scribes had conjecturally emended their texts only in ways that could be explained as innocent errors in the event of a challenge or complaint. This was to say any manuscript variant that looked like a scribal error was very likely a malicious emendation in the guise of a careless slip of the pen. It followed that any subsequent reader who compared two manuscripts might take the real, original reading to be an inadvertent scribal error derived from the late, confected reading. At the same time, Bentley frequently stated the well-known principle that scribes had customarily changed difficult words into more frequent, easy words, not the other way around.58 Hence the need for an “elegant contemplator of the forms,” such as Bentley, to rise above the evidence of manuscripts and render a verdict based on “the inmost force of the meaning and the form of the language”—not omitting a punishing number of putative parallel passages. Apart from the extremes to which Bentley took conspiracy theories such as these, his methods contained nothing especially principled or especially novel. As we have seen, he argued opportunistically for conjectures or for manuscript readings in essentially the same way, and he extended the same opportunism to his frequent disagreements with other scholars. For example, he applauded a conjecture by Claude Saumaise which Bentley found in his copy of Nicolaas Heinsius’s annotated book—instead of the coming “of spring” (veris) rustling with leaves, Saumaise and Bentley thought that “a bush” (vepris) rustled with leaves.59 Yet just as often, Bentley mercilessly censured his fellow critics for conjectures he characterized as needless, reckless, or mindless: “In addition to the fact that all manuscripts agree in this reading, it also has the support of Servius, who quotes the passage in his commentary on the Aeneid, and of Lactantius in his commentary on Statius’s Thebaid. Yet Daniel Heinsius, with his usual inability to let well enough alone, would have us plaster over a place that is already sound: he proposes the following amazingly infelicitous correction.”60 At the same time, there is nothing particularly sinister in Bentley’s eclectic use of his judgment and his consequent appeal to whatever argument suited him at a given moment, nor did contemporaries find his practice objectionable. Jean Le Clerc’s widely read Latin treatise On the Art of Criticism

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(1697), for example, had offered up a congeries of rules for emending so heterogeneous that it was clearly impossible to follow them all at once.61 Le Clerc himself, by the 1710s an inveterate enemy of Bentley’s, nonetheless found nothing to censure in this respect in a book review of the Horace edition: “In this case [i.e., textual criticism], that the editor is not supported by a mathematical degree of evidence is shown by the fact that often one employs a Maxim in one place but rejects it in another. This shows that the Maxim is not general and without exception, and consequently that it is uncertain—or that it’s not clear how to apply it because the material at hand is obscure.”62 If Le Clerc tacitly rejected Bentley’s pronouncements of total certainty for his conjectures, Le Clerc still had no riposte to the fundamental pragmatism of Bentley’s approach. Earlier prescriptions on how to edit a text had included equally fluid sets of suggestions in the expectation that the critic’s judgment would discover the right one to use.63 One concludes that Bentley’s real practice was far less exceptional than the frenzied reaction to his edition would suggest; it was his domineering style and the sheer bulk of his arguments that captivated and irritated his readers. At the same time, Bentley was capable of reading Horace through other lenses than that of semantic or factual correctness.64 His sense of Horace’s style was on many occasions hard to quarrel with. For example, he rejected the idea that Horace would have repeated the word reducit twice within six lines, changing one of the instances to educit with the help of a minority manuscript reading.65 Again, he willingly changed a word to eliminate a near-rhyme (vice and prece at the ends of two successive lines), observing that “if I know him right, the author never allowed this.”66 And in a passage where Henri Estienne had suggested that Horace was imitating the Greek poet Anacreon—something Bentley said he doubted to begin with— Bentley objected to André Dacier’s attempt to emend Horace in order to produce a more exact parallel to Anacreon, arguing that Horace himself had opposed strict and literal translation in his Art of Poetry.67 Poetic form, in the shape of meter, was also a running preoccupation as always with Bentley. In one case, he rejected a line as spurious on the grounds that it ignored a caesura which Horace otherwise treated as mandatory, muttering darkly that “I recognize the Monkish talent and color of this verse.”68 But he also indulged his taste for systematic pronouncements, pointing out, for example, that while Alcaeus had used either a spondee or a trochee in the two syllables before the caesura of an Alcaic line, Horace had only ever used a spondee.69 He also explained long poetic lines that his predecessors had sometimes cut in two: the Ionic a minore and a host of mixed (“synartete”) lines.70 Bentley even enunciated a metrical rule for the Latin comedy

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(that the fifth foot is rarely or never an iamb), promising the already stupefied reader that he would publish an edition of Terence in due course.71 Such discussions were at least as constructive as many of his emendations; metrical rules, when valid, made a far sounder basis for emendation than Bentley’s idiosyncratic sense of what was semantically correct. Bentley’s use of manuscripts, while in no way exceptional compared with contemporary practice, also revealed thought that went beyond the simple opposition between manuscripts and conjectures. Like other editors of the time, he clearly imagined an archetype or common ancestor of all existing manuscripts, making arguments about how and why its readings had been changed.72 His “Monkish” interpolator of the metrically faulty line placed the archetype in medieval Christian Europe, and as we have seen, Bentley thought that subsequent variants had arisen through individual monkish attempts at correction. These two propositions could be readily combined, as in a passage where Bentley contended that “It’s easy to suspect that long ago a two-syllable word fell out of the text; later scribes replaced it in various ways according to their capacities.”73 He also engaged in the common practice of working out how medieval abbreviations could have been mistaken for one another: in a typical case, Bentley wished to emend populum to campum and argued that the words would have looked far more similar when abbreviated as pplum and cpum.74 Nonetheless, Bentley placed definite limits on his hypothesizing about the archetype—specifically, he never took an interest in the game, fascinating to some others, of positing that large chunks of the text had been mistakenly moved about. Conversely, he censured Daniel Heinsius for proposing to move a group of fifty-four lines from one Epistle to another, observing that Heinsius “was drawn to this kind of thing by a mistaken emulation of Scaliger.”75 When it was convenient, Bentley recognized that some of the manuscripts he used were “better” (meliores) than others. But his basic willingness to use any extant manuscript reached an apogee in his notes on the Art of Poetry, of which he had found a manuscript in the library of Worcester Cathedral that interested him very much.76 (This does not imply that Bentley attempted a systematic survey of British manuscripts; he had been canon of Worcester from 1692 to 1700, originally stationed there as a chaplain to Stillingfleet.) In one case, he found that a variant recorded between the lines confirmed a conjecture he had already made (“whoever can’t be moved by arguments and reasoning, let him place credit in this manuscript”).77 In another, the Worcester manuscript provided minority support for a pleasing reading found in only one other manuscript: for captae post tempora Troiae, it gave captae post moenia Troiae, “after the

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walls of fallen Troy” instead of the usual “after the time of fallen Troy.”78 As Bentley pointed out, the second reading was “more figurative and more poetic” (figuratius et poihtikwvt eron). Elsewhere, Bentley substantiated an old conjecture out of “some anonymous grammarian” he had met with in the Worcester library: instead of dramatic spectators who “laugh” when the actors “laugh and are there when they cry,” the conjecture and the grammarian had the spectators “laugh when they laugh and cry when they cry.”79 Here Bentley’s local pride and pride of original discovery combined seamlessly with his radical open-mindedness about where good readings might possibly be found. Despite the wholly different setting of the Horace edition, then, Bentley’s habits remained substantially unchanged from his earlier work on difficult Greek texts, notably the Letter to Mill and his edition of Callimachus’s fragments. He consulted both facts and his own literary sense, freely conjecturing whenever he lacked manuscript support. He listed as many parallel passages as possible to demonstrate the correctness of his choice. He took his manuscript support where he found it, although he also never failed to mention that “better” or “older” manuscripts were on his side when that was the case. Probably the most jarring holdover from his earlier career was Bentley’s habit of digressing and emending, invariably brought on by his multifurcated lists of parallels in both Latin and Greek. So in the course of arguing for readings in Horace, Bentley also proposed conjectural emendations to Varro, Anacreon, Manilius, Euripides, Vergil, Hesychius, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Aristophanes (for example). At such points, Bentley was no longer preoccupied with displaying himself as a gentleman of polite taste; he reverted utterly to form, embodying the scholar as an equally flashy and perhaps equally admirable sort of reader. This, then, was what Bentley substituted for the kind of historical commentary that he had devalued in his preface: a purely lexical mode of contextualization in which the criteria for relevance were minimal. If the Horace edition began and ended as poetry, in the middle of the story lay the pure study of language itself, essentially untroubled by textual history and driven by the simple urge to correct. It was this directness and this freedom that struck Bentley’s contemporary readers as so remarkable and that have held the attention of textual critics even into the present.

Reactions: Yes and No The Horace edition elicited many published responses, of which some were approving and some—especially in England—were vitriolically derisive.

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The story of English anti-Bentleianism before Pope’s Dunciad has been told more than once before; its usual targets were Bentley’s self-glorifying rhetoric and his presumption in changing the text, with the occasional detour to point out Bentley’s slips from classical Latin usage.80 The monotony and philological naiveté of much of this literature suggest that its motivation was largely partisan, and it probably worked to call public attention to Bentley’s edition as much as anything else. For other writers, the Horace edition was both arrestingly powerful and difficult to accept in its totality. Contrary to Bentley’s predictions, the readers who were most thoroughly impressed by his edition seem to have been the ones who focused on its preface, rather than on the weight of Bentley’s reasons and the number of his examples. In particular, reviewers for learned journals tended to produce close paraphrases of Bentley’s own prefatory rhetoric, followed by small snippets of the text and annotations—standard operating procedure for book reviews at the time, which happened in Bentley’s case to push his methodological polemic to the fore. For example, Bentley received a favorable review by Gottfried Olearius in the Acta eruditorum, the monthly Leipzig journal that at this time still gave the most international and comprehensive view of current scholarship; Olearius’s review was the first piece in the November 1712 Acta, making Bentley literally front-page news.81 Olearius began by cutting and pasting the text of Bentley’s preface to produce a two-page summary, then briefly discussed Bentley’s treatment of several passages of Horace’s text. Echoing Bentley’s claims about the preponderance of conjectural emendations in his edition, Olearius noted one emendation from a manuscript reading, one defense of a traditional reading, and several conjectures, praising all of these liberally. Bentley’s own hand may be detectable in an outrageously favorable review that occupied the entire January 1712 number of the London Memoirs of Literature, the same month the Horace edition was published. Much of the review is essentially an English translation of the self-laudatory opening section of Bentley’s preface, with Bentley’s “I” almost superfluously changed to “the Editor.”82 To the intrepid readers who engaged more fully with the substance of the Horace edition, it seemed prudent to couch any public response in a mixture of assent and principled resistance. The 1713 Horace edition by Pieter Burmann, Bentley’s correspondent and J. G. Graevius’s former student in Utrecht, provides a curious case. Burmann published this book— the third edition of Horace he had prepared—at the request of his bookseller, who wanted to bring out a cheap and readily vendible edition reflecting the new, Bentleian state of the art.83 Burmann’s text followed Bentley’s in the overwhelming majority of the passages Bentley called his

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emendations, yet in Burmann’s preface, he was at pains to show that this nearly supine compliance was really the result of independent choice. In gloriously ornate Latin, Burmann spelled out the precise extent and boundaries of his allegiance to Bentley: I beg my readers to believe, that I acknowledge as positively correct many of the ingenious gentleman’s conjectures, those, I mean, which are supported by the authority of old copies: indeed, I have accepted them into the text without number: yet I have not ventured to admit everything he has derived from conjectures against the testimony of manuscripts, let those conjectures be pleasing and ingenious as they may; for it often happens that from some new manuscript which others have overlooked, a different reading may be sometimes produced, which wrecks and overturns all the conjectures of previous commentators. I believe no work so useful has been devoted to any Poet since the revival of learning, nor has any Critic produced emendations more certain, and more laudable for the force of their demonstration; yet I will not conceal, that not all of his emendations have yet gained my trust by an equal degree of evidence; nor, I hope, have I done myself any injury by thus ingenuously revealing my opinions. For if liberty is anywhere to be enjoyed, it must be enjoyed preeminently in the republic of letters, where we acknowledge neither Kings, nor Tyrants, but every one may live in accordance with his own laws, and go about his business in accordance with his own judgment.84

The term “republic of letters” to mean the international community of scholars was a widespread metaphor by 1713; Burmann’s vigorous elaboration of it here was astute and witty, if not totally unpredictable for a scholar living in the Dutch Republic. The passage is remarkable more generally because Burmann is so very specific about the way in which Bentley’s edition threatens to tyrannize over this blissfully libertarian group. In particular, Burmann accepted wholesale Bentley’s premise that conjectural emendations are somehow intimately personal to the critic—but in Burmann’s view, that was precisely the problem. To agree with Bentley on the basis of manuscripts made one a member in the republic of the reasonable; to agree too often with Bentley’s conjectures would be to place oneself ignobly under his personal sway. Burmann clearly dismissed out of hand Bentley’s infamous claim that his conjectures were “more certain” than his emendations from manuscripts—Burmann repeated Bentley’s very words (magis certae) in this very different context. Nor did Burmann accept Bentley’s practical assumption that manuscript readings and conjectures could be argued for in just the same way. According to Burmann, one kind of emendation was inherently acceptable to the community, while the other was inherently suspect. Nonetheless Burmann remained in some ways a captive of Bentley’s rhetoric—not only in the tenacity with which

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he seized on Bentley’s distinction between the conjecture and the manuscript emendation, but also insofar as he presented his own readerly options as a stark choice between capitulation or resistance. The Franeker professor Lambertus Bos took a subtler, more insidious approach in replying to Bentley. In 1715, Bos published a book of miscellaneous Animadversions that commented, in classic seventeenth-century style, on individual textual readings in a long list of Greek and Latin authors.85 Bentley and his German protégé Ludolf Kuster made frequent appearances throughout this book, as Bos took issue with their published emendations on Menander, Aristophanes, Callimachus, and Suidas. But Bos had a special contribution, as he described it, for the text of Horace. Bentley had acknowledged in his edition that for the readings of a potentially important manuscript in Franeker, he had been obliged to rely on a spotty collation of dubious accuracy.86 When Bos inspected the Franeker manuscript for himself, he found that this constituted a real omission, since it “very often contain[ed] the readings that Lambin, Cruquius, Torrentius, and Bentley report having found in the oldest, best, and most reliable manuscripts.”87 Out of public-spiritedness, therefore, Bos had decided to publish the Franeker manuscript’s readings for a number of controverted passages. The readings would, he said, either “verify the conjectures of Horace’s learned editors, or confirm the readings of other good manuscripts.” Bos hoped no one would take it in the wrong way if he disagreed with the conjectures and emendations of his fellow scholars.88 This strategy of issuing a challenge in the guise of ultrapolite collaboration was fairly usual in the Republic of Letters.89 Nowhere did Bos proclaim his own liberty of judgment in ringing tones like Burmann’s. Instead, he calmly listed dozens of the Franeker manuscript’s readings, either to express disapproval of Bentley’s editorial choices—here was one more manuscript Bentley had contravened—or, as Bos slyly said, to support Bentley’s choices of manuscript readings. In the case of Epode 11.2, for example, Bos agreed with Bentley that percussum was the better reading. But this was in part because the Franeker manuscript turned out to be an additional witness in favor of percussum, both in its text and in a preliminary treatise on meters where the line was quoted.90 Where Bentley had labored to show that the manuscripts were all but irrelevant for considering this passage, Bos’s report on the Franeker manuscript quietly begged to differ. Elsewhere, Bos mounted a more general objection to the principle of analogy, and thus to Bentley’s attempts to justify his readings by quoting parallel passages when the manuscripts went against him: “I have noticed some scholars proposing emendations that are not really necessary, purely from analogy with other authors on the basis of some phrase they customarily

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use; yet this is not always successful; for it is quite possible that some ancient author preferred a certain phrase which is rare, not familiar to all, and which you would have difficulty finding in other authors.”91 Bos did not have particularly doctrinaire ideas about what constituted a good argument on the basis of manuscripts. As we saw, he was willing to follow Bentley in preferring percussum in Epode 11.2, even though the addition of the Franeker manuscript did not sway the numerical count appreciably in Bentley’s favor; like Bentley, Bos believed that some manuscripts, like the Franeker one, were particularly good and especially worthy of attention. Yet Bos’s polite appeals to his Franeker readings showed that Bentley’s arguments, whether from manuscripts or otherwise, remained eternally vulnerable to the readerly strategy we might call the demand for n + 1. If Bentley cited three good manuscripts, his fellow scholars had the option of calling for a fourth; if he quoted six parallel passages, they had the right to reserve judgment until they saw a seventh and an eighth. Bentley had claimed in his preface that the weight of his reasons and the number of his examples would defeat the most obstreperous reader’s powers of disbelief. Bos’s critique shows that the real boundaries of convincing scholarly practice were both invisible and supple, always liable to gerrymandering by enterprising editors and their learned readers. How far had Bentley come since confronting the problems of authority and persuasion in the controversy over Phalaris more than a decade earlier? The Horace edition certainly did nothing to resolve the contradictions inherent in Bentley’s project of persuasion. Both the book he published and his own critical persona were radically double, declaring Bentley’s supreme originality on the one hand and the universal force of his conclusions on the other. Meanwhile, Burmann’s and Bos’s replies show that individual readers could take issue both with Bentley’s overweening presentation of self and with the ways in which he tried to make his arguments acceptable to a community. In fact, the most significant thing Bentley did in the Horace edition was precisely to enact his dilemma so unmistakably and on so many levels. The resulting publication was new and strange, but it was Bentley’s unprecedented assertions of personal authority that made his work so alluring a model for later generations of editors. However much Bentley remained a seventeenth-century polyhistor in his instincts and his techniques, his heroic efforts to create a new social and intellectual role made contemporaries see that an English philological scholar could be a highly public, highly controversial, and highly exciting figure. Horace had given Bentley his Archimedean place to stand, and in one respect Bentley did move the world. By exploiting and perpetuating Horace’s status as a canonical poet in elite culture, Bentley elevated himself into a powerful new kind

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of critic. Uniquely ingenious and universally authoritative, the critic of Bentley’s imagination deserved to mediate between the author of his text and all other, less preternaturally gifted, readers. The astonishing efflorescence of textual editing in eighteenth-century England suggests that Bentley’s example was no less attractive for being so deeply problematic.

chapter six

The Measure of All Things Vi commodavi

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ike the D issertation on Phalaris before it, Bentley’s edition of Horace provoked replies ranging from the minutely technical to the vaporously abstract. It is easy enough for us to see that Bentley’s specialist interlocutors writing in Latin—Pieter Burmann, Lambertus Bos, and Jean LeClerc among them—did their reading and rebutting in an atmosphere of personal and methodological competition. Since these scholars understandably preferred to think of their own methods as the proper ones, Bentley’s intervention forced them to articulate what was the matter with him, though not necessarily to produce well-theorized accounts of what critics should do instead. The professional stakes were summed up perfectly in Pieter Burmann’s anxious vision of Horace’s text as an epistemological zero-sum game: to the degree that Bentley was right, everyone else must quietly submit, but to the degree that Bentley was wrong, others had at least a chance to be right. The endless contemporary (and modern) pastime of detecting Bentley’s errors was in large part a way of asserting that other critics still had the right to exist, a point that was not made clear in Bentley’s own texts. A similar anxiety motivated other contemporary responses to Bentley, even and especially by those writers who lacked the philological skills to reply on points of detail. Alexander Pope’s repeated engagements with Bentley furnish at once the most famous and the most surprising example. Pope’s rhetoric has carried the day in this conflict, to the extent that it pervades

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most discussions of Bentley emanating from English literary studies. Yet we need to read Pope not as an oracle of cultural diagnosis but as a combatant who was himself scrambling for position in the 1710s and 1720s. Pope’s Essay on Criticism, his first independent publication, appeared about May of 1711, and Bentley’s imposing Horace appeared in January of 1712. At the very moment when Pope hoped his reputation as a critic had been established, that is, he had to face Bentley’s startling new incarnation as a critic of genteel poetry, as well as Bentley’s older habits of conspicuous erudition and vehement self-promotion. The fact that Bentley wrote in Latin was far from diminishing his presence for educated male readers like Pope, who would later edit a book of Latin verse by Italian writers and eventually issued his own Horace imitations side by side with a Latin text that included a few of Bentley’s emendations.1 For readers whose Latin was shakier, London booksellers brought out a complete English translation of Horace and of Bentley’s notes alongside the Horace text from his edition.2 Meanwhile, for impecunious students, schoolmasters, and curates, there was a cheap pamphlet simply listing Bentley’s emendations.3 For all that Bentley’s Horace was ridiculed in a string of pamphlets and in a Spectator essay by Joseph Addison, it had clearly been noticed, and his very detractors continued to bring Bentley’s name before the audience Pope hoped to win.4 Pope’s attacks on Bentley, with tactics ranging from straightforward insult to editorial emulation to burlesque impersonation, were in large part defensive maneuvers designed to neutralize Bentley and claim the critical laurel for Pope himself. To define what Pope did so much better than Bentley was not necessarily easy. Pope’s Essay on Criticism had given a strident account of the critic’s proper work, but also, in a number of ways, a vulnerable one. According to the youthful Pope’s central argument (201–336), the good critic began by considering “the Writer’s End” (255), judging a poem as a whole while perceiving the harmoniousness of its parts (243–252). He also paid great attention to “Thought” and “Truth” (298–299), of which words are merely the clothing (318); this distinguished him firmly from the shallow and unthinking “Verbal Critick” (261). Pope’s insistence on the primacy of “Sense” (310) rapidly revealed its instability, however, as words staged a powerful bid for dominance within Pope’s own argument. On the premise of warning the reader against praising any poem for regular meter (“Numbers”) alone (337), Pope lambasted poets who failed to adapt their “Phrase” to their “Sense” (325), which is to say, poets who used the wrong words. On this basis Pope laid down and repeatedly demonstrated his famous rule that “the Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense” (365), a display whose effect was primarily to highlight Pope’s superior understanding of the use of

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words. The category of “Sense,” never securely defined from the outset, seems in danger here of happily melting into Pope’s continuously renewed, continuously varied iambics. It remained an open question, then, how Pope’s precepts could actually have reformed the practices of wayward contemporaries, as his poem ostensibly set out to do. In the economy of the Essay, Pope himself seemed to be the sole arbiter of what was and was not “Sense,” just as he seemed to be the sole “perfect Judge” (233) of the allimportant correspondence between things and words. Like Bentley in the preface to his Horace, Pope in the Essay seemed to demand from others something he also seemed to claim they could rarely deliver. In other ways too, the Pope fashioned in the Essay was more like than unlike Bentley. Pope assumed implicitly that classical poetry deserved careful attention and comment from the critic; witness his praise for eminent readers of classical texts like Aristotle (645–652), Longinus (675–680), Erasmus (693–696), and Girolamo Vida (705–708), whom Pope would shortly emulate in the copious annotations to his translation of Homer (1715–1726). Like Bentley, Pope represented critical taste as an innate, divinely granted, and inordinately rare faculty, directly comparable to poetic genius (11–14). Like Bentley, Pope often found it congenial to write in Olympian tones of metaphysical censure, up to and including the occasions when he blasted others for sins that could also be imputed to himself. “Pride,” Pope declared, was “the never-failing Vice of Fools” (204), presumably the same critics as those who failed to “speak, tho’ sure, with seeming Diffidence” (567), perhaps in the course of writing “dull Receits how Poems may be made” (115). Finally, like the ideal critic of Pope’s Essay, Bentley by no means confined his editorial practice to “Verbal” questions: his formidable emendations to Horace showed just how seriously Bentley could take the “Sense” of the poems he studied. Pope’s posture toward Bentley moved beyond resemblance when he published a complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1723–1725, thus becoming, to all appearances, a “Verbal Critick” of the kind he had censured so forcefully.5 This Shakespeare edition inaugurated the polemic that yielded the most famous anti-Bentleian texts by Pope and his circle, the Dunciad Variorum (1729) and the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus by Pope and Arbuthnot (1741).6 In 1726, Lewis Theobald had ventured to question Pope’s editorial methods and his knowledge of Elizabethan English, dissecting Pope’s treatment of Hamlet and threatening a rival edition of his own; Pope retaliated by incorporating Theobald into an unholy trinity alongside Richard Bentley and the all-purpose pedant “Martinus Scriblerus,” amplifying each critic’s sins through a continuously recirculating guilt by association.7 In the Memoirs of the fictive polymath Scriblerus, it

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was revealed to the world that the abject Scriblerus was the true author of Theobald’s Shakespeare Restored as well as Bentley’s editions of Horace, Terence, and Milton; in the Dunciad Variorum, uncomprehending and splenetic annotations by “Scriblerus” adorned each page of Pope’s printed poem.8 The annotating Scriblerus’s abrupt prose style and his habitual critical moves—the spluttering objection, the impossible conjecture, the list of quotations—evoked Bentley far more precisely than they did Theobald, an identification that was spectacularly furthered in an appendix where “Scriblerus” presented, in Latin, a specimen of his forthcoming edition of Vergil. Scriblerus boldly confronted, for example, the opening of Aeneid book 2, where Aeneas replies to Dido’s invitation to tell her the story of his travels: Infandum Regina jubes renovare dolorem. You command me, Majesty, to renew an unspeakable sorrow.

J. C. Scaliger, in his Poetics of 1561, had called this the most perfect line in Vergil.9 Scriblerus, however, detected textual corruption and proposed this revision: Infantum regina jubes renovare dolorem. Sic haud dubito veterrimis codicibus scriptum fuisse: hoc satis constat ex perantiqua illa Brittannorum Cantilena vocata Chevy-Chace, cujus autor hunc locum sibi ascivit in haec verba, The Child may rue that is unborn.10 “You command me, Majesty, to renew the sorrow of infants.” I can hardly doubt that it was written thus in the oldest manuscripts. This is amply clear from the very ancient British ballad known as Chevy-Chace, whose author imitates this passage in the following words: The Child may rue that is unborn.

Bentley, as Scriblerus, apparently stood accused of abusing his editorial authority, eagerly venerating whatever he took to be “very ancient,” dispensing information of questionable relevance, and above all daring to find fault with the poem he saw before him. In fact, Pope’s own edition of Shakespeare lay open to much the same charges, with the exception of the third: where Bentley’s endnotes formed the most spectacular part of his Horace edition, Pope conspicuously abstained from footnoting except for rare remarks on the readings of early printed versions. Yet Pope’s display of editorial reticence also meant that he did not alert his readers to all of the passages where he had emended his copy-text (Rowe’s Shakespeare edition of 1709); for passages where Pope

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did condescend to explain that he had made an emendation, his arguments revealed a Bentleian readiness to favor whichever source provided the reading he preferred.11 Particularly remarkable is the case of Romeo and Juliet, from which Pope cast out many substantial passages as editorial or actorial interpolations. Almost invariably, Pope’s grounds for omitting a disfavored passage from Romeo and Juliet was that it did not appear in the first quarto of 1597, which modern Shakespearians have classed as a “bad quarto”; manifestly, the first quarto contains a far shorter and more metrically irregular text than the second quarto of 1599 and the First Folio of 1623. Pope never explained why he was justified in citing the authority of the first quarto when exiling passages he disliked, while following the second quarto (as well as Rowe) in retaining many more passages that had been absent from the first quarto.12 In other words, Pope’s opportunistic methods of correction bore a notable resemblance to Bentley’s; also Bentleian were Pope’s aversion to Shakespeare’s wordplay, repetitious language, and metaphors he found inept or contradictory.13 Yet Pope’s interventions on these principles could be undeniably impressive in practice, as when he confronted this metrically irregular speech in Rowe’s text of Romeo and Juliet: God’s Bread, it makes me mad: Day, night, hour, tide, time, work, play, Alone, in company, still my care hath been To have her match’d. . . .14

Pope drew on the first quarto’s reading Gods blessed mother wife it mads me, Day, night, early, late, at home, abroad, Alone, in company, waking or sleeping. Still my care hath beene to see her matcht.15

to replace the first two lines with perfect iambic pentameters: God’s bread, it makes me mad: day, night, late, early, At home, abroad; alone, in company, Waking or sleeping; still my care hath been To have her match’d. . . .16

Pope’s simultaneous attraction to Bentleian textual criticism and professed horror at Bentley’s methods were encapsulated in the edition’s preface, where Pope discussed the plays’ textual history and his own work. Here Pope

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elaborated with apparent relish on the corruption of Shakespeare’s plays—by his account, no printed Shakespeare version had completely escaped injury from actors and editors—yet he also inveighed against those who emended authors by conjecture, promising that the readings he himself printed as Shakespeare’s would be “constantly ex fide Codicum, upon authority.”17 This was, of course, the very authority Pope had just spent several pages dismantling. Pope’s theory here was ahead of his practice, or perhaps vice versa, yet it would be too simple to explain away Pope’s problem as the result of his supposed genteel amateurism, which was itself a cloak of Pope’s own weaving. Like Pieter Burmann and Lambertus Bos, Pope readily took up the received methodological distinction between conjecturing and emending from manuscripts as a stick with which to fend off Bentley. Combining the languages of methodology and ethics into a single rhetoric, Pope assumed a posture of editorial conservatism that was just as much a risky performance of intellectual identity as Bentley’s posture of heroic interventionism.

The Case of Meter If Bentley and Pope worked and competed in the same intellectual world, on a wider scale too the theory and practice of English criticism in the early eighteenth century often overlapped with current work on texts in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. To argue that claim fully would take a book, of course, and not one centering on Bentley or Pope. Suggestive cases are at  hand for exploration, however, in the form of two of Bentley’s postHorace projects: his Terence edition, published in 1726, and his work on Homer, also meant to become an edition and much publicized by word of mouth but never published as a book. In both projects, Bentley’s work centered on questions of poetic meter and pronunciation, topics that preoccupied contemporary students of ancient and modern languages alike. In the process, Bentley crossed and recrossed linguistic boundaries from classical to vernacular and back again, in ways that are likely to strike modern readers as both boldly productive and perilously rash. Bentley himself had theoretical support from early modern doctrines about the derivation of languages from one another, as well as the practical examples of many keen comparatists before him. Meter is not an alluring subject for most literary critics today, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries its importance seemed intuitively plain. English grammar-school pedagogy, with its emphasis on the writing of metrically accurate verses in Latin (and, to a lesser degree, Greek),

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tended to install meter firmly at the center of elite men’s conception of poetry. Alexander Pope’s attempts to make every line of Shakespeare scan as iambic pentameter show that Bentley’s metrical emendations to Horace were hardly perverse.18 Paul Fussell and T.  S. Omond have documented the dozens of eighteenth-century controversial texts that argued over the nature of English verse, often drawing on contemporary polemics over Greek, Latin, and Hebrew poetry in the process.19 This treatment of meter as a system that crossed linguistic boundaries echoed the experiments of sixteenth-century poets who composed English verse in Latin meters, with more or less violent adaptations in the process.20 Yet if metrical questions were pervasively interesting, it is also true that not every qualified contemporary chose to publish on them. Joseph Trapp, the Oxford professor of poetry in the early eighteenth century, passed over meter in his printed lectures as a subject “not contemptible, but one better explained to schoolboys than to university men.”21 Again, in a 1710 letter to Henry Cromwell, Alexander Pope wrote in detail on metrical questions, including the position of the caesura or midline pause in English iambic pentameter—he advised against writing more than three consecutive lines with the caesura in the same place.22 When Pope composed the section on “Numbers” in the Essay on Criticism, however, he omitted discussion of the caesura entirely, confining himself to the less recherché advice he had dispensed in his letter to Cromwell: one should avoid excessive hiatus, entire lines of monosyllables, and repetitive rhymes. Nonetheless, in a playful passage of deliberately bad verse, Pope repeated a fourth-syllable caesura for eight lines in a row, with an effect as monotonous as he had privately predicted.23 Expert readers would understand the reason while others simply marveled at Pope’s metamorphosis. Pope’s apparent reluctance to appear too technical and boring forms a literary parallel to the seventeenth-century chemist Robert Boyle’s improbable avoidance of mathematical notation in his writings.24 But both of these acts of self-censorship served mainly to underscore the powerful norms they attempted to resist. Just as mathematics was the language that qualified one to participate in the community of English natural philosophers in the late seventeenth century, the correct analysis and deployment of metrical forms were the sine qua non of the poet and the critic, whether or not he called the attention of nonexperts to the technical mastery involved in his work.25 Bentley, typically, exploited this situation by becoming conspicuously expert in meter, making the subject peculiarly his own from his earliest publications onward. In the Letter to Mill, the Dissertation on Phalaris, and his notes on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (1709), Aristophanes (1710), Menander and Philemon (1710), and Horace (1711), Bentley used

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metrical arguments both to proclaim his own virtuosity and to deride other critics. Joseph Scaliger, from whom Bentley had learned much about meter, came in for covert and overt attacks in the Letter to Mill and the Tusculan Disputations, while Jean LeClerc’s authentically shaky understanding of meter was Bentley’s sole target in the Emendations on Menander and Philemon.26 LeClerc, tellingly, would write Bentley off rhetorically as “Metricus Magister”—the Meter Master—at once conceding Bentley’s power in the field and shrinking him into the wrist-slapping emperor of a miniature domain.27 Likewise, Pope’s “Martinus Scriblerus” announced that a preface on meter would be included in his forthcoming edition of Vergil, just as metrical notes had been prefixed to the 1713 edition of Bentley’s Horace and an extended essay on meter had appeared in his Terence of 1726.28 Later generations of classical philologists admiringly treated Bentley as a virtual synonym for meter, as when David Ruhnken attributed Tiberius Hemsterhuis’s interest in the topic to his youthful correspondence with Bentley, or when Gottfried Hermann made Bentley stand rhetorically for all writers on classical meter prior to himself.29 Bentley’s Terence edition shows that he was keenly aware of contemporaries’ ambivalence about the study of meter. He defiantly placed meter at the center of his account of his work, yet he radically recast meter as a theoretical, virtually philosophical field where the way ahead lay in flashes of personal inspiration. In his Horace edition, Bentley had used startling claims about the value of conjectural emendation to theorize his work and shape his arguments. In the Terence edition, this polemic over conjectures and manuscripts was completely abandoned, and meter became the new Delphic tripos that subtended Bentley in his oracular mode. Bentley used his annotations to show himself thinking in terms of the new, exciting study of meter, while he actively avoided making arguments that drew on traditional understandings of the subject. Meanwhile, meter itself was represented as Bentley’s parthenogenetic creation: his introductory essay on Terence’s meters did not name a single predecessor, although not, as we will see, because Bentley had learned nothing from previous scholars.

Terence The meter of the Old Comedy was a difficult subject made compelling because its goal seemed so nearly within reach. Given the information from antiquity that Terence and Plautus composed in iambic and trochaic trimeters and tetrameters, early modern scholars’ task was to reconcile those metrical descriptions with the texts they found—something often

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easier said than done. True, many lines scanned readily, like this one from Heautontimorumenos (“The Self-Tormentor”), which has remained essentially unchanged from the fifteenth century to the present: Iocon an serio illaec dicat nescio. (Heaut. 3.2.30)30 I can’t tell whether he’s joking or serious when he says that.

Since this line falls in a scene written entirely in iambic trimeters—a fact announced to readers by prominent annotations in many early modern editions—the goal is simply to scan it in that meter. Traditionally, we do this based on the long or short quantity of each syllable, and we know the quantities in advance from grammar, yielding this: ˘

ˉ | ˉ ˉ |˘ ˉ | ˉ ˉ | ˉ ˉ | ˘ ˉ Iocon an serio illaec dicat nescio.

According to the Greek theory that was the basis of early modern doctrines, the iambic foot ( ˘ ˉ ) should be the dominant meter here, and we should especially expect it to appear in the second, the fourth, and above all the sixth foot. Actually, the iambs are in the first, third, and sixth feet, a  deviation that early moderns ruefully recognized as part of Terence’s habitual “license” (licentia): spondees ( ˉ ˉ ) are substituted for iambs in the second, fourth, and fifth feet. As in any other kind of Latin poetry, the final vowel of serio was combined with the opening vowel of illaec in pronunciation, so that the words serio illaec contained four syllables rather than five. These basic principles were set out in late antique, medieval, and early modern grammatical texts, and young readers of Terence in early modern schools would ideally have understood them well.31 It seems likely, however, that most teachers hoped for no more, and some may have hoped for less. One copy of Terence heavily annotated by a sixteenth-century English schoolboy shows no indication that the class grappled with difficult metrical cases; a copy of a late seventeenth-century Oxford edition of William Lily’s Latin grammar has a simplified section on meter added in manuscript, while the scribe did not mark the bulk of Lily’s printed discussion as assigned reading.32 Bentley himself, as a 16-year-old undergraduate, owned a school text of Terence with the helpful but metrically unambitious notes of Thomas Farnaby and Meric Casaubon.33 Conversely, there was never a second printing of the monstrously ambitious 1560 school text of Terence by Pierre Davantes (Antesignanus), which used a complicated code to supply a scansion for each and every line.34

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What classroom instruction may have passed over in haste, however, scholars on their own time considered it a point of honor to debate and clarify. The great problem in explaining Terence’s meter was that his lines seemed to contain too many syllables, sometimes as many as fifteen or twenty rather than the ideal twelve; moreover, too many of those syllables were long, even given the permissive standards that were understood to apply to the Old Comedy. An example much discussed in the sixteenth century came from the opening scene of Terence’s Andria: ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘ ¯ ˘ ¯ ¯ ˘¯ ¯ ˘˘ ¯ ¯ Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas, nam antea (Andr. 1.1.25)

From fuit onward, this line appeared completely standard—but in that case, the seven syllables preceding fuit, four of which were long, had to be somehow stuffed into two metrical feet. To solve such problems required the scholar to negotiate three interdependent questions in theory and practice. Which metrical feet were permitted as substitutions for the iamb? Under what conditions could syllables be lengthened, shortened, or omitted to make a line fit into the permitted feet? And what was the critic’s authority to emend the text so that it fit his version of the rules?35 Desiderius Erasmus, whose 1532 Terence edition provoked an intense critical conversation lasting for decades, relied on late medieval rules that recommended adjusting one’s pronunciation to remove (or “elide”) troublesome consonants and vowels.36 In this scheme, the most frequent victims were s (isti became iti), consonantal u (inuidia became inidia), and any letter appearing in a pair (illud became ilud).37 When a rule about the joining of adjacent vowels was added—fuit and meum were monosyllables, deorum and meorum were dissyllables—the troublesome line from Andria was easily dispatched, with an acceptable dactyl in the first foot: ˉ ˘ ˘| ˉ ˉ | ˉ ˉ | ˘ ˉ | ˉ ˉ | ˘ˉ Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas, nam antea38

The same rules naturally allowed other solutions. For example, Johann Rivius proposed in 1535 that instead of turning uiuendi into the disyllabic uiendi, one should remove the s from liberius and join the last two vowels to make the word a trisyllable: ˉ ˘ ˘ |˘ ˉ |ˉ ˉ | ˘ ˉ |ˉ ˉ |˘ˉ Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas, nam antea39

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Other scholars disliked the technique of eliding letters, either because they found it crude or because it obviated the need to emend otherwise tempting passages. For example, Antonius Goveanus, attacking Erasmus’s elisions (“pardon me, I almost wrote illusions”) on the one hand and muttering darkly about the corrupt state of Terence’s manuscripts on the other, conjectured this reading of the suddenly recomplicated line from Andria: ˘ ˘ ˉ |ˉ ˉ|˘ ˘ˉ| ˘ ˉ | ˉ ˉ |˘ˉ Fuit viuendi liberius potestas: nam antea40

“Many scholars have used manuscripts,” Goveanus remarked, “but for me, the judgment of reason has always outweighed the scribe’s ignorant and intrusive hand.”41 Not surprisingly, Goveanus also rejected Heinrich Glareanus’s recent suggestion that a number of unorthodox feet should be recognized and accepted in Terence’s iambics—the cretic ( ˉ ˘ ˉ ), the bacchiac ( ˘ ˉ ˘ ), the paean (any combination of three longs and one short), and even the trochee ( ˉ ˘ ).42 Glareanus had proposed admitting these feet in order to avoid the consonant elisions Erasmus had recommended to make lines scan; for Goveanus, nothing could have been further from the point.43 By the time Goveanus wrote, in 1541, Terence’s meter was firmly established as a topic for debate among specialists. The prefatory matter to Goveanus’s edition rapidly sketched out his controversial positions rather than teaching the uninitiated; his highly allusive style recalls the obligatory “theory section” of the modern academic paper. Even more intractably specialized was a fiery 1539 essay by Julius Caesar Scaliger, who interrupted his demolition of Erasmus only to speculate on the general nature of meter in what Scaliger apparently considered an Aristotelian vein.44 Yet it was Scaliger, along with Gabriele Faerno two and a half decades later, who introduced new methods to supplement contemporaries’ zero-sum game of adjusting syllable quantities, permitting and disallowing feet, and conjecturing. While Bentley probably studied Goveanus and certainly studied Goveanus’s successor in emendatory zeal, Marc Antoine Muret, he drew on Scaliger and Faerno for the broader metrical interventions he presented as the heart of his edition.45 To understand Bentley’s work, then, we need to look not at predecessors like Goveanus and Muret, who enforced rigid metrical schemata the better to require frequent emendation. Instead, paradoxically, we should examine the textual conservatives, Scaliger and Faerno, who carefully explored the structure, boundaries, and idiosyncrasies of Terence’s meter. Scaliger approached Terence from an intense interest in linguistics, particularly the derivation of Latin from Greek. Read cynically, his arguments

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in the essay “On comic meters” (De comicis dimensionibus) were largely a vehicle for displaying his strange erudition and shaping it into a series of weapons against his longtime enemy Erasmus.46 In the process, however, Scaliger gave more careful thought than any predecessor to the conditions under which Terence’s syllable quantities could be adjusted, among other topics; his attention to the problem of Terence’s consonants would inspire Bentley in more than one way. Scaliger’s fundamental premise was that each word in Terence behaved in an individual way due to its etymology. As a result, blanket rules like Erasmus’s permission to elide s and consonantal u whenever necessary were deeply misguided. Scaliger agreed that consonants could sometimes be elided, or left out altogether in pronunciation, but only in cases where the elided consonant was absent from the Latin word’s Greek cognate, and thus, in some sense, not really in the Latin word to begin with. On this basis, for example, Scaliger argued that if the metrical context made it necessary to pronounce isthic as two short syllables, as in Andria 2.5.9, one should elide the t, not the s as Erasmus had prescribed. The reason lay in the derivation of Latin from the Aeolic dialect of Greek, which systematically elided t in words where other dialects had –st– (Scaliger’s example was Aeolic ejslovn, eslon, for standard ejsqlovn, esthlon).47 Again, Erasmus had happened to be correct in proposing that the second u should be elided from uiuendi in Andria 1.1.25, but only because biw', the Greek word corresponding to Latin uiuo, lacked the “Aeolic digamma,” a nonstandard Greek letter from which Scaliger believed Latin’s consonantal u was descended.48 In Scaliger’s account, then, Erasmus had failed to understand his own most central technique for scanning Terence. Meanwhile, if no Greek etymology authorized the actual removal of a letter, Scaliger proposed a second way of solving the problem, one also controlled by etymology. As Johann Rivius had already pointed out in passing, ancient grammatical doctrine allowed a syllable ending in two consonants to be counted as short even without removing a consonant, on the assumption that comic actors (or ordinary Romans) had really pronounced the word that way.49 Rivius himself found this theory “a bit strained” (paulo coactius). Scaliger, however, saw a fresh opportunity to introduce linguistic precision. Where Erasmus had complained at Andria 2.3.17 that the word omni made the line too long, Scaliger replied that the difficulty disappeared if the first syllable of omni was read as short. That could be done not by appealing to a vague and infinitely expandable “license” (licentia) in pronunciation, but via Greek. Omnis was derived from oJmw'~, Scaliger claimed, the o in the Latin word was therefore short by nature, and it was the shortness of the vowel that allowed the lengthening effect of the two consonants to be ignored.50

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Scaliger’s method was sometimes too rigorous to accomplish everything he could have wished. His argument about the Aeolic Greek loss of t in –st–, for example, left untouched the dozens of words besides isthic in which Erasmus had also advocated eliding the s. Nor was Scaliger able to appeal to etymology in every case. For example, the final vowel of the conjunction enim was already well known to be short, making it very straightforward for Scaliger to argue that enimuero should be pronounced with the second syllable short (treating lengthening as optional), rather than the elision of u Erasmus had envisaged.51 Nonetheless, Scaliger’s insistence on proofs and his attention to specific cases—in effect, his desire to lay down rules about exceptions—opened large new avenues for elaboration, for example when he described the conditions under which hiatus and the nonelision of final intervocalic m were permitted.52 Scaliger showed his theoretical purity most forcefully when he admitted defeat at the task most previous scholars had assigned themselves—to fit every foot in Terence into the metrical equivalent of an iamb or spondee. Like Heinrich Glareanus, Scaliger argued that the cretic, bacchiac, and proceleusmatic (  ˘  ˘ ˘ ˘ ) should be accepted as parts of Terence’s verse; typically, Scaliger then used these uncouth feet as sticks to beat Erasmus with.53 Erasmus would never have interfered with the notorious line from Andria, Scaliger gloated, had he recognized that its first foot could be and was a cretic: ˉ ˘ ˉ | ˘ ˉ | ˉ ˉ |˘ ˉ|ˉ ˉ |˘ˉ Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas, nam antea

Scaliger’s very permissive metrical schema, and the possibilities for utter textual conservatism that resulted, were in fact the necessary conditions for the spare, incisive comments he wished to make: if a large number of lines were newly allowable, Scaliger could confine his remarks purely to the cases that interested him on linguistic grounds. Scaliger had few if any followers in his sympathy for the cretic and bacchiac in the iambic line, and Bentley was certainly not among them. The other sixteenth-century critic on whom Bentley drew deeply was Gabriele Faerno, who edited and annotated Terence’s text and also began an ambitious treatise on Terence’s meters (it appeared in unfinished form in Faerno’s posthumous edition of 1565).54 In a characteristically barbed homage, Bentley reprinted Faerno’s notes interspersed with his own, silently accepting most of Faerno’s readings but disagreeing in patronizing tones when opportunity offered. For Faerno, whose primary concern was to emend Terence’s text from a group of manuscripts he esteemed, the explanation of metrical anomalies was a way of admitting metrically challenging

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readings from manuscripts into his text.55 In a typical passage from Eunuchus, Faerno found this metrically straightforward reading in printed books: ˘

ˉ | ˉ ˘ ˘| ˉ ˉ| ˉ ˉ |ˉ˘˘ | ˘ ˉ Set ipsa egreditur, nostri fundi calamitas. (Eun. 1.1.34) There she is coming out, the ruination of our estate.

His manuscripts, however, including the Bembine manuscript to which he gave the most weight, all added the word ecca (“look there”). If the letter t was elided from set and the resulting word joined with ecca, Faerno explained, the line could stand in its correctly augmented form: ˉ ˉ | ˉ ˘˘| ˉ ˉ | ˉ ˉ | ˉ ˘˘ | ˘ ˉ Set ecca ipsa egreditur, nostri fundi calamitas.56

For the canonically difficult line Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas (Andr. 1.1.25), Faerno offered a large bouquet of solutions that could allow the text to stand: not only could one elide the second u in uiuendi, one could also elide the s from the second syllable of potestas, or again one could read liberius as libriu’, minus its e and its final s.57 Throughout his notes, Faerno was content to retain an essentially Erasmian metrical technique and terminology, and these were entirely adequate for his purposes. In his unfinished essay on comic meters, however, Faerno had ascended to more contemplative realms, which would intrigue Bentley as much as Faerno’s elisions disgusted him.58 Here Faerno added a powerful dimension to metrical study by exploring the characteristic phenomena of particular feet and particular areas of the iambic line. His heavily documented discussion of permissible substitutions for the iamb, for example, began by showing that an iambic trimeter catalectic line could contain a tribrach in the first or second foot (examples came from Horace and Ausonius), or an anapest in the first or third (Ausonius and Seneca), but never a dactyl or tribrach in the third.59 The young Bentley would propose several rules of the same kind in his Letter to Mill—he was particularly fond of claiming that a given metrical event never happened in any ancient text, doing away with apparent exceptions by emending them—but for the Terence edition, it was Faerno’s discussion of caesurae and bridges that Bentley elaborated and adapted into a seemingly extraordinary discovery. In the third and fourth feet of the iambic trimeter, Faerno had pointed out, it was nearly impossible for a single word to be coextensive with a foot.60 This was because a customary caesura or word-end fell in the middle of the third foot,

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implying that the word immediately following the caesura would extend into the fourth foot (thus forming, in modern terminology, a bridge), except when that word was monosyllabic. Faerno’s theoretically cumbersome phrasing of his rule suggests that he meant for it to serve primarily as a practical aid to emendation. Indeed, if the printed text of an iambic line did contain a word coextensive with the third or fourth foot, Faerno went on to say, the scholar should search in manuscripts for alternate readings.61 Bentley, by contrast, would cite the behavior of the middle third of  the trimeter as a proof of his new theoretical account of Terence’s meter—in fact, as its only perfect instantiation.

The debate over the meters of Old Comedy subsided rapidly after the 1570s, although scholars continued to issue editions of Terence throughout the seventeenth century, examining new manuscripts and proposing conjectures based on the received metrical rules.62 In 1687, the schoolmaster Christopher Wase published an immense treatise summarizing contemporary technical knowledge about the iambic trimeter.63 Following Julius Caesar Scaliger, he carefully distinguished between the elision of letters and the optional nonlengthening of syllables, or “weak position” (positio debilis); also following Scaliger, Wase proceeded by discussing one Latin word at a time, documenting his claims with Greek etymologies and quotations from Terence and Plautus. In John Leng’s view, Wase had more than exhausted the subject of Terence’s meter—“the whole topic is explained with extraordinary fullness,” Leng wrote tactfully, “and confirmed with countless examples”—leaving Leng’s own Cambridge edition of 1701 to contribute to the scholarly discourse mainly by offering the first survey of English Terence manuscripts.64 The first challenge to this state of affairs came, albeit in garbled form, in Francis Hare’s Terence of 1724. Citing private hints about Terence’s meters from Bentley—“a few words, but enough for a man who is not altogether unlearned”—Hare proposed several strange new principles whose interrelations remained obscure to readers and, one suspects, to Hare himself.65 In a diffuse and heavily documented essay on meter, Hare announced that Terence’s lines should be scanned not in individual feet, but in pairs, or dipodies; that the trochee, not the iamb, was the fundamental foot of the Old Comedy; and that iambic lines should therefore be thought of as trochaic lines preceded by an extra syllable.66 This explained the ancient grammarians’ rule that iambics should have iambs in even-numbered feet but trochaics should have trochees in odd-numbered feet, and it relocated the customary caesura of the iambic trimeter from the middle of an iambic foot to the end of a trochaic foot.67 Finally, Hare added, the Latin

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word-accent played an unrecognized but vital role in scansion. The acute accent lengthened the syllable on which it fell, making it impossible to treat that syllable as long only by position; conversely, the syllable preceding an acute was likely to be shortened in compensation; moreover, the accent could, under circumstances Hare did not define well, move to a syllable that was not customary.68 Hare’s line-by-line annotations did little to explain how one should actually apply this congeries of doctrines. Instead, Hare presented Terence’s lines already scanned, peppered with long and short marks, foot divisions, dipody divisions, caesurae, and marginal abbreviations keyed to Hare’s list of the twenty-five possible dipodies in his metrical system.69 Meanwhile, Hare intervened scarcely at all in the text’s readings; as he acknowledged, his edition was based on that of Faerno, whose annotations he also paraphrased in his own notes. Hare also reported English manuscript readings culled from John Leng’s collation book, which he consulted in the library of St. Catharine’s, Cambridge.70 Not unpredictably, Hare’s production provoked Bentley into quickly completing and publishing his own Terence, on which he had probably begun work in the early 1710s.71 He now faced two essentially incompatible tasks—to explain clearly the confused theories Hare had attributed to him but also to control the aesthetic damage caused by Hare’s hideously laborious and technical presentation of his material. Hare’s tendency toward the didactic and the compulsively detailed may have been as important as any other factor in Bentley’s paradoxical decision to present meter as an abstract, nearly philosophical field where sudden flashes of inspiration were the norm—in short, as theory. In fact, Bentley’s important essay on Terence’s meter would have been vastly easier to understand had he offered more explanations, addressed predictable objections, and cited his more important predecessors. Bentley moved vertiginously from one topic to the next; he provided examples that raised more questions than they answered; he hid away crucial observations in subordinate clauses. To the majority of readers, this expository style may have seemed like a convincing staging of intellectual parthenogenesis, suggesting the rush of insights in Descartes’ Meditations or the calculated impetuosity of the contemporary Pindaric lyric poem. To the few, like John Leng, who had digested the metrical polemics of the middle sixteenth century, it was also clear that Bentley was engaged in a dialogue with the dead, intervening in a crowded field as sharply and economically as Antonius Goveanus or J. C. Scaliger once had.72 After looking at Bentley’s own arguments, then, we should explore their precedents. Bentley presented his theory as a profound reconceptualization of Terence’s poetry. His arguments, indeed, aimed to undo a supposition so fundamental that contemporaries rarely articulated it outside the most

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elementary textbooks: that the many forms of classical verse were all controlled by syllable quantities, the more or less variable pattern of longs and shorts. In the case of Terence and Plautus, Bentley claimed, any metrical account based on quantities alone missed the real principle of their verse, which he called its beat (ictus). This had been, quite literally, the regular beating of an ancient flute-player’s foot throughout a poetic line, and it corresponded (Bentley said) to the metrically important syllables in the line, which the ancient actor emphasized through a “raising” or “heightening” of the voice (arsis).73 Bentley envisaged one syllable with arsis for every two metrical feet—a total of three in a trimeter line, four in a tetrameter. The arsis sometimes, but by no means always, fell on a syllable that bore word accent according to the standard rules; Terence had made reasonable efforts to keep the arsis from falling on the last syllable of a word, where the standard rules absolutely forbade the word accent, but only in the third and fourth feet of the trimeter could arsis on the last syllable be completely avoided.74 The problem, and the allure, in this doctrine was that it implied a pronunciation totally opposed to the one most early modern readers considered correct. Common knowledge held that one should emphasize the natural word accents (marked here) and ignore the pattern of metrical feet when reading aloud, like this: x

ˉ ˉ | ˘ ˉ | ˘˘ ˉ | ˘ ˉ | ˘ ˉ | ˘˘ Díci, díem adímere aegritúdinem homínibus. (Heaut. 3.1.13)75 [I have heard it] said that time lessens our troubles.

The only sure way to determine that this line is poetry at all is, clearly, to scan and count the syllables. Unless, that is, one pronounces the line with emphasis on the syllables Bentley marked: Dicí, diem adimere aégritudinem hóminibus.76

Here, the last syllable of every other foot receives metrical emphasis, which does indeed produce a regular and audible movement through the line. To underscore his point and provide economical scansions, Bentley printed three or four acute accent marks over every line of Terence in his text. “With the help of these accents,” he explained, “the reader will pronounce each verse just as the ancient actor did onstage in time to the flute.”77 By itself, this argument would have been little more than an eccentric novelty. On a cynical reading, Bentley was simply recommending a form of pronunciation that generations of educators had labored in vain to train out of their charges—an objection Bentley tried to forestall when he

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cautioned the reader not to pronounce Vergil in the way Bentley said one should read Terence.78 But Bentley went on to educe from it, somewhat tenuously, a gripping new account of the structure of the iambic line. Where Aristotle and his vehement partisan J. C. Scaliger had argued that the trochee, not the iamb, was the originary foot of comic poetry, Bentley now claimed that the trochee, not the iamb, was the basis of Terence’s meter.79 Not wanting to demonstrate this by quasi-metaphysical arguments about the nature of long and short like Aristotle’s and Scaliger’s, Bentley resorted instead to the surprising vehicle of the caesura. When iambic trimeters were scanned in the usual way, he pointed out, the customary caesura ( || ) never corresponded with the end of a dipody ( | ), which caused “all the power and grace of the caesura to perish miserably,” like this:80 | || | Poéta dederit quaé sunt adolescéntium (Heaut. prol., 2)

But when the iambic was scanned as trochaic dipodies preceded by an extra syllable, the caesura and the end of the dipody were one: | || | Poéta dederit quaé sunt adolescéntium.

Bentley gave examples, too, of trochaic lines that naturally possessed the desired word-end between dipodies: | | | Ádeon’ hominem esse ínvenustum aut ínfelicem quémquem ut ego sum.81

What could be more convincing? In fact, Bentley was not on the firmest ground here. As his own examples showed, the Latin caesura often fell precisely in the middle of a foot in other meters. Yet Bentley did not feel it necessary to rescan Vergil’s dactylic hexameters, for example, as anapestic for the sake of caesura.82 Bentley could equally well have rescanned the trochaic as a version of the iambic and preserved his argument about the two meters’ near-identity. That argument, however, had an irresistible payoff. As Francis Hare had explained, Bentley’s rereading of the iambic solved a conundrum posed, but conspicuously not answered, by J. C. Scaliger: why it was that in the standard Greek model of the iambic trimeter, a short syllable must fall in every even-numbered foot

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X

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ˉ |˘ X 5 6

while in the trochaic, a short syllable must fall in every odd-numbered foot: ˉ ˘ | ˉ X | ˉ ˘ | ˉ X | ˉ ˘ | ˉ X 1 2 3 4 5 6

When the iambic was read as a trochaic preceded by an extra syllable, the feet requiring a short syllable became precisely the odd feet of the trochaic:83 X

| ˉ ˘ | ˉ X | ˉ ˘ | ˉ X | ˉ ˘ | ˉ X 1 2 3 4 5 6

If we apply this system to a real iambic line from Terence—again, the problematic Heautontimorumenos 3.1.13—all the elements of Bentley’s argument suddenly, if improbably, unite: | || | Dicí, diem adimere aégritudinem hóminibus.

Each of Bentley’s fluidly positioned accent marks falls on the first syllable of a trochaic dipody. The customary caesura of the trimeter falls just before the second accent mark. And a short syllable, in the ideal case, should immediately follow every accent mark. All of these rules were captured in Bentley’s brash mnemonic for the Greek iambic line: Vi cómmodavi, cómmodavi, cómmoda, meaning “By force I made it fit, I made it fit, I made it fit.” Unfortunately, Bentley’s claims throughout this argument were beset by difficulties that will already be apparent to specialists. As Bentley had to acknowledge, neither Terence nor Plautus had actually observed the Greek rule about mandatory short syllables in the iambic and trochaic; as a result, their verse required a different and less sanguine mnemonic, Vi cómmendavi, cómmendavi, cómmoda (“With force I recommended it, I recommended it”). As a further result, Bentley’s remarkable observation about the short-syllable rule had no strict relevance for the editing of Terence, leading him to mention it only in an innocent-seeming parenthesis.84 Meanwhile, on the subject of arsis, seemingly his most original proposal, Bentley left much to be desired in clarity and completeness. He apparently understood the arsis as an operating substitute for word accent when Terence’s poetry was sung. “Raising” (tollere) and “heightening” (acuere)

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of the voice, Bentley’s descriptive terms for the arsis, were also the standard descriptions of the word accent in speech. Moreover, when Terence, in Bentley’s account, sought to avoid placing arsis on the final syllables of words, Bentley made it explicit that Terence was really seeking to obey the general Latin prohibition on final syllables bearing “beat or accent” (Ictus seu Accentus).85 Bentley introduced a potent source of confusion, however, when he advised readers to go on pronouncing Vergil’s poetry with the standard word accents as usual, yet declined to explain why Terence’s plays were different. Nor, finally, did Bentley ever acknowledge straightforwardly that in practice the arsis remained linked to syllable quantity. Only his annotations on individual lines of Terence made clear his understanding that the theory of arsis supplemented the traditional quantitative scheme rather than replacing it. Bentley’s accent doctrine actually had a complex genealogy, which it will probably be more convenient to explore after we have looked into his treatment of Terence’s text. For the moment, however, we should pause briefly to notice the sixteenth-century roots of one of Bentley’s more enigmatic suggestions. How did Bentley come to propose his rule that Terence avoided accenting final syllables in the second dipody of the trimeter? We know the importance of this rule for Bentley’s larger doctrine: in this area of the line, the arsis behaved to some degree like the word accent, a similarity that was crucial for Bentley’s metrical theory and for some timely claims about Terence’s poetic skill.86 In fact, Bentley’s rule followed directly from Faerno’s observations about the thirdfoot caesura. Given that a new word usually began in the middle of the third foot (like aegritudinem in Heaut. 3.1.13), and given that Bentley always marked an accent on the first syllable of that word (aégritudinem), no polysyllable in the key position of the second dipody could ever have accent on its final syllable in Bentley’s system. Whenever Terence observed the third-foot caesura and did not follow it with a monosyllable, that is, he necessarily followed Bentley’s rule. In introducing his observation, however, Bentley quoted not Faerno, but the much less specific remarks in Aulus Gellius that apparently inspired Faerno’s discussion, making his own intervention seem substantially greater.87

Bentley’s aggressively theoretical discussion of meter rested, then, on a probing rereading of the early modern scholarly tradition. Where Bentley’s contemporaries like Wase and Leng read their predecessors for practical help in scansion, Bentley seized on broader structural questions that lent themselves to further exploitation, like Scaliger’s claims about the primacy of the trochee and Faerno’s interest in the caesura. But did Bentley’s theoretical innovations allow him to make correspondingly innova-

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tive choices in the course of his edition? Bentley invoked the theory of arsis whenever possible in his annotations, and it did allow him to make some arguments that were not otherwise possible. Like Hare, Bentley used Faerno’s Terence text as the basis of his own, meaning that every difficulty arising from accent was presented as a problem that Faerno had missed. Most often, Bentley changed the order of words in a line so that the arsis fell on an especially important word, where possible on the syllable that also bore the standard word accent.88 Bentley did not generally demand that a given word be pronounced with consistent accent at all times— indeed, he noted that for the word argumento, he was equally ready to accept the pronunciations arguménto, argúmento, or árgumento—but he did require the same pronunciation for repetitions of a word within a line or two.89 Bentley also found occasions for applying his rule about arsis in the second dipody; he generally transposed words in order to avoid arsis on a final syllable, which might otherwise occur in lines where the regular caesura was absent or followed by a monosyllable.90 Nonetheless, the majority of Bentley’s emendations did not rely on his new theory in any way. He often replaced a word without changing a line’s meter, and when he did argue from meter, more often than not he considered only syllable quantities in the traditional way. This was his approach to the much-contested Andria 1.1.25, where he began an ongoing polemic about the theory on which syllable quantities should be adjusted. Where Faerno had offered a number of elisions that could make the line work, and “a certain person” (quidam)—Francis Hare—had proposed reading the first word as liberyu’, a trisyllable with the final s elided, Bentley declared that only emendation could solve the problem.91 Instead of the traditional Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas, nam antea

Bentley conjectured: Líbera uiuendi fúit potestas, nám antea.92

With the dactylic libera safely confined to the first foot, no syllables in the new line needed to be shortened by any means. Yet Bentley’s principles did not actually oblige him to propose such an unambiguous and comparatively drastic solution. On most occasions, Bentley was happy enough to invoke the Scaligerian principle of optional lengthening when a syllable needed to be shortened. On Heautontimorumenos 1.1.19, for example, he simply rephrased Faerno’s recommendation that s in esse and p in voluptati should be elided, remarking that the words in question were indeed

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“often shortened.”93 The case of Andria 1.1.25, however, offered Bentley an irresistible opportunity to reenact Scaliger’s polemic against Erasmus’s elisions of s and consonantal u. For the purposes of this annotation, Bentley evidently assumed that the s in liberius could be neither elided nor disposed of by shortening, so that Hare’s reading had inadvertently produced the same cretic with which Scaliger had taxed Erasmus. Meanwhile, Faerno’s elisions of u in uiuendi and s in potestas were simply “unpoetic” (immodulate). Though Bentley paid homage to Scaliger here, in emending the text he also quietly demonstrated what Scaliger might have done had he been prepared to exile the unorthodox cretic from Terence and adjust the text accordingly. Like many other annotations in Bentley’s Terence edition, this one could equally well have been written in the late sixteenth century. Bentley’s representations of his work in his preface and notes rarely, if ever, invoked the debate over conjectures and manuscripts that had dominated his Horace edition. He presented his conjectures in the Terence with little or no self-congratulation, and he also called far less attention to his work with manuscripts. Bentley nowhere provided a list of his Terence manuscripts—an unusual omission for editors in his English milieu—nor did he often specify which manuscripts he was arguing from in a given annotation, preferring opaque phrases like “many of my manuscripts” (plurimi ex nostris).94 But manuscripts certainly remained among Bentley’s actual tools for editing. He used the same manuscripts as John Leng had in 1701, minus the ones in Oxford—Oxford was not a place Bentley happily visited—but adding three new manuscripts from the Royal Library, two belonging to Richard Mead, and two from the library of Caius College, Cambridge.95 Bentley probably made all new collations for himself, then had two young assistants, John Walker and his own nephew Thomas Bentley, gather up the manuscript readings into an interleaved copy of Leng’s edition into which they also copied annotations and manuscript readings from previous editions.96 At some point Bentley also made a book of conjectures on Terence, as he did for Horace and Milton, and he consulted this book together with his assistants’ collection of manuscript readings when he first drafted his edition in the early 1710s.97 From the book that records Bentley’s first sketch of a complete edition, now in the library of Trinity College, we can add to the picture of his methods that arises from his reticent printed notes.98 The opening of Heautontimorumenos is a good part of Terence’s text to look at because here, unlike in the heavily trafficked opening of Andria, Bentley was not at pains to prove anything in particular about Terence or himself. Here as in most of his edition, he was often content simply to note that he accepted Faerno’s readings, either citing his own manuscripts in

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support or noting that some or all of his manuscripts were opposed but erroneous.99 He was now much less concerned than in Andria to highlight questions of meter and accent: his draft edition book contained many metrically motivated emendations, both from conjecture and from minority manuscript readings, that Bentley did not carry over into his final text.100 The draft edition book also shows that when Bentley found metrical difficulty in a line, he checked for alternative readings in his manuscript collations before making a conjecture—precisely the procedure Faerno had recommended.101 Bentley occasionally argued against Faerno for a reading that stood in the majority of his manuscripts, but he forbade himself in all but the rarest cases to print minority manuscript readings in the text, and he felt obliged to argue at great length when he did so.102 This rule was not especially consistent with Bentley’s comparative willingness to insert his conjectures into his text and to support his conjectures by quite brief arguments; it does demonstrate that Bentley treated manuscripts as Faerno’s bailiwick, an area where special circumspection on his part was advisable. The practical effects of Bentley’s rule are strikingly clear in his treatment of Heautontimorumenos 1.1.71 in his printed edition, where Faerno’s text read Domum revertor maestus atque animo fere 71 Perturbato atque incerto prae aegritudine. I went home grieving, my mind was troubled and uncertain with sorrow.

Bentley in his printed note wrote that “all my manuscripts but one” read conturbato (disordered) for Faerno’s perturbato (troubled); with the support of the majority, Bentley printed conturbato in his own text.103 Having disposed of perturbato in a single sentence, he turned to an elaborate discussion of the word incerto (uncertain) in the same line. It made no sense, Bentley thought, that a sorrowful mind should be called “uncertain”; on the contrary, an uncertain mind was precisely a mind unable to decide between the options of sorrow and, say, vengeful anger. Fortunately, a manuscript reading happened to be at hand to resolve the problem: inerti (helpless), a reading in the manuscript in Corpus Christi, Cambridge, that had been corrected by a later scribe. Another Cambridge manuscript read incerti, which differed by only a letter from inerti.104 Bentley went on to cite a parallel from Andria 2.1.2–4 for the general notion of alarm and stupefaction, and he ended his note with more hectoring argument about the suitability of inerti. Yet in his printed text on the same page, he retained Faerno’s incerto. This was a rare instance where Bentley enacted his emendatory restraint in a way visible to his readers; on most occasions, his roads not taken remained securely in his own papers.

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Altogether, Bentley’s methods in the Terence edition differed in degree but not in kind from those of his Horace. The Terence contained more emendations based on meter and fewer notes with copious argumentation, and its dealings with minority manuscript readings were curbed by Faerno’s long shadow. But these were shifts in emphasis among a single and quite stable set of techniques; Bentley was recognizably the same critic in 1711 and 1726. What did change radically was Bentley’s presentation of his work. In his Horace, Bentley positioned himself theoretically by seizing on the traditional distinction between conjecture and manuscript emendation; in his Terence he abandoned those categories, instead resurrecting and making his own his predecessors’ structural, sometimes speculative approach to poetic meter. It is Bentley the conjecturer, of course, who captured imaginations on a wide scale in his own day and who has received the lion’s share of subsequent comment. Was Bentley the philosophical metrician simply a miscalculation, then, a failed experiment in public relations? A closer look at Bentley’s doctrine about accent and arsis may show why a critic in the 1720s might have hoped for great results from this approach. In this field, as usual, Bentley’s habitual refusal to discuss his predecessors should make us all the more eager to seek them out. When Bentley laid out his novel-seeming arguments about the arsis, he was actually translating into the field of Latin poetry a subversive seventeenth-century account of Greek poetry proposed by the iconoclastic Isaac Vossius.105 In 1673, Vossius announced his astonishing and elegant solution to the problem that in the present day, as he saw it, “if you follow the modern accents or prosody of the Greeks while reciting the poems of Homer or any other ancient poet, you will recognize no feet, no meter or rhythm, nothing that has numbers or pleases the ear; rather, you will perceive a discordant and absurd sound, verses incapable of being sung, and, in short, anything other than poetry.”106 If one pronounced classical poetry with emphasis on the word-accents— the method Vossius considered customary—the quantities and feet were entirely lost, and the resulting recitation sounded merely like a convoluted variety of prose. All became clear, however, if one pronounced according to the ancient system Vossius had recovered. The original principle of Greek poetry was what Vossius called “rhythm” (rhythmus), which ancient grammarians had notated in written texts with accent marks. In classical times, the spoken and written “accent always agreed with the true and natural measure of the syllables”—in other words, with the quantitative structure of the line. In the Christian era, changes in Greek pronunciation and the decline of grammatical study had produced the erroneous

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system of accentuation that seventeenth-century readers knew and had attempted to use until the present day.107 One should pronounce Homer, Vossius concluded, not according to the customary accents like this: ’Ηevlio~ d’ ajnovrouse lipw;n perikalleva livmnhn ’Ourano;n ej~ poluvcalkon, iJn’ ajqanavtoisi faeivnhÛ Kai; qnhtoi`s i brotoi`s in ejpi; zeivdwron a[rouran. Leaving the lovely sea, the sun leapt up to the brazen sky, to shine for immortals and for mortal humans on the wheat-bearing earth. (Odyssey 3.1–3)

but as “the ancients” had: ’Helio;~ d’ ajnorou`se lipw;n perikavllea livmnhn “Ouranon ej~ polucavlkon, iJn’ ajqanatoi`s i faejivnhÛ Kai; qnhtoi`s i brotoi`s in ejpi; zeidw'ron ajrou`ran.108

Aside from his gloomy narrative of linguistic corruption, these short before-and-after quotations constituted virtually Vossius’s entire argument for his reform. Apparently, the sudden regularization of the accents in the second quotation was meant to speak eloquently for itself, to the internal ear of readers who would find this pronunciation natural, easy, and right. Bentley’s debt to Vossius would have been clear to well-informed contemporaries.109 In his essay on Terence’s meters, he pointed to his theoretical grounding by using the terms “meter” (metrum) and “rhythm” (rhythmus) interchangeably, an identification that was the essence of Vossius’s claims about Greek poetry.110 His emphasis on the sung performance of Terence’s plays in antiquity mirrored Vossius’s concern with ancient and modern music: the full title of Vossius’s treatise was On the Singing of Poetry and the Power of Rhythm (De poematum cantu et viribus rythmi), and Vossius had spent far more time discussing music than his accent theory. In his quotations from Greek drama in the essay, Bentley wrote accents not in their usual positions, but on the metrically important syllables as in Vossius’s system.111 And in his annotations, Bentley often imitated Vossius’s technique of juxtaposing a poorly accented line with a correctly accented (usually emended) version, apparently believing the words on their own had the power to compel belief. At the same time, Bentley silently took issue with the specifics of Vossius’s historical narrative, and therefore with the scope of the accent reform Vossius had proposed. When Bentley quoted a line from Homer to illustrate its caesura, he placed the accents in their normal positions—a direct rejection of the single example that Vossius had

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used to illustrate his theory.112 Bentley was also replying to Vossius when he cautioned his readers that Vergil must continue to be pronounced with the standard word accents. In a tantalizing passage on the accent in Latin, Vossius had complained that the modern pronunciation of “the poems of Vergil and others” was as bad as that of Homer, again due to faulty accents: “you would hardly know they are poems at all.”113 Even as Bentley was attracted to Vossius’s unorthodox vision of ancient poetry, he restricted Vossius’s theory purely to the ancient stage. Homer’s epics, on this account, were no more affected by the conditions of ancient performance than Vergil’s. Clearly, then, Bentley’s instructions to accent Terence’s poetry on the beginnings of dipodies resulted from neither ignorance about the accent nor a lack of reflection.114 We can still ask, however, why Vossius’s theory of the Greek accent seemed persuasive to Bentley, and indeed to Vossius himself. It was and remains all but impossible for native speakers of Germanic languages to signal both quantity and accent while reading classical poetry aloud—this was regretfully admitted by as great a scholar as Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.115 Bentley himself assumed that the reader must choose whether to accent the metrically important syllables in a line of Vergil, “like schoolboys,” or the syllables that really bore the linguistic accent.116 The aesthetic disappointments (from our perspective) of doing the latter, and the guilty shame that attends doing the former, are widely known if rarely acknowledged. Vossius’s theory of the Greek accent simultaneously articulated this disturbing problem for the seventeenth century and claimed to solve it instantaneously. Any Northern European reader who followed Vossius’s advice found that an entire corpus of alien poetry had been suddenly, reassuringly domesticated. We should not rush to criticize a theory that allowed early modern readers to succeed at pronouncing classical verse where in the past they had inevitably failed. Vossius’s mission to make Homer “sound like poetry” reminds us that classical texts have rarely worked as a straightforward legacy or gift to posterity; more often, they have been participants in more or less subtle forms of cultural exchange.117 Bentley pursued that exchange even further in an extraordinary section of his metrical essay that may cause us to remember Alexander Pope’s healthy interest in the meter of English. Claiming that Terence’s iambics and trochaics were the best and most underappreciated model for the writing of English verse, Bentley produced sample English lines drawn from contemporary songbooks, showing that the iambic trimeter, the trochaic and iambic tetrameters, and the rare bacchiac were all alive and well in modern England.118 Characteristically, Bentley did not indicate their

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sources, but English readers would probably have recognized the lyrics, powerfully underscoring Bentley’s Vossian argument that Terence’s comedies were originally sung. Bentley also chose English lines that would recall the rough-and-ready language of the Old Comedy, like his redoubtable example of the iambic trimeter catalectic, “He’s décently run throúgh the lungs, and thére’s an end o’ Búlly.” Finally, Bentley argued that his new account of Terence’s meter also held the key to the most honored of English lines, the iambic pentameter. The standard English meter was in fact an abbreviated Latin iambic trimeter (quinarius), meaning it was regulated by both arsis (exactly three fell in every line) and quantity (at least three short syllables had to appear in each line, corresponding to the mandatory short syllables of the Greek iambic). John Denham’s muchquoted line from Coopers Hill (1642), which Bentley apparently lifted from a contemporary poetry handbook, illustrated what was meant: Though deép, yet clear | ; though géntle, yet not dúll.119

Bentley read the first yet, the last syllable of gentle, and the word not as the line’s three short syllables, on the grounds that they each contained a short vowel and were “long” only “by position.”120 To modern readers this will seem perverse at best, but Paul Fussell showed long ago that quantity and accent (as well as syllable count) were both thought of in this period as valid categories for describing English verse.121 Here, Bentley was perhaps responding to Edward Bysshe’s argument in his Art of English Poetry (1702) that quantity played no part in the structure of English verse.122 Yet even as Bentley contributed to the contemporary debate over English poetry, his final concern was to translate his arguments back again to the study of Terence. Denham’s “Though deep, yet clear,” as explained by Bentley, was meant to reconcile English readers to the principle of optional lengthening in Terence, while another Denham line, beginning “Strong without rage,” allowed Bentley to observe that Terence sometimes used a trochee in the first foot of an iambic line, also a well-known practice in contemporary English verse.123 This was not a revelation to the field of Terence studies—Priscian had already pointed out Terence’s first-foot trochees in late antiquity.124 But where Priscian had defended this anomaly by citing Greek precedents in Sophocles and the lost comic writer Eupolis, Bentley treated Denham’s seventeenth-century English as a source of poetic authority, asking his reader, “Will you deny Terence the liberty you grant to Denham?”125 If Terence’s meters could explain English poetry, English poetry could sometimes explain Terence in turn.

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Homer and the Digamma: Unlicens’d Greek The Homeric epics presented early modern readers with much the same problems they found in Terence’s plays: metrically irregular lines, an ideal schema to which those lines were supposed to conform (the dactylic hexameter), and a group of ancient rules for reconciling text and theory (the socalled pavqh levxew~, or “things that happen to words”). Bentley was famously the first to propose that the archaic letter digamma, written as ¸ and sounding like English w, should be systematically inserted in certain words in the Homeric poems to reflect their Aeolic dialect and regularize their meter. In the modern view, the digamma was indeed in the poems when they were first composed—we think, roughly speaking, that Bentley was right.126 Bentley never published his work on Homer, however, and the obscurity of what he actually believed about the digamma has only added to the indistinct grandeur he enjoys as the rediscoverer of a Greek letter. Bentley’s manuscripts and annotated books show us that in this case, as in his edition of Terence, his intervention was largely a matter of choosing his path through an already well-populated field. It was only well into his career, in fact, that Bentley decided Homer was the problem to which the digamma was the solution. Standard Greek texts in early modern Europe did not contain the digamma, yet it was hardly unknown to scholars. If anything, too much rather than too little information was at hand, largely from the Latin grammatical tradition. Ancient scholars had spent much time and energy tracing Latin words to their Greek roots, an enterprise in which the digamma was often pressed into service. Moreover, any thorough discussion of the Latin alphabet was likely to mention the digamma apropos the letters F or U or both. Priscian, for example, explained that the Latins had originally used the Greek digamma in writing but eventually replaced it with u used as a consonant, “to which the digamma is obviously related because of the similarity of the sound”; he immediately distinguished this sound from the classical Latin letter F.127 The digamma’s behavior in Greek poetry was quite unpredictable, Priscian added. Sometimes it acted as a single consonant, sometimes as a double consonant, sometimes it turned from a consonant into a short vowel, and sometimes it had no metrical force at all. In this too the digamma was like the Latin consonantal u, which had to be discounted in the first foot if this line in Terence’s Andria (for example) was to scan: Sine inuidia laudem inuenias, et amicos pares. (Andr. 1.1.39)128

Bentley quoted this passage of Priscian with disapproval in the corresponding note in his Terence edition: “The great Master is mistaken in that

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he would rather elide the letter u than shorten the syllable in.”129 We realize at once that Bentley’s hypersensitivity to the value of consonantal u in Terence was fueled by his interest in the Greek digamma’s metrical effects—and perhaps vice versa. Humanists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often discussed the digamma, but unlike Priscian, they had more doubts about its sound than about its role in poetic meter. Contemporary Greeks pronounced Greek u as Latin f, a sound that must have suggested itself to many as the one expressed by the digamma ¸. In Priscian’s treatise as printed by Helias Putschius in 1605, indeed, the Greek letter f was unhelpfully inserted as a gloss on Priscian’s statement that “F, the Aeolic digamma, had the same sound among the most ancient Latins as among the Aeolians.”130 From the early sixteenth century onward, a party led by Erasmus attacked the Byzantine pronunciation of Greek with gradual success, but even those who did not think of the digamma as Latin f faced practical difficulties in explaining just what it was.131 To write, like Priscian, that the digamma sounded like Latin consonantal u begged the question of how consonantal u should sound, at a time when many if not most speakers apparently voiced it as English v. In Erasmus’s dialogue On the Correct Pronunciation of Latin and Greek (1528), for example, a bear and a lion laboriously canvassed all possible sounds not only in Latin and Greek, but in Flemish, Frisian, English, and German as well.132 The more authoritative-sounding bear recommended pronouncing the digamma and the double u in Latin, as in seruus, like English w; the lion skeptically held out for English v, arguing that this was also the sound of Hebrew vav. Subsequent writers were no more capable of reaching consensus. J. C. Scaliger, inevitably, took the side of Erasmus’s recalcitrant lion, arguing for the sound of a minimally aspirated English v in his Causes of the Latin Language (1540).133 Justus Lipsius, in his 1586 dialogue on Latin pronunciation, portrayed his younger self as scandalized but captivated by M.  A. Muret’s suggestion that digamma and consonantal u sounded like—as far as one can tell— English w.134 Claude Saumaise, writing in 1619, pursued a different and provocative argument that was also suggested by ancient grammatical texts. He believed, fairly unremarkably, that the digamma sounded “like b or like Latin V used as a consonant,” evidently thinking of the Byzantine pronunciation of b as English v.135 What truly engaged Saumaise’s interest, however, was not the relationship between digamma and the Latin u, but the relationship between the digamma in Aeolic Greek and the letters that took its place in other Greek dialects: the aspiration (“H”), the s, and the u. In particular, the Aeolians had inserted the digamma at the beginning of words that started with an aspirated vowel in other dialects—Priscian had

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pointed this out long ago—but also at the beginning of words with unaspirated vowels, or before any vowel in the middle of a word.136 It was now suddenly possible to go out looking for the digamma in Greek words, and Saumaise recommended that the reader do this in the large and rich lexicon of Hesychius.137 Saumaise pointed to the letter G as an especially fruitful place to begin: the Laconians and Aeolians, he thought, had often replaced an initial digamma with a simple gamma, as shown by entries like “goi`no~, oi\no~,” and “giv~ defined as iv~, which is also written biv~, whence the Latin vis.”138 Bentley seems not to have read Saumaise’s book when he first encountered Hesychius, but he had the help of Hesychius’s annotators Daniel Heinsius and François Guyet, who evidently had. Bentley’s copy of Hesychius in Schrevelius’s variorum edition of 1668 records the treasure hunt he embarked on.139 Where Guyet and Heinsius had typically glossed words in G with their more usual Greek equivalents, Bentley always wrote in forms with the digamma. On Hesychius’s definition “Gevgkalon, h{s ucon” (“Gevgkalon: at peace”), Schrevelius printed this collection of notes: Gevgkalon. ] Gevkalon. That is, e{kalon, e{khlon [“at rest”]. Guyet, Saumaise. Gevlanon. Sopingius.140

Alongside, Bentley wrote ¸ evkalon, making explicit the hidden connection between the forms on the page. In his earliest encounters with Hesychius, Bentley evidently considered digammas like this to be his own discovery. On the definition goi`no~, oi\ no~, for example, he wrote “ie ¸ oi,” probably in the 1680s when he read through the dictionary collecting fragments of poetry.141 A decade or two later, however, Bentley learned of the brief but excellent discussion of the digamma in Angelo Canini’s sixteenth-century Greek grammar, where he found that ¸oi`no~, along with many of his other early annotations, had been anticipated. Alongside his previous note, Bentley now wrote “Ben.,” attributing the digamma to himself as he would have done had he been recording a conjecture in a book of manuscript collations; he added a citation of the relevant page in Canini.142 Until the early 1730s, when he stopped work on his Homer project, Bentley continued to write in new words with digamma, which he eventually collected into a list to be inserted in the Homer edition. By this time Bentley knew that Saumaise considered the simple gamma a standard substitution for digamma in Aeolic Greek, a view he contradicted sharply in the heading of his list: “Hesychius is quite ridiculous. In many Aeolic words, he wrote a simple G in place of the ¸ Digamma.”143 But for the ridiculous lexicographer, however, it would have been impossible to identify dozens of words that really did contain the digamma.

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Alexander Pope was more right than he knew when he made Bentley declare in the four-book Dunciad, For Attic Phrase in Plato let them seek, I poach in Suidas for unlicens’d Greek.144

It was Hesychius, not Suidas, whose preserves Bentley raided for the digamma. But his interest in the letter was produced and augmented by his active and repeated reading, not by a vatic inspiration from on high. It may well have been his work on Terence that led Bentley to expand the project of finding Greek words containing digamma into the larger project of editing Homer’s poems. As we have seen, Bentley took to heart J. C. Scaliger’s injunctions against recklessly eliding the Latin u in Terence, and Bentley could not have failed to notice Scaliger’s continual references to the Latin consonantal u as the “Aeolicum digamma.” It was well known that Homer’s Greek dialect was Aeolic; Priscian had quoted many lines of Homer with digammas in the course of discussing the digamma’s metrical behavior, as had Saumaise; Bentley himself often wrote down Homeric forms (adding digamma to them) as he read Hesychius. By the early 1720s, Bentley was interested enough in the prospect of a Homer edition to buy an apograph of the Leipzig manuscript of Homer from J. C. Wolf in Hamburg. The Leipzig manuscript contains copious scholia representing both the B and T traditions that were then almost entirely unpublished; Bentley learned of the apograph from an article by Wolf’s protégé Stephen Bergler in the Acta eruditorum, and he induced Wolf to part with it and keep an apograph of the apograph for himself.145 Bentley was especially interested in the textual readings of the ancient critics Aristarchus and Zenodotus, many of which he copied from his scholia manuscript into the annotations meant to accompany his edition; he found that neither critic discussed the digamma, but he was attracted for metrical reasons to several of their readings. Particularly because Bentley’s rival Joshua Barnes had been careless in editing the scholia he published in his Homer edition of 1713—an accusation made before the world in another Acta article by Bergler—it seems likely that Bentley would have presented his own scholia as a central virtue of his edition. Bentley went through the entire text of Homer, marking digammas in the margins where he believed they should be inserted.146 He also collated manuscripts in the Harleian library, the Eton College library, and one each from the Cambridge University Library and the library of Benet College, Cambridge.147 Bentley neglected to return the manuscript belonging to the Cambridge University Library, and after his death, his son gave it to the

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library of Trinity College, where it remains today—the manuscript can be identified from readings Bentley reported in his notes as those of the “codex Academicus.”148 Finally, Bentley gathered materials for a preface on the digamma and began writing line-by-line emendations on Homer’s text.149 He had only started the fifth book of the Iliad, however, and announced his forthcoming Homer edition in a note to his Paradise Lost, when misfortune struck on a grand scale in 1732.150 Bentley’s nephew Thomas, who was copying or excerpting the scholia manuscript for Bentley’s use, started a fire in his house by reading in bed with a candle, and the scholia along with other manuscripts were destroyed.151 In theory, Bentley could have commissioned a new apograph of the Leipzig manuscript. In the event, he abandoned the Homer edition entirely, leaving vague rumors about his insertion of the digamma to percolate into print through his associates and his enemies. Like the Terence edition, Bentley’s Homer project was at once highly focused and suggestively outward-pointing. Bentley’s work was made possible in the first instance by Saumaise’s reorientation of the field toward the digamma’s place in Greek; it was Hesychius and Hesychius’s seventeenthcentury annotators who provoked Bentley’s initial interest. On that basis, however, Bentley was able to reexpand the field toward a renewed comparative approach, using the resolutely consonantal behavior of u in Terence as a model for the digamma’s behavior in Homer. For centuries scholars had read Priscian’s conflicting accounts of the digamma’s metrical effects in poetry; only Bentley, the editor of Terence, was resolute enough to decide that the digamma in Homer invariably acted as a single consonant and to emend Homer’s text accordingly. At the same time, Bentley marked his Homer as an English project by explaining the sound of the digamma, more or less unavoidably, in vernacular terms. The sound of the phrase d’ ¸oivkade (“homeward”) in Homer might be uncouth, he allowed, if the digamma were sounded as English v. The correct pronunciation, however, was English w; as a result, the initial consonant cluster of d’ ¸oivkade could no more be objected to in Homer than in the English word “dwell.”152 The precise sound of the digamma had no automatic bearing on its metrical behavior in poetry, as Bentley certainly recognized. But just as he had domesticated the consonantal u in Terence—it too sounded like English w, so that the Latin word via was identical with the English word way “in meaning and in sound”—Bentley imagined the digamma from his own language and for his own time.153

chapter seven

Bentley’s New Testament The Return of the Repressed

A

fter the Letter to Mill of 1691, Bentley for decades avoided theological topics in his scholarly writing, treating Greek and Roman antiquity as entirely self-contained and self-explanatory. Yet even while he rejected the Hebraeocentric studies of his polyhistoric teachers—as well as  their preferred form of publication, the historical treatise, following the debacle of the Phalaris Dissertation—Bentley’s social and professional lives remained emphatically those of an Anglican churchman. Not only did he hold an impressive succession of jobs that depended partly or fully on his clerical status and ecclesiastical patrons—royal librarian, chaplain in ordinary to the monarch, master of Trinity College, archdeacon of Ely, Regius Professor of Theology from 1716 onward, and even an offer of the bishopric of Bristol in 1724 (this Bentley rejected, perhaps because it would have meant fleeing the field in his perennial battle with the fellows of Trinity and his fellow heads of college). Bentley also opportunistically spoke and published in theological genres when it was expedient, most famously in the inaugural series of Boyle Lectures he delivered in London in 1692 and 1693, but also in a 1696 Cambridge sermon on the occasion of receiving his doctorate in divinity, and notoriously in a vehement 1715 sermon against “Popery,” which the benighted Mr. Yorick in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was to plagiarize for his own pastoral use.1 As the divinity professor, meanwhile, Bentley was supposed to preside at university theological disputations and to deliver sermons in Latin twice annually—his enemies,

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however, complained that he did the first in “a Careless, Yawning manner” and the second as rarely as possible.2 If these charges are true, it is hard to find fault with Bentley’s tastes. Yet the tediousness of some of his actual duties does not change the conclusion that the church was far more than a day job for Bentley and his peers. The ecclesiastical university supplied them with libraries, colleagues, students, social contacts in London, and even political representation, as the university elected its own member of the House of Commons (during the early part of Bentley’s mastership, this was Isaac Newton). Improbable though it might appear from his work, Bentley passed the whole of his professional life inhaling, and occasionally exuding, the odor of piety. In the middle 1710s, moreover, with his reputation as a classical scholar firmly established, Bentley set out to claim a position in the field of sacred scholarship. It was no accident, surely, that at this moment Bentley expected the rich Regius chair soon to become vacant: the Cambridge chair of Greek had long been held by his rival Joshua Barnes, and Bentley rightly perceived that in order to gain the even more desirable chair of theology, he must belatedly demonstrate some sort of competence and inclination for the job.3 In a 1713 tract against the deist Anthony Collins—the Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-Thinking, published under the pseudonym “Phileleutherus Lipsiensis” (“a freedom-loving gentleman of Leipzig”)—Bentley hinted at his grandiose plan. He “would not lament,” he wrote, if someone were to reedit the New Testament with lists of the readings of “old manuscripts yet untouched”; for several pages, Bentley discussed the methods such an editor ought to use, insisting repeatedly that textual criticism was harmless to the cause of “true religion.”4 By 1716, Bentley was describing his own projected edition to the archbishop of Canterbury and asking him to help Bentley approach the king or parliament for funds to obtain manuscripts and collations.5 At last in 1720, Bentley published a pamphlet soliciting subscriptions for his New Testament; at this point, he had already collated manuscripts in England himself and had others collated by Edward Rud and David Casley, sent J. J. Wetstein and John Walker to the continent to collate or buy manuscripts, and corresponded extensively with biblical scholars in France and Germany.6 Apparently feeling it insufficient to advertise his edition as “a keimhvlion, a kth'ma ejsaei;, a charter, a magna charta, to the whole Christian church”— the reader is catapulted from Homer to Thucydides to the Plantagenets on the long trajectory of Bentley’s self-regard—he went on to warn direly that “no more copies will be printed than are subscribed for.”7 Publishing by subscription would have been not only a completely novel experiment for Bentley, it was also a fairly recent phenomenon in England as a whole.

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Unfortunately, we do not know who may have subscribed at Bentley’s steep price of three guineas in small paper or five in large paper; Bentley did not generally keep letters on business matters, although his biographer Monk reports a contemporary rumor that he raised 2,000 guineas.8 Signaling another departure from his usual publishing habits, Bentley did not specify the press he planned to use for his New Testament—he may have intended to take bids from various printers, but in any event he did not commit himself to the Cambridge University Press, which he had otherwise used without exception since taking up his university post in 1700. Whether because of a lack of capital or for reasons arising from the work itself, the edition never appeared in print, although Bentley worked on it into the 1720s and left behind many printed New Testaments filled with notes in his own and his assistants’ hands.9 These deserve attention because of the importance of this uncompleted project, not only in Bentley’s own career, but also as an exemplary case suggesting the tasks and difficulties of biblical scholarship in general at this time. What did Bentley take to be the relationship between classical scholarship and sacred studies, and how did he attempt to negotiate their differences? In his Remarks of 1713 against Anthony Collins, his most extended approach to the question, Bentley used his own authority as a classical scholar to give heightened credibility to a fairly conventional claim—that the New Testament should be studied precisely as any ancient pagan text would be. Where Collins had argued that the text of the New Testament was dubious, pointing to the thousands of variant manuscript readings in John Mill’s monumental Oxford edition of 1707, Bentley rejoined that classical authors like Tibullus and Terence exhibited comparable numbers of variants.10 A completely unanimous manuscript tradition, such as the naive Collins seemed to demand, would indeed “exceed all the miracles of both Old and New Testament.”11 Indeed, Bentley went on, the New Testament’s text was even more secure than that of any classical author, precisely because of the great number and geographic distribution of its Greek manuscripts, as well as its several ancient translations: so many witnesses guaranteed that no serious textual corruption had taken place.12 Bentley treated the question of methodology as equally transparent. Both classical scholars and biblical scholars, he wrote, had always begun to edit their texts by consulting as many manuscripts as possible—a claim that somewhat overstated the case for the classical editors he named (Joseph Scaliger, Isaac Casaubon, and Daniel Heinsius), if less so for their biblical counterparts (Robert Estienne, Junius, Curcellaeus, Walton, Fell, and Mill).13 However, the New Testament was again like classical texts in that it sometimes required emendation by conjecture, justifiable because an original

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reading might have been lost altogether from the manuscript tradition. Here Bentley proposed several conjectures of his own as examples, carefully noting that he hoped they would one day be found in manuscripts as well.14 Such arguments about the essential equivalence of classical and sacred texts had a venerable genealogy by Bentley’s time. Louis Cappel, in his Critica sacra (1650) on the Hebrew Bible, had made precisely the same case in very similar language, even down to his use of Terence as his exemplary classical author; in turn, Cappel acknowledged borrowing his ideas on the subject from Robert Estienne. Like Bentley, Cappel and Estienne were concerned to forestall any perceived threat to piety that their acknowledgment of the Bible’s textual variations might imply to their contemporaries. Yet when Bentley issued his Proposals in 1720, he abruptly abandoned any suggestion that the New Testament was like a classical text, or that his New Testament edition would resemble a classical edition. He now labored to distinguish his project from classical scholarship, above all from his own. Where the Bentley of the 1711 Horace edition had trumpeted his skill at making conjectures and boasted of the number of his emendations that they represented, Bentley the New Testament editor remarked curtly that “in the sacred writings there’s no place for conjectures,” promising to isolate any such suggestions safely within his preface, if indeed they occurred to him at all.15 A similar concern to emphasize the particularity of the New Testament text apparently underlay what contemporary biblical scholars considered the most unaccountable part of Bentley’s plan, his decision simultaneously to edit the Greek text and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, in parallel columns, so as to make them exactly “agree both in words and in order of words.”16 Practically speaking, Bentley’s interest in reconciling the Greek and Latin texts may well have been inspired by the important early manuscripts that contained both versions, such as the codex Ephraimi in Paris and the codex Bezae in Cambridge, whose script Bentley was asking his friend William Wotton to compare with an engraving in the first volume of Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica (1681) as early as 1689.17 He took the self-imposed task seriously, moreover: Bentley’s most comprehensive working copy of the New Testament, a Paris 1628 folio containing both the Greek and Latin texts, shows that he did often emend to make the word order match, especially by conjecturally changing the Latin version, for which he used few manuscripts.18 In the rhetorical setting of Bentley’s Proposals, however, the plan to edit both texts together worked primarily to prove a claim Bentley had already aired in his 1713 Remarks: that the ancient translations of the New Testament had rendered it uniquely resistant to corruption, more certain and secure

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than any classical text.19 In practice—indeed, even in theory—Bentley’s joint use of the Greek and Latin texts involved a decided petitio principii, which his eighteenth-century readers were quick to point out. By his own account, Bentley first “conjecture[d]” (his own provocative term) that the fourth-century Greek text and Jerome’s Latin had matched; he then revised the two texts so that they matched; as a result, he discovered that they matched. J. D. Michaelis would later attribute Bentley’s theory about the Greek and Latin texts, together with the rest of the New Testament project, to Bentley’s classical orientation and his relative inexperience in sacred criticism. And certainly, Bentley was not in total mastery of this vast field—he believed, as Michaelis scoffingly pointed out, that Origen had issued a corrected Greek version of the New Testament as well as his polyglot edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Hexapla.20 Yet it was precisely by attempting in every respect not to do what was expected of him as a classical scholar that Bentley worked out the approach he presented in his Proposals, for better or worse. Bentley was by no means alone in assuming in 1720 that the New Testament required distinctive treatment from the textual scholar. Since Daniel Heinsius’s fateful words in his anonymous preface to the Elzevir 1633 New Testament—“Here you have the text that is now received by everyone, which we give without any alteration or corruption”—the same Greek text had been repeatedly reprinted, with manuscript readings and conjectural emendations supplied only in editors’ annotations for editions that contained an apparatus.21 The number of manuscript and conjectural readings continued to expand during this time precisely because editors thought that given passages should, or at least might, read differently; John Mill’s New Testament of 1707, the apotheosis of such editions as far as Bentley was concerned, was said to contain 30,000 variant manuscript readings. Nonetheless, New Testament editors did not insert changes in the continuous printed text itself, in marked contrast to the practice of classical editors during the same period. This collective inclination toward utter textual stability—or, as Bentley saw it, stagnation—was certainly a matter of practical convention rather than any single, deliberate decision. The effect was striking nonetheless: one treated the New Testament in a special way, more or less purely because it was the New Testament. That seventeenth-century New Testament editors could reconcile an understanding of their text’s historical variability with an editorial method of complete textual fixity makes a parallel, moreover, with another living tradition of sacred commentary. Among early modern Jewish scholars, even (and perhaps especially) those writers who were most interested in the Hebrew Bible’s textual history did not suggest that it should be emended or

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printed differently, including in the case of marginal readings (cethib) that they took to be correct emendations of the continuous text (kere). Elias Levita and Azariah de’ Rossi, despite their well-known disagreement about the origin of the vowel points in the Hebrew text, were of one mind on this point.22 Had Bentley chosen to, he could certainly have produced a new edition of the New Testament along the established lines; even Mill’s massive edition had not exhausted the number of important manuscripts available for study. This, in fact, was what Bentley’s protégé Ludolf Kuster did when he reissued Mill’s New Testament with new collations of his own in Rotterdam in 1710.23 For his own part, however, Bentley was deeply impatient with the received text of the New Testament, which he identified with Robert Estienne’s Paris editions of 1546 and 1550.24 The major innovation of Bentley’s own New Testament, indeed, was to have been the simple fact that he ventured to change the received text. Nonetheless, Bentley evidently felt the need sharply to distinguish his projected methods from the way in which he himself had treated Horace in 1711. His solution was at once novel in the field of New Testament criticism and utterly at odds with his own classical editorial practice. He would exclude conjectural readings from the continuous printed text and even, he promised, from the annotations that would appear on the text pages. Already in the specimen chapter from Revelation that he printed with his Proposals, Bentley had difficulty keeping to this self-proscription: he could not resist conjecturally emending one word in the Latin text to agree grammatically with the Greek, and he printed his emendation in the text itself.25 Clearly, Bentley had hardly claimed he would not insert his conjectures because he could not envisage a situation in which an original reading was nowhere to be found in the manuscript tradition; this had been precisely the situation Bentley described in his 1713 Remarks when pleading the necessity of conjecture in New Testament textual criticism. What is striking about the criterion Bentley chose— that in his New Testament, he would not insert conjectures in the text—is rather that the very distinction between conjectural and manuscript emendation had originated for early modern scholars in the field of classical textual criticism. While the same distinction was naturally known in biblical criticism, it carried rather less weight in the seventeenth-century climate of fidelity to the received text; those scholars who raised the topic at all, like Louis Cappel, generally did so as an explicit borrowing from the classical field, and then in an attempt to legitimate the practice of conjecture.26 We can only speculate about Bentley’s precise motives for so conspicuously changing his public theory of New Testament criticism between 1713 and 1720, but the cautionary example of the French Oratorian scholar

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Richard Simon seems likely to have been one Bentley decided he must avoid at all costs. Simon’s Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (1689; English translation 1689) had made Simon a byword for pessimism about the prospect of arriving at a perfect Greek text, just as his Critical History of the Old Testament (1678; English translation 1682) had compiled arguments for doubting the accuracy of the Hebrew text.27 The Old Testament book in particular caused something of a sensation in Bentley’s ecclesiastical milieu, eliciting responses from Isaac Vossius and Humphrey Hody, among others. English contemporaries, Bentley included, attempted publicly to write off Simon as simply a Roman Catholic apologist intent on undermining the original biblical texts by any means, although this fell short of explaining Simon’s frosty reception by the Sorbonne censors and the community of the Oratory itself. Simon’s received image as a transgressive textual doubter may well have seemed too close for comfort to Bentley’s own public posture in his Horace edition; the methods Bentley hoped would make him appear a glamorous bad boy in the classical sphere would likely have provoked charges of crypto-Catholicism had he proposed to repeat them in his New Testament. The connection between Bentley and Simon is more specific, however, than the nebulous if ever-present question of scholarly image. Simon’s Critical History of the Text of the New Testament had dwelled at length on Jerome’s statement that he had not attempted to produce a perfect correspondence between his Greek manuscripts and his revision of the unsatisfactory Old Latin translation; accordingly, neither the Vulgate nor, a fortiori, the Old Latin could serve as a reliable witness to the Greek manuscripts of Jerome’s time.28 It was certainly Simon against whom Bentley leveled his quixotic argument that he could in fact reconcile Jerome’s Latin and the Greek text perfectly—a claim, moreover, in which Bentley precisely echoed the French New Testament translator and commentator Denys Amelote, whom Simon censured for his misrepresentations and his ignorance of manuscripts.29 Yet even while opposing Simon on one front, Bentley characteristically followed him on another. Throughout his book, Simon had labored to show the primary importance of manuscript variants, especially manuscript errors, for settling disputed questions about the New Testament text. He consistently chose to discuss passages about which he could produce arguments drawn from the manuscripts he had inspected in Paris, for example, the spurious pericope de adultera at John 7.53–8.11, which he found to be absent, asterisked, or written in the margin in several manuscripts.30 Bentley’s newfound devotion to manuscripts in 1720, though few biblical scholars would have taken exception to it, strongly brings to mind Simon’s nearly missionary zeal on behalf of the manuscripts he valued.

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Like the lone conjecture that strayed into Bentley’s printed specimen of Revelation, his working materials on the New Testament tell a more complicated story than the official one. Early in his project, on the margins of books that also recorded collations of a few Greek manuscripts each, he was quite willing to record conjectures to the Greek text, perhaps in the hope that these readings would surface in the manuscripts that Wetstein and Walker were reading for him in Europe. But by the time he compiled a summary of his Greek and Latin readings and added sketches of his textual annotations, at some point after 1720, Bentley largely restricted his interventions in the Greek text to readings from the oldest manuscripts and patristic biblical quotations, although he took a freer hand with Jerome’s Latin version.31 If Bentley in practice did not manage to be quite as purist as advertised, still his method in his final summary book was indeed markedly different from that of his editions and working copies of Horace and Terence. In his early New Testament conjectures, on the other hand, perhaps we should read a direct echo of his classical practice, in which he regularly started an edition by recording his conjectures alone before inspecting his manuscripts.32 As he would later do in his Paradise Lost edition, then, Bentley in part adapted his habitual practices for classical editing and in part transferred them quite directly as he entered the new field of biblical criticism.

As

Bentley himself acknowledged in his Remarks against Anthony Collins, the majority of the controverted passages in the New Testament had small doctrinal or even semantic significance. Although Bentley, following Louis Cappel on the Old Testament, presented this situation as fortunate—the great number of manuscript variants at which Collins had professed horror only rarely affected the substance of the text—a representative selection of Bentley’s emendations would make for arid discussion indeed.33 On at least some occasions, however, Bentley’s comments on the New Testament were positively remarkable, largely because he had discovered a way to introduce into the edition his most congenial form of discourse, the polemic. Throughout the 1710s and 1720s, ecclesiastical circles in England were rocked by public controversy over the Anglican doctrine of the Trinity, and in his edition, Bentley gave great attention to the biblical passages that were traditionally taken to imply a divine Trinity. He conjectured, compiled manuscript readings, speculated about the state of the passages in the patristic period, and silently appreciated the bracing interventions of his seventeenth-century predecessors.34 One does not expect to find Bentley occupied with hotly contested points of Anglican doctrine, and indeed in one respect his engagement with the Trinity doctrine

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figured as a return of the repressed: he had ostensibly washed his hands of scholarly theology in the Letter to Mill but now discovered himself standing again on all too familiar ground. We will find, in fact, that Bentley on the Trinity demonstrated a deeply submerged but surprisingly close kinship with the seventeenth-century scholarly world of his youth. The resulting narrative of change and continuity illuminates both Bentley’s choices in editorial methodology for his New Testament and his broader intellectual choices about the kind of scholarship he practiced. In the years around 1700, English scholars had made a radical change in the way in which they studied the ancient Mediterranean world. In the seventeenth century, the form that dominated English scholarly publishing was the massive synthetic treatise on the comparative history of ancient cultures. A scholar might argue, like Edward Stillingfleet and Edmund Dickinson, that Greek myths actually proved the Old Testament to be the truest record of human history. More daringly, he might argue, like John Spencer and John Marsham, that parts of ancient Hebrew ritual were really derived from ancient Egypt.35 In each case, the writer’s goal was to fit together passages from as many texts as possible and create a striking new tissue of interconnections; as a result, the point of studying any particular text was precisely to integrate the interesting passages in it into some larger, grander scheme. The majority of English scholars at this time were clerics associated in one way or another with the ecclesiastical universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and they collectively hoped to show that the pagan cultures of ancient Greece and Rome presented no challenge or alternative to their own Christian world picture but actually corroborated the truth of revealed history and theology. In the eighteenth century, this kind of writing essentially vanished from scholarly circles, to be replaced by the minutely focused genre of the textual edition. Whether a scholar set out to edit a pagan or a Christian text, he tried to limit his concerns purely to the readings of the text; historical and exegetical commentary were generally spurned unless they had some unavoidable bearing on the choice of readings at hand. Like the synthetic treatises of the past, textual editions still required the scholar to consult other texts and to accumulate and reconcile their passages—when deciding whether a given word should stand in one’s own text, for example, one wanted to know how it was used elsewhere. Yet the net effect of the eighteenth century’s turn to texts was the decisive abandonment of the projects in cultural interconnection that had so intrigued earlier scholars. As a result, ancient paganism rapidly descended to the status of a virtually ornamental knowledge. Greco-Roman religion was no longer a great historical problem whose solution brought potentially great rewards; it was now

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simply a part of the background information one needed when reading Homer or Livy, and a fount of difficult personal names and toponyms that a scholar might try to educe from the corrupt readings of a pagan text. The end of the seventeenth century’s fascination with paganism thus arrived hand in hand with a newly widespread way of writing that made it almost impossible to present substantive and prolonged historical comparisons of the seventeenth-century variety. This transformation in method was also visibly enacted in Anglican dealings with the doctrine of the Trinity. In the seventeenth century, proTrinitarian scholars approached the subject as a problem in the history of beliefs: at what point were Trinity-like beliefs first held and first articulated by Christians? Could those beliefs be shown to have originated in Christianity itself, or did they come from some other ancient tradition, namely, Neoplatonism? Like other broad-ranging seventeenth-century lines of inquiry, these questions demanded the exhaustive compilation and synthesis of source passages into more or less coherent historical narratives. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, however, scholars effectively turned the question of the Trinity doctrine into a series of problems about the text of the New Testament alone. For example, did the apostles ever refer to Christ as “God” (theos) or only as “Lord” (kurios)? Was the spectacularly Trinitarian passage at 1 John 5:7–8 originally part of the Bible, or a later interpolation by some speaker of Latin in search of a proof text? When the manuscript tradition contained Trinitarian and nonTrinitarian versions of a single passage, which one was the true reading and which one was a deliberate or inadvertent scribal revision? While the answers to these questions necessarily drew in part on prior assumptions about the history of Christian belief, eighteenth-century scholars tended to write as if their textual decisions were totally separate from interpretive or doctrinal concerns. The conditions of contemporary polemic may also have contributed to the Anglicans’ textual turn: from the 1680s and into the 1710s, the genre of the broad historical narrative began to be aggressively coopted by the unorthodox and the relatively unscholarly, for example Charles Blount, John Toland, Anthony Collins, and William Whiston. It became clear, in other words, that scholars needed to turn to a new set of methods if they were to distinguish their own practices definitively from those of the intellectually unwashed: when the opponents of the proTrinitarian scholars changed their tactics, the scholars felt obliged to change in turn. This, certainly, is the reason why Mill’s New Testament edition of 1707 and Bentley’s unpublished edition engaged with the Trinity doctrine where previous English editions of the New Testament had not. The Trinity doctrine was an object in and of public controversy, and scholars’ arguments

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about the Trinity were shaped as much by the need to win as by the repertoire of scholarly techniques at their disposal. It was not enough for a scholar’s methods to be credible by the standards of the scholarly community, then; the scholar’s methods also had to demonstrate an expertise that other contemporaries could not easily duplicate.

In

the seventeenth century, the question of the historical legitimacy of the Trinity doctrine was treated as essentially a question of its origins and its attestations. Those who challenged the doctrine pointed out that the New Testament offered infrequent support for it; they argued that the doctrine was unknown to the early Christian church and that it had only been confected in the fourth century CE by philosophically inclined church fathers imitating the three hypostases of the pagan Neoplatonists. One of the most distinctive Christian doctrines was, therefore, not Christian at all.36 Conversely, those who defended the Trinity claimed to find the doctrine in the writings of the earliest church fathers, as George Bull did, or even in the teachings of Moses—such was the argument of Ralph Cudworth in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). Seventeenth-century scholars who sought to defend the Trinity doctrine on historical grounds faced two related inconveniences. By and large, the authors of the New Testament had not written especially carefully or consistently about the nature of Christ and his relation to God, nor had the church fathers of the first three centuries. This was what allowed biblical commentators like Faustus Socinus and Jonas Schlichting to interpret the New Testament to mean that Christ was not divine, and allowed Christoph Sand and Daniel Zwicker to produce heavily documented ecclesiastical histories arguing that the Trinity doctrine was nowhere to be found in the earliest centuries of the church.37 The orthodox took various paths in their counterarguments, but in England, their writings all tended to fall into the category of the far-reaching historical narrative. Isaac Casaubon’s proposal was perhaps the most elegant solution to the problem of the early church’s silence on the subject of the Trinity. In his Exercitationes of 1614, Casaubon conceded that the doctrine was hard to find in the first three centuries of the church, but he turned this apparent absence into an indication of the Trinity’s actual yet deliberately concealed presence. Casaubon explained that early Christians conducted their religion like a pagan mystery cult, into which believers were gradually indoctrinated over a period of years.38 Only the full “initiates” (memueˉmenoi) were privy to the entirety of Christian teaching, and the Trinity was one of the “mysteries” (musteˉria) which was known only to them. Unlike a pagan mystery, the Trinity according to Casaubon was never actually “unutterable” (aporreˉton), because the

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doctrine was absolutely necessary for believers to understand. Nonetheless, the early fathers had used all precautions to keep pagan unbelievers, or even novice Christians, from hearing of the doctrine.39 Even following the Council of Nicaea, at which the Trinity doctrine had been officially declared a part of orthodoxy, the fathers had remained reluctant to use the words “Trinity” and “homoousios” (of the same substance) before those whose belief was still weak.40 The Trinity, then, was one of the doctrines to which the early fathers were referring in their sermons in elliptical formulae such as “the initiated will understand what I mean.”41 Casaubon’s argument appealed to contemporaries not only because of its classical and patristic  learning and its gratifyingly Tacitean atmosphere of conspiracy and innuendo; it was also, obviously, extremely difficult to prove Casaubon  wrong. His claims were being admiringly elaborated as late as the 1670s, in William Cave’s much-reprinted pro-Trinitarian treatise Primitive Christianity.42 By contrast, Ralph Cudworth chose to defend the Trinity by appealing to a historical period long before the advent of Christianity. In his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), Cudworth attempted to defuse the anti-Trinitarians’ contention that the doctrine had only entered the church via late, pagan Platonism. Tacitly conceding that this might actually have been the case, Cudworth sought to demonstrate that the doctrine was nonetheless true and a historically legitimate part of Christian belief. The key lay in showing that Plato had actually borrowed his Trinity doctrine from Moses’ teachings, a claim that involved Cudworth in some adventurous passages of Old Testament exegesis. Cudworth went on to argue that other pagans besides Plato had also learned of the Trinity doctrine from Moses, among them the poet Orpheus and the prophetesses known as the Sibyls; Cudworth angrily rejected other scholars’ arguments that both Orpheus’s poems and the Sibylline oracles were Hellenistic forgeries.43 Unfortunately for Cudworth, several contemporaries interpreted his argument as unorthodox, and even as a covert contribution to the antiTrinitarian side of the debate: for these readers, any reference at all to the so-called Platonic Trinity in antiquity came much too close to the Socinian narrative according to which the Trinity had originated in Neoplatonism.44 But the point of Cudworth’s argument, of course, was precisely to show that the Socinians’ narrative posed no threat to the Trinity even if it were accepted: if the Trinity had formed part of the true original religion of mankind, the route by which Christians had acquired the doctrine became an irrelevant question.45 By the late seventeenth century, orthodox scholars felt less and less confidence in the persuasive power of elaborate narratives like Casaubon’s

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and Cudworth’s. A few scholars now resolved to take an even bolder approach, directly contradicting the anti-Trinitarians’ claims where Casaubon and Cudworth had ingeniously explained them away. George Bull, an Oxford theologian and later a bishop, was probably the most prominent writer in this vein. In his Defensio fidei nicaenae of 1685, Bull assailed the anti-Trinitarian ecclesiastical history by Christoph Sand head on, claiming that the Trinity doctrine in its orthodox form actually could be found in the writings of the earliest fathers.46 The majority of English theologians, however, were in the process of abandoning any effort at all to make historical arguments in favor of the Trinity doctrine. Typical of this more pessimistic group were John Owen, William Sherlock, and Edward Stillingfleet, who defended the Trinity doctrine on purely logical and philosophical grounds in numerous pamphlets.47 Beginning from a few passages in the New Testament, they argued in effect that if God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit existed, it was logically necessary for the relationship between them to be that of the orthodox Trinity. In effect, apologists for the Trinity were quickly dropping the technique of the narrative history of beliefs, and the narrative history never again recovered its prominence in English arguments on behalf of the Trinity doctrine. One reason why the creative pro-Trinitarian historical narratives fell out of favor at this time was, no doubt, simply that they were hard to prove and easy to ridicule. But another reason most likely had to do with the genre of the narrative history of religion itself. In the 1680s and 1690s, the narrative format began to be regularly coopted by the anticlerical enemies of the Trinitarians, who sought to expose the fraudulent origin of all organized religion in rude superstitions and priestly fabrications. In a stream of treatises that strongly recall the contemporary muckraking genre of the political “secret history,” the anticlerical writers elaborated their unflattering story of the rise of religion in the ancient world.48 They drew their inspiration in part from Herbert of Cherbury’s De religione gentilium, a panoramic indictment of ancient worship that was itself largely based on G. J. Vossius’s apologetic De theologia gentili.49 Blount and John Toland published numerous original tracts in this vein, with Toland further extending his accusations to ancient Ireland: the fabled Druids, in his account, had the distinction of being just as self-serving and manipulative as the priests of the Greek Apollo at Delphi.50 Although neither Blount nor Toland had much use for the Trinity doctrine, the specific arguments they offered against it tended to be swallowed up in their broader claims about organized religion in general. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, however, the Trinity doctrine became the subject of more specialized debunking histories. William Whiston’s

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Primitive Christianity Reviv’d (1711–1712), for example, remains fairly well known today, because it was largely responsible for Whiston’s expulsion from his job in Cambridge.51 In this treatise, as elsewhere, Whiston’s amateurism as a scholar is at least as remarkable as his doctrinal convictions. His assault on the Trinity doctrine perversely relied on the late antique text called the Apostolical Constitutions, which Jean Daillé had shown in 1653 to be a late antique forgery by Arians; Whiston, however, insisted that the text really was authored by an associate of the biblical apostles, just as he insisted on the authenticity of the Sibylline oracles, an equally dubious text in his contemporaries’ eyes.52 A more conceptually elegant contribution was the History of the Apostles Creed (1702) by Peter King, the cousin and editor of John Locke.53 Just as Herbert of Cherbury’s De religione gentili had drawn large amounts of its information from an earlier apologetic text, G. J. Vossius’s De theologia gentili (1641), King here made a heavy but subversive use of John Pearson’s popular Exposition of the Creed (1659).54 For King, the Apostles’ Creed (beginning “I believe in God the Father Almighty”) was not actually written by the apostles: only this first statement, belief in a single god, was originally part of Christian teaching. The rest of the creed, phrase by phrase, had been added in successive centuries as the need arose to combat one heresy after another by  writing its tenets out of orthodox belief. Thus the creed’s provision about Christ descending into hell had been added by Arians in the year 359 when they were trying to placate their Trinitarian opponents; the clause that says he was buried was added by another group of Arians trying to outdo the first in a spurious show of orthodoxy; meanwhile the Trinitarian faction themselves did not add the descent into hell until fourteen years later, in 373. For King, in the end, the creed was literally a stratification of progressive additions, each one of which was controversially motivated and quite contingent on the immediate historical circumstances of early Christianity. By the early years of the eighteenth century, then, to write a “history” of any religious subject generally was an attempt to debunk and dismantle it. For orthodox scholars around 1700, this appropriation of the historical narrative by anticlerical writers posed a major problem, which went well beyond the simple fact that orthodox claims were being publicly opposed. Now that readers could find substantial and seemingly well-documented histories of religion on both sides of the question, scholars no longer possessed any distinctive method of writing that could automatically impart credit to their arguments. True, neither the histories by the orthodox nor the histories by the anticlerical writers tend to seem especially plausible from a modern perspective—nor did they seem so to more scrupulous con-

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temporaries, as we have seen from Sherlock’s and Stillingfleet’s voluntary abandonment of the genre. But it was not only these internal problems with the content of the religious-historical narratives that encouraged the orthodox to find new venues for their polemics. It was also, certainly, the social imperative to show oneself to be an expert in a controversy being played out before many nonexpert and semiexpert onlookers. If scholars were to reintroduce some obvious distinction between their own methods and those of their opponents, they were going to have to change their ways. As much as anything else, this social necessity furnished a powerful motive for the demise of paganism in the arguments of the orthodox around the turn of the eighteenth century. When scholars relinquished the genre of the apologetic, comparative historical narrative, paganism was dethroned by default from its earlier role as the mirror and guarantor of Judeo-Christian history. The religion of the Greeks and Romans became little more than background scenery useful for explicating ancient artifacts and texts.

In this context, the enterprise of biblical text criticism came to seem newly promising as a forum where scholars could respond to the debate over the Trinity. When the English Polyglot Bible was published in 1655– 1657, its editor Brian Walton had shown exceedingly little interest in the Trinity doctrine, or indeed in virtually any subject relating to the New Testament. He devoted the majority of his long prolegomena to the Old Testament, siding with Louis Cappel in the then-current debate over the antiquity of the vowel points in the Hebrew text, and with the supporters of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament over the Septuagint for accuracy.55 Nor did the Trinity doctrine make a prominent appearance in John Pearson’s Critici sacri, the collection of critical and exegetical treatises designed as a companion to the Polyglot, or in John Fell’s edition of the New Testament with variant readings, which appeared at Oxford in 1675.56 But the case was different by 1707, when John Mill’s important edition of the New Testament appeared from the Oxford University Press after more than two decades of preparation.57 The actual text Mill printed was, as we would expect, unchanged from the received text that had been reprinted since the early seventeenth century. At the foot of each page, however, Mill offered lists of variant manuscript readings much more extensive than any that were previously available. In many cases, he explained which reading he took to be correct and why, and in his prolegomena, he also noted his own and others’ conjectural emendations. Mill’s edition forcibly impressed his contemporaries and quickly came to be perceived as a new standard. Ludolf Kuster published a reprint of it in Holland, augmented with the

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readings of additional manuscripts, and the dissenter Joseph Hallet published a summary list of all the manuscripts Mill had cited, allowing the user of Mill’s edition to find out quickly how many of Mill’s manuscripts contained a given book or chapter.58 Decades later, J. D. Michaelis could write that although Mill’s edition had since been superseded, it was nonetheless the one work that had brought New Testament criticism out of its infancy and into adulthood.59 Mill’s edition is interesting in our context because on a few striking occasions, Mill used his notes to argue for seemingly Trinitarian textual readings against non-Trinitarian alternatives. While Mill’s choices of readings might not be enough in themselves to show that his intentions were partly doctrinal, the unusual length of these notes suggests that Mill considered these passages especially important, as does the fact that these notes are all couched as angry rejoinders to Hugo Grotius. Grotius’s Annotationes on the New Testament had appeared in 1641–1650, and although his comments were largely devoted to linguistic and historical information, he had also made occasional remarks on the readings of the text. In particular, Grotius had preferred or conjectured non-Trinitarian readings for the well-known passages 1 Timothy 3:16, Romans 9:5, and Acts 20:28, as well as repeating Erasmus’s opinion that the comma Johanneum at 1 John 5:7–8 was an interpolation—all of these passages being among the favorite proof-texts for the biblical authority of the Trinity doctrine.60 At 1 Timothy 3:16, for example, Grotius had read the following in the so-called textus receptus, the Elzevir edition of 1633: “And without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness: God ( qeov~) was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. (kai; oJmologoumevnw~ mevga ejsti;n tov th'~ eujsebeiva~ musthvrion· qeov~ ejfanerwvqh ejn sarki;, ejdikaiwvqh ejn pneuvmati, w[fqh ajggevloi~, ejkhruvcqh ejn e[qnesin, ejpisteuvqh ejn kovsmwÛ, ajnelhvmfqh ejn dovxhÛ.)” The doctrinal problem here, to those who considered it a problem, clearly lay with the word qeov~ (“God”): since Christ was evidently the being who was made “manifest in the flesh,” the word “God” must refer to Christ, with Trinitarian consequences. Grotius preferred a reading which was not found in any New Testament manuscript he knew, but which he believed had appeared in the manuscripts used by “the ancient translators—Latin, Syriac, and Arabic—and Ambrosius”: o{, or “which,” referring to “the mystery of godliness.”61 The passage thus meant, Grotius explained, that the gospel had first been made known not by angels, but by “mortal men, who gave the external appearance of weakness: Christ and his apostles.” Again, at Romans 9:5, Grotius proposed removing the word “God” ( qeov~) from the text, again so as to avoid the word’s

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referring to Christ; he based this emendation on the ancient Syrian translation and citations in the church fathers Cyprian, Hilarius, and John Chrysostom.62 At Acts 20:28, Grotius favored the manuscript reading “Lord” (kurivou) over the received reading “God” ( qeou`), in order to avoid the implication that God had founded the church “by his own blood” (dia; tou` ai{mato~ tou` ijdivou).63 “The Apostles often call Christ Lord (kuvrio~),” Grotius added, “but they call the Father God.”64 The point of calling attention to these notes is hardly to resurrect the seventeenth-century debate over Grotius’s orthodoxy; naturally we cannot know whether Grotius was himself a decided anti-Trinitarian, or whether he was merely an “irenicist” who wished to eliminate these seemingly Trinitarian passages as potential grounds for controversy among Christians.65 But unquestionably, the effect of his proposed emendations was to eliminate some of the most prominent of the traditional proof-texts for the Trinity doctrine. In each of these cases, Mill responded by defending the received reading, both in notes at the foot of his printed text and in a special section of his prolegomena devoted to complaints about Grotius.66 In the case of 1 Timothy 3:16, Mill claimed that Grotius’s proposed reading of o{ (“which”) for qeov~ (“God”) was simply nonsensical: “I certainly do not understand how a mystery could be said to be seen by the angels and received up into glory.”67 He pointed out that all the extant Greek manuscripts but two read qeov~ (“God”); the codex Claromontanus read o{ (“which”), and the codex Colbertinus read o{~ (“who”). He cited several church fathers who had quoted the passage with qeov~ (“God”), although he conceded that no one had quoted the passage at all until the Trinitarians’ controversy with the Arians was under way in the fourth century. Finally, Mill explained how the reading qeov~ (“God”) could have given rise to the other two through scribal errors of simple negligence: since qeov~ was conventionally abbreviated in manuscripts as H Σ, someone might easily have overlooked the middle bar in the letter H and written ΟΣ. This in turn could have been carelessly copied as Ο, the reading that Mill acknowledged lay behind the Vulgate, Syrian, and Ethiopic translations as well as the patristic citations Grotius had mentioned.68 Mill gave essentially similar treatment to the other two passages where Grotius had proposed non-Trinitarian readings. For Romans 9:5, he claimed that all manuscripts contained the troublesome qeov~ (“God”) that Grotius wanted to omit, and he listed more than four dozen patristic quotations that also contained the word; even the Syriac translation that Grotius had cited in his own favor actually read qeov~, according to Mill.69 Here Erasmus came in for criticism too: Erasmus had suggested it was possible the word qeov~ was not authentic on the grounds that it was missing from quotations of the passage in Cyprian and

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Hilarius, and that Chrysostom did not discuss the word in his comment on the passage.70 In the case of Acts 20:28, Mill had to acknowledge that several important manuscripts, including the Alexandrinus and the codex Bezae, sided with Grotius in giving kurivou (“Lord”) instead of qeou` (“God”), but on the grounds that an approximately equal number of manuscripts and patristic texts gave qeou` (“God”), Mill concluded that “we should hardly retreat from the received reading.”71 But the most remarkable indication of Mill’s desire to produce an orthodox text came in his treatment of what is called the comma Johanneum, the biblical passage that provides the clearest support for the doctrine of the Trinity. On its face, the passage articulates the notion of a Trinity with a clarity found nowhere else in the New Testament, reading “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one. (o{t i trei`~ eijs ivn oiJ marturou`nte~ ejn tw`/ oujranw`/, oJ path;r, oJ lovgo~ kai; tov a{gion pneu`ma, kai; ou{toi oiJ trei`~ e{n eijs in; 1 John 5:7).” It also happens that this passage is, in modern scholars’ view, unquestionably an interpolation: it is found in the Latin Vulgate text of the Bible, but not in any Greek manuscript written before the sixteenth century. Erasmus had already pointed this out and omitted the passage from the first edition of his New Testament in 1516, saying he would reinstate it if anyone could find the passage in even a single Greek manuscript; a single manuscript duly appeared, and Erasmus was forced to include the comma in his subsequent editions.72 Mill knew this story as well as anyone, and he admitted that only one Greek manuscript contained the comma, yet he argued in a long and painstakingly documented note that the passage should nonetheless be considered authentic. According to him, the comma had indeed been present in the original text of 1 John, but it had dropped out of the text through an innocent scribal error in an early copy. Centuries later, someone discovered a little-known manuscript with the correct text, and it was this full text that had supplied the basis for the Latin Vulgate translation, although it left no trace in the Greek tradition.73 We should notice, among other things, the uncanny way in which Mill’s story echoes Isaac Casaubon’s explanation of the Trinity doctrine as an unspoken mystery in the early church. Where Casaubon argued that the Trinity doctrine had really existed in the first four centuries without leaving any record, Mill transposed this narrative into the plane of textual criticism, arguing that a critical Trinitarian passage in the New Testament had similarly languished in silence until the making of the Latin Vulgate. It is impossible to know, of course, whether Mill really believed in his account of the comma’s fortunes or whether he was prudently accommodating his claims to the self-consciously high-church orthodoxy of the Oxford

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authorities who published his edition.74 What is clear is that the text of the New Testament had become a site where English scholars assumed that the Trinity doctrine was at issue. That Mill’s efforts on behalf of the Trinity were understood by at least one contemporary is clear from an essay commenting on Mill’s edition published by Daniel Whitby in 1710. While Whitby worried that Mill’s publication of so many “variae lectiones” (various readings) might serve the unorthodox as an argument against the stability of the New Testament, Whitby explicitly approved of Mill’s defense of the received text of 1 Timothy 3:16 against Hugo Grotius.75 Bentley had been a protégé of Mill’s in Oxford when Mill’s New Testament was under way in 1689–1691. Bentley’s Letter to Mill was, of course, coaxed out of him by Mill, or so Bentley claimed, to accompany the first edition of Malalas’s chronography that Mill oversaw at the university press; it was in this text that Bentley published his first conjectural emendation of the New Testament, arguing that a difficult phrase at Galatians 4:25— “Sina is a mountain in Arabia” (Σina` o[ro~ ejsti;n ejn th/` ’Arabiva/)—had originated as a marginal gloss and should be removed from the text.76 In Bentley’s own New Testament edition, he followed Mill in giving special attention to passages relevant to the Trinity doctrine, although not necessarily in the service of orthodoxy. Bentley began work on his edition, characteristically, by recording his conjectures in the margins of a printed copy of John Fell’s 1675 Greek New Testament edition, which Bentley signed and dated in 1716.77 In the same book, he collated the codex Alexandrinus, an important uncial manuscript of the complete New Testament in Greek to which he had easy access as the keeper of the Royal Library where it was housed.78 While the great majority of Bentley’s conjectures on the margins of the Fell edition had little if any theological significance, he also included a few conjectures that would have met with incredulous outrage had he ever published them. These involved passages that had become firmly established in seventeenth-century polemics over the Trinity, and which Mill had defended against Grotius’s proposed revisions. Bentley’s interventions would have neutralized the apparently Trinitarian import of each passage, but in a more textually virtuosic way than Grotius had ventured to do. We might begin with Bentley’s treatment of 1 Timothy 3:16, the passage where the received text reads “God was manifest in the flesh” ( qeov~ ejfanerwvqh ejn sarkiv), and where Grotius had argued for “which” (o{) on the basis of patristic citations and ancient versions. Bentley apparently reasoned that disputes over the word qeov~ (“God”) alone could continue indefinitely and unfruitfully, and he conjectured a new reading that spectacularly ignored the textual problem as it had heretofore been understood. He proposed to change not only qeov~ but the second word of the phrase as

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well, resulting in the text “Christ was put to death in the flesh” (χristov~ ejqanatwvqh ejn sarkiv).79 This transmuted 1 Timothy 3:16 from a passage of towering Christological importance to an extremely pedestrian statement of biography; the passage as Bentley wrote it could hardly have been used by anyone in arguments for or against the Trinity. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that in his 1716 conjecture book, Bentley meant to defang this much-discussed passage once and for all. This conjecture of Bentley’s was eventually published by his onetime protégé J. J. Wetstein, and then repeated by William Bowyer in his Critical Conjectures. Bowyer, however, rejected it on the grounds that “Sir Isaac Newton hath shewn” that “”O [which] ejfanerwvqh was the reading of all the Mss. before the fifth century.”80 A less extravagant but equally telling intervention was the one Bentley made at Romans 9:5. In the received text, the passage read as follows: “3 For I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh: 4 who are Israelites; whose (w|n) is the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; 5 whose (w|n) are the fathers, and of whom (w|n) is Christ as concerning the flesh, who is (oJ w[n) God ( qeov~) over all, blessed for ever.”81 Previous commentators on this passage had by and large focused on the word “God” ( qeov~) in the last verse. As we have seen, Grotius claimed that the Syriac version and a few church fathers omitted the word entirely, while Mill claimed that the Syriac version did contain the word and pointed out that Grotius’s patristic references were outnumbered by patristic citations in favor of qeov~. Bentley proposed two new readings that conceded that “God” ( qeov~) belonged in the text, yet decisively differentiated this God from Christ. He did this by turning his attention to the words “who is” (oJ w[n). He suggested, first, that the order of these two words might be the result of accidental transposition by a scribe, in which case the true reading would be “of whom is the God over all” (w|n oJ qeov~ ejpi; pavntwn). Christ was descended from the Israelites, and the Israelites’ God was the God of all things; there was no special connection between these two propositions at all. Alternately, Bentley suggested that the original reading might have been “of whom is the one who is God over all” (w|n oJ w[n qeov~ ejpi; pavntwn). In this case, the first wn would have dropped out of the text by accident; the effect on the passage’s doctrinal import is just the same as in Bentley’s first conjecture. Although Bentley did not say so in his annotated book, he most likely knew that he was not the first to propose his first conjecture on Romans 9:5, changing the received oJ w[n to w|n oJ. That honor belongs to the seventeenthcentury Socinian theologian Jonas Schlichting, whose New Testament

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commentary in the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum Bentley could have consulted either in Edward Stillingfleet’s library in the 1680s or 1690s or in John Moore’s library at any point before 1714.82 Schlichting’s previous support for Bentley’s proposed reading can only strengthen the already unavoidable impression that Bentley sought to revise Romans 9:5 precisely because it was a well-known proof-text for the Trinity doctrine. Bentley had no comment on Acts 20:28 in his 1716 conjecture book, although he did, predictably, delete the comma Johanneum at 1 John 5:7–8.83 This was one textual decision Bentley was willing to make public in his lifetime: in 1717, he used the occasion of his installment as Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge to argue against the authenticity of the comma, provoking angry replies from the orthodox and creating a climate of suspicion that resurfaced in the responses to Bentley’s Proposals for his edition in 1720.84 In the later stage represented by Bentley’s annotated copy of the Paris 1628 New Testament, he drew back from his bold initial conjectures. Neither his conjecture on 1 Timothy 3:16 nor his conjectures on Romans 9:5 survived the process of winnowing by which he compiled his final version; they were replaced, however, by long notes in which Bentley evaluated the evidence offered by patristic citations and ancient versions. These notes show how Bentley shifted from treating these key passages as tools for present-day controversy to treating them as records of a parallel controversy in ecclesiastical antiquity. Bentley considered not only the form in which a given patristic writer presented a quotation but also the motivations that lay behind the quotation’s being made at all. On 1 Timothy 3:16, for example, Bentley wrote as follows: Instead of ‘God’ [qeov~], the Coptic translation reads “he who” (for Greek o{~), the Syriac and Ethiopic translations read “what” (for Greek o{), and the codex Augiensis reads “he who” [o{~]. Hilarius [fourth century] writes, p. 1087: “All confess that what [quod] was manifest to the angels was preached to the nations.” Cyprian [third century] did not cite this passage even when arguing that Christ was God. Cyril of Jerusalem [also a pro-Trinitarian; fourth century] never cites it. The manuscript commentary by Photius [ninth century] in the Cambridge University Library reads on this passage: “God was manifest [qeov~ ejfanerwvqh] St. Cyril in chapter 12 of his commentary says: ‘He who o}~ was made manifest in the flesh’.” The printed text of Athanasius [fourth century] reads “God [qeov~] was made manifest,” but this passage is not in the manuscripts of Athanasius, and Athanasius never gives this quotation anywhere else. However, pseudo-Athanasius p. 33 writes “God” [qeov~]: see the notes in the edition.85

Bentley starts this note by listing testimonies to variant readings that had not been noted by Mill: the Coptic version read “he” where the other ancient

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versions read “which,” and the codex Augiensis, which Bentley himself owned, provided another Greek witness for “he.”86 Bentley also finds two patristic quotations of the passage with readings other than “God,” in Hilarius and in Cyril as attested by Photius. But most interesting are Bentley’s arguments from silence: had the passage really existed in the form with “God,” it should have been frequently quoted by ancient Trinitarian polemicists, whereas in fact Cyprian, Cyril, and even Athanasius himself never appeal to the passage. This technique of arguing from patristic silence was hardly new in itself. Mill had done so frequently, and had attacked Erasmus for doing the same in his remarks on Romans 9:5; the use of patristic citations in general had been advocated by Joseph Scaliger in the posthumous Scaligerana, a collection of his remarks in conversation.87 But in Bentley’s case, patristic citations are particularly significant because his note in the Paris 1628 book shows him imagining the New Testament text as a vehicle for ancient controversy and imagining that controversy as turning precisely on the contents of the New Testament. The history of ancient beliefs now serves Bentley as a tool for reconstructing the ancient readings of a textual passage, and the readings of the text, rather than the history of beliefs, are the ultimate goal of Bentley’s scholarly enterprise. In the end, Bentley allowed the received reading with “God” ( qeov~) to stand in his summary annotated book, although he marked the passage with a vertical bar in the margin of the printed text—his customary sign for readings he disliked. An even more vivid scene of reconstruction comes from Bentley’s note in his final version on John 1:18, another passage that had exercised commentators on both sides of the debate over the Trinity. This passage read in the received text: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten son (monogenh;~ uiJov~), which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” While the received reading did not carry any particular Trinitarian implication, it was well known that some manuscripts gave an alternate reading, “only begotten God” (monogenh;~ qeov~), which presented the familiar problem of identifying Christ with God. In his manuscript note, Bentley used patristic citations to imagine the state of the text in antiquity: “Eusebius [fourth century] in Against Marcellus writes: ‘The only begotten son (uiJov~) or only begotten God (qeov~).’ As if this were a variant reading [varia lectio]. But on p. 86, he gives the same reading as the editions. Irenaeus [second century] page 333: “Except the only begotten son [filius]”; but page 335: “only begotten God [deus].”88

Again, Bentley was not interested in changing the received text in this case. But his patristic citations show him considering at least two different

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kinds of textual variation in ancient copies of the New Testament. When Bentley remarks that Eusebius’s quotation suggests that “God” ( qeov~) was a “varia lectio,” he probably meant not merely that both readings were available in manuscripts Eusebius knew, but more specifically that Eusebius had a manuscript in which “son” (uiJov~) stood in the continuous text and “God” ( qeov~) was presented as a marginal gloss or correction. “Varia lectio” was the standard technical term in early modern Old Testament studies for the marginal corrections in Hebrew manuscripts that were actually read and interpreted, and Bentley seems to have envisaged something similar in this case: the gloss “God” ( qeov~) was eventually substituted in some manuscripts for the original reading “son” (uiJov~), perhaps by scribes who took the gloss for an actual textual correction.89 In the case of the two quotations of John 1:18 from Irenaeus, Bentley must have imagined either that Irenaeus himself knew the passage in both versions or that some enterprising scribe had changed the reading of one of Irenaeus’s quotations from “filius” to “Deus” but overlooked the other. Here again, then, in practical terms, Bentley imagined the ancient Trinity controversy as centering on texts and revealed by the textual record; the history of ancient polemics served to explain the New Testament quotations in patristic writers, and not vice versa. Bentley may or may not have opposed the Trinity doctrine personally, and it is neither possible nor especially important to decide the question. On the evidence alone, he could indeed have believed in the doctrine but wished to deemphasize its traditional proof-texts, perhaps with the good latitudinarian mission of encouraging dissenters to join the Church of England. The rest of Bentley’s career suggests only that he had scant interest in actively defending the Trinity doctrine, either in private or in public. In the 1690s, for example, Bentley attempted to start a club that would meet in the Royal Library, boasting to John Evelyn that the anti-Trinitarians Newton and Locke were founding members.90 When Bentley received his doctorate in divinity in 1696, he delivered a sermon whose sole object was to prove that Jesus was the Christ and Messiah: according to Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity, published in the previous year, this was the single proposition one needed to believe in order to be saved.91 And in his two best-known pieces of theological polemic, Bentley similarly engaged in very broad arguments that involved no claims more shocking than the existence of God and the historical authenticity of the New Testament. In his Boyle Lectures of 1692, Bentley attempted to demonstrate that the complexity and order of the natural world, from human bodies to the planetary orbits described by Newton, ineluctably revealed the hand of a creator God; in his Remarks against Collins of 1713, he argued that the

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New Testament variant readings compiled by Mill were the predictable products of a long manuscript transmission and did not tell against the basic stability of the New Testament text. At most, we might conclude that Bentley’s change of heart between his boldly non-Trinitarian conjecture book and his more measured final edition of the New Testament arose not only from a scholarly desire to present documented readings but also from an inclination to continue his policy of public silence on the question of the Trinity. Paradoxically, then, what is likely to be Bentley’s most obscure project was also the one in which his scholarly concerns and his personal thoughts were most intertwined.

chapter eight

Interlopers and Interpolators Manilius and Paradise Lost

I

n 1732 Bentley published the most redoubtable of all his editions, his notorious Paradise Lost. Rejecting his nephew Thomas’s pleas that he reconsider at least some of his more heartstopping emendations, Bentley argued to a bemused readership that Milton’s epic had been seriously corrupted before coming to the press in 1662; he duly cast out the many parts of the poem that he had determined were not by Milton.1 The conventions of narrative, and certainly the shade of Milton, would seem to demand forcefully that Bentley lay down his pen after this production. But in Bentley’s oeuvre, as in Milton’s poem, the moment of highest drama was followed by a slightly puzzling coda. In 1739, in precarious health, Bentley directed his nephew to see through the press what he surely knew would be his last edition: Manilius’s Astronomica, an ancient guide to astrology in five books of Latin hexameter verse.2 Bentley had begun work on Manilius as early as the 1680s, when he borrowed papers from Manilius’s translator Edward Sherburne. That Bentley chose decades later to revive this project, alone of his many abandoned plans, should attract our curiosity in itself. In fact, Bentley’s Manilius was connected as closely as possible with his Paradise Lost in its conception and its method. Like Milton’s poem, the Astronomica according to Bentley was rife not merely with scribal errors and corrections, but with large-scale interpolations by “an evil hand” (mala manus); these Bentley detected by their barbarous language and their ignorance of Manilius’s subject matter. Unlike Milton’s

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interpolator, however, the evil hand in Manilius was not Bentley’s own discovery. Joseph Scaliger, in his editions of 1579 and 1600, had pointed to several passages in the poem as interpolated; Bentley expanded their number greatly while quarreling with Scaliger about the particular lines involved. In an important sense, then, Bentley’s Manilius project stood directly behind his seemingly idiosyncratic Paradise Lost. At the same time, it is quite possible that the Paradise Lost edition stood behind the final form of Bentley’s Manilius, centrally devoted as both editions were to exposing the work of spectacularly active interpolators. The two editions, indeed, might be read as attempts at mutual legitimation, although in the event, belief in Manilius’s interpolator has remained as nearly universal as disbelief in Milton’s. In this chapter I read Bentley’s Manilius and his Paradise Lost against one another, not only because of this clear connection in Bentley’s biography but also because the two editions worked as multiple, and related, acts of positioning for Bentley as a scholar. In each case, Bentley implicitly argued for his own dominance in a field of contestants—in the Manilius edition, through his close engagement with his predecessor Joseph Scaliger, and in his Paradise Lost, through the calculated uniqueness of this entrance into the criticism of English poetry. Paradise Lost performed the more complex piece of triangulation, in that Bentley simultaneously drew on habits developed in his classical work and engaged in silent dialogue with critics of English poetry, notably Joseph Addison and Patrick Hume. In both editions, again, the place of theory was occupied by a new and heady technique, the detection of textual interpolation, which yielded striking emendations while distinguishing Bentley persuasively from less bold fellow-editors. Through the theory of interpolation, these two editions staged dramatic confrontations between the critic and his text, and did so even more overtly than in Bentley’s earlier projects. Where Bentley’s opponents in his previous editions had essentially been limited to nameless “scribes” (librarii) and to his own fellow editors, here Bentley battled the forces of textual corruption gathered into single, unpardonable figures, like the Miltonic allegories of Sin and Death, or for that matter their father Satan. Placed beside such transgressors, Manilius and Milton themselves tended to pale in interest as far as Bentley was concerned—perhaps inevitably, given their consequent resemblance to Paradise Lost’s virtuous but slightly tedious Son.

Manilius In the late 1680s, Manilius was not as recherché a choice for a young scholar as he would assuredly be today: John Milton, for example, had

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read Manilius in the 1640s with his young pupils, and Thomas Creech would translate Manilius into English in 1697 as a counterpart to his Lucretius of 1682.3 Moreover, in an age when Ptolemaic cosmology and the fundamentals of astrology were widely understood, Manilius’s doctrines would not have seemed as altogether foreign as they do to us.4 Nonetheless, the ambiguous phrases and extravagant circumlocutions necessitated by Manilius’s hexameter verse must often have made the Astronomica seem, as it does today, rather like a trigonometry textbook rendered as a Saturday New York Times crossword. The young Bentley, as we know, was attracted to few things more powerfully than difficult texts. In this case, he aimed to prove himself not simply against the world at large, but against his most exciting and anxiety-inducing predecessor, Joseph Scaliger. To prepare a textual edition of a Latin poem in 1680s England was already, in large measure, to place oneself in Scaliger’s tradition; yet in reediting the poem to which Scaliger himself had devoted such sustained attention, Bentley inevitably produced a very vexed form of homage. Bentley presented the readings of Scaliger’s 1600 text as the “standard” or “received” ones (vulgatae lectiones), meaning that his own new readings were above all differences from Scaliger: like Gabriele Faerno’s annotations in Bentley’s Terence edition, Scaliger’s readings in the footnotes to Bentley’s Manilius seemed to stand for the whole previous textual history of the Astronomica, which Bentley respected and combated by turns. In his annotations, Bentley found fault with Scaliger’s use of his manuscripts, rejected Scaliger’s conjectures (like Scaliger’s systematic emendation of nomina, names, to momina, motions), and argued for retaining lines that Scaliger had obelized.5 Even more pugnaciously, Bentley used one of Scaliger’s own techniques—the identification of interpolated passages—both to trump Scaliger, when Bentley called for the removal of passages in which Scaliger had perceived no difficulty, and piously to justify Manilius, when Bentley deattributed from the poet lines about which Scaliger had complained on various grounds. While Bentley occasionally took account of the work of seventeenth-century critics of Manilius, among them J. F. Gronovius, P. D. Huet, Isaac Vossius, Michel Du Fay, and J.  C. Gevartius, his brief responses to them were breathing spells from his sustained and virtually claustrophobic engagement with Scaliger. As he argued for his emendations to Scaliger’s Manilius, Bentley often, naturally, appealed to the technical meaning of the passage at hand, but he also made particularly careful arguments about Manilius’s language and style. Bentley fairly often emended to make an astronomical or philosophical exposition consistent—in addition to countless technical examples, he

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obelized a seemingly Epicurean passage at 1.128–131 whose materialism was out of keeping with the poem’s providentialist account of the world. Bentley also emended so as to increase Manilius’s astronomical acumen in late seventeenth-century eyes, for example, when he made Manilius imply that the Milky Way was more likely to be a thick cluster of individual stars than a continuous white substance, two explanations that the received text proposed with seemingly equal probability.6 “This, after all, is its true cause,” explained Bentley, “as we know with certainty from telescopes.”7 When Manilius again proposed alternate explanations for the existence of comets—either that they were spontaneously generated from time to time or that they were eternal like the rest of the universe—Bentley assumed in his annotation that Manilius had personally favored the second explanation, not only because it had been “demonstrated in our own time by the great Isaac Newton” but because in antiquity Seneca had attributed this view to the Chaldeans.8 The Chaldeans were generally thought to have invented both astronomy and astrology—in ancient Rome, indeed, the word “Chaldean” (chaldeus) commonly meant “astrologer”—so it was neither arbitrary nor completely implausible for Bentley to suggest here and elsewhere that Manilius himself was either a Chaldean or, at any rate, a “foreigner from someplace in Asia.”9 If by virtue of being non-Roman Manilius was an authority, by ancient standards, on astrology, Bentley’s extensive discussion of the poet’s style also seemed to fall under the rubric of his foreignness. Manilius was particularly fond, Bentley found, of antithetical turns of phrase, like “rises and falls” (surgitque caditque) or “follows and flees” (sequiturque fugitque), a pattern that authorized Bentley to conjecture many new antitheses—for example, substituting the word “ice” for “the poles” so as to contrast with the word “flames” at 1.1.318.10 Bentley also pointed out more isolated stylistic habits, like Manilius’s fondness for the phrases per omnes and per cunctos (“through all of them”), and his use of in ipsa to mean in se or se ipsa (“in itself” or simply “itself”); these observations too became Bentley’s grounds for emendations that created further instances of them.11 On a more pervasive scale, Bentley argued that Manilius, showing a respectable but not exhaustive command of Latin poetry, alluded often to Vergil but not to any other poet.12 This allowed Bentley to emend Manilius’s received text so as to produce even more parallels with Vergil, although the task, Bentley said, was complicated by the fact that Manilius’s interpolator also alluded to Vergil.13 On occasion, Bentley acknowledged how similar his own work was to that of the evil hand whose traces he found throughout the Astronomica. “I substitute something you yourself will confess is better,” Bentley wrote as he emended nearly every word

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of line 1.421 and created yet another Vergil allusion; “if you are just, you will attribute it to the author himself, not to me.”14 Bentley’s discussions of Manilius’s style were doubtless meant to showcase his own literary and linguistic acumen, but they also drew deeply on that most traditional mode of textual commentary, the discourse of praise and blame, or what we might call the criticism of J’accuse and J’excuse. Bentley positioned himself squarely as Manilius’s defender, meaning, for example, that he carefully avoided any implication that Manilius’s antitheses were tedious or his usage of in ipsa was technically irregular. Bentley went on to prevent Manilius from making mistakes in grammar or meter, or even from using archaisms like clepere (to steal), which Bentley considered “too obsolete and old-fashioned for the time when our author wrote.”15 Such, indeed, was Manilius’s scrupulosity that he declined (with Bentley’s help) ever to use the genitive singular of nouns with nominatives in –ius and –ium, because in the time of Augustus, when Bentley dated Manilius’s poem, the genitive and vocative singulars of such nouns both ended in –i, an unacceptable ambiguity.16 In keeping Manilius to the straight and narrow, particularly in his grammar, Bentley was avowedly rejecting the approach of Scaliger, who had explained many irregularities simply as peculiarities of the poet: “our author’s fate is indeed miserable,” Bentley exclaimed apropos one of Scaliger’s comments, “if he must constantly be excused in such a way as this.”17 Bentley usually preferred to change the text to make it right by his own standards—he accused scribes and Manilius’s interpolator, that is, rather than excusing (and thus covertly accusing) the author. Bentley’s strategy emerges with special clarity from his responses to two of Scaliger’s complaints, indignantly quoted in Thomas Bentley’s preface: that Manilius often repeated a single word within too short a space and that his poem suffered from a general logorrhea (“he cannot lift his hand from his tablet”).18 Particularly at the opening of his edition, where he gave great prominence to stylistic matters, Bentley was concerned to contradict Scaliger’s general stylistic complaints, which he did by simply changing repetitive words and removing lines he found otiose. As he obelized line 1.527, for example, Bentley quoted Scaliger on Manilius’s wordiness and commented, “He is right, if we concede that this nonsense is by the author himself; he is wrong if we know how to distinguish the spurious from the genuine with a well-wiped nose (emuncta nare).”19 Scaliger, on this account, appeared both insensible to poetic niceties and positively misanthropic vis-à-vis Manilius; that Scaliger’s edition was on the whole far more ambitious than Bentley’s, and that it had made a vastly greater contribution toward the fundamental understanding of the text, were points to which Bentley did not call his readers’ attention.

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Bentley’s actual methods of emendation roughly resembled those of Scaliger’s second Manilius, combining conjectures with manuscript readings (particularly those that Scaliger had rejected in favor of his own conjectures). Under the influence of Scaliger’s description of the lost archetype of the Astronomica, Bentley became especially interested in errors that could have arisen from abbreviations in that manuscript, such as qd for quod (easily confused with the preposition ad), and what he believed had been the substitution of astrological symbols for full words in the poem.20 However, Bentley did not produce any uniform statement about his methodology in the edition, perhaps not only because his nephew composed the preface on his behalf. Thomas Bentley carefully listed Bentley’s sources of manuscript readings, then simply added that Bentley reserved the right to conjecture, not least because “this poet is the most corrupt of all writers in existence.”21 This disinclination to prioritize made a marked contrast with Scaliger, who in his first edition had exclusively conjectured, refusing to study any manuscripts whatsoever, then made a volte-face in his second edition to present manuscripts as the cornerstone of his work, supplemented by conjecture only when absolutely necessary.22 Left by Scaliger’s own multiplicity without any obvious position from which to censure him, Bentley equivocated—although this very equivocation made the Manilius preface perhaps Bentley’s least distorting statement for the record about his general methods of emendation. In the course of Bentley’s edition proper, meanwhile, Manilius’s interpolator quickly came to supply the place of theory, often referred to and often relied on by a kind of hermeneutic circle of disdain. Characteristically, Bentley nowhere gave a coherent account of the interpolator’s activity and habits, but from various annotations we can piece together his basic assumptions. In terms of textual history, Bentley apparently believed the interpolations began as marginal insertions that had already entered the text itself in Manilius’s archetype: one interpolation in Book 1, Bentley thought, was not only not by Manilius, it had also been mistakenly inserted at a point different from where the interpolator intended.23 Given Bentley’s dating of the extant manuscripts, this would place the interpolator sometime before the tenth century, a period to which Bentley would happily have ascribed the interpolator’s “barbarous” use of Latin, his telltale familiarity with scholastic logic, and his maladroit imitation of Vergil.24 Perhaps encouraged by Scaliger’s earlier theory of an interpolator, however, Bentley offered no argument about why an interpolator had to be the solution to the textual questions posed by Manilius’s poem, nor did he suggest any particular reason why the interpolator had set to work at all. Like the forger of Phalaris’s letters, who deceived, ac-

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cording to Bentley, purely for the sake of deceiving, Manilius’s interpolator was impelled by a motiveless malignity: “in the past,” Bentley explained or rather did not explain, “forgers did their best to obtrude their own verses everywhere they could.”25 In general, Bentley’s discussion of the interpolator was confined to the diagnostic, as he repeatedly detected enormities of style and matter that he claimed were too repugnant to ascribe to Manilius.26 At the same time, Bentley preferred to keep the interpolator in reserve, so to speak, for the most egregious cases: he explained many smaller textual problems as venial scribal corrections, as scribal glosses mistakenly inserted in the text, or as honest scribal errors arising from the influence of near-parallel passages or from the mistaken expansion of abbreviations.27 Notwithstanding this carefully constructed hierarchy of textual corruption, once Bentley’s theory of the interpolator was in place, the possibility always remained theoretically open that the interpolator had in fact obtruded other verses that Bentley’s diagnostic criteria and poetic acumen simply failed to recognize. Bentley anxiously forestalled this thought by calling the interpolator ignorant and incompetent whenever the opportunity arose. Yet the theory of the interpolator, designed as a vehicle for displaying Bentley’s critical skill, also by its very nature posed a question about the limits of Bentley’s abilities. Nothing, in the end, prevented Bentley from being taken in by the interpolator’s evil hand for the space of a line or two, just as Bentley had taxed William Temple and his partisans decades earlier for being taken in by the forger of Phalaris. Even though Bentley imagined the interpolator of Manilius in historically specific ways, the interpolator also carried wider resonances for Bentley’s entire project of textual editing. In the first place, we should notice that early modern classical scholarship provided Bentley with several models for casting an interpolator as the malicious embodiment of textual corruption or, at any rate, uncertainty. Euclid’s geometry was thought to have been reworked and expanded by his student Theon; Homer’s epics, as Bentley himself pointed out in his Paradise Lost edition, were thought to have been edited by a later poet named Choerilus; Nicholas Heinsius argued that several of the letters in Ovid’s Heroides were really by an interpolator, and he proceeded to emend these even more heavily than the rest.28 In a conspicuous homage to Heinsius, whose Ovid he had read with keen attention, Bentley himself sometimes emended passages of Manilius that he claimed were by the interpolator (“There is no doubt in my mind that the interpolator wrote as follows”).29 Even closer to home, Bentley’s opponents in the Battle of the Books had drawn on the theory of an interpolator to excuse the historical impossibilities Bentley detected in Phalaris’s letters: could not the letters be essentially authentic, asked Francis Atterbury

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writing as Charles Boyle, on the supposition that their anachronisms had all been inserted by some later reviser?30 Meanwhile, Bentley himself believed that Hesychius’s ancient Greek lexicon contained interpolations by a Christian compiler, and one suspects it was also Bentley who informed the bemused Peter Needham in 1712 that Isaac Casaubon’s commentary on Theophrastus’s Characters, which Needham reprinted in his own edition, contained interpolations first introduced in a 1659 Braunschweig edition.31 Neither Manilius’s interpolator nor Milton’s, then, arose purely from Bentley’s own invention. Meanwhile, Bentley’s English readers unfamiliar with classical criticism would have recognized a further genealogy for the malicious proofreader of Paradise Lost: the unscrupulous friends and printers whom it was customary for seventeenth-century poets to blame for hurrying unauthorized verse collections through the presses. “Some infernal spirits,” complained Katherine Philips in 1667, had produced the first edition of her Poems from hastily written “rags of Paper, and what the careless blotted writing kept them from understanding, they have supplied by conjecture. . . . I believe also there are some [poems] among them that are not mine.”32 Both in the task of defending others’ texts and in the task of defending one’s own, that is, contemporaries were notably ready to conjure up editorial demons as the necessary prelude to their exorcism. In commentary on Bentley’s Paradise Lost edition, it has long been a truism that the putative interpolator of Milton really resembles no one more than Bentley himself. Discussions of classical editing in the Anglophone world have generally resisted a parallel conclusion.33 Yet the essential similarity between early modern textual revision and late antique or medieval textual revision is one to which Bentley’s Manilius itself pointed explicitly. Bentley observed, for example, that Manilius’s fifteenth-century editor Bonincontrius had added two lines to the text in Book 1, just as the evil hand of Manilius’s usual interpolator had added lines throughout the Astronomica.34 But while Bentley generally used the word interpolator to refer to the medieval writer he believed had added passages to the poem, he also exploited the semantic flexibility of the word in Latin to turn the finger of blame in provocative additional directions.35 As Bentley noted in an annotation on Manilius 4.105, interpolare meant not only to add something extraneous but also more broadly to refashion, to renew, to reform, or most simply to change.36 By this standard, no less than Joseph Scaliger figured as an interpolator when he conjecturally emended Manilius: “this line is spurious,” Bentley remarked of Astr. 1.214, “and an eminent man has labored in vain in trying to interpolate it (interpolare).”37 Bentley cannot have failed to notice the question-begging slippage this language produced, just as in his Paradise Lost edition, he called attention in the

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preface to his own habit of referring to Milton’s interpolator as the “Editor.”38 In effect, Bentley’s terminology acknowledged that his own work stood in a long tradition of reading and revising ancient texts; that Bentley claimed his own revisions were at last the true ones was only the pragmatically necessary qualification to this fundamental self-diagnosis. This energetically interventionist but also self-conscious Bentley is the person I will suggest we should think of as the editor of Paradise Lost—one whose attacks on an interpolator and defenses of his author were both liable to be reapplied to his own literary production.

Paradise Lost Bentley’s cue to edit a poem in English was surely the polemic between Alexander Pope and Lewis Theobald over the editing of Shakespeare in the middle 1720s. Where Pope had struggled to free himself from Bentley’s example while Theobald openly embraced it, Bentley’s own voice was notable by its absence from this debate. The 1732 Paradise Lost, however, formed a delayed and oblique reply, designed both to strengthen Bentley’s earlier methodological claims and to present Bentley in action for readers who could not judge his classical editions for themselves. Pope and Theobald, writing in the aftermath of Bentley’s Horace, had identified Bentley’s central critical method as the conjecture; in Paradise Lost, Bentley would expand conjecture from a means of emending individual words into a device for reconceiving a text more fundamentally, through his narrative of malicious interpolation and fortunate detection. Not only did Bentley conjecturally remove dozens of lines as interpolations and conjecturally emend hundreds of words as scribal or typographical errors, he denied the very existence of the surviving manuscript of Paradise Lost Book 1, despite having borrowed it from Jacob Tonson and recorded some of its readings in his notes.39 In turning to Milton, then, Bentley chose (and in part created) an editorial project in which conjecture, the method most closely associated with him in contemporary controversy, was the only possible means of emending the text. If the edition that resulted was remarkable, it also managed completely to ignore the question that had exercised Pope and Theobald, namely, how one should edit English poems when varying textual versions were in fact available. Editing Shakespeare or Chaucer, for example, would have afforded Bentley a rich opportunity to show what he took to be the correct way of using printed and (in Chaucer’s case) manuscript versions. Yet if Bentley’s avoidance of the central problem was disappointingly characteristic in one

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sense, a more sympathetic reading is also possible. In declining to edit an English poet in precisely the same way he might have edited a classical one—this was the approach of Theobald, who explicitly modeled his Shakespeare Restored and Shakespeare edition on Bentley’s Horace— Bentley quietly acknowledged the difficulty of translating the methods of classical scholarship directly into the study of English poetry, a difficulty that made little impression on the great majority of his contemporaries. Pope and Theobald had chosen Shakespearean readings at will from many different printed versions, just as Bentley had drawn on all available manuscripts in his Horace edition; their explanations for why all these readings might be authorial tended, necessarily, toward the evasive. Bentley’s account of Milton’s textual history, by contrast, was nothing if not internally consistent, its implausibility in other respects aside. According to Bentley, errors had entered Paradise Lost first in the course of dictation by the blind author, then through mistakes in printing, and finally through the depradations of a “suppos’d Friend, (called in these Notes the Editor),” who had been enlisted to read the proofs.40 Therefore, the printed text was corrupt; therefore, Bentley’s intervention was necessary. From this perspective, what is most interesting about Bentley’s narrative as a groundwork for editing is precisely that it was unprecedented in Bentley’s career. By ruling out the use of manuscripts or variant printed versions, Bentley sharply differentiated his work on Paradise Lost not only from Pope and Theobald’s work on Shakespeare but also from his own classical editions, in which, as we have seen, he invariably drew on manuscript evidence. If Bentley’s technical solution to the problems posed by English poetry was largely negative, then, his very refusal to treat Milton precisely like Horace or Manilius represented a meaningful intervention in its own right. As usual, however, Bentley’s actual emendations and arguments in this edition were not at all restricted to exemplifying his broadest theoretical claims: the putative interpolator justified Bentley’s interventions rather than determining them. The printed Paradise Lost of 1732 and Bentley’s manuscript notes show how his work overlapped not only with his habits of classical editing but also with previous critical writing on Milton’s poem, above all Joseph Addison’s. Bentley began his Paradise Lost edition as he had begun his Horace and Terence editions, by preparing a conjecture book. In a copy of the 1674 second edition borrowed or inherited from a relative, he worked through the text fairly quickly, emending some lines, noting others to be returned to later, marking accents on metrically unusual lines, and designating only a few passages for deletion.41 At some later point, Bentley acquired a copy of Tonson’s 1720 edition of Milton’s Poetical Works, in many ways a much more useful book for him: it contained printed line

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numbers, an index, and Addison’s eighteen Spectator essays on Paradise Lost first published in 1712.42 Bentley began by reading Addison with pen in hand; he emended passages from Paradise Lost that Addison quoted and censured, and, even more often, passages that Addison quoted and praised. He then worked through the Paradise Lost text of the 1720 volume, recording manuscript readings for Book 1, transferring his conjectures from the 1674 volume, making new emendations including those prompted by his reading of Addison, and writing brief comments to be expanded into fuller annotations in his printed edition. Meanwhile, the interpolator, for all his prominence in Bentley’s final edition, emerged only gradually as Bentley studied and restudied the text. An instructive example is the fate of lines 1.575–576, to which Addison first drew Bentley’s attention; they bear no markings in Bentley’s initial conjecture book. In an essay cataloguing “the several Defects” of Paradise Lost, Addison had complained of passages that “degenerate even unto Punns,” giving as an example the poem’s description of the pygmies in Homer: . . . The small Infantry Warr’d on by Cranes. . . . (PL 1.575–576)43

Bentley shared other contemporaries’ disdain for puns, and he marked a vertical line beside this quotation in Addison, reminding himself to come back to the passage in the future.44 His subsequent annotations on the full text of Paradise Lost show that he first tried to remove the problem by a simple emendation: he changed the word “Infantry” to “Cavalry,” noting that according to Pliny, the pygmies in fact rode into war “mounted on the backs of rams and nanny goats” (insidentes arietum caprarumque dorsis).45 Later, however, Bentley decided to treat the pun as a deliberate and tasteless insertion by the interpolator; to remove it in such a way that the remaining text scanned and made sense, he was obliged to delete all of line 575 and parts of lines 574 and 576.46 Bentley’s final printed edition gave the passage with the same offending lines bracketed and italicized as spurious, and “Infantry” deitalicized to highlight its egregiousness. In the accompanying note, Bentley’s quotation from Pliny now became a proof that such a factually incorrect passage could not have been composed by a poet of “Milton’s known Learning.”47 At the same time, Bentley both acknowledged Addison’s remarks in the Spectator and differentiated his own approach from Addison’s. Without naming Addison, he observed that the phrase “small infantry” “has been justly censur’d, as looking like a Pun.”48 Bentley’s own explanation, however, censured Milton’s false friend rather than the poet himself, while his valuable Pliny passage supplied an argument

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that seemed to rise above mere grumbling over style. Bentley’s dealings with Addison throughout the Paradise Lost edition performed the same dance of rapprochement and evasion; this ambiguous form of engagement was, of course, none other than the way in which Bentley habitually treated his predecessors in his classical editions. It is remarkable enough to learn that Bentley read Joseph Addison’s essays on Milton: a deep gulf would appear to separate Addison’s polished Aristotelian musings from Bentley’s swashbuckling textual criticism. In fact, however, the commonality of these two critics’ interests reached well beyond Bentley’s eagerness to emend the passages Addison discussed. Both critics were deeply concerned with the decorum of Milton’s language and episodes, and with the characteristics of Milton’s meter and linguistic usage; both took pride in tracing Milton’s classical and biblical references. Above all, both Bentley and Addison tended to phrase their remarks in terms of praise and blame. Where Addison praised Milton as often as possible, for his poem’s plot, characters, “sentiment,” and language, Bentley’s theory of an interpolator allowed him to praise Milton even more regularly, laying virtually all of his complaints about Paradise Lost at the feet of an entirely different writer. With a basis in these common habits of reading and arguing, Addison and Bentley proceeded to articulate and substantiate their claims in two discrete languages of criticism, whose family resemblance is at least as striking as their manifest differences. A sustained look at both critics’ work on Paradise Lost can add important nuances to our view of Bentley, and perhaps in turn to our view of Addison. The Addison of the Paradise Lost essays drew his theoretical orientation from seventeenth-century France. To Aristotle’s central categories of plot and character, he added Boileau’s criterion of truth in “sentiment,” as well as the occasional reference to pseudo-Longinus’s On the Sublime, notably for the suggestion that in a great poetic genius we forgive faults that would repel us in lesser writers.49 Like many a more recent work of criticism, Addison’s essay series laid out its theory first, in a group of six general essays on Paradise Lost; Addison periodically recalled attention to these criteria as he discussed the individual books of Paradise Lost in his last twelve essays. For Bentley, inclined to couch all discussion in terms of the semantic and ontological correctness of his texts, Addison’s more abstract theoretical remarks held scant interest. Bentley made virtually no markings as he read Addison’s first three essays, which respectively discussed plot, character, and “sentiment” with very little quotation from Milton. Bentley began to annotate energetically, however, as soon as Addison descended from these lofty heights and began to cite instances and quote passages to demonstrate what he meant. Addison’s quotations from Paradise Lost sparked

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the great majority of Bentley’s markings, but at one point Bentley was also able to correct Addison on a matter of historical English usage. In his general essay on Milton’s language, Addison taxed Milton with coining words such as “miscreated” (PL 2.683), whereupon Bentley wrote in the margin that Spenser had “often” used the same word.50 Bentley’s eventual printed note on “miscreated” made the same point, complete with two quotations from The Faerie Queene, although Bentley typically avoided naming Addison as his opponent.51 When the poem itself was the subject of discussion— more specifically, when individual passages of the poem were the subject of discussion—Bentley and Addison could engage in genuine dialogue. Indeed, virtually any aspect of Paradise Lost that was not straightforwardly explained by Addison’s essentially Aristotelian theory—above all, any question about the poem’s language—could lead Bentley and Addison to write in similar terms. Both critics, as we saw, disliked the pun “small infantry” at PL 1.575. Again, both were embarrassed at the poem’s occasional descents into colloquial stylistic registers, for example, when Eve serves a dinner of raw fruits in Book 5 and the narrator comments, “No fear lest dinner cool” (PL 5.396): Bentley cast this phrase out of the text, while Addison found it excessively “Idiomatick.”52 Both critics paid attention to the poem’s meter as well. Addison noted Milton’s copious “Elisions” and pointed out the anomaly of the Father’s speeches to Adam and Satan in Book 10, which closely follow the King James version at the expense of the regular iambic pentameter (PL 10:178, 198, 202, 205); Bentley marked elisions in his text, inserted accent marks to regularize questionable lines, and even transposed words to produce “better Accent,” just as he had done in the text of Terence.53 Bentley could also find himself agreeing with Addison’s remarks about plot and decorum, where Addison’s Aristotelian concern for verisimilitude intersected with Bentley’s concern for “correctness”: both critics felt discomfort at the scene in which the rebel angels invent gunpowder for the war in heaven, Addison apologizing profusely for it and Bentley emending furiously to render the description technically accurate.54 At the same time, some of Bentley’s comments and emendations were apparently drawn directly from his approach to Manilius—yet these too could overlap with Addison’s remarks on Paradise Lost. We recall how Bentley defended Manilius against two stylistic charges leveled by Joseph Scaliger: Manilius’s frequent repetition of a word within the distance of a few lines, and his wordy inability “to lift his hand from his tablet.” The received text of Paradise Lost, like the received text of the Astronomica, contained many verbal repetitions and many passages that an impatient reader might censure as digressions, and Addison had regretfully called attention to

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both of these perceived failings.55 In the case of Paradise Lost too, Bentley attributed such passages to an interpolator rather than the poet, nor did he limit himself to correcting the particular passages Addison had singled out as examples. Addison, for example, had praised without qualification the “Passion and Sincerity” of a speech of Adam to Eve in Book 4, which he quoted at length (PL 4.408–448); while reading Addison, Bentley homed in on Milton’s phrase “sole Partner and sole Part of all these Joys” (4.411), underlining the words “sole Part” as questionable.56 In his printed edition, Bentley changed “sole Part” (“This could not come from the Author”) to “best Part,” presenting an argument of dubious logicality to avoid relying on stylistics alone: “How can a Part be sole? sole part is a self contradiction.”57 Typically, Bentley declined to follow Addison into effusions on the speech’s “Passion” or “Sincerity.” Meanwhile, on the subject of Milton’s “Digressions,” Bentley emphatically did not share Addison’s face-saving concession that “there is so great a Beauty in these very Digressions, that I would not wish them out of his Poem.”58 Addison had mentioned Book 5’s description of angels eating as an unfortunate digression, while Bentley rejected a large part of the same passage on the grounds of philosophical inconsistency and incorrectness; again, Addison had censured Book 3’s description of limbo for its lack of “Probability” or verisimilitude, while Bentley cast it out of the text as “a silly Interruption of the Story in the very middle, which ought to have been continued,” in other words, a digression.59 We take away the impression that both Bentley and Addison drew on their sometimes overlapping theoretical languages to justify reactions to the poem that may not have been motivated by theory in the first instance. The readerly habit that Bentley and Addison shared most thoroughly was perhaps the identification of textual parallels, a pursuit for which Milton’s poetry of classical and biblical allusion gave generous scope. Addison quoted many parallels and announced that he was passing over many more; Bentley specialized in emending Paradise Lost to create still further parallels, discovering that Milton’s typesetter and proofreader had distorted references to Tasso, Sidney, Spenser, the New Testament, Homer, Callimachus, Ovid, and Manilius, among others.60 On one occasion, Bentley even emended Milton so as to efface an allusion to a classical passage whose text he considered faulty: having in 1711 removed the phrase “with dry eyes” (siccis oculis) from Horace’s Ode 1.3.18, Bentley now removed the phrase “dry-ey’d” from Paradise Lost 11.495, although he refrained, perhaps sensibly, from mentioning the Horace passage in his printed note.61 In one area, however, Bentley refused to follow Addison in the hunt for parallels—namely, the alleged narrative parallels between the Old Testament and pagan mythology that were supposed by some to provide independent

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corroboration of Old Testament history. Addison, for example, excused the potential indecorousness of the rebel angels’ uprooting hills in heaven (PL 6.643–646) by pointing to the episode’s source in Hesiod’s Theogony, which itself (Addison said) reflected an ancient oral tradition based on real biblical events: “the Fable of the Gyants War, which . . . gave Birth to the sublimest Description in Hesiod’s Works, was an Allegory founded upon this very Tradition of a fight between the good and bad Angels.”62 Although Bentley underlined the words “Hesiod’s Works” as he read this passage in Addison, his printed edition passed over the parallel in stern silence.63 Bentley’s resistance to Addison here, in fact, was simply an extension of his larger resistance to the aggressive presentation of pagan parallels throughout Paradise Lost itself. Bentley rejected, for example, a passage in Book 10 suggesting that the fall from Eden was the real subject of the pagan story of Ophion, Eurynome, and the serpent (PL 10.578– 584), and likewise rejected a passage in Book 1 seemingly proposing the prostrate Satan as the historical original of the pagan Titans (PL 1.197– 200).64 Bentley was not bold enough to athetize Book 1’s long catalogue of Satan’s followers, where each demon is listed under the name by which the pagans knew him, but Bentley did grumble repeatedly that Milton “was . . . tired or sleepy”—had nodded Homerically—while composing this “negligently done” passage.65 As we saw in earlier chapters, Bentley had rejected the seventeenthcentury polyhistors’ syncretistic versions of ancient history since the time of his earliest publications.66 In the Letter to Mill, he ridiculed Joannes Malalas’s attempts to divine Old Testament history in Greek poetry; in his Boyle Lectures, he appropriated virtually all of his patron Edward Stillingfleet’s apologetic arguments with the exception of this one; meanwhile, Bentley’s historical chronology in the Dissertation on Phalaris was confined strictly and self-consciously to the pagan world. Bentley’s disdain for the polyhistors’ universalizing search for parallels necessarily brought him into conflict with Addison, and a fortiori with Milton. It also seems to have poisoned any chance of Bentley’s making productive use of Patrick Hume’s 1695 commentary on Paradise Lost, remarkable for its careful detail and, more simply, for being the first full-length commentary on an English poem produced independently of authorial encouragement or collusion.67 Hume’s comments often amounted to a miscellaneous collection of theological, geographical, mythological, rhetorical, etymological, and grammatical explanations, the latter sometimes so elementary that they seem directed to nonnative speakers of English. But if one thread ran consistently through Hume’s remarks, it was precisely his conviction that Milton had appreciated and sought to expound in Paradise Lost the ancient wisdom

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that Bentley execrated. When a passing reference to Noah’s son Cham appeared in Book 4, for example, Hume indulged in verbose discussion of the ancestry of peoples and ancient chronology, whose point was to confirm that the biblical Cham was historically identical with the “Lybian Jove” mentioned in the same passage.68 Again, when faced with Book 7’s complicated account of the creation of the world, Hume energetically compared and tried to reconcile Milton, the Old Testament, Aristotle, and Epicurus on various topics in natural philosophy.69 The nail in Hume’s coffin, however, was already in place early in Book 1, where apropos the name “Jehovah” (PL 1.386), Hume enthusiastically discussed not only the tetragrammaton itself but also the similarly weighty divine name “Erikepaios,” which he implied he had found in Joannes Malalas and explained as the numerological equivalent of “Jehovah” in Hebrew.70 In reality, Hume seems to have drawn his remarks entirely from a 1646 New Testament commentary by James Gregory, in which the “Arithmeticall Traditions” of “the Cabalists” on the subject of Malalas’s “Erikepaios” were tantalizingly related.71 By Bentley’s lights, however, Hume would have appeared not merely unoriginal but willfully and absurdly mistaken. In the Letter to Mill that Bentley published with the first edition of Malalas’s chronography in 1691, “Erikepaios” was the very first Orphic secret to be debunked, beginning with the opening paragraph of Bentley’s text and proceeding onward to dark strictures about “the superstitious nonsense of the kabbalists.”72 On the relatively safe assumption that Bentley read Hume’s commentary, his reaction was perhaps understandably one of pure and indignant negativity, as he systematically ignored or even excised the very passages of Paradise Lost that for Hume held the most vital and transcendent truths.

As usual, then, Bentley’s final publication was the record of a protracted and multifarious work of bricolage. He responded in explicit and inexplicit ways to the work of previous critics—in this case, both English ones who wrote on Paradise Lost itself and his own and Joseph Scaliger’s editions of Manilius. Ever impatient with Aristotelian critical terms, here Bentley filled the place of theory with the powerful notion of the interpolator, a figure whose ancestors included the interpolator of Manilius according to Scaliger and the interpolator of Ovid according to Nicholas Heinsius, as well as the forger of Phalaris and the interpolator of Hesychius in Bentley’s own work. Again characteristically, however, Bentley suppressed any reference to these genealogies in what he actually wrote, preferring to appear alone on the critical stage in the splendor of his genius and taste. Yet if the Paradise Lost edition was a far more complicated project—indeed, a far more serious project—than we could have guessed without historical

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detective work, does this in itself make the edition any less singular and unaccountable than its reputation suggests? The answer is probably no: Bentley’s affinities with other contemporaries who wrote about English poetry did not arise from any shared fascination with Hesychius or Joseph Scaliger. Nonetheless, those affinities become very apparent when we turn from strict genealogy to what we might call the rhetoric of critical practice, in which Bentley proposed striking new answers to questions about authors and critics that touched on every writer concerned with English poetry. In some ways, Bentley’s maneuvers reverberated back to the controversy over Phalaris, while in others, Bentley reminds us that doubt and experimentation with respect to the basic assumptions of criticism by no means originated in the twentieth century. The Paradise Lost edition offered, in the first place, a bold if also somewhat passive-aggressive reply to a long tradition in which Patrick Hume and Joseph Addison found themselves enmeshed—the tradition demanding that a literary commentator act not only as his author’s exegete but also as his apologist and defender against all comers. Beginning with the remarkable exertions of Homer’s and Vergil’s commentators in late antiquity, praise and (where necessary) justification were the critic’s central idioms, whether the actual question at hand concerned a poem’s style, meter, plot, or historical or mythological accuracy.73 Conversely, any critic who wished to shock and impress had only to find fault with his author— consider the reputations of Zoilus, the ancient scourge of Homer, of Julius Caesar Scaliger, who similarly discounted Homer while venerating Vergil, and of John Dennis, whose name became a byword in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for bilious complaint about living authors. In this environment, one’s choice of theory counted largely as a choice of potential arguments for the defense: to call Addison a follower of Aristotle and Boileau, for example, is essentially to observe that it was their categories he most often used to justify Milton. In early eighteenth-century England, a carefully rationed amount of censure was apparently thought to be consistent with, perhaps even to demonstrate, a critic’s candor and ingenuity. Addison allowed himself to opine, for example, that a passage in Book 4 of Paradise Lost fell “below the genius of Milton,” although he gave few details and quickly abandoned the painful topic entirely.74 On the level of metacritical theory, similarly, large portions of Pope’s Essay on Criticism were concerned with the management of critical discontent: censure could not be avoided in every case, Pope suggested, although it could often be rephrased and should often be passed over in silence. Bentley, by contrast, imported into English criticism a language that allowed him simultaneously to blast what he claimed were the

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faults of Paradise Lost and to defend Milton with maximal indignation. Indeed, the more stridently Bentley complained about the poem—given his narrative of the interpolator—the more stridently he also defended the poet. Yet if within this logic of his own argument Bentley neatly managed to have matters both ways, in fact the tendency of his edition was to shortcircuit the economy of authorial praise and blame altogether. Given that for Bentley, Milton wrote well not just usually but inevitably and by definition, it was only Paradise Lost itself that remained to be adjudicated— and this Bentley did essentially without reference to Milton, except as the name attached to the sum of Bentley’s criteria for poetry. In this sense, the putative interpolator of Paradise Lost not only furnished an answer to the question how the techniques of classical scholarship might be translated into the study of English poetry. The interpolator also posed and answered an equally new question about the possibility of bodily separating authors from texts and of directing criticism in practice purely to the latter. By reducing to a vacuous tautology his traditional responsibility to defend his author, Bentley pointed the way toward even further critical innovations, including some that make his own story about Milton’s interpolator look timid and equivocating by comparison. Conversely, the specter of the interpolator allowed Bentley to figure himself forth as a critic on a new and compelling scale. Where Bentley in his edition of Horace had seemed to contest the palm of authorship with Horace himself, in the Paradise Lost edition, with Milton consigned to an honored but nebulous place in the background, Bentley staged a spectacular battle with an explicitly realized and eminently censurable enemy. As he infallibly detected the interpolator’s footsteps, Bentley now gave more ineluctable proof than ever of his virtually authorial power over the poem at hand. Rhetorically, this was a power that authorized itself by denying its own authority: according to Bentley, it was not he but the interpolator who had rewritten and distorted the poem, not he but the interpolator who had grievously misunderstood Paradise Lost. In reality, however, Bentley’s active interventions were socially necessary in their own right so that Milton could receive the protracted textual ministrations that confirmed his prestige, while Bentley in turn received credit both for his virtuosic work and for his association with the poet. The theory of Milton’s interpolator, then, at once made Paradise Lost a vulnerable and venerable poem in need of textual rescue and allowed Bentley to present his rescue operation as the work of his own singularly sensitive faculty of taste. The anxiety of influence that Bentley inspired in the middle and late eighteenth century in fact derived both sides of its ambivalence from him—not only the desire to appear critically authoritative but also the desire to appear effortlessly

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ingenious and insightful, impulses that warred in Bentley’s successors from John Jortin and William Warburton to Dr. Johnson and the Wartons. It was certainly the very magnitude of Bentley’s presentation of himself that made him seem such a perilous, if also seductive, model for English critical work. Nonetheless, his overweening performance seems in retrospect to have been an utterly necessary condition, not only for Bentley himself to gather the force to translate his work into a new and uncertain field but also for other critics to imagine their role as masterful, independent, and crucial to the life of their culture.

Conclusion Dominating Antiquity

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hat was Richard Bentley’s effect on posterity, how was he distinctive in his own time, and how is his story relevant for the twenty-first century? Throughout the eighteenth century, during and after his life, Bentley’s name was synonymous with classical scholarship itself, largely displacing that of Joseph Scaliger. As in the international cult of Isaac Newton, albeit on a more specialized scale, Bentley became the object of admiration even from readers who made no pretense of understanding his work completely.1 His appeal, and for some his repellence, stemmed from the fact that Bentley was very firmly a mind of his own generation, an ardent systematizer and a proponent of reason over authority—in short, a distinguished specimen of Enlightenment man. His public face, for his broader audience, also derived from his turning his attention exclusively to well-known poetry: we can thus ask how Bentley figured in the literary criticism of the eighteenth century and whether he can appear as an ancestor for literary criticism today. Homages to Bentley began during his final illness in 1738 and continued after his death in 1742. His posthumous edition of Lucan was printed at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill press in 1760, by his grandson Richard Cumberland. For Samuel Johnson, that stupendous literary worker, Bentley was among few men in living memory who had “studied hard,” Johnson claiming not to know a single one himself. Meanwhile, to Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, it was a keen disappointment that “the great

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critick” had never attempted to explain a certain tricky passage in Horace’s Art of Poetry, “It’s difficult to speak suitably of common things” (difficile est proprie communia dicere): Bentley’s rule of absolute silence unless he could make an emendation could evidently bring chagrin to his admirers.2 Backhanded compliments were likewise thick on the ground. The churchman William Warburton, in his rambling and pugnacious Divine Legation of Moses (1738–1741), squarely confronted Bentley’s Dissertation on Phalaris in quixotically claiming that the laws attributed to Zaleucus, of Greek Locri in Sicily, were authentic.3 With mounting alarm, the Earl of Chesterfield warned his bookish son of the social death that would likely overtake him if he failed to mend his pedantic ways (“read Homer and Horace only when you have nothing to do”); Chesterfield conceded that Bentley had been “the most learned man” in England but observed pointedly that Bentley was in no way “the best-bred, most polite, and agreeable.”4 To educated readers in England, then, Bentley was the sign of scholarship and of intellect in general; Johnson’s and Warburton’s remarks also show that Bentley’s Greek scholarship remained of interest during the eighteenth century despite Bentley’s showy turn to the textual criticism of poetry in the middle of his career. For Bentley’s scholarly readers, particularly those on the continent, Bentley was eagerly followed during his life and idolized long after his passing. Arnold Drakenborch of Utrecht ventured to evaluate Bentley’s 1726 Terence even before he had seen it, on the basis of others’ gossip: “I haven’t yet managed to see the work itself; but my friends tell me that this most learned man everywhere dominates antiquity, that is, his unsurpassed genius and acumen shine out at every turn, although one cannot but wish for a greater modesty in his corrections.”5 Indeed, so thoroughly did Bentley “dominate antiquity” that he severely intimidated some of his most sincere admirers. J. C. Wolf of Wittenberg confessed that when he was just beginning his Greek studies, he happened to read Bentley’s Phalaris Dissertation, which so discouraged him (“I saw, rightly, that I would never reach that capaciousness of learning”) that he considered giving up scholarship altogether.6 A similar story was told by Tiberius Hemsterhuis, who at 21 released an edition of the Greek lexicographer Pollux; after receiving friendly but extensive criticisms from Bentley, it is said, Hemsterhuis did not open a Greek book for two months.7 The tributes of others were more workmanlike: Bentley’s Letter to Mill, in particular, was liable to be cut up and pasted into the manuscripts and interleaved annotated books of other scholars. His Horace was remembered too, and in this case, Bentley continued to encounter detractors. “Hardly anyone,” claimed one J. H. Benner in a Giessen dissertation of 1741, “would administer such impetuous

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medicine as the English Aristarchus has administered here.”8 Bentley, then, formed part of the German Anglophilia of the eighteenth century, a celebrated import not unlike Locke, Hume, or even Richardson’s Pamela. Bentley’s influence continued into the German nineteenth century, that vibrant and expansive period for classical scholarship as well as for literature, music, and philosophy. The protagonist of Bentley-worship was Gottfried Hermann of Leipzig, who regarded Bentley’s edition of Terence as his most novel and durable achievement. Fascinated with language and poetic meter, and possessing far more patience than Bentley for detailed and systematic explanation, Hermann issued two weighty treatises on Greek and Latin meters, mixing abstruse Kantian speculations with Bentley’s notion of “rhythm” and with his observation about the pick-up syllable (or anacrusis) that differentiates the trochaic and the iambic lines.9 Subsequent generations have followed Hermann in viewing Bentley as the founder of modern metrical studies, an idea that (as we have seen) would shrink the world to convenient proportions by overlooking substantial countervailing evidence.10 Hermann, a hardened polemicist, widely publicized his position that the understanding of language must lie at the foundation of all study of the ancient world, and he found emulators who similarly admired Bentley, for example his student (and Friedrich Nietzsche’s teacher) F. W. Ritschl, who published extensively on Old Latin and edited many of Plautus’s comedies.11 On the front of language again, Bentley’s theory about the missing Greek letter digamma, which might regularize the meter of the Homeric poems, was eagerly pursued for decades. Meanwhile Bentley was emulated—perhaps most of all the Bentley of the Paradise Lost was emulated—by a series of scholars who purported to discover extensive interpolations and transpositions in the poems of Horace.12 Bentley himself could have functioned to a fair extent in this milieu, even though it would have meant adapting his hit-and-run habits of commentary to that crowning nineteenth-century publication format, the academic article. However, as for the other famous philological enterprise of nineteenthcentury Germany, Bentley took no interest in anything even vaguely resembling it. Specifically, he neither aspired to nor achieved a total science of antiquity of the kind that F.  A. Wolf named Altertumswissenschaft in 1807.13 While Wolf himself admired Bentley to the point of composing a lengthy biography of him, Wolf essentially restricted his praise to Bentley’s Phalaris dissertation, mourning the fact that Bentley had produced no further works that combined erudition with divination in quite the same way.14 The Dissertation itself was printed in a Latin translation at Groningen in 1777, clearly presenting itself as Bentley’s exemplary work and as a

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model for contemporary scholars to follow.15 Yet in reality, even in the Dissertation, Bentley’s work remained almost always a series of spot interventions, no matter how many of these he generated in a row—a habit of discontinuity not at all helped by his later turn to the format of the textual edition. His probings into literary history in the Letter to Mill and the Phalaris Dissertation were satisfying, yet even these had little to do with the context of the poetry that he studied, for example, the performance practices of the ancient drama; even more starkly, he could edit the fragments of Callimachus without uttering a word about that poet’s scholarly activity and the library of Alexandria. Further, as we have seen, in his textual editions Bentley refused to say anything that did not involve a new passage he could emend, a self-imposed rule that prevented him from systematically discussing any text. It would have been inconceivable, then, for Bentley to produce an edition like K. O. Müller’s Eumenides of 1833 (the target of a vituperative review by Gottfried Hermann), much less Wilamowitz’s 1889 edition of Euripides’ Heracles: historical and interpretive comment on the ancient world, as Bentley huffily informed the reader of his Horace edition, were simply not in his line.16 Against this backdrop, Bentley’s limitations stand out sharply. His activity resembled an endless string of firecrackers rather than a continuous, light-giving flame. In the twentieth century, Bentley remained the object of respectful attention from classical scholars, both in the standard histories of classical scholarship and in the work of editors who repeated his projects.17 The extravagant praises in A.  E. Housman’s edition of Manilius are a locus classicus, not least because Housman quite counterintuitively insisted that Bentley had been a far greater critic of this text than Joseph Scaliger. Editors of Horace have often admired and accepted Bentley’s conjectures, among them C. O. Brink and D. R. Shackleton Bailey.18 But Bentley’s greatest notoriety by far in the twentieth century was due to his Paradise Lost, which was not only his sole edition in English but also the most starkly easy to understand in terms of its premises and methods. In a classic article that remains widely read, William Empson treated Bentley’s many objections as signals of real difficulties and questions in Milton’s poem, above all around the figure of Eve and, by extrapolation, women in general.19 Empson’s analysis was brilliant not least because it managed to discover real acts of literary reading on Bentley’s part, acts that only coincidentally fit his method of striking out passages and that made possible a direct conversation between Bentley and the twentieth century. For literature scholars, then, Bentley was made public as a figure of license and misrule, a reader like others but who registered his aesthetic reactions in an unaccountable, indeed forbidden way. In this context, the inclusion of Bentley

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in more recent histories of the formation of the English literary canon counts as a legitimation, perhaps even as a rehabilitation.20 But with the Paradise Lost forming the major piece of evidence for Bentley’s career in such discussions, it is no wonder that scholars have vexed themselves in trying to understand the impact and influence of Bentley’s activity. To that end, matters are not helped by the widespread but essentially impossible view that Bentley figured as a pioneer of a specifically historical brand of scholarship. E. J. Kenney, for example, regarded Bentley as “the innovating genius and founder of the science of historical criticism,” especially on the evidence of his unfinished edition of the New Testament.21 Even the far more careful account of Wilamowitz implied that Bentley’s true contribution as a textual scholar lay in the study of manuscripts, further suggesting that Bentley “abandoned numerous projects because his efforts to find a reliable manuscript tradition had not succeeded.”22 This is a bold theory. Sebastiano Timpanaro, like Wilamowitz and Kenney, stressed Bentley’s work with manuscripts as well as his New Testament; Timpanaro viewed Bentley as a direct ancestor of the celebrated Lachmann, as a key figure in his important argument that the nineteenth century did not invent its philological methods out of whole cloth.23 It is telling that such accounts cannot easily find room for Bentley’s Phalaris Dissertation or, except in the case of Wilamowitz, for Bentley’s Latin editions. As for Bentley’s New Testament project, we have seen that he seems ultimately to have viewed textual conjectures as unsuitable for an edition of the scriptures, turning him into a critic solely of manuscripts by default. By contrast, we have seen how Bentley’s published works revolved around a single method of inquiry, whether they drew on manuscripts or not: invariably, he compared and reconciled textual passages rather than presenting historical context or deploying any novel methods of imagining textual history. That is, his signature technique was almost purely literary and linguistic. When we evaluate Bentley’s influence on English literary criticism, then— above all through the medium of his Horace edition—it would not explain much to describe Bentley’s Horace edition as a “historicist” project, whatever we take the meaning of “historicism” to be.24 If we were to identify historicism in the context of editing with a preference for manuscripts over conjecture—a widespread although perhaps not an easily justified view— Bentley clearly would not qualify. If we were to identify historicism with a more generalized sense of the pastness of the past, perhaps accompanied by philosophical musing or methodological circumspection, then surely the most salient point about Bentley’s Horace text and notes is that they were produced in and for the present, by Bentley’s standards and for Bentley’s audience. Far from agonizing over his methodology or the degree of cer-

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tainty it could produce, Bentley proceeded as if his own methods were transparently correct, and his rhetoric emphasized over and over that Horace’s mind and meaning were fully accessible to a gifted critic. To emend Horace was not to lose Horace, according to Bentley, but to gain an even better Horace—even if many of Bentley’s readers required violent help to dispel their impression that Bentley had indeed made their favorite poet disappear. So it is timely to reassess Bentley’s place in English literary culture in the light of his entire career and, specifically, of his commitment to the study of poetry. At the beginning of Bentley’s career, literary criticism of any kind was a fairly new endeavor in England. We can find scattered examples of criticism before the Restoration, for example, Thomas Hobbes’s short essay of 1651 on William Davenant’s egregious epic Gondibert.25 John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy of 1668 combined relatively soporific neoclassical doctrine with lively discussion of actual dramas, above all those of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. John Dennis, beginning in the 1690s, devoted occasional pamphlets to evaluating new literary works, although his major pieces of criticism were planned, like Dryden’s essay, on a more general plane. England, then, was ripe to receive a new and showy model for speaking about poetry; but the classical editions characteristic of Oxford, which preceded Bentley’s in time, were generally modest in the nature of their comments and conservative in their approach to their texts. So were the Tonson classical editions orchestrated by Bentley and printed at Cambridge beginning in 1696. In 1712, Bentley’s Horace irrupted onto the scene along with its entirely new presentation of the critic at work: irascible, garrulous, erudite, totally independent of Aristotelian theory, and focused intently on the poetry in front of him. Bentley’s persona was overwhelming to the reader (perhaps by design), but this larger-than-life quality was of a piece with Bentley’s constant displays of personal judgment about Horace’s text. And the truly unique element of Bentley’s edition—the incessant parallel passages that he quoted in the course of making his emendations—demonstrated that the classical critic could persuasively adduce standards of linguistic and poetic usage in a way that English critics, who so far lacked adequate reference works, could not. Bentley could impress by both his style and his substance because he was working at the highest level in an already mature scholarly discipline: by the standards of classical scholarship he was extremely good, but by the standards of vernacular criticism he was simply unimagined. The editors of Shakespeare and Spenser who came after Bentley emulated virtually all of his orientations to one degree or another. They intervened in their texts; they wrote annotations in which they explicitly handed

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down their personal verdicts; they often worked to find parallels in Shakespeare and other poetry; and they necessarily devoted their attention to single works, rather than indulging in the vaporous generalities favored by the neoclassical tradition. Simon Jarvis has argued that we can distinguish between the “scholars” and the “gentlemen” in this new movement for vernacular editing, and it was certainly the scholars—such as Lewis Theobald, William Warburton, and Samuel Johnson—who were more willing to show their judgment in action as they compared early printings, searched for literary parallels, and explicitly discussed conjectures.26 This is to say that Jarvis’s “scholars” willingly inherited a more visible, a more personal, even a more flashy style of criticism, staging displays of their own judgment in a Bentley-like way at every turn. On the other hand, the “gentlemen” editors—signally Alexander Pope—were liable to emend their texts pervasively but silently, by the spectral method that Bentley ascribed to the putative interpolator of Paradise Lost. In effacing their own work, they not only rejected the loud Bentleian persona of the critic; they also made it exceedingly difficult to find out just what they had done. Gentility, on this model, also meant a substantial degree of obscurity and confusion. By a momentous accident of history, all of these developments began in England during the time of the early Enlightenment. In other European nations, vernacular literary canons and their attendant parades of humanist critics had been established earlier, in some cases for centuries. Italy’s “three crowns”—Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio—form the most arresting case. Full-scale and polemical commentaries on Petrarch, for example, were widespread by the early sixteenth century.27 By contrast, in England, seventeenth-century appreciation for Shakespeare and Chaucer was in no way scholarly—indeed, it constituted less an appreciation than a transformation or even refusal. During the Restoration, Shakespeare’s plays were performed in radically revised versions, while John Dryden produced freely adapted translations of Chaucer. Only in the eighteenth century, so Jack Lynch has argued, did English readers gain a full sense of the pastness of their literary past, of a distinct demarcation between themselves and the newly canonical poets.28 But this transformation took place, as we have seen, in a climate that valued the application of reason and system to problems of every kind. Accordingly, the new literary criticism in England combined habits that we would conventionally associate with Renaissance humanism with an orientation toward the values of the Enlightenment. This is to say that the birth of the new literary criticism was also the story of Bentley’s own career. Bentley began as an essentially seventeenth-century scholar, and as we saw, his rejection of the brand of scholarship that then pervaded the

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church and universities was time-consuming, difficult, and never quite complete. To the predecessors whom he chose and preferred—the continental scholars who for generations had paid attention specifically to ancient poetry—he stood in a closer and more overt relation, even complaining in his Horace edition that he had simply been born too late. This is to say that in large measure Bentley remained a practitioner of Renaissance humanism: relatively little that he did as a classicist could not have been done a hundred years before. In the case of Bentley’s Horace edition, Denis Lambin and Jacob Cruquius had studied manuscripts with comparable attention, while Joseph Scaliger could readily have produced as many conjectures as Bentley did (and Scaliger’s pupil Daniel Heinsius was well on the road to actually doing so).29 Similarly, Bentley’s Letter to Mill could for the most part have been composed a century earlier by Isaac Casaubon, the indefatigable Hellenist who specialized (among other things) in fragmentary poetry and the Greek drama. Nonetheless, Bentley was distinctive in important ways. In the first place, he thickly overlaid the language of Enlightenment onto his old-fashioned habits, speaking repeatedly of “proofs” in his Phalaris Dissertation and of his own “reason,” “genius,” and faculty for “criticism” in his Horace. In the second place, finding himself in the late-blooming intellectual climate of England, he made his interventionist brand of scholarship accessible to readers at large, either by writing in English (as in the Phalaris Dissertation) or by treating wellknown and beloved poetry (such as Horace and Terence). Bentley’s preoccupation with such publicity became ever greater over the course of his career: his long trajectory from the exceedingly difficult Letter to Mill to the intensely fashionable Paradise Lost was a radical experiment in transforming the uses of scholarship in England and of making serious, focused literary study into an enterprise for the mainstream. But Bentley’s true distinction, in the context of humanist scholarship, was his addiction to system and to theory—and these of radically different kinds from the Aristotelian doctrines that by the late seventeenth century lay so thick on the ground in literary criticism. He habitually seized on arguments, plausible or otherwise, that boasted impeccable internal consistency, a broad application, and logic carried out to many steps. The argument about the forged fragments of Thespis in the Phalaris Dissertation was an early and striking example, even if it rested on doubtful assumptions and relatively scanty evidence. Even more spectacular, of course, was Bentley’s theory about systematic interpolations in the text of Paradise Lost; whatever else might be said about them, Bentley’s claims in this case at least made it amply clear why the poem must be edited, which (for him) meant emended. Bentley encountered far greater success when he elucidated metrical rules

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for ancient poetry, which not only were general by definition but also became new touchstones for evaluating and emending texts. From his observation about anapestics in the Letter to Mill to his argument in the Terence edition about the relationship between iambic and trochaic lines, in this field Bentley’s taste for universal pronouncements served him well—well enough, in fact, to take him significantly beyond his predecessors. Bentley the overweening interventionist, then, could make true contributions to the study of ancient literary form. Bentley’s theories, however, could never have been devised by anyone but an actual scholar. (The inauthenticity of the Phalaris letters, far from being his own discovery, was already a truism when Bentley wrote against them.) Their concreteness and their detail bespeak a worker intimately familiar with the sources and the customary practices of scholarship. In Bentley’s time, the world of scholarship was finely attuned to the currents of Enlightenment thought, and perhaps even a contributor to them. In his assaults on antiquity, Bentley certainly went farther than the amiable Pierre Bayle, who limited himself to polite demolition rather than positive assertion: Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary of 1695–1697 calmly assembled masses of pagan and Christian authorities in a way that masterfully revealed them as questionable, if not hilarious. On the other hand, Bentley stopped well short of the astounding Jesuit Jean Hardouin, who decided in the 1690s that the entire extant corpus of Greek and Roman texts had been forged in the fourteenth century, with the exceptions of Cicero, Pliny, Vergil’s Georgics, and the satires and epistles of Horace.30 Yet even Hardouin, as Anthony Grafton has shown, continued to be treated as a bona fide (if mistaken) member of the Republic of Letters, and if Bentley attracted critics, it occurred to none of them to suggest that he was actually a bad scholar. In the world of scholarship and criticism around 1700, then, we can speak of Enlightenment not as a doctrine but as a series of methods or habits of inquiry, an active way of working, for better or worse. Bentley’s turn to the exclusive study of literature, in the context of England, was his most impressive act of Enlightenment. Out of the diffuse and often directionless masses of knowledge that he had inherited, he fashioned a set of striking and sharp-edged tools, proposing to dominate antiquity not by omnivorousness but by an exquisite precision. Even when asked to write on an uncongenial and apparently unpromising subject, Bentley managed to make himself literary—the most remarkable case being his youthful Letter to Mill, a treatise on the Greek drama forcibly wrested out of a Byzantine chronicle of the world. How, then, are we to evaluate Bentley as a literary scholar? He must be counted as one, on the simple grounds that he wrote so copiously about poetry. Moreover, despite

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his frequent preoccupation with factual accuracy in the poems before him—as when he demanded that “dry eyes” (siccis oculis) in Horace be changed to “unwavering eyes” (rectis oculis)—at other times Bentley weighed textual readings in a genuinely literary way, even by today’s standards. For example, as we saw, he argued that it was more decorous for Horace’s speaker to complain of being merely “struck” by love rather than violently “smitten” by love. Again, he argued that the phrase “after the walls of captured Troy” (captae post moenia Troiae) was more elegant and Horatian than the simpler “after the times of captured Troy” (captae post tempora Troiae). Whether we agree completely with those assertions or not, Bentley’s attention to poetry clearly included a strong aesthetic dimension: he cannot be dismissed as a bull in a china shop, a pedant who failed to understand what poetry was. Nor should we forget Bentley’s undisputed mastery of literary form in the shape of ancient poetic meters—a powerful and necessary tool in judging whether a given line or word was appropriate or even possible. What is truly distinctive about Bentley the critic is his dealings with his authors, as well as his loud assaults on the authority of manuscripts and of earlier textual editions. For however much his fellow scholars admired his work in Greek, it was manifestly Bentley’s Horace, Terence, and Paradise Lost that made his wider reputation. That is, Bentley captivated general attention when he began dealing with individual authors, and specifically with authors who were deeply canonical. He did this, moreover, at a time when the literary canon of English poetry was actively in formation and readily comparable to the canon of classical poetry that was so valued as a mark of social status and taste.31 Bentley thus became a model for the broader question of how contemporary readers might treat a respected author. Strictly scholarly considerations were not the only factor at issue. As he dominated antiquity, Bentley not only showed his linguistic mastery and his facility for conjecture; he also claimed a special, innate gift for understanding his authors, leading directly to the converse claim that he could also readily identify what had not come from the pen of his author. In effect, these ideas turned Bentley into something like an author himself, and this in turn makes it reasonable to go beyond the simple observation that Bentley emended his texts in accordance with his own taste and knowledge. His treatment of his classical authors—specifically, Horace and Terence— deserves consideration specifically as an act of literary rewriting. Both Bentley’s authorial rhetoric and his frequent emendations were deliberately spectacular. On the other hand, there were ultimately boundaries to the rewriting in which Bentley was willing to engage. In fact, as we have already seen in several contexts, Bentley’s self-conscious boldness with respect to his authors was always counterbalanced by constraints on

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his practice: the conventionally imposed obligation to produce linguistic parallels, the self-imposed rule that Bentley’s emendations should usually involve only a few letters of a word, even the calcified rhetorical topoi Bentley drew on as he praised his own “genius.” This simultaneous intellectual performance of liberty and necessity is the paradox we must take into account in describing what Bentley did as a writer who stood in a relation to his many earlier texts. To that end, we can usefully call on Gérard Genette, surely the most patient and clever writer who has considered the formal relations of texts to one another, or what Genette calls “transtextuality.” Genette’s typology of transtextualities has the advantage of being derived from classical and humanist categories, so that it might in theory have been intelligible to Bentley’s contemporaries.32 If we accept Genette’s categories as well defined, then we say something interesting if we describe Bentley’s practice, and the practice of eclectic editing generally, as a hybrid of two apparently very distinct practices of rewriting, which Genette calls parody and imitation. The parody, for Genette as for early modern theorists of poetics, involves beginning with a given text, then changing one or more of its words to produce a new text. The effect is often, although not necessarily, satirical; the indispensable feature of the parody is that it is essentially recognizable as some other text, yet it has been made to mean something else—its reference has been changed, simply or multiply.33 No minimum number or critical mass of revisions is required to qualify the resulting text as a parody.34 A single emendation will do the job, as Genette explains with the hypothetical example of an unusual edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la Recherche du temps perdu). With due precautions taken to ward off misprints and accidental faulty transcriptions, one could imagine producing an edition of Proust’s Recherche adorned with one . . . minimal variation; to make the reading easier, the variation might bear on the first line alone {“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure”: For a long time I would go to bed early}. A sportsmanlike version would read Longtemps je me suis douché de bonne heure {For a long time, I would shower early}; a nosographic version, Longtemps je me suis mouché de bonne heure {For a long time, I would blow my nose early}; a sexological version, and one that would probably be more accurately biographical, Longtemps je me suis touché de bonne heure {For a long time, I would touch myself early}. This would surely be a costly publishing operation, but such subversive practices are addressed, by definition, to wealthy audiences.35

The resemblance of parody on this minimal scale to textual emendation is no less important than it is obvious. One might add that the parodic aspect

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of Bentley’s Horace edition was called to the reader’s attention most strongly by the layout of the printed text itself: the “common readings” at the foot of the page generally differed by only one or a few letters from the readings that Bentley placed in the continuous text. Further, we have seen that in Bentley’s arguments in favor of his readings, he often preferred to explain what he took to be wrong manuscript readings as deliberate scribal revisions rather than innocent or mechanical scribal errors. In that sense, he treated his manuscripts (and if necessary, all manuscripts at a given point) as containing a minimally variant parody of Horace’s real text. Bentley’s layout of his printed text, together with his more strident pronouncements in his annotations, also emphasize the degree to which Bentley himself was active in producing the parody that he printed. By designating a set of “common readings” that did not actually correspond to any single edition, and by his stark declarations that these common readings were impossible, Bentley constructed both the text that he was (in theory) beginning with and the text that he himself was so dramatically producing. It was Bentley’s own representation of himself as a bold interventionist, combined with his incessant language about his “reason” and its “necessity,” that created the impression of overweening subjective freedom—in a word, of Bentley as a renegade and also sovereign reader. By contrast, much of the matter in Bentley’s textual annotations—in particular, his minute proofs and his lists of parallel passages—seem designed to demonstrate that Bentley’s rewriting was multiply constrained. This is the larger force of Bentley’s declarations that his emendations were the result simultaneously of reason and of necessity: to show that a given reading was necessary involved, for Bentley, demonstrating that it corresponded to Horace’s usage, general Latin poetic usage, the (presumed) sense of the passage at hand, and the real nature of the world at large. Bentley demonstrated, in other words, that his chosen reading followed the rules, albeit in a way that had rarely or never been seen before. This part of Bentley’s practice was in fact a case of imitation, in the sense Genette gives to the word. For Genette, to imitate is to write a new text that conforms in special ways to the conventions of some genre: where parody begins with an old text and adapts it into a new one, imitation is the shaping of a new text so as partially to resemble one or more old texts.36 Genette insists, moreover, that it is only possible to imitate a genre, not a single text. Even in cases where a single text is manifestly being imitated, that text must be thought of as a genre: its style and conventions, not its actual words, are the point at which it bears a relation to the new text that imitates it. This notion of imitation gives a fair description of what Bentley argued, in his technical annotations, that his emendations were really doing. Again,

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the Horace edition, in which Bentley wrote by far the longest annotations of his career, is a particularly useful example. On the one hand, every reading Bentley argued for was different from what Bentley called the “common reading”; on the other hand, Bentley was at pains to show that his chosen reading was the one that was most like Horace, the one that conformed most completely to the rules of Horace, drawing on the familiar array of arguments we know. To reconstruct what Horace wrote was, in this sense, precisely to imitate Horace and his poetic contemporaries. Only by proclaiming his total submission to their linguistic authority could Bentley claim that his chosen readings were authentic. We have also seen that despite Bentley’s claims to novelty and uniqueness, the specific kinds of technical argument he favored tended to conform to the conventions of seventeenth-century English scholarship, specifically the Greek scholarship in which he himself had earlier engaged. In presenting arguments of the conventionally accepted kinds, that is, Bentley showed himself to be a scholar who imitated the practice of other scholars. Imitation of a further kind was involved in Bentley’s preference for emendations that resembled the received reading as closely as possible. While he was apparently unique in suggesting that malicious interpolations were often disguised as scribal errors, there were old precedents for his desire to restrict his own emendations to what could plausibly be taken for a scribal error. Already in the fifteenth century, Lorenzo Valla defended an emendation against the attacks of Bartolomeo Facio by writing, “adestne similitudo?” (don’t you see the similarity between my conjecture and the manuscript?).37 Not only Bentley was subject to constraint in textual matters, however. In the Horace edition, turning the tables, Bentley went on to claim that his annotations would compel the consent of his own readers, even those who had read and cherished faulty (non-Bentleian) texts of Horace since their school days. As in the Phalaris Dissertation, Bentley predicted that it was precisely the most technical parts of his text that would force his readers to capitulate: “I would attack outright their [i.e., readers’] prejudice and resistance. In my annotations, I have drawn out many points diffusely and at great length, contrary to my habit. Even if they grow angry and struggle, I will overwhelm them with the weight of my reasons and the number of my examples, until at last I drag them by the neck into agreement with me.”38 It was not, then, Bentley’s virtuosic parody of Horace in itself, but Bentley’s demonstrations that he was imitating Horace, that were supposed to carry the day. In what seems like an optimistic attempt to bring this about, many of Bentley’s annotations were structured as narrative representations of the very experience of being “overwhelmed” by “reasons” and “examples.” Over the course of such an annotation, Bentley rhetorically enacted

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upon himself the process of forcible conversion that he also meant to visit on his reader. If he began an annotation in a tone of uncertainty or frustration, he invariably “conceded,” once all his arguments and lists were done, that there was only one conclusion he could possibly draw. Bentley’s theatricalization of critical judgment strongly recalls, among other models, the Descartes of the Meditations—a Descartes who persuaded not through the technical art of rhetoric which he had so vehemently rejected, but through the ultrasincere staging of an intellectual conversion narrative in which Descartes himself figured as the sublimely introspective protagonist. Just as we may wonder whether the Meditations are really about God or about Descartes, Bentley’s Horace and Terence editions were on many levels a story about the readerly and writerly actions of Richard Bentley. In this respect, among others, Bentley resembles the literary critic as we know that creature in our own time. For us, after all, the scholar’s judgment is clearly understood to be separable from the work being discussed, and it is meant to be visibly and actively deployed. The critic’s methods should be deliberately and thoughtfully chosen, and at the same time transparent to the reader. In the best case, a critical argument is meant to oscillate between the poles of self-willed discussion and the necessity imposed by the text. And while aesthetic criticism is freely engaged in today, it is enunciated from a rhetorical position of freedom, not out of an ingrained convention of praise and blame. That is to say, we do not see as particularly plausible ancestors the polite gentlemen who sat in eighteenth-century coffeehouses dilating on the “beauties” of Milton: Joseph Addison’s essays on Paradise Lost come to mind. Indeed, Bentley utterly disregarded neoclassical poetic theory, a fact that is bracing and refreshing to anyone who has waded through even short stretches of the other criticism of his time. What Bentley practiced instead was a criticism that scrutinized every word and every line of a poem, asking many questions and often generating novel answers. In effect, Bentley and his fellow editors of poetry practiced close reading, the signature method of English study in the twentieth century. Not only intellectually but professionally, too, an accurate lineage for us descends from Bentley the professor: more precisely, from Bentley the superstar professor, consumed with seeking promotion and with controlling institutions such as his college’s library and the Cambridge University Press.39 Proud of his international reach, Bentley corresponded with scholars abroad and entertained the students of continental colleagues drawn to Cambridge by his reputation. At home, he assembled a group of younger scholars—roughly the age of today’s graduate students—and encouraged them to undertake projects whose publication he facilitated. He gleefully gossiped to associates about his own discoveries and emendations, ensuring

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that each of his publications was being discussed long before it appeared in print. Sometimes he overreached, conceiving grand projects—the New Testament and Homer—which he was unable to finish despite substantial investments of time and money. He also disparaged the publications of his colleagues and forgot to return the books they lent him. But above all, Bentley used his university as a base for his public scholarship, a setting that facilitated his work but in no way set boundaries for it. In the process, he expanded the limits of what it was possible to do as a professor in England—much as the satires of his adversary Jonathan Swift redefined the realm of possible publications for a churchman. Bentley, of course, marketed himself as a unique instance of expertise and genius combined. But his social and institutional contexts reveal that Bentley always operated, sometimes captiously, as a member of a scholarly community. Bentley had dozens of contemporary peers in the English church and universities, whose work he learned from, cited, and often energetically refuted. He met them in libraries, episcopal palaces, colleges, and the precincts of the Cambridge University Press, collaborating and competing with them in their projects and giving and receiving favors. With these scholars Bentley shared the genres of his publications, his language and methods of argumentation, and a shifting common understanding about which texts and questions deserved attention. Bentley and his English peers also corresponded and collaborated with scholars on the continent, exchanging with them news, books, manuscript collations, and students armed with letters of recommendation. In addition to this vibrant life in the present, moreover, Bentley and his fellow scholars shared a common understanding of their past—a loosely defined canon of venerable predecessors, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century humanists like Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon, whose works Bentley drew on deeply while also seeking to show himself at least their equal. In other words, Bentley’s intellectual and social world was a community at once expansive and cohesive, with the result that Bentley himself was very far from being the lone villain pilloried by Pope and Swift. Indeed, Bentley’s world was much more like modern academia than was the world of Pope and Swift, from its institutional basis and conventionalized modes of work to its competitiveness, its interest in detail and technical expertise, and its occasional opacity to outsiders. It was that opacity and aura of inaccessible expertise, however, that Bentley sought to overcome as he strove to become a truly public intellectual. He sought and gained the attention of a wider audience of polite English readers, readers whom he hoped would take seriously the technical study of the ancient world. This series of experiments, as we have seen, was not completely successful. Although Bentley duly became famous to a

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wider public, that public had rarely if ever seen real scholarship before. And with Bentley as its exemplar, it surely appeared even more bracing and puzzling than it otherwise might have. Yet Bentley carefully prepared his works with a nonexpert audience in mind. For example, he remarked in his Dissertation on Phalaris that he had assembled demonstrative chronological “proofs” which he aimed specifically at those readers whose sense of Greek prose style was inadequate to tell them that the Phalaris letters were forged. Again in his Horace edition, Bentley announced that for the sake of his less expert readers, he would compose heavily documented and argumentative notes “contrary to my custom”—which, lamentably, he proceeded to do. In effect, Bentley’s audience actually shaped the way in which he presented his scholarship and himself: he wished both to excel by the international standards of classical scholarship and to persuade and convince other readers who had no way to gauge those standards except through Bentley’s work itself. In this way, Bentley aggressively worked to erode the boundaries that England had erected between scholarship and the polite world at large. To use the language of the twenty-first century, he wished to make himself and his work relevant. This, paired with Bentley’s institutional position in the church and the university, is perhaps the broadest aspect of his career that finds resonances today. Beginning from the amorphously defined position of a qualified scholar, he rapidly decided to specialize in the study of secular classical poetry, that is, the canonical literature venerated in the polite world at large. Bentley’s Horace edition, as we recall, was originally designed as a small volume to be presented as a gift to his genteel undergraduates in Trinity College. And Bentley set out not only to belong to contemporary literary culture, but actively to change it. But his consequent difficulties echo the problems that bedevil the public intellectual today. For it is still by no means clear how an expert is to win the credence of a wide audience, especially in fields where pseudo-experts abound and are convincing to many. In Bentley’s case, his double presentation of himself was surely designed to address this problem, as he figured himself simultaneously as a capable expert and as a man of taste. Yet if it was Bentley’s expertise that purportedly showed he was right, the more he brandished his expertise in order to convince, the less it convinced those readers who were relative novices. However, it is not Bentley’s failures but his aspirations that make him our predecessor. The enterprise of setting serious humanistic scholarship before a wider audience remains an active and important aim today. In the English-speaking world, the honor of inventing that desire surely belongs to Bentley.

Notes

Abbreviations BL Bodl. MS MSS ODNB

British Library Bodleian Library Manuscript Manuscripts Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) TCC Trinity College, Cambridge UL University Library

Introduction 1. See especially William Empson, “Milton and Bentley: The Pastoral of the Innocence of Man and Nature,” in Milton: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Louis L. Martz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 19–39 (a revised version of the essay appears in Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral [London: Chatto & Windus, 1935]); and William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2. “Editor”: Milton’s Paradise Lost: A New Edition, by Richard Bentley, D.D. (London, 1732), preface, sig. a3ro (and in textual notes throughout); “monstrous Faults”: preface, sig. a2ro. 3. See, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. R. Johnson (Cambridge: Polity, 1993).

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4. An exception was the chair of poetry in Oxford, whose incumbents beginning with Joseph Trapp in the early eighteenth century lectured on English as well as classical poetry: see Trapp’s Praelectiones poeticae, 3 vols. (London, 1711–1719). For anecdotal evidence about the reading of Spenser in eighteenthcentury grammar schools, see Richard Frushell, Edmund Spenser in the Early Eighteenth Century (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999). 5. See Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725– 1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).

1. Before Bentley 1. In Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), the earliest letter dates from 14 May 1689 (William Wotton to Bentley). On 4 July 1689, James Stillingfleet matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, accompanied by Bentley as his tutor. J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses 1500–1714, 4 vols. (Oxford: Parker and Co., 1891–1892), 4:1424. 2. Marika Keblusek, Boeken in de Hofstad: Haagse Boekcultuur in de Gouden Eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997), and “The Exile Experience: Royalist and Anglican Book Culture in the Low Countries (1640–60),” in The Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book-Trade 1473–1941, ed. L. Hellinga et al. (‘t Goy-Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2001), 151–158. 3. John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 316–317. 4. John Pearson, Vindiciae epistolarum S. Ignatii (Cambridge, 1672). Discussion is below. 5. Silvestros Syropoulos, Vera historia unionis non verae, ed. Robert Creighton (The Hague, 1660). On the origins of this edition—Creighton printed it with the help of Isaac Vossius, who had removed the Syropoulos manuscript from the library of Queen Christina of Sweden—see Keblusek, “The Exile Experience,” 155, and Vitalien Laurent, ed., Les “Mémoires” du Grand Ecclésiarque de l’Église de Constantinople Sylvestre Syropoulos sur le concile de Florence (1438– 39) (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1971), 53–55. 6. Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 312–395. 7. The classic argument is that of A. Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” in Momigliano’s Contributo alla storia degli studi classici (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1955), 67–106.

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8. Henri de Valois, Polybii, Diodori Siculi, Nicolai Damasceni, Dionysii Halicar. . . . excerpta ex Collectaneis Constantini Augusti Porphyrogenetae (Paris, 1634); Pomponius Mela, De situ orbis, ed. Isaac Vossius (The Hague, 1658). 9. Hierocles, Commentarius in aurea Pythagoreorum carmina (London, 1654) and De providentia & fato (London, 1655), both ed. John Pearson. Pearson dated his author, the Neoplatonist Hierocles of Alexandria, to the early fourth century, identifying him with the Sossianus Hierocles to whom Eusebius of Caesarea replied in Against Hierocles. This identification appears to have been conventional; it was also made, e.g., by Jean Curtier, whose preface to Hierocles (1583) Pearson reprinted. 10. Opuscula mythologica, ethica, et physica, ed. Thomas Gale (Cambridge, 1671); Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui, ed. Gale (Paris, 1675); Iamblichi . . . De mysteriis liber (Oxford, 1678). 11. Eusebius, Ecclesiastica historica, ed. Henri de Valois (Paris, 1659), BL shelfmark Eve.b.56. 12. Joseph Juste Scaliger, Thesaurus temporum (Leiden, 1606) [expanded posthumous edition, Amsterdam, 1658]. For discussion, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2: Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). 13. Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy, 3 vols. (London, 1655–1660), and The History of Chaldaick Philosophy (London, 1662). 14. By far the best discussion of the History of Philosophy is in Luciano Malusa, “Le prime storie generali della filosofia in Inghilterra e nei Paesi Bassi,” in Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, ed. Giovanni Santinello, 5 vols. in 7 (Brescia: La Scuola and Padua: Antenore, 1979–2004), 1:176–215; there is an English translation, Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 1: From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the “Historia Philosophica,” ed. Santinello, C. W. T. Blackwell, and Philip Weller (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993). 15. See also Stanley’s preface in vol. 1, sig. a1 vo: “The onely Author in this kind [i.e., the history of philosophy] for the more antient philosophers is Diogenes Laertius, for the later Eunapius. And to make the misfortune the greater, that which Laertius gives us is so far short of what he might have done, that there is much more to be found of the same persons dispersed amongst other Authors, which I have here collected and digested, with what diligence I could.” 16. See Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, vol. 2: Historical Chronology, esp. 501–743. 17. Stanley, History of Philosophy, at the end of vol. 1, sigg. Xxx 2ro–Zzz 1vo (“A Cronologie”), and at the end of vol. 3, sigg. Ooooo 2ro–Rrrrr 1vo (“Chronological Table”). 18. See John Marsham, Chronicus canon (London, 1672). 19. The enterprise was plagued by problems, however, some of which were not directly Stanley’s fault. In the “Cronologie” of volume 1, the Aera Philosophica (A.P.) ran only to year 372, due to a set of printing mistakes (Stanley, living in Hertfordshire, apparently trusted someone else to do his proofreading in London); the most serious of these errors resulted in a loss of eighty years, when the series of Olympiads leaped from Ol.CXLI (i.e., 141) to Ol.CLXII (i.e., 162) while the series of years A.P. continued without a break.

Notes

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

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On the other hand, in the final “Chronological Table” (vol. 3), Stanley mistakenly revised his notice of Carneades’s birth in Ol.162.4 to become a notice of Carneades’s death. Perhaps he misremembered his own argument from the article on the chapter on Carneades (2:145–154) that Laertius’s notice (from Apollodorus) of Carneades’s death in Ol.162.4 must instead be taken as a notice of Carneades’s birth; perhaps, faced at the last minute with the graphic layout of his table, he now grasped that his own argument in the chapter on Carneades had made it impossible for Carneades and Clitomachus to be contemporaries (according to Laertius, Clitomachus was Carneades’s student and successor). Such difficulties underscore the ambition with which Stanley entered what was manifestly an unfamiliar field for him. See Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, vol. 2: Historical Chronology, 249–253. For British contemporaries of Stanley who adopted the Julian period, see John Selden, Marmora Arundelliana (London, 1628); James Ussher, Annales Veteris Testamenti (London, 1650); and Marsham, Chronicus canon. These observations have been well made by Malusa, “Le prime storie generali della filosofia,” 187–188. On the other hand, some of Stanley’s contemporaries gamely treated Pythagoras’s “Italic school” as a real and coherent lineage. Ralph Cudworth would describe Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus as “Atheizers of the Italick Physiology” (True Intellectual System of the Universe [Cambridge, 1678], 742; see also 50–52). For the history of philosophy deployed in seventeenth-century polemics, see, e.g., J. G. A. Pocock, “Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast? His Place in a Restoration Debate,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 737–749; Richard Tuck, “Grotius, Carneades and Hobbes,” Grotiana 4 (1983): 43–62; Robert Kargon, “Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle and the Acceptance of Epicurean Atomism in England,” Isis 55 (1964): 184–192; Gunnar Aspelin, Ralph Cudworth’s Interpretation of Greek Philosophy, trans. Martin Allwood (Goteborg: Elander, 1943); and Charles Trawick Harrison, “The Ancient Atomists and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 45 (1934): 1–80, and “Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle, and the Ancient Atomists,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 15 (1933): 191–218. Stanley, History of Philosophy, preface, vol. 1, sig. a1vo. Isaac Casaubon, Notae ad Diogenis Laertij libros [1583], in Laertii Diogenis De vitis dogmatis et apophthegmatis, ed. J. Pearson (London, 1664), notes, 20. According to Jerome’s Chronicle, Miletus was founded in 1287 BCE (year 730 of Abraham). For the prisca theologia in the Cambridge milieu, see Sarah Hutton, “Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the Decline of Moses Atticus: A Note on Seventeenth-Century Anglican Apologetics,” in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 68–84, and John Gascoigne, “ ‘The Wisdom of the Egyptians’ and the Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton,” in The

Notes

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

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Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 171–212. Stanley, History of Philosophy, 1:6 (“Thales,” ch. 5), 9–10 (ch. 6.1). On Stanley’s account of the relationship between Greek philosophy and the east, see Malusa, “Le prime storie generali della filosofia,” 188–193, esp. 189: “Manca nella History of Philosophy la tesi della continuità tra sapienza orientale e pensiero greco.” The discussion in Paolo Casini, “Pythagore en Angleterre dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle,” in Enlightenment Essays in Memory of Robert Shackleton, ed. Giles Barber and Cecil Patrick Courtney (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1988), 27–38 is misguided. Stanley, History of Philosophy, 1:4 (“Thales,” ch. 3), 15–18 (ch. 7). Diogenes Laertius, “Thales”; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 3.36.1. Stanley, History of Philosophy, 1:2–3 (“Thales,” ch. 2). Selden, Marmora Arundelliana, p. 3, line 54 (for Damasias’s second archonship); on p. 101, Selden pointed out that the notice in Diodorus referred to Damasias’s first archonship in Ol.35. Stanley in his Aeschylus edition asserted that this inscription ought to be trusted over the testimony of any and all Greek manuscripts: to the Parian Chronicle, or rather the “Arundeliana Epocharum stela,” “ni fallor, prae omnibus codicibus calamo exaratis debetur fides” (Aeschyli tragoediae septem, ed. Thomas Stanley [London, 1663], 704). Lucas Holstenius’s edition of Porphyry’s De abstinentia with the life of Pythagoras and other works had been reprinted at Cambridge in 1655; for Iamblichus, the standard edition was De vita Pythagorae, ed. Johannes Arcerius (Heidelberg, 1598). Stanley, History of Philosophy, 2:56–93 (“Alcinous”) and vol. 1, pt. 3:67–93 (Clouds). In the margins of the Aristophanes translation, to justify his renderings of particular phrases, he repeatedly cited a set of scholia in manuscript (“Schol. M.S.”). “Thomas Stanley,” ODNB; on Stanley’s London milieu in the 1640s, see Stella P. Revard, “Thomas Stanley and ‘A Register of Friends,’ ” in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 148–172. Thomas Stanley, Poems and Translations, ed. Galbraith M. Crump (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); for Sandys, see Stanley’s History of Philosophy 3:106 (“The Doctrine of Pythagoras,” pt. 3, sec. 4, ch. 9). See the important discussion in J.  A. Gruys, The Early Printed Editions (1518–1664) of Aeschylus: A Chapter in the History of Classical Scholarship (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1981), 153–199, which corrects errors in the pathbreaking account by Fraenkel; see also Aeschylus, Agamemnon, ed. Eduard Fraenkel, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), 1:39–44, 62–85. “Pythagoras his moral Rules,” in Stanley’s Poems (s.l., 1651), 79–81; the translation appeared again in Stanley’s History of Philosophy, 3:127–128 (“The Doctrine of Pythagoras,” pt. 4). Pearson’s editions were Hierocles,

Notes

38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

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Commentarius in aurea Pythagoreorum carmina (London, 1654) and De providentia & fato (London, 1655); discussion is below. It was Bentley who eventually pointed out that the lectures must be by Duport. See Theophrasti Characteres ethici, ed. Peter Needham (Cambridge, 1712), sig. a5 vo–a6 ro. See Chapter 4 in this volume. See Monique Mund-Dopchie, La survie d’Eschyle à la Renaissance: Éditions, traductions, commentaires et imitations (Louvain: Peeters, 1984), in addition to Gruys, Early Printed Editions. This was the case even in the Prometheus Bound, where Stanley’s printed translation was a revision of the earlier Latin version by M. Garbitius. See Mund-Dopchie, La survie d’Eschyle, 197–199, and Gruys, Early Printed Editions, 187–189. For the Parian Chronicle, in the context of a discussion involving Samuel Petit and Isaac Casaubon, see Aeschyli tragoediae septem, ed. Stanley, 374. Ibid., 714, 717. In antiquity, Cicero had argued that Aeschylus was a Pythagorean (Tusculan Disputations 2.9). Stanley provided variae lectiones from Bodl. MSS Bar. 74 and Selden supra 18 (the latter MS had belonged originally to the earls of Arundel). The B scholia on the Prometheus and Seven against Thebes came from the second manuscript (Gruys, Early Printed Editions, 182). Aeschyli tragoediae septem, ed. Stanley, sig. b2 ro. Agamemnon, ed. Fraenkel, 1:78–81. Gruys, Early Printed Editions, 191. Aeschyli tragoediae septem, ed. Stanley, 80. Eustathius, Il. 421, 30, in Eustathii Commentarii in Homeri Iliadem Pertinentes, ed. Marchinus van der Valk, 4 vols. (Leiden, 1971–1987), 1:662. Aeschyli tragoediae septem, ed. Stanley, 733. See David Sansone, Aeschylean Metaphors for Intellectual Activity (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1975), 60n17. In the Palaeographia Graeca (Paris, 1708), Bernard de Montfaucon accepted Eustathius’s account of the deltos as Stanley had done (25); conversely, Montfaucon offered no exact dating for the rise of the codex, saying only that it had been in use “for many centuries,” a multis retro saeculis (26). On the genre of the tour, see Christian Jacob, La description de la terre habitée de Denys d’Alexandrie, ou, la leçon de géographie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), and Rudolf Güngerich, Die Küstenbeschreibung in der griechischen Literatur (Münster: Aschendorff, 1950). For maps and travel notes inscribed on tablets, see Jacob, Géographie et ethnographie en Grèce ancienne (Paris, 1991), 38–39. Wilhelm Schubart, Das Buch bei den Griechen und Römern, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1962), 31–32. For first inventors, see, e.g., Claude Saumaise, Plinianae exercitationes in Caij Iulij Solini Polyhistora (Paris, 1629), and Richard Bentley, “Epistola ad . . . Millium,” in Joannis Antiocheni cognomento Malalae historia chronica (Oxford,

Notes

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66.

67.

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1691); for general discussion, see Helmut Zedelmaier, “Karriere eines Buches: Polydorus Virgilius De inventoribus rerum,” in Sammeln, ordnen, veranschaulichen. Wissenskompilatorik in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Frank Büttner et al. (Munster: LIT, 2003), 175–203; for Prometheus, see Horst Bredekamp, The Cult of Antiquity and the Lure of the Machine, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995), 20–27. See Dirk M. Schenkeveld, “Strabo on Homer,” Mnemosyne 29 (1976): 52–64. Stanley himself not only commented readily on Aeschylus’s geography, he also studied ancient Greek geographers. In 1653, he copied out someone else’s list of readings from the Palatine (by then, Vatican) manuscript of Stephanus Byzantinus. Agamemnon, ed. Fraenkel, 1:39. Critici sacri, ed. John Pearson, Anthony Scattergood, and Francis Gouldman, 9 vols. (London, 1660); Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed (London, 1659). John Pearson, Opera posthuma chronologica, ed. Henry Dodwell (London, 1688); Pearson’s notes on Hesychius are in the library of TCC, shelfmark MSS R.9.5–7 (printed in Joannis Pearsoni olim episcopi Cestriensis Adversaria Hesychiana, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1844]). A printed Hesychius (Venice, 1514) with Pearson’s marginalia is BL shelfmark 624.k.2. This was also the conclusion of Gruys, Early Printed Editions, 185–186. For Pearson’s ownership of the Aeschylus with Casaubon’s marginalia—a copy of the Vettori-Estienne edition of 1557, now Cambridge UL shelfmark Adv.b.3.3— see T. A. Birrell, “The Reconstruction of the Library of Isaac Casaubon,” in Hellinga Festschrift-Feestbundel-Mélanges, ed. Anthony R.  A. Croiset van Uchelen and Ernst Braches (Amsterdam: Israel, 1980), 59–68. BL MSS Add. 11357–11358; discussion is in Chapter 2 in this volume. Bentley to Edward Bernard, n.p., n.d., in Bentley’s Correspondence, 10–11; in 1655, Meric Casaubon reported that Pearson intended to edit Hesychius and the Suda (Hieroclis de Providentia & Fato, ed. Pearson [London, 1655], 181). On the English Polyglot, see Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–57),” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 463–482. On their activities, see “Castell, Edmund,” “Casaubon, (Florence Estienne) Meric,” “Lightfoot, John,” “Walton, Brian,” and “Ussher, James,” in ODNB. These English translations are Stanley’s (Poems, 79–81, and History of Philosophy, 3:127–128 [“The Doctrine of Pythagoras,” pt. 4]); a translation of Hierocles’ commentary is in Hermann S. Schibli, Hierocles of Alexandria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). I am grateful to Noel Swerdlow for pointing this out. For examples, see Stanley, History of Philosophy 3:79 (“The Doctrine of Pythagoras,” pt. 2, sec. 4, ch. 1); Pierre Gassendi, “Nicolai Copernici Vita,” in Tychonis Brahei . . . vita (Paris, 1654), 10; and Thomas Burnet, Archaeologiae philosophicae (London, 1692), 151–154. Hieroclis . . . commentarius in Aurea Pythagoreorum Carmina (1654), sig. *3 vo–*4 ro: “Effectum divina providentia est, ut multis postea seculis ex Stoicorum Schola prodierit Hierocles, maximus sane acutissimusque philosophus,

Notes

68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75.

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qui eos [sc. versus] nobis ex Pythagoreorum sensu ita explicaret, ut nihil illis jam nec apertius, nec ad vitae morumque rationem utilius reperiatur. Nam praeterquam quod unicum hoc scriptum exstare videtur, a quo vera Pythagoreorum carminum explicatio peti queat; praeter id etiam, quod multa sectae hujus, atque Stoicae, ex professo dogmata continet, quae in caeteris aliorum monumentis wJ~ ejn parovdwÛ vix indicantur: & hoc quoque doctorum multorum judicio, quibus ipsum videre contigit, affirmare non vereor, nullum profani nominis autorem luce donatum adhuc, quod sciam, qui tam multa de moribus, de providentia, similibusque rebus, more nostro, id est, Christiano, hostis alioqui nominis hujus acerrimus, tam bene tamque aperte disseruerit.” As Pearson would also do, Curterius identified this Hierocles with the pagan judge and persecutor of Christians mentioned by Lactantius and replied to by Eusebius of Caesarea in the Against Hierocles. Marci Antonini . . . de rebus suis, ed. Thomas Gataker (Cambridge, 1652); Marcus Aurelius Antoninus . . . his Meditations concerning Himselfe, trans. Meric Casaubon (London, 1634). For discussion, see Jill Kraye, “ ‘Ethnicorum omnium sanctissimus’: Marcus Aurelius and His Meditations from Xylander to Diderot,” in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and Martin Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), 107–134; see also Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Pearson pointed out that Hierocles spoke, like Platonists, of the human soul as a middle point between the divine and the terrestrial, and also of the descent of the human soul into the body. Prolegomena to Hieroclis De providentia & fato [1655], sigg. **8 ro–A1 ro. In Hieroclis De providentia & fato [1655], 184 and 175: when one reads Hierocles’ commentary, “ubique, quae ad veram vitam, id est, constantem & inoffensam animi tranquillitatem & eujqumivan eximie faciant, sese ingerunt.” Schibli’s valuable annotations on the Commentary on the “Golden Verses” point out many Stoic doctrines, although Schibli regards Hierocles as a Neoplatonist. In Hieroclis De providentia & fato [1655], Prolegomena, sig. ***1 ro. Lilio Giraldi, “Philosophi Pythagorae Symbolorum interpretatio,” in Hieroclis De providentia & fato [1655], 99. Alcinous (i.e., Albinus), In platonicam philosophiam introductio, ed. John Fell (Oxford, 1667), “Praefatio”: “Vix quicquam hac ex parte [sc. for understanding Plato] magis optandum, quam si divini magistri Dogmata . . . ad Methodum aliquam scientificam, artisque speci<e>m quadantenus fingerentur.” For similar complaints about Plato from earlier centuries, see E. N. Tigerstedt, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato (Helsinki: Societas Scientariarum Fennica, 1974), 32–36. By 1663, Stanley had changed his mind, proposing in his Aeschylus edition (795) that the Golden Verses might have been composed by any one of several later Pythagoreans. Pearson’s Prolegomena referred to Pythagoras as the author of the Golden Verses. Hieroclis De providentia & fato [1655], sig. *2 ro (“Aurea ejus [sc.

Notes

76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81. 82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

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Pythagorae] Carmina”). Meric Casaubon acknowledged (178) that the attribution to Pythagoras might not be correct but otherwise referred to the author of the Golden Verses as “Pythagoras.” The history of the debate is outlined in Hugh de Quehen, “Politics and Scholarship in the Ignatian Controversy,” Seventeenth Century 13 (1998): 69–84. Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 48–49, 58–59; Jon Parkin, “Liberty Transpros’d: Marvell and Samuel Parker,” in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 269–289; and “Parker, Samuel,” ODNB. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3.36. Neither Pearson nor his opponents discussed the four additional letters that were known only in Latin. This was the argument of Nicolaus Vedelius in his edition of S. Ignatii . . . quae extant omnia (Geneva, 1623). James Ussher, ed., Polycarpi et Ignatii epistolae (Oxford, 1644), 195–238; Isaac Vossius, ed., Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii martyris (Amsterdam, 1646). Ussher’s Latin manuscripts were in Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (now shelfmark 395) and in the private collection of Richard Mountagu (“Adnotationes,” xv); the Mountagu manuscript was already lost in the late seventeenth century. See F.  X. von Funk, Die Echtheit der ignatianischen Briefe (Tübingen: H. Laupp, 1883), 144. Ussher placed the interpolations in the sixth century. Ussher, ed., Polycarpi et Ignatii epistolae, annotations, xxxiii–xli, lxxix–cx. See Johannes Quasten, Patrology, 4 vols. (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1950– 1986), 1:73; modern skeptics have included Josep Rius-Camps, The Four Authentic Letters of Ignatius the Martyr, trans. Kathleen England (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Orientalium Studiorum, 1980), and Reinhard Hübner, “Thesen zur Echtheit und Datierung der sieben Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochien,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 1 (1997): 44–72. David Blondel, Apologia pro sententia Hieronymi de episcopis et presbyteris (Amsterdam, 1646); Claude Saumaise, Apparatus ad libros de primatu papae (Leiden, 1645), 56–66. Here Saumaise amplified his earlier arguments from De episcopis et presbyteris (Leiden, 1641; published under the pseudonym “Walo Messalinus”), 252–260. James Ussher, Appendix Ignatiana (London, 1647), sig. a2 ro–a4 vo; Henry Hammond, “De Ignatio, ejusque testimoniis cum Hieronymi sententia collatis,” in Dissertationes quatuor (London, 1651), 53–131, and the far less substantive discussion in Of the Power of the Keyes: Or, of binding and loosing (London, 1647), 20–31. Vossius had also replied to Saumaise in the annotations to his Ignatius edition of 1646. Jean Daillé, De scriptis quae sub Dionysii Areopagitae et Ignatii Antiocheni nominibus circumferuntur (Geneva, 1666). Pearson, Vindiciae, pt. 2, 4–6. Pearson’s next earliest testimony came from Clement of Alexandria. On Magnesians 8.2, see the classic defense in Funk, Echtheit, 75–100, essentially from the same frame of reference as Pearson’s, but also drawing on R. Bultmann’s thesis of a general influence of gnosticism on the early fathers

Notes

88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98.

99. 100.

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including Ignatius; further approaches are summarized in Mark J. Edwards, “Ignatius and the Second Century: An Answer to R. Hübner,” Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 2 (1998): 214–226, esp. 222–224. Greek text from Ussher, Appendix Ignatiana, 13. For Pearson’s intepretation, see Vindiciae, pt. 2, 35–39. Saumaise, Apparatus ad libros de primatu papae, 59, 61; see further Daillé, De scriptis, 293–308. Vossius, ed., Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii martyris, annot. on Magnesians 8.2; Ussher, Appendix ignatiana, sigg. a2 vo–a4 ro; Hammond, “De Ignatio,” 77–81. Saumaise, Blondel, and Daillé had already acknowledged this freely, interpreting Sige in the Ignatius passage as an all-purpose first principle. Pearson, Vindiciae, pt. 2, 39–88. Iamblichus, De mysteriis, ed. Thomas Gale (Oxford, 1678), 301–302 (on ch. 8.3), referring to Pearson, Vindiciae, pt. 2, 46. Thomas Gale, ed., Opuscula mythologica, ethica et physica (Cambridge, 1671). De mysteriis, ed. Gale, sig. **2 ro. Edward Bernard to Gale, n.d. n.p., BL MS Add. 4292, fol. 127ro: “De Theologia Punica aut Babylonica, ut te multum crucies, amabo, caveas sedulo. Infra curam studiaque tua ipsarum ea est Gentium, tum etiam Apollodorus cum suo Hellenismo. Si in sacris tibi perplaceat versanti, nostra, Vir piissime, aeterna illustra. Vis autem pergere, uti praestantissimis viris Seldeno, Vossio, forte & Bocharto visum. Moneo tamen atque imprimis assero confuse esse ea ferme omnia, nulloque ordine tradita, quae ex Chaldaeorum, vel etiam Aegyptiorum Theologis accepta referunt Plutarchus, Clemens, Eusebius, alii, neque ille tuus esse potest accuratior Damascius.” The letter is addressed to Gale as fellow of Trinity College, a post he left in 1672. Damascius is the epitomator often excerpted in Photius’s Bibliotheca, including for Hierocles’ De providentia. Stanley, History of Philosophy, 1:4 (“Thales,” ch. 3). For his manuscripts, Gale, ed., De mysteriis, sig. **1 vo–**2 ro. Gale’s copytext was a manuscript then belonging to Isaac Vossius (now Leiden UL MS Voss.Q.22); Gale also obtained readings of a Basel manuscript then belonging to Sebastian Feschius (now Basel UL MS F.II.1b) and a composite collation of three manuscripts in the Royal Library of France (see Martin Sicherl, Die Handschriften, Ausgaben und Übersetzungen von Iamblichos “De Mysteriis” [Berlin: Akademie 1957], 196–197). E.g., De mysteriis, ed. Gale, 205. See Brian Copenhaver, “Natural Magic, Hermetism, and Occultism in Early Modern Science,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 261–302; Penelope Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); and D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958).

Notes

p 257

101. In De mysteriis, ed. Gale, see 206–207 (archangels), 302–304 (decans), 299– 300 (Malalas), 221–222 (Culham; compare De mysteriis 3.5), 234–235 (natural magic), 226 (music of the spheres). 102. Thomas Gale, ed., Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui (Paris, 1675). 103. Angelo Poliziano, Miscellanea (Florence, 1489), sig. a vi vo (placing Apollodorus in a list of “Graeci auctores grammatici”). For Apollodorus’s date (fl. Ol.160), see Gale, ed., Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui, 22. 104. On the Chronicles, see Alden A. Mosshammer, “Geometrical Proportion and the Chronological Method of Apollodorus,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 106 (1976): 291–306. 105. “Index Scriptorum qui in Hesychij Graeco Vocabulario laudantur,” in Apuleius, Metamorphoses, ed. Joannes Pricaeus (Gouda, 1650), 739–758. 106. On the “Hellenists,” see C. H. LeBram, “Ein Streit um die Hebräische Bibel und die Septuaginta,” in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 21–63. 107. Apollodorus, Bibliothecae libri tres et fragmenta, ed. C. G. Heyne, 2nd ed. (Göttingen, 1803; repr., Hildesheim: Olms, 1972). 108. For similar observations, see Anthony Grafton, “Prolegomena to F. A. Wolf,” in Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214–243, and Arnaldo Momigliano, “Gibbon’s Contribution to Historical Method,” in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966), 40–55, esp. 51. 109. Gale’s discussion is in his notes to Apollodorus, 30. 110. Text as printed in Gale, ed., Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui, 61–62. 111. Apollonius Rhodius 4.1707; Hesychius s.v. Μelavntio~. “Melantius” is not in Strabo; Heyne (p. 102) seems to have searched for Gale’s reference and found that Strabo 10.5.1 instead offers a parallel for the reading ΑiJglhvtou (Callimachus frag. 7.23 Pfeiffer). 112. Gale’s notes to Apollodorus, 26–27. 113. Ibid., 13: “Druov~] In Pal. erat Diov~. Enimvero Thyrsus postulat, ut legamus Diovnuson—Scripturae abbreviatio mendum pepererat.” 114. Q. Horatius Flaccus, ed. Richard Bentley (Cambridge, 1712), note to C.2.19.23. 115. Apollodorus 2.5.10; Gale’s notes to Apollodorus, 49. As Heyne pointed out (p. 188), it is not obvious why Gale did not advocate the far easier emendation of Λibuvhn to Λiguvhn. 116. Philipp Cluverius, Italia antiqua, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1624), 1:317. 117. “Dignus erat hic locus, in quo emendando aliquam operam collocassent viri docti qui Apollodorum ante nos recensuerunt”: Gale’s notes to Apollodorus, 30. 118. On the undergraduate curriculum in the seventeenth century, see Mordechai Feingold, “The Humanities,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 211–357. 119. Bentley’s copy of Farnaby’s Terence (Amsterdam, 1651), inscribed on the title page with his name and the year 1678, is in the library of TCC, shelfmark

Notes

120.

121. 122.

123.

124. 125.

126.

127.

128. 129.

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Adv.d.2.16; his own edition was Publii Terentii Afri comoediae (Cambridge, 1726). On encyclopedism, see Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, Topica universalis: Eine Modellgeschichte humanistischer und barocker Wissenschaft (Hamburg: Meiner, 1983); Helmut Zedelmaier, ed., Bibliotheca universalis und Bibliotheca selecta: Das Problem der Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992); and Theo Stammen and Wolfgang Weber, eds., Wissenssicherung, Wissensordnung und Wissensverarbeitung: Das europäische Modell der Enzyklopädien (Berlin: Akademie, 2004). On the many valences of “curiosity,” see Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See Dominique de Courcelles, ed., La “varietas” à la Renaissance (Paris: École des Chartes, 2001), and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 13–28. For antiquarianism as a concept, see Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian”; his careful emphasis on political history is particularly valuable for explaining the near-total absence of antiquarian study of the ancient world in Restoration England. Tacitus, Opera, ed. J.  F. Gronovius, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1685); Stephanus Byzantinus, De urbibus, ed. Abraham Berkelius (Leiden, 1694). In Stanley’s History of Philosophy, vol. 3, sig. A1ro–vo (quoting Bacon, Advancement of Learning 3.5); for Greaves and his Pyramidographia (1646), see Zur Shalev, “Measurer of All Things: John Greaves (1602–1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology,” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002): 555–575. R. Häfner, Götter im Exil: Frühneuzeitliches Dichtungsverständnis im Spannungsfeld christlicher Apologetik und philologischer Kritik (ca. 1590–1736) (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003). On historia litteraria, see Martin Mulsow and Helmut Zedelmaier, eds., Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001); Ralph Häfner, ed., Philologie und Erkenntnis: Beiträge zu Begriff und Problem frühneuzeitlicher “Philologie” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001); Büttner, ed., Sammeln, ordnen, veranschaulichen; Michael C. Carhart, “Historia Literaria and Cultural History from Mylaeus to Eichhorn,” in Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. Peter N. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 184–206; and for an important sixteenth-century case, see Donald R. Kelley, “Writing Cultural History in Early Modern Europe: Christophe Milieu and His Project,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 342–365. Gale, ed., Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui, notes to Apollodorus (2.2.2), 40–41; see Poliziano, Miscellanea, sig. h4 ro–vo (ch. 50). For Bacon, see Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. S. Rabinovitch (London: Routledge, 1968), 36–72 (ch. 2); for Boyle, see Kargon, “Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle,” and Harrison, “Bacon, Hobbes, Boyle.”

Notes

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130. In Boyle’s Works, vol. 1 (London, 1744), 420–421 (on Democritus; preface to Some Considerations Touching the Usefulness of Natural Experimental Philosophy), 290–371 (Sceptical Chymist; see esp. the “Physiological Considerations,” 294–299). 131. Cudworth, True Intellectual System. 132. Isaac Barrow, ed., Euclidis elementorum libri XV. breviter demonstrata (Cambridge, 1655), and Archimedis opera (London, 1675); see Anthony Grafton, “Barrow as a Scholar,” in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 291–302. 133. Stanley, History of Philosophy, 1:18. 134. Some discussion is in J.  E. McGuire and P.  M. Rattansi, “Newton and the ‘Pipes of Pan,’ ” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 21 (1966): 108–143. 135. See John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). 136. On the prisca theologia in the Restoration, see Hutton, “Decline of Moses Atticus,” and Gascoigne, “The ‘Wisdom of the Egyptians.’ ” 137. “Facile est conijcere hanc fabulam, ut et plerasque poetarum fabulas, ex sacra pagina originem desumpsisse”: BL MS Burney 407, fol. 47 vo. The notebook is a fair copy of Cambridge lectures and orations by Creighton, in a hand often seen in manuscripts associated with Thomas Gale. 138. On the English outpost of the Republic of Letters, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680– 1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Harold J. Cook and David S. Lux, “Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance during the Scientific Revolution,” History of Science 36 (1998): 179– 211; and Paul Dibon and Françoise Waquet, Johannes Fridericus Gronovius pèlerin de la République des lettres (Geneva: Droz, 1984). 139. Origen, Contra Celsum, ed. W. Spencer (Cambridge, 1658), notes, 85–87. 140. Herbert Thorndike to William Sancroft, London, 18 December 1657 (n.s.), BL MS Harl. 3783, fol. 175r. 141. For Casaubon and Scultetus, see Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon 1559–1614, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1892); for de Dominis, see Noel Malcolm, De Dominis, 1560–1624: Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984). 142. See Aurelii Prudentii Clementis quae exstant, ed. Nicolaas Heinsius (Amsterdam, 1667), sigg. *10 vo–*11 ro; Bentley’s copy is BL shelfmark 686.d.7–8. 143. On professional options for clergymen, see William Gibson, A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain, 1530–1840 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). 144. J.  H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1833), 1:11–12. Another fellow from Yorkshire was not elected until 1688: Thomas Baker, History of the College of St. John the Evangelist, Cambridge, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1869), 1:300.

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145. Monk, Bentley, 1:12. 146. Grammar schools in Yorkshire typically enjoyed close relations with at least one Cambridge college: Nicholas Carlisle, A Concise Description of the Endowed Grammar Schools in England and Wales, 2 vols. (London, 1818), 2:778–920; at Spalding, the appointment of the master lay in principle with a board of governors, and the master and fellows of St. John’s College had the right to fill a persisting vacancy (1:844). 147. Monk, Bentley, 1:13.

2. London in the 1680s 1. See above all John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991). 2. Ibid., 154–158 (for example). 3. On Stillingfleet and Locke, see Sarah Hutton, “Science, Philosophy and Atheism: Edward Stillingfleet’s Defence of Religion,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 102–120, and Douglas Hedley, “Persons of Substance and the Cambridge Connection: Some Roots and Ramifications of the Trinitarian Controversy in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 225–240, esp. 231–234. 4. J. H. Overton, Life in the English Church (1660–1714) (London, 1885), 61–62. 5. Spurr, Restoration Church, 48–49 (for Sheldon) and 85–86 (for Compton), and R. A. Beddard, “Tory Oxford,” in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 887n1 and 888n172 (for Sancroft). 6. E.g., William Cave, Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia literaria (London, 1688), prolegomena, sec. 3, on a posthumous Ussher manuscript supplied to Cave by Stillingfleet; Edward Stillingfleet, Conferences between a Romish Priest, a Fanatic Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England (London, 1679), containing a posthumous treatise by Herbert Thorndike. For a particularly complex case of close collaboration, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991– 2000), 1:37–44. For Stillingfleet as one of the organizers of anti-Catholic sermons and pamphlets in the late 1680s, see Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (1833; repr., Hildesheim: Olms, 1969), 3:105, cited in Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment 1:47. 7. For some very clear cases of private review, see “Tillotson, John,” ODNB. 8. BL MS Royal 7.A.12, fol. 119ro. 9. Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1668), and for a later panegyric on Laud as a patron of scholars, see White Kennett, “The Life of Mr. Somner,” in William Somner, A Treatise of the Roman Ports and Forts in Kent (Oxford, 1693), 6–8; William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants (1638), repr.

Notes

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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1664, 1674, 1684, abridgment as Mr. Chillingworth’s Judgment of the Religion of Protestants 1680, repr. 1689, and expurgation by John Patrick in 1687; Henry Hammond, Works, 4 vols., ed. W. Fulman, 2nd ed. (London, 1684); John Hales, Golden Remains, ed. John Pearson (1st ed. London, 1659; 3rd ed. London, 1688); Joseph Mede, Works, 2 vols., ed. John Worthington (1st ed. London, 1663–1664; 4th ed. London, 1677). On such homages and their contexts, see John Spurr, “ ‘A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops’: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-Century Protestantism,” Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005): 313–334. Edward Stillingfleet, Conferences between a Romish Priest, a Fanatic Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England (London, 1679); see also William Laud, Relation of the Conference between William Laud . . . and Mr. Fisher, the Iesuite (London, 1639); Meric Casaubon, Of the Necessity of Reformation, in, and before Luther’s time (London, 1664); and Edward Stillingfleet, Rational Account of the Grounds of the Protestant Religion (1665). For further installments, see Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 1:47. Compare, following the end of the Sancroft era, John Strype, Memorials of the Most Reverend Father in God Thomas Cranmer (London, 1694), History of the Life and Acts of . . . Edmund Grindal (London, 1710), and The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (London, 1711). BL MS Add. 4236, fol. 127ro; for Tillotson’s plan, see the note of his biographer Thomas Birch on fol. 129vo, and further see Gilbert Burnet, Some Sermons preach’d on Several Occasions; and an Essay towards a new book of Homilies, in seven sermons, prepar’d at the desire of Archbishop Tillotson and some other bishops (London, 1713). Jean-Louis Quantin, “Patristique et politique dans l’Angleterre de la Restauration,” Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa 36 (2000): 415–458; Quantin, “Apocryphorum nimis studiosi? Dodwell, Mill, Grabe et le problème du canon néo-testamentaire au tournant du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle,” in Apocryphité: Histoire d’un concept transversal aux religions du livre, ed. Simon Claude Mimouni (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002), 285–306, esp. 293–295; Spurr, Restoration Church, 128–131, 134–140, 160–162; and, more generally, Quantin, “Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity,” in History of Scholarship: A Selection of Papers from the Seminar on the History of Scholarship Held Annually at the Warburg Institute, ed. Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 306–356. On the political context of Fell and the Press, see R. A. Beddard, “Restoration Oxford,” in Seventeenth-Century Oxford, ed. Tyacke, 803–862, esp.  843– 847; in general, see Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 61–92, 110–120. For posthumous publications, see John Pearson, Opera posthuma chronologica, ed. Henry Dodwell (London, 1688), and Thomas Smith, ed., S. Ignatii epistolae genuinae . . . annotationibus D. Joannis Pearsoni . . . illustratae (Oxford, 1709). Thomas Gale found Pearson’s manuscript notes on Hesychius and gave them to the library of Trinity College, Cambridge in 1701 (TCC

Notes

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

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MSS R.9.5–7), not before having a partial apograph made for himself (now TCC MS O.10.15). William Cave, Apostolici (London, 1677, repr. 1682, 1687, and 1716), and Ecclesiastici (London, 1683). Cave’s Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum historia litteraria (London, 1688), published in Latin, aimed much more concisely to inform its reader about sources, texts, and the state of contemporary debate; its chronological scope extended to the fifteenth century. Richard Cumberland, An Essay towards the Recovery of the Jewish Measures & Weights (London, 1686), 111. Richard Cumberland, De legibus naturae disquisitio philosophica (London, 1672); a discussion is in Jon Parkin, Science, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England: Richard Cumberland’s “De legibus naturae” (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999). I am grateful to Mordechai Feingold for this suggestion. On Warburton, see Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearean Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), ch. 5; on Hurd, see Jonathan B. Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 4, and Kristine Louise Haugen, “Chivalry and Romance in the Eighteenth Century: Richard Hurd and the Disenchantment of The Faerie Queene,” Prose Studies 23 (2000): 45–60. Nick Groom, The Making of Percy’s “Reliques” (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999). William Lloyd, Exposition of the Prophecy of Seventy Weeks (s.l., 1690?) and Chronological Account of the Life of Pythagoras (London, 1699). Joshua Barnes, ed., Euripidis quae extant omnia (Cambridge, 1694). In William Somner, A Treatise of the Roman Ports and Forts in Kent (Oxford, 1693), see White Kennett, “Life of Mr. Somner,” 14. Ibid., 70–71, 73, 96, 111, 113–114. Ibid., 59–60, 67–69, 105–107. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines Britannicae (London, 1685), 32. According to Kennett (65), John Fell bought a large number of Somner’s manuscripts and gave “encouragement” for them to be published. Kennett, “Life of Mr. Somner,” 88–89, 119–120. John Battely, Antiquitates rutupinae, ed. Thomas Terry (Oxford, 1711). Neil R. Ker, “Archbishop Sancroft’s Rearrangement of the Manuscripts of Lambeth Palace,” in A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library: MSS. 1222–1860, ed. E. G. W. Bill (Oxford, 1972), 1–51; see also Helen Carron, “William Sancroft (1617–93): A Seventeenth-Century Collector and His Library,” The Library, 7th ser., 1 (2000): 290–307. Richard Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus (Cambridge, 1712), sig. c2 vo. Thomas Gale, ed., Herodoti Halicarnassei historiarum libri IX (London, 1679), with textual notes at the end of the volume. On Sancroft’s library in  general, which is now in Emmanuel College, Cambridge, see Carron, “William Sancroft.” John Battely, The Antiquities of Richborough and Reculver, trans. John Duncombe (London, 1774).

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34. For ghostwriting of part of Evelyn’s Numismata: A Discourse of Medals, Antient and Modern (London, 1697), see Bentley to an unnamed correspondent, n.p., 15 February 1694/95, Bodl. MS Don.d.135, item 18: “I am vexed at my self, yt I should be so heedless, as not to remember yt you had said already in ye 14th p: much of wt. I had written. But however I am glad yt it happens so. For those passages yt are coincident may be very well spared out of mine (since they are said so soon after) and in stead of them I will add two Paragraphs; one about ye Greek money; & another about reducing ye Ancient money to our modern computation.” Bentley apparently refers to a passage in Numismata, 16–17, that in the event was printed as a single paragraph; this letter is not in the Correspondence. Corrected proof sheets of parts of the Numismata were in Bentley’s possession (now TCC Adv.a.2.7), although the hand that made the corrections is rarely if ever Bentley’s. 35. Jean Le Clerc, Epistolario, 4 vols., ed. Maria Grazia Sina and Mario Sina (Florence: Olschki, 1987–1997), e.g., 2:249–250, 264–265. 36. Charles Boyle, Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris . . . Examin’d (London, 1698), 223; Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 2nd ed. (London, 1699), lxxviii, visibly torturing the facts in that Stillingfleet was not yet a bishop during the 1680s, when Bentley served him as “tutor.” 37. For Sharp, Patrick, Moore, and Tillotson, see ODNB; on such posts in general, see William Gibson, A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain, 1530– 1840 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997). 38. BL MS Add. 62114, fol. 19ro–24vo. On the vogue at this period for preparing ideal reading lists for the young, see Thomas Barlow, A Library for Younger Schollers, ed. Alma De Jordy and Harris Francis Fletcher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). 39. J. H. Monk, Life of Richard Bentley, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1833), 1:3. 40. On university expectations, as well as the orientation of grammar schools, see E. G. W. Bill, Education at Christ Church Oxford 1660–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). 41. For Humphrey Wanley preparing parts of Edward Bernard’s Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae (1697), see Stanley Gillam, “Humfrey Wanley and Arthur Charlett,” Bodleian Library Record 16 (1999): 411–429, esp. 412–413; for Henry Wharton as an assistant and ghostwriter to William Cave, see Wharton’s memoir in George D’Oyly, The Life of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, 2 vols. (London, 1821), 2:103–178. 42. For the parallel case of the chaplains who looked after John Moore’s great library, see David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), 58–67. 43. In Under the Hammer: Book Auctions since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2001), see Michael Harris, “Newspaper Advertising for Book Auctions before 1700,” 1–14; Giles Mandelbrote, “The Organization of Book Auctions in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” 15–50; and T.  A. Birrell, “Books and Buyers in Seventeenth-Century English Auction Sales,” 51–64.

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44. Bibliotheca Angleseiana (London, 1686), Lambeth Palace Library, shelfmark Z9999.(P4); Bibliotheca Jacombiana (London, 1687), BL shelfmark 619.m.2, Mic.B.56/1035; Bibliotheca Cudworthiana (London, 1690/1691), BL shelfmark S.C.875, Mic.B.619/212. A census of surviving catalogues marked with prices and purchasers’ names is in Birrell, “Books and Buyers.” The Cudworth sale was apparently attended both by Richard Bentley the scholar and by Richard Bentley the publisher and bookseller (“Mr. Bentley Bookseller”); it appears that Stillingfleet’s Richard Bentley had his books delivered whereas the bookseller did not (see, e.g., p. 24). Some of the standard theological books Bentley bought from the Cudworth sale were probably destined for his pupil James. 45. Marquard Freher, De Lupoduno, antiquissimo Alemaniae oppido, commentariolus (Heidelberg, 1618); Johannes Rivius, Rerum Francicarum decades quatuor (Brussels, 1651); Andrea Morosini, Historia veneta, ab anno MDXXI. usque ad annum. MDCXV. (Venice, 1623); Giovanni Filippo de’ Marini, Delle missioni de’ padri della Compagnia de Giesu nella Provincia del Giappone (Rome, 1663), in Bibliotheca Angleseiana, pp. 23, 27, 22, 91. 46. Stillingfleet paid rates in Twickenham throughout the 1680s, although the records do not show whether he owned a house or only land: “Edward Stillingfleet,” http://twickenham-museum.org.uk (accessed May 19, 2010). 47. In Bibliotheca Jacombiana, 34, 99; the books Bentley bought were Aeschylus, Tragoediae septem, ed. Thomas Stanley (London, 1663); Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, ed. Isaac Casaubon, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Lyon, 1612); Callimachus, Hymni cum scholiis nunc primum aeditis, ed. Sigismundus Gelenius (Basel, 1532); and Hesiod, Opera et dies. Theogonia. Scutum Herculis. Omnia vero cum multis optimis expositionibus, ed. Vettore Trincavelli (Venice, 1537). 48. The effect is also seen, although to a smaller degree, in the case of folio volumes. Stillingfleet’s copy of Freher’s 30-page treatise cost 8s10d and his copy of Morosini’s 720-page history 1£1s; Bentley’s nearly 900-page Aeschylus cost 17s6d, and his Athenaeus in two volumes cost 17s. 49. In The London Book Trade: Topographies of Print in the Metropolis from the Sixteenth Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 2003), see Michael Harris, “Print in Neighbourhood Commerce: The Case of Carter Lane,” 45–69; James Raven, “Location, Size, and Succession: The Bookshops of Paternoster Row before 1800,” 89–126; and Giles Mandelbrote, “Workplaces and Living Spaces: London Book Trade Inventories of the Late Seventeenth Century,” 21–43. 50. See, e.g., the large number of letters to the London booksellers John Wyatt and Thomas Newborough in BL MSS Add. 4275–4276. For tea, see Henry Newcome to John Wyatt, Middleton (Lancashire), 5 January 1702/1703, BL MS Add. 4276, 56ro. 51. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 237–240. 52. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 177–179; on the book district as a meeting place for authors in general, see also 62–74.

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53. Ian Green and Kate Peters rightly emphasize that only the relatively solvent among the clergy could afford to buy books regularly: “Religious Publishing in England 1640–1695,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–1695, ed. J. Barnard and D.  F. McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 85–86. 54. Bentley and Woodward appear as buyers on the same page in Bibliotheca Angleseiana, 25, 27, 42, 56. On Woodward’s scholarship, see above all James Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 55. Bentley and Evelyn appear together in Bibliotheca Angleseiana, 22, 25, 90. For Evelyn and Bentley, see Chapter 4 in this volume. 56. Bentley and Sherburne appear on the same page in Bibliotheca Jacombiana, 34, and Bibliotheca Angleseiana, 25, 46, 64. 57. See Isaac Casaubon, Ephemerides, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1850), and Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon, 1559–1614, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1892); for G. J. Vossius and William Laud, see his Epistolae (London, 1690); for Junius as another client of Laud, see Kennett, “Life of Mr. Somner,” 105. 58. See Chapter 1 in this volume. Isaac Vossius, ed., Epistolae genuinae S. Ignatii martyris (Amsterdam, 1646). 59. On the period before his arrival in England, see F. F. Blok, Isaac Vossius and His Circle: His Life until His Farewell to Queen Christina of Sweden, trans. C. van Heertum (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 2000), and the correspondence with Nicholas Heinsius in Sylloge epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum, ed. P. Burmann, 5 vols. (Leiden, 1724–1727), 3:556–692. Vossius’s manuscript collection, now in Leiden, is catalogued in K.  A. de Meyier, Codices Vossiani Graeci et miscellanei (Leiden: Bibliotheca Universitatis, 1955) and Codices Vossiani Latini, 4 vols. (Leiden: Universitaire pers, 1973–1984), and P. C. Boeren, Codices Vossiani Chymici (Leiden: Universitaire pers, 1975). 60. For Scaliger’s literary and linguistic study, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 1: Textual Criticism and Exegesis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). 61. See especially Daniel Heinsius’s interventionist edition of Aristotle’s Poetics (Leiden, 1611), as well as his editions of Horace (1612), Terence (1626), and Ovid (1629), and Nicholas Heinsius’s editions of Ovid (1652), Vergil (1664), and Prudentius (1667). 62. Bentley and Vossius appear as buyers on the same page in Bibliotheca Angleseiana, 49, 64, 65, 82. 63. Vossius’s letters on Ignatius are in John Pearson, Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatii (Cambridge, 1672), sig. Aaaa2 ro—Eeee3 vo; see also Vossius, De poematum cantu et viribus rythmi (Oxford, 1673), and Cajus Valerius Catullus, ed. Vossius (Leiden and London, 1684). 64. A catalogue by Paul Colomiès was published only in 1697, by which time Vossius’s books were no longer in England: see Edward Bernard, ed., Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliae et Hiberniae, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1697), vol. 2, pt. 1, 57–72, with annotated books at 69–72.

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65. For ecclesiastical history of an Anglophile cast, see esp. Paul Colomiès, ed., S. Clementis Epistolae Duae ad Corinthios (London, 1687); see also Colomiès’ annotations in the Prima Scaligerana (Groningen, 1669) and the Recueil des particularitez contained in his Opuscula (Paris, 1668). On the seventeenthcentury study of ecclesiastical history at large, see Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 66. For Bentley, see BL MS Add. 4277, fols. 22 vo–23 ro; for the engravings, see Bibliotheca Angleseiana (1686), Lambeth Palace Library, shelfmark Z9999. (P4), p. 78 [printed: 76] of the English class; for biography, see Rudolf de Smet, Hadrianus Beverlandus (1650–1716): Non unus e multis peccator (Brussels: Palais der Academiën, 1988). Beverland may have been buying at the Anglesey auction for a patron such as Vossius or the third Earl of Carbery. 67. J.  A. Gruys, The Early Printed Editions (1518–1664) of Aeschylus (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1981), 158–159, 162. 68. Bodl. MSS Smith 14, pp. 1, 211; Smith 72; D’Orville 470–471. 69. For Origen and Irenaeus, see Quantin, “Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad,” 317; for Bernard’s Josephus, see below. For Fell cultivating Vossius on the press’s behalf, see Beddard, “Restoration Oxford,” 844n249, 846n267. 70. For Vossius’s manuscript of Pollux, see Bentley, “Epistola ad . . . Millium,” in Joannis Antiocheni cognomento Malalae historia chronica (Oxford, 1691), 35–36, 54, 58; on Cannon’s Hierocles volume, see Peter Needham, ed., Hieroclis . . . Commentarius in aurea carmina: De providentia & fato (Cambridge, 1709), sig. a5 ro. 71. TCC MS R.16.36, an apograph of Leiden UL, MS Voss.Gr.F.52. 72. David Katz, “Isaac Vossius and the English Biblical Critics, 1670–1689,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 142–184, esp.  152–154, 159–176. For further surprising theses, see Thijs Weststeijn, “Spinoza sinicus: An Asian Paragraph in the History of the Radical Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 537–561. 73. BL MSS Add. 11357 (alphabetical compilation), 11358 (discussion of passages). For the date, see MS Add. 11358, fol. 121 vo: “Jan. 7, 1683. 1683”—probably O.S., or 1684 in modern reckoning. 74. Humphrey Hody, Contra historiam Aristeae de LXX interpretibus (1684); Hody, ed., Aristeae historia LXXII: Interpretum (Oxford, 1692); Hody, De Bibliorum textis originalibus (Oxford, 1705). Hody and Bentley were both chaplains to Stillingfleet in the early 1690s; Hody’s first known contact with Stillingfleet was as college tutor to his son, whom Bentley accompanied to Oxford. 75. For the English background, see Scott Mandelbrote, “English Scholarship and the Greek Text of the Old Testament, 1620–1720: The Impact of Codex Alexandrinus,” in Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and Nicholas Keene (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 74–93. 76. Brian Walton, ed., Biblia sacra polyglotta, 6 vols. (London, 1657). Readings from the Alexandrinus appear on each printed page of text; the further collations are in vol. 6.

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77. Hesychii Lexicon, ed. Cornelius Schrevelius (Leiden and Rotterdam, 1668), TCC Adv.c.2.6. For an indication that the earliest hand in this volume predated Bentley’s period in Oxford in 1689–1691, see p.  373. Having completely filled the margins, Bentley later squeezed in two references to corrections he had printed in his Letter to Mill. 78. For Homer lemmata, see TCC MS R.9.7, fols. 151 ro–222 vo. 79. Pearson’s Hesychius notebooks are TCC MSS R.9.5–7; an apograph of MS R.9.6 made for Gale is now MS O.10.15. A printed Hesychius (Aldus, 1514) annotated by Pearson and earlier scribes is BL 624.k.2; an eighteenth-century hand on the flyleaf of this volume gives a sample comparison with another Pearson copy of Hesychius then in Chester. 80. Thomson’s copy: Hesychius (Aldus, 1521), TCC MS R.9.4; Hesychius notebooks compiled by Gale are TCC MSS O.4.28–30. 81. In TCC Adv.c.2.6, p.  663 gives an especially clear case of Bentley writing subsequent annotations around his earlier note of Photius. Gale’s manuscript of Photius is now TCC MS O.3.9. 82. Schrevelius’s Praefatio ad Lectorem, sigg. *3 vo–*4 ro; for Hesychius as Christian, see Bentley’s annotations on 859; for Hebrew, see, e.g., 5, 144, 477 (a passage Bentley later decided was an interpolation). The Suda s.v. Hesychius, printed by Schrevelius on sig. **1 vo, asserted that Hesychius was a pagan. 83. According to a seventeenth-century study guide for young divines, Hesychius was “incomparably the best” for Hellenistic Greek “but very false printed”: Thomas Barlow (attrib.), “A Library for younger Schollers” Compiled by an English Scholar-Priest around 1655, ed. Alma DeJordy and Harris Francis Fletcher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 26. 84. In a heavier and later hand, Bentley inserted square brackets around entries with Christian lemmata passim in TCC Adv.c.2.6; see also Bentley to J. C. Biel, London, 30 August 1714, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 484–490, and TCC MS B.17.20 (a volume of biblical compilations), fols. 143 ro–144 vo. 85. In one of the printed copies of the Homeric poems that Bentley marked throughout with digammas, the hand appears to be as early as the first annotations in his printed Hesychius: Henri Estienne, ed., Poetae graeci principes heroici carminis (Geneva, 1566), BL shelfmark 677.h.1. 86. Aurelii Prudentii Clementis quae exstant, ed. Nicolaas Heinsius, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1667), BL shelfmark 686.d.7–8. 87. Corpus Christi College (formerly Benét College), Cambridge, MS 223; see Heinsius’s introduction “Lectori,” sigg. *10 vo–*11 ro. Bentley recorded its readings as “B.” 88. Heinsius’s manuscript was Bodl. MS Auct.F.3.6 (described in his preface “Lectori,” sig. *9 ro). 89. Taking issue with Vossius’s choices, recto and verso of the blank leaf preceding the title page to vol. 1; conjectures, e.g., 1:235, 1:311; conjectures to Heinsius’s notes, e.g., 2:31 (on Peri stephanon 2.96). 90. P. Terentii comoediae sex, ed. Thomas Farnaby (London, 1651), multiply reprinted in the following decades. 91. Cajus Valerius Catullus, ed. Isaac Vossius (Leiden and London, 1684).

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92. On Scaliger’s editions, see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:161–179. 93. Isaac Vossius to Edward Bernard, Windsor, 15 October 1679, Bodl. MS Smith 16, p. 1: “Quod parcus sis in interponenda tua circa variantes lectiones opinione, et hoc quoque placet, sequerisque in eo magnorum in literis virorum exemplum, qui maluerunt in locis dubijs aliorum exspectare potius quam anticipare sententiam, cum judicij a prudentibus loco semper habeatur suspendere judicium. Nec tamen propterea peribunt tibi si quae praeclare cogitata aut observata videbuntur.” 94. Petit’s notebooks are Bodl. MSS Auct.F.infra 1.4–5. Bernard’s full edition of Josephus appeared posthumously at Oxford in 1700; in 1687 he published On the Jewish War in a small format with explanatory notes, for the Oxford series of New Year Books. On the Josephus edition, see Carter, Oxford University Press, 88–90. 95. Joseph Scaliger, Epistolae (Leiden, 1627), BL shelfmark 1086.b.1. 96. On Casaubon’s letters, ed. by André Rivet and J. F. Gronovius (The Hague, 1638), see Paul Dibon, “Les avatars d’une édition de correspondance: Les Epistolae I. Casauboni de 1638,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 2 (1982): 25–63; Gerardi Joan: Vossii et clarorum virorum ad eum epistolae, ed. Paul Colomiès (London, 1690). William Nichols (1644–1712), formerly secretary to John Fell of Oxford, eagerly annotated his copy of the Vossius correspondence (BL shelfmark 635.m.10), especially for its clear documentation of G. J. Vossius’s patronage by William Laud. 97. Sylloges epistolarum . . . tomi quinque, ed. Pieter Burmann, 5 vols. (Leiden, 1724–1727). A complete edition of Scaliger’s letters by Anthony Grafton, Paul Botley, and Dirk van Miert is now in progress. 98. In Bentley’s copy of Scaliger’s Epistolae, e.g., 627. 99. Richard Bentley, “Epistola ad . . . Millium,” in Joannis Antiocheni cognomento Malalae historia chronica (Oxford, 1691), 20–21; see also 50. 100. Isaac Casaubon, Animadversiones in Athenaei Dipnosophistas (Lyon, 1600); from Porphyrogenitus’s De legationibus, Fulvio Orsini, ed., Ex libris Polybii Megapolitani selecta De legationibus (Antwerp, 1582), and David Hoeschelius, ed., Eclogae legationum (Augsburg, 1603); from the De virtutibus et vitiis, Henri de Valois, ed., Polybii, Diodori Siculi . . . excerpta (Paris, 1634). 101. Canter published Sophocles fragments in his Aeschylus edition (Antwerp, 1580); his Aristophanes fragments were posthumously printed in the Aristophanes variorum of Leiden 1624, and he also prepared a collection of Euripides fragments (Bodl. MS D’Orville 121), which did not appear in his own edition of Euripides (Antwerp, 1571). Stanley’s Aeschylus fragments are in his Aeschyli tragoediae septem (London, 1663), 638–649. 102. Isaac Casaubon, De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira (Paris, 1605). 103. Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri septem (Lyon, 1561). 104. G.  J. Vossius, De veterum poetarum temporibus libri duo (Amsterdam, 1654); Lilio Giraldi, Historiae poetarum dialogi decem (Basel, 1545). A reprint with new annotations by Johann Faes and Paul Colomiès appeared in Giraldi’s Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Leiden, 1696), 2:1–518.

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105. Bodl MS Add.A.70, the first of Hody’s volumes of source indexes, contains author citations collected from Eustathius, the Aristophanes scholia, and the scholia to Apollonius Rhodius, among other Greek authors; Bodl. MS Add.A.74 is an alphabetical list of attested authors with references to the passages that cite them. The hand is clearly Hody’s and not Bentley’s. 106. Word indexes and author indexes to several sets of Greek scholia compiled by R. Walker at Fredville and Wye (Kent) during the 1680s, TCC MS R.16.37; Thomas Gale’s index of authors cited in the Suda, TCC MS O.4.17, fol. 72 ro; Bentley’s handwritten author index tipped into the end of a printed edition of Pindar with scholia (Frankfurt, 1542), BL shelfmark 682.b.3. 107. The notebooks compiled by Canter (1542–1575) are Bodl. MSS D’Orville 122 (fragments of thirty-six Greek tragedians) and 123 (fragments of Greek comedians); they are described in Gruys, Early Printed Editions of Aeschylus, 301–304. The D’Orville manuscripts had not yet entered the Bodleian during Bentley’s lifetime. 108. Gruys, Early Printed Editions of Aeschylus, 307–308. 109. Pindari. Olympia. Pythia. Nemea. Isthmia (Frankfurt, 1542), BL shelfmark 682.b.3. Bentley’s author index on loose gatherings is tipped in at the end of the volume. 110. See Casaubon’s Animadversiones in Athenaei Dipnosophistas; Caspar Barthius, Adversariorum commentariorum libri lx (Frankfurt, 1624); and Joseph Juste Scaliger, Conjectanea in T. Varronem de lingua latina (Paris, 1565). For Scaliger, see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:110–114.

3. Bentley in Oxford 1. Richard Bentley, Epistola ad Cl. V. Joannem Millium S.T.P., in Joannes Malalas, Historia chronica (Oxford, 1691), hereafter Letter. Modern editions: Chronographia, ed. Ludwig Dindorf (Bonn, 1831), and The Chronicle of John Malalas, trans. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys, and Roger Scott (Melbourne: Australian Association for Byzantine Studies, 1986). 2. Isaac Casaubon, Animadversiones in Athenaei Dipnosophistas (Lyon, 1600); reference works: e.g., Lilio Giraldi, Historia poetarum tam Graecorum quam Latinorum (Basel, 1545); Johann Meursius, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; sive de tragoediis eorum (Leiden, 1619); G. J. Vossius, De veterum poetarum temporibus (Amsterdam, 1654); Porphyrogenitus: Johann Meursius, ed., De administrando imperio (Leiden, 1611); and Henri de Valois, Polybii, Diodori Siculi, Nicolai Damasceni, Dionysii Halicar. . . . excerpta ex Collectaneis Constantini Augusti Porphyrogenetae (Paris, 1634). 3. John Wallis, ed., Archimedes’ Psammites (Oxford, 1676) and the first Greek edition of Aristarchus, On the Sizes and Risings of the Sun and Moon (Oxford, 1688); Humphrey Prideaux, Marmora oxoniensia (Oxford, 1676); Thomas Lydiat, Canones chronologici (Oxford, 1675). 4. An exception: William Beveridge, Σunodikovn, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1672), a collection of Greek church councils and other documents. I owe this reference to G. J. Toomer.

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5. “Gregory, John,” ODNB; G.  J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 102; Mordechai Feingold, “Chilmead, Edmund (1610–1654),” ODNB. 6. Further participants in the edition were Henry Dodwell and William Lloyd. Jean-Louis Quantin, “Anglican Scholarship Gone Mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–1711) and Christian Antiquity,” in History of Scholarship, ed. Christopher Ligota and Jean-Louis Quantin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 327. 7. Arguments for this identification: Malalas, sig. *********1ro-vo, sig. Hh2 vo. 8. Malalas, sig. Ii4 ro–Kk2 ro, and see also sig. Hh2 vo–Ii4 ro; in both sets of notes, Mill (or an anonymous associate) referred to Charles Du Fresne, Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae graecitatis, 2 vols. (Lyon, 1688). 9. On early Byzantine editions, see G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1:32. 10. Thomas Stanley, History of Philosophy, 4 vols. (London, 1655–1660), 1:21. 11. Henri de Valois, in Polybii. Diodori Siculi . . . Excerpta (Paris, 1634), sig. e1 ro: “Ioannem autem Malelam . . . consulto missum feci, eo quod praeter tres quatuorve fabulas de Minoe, Antiopa, ac Bellerophonte, easque illepido sermone textas, nihil bonae frugis continebat.” In fact, the chronicle Valois was looking at was not by Malalas. 12. Humphrey Hody, prolegomena to Malalas, sigg. *****4 ro and *******1 vo. 13. Anglicani novi schismatis redargutio (Oxford, 1691) and The Unreasonableness of a Separation from the New Bishops (London, 1691); see Mark Goldie, “The Nonjurors, Episcopacy, and the Origins of the Convocation Controversy,” in Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1759, ed. Eveline Cruickshanks (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1982), 21–23. 14. John Mill to Bernard de Montfaucon, Oxford, 8 July 1690, in Emil Gigas, ed., Lettres des Bénédictins de la congrégation de St-Maur 1652–1700 (Copenhagen, 1892), 161–162, and Mill to Montfaucon, Oxford, 24 October 1690, ibid., 169. 15. Kristine Louise Haugen, “Academic Charisma and the Old Regime,” History of Universities 22 (2007): 213–216. 16. Stanley, History of Philosophy; J. Jonsius, De scriptoribus historiae philosophicae (1659; repr., Jena, 1716); Vossius, De veterum poetarum temporibus. On Callimachus, see Letter, 67–68. 17. E.g., Giraldi, Historia poetarum; Claude Saumaise, Plinianae exercitationes in Caii Iulii Solini Polyhistora (Paris, 1629); Isaac Vossius, De sibyllinis aliisque quae Christi natalem praecessere oraculis (Oxford, 1679). 18. Letter, 44, referring to p. 181 in the printed chronicle: ejn toi`~ crovnoi~ <de;> toi`~ meta; th;n avlwsin Troiva~ par’ “Ellhsin ejqaumavzeto prw'to~ H evmi~ ojnovmati · ejxeu`re <ejxh'ure> ga;r tou`to~ tragika;~ melwÛdiva~, kai; ejxevqeto prw'to~ dravmata, kai; meta; tou`to Μivnw~, kai; meta; Μivnwa Αujlea~ tragikou;~ corou;~ dramavtwn sunegravyato. The words in brackets are the readings of the actual printed text in the Malalas edition. 19. Ibid., 46: “Neque enim agnosco commentitios istos Theomin, Minoem, Auleam; quorum ego loco non dubia conjectura repono Thespin, Jonem, Ae-

Notes

20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

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schylum: neque Thespis ea, qua rentur, tempestate vixit; nam Solonis aequalis a Troicis temporibus longissime abfuit: neque Jon Aeschylo prior fuit: neque primus Aeschylus Choros tragicos instituit; quod contra chorum, qui perpetua ante oratione totam fabulam decantabat, primus diverbiis & personis distinxit.” For “Theomis” as a variant of “Themis,” Bentley cited the scholia to the Life of Aeschylus in Aeschyli tragoedia septem, ed. Thomas Stanley (London, 1663). Letter, 49. Leone Allacci, De patria Homeri (Lyon, 1640), 275. Jonsius, De scriptoribus historiae philosophicae, III.13, sec. 4, 215–216. In addition to Jonsius, De scriptoribus historiae philosophicae, see Thomas Stanley on “the notorious anachronisms of Plato” (History of Philosophy, 1:41). Giraldi, Historiae poetarum, 746. See Letter, 52 for a particularly suspect argument drawn from a reference to Ion in Aristophanes’ Peace (with an equally suspect scholion). See Victoria Jennings and Andrea Katsaros, eds., The World of Ion of Chios (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Letter, 51, citing Laertius in the form ejpidhmh'sai (“visit”); compare ajpodhmh'sai (“travel”) in Diogenes Laertius, De vitis . . . eorum qui in philosophia claruerunt (London, 1664), 39. (For Ion’s work with this title, see Letter, 65–66.) Bentley omitted the Laertes, leaving him with an actual total of ten plays despite his mentioning a total of eleven (Letter, 60). In Bentley’s annotated copy of Hesychius (TCC Adv.c.2.6), see citations of himself on pp.  373, 444, 445, and 729. The note on pp.  373 is visibly squeezed in between existing annotations. Isaac Casaubon, De satyrica Graecorum poesi et Romanorum satira (Paris, 1605), 186; Casaubon added, “My list [which omitted Ion] contains only those poets whom we could prove, by unquestionable ancient testimonies, to have written satyr plays” (197–198). Letter, 56; Bentley’s plot summary conflated the language of the major source, Ovid, Heroides 9.77, with the farcical diction of Terence, Eunuchus 1028. Letter, 56: “quae [sc. fragmenta] nihil nisi convivia, comessationes, & symphonias pollicentur.” Translation adapted from Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, trans. C. B. Gulick, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928–1957), 4:365 (book 10, 411b): uJpo; de; th'~ eujfhmiva~ / katevpine kai; ta; ka`la kai; tou;~ a[nqraka~. Casaubon’s reading eujfagiva~ would have produced a fifth-foot trochee: a in e[fagon is short. eujfhmiva~ is preferred in Bruno Snell, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 104, and Aloisius Leurini, ed., Ionis Chii Testimonia et Fragmenta, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 2000), 26. eujqhniva~: Albrecht von Blumenthal, Ion von Chios: Die Reste seiner Werke (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1939), 40.

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35. Strabo, Geography, 1.3.19 (60c); Isaac Casaubon, Commentarius et castigationes in his Strabo edition (Geneva, 1587), 33. 36. Edward Stillingfleet in Origines Sacrae (London, 1662), 41; Ralph Cudworth in The True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 295–298; and Thomas Burnet, Archaeologiae philosophicae (London, 1692), 409, cited in Giovanni Santinello, ed., Models of the History of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 359. For other predecessors, see Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 73–74. 37. Letter, 5–11. 38. Malalas, 47 (1691), 40–41 (Chronographia, ed. Dindorf). 39. Letter, 12. 40. Ibid., 12–13. 41. Ibid., 92–93. 42. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–1993), 2:706–707. 43. Edward Bernard to Bentley, n.p., n.d., in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 19; Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 363. 44. Bentley acknowledged that Seneca had occasionally ended a line with a trochee if it also formed the end of a sentence: Letter, 26. 45. “Quod vitium commune Grotio est cum Jos. Scaligero, Flor. Christiano, aliisque, opinor, omnibus qui saeculo hoc & superiore vel Tragoedias Graecas latine verterunt, vel ipsi scripserunt novas. . . . Nae isti, si olim stante re Graeca vel Romana suas fabulas edidissent, sibilis & klwgmoi`~ e scena explosi fuissent”: Letter, 26. He referred to Scaliger’s 1574 translation of Sophocles’ Ajax (appended to the Poemata of his father Julius Caesar Scaliger and reprinted in Joseph Scaliger’s Poemata omnia, 1615) and Chrestien’s versions of Aeschylus’s Septem (Paris, 1585), Sophocles’ Philoctetes (Paris, 1586), and Euripides’ Cyclops printed with Casaubon’s De satyrica Graecorum poesi (Paris, 1605). 46. Varro, Opera, 3rd ed. containing Scaliger’s notes on De lingua latina (Geneva, 1581). 47. Richard Bentley, Emendationes in Menandri et Philemonis reliquias (Utrecht, 1710), 67, cited in Jacob Bernays, Joseph Justus Scaliger (Berlin, 1855), 110. 48. Bentley’s copy is Joseph Juste Scaliger, Epistolae (Leiden, 1627), BL shelfmark 1086.b.1. 49. Letter, 70: “P. 214. Σthsivcoro~ kai; Βakculivdh~, oi} h\san ojrchvsew~ euJretai; kai; poihtaiv. Quid narras? nimirum nostra nos opinio fefellit, qui credidimus te Antiochiae esse natum. Siquidem author est Lucianus Antiochenses de saltatoribus optime omnium judicare potuisse: te autem cum aliarum omnium, tum hujus artis imperitissimum videmus. Rogo te, homo hominum ignavissime, nunquamne Sacras Scripturas lectitasti? nonne ibi frequens Saltationis mentio diu diuque, antequam Stesichorus nasceretur? quid? ne Homerum quidem per transennam aspexisti? [Cicero, De oratore 1.xxxv.162] jam ergo eum audias licet:

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Οrchstu;~, molphv te, tavper t’ ajnaqhvmata daitov~. [Od. 1.512] “ΑllwÛ me;n ga;r e[dwke qeo;~ polemhvi>a e[rga, “ΑllwÛ d’ ojrchstu;n, ejt evrwÛ kivqarin kai; ajoidhvn. [Il. 13.731] Scio tamen, quid in fraudem te impulit; nempe nomen Stesichori, tanquam si primus ejsthvsato corouv~: & poemata quaedam Bacchylidis, quae ‘γporchvmata inscripta sunt, & a Stobaeo citantur, & Athenaeo lib. XIV. ‘Η d’ uJporchmatikhv ejstin, ejn h|Û a[Ûdwn oJ coro;~ ojrcei`tai · fhsi; gou`n oJ Βakculivdh~ · Οujc e[dra~ e[rgon oujd’ ajmbola`~ [Ath. Deipn. 631c]. Locus aliquanto integrior est apud Dionysium Halicarnassensem. Οujc e{dra~ e[rgon, oujd’ ajmbola`~, ajlla; crusaivgido~. ’Itwniva~ crh; par’ eujdaivdalon nao;n ejlqovnta~ aJbrovn ti dei`xai [De compositione verborum sec. 25]. Omnes Cretici praeter unum pedem qui in Paeonem solutus est; adeo ut, cum hunc locum lego, coram oculis videre videor uJporcoumevnou~ & subsultantes. Nec tamen princeps & inventor hyporchematum Bacchylides; sed, ut quibusdam videtur, Pindarus; ut alii volunt, Xenodamus. Vide Clementem, Athenaeum, & Plutarchum peri; Mousikh'~.” 50. Richard Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 2nd ed. (London, 1699), 406. 51. “Non enim sum Cicero. Me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo”: JoAnn DellaNeva, ed., Ciceronian Controversies, trans. Brian Duvick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2.

4. Into the Drawing Room 1. Richard Bentley, The Folly of Atheism and (what is now called) Deism; Even with respect to the Present Life (London, 1692), sig. A2 ro; for excellent discussion and the extensive bibliography, see C. J. Kenny, “Theology and Natural Philosophy in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century Britain” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, 1996), 1–23 and 115–172. 2. Richard Bentley, Matter and Motion Cannot Think: Or, a Confutation of Atheism from the Faculties of the Soul (London, 1692), 2; James Paterson, Pietas Londinensis: Or, The Present Ecclesiastical State of London (London, 1714), 164. 3. Richard Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, Part II (London, 1693), 26–32. 4. Ibid., 32, 30. 5. Isaac Newton to Richard Bentley, Cambridge, 25 February 1693, in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 70; see also Newton to Bentley, Cambridge, 17 January 1693, Bentley, Correspondence, 61: “the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know.” 6. Richard Bentley, Stultitia et irrationabilitas atheismi, trans. D.  E. Jablonski (Berlin, 1696), sig. a5vo–a6ro. 7. Compare Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (London, 1662), 3.2.1 with Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part I (London, 1692), 17–18. The general similarity between Bentley’s Boyle Lectures and this part of Stillingfleet’s work is pointed out by Sarah

Notes

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

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Hutton, “Science, Philosophy and Atheism: Edward Stillingfleet’s Defense of Religion,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Richard H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 102–120, at 111n26. J. J. Dahm, “Science and Religion in Eighteenth-century England: The Early Boyle Lectures and the Bridgewater Treatises” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 15–16. Thomas Tenison, A Sermon Concerning the Folly of Atheism; Preached before the Queen, at White-hall, February 22. 1690/1 (London, 1691). BL MS Add. 4236, 127ro–129vo. The plan is perhaps not complete; it ends with sermons on “from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead,” some distance from the end of the Apostles’ Creed. John Birch was reminded of Tillotson’s 1691 plan for a new Book of Homilies: see Gilbert Burnet, Some Sermons preach’d on Several Occasions (London, 1713), 193–200. Cartesians: Matter and Motion Cannot Think (London, 1692), e.g., 29–30; Girolamo Cardano and Andrea Cesalpino, A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part II (London, 1692), 3–4. For Hobbes, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Thomas Hobbes: Atheist or Enthusiast? His Place in a Restoration Debate,” History of Political Thought 11 (1990): 737–749; in general, see Chapter 1 in this volume. See especially the second sermon, Matter and Motion Cannot Think. Ibid., 31. See Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 1998), and James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, eds., The Books of Nature and Scripture: Recent Essays on Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Biblical Criticism in the Netherlands of Spinoza’s Time and the British Isles of Newton’s Time (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part I, 10; A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part III (London, 1692), 25–26, 28; A Confutation of Atheism from the Origin and Frame of the World, The Third and Last Part (London, 1693), 41–42. Both the Aeneid and Ennius had been used as examples for a similar argument in Stillingfleet’s Origines sacrae (3.1.8, 3.1.15); the Ennius example also appears in Cicero’s De natura deorum (2.93). Bentley, A Confutation of Atheism from the Structure and Origin of Humane Bodies, Part III, 30. To be precise, Justel had done the librarian’s job only as a subcontract from the actual officeholder, Frederick Thynne, who made a similar arrangement with Bentley. Edgar Sheppard, Memorials of St. James’s Palace, 2 vols. (London, 1894), 1:378–379, and J. H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1833), 1:55. Bentley, Correspondence, 752. For Casaubon, see Mark Pattison, Isaac Casaubon (Oxford, 1892; repr., Geneva: Slatkine, 1970), 173–185; for Vossius, see F. F. Blok, Contributions to the History of Isaac Vossius’ Library (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1974),

Notes

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

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and Blok, Nicolaas Heinsius in Dienst van Christina van Zweden (Delft: Ursulapers, 1949); for Leibniz, see Otto von Heinemann, Die Herzogliche Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel, 1550–1893, 2nd ed. (Wolfenbüttel, 1894; repr., Amsterdam: van Heusden, 1969). G. Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Paris, 1627); Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library, trans. J. Evelyn (London, 1661; repr., London: Dawsons, 1966). See discussion in Paul Nelles, “Libraries, Books, and Learning, from Bacon to the Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, vol. 2, 1640–1850, ed. Giles Mandelbrote and K. A. Manley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 23–35, and on seventeenth-century libraries in general, see David Vaisey and David McKitterick, The Foundations of Scholarship: Libraries and Collecting, 1650–1750 (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1992); Mario Rosa, “Un ‘médiateur’ dans la République des Lettres: le bibliothécaire,” in Commercium litterarium: La communication dans la République des Lettres, ed. Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994), 81–99; and Histoire des bibliothèques françaises, vol. 2: Les bibliothèques sous l’Ancien Régime 1530–1789, ed. Claude Jolly (Paris: Promodis, 1988). For the daily duties of an early eighteenth-century librarian who was probably considerably busier than Bentley, see The Diary of Humfrey Wanley, ed. C. E. and Ruth C. Wright, 2 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1966), 1:lxix–lxxiv. For collating New Testament manuscripts, see Monk, Life of Bentley, 2:149; for borrowing manuscripts for Bentley, see Diary of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Wright and Wright, e.g., 1:168, 175; and for Casley as Walker’s agent, 1:153, 158. Wanley did not particularly trust Casley, especially after Casley asked to remove a manuscript of Livy he was collating for Jacques d’Orville and “Offer’d . . . a South-Sea Bond as Security. . . . I would by no means hearken to such a proposal” (Diary of Humfrey Wanley, ed. Wright and Wright, 2:396). Casley’s catalogue is A Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the King’s Library: an appendix to the Catalogue of the Cottonian Library (London, 1734). A printed copy is BL shelfmark 816.m.12.(32); the text is reprinted in A. T. Bartholomew and J. W. Clark, Richard Bentley, D.D.: A Bibliography (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1908), 93–96, and Edward Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries, 2 vols. (London: Trübner, 1859), 1:423–426. Excerpts are printed in Sheppard, Memorials of St. James’s Palace, 1:382–384, but mistakenly dated to the 1750s. Evelyn to Bentley, Wotton, 25 December 1697, BL MS Add. 78299, fol. 114v, no. 804. To avoid the high cost of paper in England, Bentley contemplated printing an edition of Philostratus in Germany and postponed publishing his edition of Manilius. See Richard Bentley, A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, 2nd ed. (London, 1699), lxii–lxiii (for Manilius), and Bentley to J. G. Graevius, London, 15 May 1694, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 87. See in general

Notes

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

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David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 108–109. For de Thou’s books, see Henry Harrisse, Le Président de Thou et ses descendants, leur célèbre bibliothèque, leurs armoiries et les traductions françaises de J. A. Thuani Historiarum Sui Temporis (Paris, 1905), 30–42. G. W. Leibniz bought Gudius’s printed books and some of his manuscripts for the ducal library of Wolfenbüttel in 1710; see von Heinemann, Herzogliche Bibliothek, 125–127. “Upon this Parliamentary Fund [i.e., the library fund that Bentley proposes should be supplied by a paper tax], the Curators, if occasion be, may take up Money at Interest, so as to lay out two or three years Revenues to buy whole Libraries at once.” James had his library moved to St. James’s Palace and had a catalogue of the library prepared by the librarian, Patrick Young; in January 1647/1648, Charles I reiterated the order to move the royal collections to St. James’s for public use. See Sheppard, Memorials of St. James’s Palace, 1:372–373. See Gaston Boissier et al., L’Institut de France (Paris: Renouard-Laurens, 1907). See Michael Hunter, Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), and The Royal Society and Its Fellows 1660–1700: The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1982). Bentley to John Evelyn, [London], 21 October 1697, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 152. For natural philosophy as the progressive source of modernity, see R.  F. Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); for natural philosophy as especially suited to royal patronage, see Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva: Droz, 1988), 138–139, 174–198. Ibid., 140–142. Tenison to Stillingfleet, March 24, 1697, Dr. Williams’s Library (London) MS 201/38, fol. 48r. See McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, chs. 2–3, and D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press 1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 1:6–15, 36–39. McKitterick, Cambridge University Press, 66–68. Ibid., 58–61, 67. For Bentley’s Hesychius, see Graevius to Bentley, Utrecht, 22 April 1697, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 144; Kuster’s edition of the Suda is Suidae Lexicon Graece & Latine (Cambridge, 1705). On Oxford, see Harry Carter, A History of the Oxford University Press, vol. 1: To the Year 1780 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). L. Bourdelon, L’histoire critique des personnes les plus remarquables de tous les siècles (Paris, 1699), cited by Françoise Waquet, “L’espace de la Répub-

Notes

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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lique des Lettres,” in Bots and Waquet, eds., Commercium Litterarium, 175– 189 at 182. On the association between Bentley’s patronage network and Cambridge, see John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). On the controversy in general, see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), and Howard D. Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). While I view the controversy as unserious, trivial, and disingenuous, Levine’s sensitive contribution deserves the highest recommendation. William Temple, “Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” in his Miscellanea: The Second Part, 2nd ed. (London, 1690); William Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London, 1694). That Wotton wrote at someone’s behest is the implication of Tancred Robinson’s earlier, unsuccessful attempt to persuade John Ray to reply: Levine, Battle of the Books, 33. Bentley explicitly remarking that he will not take sides: A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles, Socrates, Euripides, and Others; and the Fables of Aesop (London, 1697), printed with W. Wotton, Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 2nd ed. (London, 1697), 6–7. (Hereafter Dissertation, 1st ed.) Temple, “Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” 60–61. The fables of Aesop were as pseudonymous as Phalaris’s letters, something pointed out in an appendix to Bentley’s Dissertation. Vinko Hinz, Nunc Phalaris doctum protulit ecce caput: Antike Phalarislegende und Nachleben der Phalarisbriefe (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2001), esp. 276–279. An excellent account of Temple’s argument is in Hinz, Nunc Phalaris, 319– 321. See also Levine, Battle of the Books, 17–28, and the immortal lambasting by T. B. Macaulay, “Sir William Temple,” in his Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1946), 1:195–272, esp. 265–268. “J.S.” [i.e., Solomon Whately], trans., The Epistles of Phalaris (London, 1699), 73–74 (letter 77). For Poliziano, see Hinz, Nunc Phalaris, 217–223. Serena Bianchetti, Falaride e Pseudofalaride: storia e leggenda (Rome: Erma di Bretschneider, 1987), 149. “W.D.,” trans., The Epistles of Phalaris (London, 1634); Phalaridis Agrigentinorum tyranni epistolae, attributed ed. C. Boyle (Oxford, 1695). Very entertaining translations of Phalaris’s prose are also in R. C. Jebb, Bentley (London, 1882). Phalaridis . . . epistolae (1695), “Lectori,” sig. a3 ro. Today BL MS 16.D.ii. Phalaridis . . . epistolae (1695), sig. a4 vo. Phalaridis . . . epistolae (1695), BL shelfmark 682.b.7. P. Cluver, Sicilia antiqua (Leiden, 1619), 16, 81–84. Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 98. Bentley, Dissertation, 1st ed., 53.

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62. T. Burnett to G. W. Leibniz, 3 May 1697, cited in Hinz, Nunc Phalaris, 357. 63. Bentley, Dissertation, 1st ed., 13–14. 64. Barnes’s edition was Euripidis quae extant omnia (Oxford, 1694); for his defense of Euripides’ letters, see 523. Barnes’s letter to Bentley does not survive, but its contents can be inferred from Bentley’s reply. 65. Bentley to Barnes, Worcester, 22 February 1692/1693, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 64. 66. Q. Horatius Flaccus, ed. Richard Bentley (Cambridge, 1712), xx–xxi. 67. Burnett to Leibniz, 178. On “demonstration,” see Hinz, Nunc Phalaris, 380–381. 68. G. W. Leibniz to Ezekiel Spanheim, Wolfenbüttel, 20 February 1701, in Leibniz’s Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. Preussischen Akademie des Wissenschaften (Darmstadt, 1923–), ser. 1, 19:448; Horace, Epist. II.1.46–47. 69. Bentley, Dissertation, 1st ed., 14. 70. Ibid., 52. 71. Ibid., 63. 72. C. Boyle, attributed author, Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, and the Fables of Aesop, Examin’d by the Honourable Charles Boyle, Esq., 2nd ed. (London, 1698). For Atterbury’s authorship, see G. V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 40–42, and Levine, Battle of the Books, 59–61. 73. Boyle, Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations . . . Examin’d, 86–87; Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 440–442. 74. Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 195–216; for another example, on Pindar and Callimachus, 216–220. 75. Aristotle, Rhetoric, II.21, 1394b. 76. Stobaeus III.20.17. 77. Boyle, Dissertations . . . Examin’d, 140–141. 78. Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 198–209. On the discovery and early study of the Parian Chronicle, see G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1:360–387. 79. Now BL MS 16.D.xiv; the verses had been incidentally discussed in John Pearson’s Vindiciae epistolarum S. Ignatii (London, 1672), pt. 2, p. 11. 80. Horace, Ars poetica, 275–277. 81. Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 207. The letters in lower case are conjectures: Af Ou EN APhnAIS KWMWdiai eforE H HSAN γpo TWN IKARIEWN EγRONTOS SOγSARIWNOS. Bentley used Humphrey Prideaux, ed., Marmora Oxoniensia (Oxford, 1676), 165, 203. 82. Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 238–245. 83. Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance Readers of Homer’s Ancient Readers,” in Homer’s Ancient Readers, ed. Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 162–164. 84. Aristotle, Poetics, sec. 4, 1448b. 85. Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 199. 86. Plutarch, Symposium I.1, 615a.

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87. Isaac Casaubon, De satyrica Graecorum poesi, & Romanorum satira (Paris, 1605), 157. 88. He knew three fragments from printed sources: see Bruno Snell, ed., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, vol. 1 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), 65–66 (Pollux, Plutarch, and Clement). Discussion in Bentley, Dissertation, 2nd ed., 239–245. 89. Bentley, Epistola ad Cl. V. Joannem Millium S.T.P., in Joannes Malalas, Historia chronica (Oxford, 1691), 46–48. Bentley’s discussion of the alphabetical words in “Thespis” and of a related Porphyry manuscript resemble very closely Thomas Gale, ed., Historiae poeticae scriptores antiqui (Paris, 1675), introduction, 16–18. 90. “Pedant”: Boyle, Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations . . . Examin’d, 91–99; dictionaries and indexes, e.g., 90, 164; theft of quotations, 143. See also Levine, Battle of the Books, 61–62 and Hinz, Nunc Phalaris, 333–334. 91. Boyle, Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations . . . Examin’d, 91–99. 92. Ibid., 93. 93. [F. Atterbury,] A Letter to a Convocation-man (London, 1697) and The rights, powers and priviledges of an English convocation (London, 1700). For a full account, see G. V. Bennett, White Kennett, 1660–1728, Bishop of Peterborough (London, 1957), chs. 2–3. 94. Levine, Battle of the Books, 64–65, 68–69; Hinz, Nunc Phalaris, 366–369.

5. Rewriting Horace 1. The title page was dated 1711. 2. David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 47–142; McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992–2004), 2:70. 3. Joseph Wasse to Thomas Birch, n.d., BL MS Add. 4321, fol. 33ro. 4. Maximus of Tyre, Dissertationes, ed. John Davies (Cambridge, 1703); Geoponicorum; sive de re rustica libri XX, ed. Peter Needham (Cambridge, 1704). 5. BL MS Harl. 6876; Wanley also owned the partial manuscript Harl. 1686. 6. Kristine Louise Haugen, “Academic Charisma and the Old Regime,” History of Universities 22 (2007): 199–228, esp. 215, 213–214. 7. Thomas Tickell to Humfrey Wanley, Oxford, 17 November 1713, BL MS Harl. 3781, fol. 169ro. 8. Tickell to Wanley, Oxford, 6 January 1713/1714, BL MS Harl. 3781, fol. 171ro. See Richard Steele, ed., Poetical Miscellanies, Consisting of Original Poems and Translations (London, 1714), 302–309. 9. This is the publication date of his prospectus for the edition, the Diatriba de Suida (Cambridge, 1701), in which Kuster refers to notes by John Pearson “here” in Trinity College. 10. The proposed lexica project: Bentley to Edward Bernard, n.p., n.d., in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 10–11.

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11. Kuster’s list of books: BL MS Add. 4321, 83ro–88ro. 12. BL MS Add. 4321, 33ro; D.  F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press 1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 2:14. 13. Warehouse: McKitterick, History of Cambridge University Press, 2:90. 14. TCC MS R.16.36. 15. Bentley to Kuster, Cambridge, 24 July 1708, Correspondence, 305–323, and 21 August 1708, 326–364. 16. Bentley to Kuster, Cambridge, 6 November 1706, Uppsala UL, MS Waller gb.00185. 17. Bentley’s conjectures first appeared in the second printing of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (Cambridge, 1709). 18. Hieroclis . . . Commentarius in aurea Pythagoreorum carmina, ed. P. Needham (Cambridge, 1709). 19. Theophrasti Characteres ethici, ed. Peter Needham (Cambridge, 1712), sig. a5 vo–a6 ro. 20. Q. Horatius Flaccus ad nuperam R. Bentleii editionem accurate expressus, ed. Thomas Bentley (Cambridge, 1713). 21. J.  E.  B. Mayor, ed., Cambridge under Queen Anne (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, 1911), 21, 53. 22. BL MS Add. 22911, fols. 76ro, 79vo, 87ro, 91ro, 124vo, 131ro–vo, 140vo. 23. Needham’s plans for Aeschylus: BL MS Add. 23101, fols. 22ro, 23ro–vo. 24. André Dacier, Remarques critiques sur les oeuvres d’Horace avec une nouvelle traduction, 10 vols. (Paris, 1681–1691). 25. William King, Political and Literary Anecdotes of His Own Times, 2nd ed. (London, 1819), 67–68. 26. King, Political and Literary Anecdotes, 70 (Shaftesbury is “the late E. of S.”). 27. Douglas compiled a catalogue of his Horace holdings, Catalogus editionum Quinti Horatii Flacci, Ab ann. 1476. ad ann. 1739. Quae in Bibliotheca Jacobi Douglas, Colleg. Medicor. Londinens. Socii Honorarii et S.R.S. Adservantur (London, 1739); see also David Watson’s translations of Horace’s Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Saeculare (London, 1741) and Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry (London, 1743). For a more threadbare stage of Douglas’s career—he was paid to give anatomical demonstrations for the Royal Society—see Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 634, 684. 28. On Pope, see Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). A useful survey is Caroline Goad, Horace in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (1918; repr., New York: Haskell House, 1967). For Alsop, see D. K. Money, The English Horace: Anthony Alsop and the Tradition of British Latin Verse (London: British Academy, 1998). 29. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 30. Luisa Simonutti, “Shaftesbury e la Bibliothèque choisie,” Giornale critico della filosofia italiana ser. 6–7 (1987): 235–281, esp. 240; LeClerc’s review: Bibliothèque choisie (Amsterdam), 26 (1713): 260–279.

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31. Richard Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus (Cambridge, 1712), preface, sig. c1 ro. 32. Ibid., preface, sig. c2 ro. 33. Richard Bentley to J. G. Graevius, Cambridge, 20 August 1702, in Bentley, Correspondence, 194. 34. For the New Year Books, see Chapter 4; Trinity and Christ Church were founded simultaneously by Henry VIII, both were the colleges in which the Regius professors had their appointments, and in Bentley’s time they cooperated in admitting undergraduates from Westminster School. Free copies: McKitterick, History of the Cambridge University Press, 2:98. 35. McKitterick, History of the Cambridge University Press, 2:96. 36. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, preface, c2 ro: “Horum ego ut praejudicio & ajnqolkhÊ' occurrerem; fuse pleraque & prolixe praeter morem meum in adnotationibus deduxi: ut vel indignantes ac reluctantes cum rationum pondere tum exemplorum numero obruerem, inque meam tandem sententiam vel obtorto eos collo traherem.” 37. Ibid., notes, 147, ad Ode 3.27.15: “Nobis & ratio & res ipsa centum codicibus potiores sunt, praesertim accedente Vaticani veteris suffragio.” 38. H. R. Jolliffe, The Critical Methods and Influence of Bentley’s Horace (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1939), 6–7. On conjectures and manuscripts, see C. O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman (Cambridge: J. Clarke, 1986), 66–69. 39. Pieter Burmann, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus: Accedunt J. Rutgersii Lectiones Venusinae (Utrecht, 1699), BL shelfmark 685.a.8. On page 1, Bentley wrote: “Richardi Bentleij Emendationes Horatij. Aprilis 2: 1703.” Like several other books Bentley owned, he had borrowed this one from the library of John Moore and never returned it: a leaf pasted into the volume facing the title page is a note of Bentley’s reading “Ex libris Revendiss. Johannis Mori Episcopi Norvicensis.” 40. Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–1993), vol. 1. 41. “Utilissimam sane operam navarunt. . . . Diffusa illa lectio et eruditio, veterisque totius Latii et Graeciae notitia, quae in illa studiorum materie totum constituit, in hac Nostra partis duntaxat infimae et initiorum apparatusque locum obtinet”: R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, sig. c1 ro. 42. On these compilations, see Martin Gierl, Pietismus und Aufklärung: Theologische Polemik und die Kommunikationsreform der Wissenschaft am Ende des 17. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1997). 43. Jean Le Clerc to John Locke, Amsterdam, 16 June 1693, in Le Clerc, Epistolario, ed. Maria Grazia Sina and Mario Sina, 4 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1987–1997), 2:101–102. 44. M. H. Hoeflich, “Bibliography in the Seventeenth Century: J. G. Graevius’s Lectures,” The Library 32 (1977): 48–52. 45. Pieter Burmann lent Bentley Nicolaas Heinsius’s copy of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Paris, 1613), which had appeared in the auction catalogue of Nicolaas Heinsius’s library. See R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, preface, sig. c2 vo, and Bibliotheca Heinsiana (Leiden, 1682), p. 123, number 52. Bentley

Notes

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

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employed one Charles Cole, then an undergraduate at Clare, to transcribe Heinsius’s annotations into a copy of Q. Horatii Flacci Opera, ed. Daniel Heinsius (Leiden, 1612), which is now BL shelfmark 683.d.6. In this volume, Nicolaas Heinsius’s conjectures are marked “f.” for fortasse, “perhaps.” For Saumaise’s conjecture, see Bentley’s note to Ode 1.23.5 (notes, 38). McKenzie, Cambridge University Press 1696–1712, 2:231 (V.03.54; the bill for composing the first sheets of text, dated 4 September 1703), 2:285 (V.06.43; the last extant bill for composing sheets of text, dated 28 October 1706, through sheet Ff, which ends in the middle of Sat. 2.8), 2:328 (V.10.34; a bill dated 4 November 1710 for composing sheets Uu, Xx, and Yy, which fall near the end of the notes section), 2:340 (V.11.30; the bill for printing the last three sheets of notes and the title page, dated 3 November 1711). The press records for 1705–1707 are missing, but the printing of the text was apparently completed before 4 November 1707 when the records resume (2:54–55; PA.08). In 1709, there was some delay in printing because new type had to be ordered from Holland (1:252). R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, preface, sig. c3 ro–vo. In 1711, near the end of the printing, Bentley also replaced sheet Q of the text, which runs from the middle of Ode 4.11 to the end of Epode 1. McKenzie, Cambridge University Press 1696–1712, 2:339 (V.11.24). R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 6–7, ad C.1.3.18: “ego vero vel meticulosum quemvis, etiam feminam id posse praestare dico, ut sine lacrimis ea [sc. haec] videat; quippe quae in eiusmodi terrore, prout natura omnes comparati sumus, etsi maxime velit, lacrimari non possit. Prae misericordia quidem, vel amore, desiderio, pudore, ad leve periculum praesens, vel ingentis praeteriti recordationem, etiam invitis oculis identidem oboriuntur lacrimae. . . . Scimus hoc omnes; quod et vita magistra didicimus, et in nobis ipsis experti sumus. Quid igitur tam magnum aut mirabile, si siccis oculis vir fortis ea viderit; quae vel timidissimi non aliter possunt aspicere?” Ibid., notes, 8, ad Ode 1.3.18: “Satis jam, opinor, & abunde pervicimus, aut scripsisse rectis oculis Flaccum, aut saltem ita debuisse: quorum alterum modo si negas; qui Horatius sit, omnino nescis: sin utrumque; vereor ne, qui tu sis, optime sciamus.” Omnis is the accusative plural; Bentley fairly consistently rendered accusative plurals of the third declension in –is, on the model of Nicolaas Heinsius’s 1664 edition of Vergil. See R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, preface, sig. c3 vo. Translation from Watson, Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Saeculare, 434; for “smitten,” Watson writes “persecuted.” R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 198, ad Epode 11.2. Ibid., notes, 199: “Ergo in re graviore perculsus aptius vocabulum est; Perculsus terrore, metu, formidine, clade, ruina, damno, discordiis, passim in auctoribus occurrunt.” On p. 136 of the printed text, Bentley relegated porrecta to the bottom of the page and substituted projecta, but in his preface (sig. c3 vo) he wrote that

Notes

55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

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porrecta in this passage was one of the readings he would now restore from the bottom of the page to the text. His copy of Nicolaas Heinsius’s Ovid (Amsterdam, 1658–1661) is now BL shelfmark 686.a.5–7. Daniel Heinsius, De tragica constitutione (Leiden, 1611), 201–202. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 7, ad Ode 1.3.18: “Non ita magna est a recepta lectione mutatio; ut incredibile sit audaculos Librarios hoc in se facinus admisisse; praesertim cum haec dictio [rectis oculis] paullo rarior esset, illa [siccis oculis] vulgo tritissima.” Especially clearly stated in notes, 412, ad AP 60. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 37–38, ad Ode 1.23.5. In fact, unbeknownst to both Bentley and Saumaise, the conjecture had been anticipated by A.  H. Gogava (Gogavius) in Omissorum in Horatium elenchus (Venlo, 1567), 26. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 22, ad Ode 1.10.3–4: “Et decorae More palaestrae.] Praeterquam quod omnes libri in hac lectione conspirant, accedit etiam Servius qui ita locum citat ad Aen. IV, 559. & Lactantius ad Statii Thebaid. VI, 830. Daniel tamen Heinsius pro solita sua periergiva/ incrustare vult locum sincerum; & mirum quam infeliciter corrigit, Catus & decorae hu— —more palaestrae, . . .” See Daniel Heinsius, In Q. Horatii Flacci Opera, Animadversiones et Notae (Leiden, 1629), published with Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Leiden, 1629), 25; in his text, however, Heinsius printed more (11). Jean Le Clerc, Ars critica, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1697). Jean Le Clerc, review of Bentley’s Horace edition, in Bibliothèque choisie 26.1 (1713): 274: “Une chose, qui fait voir qu’en cette occasion on n’est pas appuyé sur une évidence Mathematique, c’est qu’on employe souvent en un endroit une Maxime, qu’on rejette dans un autre. Cela montre que la Maxime n’est pas génerale & sans exception, & par conséquent peu sure; ou qu’on ne la sait pas bien appliquer, parce qu’il s’agit de matieres obscures.” Earlier in the review, Le Clerc had extensively criticized Bentley’s method of argument from analogy (266–272). Klara Vanek, Ars corrigendi in der frühen Neuzeit: Studien zur Geschichte der Textkritik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007). Such are the examples produced in David Konstan and Frances Muecke, “Richard Bentley as a Reader of Horace,” Classical Journal 88 (1993): 179–186. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 154, ad Ode 4.2.23. Ibid., notes, 212, ad Epode 17.42; he had the support of a single manuscript in changing vice to vicem. Ibid., notes, 116–117, ad Ode 3.11.9; Dacier had conjectured laetis campis for latis. On translation, see Art of Poetry, 133–134. Ibid., notes, 169, ad Ode 4.8.17. In the line Non incendia Carthaginis inpiae, the caesura ought to fall after the first syllable of Carthaginis. Ibid., notes, 90, ad Ode 3.2.1.

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70. Ionics a minore: notes, 118–120, ad Ode 3.12.1; synartetes: notes, 196–198, ad Epode 11.1. 71. Ibid., notes, 321, ad Satire 2.5.79. 72. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 47–53; Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:28–32, 63, 172–176. 73. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 165, ad Ode 4.6.17. 74. Ibid., notes, 351, ad Epistle 1.6.59. 75. Ibid., notes, 397, ad Epistle 2.2.87. 76. The manuscript is apparently no longer in Worcester; see R. M. Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in Worcester Cathedral Library (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001). 77. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, notes, 423, ad Art of Poetry 157; this conjecture (maturis for naturis) is especially unconvincing. 78. Ibid., notes, 421, ad Art of Poetry 141. For a third use of the Worcester manuscript, see notes, 417, ad Art of Poetry 99. 79. Ibid., notes, 417, ad Art of Poetry 101; Ut ridentibus adrident, ita flentibus adflent (for the received adsunt). 80. J.  H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1833) 1:316–321; full bibliography is in A. T. Bartholomew and J. W. Clark, Richard Bentley D.D.: A Bibliography of His Works and of All the Literature Called Forth by His Acts or His Writings (Cambridge, 1908). For an attack on Bentley’s Latinity—among other shortcomings, he unfortunately boasted of his own linguistic puritas (purity), a word that is itself unclassical—see Richard Johnson, Aristarchus Anti-Bentleianus (Nottingham, 1717). 81. Acta eruditorum (Leipzig), November 1712, 481–485. Articles in the Acta were unsigned, but a manuscript annotation in the Princeton University Library copy (Department of Special Collections, Ex 0958.113.1712–1713) attributes this review to Olearius. For other sets of the Acta annotated with the names of contributors, see Hub. Laeven, The “Acta Eruditorum” under the Editorship of Otto Mencke, trans. Lynne Richards (Amsterdam: APAHolland University Press, 1990). 82. Michel de la Roche, ed., Memoirs of Literature (London), January 1712, 17– 24. On this journal, see Alvin Sullivan, ed., British Literary Magazines, vol. 1 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 189–191, 223–225; de la Roche was an associate of Bentley’s friend Samuel Clarke (189). 83. Pieter Burmann, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus (Utrecht, 1713), preface, sig. *3ro– *3vo. Burmann acknowledged the edition was his when he enclosed a copy with a 1713 letter to Bentley (Utrecht, 18 June 1713, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 463). Apparently, Burmann’s edition was successful in the market for school books: the copy in the Princeton University Library, Department of Special Collections, shelfmark WIT 2865.1713, belonged to Princeton’s first president John Witherspoon, who brought it to the University of Edinburgh as an undergraduate in 1736. See Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925), 1:13n14.

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84. Burmann, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus (1713), preface, sig. *5vo–*6ro: “Hoc vero omnibus persuasum esse volumus, nos plurimas Viri ingeniosissimi conjecturas, quae quidem auctoritate librorum veterum nituntur, verissimas credere, & etiam infinitas in textum admisisse, sed non ausos fuisse omnes, quae ex conjecturis, licet blandientibus & ingeniosis, sunt depromptae, contra codicum fidem recipere, cum saepe accidere soleat, ut ex novo, & aliis non inspecto codice, diversa aliquando producatur lectio, quae omnes priorum commentatorum conjecturas evertat. Quamvis ergo credamus a renatis literis, non utiliorem cuiquam Poetae operam fuisse impensam, neque certas magis, & vi demonstrandi commendabiles emendationes, a Critico quoquam prolatas, non tamen omnes eadem evidentia se mihi adhuc probasse dissimulare nolo, neque hanc ingenui animi denudationem mihi fraudi fore spero, cum, si usquam libertate aliqua uti liceat, ea certe in literaria republ. summa esse debeat, in qua neque Reges, neque Tyrannos adgnoscimus, sed unicuique suis legibus vivere, & arbitrio rem gerere licet.” 85. Lambertus Bos, Animadversiones ad Scriptores quosdam Graecos. Accedit specimen animadversionum Latinarum (Franeker, 1715). 86. R. Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus, preface, c2 ro. 87. Bos, Animadversiones, sig. **2ro: “praefert enim [sc. the Franeker manuscript] ut plurimum lectiones eas, quas Lambinus, Cruquius, Torrentius & Bentlejus in antiquissimis, optimis & fidelissimis Mstis reperiri testantur.” 88. Bos, Animadversiones, sig. **2vo: “Quoniam itaque hunc codicem excussi diligentius, visum fuit Lectiones praecipuas in locis, de quibus est controversia, heic exhibere, quarum testimonio comprobari queant vel doctissimorum Interpretum conjecturae, vel aliorum meliorum Codicum lectiones confirmari. . . . Quoniam autem non moleste laturos spero viros doctos, si in quibusdam sive Graecis sive Latinis modeste ab iis dissentiam, aut a conjecturis eorum & emendationibus discedam.” 89. On the incessant social and intellectual negotiations that constituted international scholarship at this time, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 90. Lambertus Bos, Animadversionum ad Scriptores quosdam Latinos Specimen (published with his Animadversiones ad Scriptores quosdam Graecos) (Franeker, 1715), 51. 91. “Videmus enim aliquando emendationes institutas minus necessarias, tantum ex aliorum scriptorum similitudine, & phrasi illis usitata; quod tamen non semper procedit; fieri enim potest, ut quis inter veteres gaudeat aliqua phrasi, quae rarior est & non familiaris omnibus, quamque vix reperias apud alios.” Bos, Animadversiones ad Scriptores quosdam Graecos, sig. **1ro–1vo.

6. The Measure of All Things 1. Alexander Pope, ed., Selecta poemata Italorum qui latine scripserunt, 2 vols. (London, 1740); the Horatian imitations were published beginning in 1732 and collected in Pope’s Works, vol. 2, pt. 2 (London, 1739, title page 1738).

Notes

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

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For Pope’s Latin text, see Frank Stack, Pope and Horace: Studies in Imitation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen seculare of Horace, in Latin and English; with a translation of Dr. Ben-ley’s notes (London, 1713); The Satires and Epistles of Horace done into English, with notes, 2nd ed., published with Horace’s The Art of Poetry (London, 1712). Horatius reformatus: Sive, emendationes omnes quibus editio Bentleiana a vulgaribus distinguitur (London, 1712). Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 470, Friday, 29 August 1712, in The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 4:161–165; of the pamphlets, see, e.g., “Philargyrius Cantabrigiensis” (Joshua Barnes), Aristarchus ampullans in curis horatianis (London, 1712), and the anonymous Five Extraordinary Letters Suppos’d to be Writ to Dr. B——y (London, 1712) and Vita et colloquia Richardi Bentleii, ut plurimum ab ipso conscripta (London, 1712). Alexander Pope, ed., The Works of Shakespear, 6 vols. (London, 1723–1725). The Dunciad Variorum: With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus (London, 1729)—the three-book Dunciad had first appeared without annotations in 1728; a fourth book, including an appearance in the story by Bentley, appeared independently in 1742, and the four-book poem appeared, with new annotations by “Bentley,” in 1743; Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Lewis Theobald, Shakespeare Restored, or, A Specimen of the Many Errors, as Well Committed, as Unamended by Mr. Pope in His Late Edition of This Poet (London, 1726). Scriblerus’s authorship of Bentley’s and Theobald’s books: Memoirs, ed. Kerby-Miller, 129. J. C. Scaliger, Poetices libri vii (Lyon, 1561), 70 (sec. 2.28). Dunciad Variorum, “Virgilius Restauratus,” 101n(b). See Marcus Walsh, Shakespeare, Milton, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Editing: The Beginnings of Interpretative Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jonathan Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For example, passages of Romeo and Juliet removed on the authority of the first quarto: 6:259 (lines removed following “Nay he’s a flower, in faith a very flower,” Act 1, sc. 4), 6:309 (two lines silently omitted following “Villain and he are many miles asunder,” Act 3, sc. 8); passages absent from the first quarto but retained in Pope’s text: 6:258 (“Yes, madam; yet I cannot chuse but laugh,” Act 1, sc. 4), 6:309 (“Now by St. Peter’s church, and Peter too,” Act 3, sc. 8).

Notes

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13. For Pope’s reactions to Shakespeare’s language, see John Butt, Pope’s Taste in Shakespeare (London: Shakespeare Association, 1936), and Wolfgang Kowalk, Popes Shakespeare-Ausgabe als Spiegel seiner Kunstauffassung (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975). 14. Nicholas Rowe, ed., Works of Mr. William Shakespear, 7 vols. (London, 1709), 5:2131 (Act 3, sc. 6), and the first folio, Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories & Tragedies (London, 1623), 70. 15. An excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet (London, 1597), sig. H1r. 16. Pope, Works of Shakespear, 6:311 (Act 3, sc. 8). 17. Ibid., “The Preface of the Editor,” 1:xxii. Pope also promised here that “The various Readings are fairly put in the margin; so that every one may compare ’em”—a procedure he rarely followed. 18. See Kowalk, Popes Shakespeare-Ausgabe, 299–350. 19. Paul Fussell, The Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954), and T. S. Omond, English Metrists in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: H. Frowde, 1907). Some representative comparative works were Edward Manwaring, Of Harmony and Numbers, in Latin and English Prose, and in English Poetry (London, 1744); Samuel Say, “Essay on the Harmony, Variety, and Power of Numbers, Whether in Prose or Verse,” in his Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1745); and John Mason, Essay on the Power of Numbers and the Principles of Harmony in Poetical Compositions (London, 1749). 20. See Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), and Walter Bernhart, “True Versifying”: Studien zur elisabethanischen Verspraxis und Kunstideologie unter Einbeziehung der zeitgenössischen Lautenlieder (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). 21. Joseph Trapp, Praelectiones poeticae in Schola Naturalis Philosophiæ Oxon. habitae, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1711–1719), 1:46: “Non, quod contemnenda Nobis ista [sc. poetic feet] videantur; sed quod Pueris, non Academicis sint explicanda. Neque nostri est instituti in arena tam sterili atque arida versari, vel circa exteriorem Poeseos corticem ludere; sed ipsius penitissimos recessus rimari, & non tam de verbis, quam de rebus disserere.” 22. Pope to Cromwell, 25 November 1710, in Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), 1:107. In Pope’s account, caesura may fall after the fourth, fifth, or sixth syllable in the line. 23. Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 154 (lines 345–352). 24. On Boyle, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 25. On mathematics as the ticket for admission to seventeenth-century natural science in England, see Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship:

Notes

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33. 34.

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Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 17–18; on eighteenth-century poetic meter as an aesthetic tool, see J. Paul Hunter, “Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 109–129, and “Form as Meaning: Pope and the Ideology of the Couplet,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 37 (1996): 257–270. LeClerc’s edition was Menandri et Philemonis reliquiae, quotquot reperiri potuerunt (Amsterdam, 1709). Jean LeClerc, Philargyrii Cantabrigiensis emendationes in Menandri et Philemonis reliquias (Amsterdam, 1711), “Praefatio,” 24. “Virgilius Restauratus: Seu Martini Scribleri Summi Critici Castigationum in Aeneidem Specimen,” in Dunciad Variorum (London, 1729), 99: “At si quae sunt in hisce castigationibus de quibus non satis liquet, syllabarum quantitates, prolegwmena [sic] nostra Libro ipsi praefigenda, ut consulas, moneo” (If any of the syllable quantities in my corrections should seem unclear, I advise you to consult the introduction I will prefix to the edition itself). Bentley’s Terence edition is Publii Terentii Afri comoediae, Phaedri fabulae aesopiae, Publii Syri et aliorum veterum sententiae (Cambridge, 1726), with the “De metris terentianis scedivasma” on pp. i–xix. David Ruhnken, Elogium Tiberii Hemsterhusii (Leiden, 1768), 24–27, and see Bentley to Hemsterhuis, Cambridge, 9 June 1708, in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 270–293; Gottfried Hermann, Elementa doctrinae metricae [1816] (Glasgow, 1817), esp. xi–xiii. A skeptical account of Bentley’s influence on Hemsterhuis is in J. G. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana: De Herleving der grieksche studiën aan de nederlandsche universiteiten in de achttiende eeuw van Perizonius tot en met Valckenaer (Nijmegen: Dekker & Van de Vegt, 1940), 85. Bentley emended Heaut. 3.2.30 to read Iocón an serio ílle haec dicat néscio (p. 204), which does not change the meter. See Jürgen Leonhardt, Dimensio syllabarum: Studien zur lateinischen Prosodie- und Verslehre von der Spätantike bis zur frühen Renaissance (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989). William Lily, Breuissima institutio seu ratio grammatices cognoscendae, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1678), Princeton UL, Department of Special Collections (eight pages of manuscript notes are bound in after the printed text; the book was signed by a Thomas Cartwright in 1686). Compare Christopher Wase, Senarius: Sive de legibus & licentia veterum poetarum (Oxford, 1687), sig. b3vo, on the subject of contemporary poetry manuals: “Artes igitur ubivis publice receptae, circa novam Poesin [i.e., Augustan and later forms] tirones instruere sat habent, de numeris vetustioribus, velut obsoletis, parum sollicitae.” Bentley’s copy of Farnaby’s Terence, which he signed and dated in 1678, is now in the library of TCC. Terentius, in quem triplex edita est P. Antesignani Rapistagnensis Commentatio (Lyon, 1560).

Notes

p 289

35. A valuable survey of the sixteenth-century debates is in Maurizio Bettini, “La correptio iambica,” in Metrica classica e linguistica: Atti del colloquio Urbino 3–6 ottobre 1988, ed. R. M. Danese, Franco Gori, and Cesare Questa (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 1990), 264–279. 36. For the background, see Leonhardt, Dimensio syllabarum, and for the case of the elision of s in particular, 148–151, 153, 166. 37. Erasmus’s edition is Terentii Comoediae, c. scholiis ex Donati, Asperi, et Cornuti commentarijs decerptis . . . Indicata sunt carminum genera . . . studio et opera D. Erasmi (Basel, 1532); I cite from the Basel 1561 reissue, P. Terentii Comoediae. See the printed marginal notes on Andr. prol. 15 (isti), Andr. 1.1.39 (inuidia), Andr. 1.1.119 (illud), and passim; for the principles, Erasmus’s preface “De metris,” sig. a5ro. 38. Erasmus, P. Terentii Comoediae, 2, printed marginal note on Andr. 1.1.25: “Nisi elidas u in uiuendi carmen non constat, & fuit monosyllabum est.” 39. P. Terentii Afri comoediae ex D. Erasmi et J. Rivii castigationibus (Cologne, 1535), Rivius’s note on Andr. 1.1.25: “Liberius si s, obliteres, postremis vocalibus coalescentibus, erit dactylus primo loco. Verbum fuit, in vnam contrahitur syllabam: quod fit in hisce quoque vocibus, scias & suae, hoc versu: Scias posse habere iam ipsum suae vitae modum. In illo proxime praecedenti: Nam qui cum ingeniis conflictatur eiusmodi: tur eius, iambum efficit, nam eius contrahitur.” 40. “Vbi, Liberius viuendi fuit potestas: nam antea. Vt versus ratio habeatur, elidi Erasmus in viuendi, V, voluit vnum, fierique Fuit, monosyllabum. Nos vt esse Fuit, syllabam vnam apud hunc authorem mille locis scimus, ita illas in Viuendi, elisiones (pene scripseram illusiones) illas inquam elisiones non agnoscimus: cum praesertim tam esse ingeniosum nihil sit necesse. Scripsisse Terentium putamus, Fuit viuendi liberius potestas: nam antea. Nihil hîc nouum, nihil non concessum committitur: neque tamen de orationis venustate quidquam deperditur”: Goveanus, dedicatory letter, in P. Terentii Afri Comoediae (Paris, 1552), 13; on Terence’s manuscripts, 12. Goveanus’s edition first appeared as Pub. Terentii Aphri comoediae sex. Ab Antonio Goveano integritati suae restitutae (Lyon, 1541). 41. “. . . codicibus ita usos fuisse plurimis, ut plus semper apud nos valuerit iudicij ratio, quam librarij manus indocta, atque temeraria”: Goveanus, dedicatory letter, in P. Terentii Afri Comoediae (1552), 12. 42. Glareanus, preface, in P. Terentii Afri Comoediae (1552), 36. 43. Goveanus, “De versibus terentianis,” in P. Terentii Afri Comoediae (1552), 17: “Terentiani versus aut Iambici sunt, aut Trochaici. Iambici pedes duos recipiunt, Iambum & Spondeum, & in quos ij dissoluuntur, nullos praeterea. Trochaici item duos, Trocheum & Spondeum, & in quos ij dissoluuntur, nullos praeterea.” 44. J. C. Scaliger, De comicis dimensionibus (Lyon, 1539), reprinted in P. Terentii Afri, poetae lepidissimi, Comoediae (Paris, 1552), and revised and slightly expanded as pp. 350–364 of Poetices libri vii (Lyon, 1561). I will cite “De comicis dimensionibus” from the Paris 1552 reprinting. On Scaliger’s attempt to refound the study of Latin on Aristotelian methodological lines, see

Notes

45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

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Kristian Jensen, Rhetorical Philosophy and Philosophical Grammar: Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Theory of Language (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1990). Muret’s edition: Terentius, a M. Antonio Mureto locis prope innumerabilibus emendatus (Venice, 1555). On Bentley as a reader of Scaliger and other sixteenth-century humanists in the field of Homer criticism, see Anthony Grafton, “Renaissance Readers of Homer’s Ancient Readers,” in Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney, eds., Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. 161–164. In 1531, Scaliger published an Oratio pro M. Tullio Cicerone contra Des. Erasmum replying to Erasmus’s Ciceronianus (1528); in De causis linguae latinae (1540), Scaliger replied to Erasmus’s De recta latini graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (1528), although he used Erasmus’s name nowhere in his treatise. Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 22–23: “. . . quemadmodum cum intellexerint [sc. his opponents] neque aspirationem, neque sibilum, neque mutam inter se conspirare potuisse, vt prima syllaba in voce hac, isthic, produceretur. Qua in voce eadem qui putant sibilum extrudi in pronuntiando, neque morem seruarunt, neque etymologiam obseruarunt. Nam Aeoles, quos Latini maxime sunt imitati, quod alij ejsqlo;n, dicerent, ipsi, ejslo;n, pronuntiabant.” The same passage, revised for style, is in Poetice, 351. Compare Erasmus’s marginal note to Andr. 2.5.9, in P. Terentii Comoediae, 49: “s eliditur in istic.” Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 25, and Poetice, 354. Rivius, “Castigatio” on Andria, init., in P. Terentii Afri, poetae lepidissimi, Comoediae, 57: In Eunucho: Iugularas hominem quid ille? TH. Mutus ilico. Hic in verbo iugularas, s, eliditur: vt sit secundo loco anapaestus, tertio iambus. Nisi quis dicere ausit pronomen ille, velut ablato altero l, corripi, more imitationeque Graecorum, quod (vt ego sentio) paulo fuerit coactius. Quamuis apud hosce fateor alteram nonnunquam de geminatis consonantibus in versu tolli kata; parevlleiyin, quo syllaba positu longa corripi queat. Et solent Latini in multis (vt diligenter adnotauit Priscianus) initium aliquod accipientes a Graecis, ab angusto in effusum licentiae spatium hoc dilatare. Sed hoc suae cuiusque coniecturae relinquo.

50. Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 31: lengthening is optional in the first syllable of omnis because “primam corripit naturâ. ductum enim est para; to; oJmw'~” (revised for style in Poetice, 363). Compare Erasmus’s marginal note on Andr. 2.3.17 (Sine omni periculo. nam hocce haud dubium est, quin Chremes), in P. Terentii Comoediae, 45: “omni superest” (omni makes the line too long). 51. Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 23, 24, and Poetice, 351, 355. Compare Erasmus’s marginal note to Andr. 1.3.1, Enimuero Daue, nihil loci est

Notes

52. 53.

54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

62.

p 291

segnitiae, neque socordiae: “Iamb. trimet. In enimuero eliditur m & u consonans” (P. Terentii Comoediae, 22). Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 30. The proceleusmatic: Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 24, and Poetice, 353; the cretic and bacchiac: “De comicis dimensionibus,” 25–26, 29, and Poetice, 353–354, 357. P. Terentii Comoediae. Ex vetustissimis libris & versuum ratione a Gabriele Faerno emendatae. In eas comoedias emendationum libri VI. Item de versibus Comicis liber (Florence, 1565); “Gabrielis Faerni Liber de uersibus comicis, imperfectus,” 223–231. Pier Vettori published the edition after Faerno’s death. On Faerno’s criticism in general, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–1993), 1:65–70; on meter, see José C. Miralles Maldonado, “Gabriele Faerno (1510–1561): La métrica como disciplina auxiliar de la crítica textual,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 57 (1995): 407–417. Faerno on Eun. 1.1.34, in Bentley’s edition, 84: “Sed ipsa egreditur. Nullum librum vidi, in quo non ita legatur, Set ecca ipsa egreditur. ratio carminis constat, si ex set, elidas t.” Faerno on Andr. 1.1.25, in Bentley’s edition, 4–5: “Liberius uiuendi fuit potestas: nam antea. Sunt qui dictionem uiuendi, eliso ex ea, u medio, in duas syllabas contrahunt: quod per synizesin fieri posse supra diximus. nos etiam ita sustentari versum putamus, si vel ex potestas, s medium abjiciatur; vel ex liberius eliso e, per syncopam fiat librius: sicut ex asperius, faceremus asprius: ex dexterius, dextrius. ita librius, erit dactylus abjecta s, more veterum: dictio autem fuit, una syllaba per synizesin, ut saepe.” Faerno, “De uersibus comicis,” in P. Terentii Comoediae (Florence, 1565), 223–231. Bentley’s note on Eun. 1.1.34, which he printed as usual directly after Faerno’s, summarized his attitude: “Eadem chorda semper oberrat: noli t elidere, sed Ec corripere” (Faerno was always harping on the same string, and it was the wrong one. Don’t elide the t; instead, shorten Ec). See also Horace, Art of Poetry 356. Faerno, “De uersibus comicis,” 228. Ibid., 224–227; discussion is in Miralles Maldonado, “Gabriele Faerno,” 411–412. Faerno, “De uersibus comicis,” 226: “Quod si quis tertium pedem posuerit, uel unica dictione constantem, uel cum ea finientem, quae monosyllabam excedat, uersum, meo quidem iudicio, omni numero carentem atque immodulatissimum effecerit. atque hoc non in trimetris modo iambicis acatalecticis locum habere obseruauimus, sed & in heroicis quos, & longos & hexametros nominamus. Monemus autem lectorem, ut si quos forte uersus in impressis poetarum libris, huic regulae repugnantes deprehenderit, sententiam suam tantisper suspendeat, donec consuluerit libros scriptos; quorum nos auctoritate nixi, haec asseueramus.” Friedrich Lindenbrog, ed., Publii Terentii Afri Comoediae (Frankfurt, 1623); Daniel Heinsius, ed., Pub. Terentii comoediae sex (Amsterdam, 1626); J. H.

Notes

63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73.

p 292

Boecler, ed., Publii Terentii Carthaginiensis Afri VI comoediae, with François Guyet’s annotations (Strasbourg, 1657); Tannegui Lefevre, P. Terentii Comoediae VI (Amsterdam, 1686). Editions of Plautus were similar: see the seventeenth century’s standard edition by J. P. Pareus, M. Accii Plauti comoediae XX: Superstites, 2nd ed. (Neustadt, 1619). Wase, Senarius. John Leng, ed., Publii Terentii Afri Comoediae ad optimorum exemplarium fidem recensitae (Cambridge, 1701), “De ratione metri terentiani,” 484: “Atque haec de comicorum licentiâ quasi obiter attigisse sufficiat. qui plura cupit, Gabr. Faerni Emendationes adeat, hominis in hoc genere versatissimi; vel Chr. Wasei nostratis libellum qui Senarius inscribitur, sive De legibus & licentiâ veterum poetarum, ubi tota res fusissime explicatur, & innumeris confirmatur exemplis.” Francis Hare, ed., P. Terentii Comoediae ad exemplar Faernianum . . . summa fide recensitae (London, 1724), “De metris comicis,” xliii: “Is [sc. Bentley] certe primus id me summonuit ante annos complures, cum inter vario sermone confabulandum, de Terentii versibus forte verba faceret, pauca quidem, sed quae homini non prorsus ajmouvswÛ satis essent.” See further “Praefatio,” xxvi, where Hare professed to fear that Bentley’s edition of the New Testament would keep him from ever publishing his Terence. Scanning in dipodies: Hare, “De metris comicis,” xxxvii; the trochee: xxxviii; the iambic as a variant trochaic, xliii–xlv; the accent, lvi. Contemporaries used the term caesura to cover the modern meanings of both “caesura” (word-end in the middle of a foot) and “diaeresis” (word-end at the end of a foot). Hare, “De metris comicis,” lvi–lviii. The list of dipodies: ibid., xxxvi. Hare, “Praefatio,” xxiv. In Hare’s Difficulties and Discouragements Which Attend the Study of the Scriptures in the Way of Private Judgement (1714), he referred to Bentley’s Terence in the apparent expectation that it would be forthcoming (9th ed. [London, 1729], 24); in Bentley’s Remarks Upon a Late Discourse of FreeThinking of 1713–1715 (published under the name “Phileleutherus Lipsiensis”), he compared the New Testament’s textual history with Terence’s, probably to promote interest in his edition; collation books for Terence in the hands of Bentley and his assistants Thomas Bentley and John Walker refer to Bp. John Moore without any indication of his death, which occurred in 1714 (citations are below). Had the notations been made after Moore’s death, we would expect formulas like “MS. olim in bibl. Johannis Mori” or “Joh. Mori tou` makarivtou.” Leng’s “De licentia metri terentiani” (Publii Terentii Afri Comoediae [Cambridge, 1701], 481–486) cited Goveanus, Faerno, Muret, Heinsius, and Wase. Richard Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” in Publii Terentii Afri Comoediae (Cambridge, 1726), i: “Ictus, Percussio dicitur; quia Tibicen, dum rythmum & tempus moderabatur, ter in Trimetro, quater in Tetrametro, solum pede feriebat: “Αrsi~ autem sive Elevatio appellatur; quod in iisdem syllabis, quibus Tibicen pedem accommodabat, Actor vocem acuebat ac tollebat.”

Notes

p 293

74. Avoidance of arsis on the ultima: ibid., xvi–xix. 75. This scansion incorporates the principles in Bentley’s essay on meters; a modern scansion of the same line would be ˘ ˘| ˘ ˘ ˘| ˘ x ˉ ˉ | ˘ ˉ | ˘ ˉ| ˘ Díci, díem adímere aegritúdinem homínibus. 76. Bentley’s edition, 196. 77. Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” ii: “Horum autem accentuum ductu (si vox in illis syllabis acuatur, & par temporis mensura, quae pedis Ditrochaei vel ’Εpitrivtou deutevrou spatio semper finitur, inter singulos accentus servetur) versus universos eodem modo Lector efferet, quo olim ab Actore in Scaena ad tibiam pronuntiabantur.” 78. Ibid., xvii. 79. Ibid., iv; see Scaliger, “De comicis dimensionibus,” 28. On the theory of the trochee’s primacy in antiquity, see Jürgen Leonhardt, Phalloslied und Dithyrambos: Aristoteles über den Ursprung des griechischen Dramas (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1991). 80. Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” iv: “vides primam Dipodiam in mediis verborum syllabis desinere, totamque Caesurae virtutem ac gratiam misere perire.” 81. Ibid., v. 82. He quoted with approval the first four lines of the Aeneid, marking the major caesura of each with |, and even acknowledging that “illa fere Caesura Romanis placuit; quae in priore tertii pedis syllaba fit” (ibid., ii). 83. Ibid., ix: “Ceterum quod in utrisque [sc. the old comedians and tragedians] vituperat Flaccus, & in Comicis excusat Maurus, hoc est: Quod in sedibus paribus, secunda & quarta (nempe uterque per dipodiam Iambicam dimetitur: in ratione nostra erunt prima & tertia, pedes scilicet ditrochaeorum priores) non volubiles pedes Iambum aut Tribrachyn, ex rythmi lege ac Graecorum exemplo; sed tardos Spondeos sive alios eis ijsocrovnou~ intulerint.” 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., xvii: “Jam vero id Latinis Comicis, qui Fabulas suas populo placere cuperent, magnopere cavendum erat; ne contra Linguae genium Ictus seu Accentus in quoque versu syllabas verborum ultimas occuparent. . . . In hac igitur concinnitatis laude [i.e., avoiding accent on a final syllable] palmam omnibus praeripuit Terentius; eamque ut consequi possit, ut & vetitos Ictus effugeret, & vocabula tamen significantiora semper sub Ictu poneret; non minore studio judicioque verba disposuit, & a prosae orationis ordine decenter invertit, quam mirificus in hac materie artifex ipse Virgilius.” 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., xviii: “In secunda igitur Trimetri dipodiva/ hoc de quo agimus [accent on a final syllable] non licebat. Gellius XVIII.15. In Senariis versibus animadverterunt Metrici duos primos pedes, item extremos duos, habere posse singulos integras partes orationis, medios haud umquam posse: sed constare eos semper ex verbis aut divisis aut mixtis aut confusis. Quotus quisque hoc vel intelligat? nedum ut Senarios per singulos pedes scandendo tempus in hac observatione conterat? At in hac Editione vel aliud agentibus in oculos incurrit.”

Notes

88. 89.

90.

91.

92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

97.

p 294

Faerno’s associate Achilles Statius also noticed Faerno’s debt to Gellius here; see Miralles Maldonado, “Gabriele Faerno,” 411n13. E.g., Eun. 2.3.32 (p. 101), Phorm. 3.1.10 (p. 401). Argumento: Andr. prol. 11 (p. 2); consistent accent in closely repeated words: díssimili and dissímili, Andr. prol. 11–12 (p. 2), aliám and álios, Andr. 1.2.18 (p. 14), cónservam and consérvam, Eun. 5.2.19 (p. 143). In his note on Eun. 2.2.37 (p. 96), Bentley did argue that Terence and Plautus usually accented the second syllable of nimírum; Bentley made this a reason to emend Faerno’s version of the line, which required accenting the first syllable (nímirum). E.g., Hecyra 3.5.29, a trochaic tetrameter without caesura after the first dipody, emended from Neque alio pactó componi potest inter eas gratias to Néque alio compóni pacto pótis inter eas grátiast (p. 343); Adelphi 3.4.34, an iambic trimeter with a monosyllable originally following the third-foot caesura, emended from Praeterea, ut captus ést servorum, non malus to Praetérea, ut captus séruolorum est, nón malus (p. 274). Hare, P. Terentii Comoediae, Andr. 1.1.25, p. 6: “Liberius vivendi ] In versu dimetiendo legendum est, libriu’ extrito e, quod in verbo etiam libero frequens apud Plautum; vel i posteriore in consonam versa, pronuntiandum, ac si scriptum esset liberyu.” Andr. 1.1.25, p. 5. On Heaut. 1.1.19 (p.  167), Faerno: “superest ut versui consulatur; qui ita stabit, si ex voluptati p elidas: ita ut antepenultima correpta remaneat. & in esse priorem syllabam corripias, ultimo s abjecto, aut tibi monosyllabum efficiatur.” Bentley, ibid.: “Recte: Voluptatis & Esse saepe corripiuntur.” “Plurimi ex nostris”: Bentley’s note on Andr. 5.4.13 (p. 70) and passim. On the Royal Library manuscripts, see Minton Warren, “On Bentley’s English MSS. of Terence,” American Journal of Philology 3 (1882): 59–71; for the two Mead manuscripts, see, e.g., Bentley’s notes on Hec. 2.1.19, Eun. 5.4.20, 5.8.15; for the Caius manuscripts, see Bentley’s note on Eun. 3.2.15. The readings of neither the Mead nor the Caius manuscripts are in the surviving book where Bentley drafted his emendations and notes (TCC Adv.c.2.8); most likely he consulted these manuscripts only after resuming his Terence project in the 1720s. The interleaved book with Walker’s and Thomas Bentley’s notes is National Art Library, shelfmark Dyce 9800 T4to (2 vols.). One book with a collation in Bentley’s hand survives, a copy of Faerno’s 1565 Terence containing readings of John Moore’s two manuscripts (Leng’s N.a and N.b); this is National Art Library, shelfmark Dyce S8vo 9799, and the annotations should be attributed to Bentley in the catalogue. Bentley stopped collating N.b (probably now Cambridge UL MS Ff.6.4; see Warren, “Bentley’s English MSS,” 69) at the end of Andria, and always referred in his edition to a single codex Mori. What survives is an apograph of Bentley’s original conjecture book: P. Terentius Afer A. M. Antonio Mureto Emendatus eiusdem Mureti argumenta et scholia in singulas comoedias (Venice, 1575), TCC shelfmark N.2.6. The annotator’s hand is not Bentley’s, though it appears typical of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century; the annotator occasionally refers to Bent-

Notes

98. 99. 100.

101.

102.

103. 104.

p 295

ley in the third person (e.g., pp. 147, 201). Nearly all the annotations consist simply of readings introduced by “l.” (lege), Bentley’s usual way of noting an emendation; the vast majority of these readings also appeared in Bentley’s printed edition. As an example of a reading Bentley reconsidered between his initial conjecture and his edition, Muret’s printed text of Heaut. 1.1.63 on p. 128 read “Aetate me putauit, & sapientia,” the scribe underlined “sapientia” and wrote “l. benevolentia,” and Bentley eventually printed “Putauit me et aetate et beneuolentia.” It seems likely that Bentley’s original conjecture book was also a copy of Muret’s Terence edition. A copy of Tannegui Lefevre’s Terence edition (Amsterdam, 1686) in the library of TCC, Adv.c.2.8. Endorsements of Faerno’s readings from the Bembine manuscript against all of his own manuscripts: Heaut. prol. 45 (p. 165), 1.1.38 (p. 169). In TCC Adv.c.2.8, Bentley proposed emending curritur to decurritur (Heaut. prol. 44) on the authority of a manuscript then in the Cambridge UL (p. 338); emending humani nihil a me alienum puto to humani a me nihil ego alienum puto (Heaut. 1.1.25) by conjecture, citing the reading humani a me nihil alienum puto from eight manuscripts (p. 342); and emending An cuiquam est usus homini, ut se cruciet? mihi to An cuiquam est homini causa, ut se cruciet? mihi (Heaut. 1.1.29) by conjecture (p. 343). In TCC Adv.c.2.8, Bentley deleted eo from Heaut. 1.1.11 by conjecture and noted that all his manuscripts read in his regionibus at the end of the same line (p. 341), and this conjecture was carried into his printed edition; he also emended At enim dices, quantum to At enim quantillum at Heaut. 1.1.25 by conjecture, noting that five manuscripts which he listed read At dices enim me quantum (p.  341). In the second case, he revised the conjecture in the printed edition, giving At enim me quantum. Arguing against Faerno for a majority manuscript reading: Heaut. prol. 18 (Bentley’s edition, p. 164), prol. 23 (ibid.). Lengthy argument for a minority manuscript reading: conrasissem for Faerno’s convasissem in Phorm. 1.4.13 (Bentley’s edition, pp. 382–383). Bentley’s edition, 170: “Sic [with perturbato] a vett. Edd. & a Faerno est. Sed nostri, uno excepto, omnes Conturbato; quod certe plus est quam Perturbato.” Ibid., 170–171: Sed & aliud est. Quomodo enim Incerto animo, qui aegritudine obrutus est. Incertus est animi, incertus consilii, qui adhuc dubitat, quid faciat: utrum aegritudini se dedat, an irae potius ac vindictae. Quomodo igitur incertus Prae aegritudine? Codex Academicus 900 annorum Incerti habet; Codex e Collegio C. C. a manu prima Inerti. Anne igitur legendum, Conturbato atque inerti prae aegritudine. Bentley’s draft edition book showed the reading inerti as a conjecture and gave victo as the reading of the Corpus Christi manuscript (p. 346); apparently he later looked at the Corpus manuscript again and discovered the reading inerti in the original hand. The reading incerti for the “Codex Academicus” was also not recorded in TCC Adv.c.2.8.

Notes to

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105. Isaac Vossius, De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi (Oxford, 1673); a brief discussion is in Engelbert Drerup, Die Schulaussprache des Griechischen von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart, 2 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1930–1932), 1:417–426. The connection with Bentley was first drawn by Ernst Kapp, “Bentley’s Schediasma De metris terentianis and the Modern Doctrine of Ictus in Classical Verse,” Mnemosyne 3rd ser. 9 (1941): 187–194. 106. Vossius, De poematum cantu, 21: “Si quis itaque hodiernos Graecorum accentus seu prosodiam sequatur, & legat carmina vel Homeri vel cujuscunque alius antiqui poetae, nullos omnino pedes, nullum vel metrum vel rythmum agnoscet, nihil quod numerosum sit vel aures afficiat; sed sonum absonum & ridiculum, & versus qui cantari nequeant, denique quidvis potius quam carmina intelliget.” Prosodiam probably means little more than “accentuation” here—it is precisely the Greek word for “accent,” spoken or written. 107. Ibid., 20; also 17–19. 108. Ibid., 19: Nec tamen existimandum, similem, ac nunc passim recepta est, olim quoque fuisse accentuum rationem. Qui enim cantus aut lectio subsistere possit, siquis Homericos versus, ita ac vulgo fit, pronuntiet? ’Ηelio~ d’ ajnovrouse lipw;n perikalleva livmnhn ’Οurano;n ej~ poluvcalkon, , i{n’ ajqanavtoisi faeivnhÛ Κai; qnhtoi`s i brotoi`s in ejpi; zeivdwron a[rouran: Longe aliter veteres; sic nempe ille accentus digerebant. ’Ηejlio;~ d’ ajnorou`se lipw;n perikavllea livmnhn “Οuranon ej~ polucavlkon, iJn’ ajqanatoi`s i faejivnhÛ Κai; qnhtoi`s i brotoi`s in ejpi; zeidw'ron ajrou`ran: 109. For contemporary interest in Vossius’s theory, as well as H. C. Henninius’s related but different theory about Greek accent, see Drerup, Schulaussprache, 1:273–276, 428–488, 2:497–512. 110. “Metrum”: Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” i (title), iv, vii, x (four times), xv, xvi (twice), xvii, xviii; “rythmus”: vi, vii, ix (twice), x, xi, xv, xvii. 111. Ibid., iii, iv, vi, xi, xviii. 112. Ibid., iii. 113. Vossius, De poematum cantu, 24: “Virgilii & aliorum carmina ita vitiose pronuntiantur, ut vix intelligas esse carmina.” 114. The point is made well by Kapp, “Bentley’s Schediasma,” and more recently by Renato Oniga, “L’apofonia nei composti e l’ipotesi dell’ ‘intensità iniziale’ in latino (con alcune conseguenze per la teoria dell’ictus metrico),” in Metrica classica e linguistica, ed. Danese et al., 195–236. 115. Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Griechische Verskunst (Berlin: Weidmann, 1921), 6–7: “Auf unseren Schulen werden die antike Verse skandiert, d. h. ohne Rücksicht auf die wahre Wortbetonung gesprochen. In gesungener Poesie können wir in der Tat den Rhythmus nicht anders vernehmbar machen, und ich weiß aus Erfahrung, wie mühsam man durch Auswendiglernen erreicht,

Notes

116. 117.

118.

119.

120.

121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126.

127.

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wenigstens in den Dialogversen des Dramas nach dem Akzente zu sprechen; die Stimme überall so steigen und sinken zu lassen, wie es der musikalische Akzent fordert, bringe ich selbst nicht fertig.” Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” xvii. For other fruitful collisions between classical texts and early modern habits of thought, see Françoise Waquet, Latin, ou l’empire d’un signe, XVIe–XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1998), and Anthony Grafton, “Petronius and Neo-Latin Satire: The Reception of the Cena Trimalchionis,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 237–248. Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” x: “Háppy is the Coúntry life blest wíth content good heálth an’ ease,” from Thomas D’Urfey, Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, 6 vols. (London, 1719–1720), 4:288; “All jóy to great Caésar long lífe, love and pleásure,” from D’Urfey, Wit and Mirth, 2:155 (in 1728 the same song would reappear in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera); “He’s décently run throúgh the lungs, and thére’s an end o’ Búlly,” from The Last and Best Edition of New Songs (London, 1677), A2v. See Edward Bysshe, The Art of English Poetry, 3rd ed. (London, 1708), 23 (ch. 3, sec. 1). Bentley, like Bysshe, attributed the line merely to “Denham.” Coopers Hill was first published in London, 1642, but the lines as Bysshe and Bentley quoted them first appeared in the London 1655 edition, COOPERS HILL . . . Now printed from a perfect Copy; And A Corrected Impression. Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” xi: “In Anglico tamen hoc notes velim, tres syllabas positione longas loco brevium poni.” It is clear which syllables Bentley meant because he juxtaposed a model line from Euripides, writing its accents in Vossius’s style: Ηkwv nekrwn | keuqmwvna kai skotouv. Fussell, Theory of Prosody. Bysshe, Art of English Poetry, 1. Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” xi (optional lengthening), xi–xii (the firstfoot trochee). Priscian, “De versibus comicis,” in Prisciani grammatici caesariensis libri omnes (Venice, 1527), sig. 285vo: “In principio nam Trochaeum posuit [sc. Eupolis] quem imitans Sophocles teste Seleuco, profert quaedam contra legem metrorum, sicut. In hoc ajlfesiboivan oJ gennevta~ pathvr. Hic quoque iambus a Trochaeo incipit.” Bentley, “De metris terentianis,” xi: “Eas tu postea, & quam Denhamo veniam concedis, Terentio neges.” Modern editors of Homer do not print digammas, on the grounds that the extant poems are essentially translations from an older form of Greek which it would be misleading to represent only in part. Priscian, in Helias Putschius, ed., Grammaticae latinae auctores antiqui (Hanau, 1605), col. 542: “Apud antiquissimos Graecorum non plus quam sedecim erant literae, quibus ab illis acceptis Latini antiquitatem seruauerunt perpetuam. Nam si verissime velimus inspicere eas, hoc est, sedecim, non plus quam duas additas in Latino inveniemus sermone, F, Aeolicum Digamma; quod apud Antiquissimos Latinorum eandem vim quam apud Aeoles habuit. f Eum autem prope sonum quem nunc habet F, significabat P cum aspiratione. . . .

Notes

128.

129.

130.

131. 132. 133. 134.

135.

136.

137. 138.

139. 140. 141. 142.

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[Eventually the Latins substituted] loco autem tou`, U pro consonante, quod cognatione soni videbatur affinis esse tw`/ Digamma ea litera.” Priscian, in Putschius, Grammaticae latinae auctores antique, cols. 546–547: “Apud Latinos quoque hoc idem V inuenitur pro nihilo in metris, & maxime apud vetustissimos Comicorum, vt Terent. in Andria: Sine inuidia laudem inuenias, & amicos pares. Est nam Iambicum trimetrum: quod nisi, sine inui, pro tribracho accipiatur, stare versus non potest.” Bentley, note to Andr. 1.1.39 in his Terence edition, 7: “Haec magnus Magister: in eo tamen errat; cum literam u elidere mavult, quam syllabam in corripere.” Bentley also omitted this passage when he transcribed this section of Priscian into his notes: TCC MS B.17.17, fol. 7ro. Priscian, in Putschius, Grammaticae latinae auctores antique, col. 542 (quoted above). Bentley indicated in his transcription of this passage that the f should be deleted (TCC MS B.17.17, fol. 6ro). Drerup, Schulaussprache, vol. 1. Erasmus, De recta latini graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (Lyon, 1528), 164–175. J.  C. Scaliger, De causis linguae latinae (Lyon, 1540), esp.  14–15; see also 20–21 and Poetice, 355. Justus Lipsius, De recta pronunciatione linguae latinae (1586) in Opera omnia, 4 vols. (Wesel, 1675), appendix to vol. 1, 33–34, 36–37. For general discussion of this text, see Dirk Sacré, “Juste Lipse et la prononciation du latin,” in Christian Mouchel, ed., Juste Lipse (1547–1606) en son temps (Paris: Champion, 1996), 117–131. Claude Saumaise, Duarum inscriptionum veterum Herodis Attici rhetoris et Regillae coniugis honori positarum explicatio (Paris, 1619), 50: “F Latinorum idem sonat ac valet quod f Ionicum. F vero Aeolicum idem quod b vel V Latinum, quando pro consonante accipitur.” Ibid., 49: “Falsum tamen est quod notat Priscianus Aeoles ubique loco aspirationis digamma ponere, ad effugiendam spiritus asperitatem [cf. Priscian in Putschius, col. 547]. Non enim tantum ijs vocibus, quae asperabantur, praeficiebant illam litteram, sed quibuslibet, & illis etiam quae leni flatu efferebantur: omnibus denique vocalibus, & in principio, & in medio vocabulorum eam praenotabant.” Ibid., Duae inscriptions, 47–48. Ibid., Duae inscriptiones, 48 (goi`no~, oi\no~), 47 (“Verissimum tamen est, gamma litteram loco digammae multis vocibus praefici solitam apud Lacones & Aeoles, quod in plurimis dictionibus mihi obseruaui apud eumdem Hesychium: quorum paucas heic ponam ad exemplum. giv~ pro iv~ quod alias biv~, unde Latinum vis.”). ‘Ηsucivou Λexikovn, cum variis doctorum virorum notis vel editis antehac vel ineditis, ed. Cornelius Schrevelius (Leiden, 1668), TCC Adv.c.2.6. Ibid., 212: “Γevgkalon. ] Γevkalon. Id est, e{kalon, e{khlon. Guiet. Salmas. Γevlanon. Soping.” Ibid., 221. Bentley wrote “et Caninius p. 83”; in the London 1624 reprint of Canini’s ELLHNISMOS, the passage is on p. 93.

Notes

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143. TCC MS B.17.17, fol. 11r. 144. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, in Four Books (London, 1743), 174 (4.227–228). 145. On the scholia in the Leipzig manuscript (known as Li), see Hartmut Erbse, ed., Scholia Graeca in Homeri Iliadem (Scholia Vetera), 7 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969–1988), 1:xxiii–xxiv, and on the Bergler apograph (actually, the apograph of the Bergler apograph), 7:263–265. The Leipzig scholia have been edited by Ludwig Bachmann, Scholia in Homeri Iliadem quae in codice Bibl. Paull. Acad. Lips. leguntur (Leipzig, 1835). Bergler’s article appeared in the July 1719 Acta eruditorum, 305–310; it is attributed to him by a marginal note in the Princeton UL copy (Ex 0958.113). 146. Henri Estienne, ed., Poetae graeci principes heroici carminis (Geneva, 1566), BL shelfmark 677.h.1. 147. The Harleian manuscripts are now BL MSS Harley 1771, 5600, 5601, and 5693; of the Eton manuscripts, one was Eton College Library MS 139 (Bl. 4. 12), and the other may have been an Eton adversaria book mentioned in the preface to Joshua Barnes’s 1713 Homer edition (I have not seen either); the Benet manuscript is now Christ’s College Library, Cambridge, MS GG.2.16. 148. TCC MS R.16.35. The manuscript had formerly belonged to John Moore, whose books and manuscripts were bought by the king for the university library after Moore’s death in 1714; perhaps Bentley had managed to lay hands on the manuscript before it entered the university library at all. 149. TCC MS B.17.17. 150. Richard Bentley, ed., Milton’s Paradise Lost: A New Edition (London, 1732), 212, note to 6.832. 151. Johann Christoph Wolf to Maturin Veyssière de Lacroze, Hamburg, 2 October 1733, in Thesaurus epistolicus lacrozianus, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1742–1746), 2:257: “Cl. Dorvillius heri mihi nunciauit, cl. Th. Bentleii aedes, una cum bibliotheca eius, quam altera pars inscriptionum Asiaticarum, scholia in Homeri Iliadem ajnevkdota et Davisii in Ciceronis de officiis libros annotationes ornarunt, ita periisse, ut ipse aegre uitam seruarit. Miseraberis, scio, et hominis eruditi, et litterarum uices.” See J.  H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1833), 2:357. 152. TCC MS B.17.17, fol. 2ro. 153. On the sound of Latin consonantal u, see Bentley’s note on Heaut. 1.1.49 (Tractáre, set ui et uiá peruolgatá patrum), p. 170 of his Terence edition: Uia hic monosyllabon est, idem & sensu & sono, quod nostrum Way. U enim apud antiquos ut nostrum W pronuntiabatur. Sic & Hec. I, 1, 16. Aut quá via captent te ílli, eadem ipsós capi.

7. Bentley’s New Testament 1. The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (London, 1693); Of Revelation and the Messias: A sermon preached at the Publick Commencement at Cambridge, July 5th 1696 (London, 1696); A Sermon upon Popery: preach’d before

Notes

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

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the University of Cambridge, November Vth, MDCCXV (Cambridge, 1715); all reprinted in Bentley’s Works, ed. A. Dyce, 3 vols. (London, 1836–1838), vol. 3. On the Boyle Lectures, see Sarah Hutton, “Science, Philosophy and Atheism: Edward Stillingfleet’s Defense of Religion,” in Scepticism and Irreligion in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. R. H. Popkin and Arjo Vanderjagt (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 102–120, esp.  111n26; John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and “From Bentley to the Victorians: The Rise and Fall of British Newtonian Natural Theology,” Science in Context 2 (1988): 219–256; and John J. Dahm, “Science and Religion in Eighteenth-century England: The Early Boyle Lectures and the Bridgewater Treatises” (Ph.D. diss., Case Western Reserve University, 1969). For Tristram Shandy, see the editor’s note in Bentley’s Works, 3:259. [Conyers Middleton], “An Argument Proving the Regius Professorship of Divinity in Cambridge, to be inconsistent with the Mastership of Trinity College in the Same University: With An Account of Dr Bentley’s Violent Seizure of that Professorship, and His behaviour in it, ever since His intrusion into the Chair. By a Member of the University,” ca. 1728, BL MS Add. 33, 491, fol. 6ro–17vo, esp. 13ro–16vo. For similar instances, see Kristine Louise Haugen, “Academic Charisma and the Old Regime,” History of Universities 22 (2007): 199–228, esp. 208–209, 213–214. Richard Bentley, Remarks upon a Late Discourse of Free-Thinking (1713), pt. 1, 1743 ed., in Bentley, Works, 3:347–361, esp. 356, 349. Richard Bentley to William Wake, Cambridge, 15 April 1716, in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 502–507. J.  H. Monk, The Life of Richard Bentley D.D., 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1833), 2:119–124, 149; for Wetstein, see also C.  L. Hulbert-Powell, John James Wettstein 1693–1754 (London: SPCK, 1938), 24–28, 31–32; and see Bentley’s Correspondence, 508–526, 532–544, 546–574, for letters dating from 1716 to 1720. Dr. Bentley’s Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greek Testament and St. Hierom’s Latin Version (London, 1721), reprinted in Monk, Life of Bentley, 2:129. The Proposals were attacked in a pamphlet by Bentley’s Cambridge enemy Conyers Middleton in 1721 (Remarks, Paragraph by Paragraph, upon the Proposals Lately Published by Richard Bentley, for a New Edition of the Greek Testament and Latin Version), leading to several rounds of riposte on both sides; see Monk, Life of Bentley, 2:127–147. The word keimhvlion (heirloom, treasure) is Homeric; kth'ma ejsaei; (a possession to last forever) is from Thucydides 1.22.4. Monk, Life of Bentley, 2:147. In the library of TCC, copies of the New Testament with shelfmarks Adv.a.2.2 (Greek and Latin, Paris, 1628); Adv.a.2.3 (ed. Gregory, Oxford, 1703); Adv.a.2.4 (ed. Mill, Oxford, 1707); Adv.b.2.2 (Geneva, 1620, annotated by Walker); Adv.d.2.3–4 (ed. Fell, Oxford, 1675); Adv.d.2.5–6 (Amsterdam,

Notes

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

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1711, annotated by Walker); Adv.e.2.1 (ed. R. Estienne, Paris, 1549); Adv.e.2.2 (Strasbourg, 1524); Adv.e.2.3 (Rotterdam, 1654); and Adv.e.2.4–5 (Cambridge, 1700, annotated by Wetstein); see also MS B.17.20. A rather arbitrary selection of Bentley’s markings in these volumes was printed by A. A. Ellis, Bentleii Critica Sacra (Cambridge, 1862). Bentley, Remarks, in Works, 3:349–352. Ibid., 3:360. Ibid., 3:349–350; see the same point in Richard Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (London, 1689), 2:112. Bentley, Remarks, in Works, 3:358–359. Bentley wrote simply “Scaliger, Casaubon, Heinsius,” so it is possible that the last classical critic he had in mind was actually Nicolaas Heinsius, who paid more consistent attention to manuscripts than his father Daniel Heinsius did. But Bentley seems primarily concerned here to evoke the glamorous age of scholarship circa 1600—and to name scholars who were also famous for conjectural emendation. Ibid., 3:355–358. Bentley, Proposals, in Works, 3:488–489: “The author is very sensible, that in the sacred writings there’s no place for conjectures or emendations [apparently a Bentleian hendiadys]. Diligence and fidelity, with some judgment and experience, are the characters here requisite. . . . If the author has any thing to suggest towards a change of the text, not supported by any copies now extant, he will offer it separate in his Prolegomena; in which will be a large account of the several MSS. here used, and of other matters which contribute to make this edition useful.” Ibid., 3:488: from Jerome’s remarks on literal translation, Bentley “took . . . the hint, that if the oldest copies of the original Greek and Hierom’s Latin were examined and compared together, perhaps they would be still found to agree both in words and in order of words. And upon making the essay, he [i.e., Bentley] has succeeded in his conjecture beyond his expectation or even his hopes.” For a polite but bemused reaction, see J. J. Wetstein, prolegomena to ‘Η Κainh; Diaqhvkh. Novum Testamentum Graecum, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1751–1752); for open scorn, see J. D. Michaelis, Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des neuen Bundes, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1788), 1:828–836, sec. 106.(17). The codex Ephraimi (C) and codex Bezae (D) had been discussed at great length in Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689), as well as in John Mill’s prolegomena to his ‘Η Κainh; Diaqhvkh. Novum Testamentum (Oxford, 1707). For Bentley’s early interest in the codex Bezae—he had asked Wotton whether it was the source of “the specimen of St. Paul’s Epistles which Mabillon sets down”—see Wotton to Bentley, Cambridge, 14 May 1689, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 1. TCC shelfmark Adv.a.2.2. Compare Bentley, Proposals, in Works, 3:488: “he [i.e., Bentley] is sure that the Greek and Latin MSS., by their mutual assistance, do so settle the original text to the smallest nicety, as cannot be performed now in any classic author whatsoever.”

Notes

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20. Michaelis, Einleitung, 1:829: “Die Critik des N. T. erfordert gewisse Kenntnisse, sonderlich von Manuscripten und Uebersetzungen desselben, die einem vorhin mit lauter Profan-Scribenten beschäftigten mangeln konnten: sie war von männern bearbeitet, die ihr fast ihr ganzes Leben gewidmet hatten, und da konnte es leicht geschehen, daß Bentley, der ihr nur Jahre schenkte, vieles nicht wußte, oder sich irrig vorstellte, das von jenen richtig entdecket war.” On Origen, see 1:832, and Bentley’s Proposals, in Works, 3:487. 21. For Heinsius as the editor of the 1633 Elzevir text, see H. J. de Jonge, Daniel Heinsius and the Textus Receptus of the New Testament: A Study of His Contributions to the Editions of the Greek Testament Printed by the Elzeviers at Leiden in 1624 and 1633 (Leiden: Brill, 1971). The original of the notorious quotation reads: “Textum ergo habes, nunc ab omnibus receptum, in quo nihil immutatum aut corruptum damus.” 22. See Elias Levita, Massoreth ha-Massoreth (1538), in Jacob ben Chajim ibn Adonijah’s Introduction to the Rabbinic Bible . . . and the Massoreth haMassoreth of Elias Levita, trans. Christian D. Ginsburg, 2nd ed. (1867; repr., New York: KTAV, 1968), and Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes (1573, 1575), trans. Joanna Weinberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chs. 4.45–4.59. Levita considered the vowel points an instrument of commentary devised by the Masoretes (after the fifth century CE; pp. 112– 114, 121–131); de’ Rossi insisted they had been revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, even if they had subsequently been forgotten and reinvented (p. 707). 23. Ludolf Kuster, ed., Novum Testamentum graecum, cum lectionibus variantibus . . . studio et labore Joannis Millii (Rotterdam, 1710). 24. On Estienne, see Bentley, Remarks, in Works, 3:353. 25. Bentley, Proposals, in Works, 3:490. At Revelation 22.3, he emended the standard Vulgate text et sedes Dei et agni in illa [sc. platea] erunt (“and the seats of God and the lamb shall be in this plain”) to et sedes Dei et agni in illa erit (“and the seat of God and the lamb shall be in this plain”), making the construction singular to agree with the received Greek text kai; oJ qrovno~ tou` H eou` kai; tou` ajrnivou ejn aujth/` [sc. plateiva/] e[stai. His note read: “Erunt ] Ita Codd. quos adhuc vidi: legendum erit, nam Graeci universi oJ qrovno~.” (Shall be [pl.] ] This is the reading of the manuscripts I have seen so far. It should read shall be [sing.], because all Greek manuscripts have the throne [sing.].) 26. Louis Cappel, Critica sacra (1650), 3 vols. (Halle, 1775), 2:1000–1016 (sec. 6.8). 27. For Bentley as a reader of Simon, see L.  D. Reynolds and N.  G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 187–188. On Simon’s English reception in general, see Justin A. I. Champion, “Richard Simon and Biblical Criticism in Restoration England,” in Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin, ed. James E. Force and David S. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 37–61. 28. Richard Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testament (London, 1689), 2:133, 135.

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29. Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, 2:118–120. Simon quoted Amelote (2:118) as writing, “I have used such diligence, that there has not been the like heard of before, to shew the conformity of the Latin, with the Ancient Greek and the first Original, I have narrowly examined all the Manuscripts extant for above these thousand years.” Bentley also named 1,000 years as the minimum age of the most important manuscripts—the date corresponded with the latest uncial manuscripts (Bentley to Wake, Cambridge, 15 April 1716, in Correspondence, 503, 505, 506 [where the figure changes to 900 years]). I have not seen Amelote’s translation, Le Nouveau Testament de Nostre Seigneur Jesus-Christ. Traduit sur l’ancienne édition latine corrigée par le commandement du Pape Sixte V, 3 vols. (Paris, 1666–1670). 30. Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testament, 1:118–122; see also, e.g., 1:95 (on the last twelve lines of Mark). 31. TCC shelfmark Adv.a.2.2. 32. For Horace, see, in this volume, Chapter 5; for Terence, Chapter 6; for Paradise Lost, Chapter 8. 33. Compare the closely parallel argument in Cappel, Critica sacra, 2:926–937 (secs. 6.1–6.3). 34. On the English controversy in general, see Philip Dixon, “Nice and Hot Disputes”: The Doctrine of the Trinity in the Seventeenth Century (London: T & T Clark, 2003), esp. 105–137, 170–196. 35. Edward Stillingfleet, Origines sacrae (London, 1662); Edmund Dickinson, Delphi phoenicizantes (Oxford, 1655); John Spencer, De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus, et earum rationibus (Cambridge, 1685); John Marsham, Chronicus canon (London, 1672). See in general John Gascoigne, “ ‘The Wisdom of the Egyptians’ and the Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton,” in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition, ed. Steven Gaukroger (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 171–212; and Sarah Hutton, “Edward Stillingfleet, Henry More, and the Decline of ‘Moses Atticus’: A Note on Seventeenth-Century Anglican Apologetics,” in Philosophy, Science and Religion in England 1640–1700, ed. Richard Kroll et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 68–84. On this intellectual milieu in general, see Jean-Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 36. See Walther Glawe, Die Hellenisierung des Christentums in die Geschichte der Theologie von Luther bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1912; repr., Aalen: Scientia, 1973). 37. Faustus Socinus, “Commentarius in Epistolam Johannis Apostoli Primam,” in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 6 vols. (Amsterdam, 1656), 1:239–243; Jonas Schlichting, “Commentarius in Priorem Epistolam Apostoli Joannis,” in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 5:409–410, ad 1 John 5:7; Joannes Ludovicus Wolzogenius, “Praeparatio ad utilem S.S. Litterarum lectionem,” in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, 6:309; Daniel Zwicker, Irenicum Irenicorum (Amsterdam, 1658); Christoph Sand, Nucleus Ecclesiasticae Historiae (Amsterdam, 1669).

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38. Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes XVI (London, 1614), sec. 43, pp. 541–566. 39. Ibid., 562: “Non recenseo inter silenda mysteria doctrinam de Sacrosancta Trinitate, de incarnatione Iesu Christi, & similia capita Euangelicae praedicationis: sine quorum notitia Christianus esse nemo potest. Non est tamen ignorandum, in tradendo mysterio Trinitatis, summopere cauisse veteres, ne apud paganos, aut Christianos adhuc infirmos de tanti arcani ratione temere verba facerent.” 40. Ibid., 563: “Minus mirum est, quod ijdem [sc. Patres] vocibus Trinitas, OMOOUSIOS, & similibus, etiam post Concilium Nicenum, per aliquod tempus apud infirmos abstinuerunt; feidovmenoi, inquit Basilius in libello de fide, p. 394, ojnomavtwn kai; rJhmavtwn ejkeivnwn, a} levxesin aujtai`~ oujk ejmfevretai th/` qeiva/ grafh/`: parcentes uti nominibus illis, quae non extant in diuina Scriptura, ipsis dictionibus. O pietatem veram & sinceram! ô viros, vere qeofovrou~, vere Dei plenos!” 41. William Cave, Primitive Christianity, 2nd ed. (London, 1675), 213: “Hence that ancient form so common in the Sermons and Writings of the Fathers, whereby when accidentally discoursing before the people of any of these mysterious parts of Religion, they used to fetch themselves off with an ISASIN OI MEMUHMENOI Those that are initiated know what is said.” Cf. Epiphanius, Adversus haereses 62.61. 42. Cave, Primitive Christianity, 2nd ed., 212–215. 43. E.g., Casaubon, Exercitationes, 70–87. 44. Sarah Hutton, “The Neoplatonic Roots of Arianism: Ralph Cudworth and Theophilus Gale,” in Socinianism and Its Role in the Culture of XVIth to XVIIIth Centuries, ed. Lech Szczucki (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1983), 139–145. 45. Glawe, Hellenisierung, particularly emphasizes seventeenth-century arguments like Cudworth’s, in which the apparently Neoplatonic origin of the Christian doctrine was traced back to the putative teachings of Moses. 46. George Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (Oxford, 1685). 47. John Owen, Brief Declaration and Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1669); William Sherlock, A Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy and Ever Blessed Trinity, and the Incarnation of the Son of God (London, 1690); Edward Stillingfleet, The Doctrine of the Trinity and Transubstantion Compared, 2 pts. (London, 1687), and Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1697). 48. On secret histories, see J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990). 49. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, De religione gentilium, errorumque apud eos causis (Amsterdam, 1663). 50. See, in general, J.  A.  I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); John Toland, “A Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion and Learning,” in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland, 2 vols. (London, 1726), 1:1–183.

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51. See also Whiston’s Historical Preface to Primitive Christianity reviv’d (London, 1711). On Whiston’s career, see James Force, William Whiston: Honest Newtonian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 52. Jean Daillé’s De pseudepigraphis apostolicis (Harderwijk, 1653) was commonly taken as proof that the Apostolical Constitutions were forged—for example, in Cave’s Primitive Christianity, 2nd ed. Joseph Scaliger had previously suggested in a short manuscript essay that the constitutions dated to the fourth century rather than the first: see H. J. de Jonge, “J. J. Scaliger’s De LXXXV Canonibus Apostolorum Diatribe,” Lias 2 (1975): 115–124. 53. Peter King, Lord King, The History of the Apostles Creed (London, 1702); Latin trans. by Gottfried Olearius, Historia Symboli Apostolici (Leipzig, 1706). 54. On Herbert and Vossius, see Mario M. Rossi, La vita, le opere, i tempi di Edoardo Herbert di Chirbury, 3 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1947). 55. Biblia Sacra Polyglotta (London, 1655–1657), prolegomena. Concerning the vowel points, Cappel had argued that the vowel points were not original but had been inserted in the text by the Masoretes; he had thus incurred the wrath of many other Hebraists, notably the Buxtorfs. See Cappel, Arcanum punctuationis Hebraicae revelatum (Leiden, 1624) and François Laplanche, L’Écriture, le sacré et l’histoire: Érudits et politiques protestants devant la Bible en France au XVIIe siècle (Amsterdam: Holland University Press, 1986). Concerning the Hebrew text versus the Septuagint, see J. C. H. Lebram, “Ein Streit um die Hebräische Bibel und die Septuaginta,” in Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 21–63. 56. John Pearson, ed., Critici sacri: Sive doctissimorum virorum in SS. Biblia annotationes et tractatus, 9 vols. (London, 1660); this work is discussed in Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 57. Mill, Novum Testamentum; see Adam Fox, John Mill and Richard Bentley: A Study of the Textual Criticism of the New Testament 1675–1729 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954). 58. Kuster, Novum Testamentum; Joseph Hallet, Index Librorum MSS. Graecorum et Versionum Antiquarum Novi Foederis, quos . . . J. Millius et L. Kusterus cum tertia editione Stephanica contulerunt (London, 1728). It was helpful to know which manuscripts were witnesses to a given book of the New Testament, because Mill often wrote notes of the form “manuscripts a, b, c, and d read X, and the rest read Y”: one wanted to know how many and which manuscripts counted as “the rest.” 59. J. D. Michaelis, Einleitung in die göttlichen Schriften des Neuen Bundes, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1788), vol. 1, sec. 106. 60. Hugo Grotius, Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (Amsterdam and Paris, 1641–1650), 2:712 (1 Tim 3:16), 2:269 (Rom 9:5), 2:118 (Acts 20:28), 3:96– 97 (1 John 5:7–8). 61. Ibid., ad 1 Tim 3:16: “ H eov~ ejfanerwvqh ejn sarki; ] Suspectam hanc lectionem faciunt interpretes veteres, Latinus, Syrus, Arabs & Ambrosius, qui omnes

Notes

62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

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legerunt o} ejfanerwvqh. Addit Hincmarus opusculo LV. illud H eov~ hic positum a Nestorianis. Sensum bonum facit illud o} ejfanerwvqh. Euangelium illud caeleste innotuit primum, non per Angelos, sed per homines mortales, & quantum extera species ferebat, infirmos, Christum & Apostolos eius. ejfanerwvqh, DACWMK Syro. Id verbum bene conuenit mysterio, id est rei latenti. Sic & Coloss. 1.26. Sa;rx LVU hominem significat mortalem, II. Cor. II.16. Vide I. Ioh. IV.2. & quae ad eum locum dicentur.” Ibid., 2:269, ad Rom 9:5. Ibid., 2:118, ad Acts 20:28. Ibid.: “Apostoli plerunque Christum Κuvrion, Patrem vero Deum.” For Grotius as irenicist, see H. J. de Jonge, De Bestudering van het Nieuwe Testament aan de Noordnederlandse universiteiten en het Remonstrants Seminarie van 1575 tot 1700 (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980), appendix II, 73; and de Jonge, “Grotius as an Interpreter of the Bible, Particularly the New Testament,” in Hugo Grotius: A Great European, 1583–1645 (Delft: Meinema, 1983), 59–65, esp. 64. Mill, Novum Testamentum, prolegomena, cxlv–cxlvii. Ibid., prolegomena, cxlvi: “1 Tim.3.16. probat [sc. Grotius] o{ ejfanerwvqh. Bonum, inquit, sensum facit. At certe, quomodo mysterium Angelis visum, & in gloriam assumtum dici possit, non capimus.” Ibid., 624n(h); see also prolegomena, xlix, xcvii–xcviii (responding to Grotius’s use of Hincmar for the suggestion that the text had been deliberately changed by the Nestorians). Ibid., 441–442n(e). Desiderius Erasmus, In Novum Testamentum Annotationes, 5th ed. (Basel, 1535), 393, ad Rom 9:5. Mill, Novum Testamentum, 382n(p): “Ut proinde a recepta lectione minime recedendum arbitrer.” See Joseph M. Levine, “Erasmus and the Problem of the Johannine Comma,” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 573–596. Mill, Novum Testamentum, 739–749, esp. 746–748. On the political and theological climate in Oxford at this time, see G. V. Bennett, “Against the Tide: Oxford under William III,” in History of the University of Oxford, vol. V: The Eighteenth Century, ed. L. S. Sutherland and L. G. Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 31–60. Daniel Whitby, Examen variantium lectionum J. Millii, first published as an appendix to Whitby’s Additional Annotations to the New Testament (London, 1710); for 1 Tim 3:16, p. 73. Richard Bentley, Epistola ad . . . Millium, in Joannes Malalas, Historia chronica (Oxford, 1691), 96; Mill endorses Bentley’s conjecture in Novum Testamentum, cxxxvii and 550–551n(b). THS KAINHS DIA H HKHS APANTA. Novi Testamenti Libri Omnes, ed. John Fell (Oxford, 1675), TCC shelfmark Adv.d.2.4. Like Mill’s, Fell’s edition printed the received text with variant readings recorded in notes; Fell did not write commentary on individual readings as Mill did. Bentley’s conjecture book for his Horace edition is a copy of Pieter Burmann’s Utrecht

Notes

78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83. 84. 85.

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1699 edition, now BL shelfmark 685.a.8; his conjecture book for his Paradise Lost edition is a copy of the London 1674 edition in the library of TCC. Modern biblical scholars refer to the codex Alexandrinus as A; it is now BL MS Royal 1 D VIII. TCC, Adv.d.2.4, 530; the full note is printed with some rearrangement in Ellis, Bentleii Critica Sacra, 67. J. J. Wetstein, Prolegomena ad Novi Testamenti Graeci editionem . . . denuo procurandam (Amsterdam, 1730), 174; for the attribution to Bentley, see Wetstein, Novum Testamentum, prolegomena, 1:155; and William Bowyer, Critical Conjectures and Observations upon the New Testament, 3rd ed. (London, 1782), 410. Bowyer’s reference is to Newton, Two Letters of Sir Isaac Newton to Mr Le Clerc (London, 1754). I have quoted from the Revised Version (1881) with slight adaptation; the King James Version is based on the same reading but is not clear enough grammatically to show what Bentley did. Jonas Schlichting, Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, vol. 7:254–255, ad Rom 9:5, “Amen.” Schlichting compared the cases of 1 Tim 3:16 and Acts 20:28, in both of which he also thought the reading “God” was an interpolation: 7:254, ad Rom 9:5, “Deus.” Stillingfleet’s copy of the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum is now in Marsh’s Library, Dublin, with the rest of his library; Moore’s copy is in the Cambridge UL. Bentley lived in Stillingfleet’s household between 1682 and 1696, and he borrowed books from Moore from the late 1680s until the end of Moore’s life: for the latter, David McKitterick, Cambridge University Library: A History: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). TCC, Adv.d.2.4, 600. For Bentley’s sermon against the comma—the text is lost, but later recollections by a member of the audience survive—see Monk, Life of Bentley, 2:15–19. TCC, Adv a.2.2, interleaf facing page 309 (also printed in Ellis, Bentleii Critica Sacra, 67): qeov~) pro qeov~ Copt. qui, oJ~ / Syr. Aeth quod, oJ / q oJ~ Hilarius 1087. Et quidem confessione omnium—quod manif.—visum est angelis, pr. est gentibus Omittit hunc locum Cyprianus p. 35, probaturus Christum esse deum. Nusquam citat Cyrillus Hierosolym scovlia MSS Photij ad locum in Bibliotheca publica Cantabrigiae. qeov~ ejfanerwvqh) oJ ejn aJgivoi~ Kuvrillo~ ejn tw`/ ibV kefalaivwÛ tw' n scolivwn fhsivn. o}~ ejfanerwvqh ejn sarkiv. Athanas. p.  706 qeov~ ejfanerwvqh sed locus iste deficit in MSS, neque usquam alibi ab Athanasio citatur. Sed Pseudathan. 33 qeov~: ubi vide Notas.

Notes

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

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(Emphasis in original.) For the final comment here, see Athanasius, Opera, ed. Bernard de Montfaucon, 3 vols. (Paris, 1698), fourth letter to Serapion, 2:706C: Montfaucon had already made the same observation. The codex Augiensis is now TCC MS B.17.1. De Jonge, Bestudering van het Nieuwe Testament, 21. TCC, Adv a.2.2, interleaf facing page 134 (also printed in Ellis, Bentleii Critica Sacra, 18): “Euseb. contra Marcell. p.  67 oJ monogenh;~ uiJov~ h} monogenh;~ qeov~: Quasi varia esset lectio. sed p. 86 ut ed. Iren. 333 Nisi unigenitus filius. sed 335 unigenitus deus.” (Emphasis in original.) For “varia lectio” used to mean a marginal reading, see, e.g., Cappel, Critica sacra. Bentley to John Evelyn, [London], 21 October 1697, in Bentley’s Correspondence, 152. Bentley, Of Revelation and the Messias, in Works, vol. 3.

8. Interlopers and Interpolators 1. Milton’s Paradise Lost: A New Edition. By Richard Bentley D.D. (London, 1732). On Bentley’s nephew, see John K. Hale, “More on Bentley’s Milton,” Milton Quarterly 14 (1980): 131. 2. Richard Bentley, ed., M. Manilii Astronomicon (London, 1739). 3. Edward Phillips, “The Life of Mr. John Milton,” in The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1932), 60; cf. Milton, “Of Education,” in The Works of John Milton, ed. F. A. Patterson et al., 18 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–1938), 4:284; Thomas Creech, trans., T. Lucretius Carus, the Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum (Oxford, 1682) and The Five Books of M. Manilius (London, 1697). 4. On the study of ancient science and its tradition in early modern England, see G. J. Toomer, Eastern Wisedome and Learning: The Study of Arabic in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Mordechai Feingold, ed., Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and S.  K. Heninger, Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974). For the contemporary practice of astrology, see, e.g., Michael Hunter, “Science and Astrology in Seventeenth-Century England: An Unpublished Polemic by John Flamsteed,” in his Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 245–285; and Hunter, ed., An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1652–1699 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 5. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, e.g., notes on 1.324, 1.339 (Scaliger’s misrecordings of G), 1.34, 3.71, 4.207, 4.307 (rejecting Scaliger’s conjectures of momina for nomina), 4.501–502 (retaining lines Scaliger obelized; see Scaliger on the same passage in the 1600 edition, p. 337, note on p. 95 line 22). Bentley did, however, agree with Scaliger in some cases, for example, obelizing 4.248 along with Scaliger (see Scaliger’s 1600 edition, pp. 323–324, note on p. 87 line 32).

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6. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, notes on 1.128–131, 1.753 (emending “an maior” to “anne magis”). 7. Ibid., note on 1.753: “Nempe haec vera causa est: ut per telescopia certo scimus.” 8. Ibid., note on 1.865: “Opinio Chaldaeorum, Senecae, et aliorum aliquot: quam verissimam esse hoc demum saeculo est demonstratum a maximo viro Isaaco Newtono: de quo quasi vaticinatus est Seneca Nat. Quaest. vii, 26. Erit qui demonstret aliquando, in quibus cometae partibus errent: cur tam seducti a ceteris eant; quanti qualesque sint. Idem vii, 22. Ego nostris (Stoicis) non assentior: non enim existimo cometen subitaneum ignem, sed inter aeterna opera naturae. Vides hic, quod Noster modo dixit, Natura eos creavit [1.865] et perpetua [1.866]. Iterum vii, 3. Qui apud Chaldaeos studuisse se dicit Apollonius Myndius, peritissimus naturalium, ait cometas in numero stellarum poni a Chaldaeis, teneri cursus eorum.” (This was the opinion of the Chaldeans, of Seneca, and some others, and in our own time the great Isaac Newton has demonstrated it to be entirely correct. Seneca wrote almost prophetically in Natural Questions 7.26: “One day someone will demonstrate where the comets go when they wander, why they travel so far from other bodies, their number and their nature.” Ibid. 7.22: “I do not agree with our philosophers ([Bentley’s explanation:] the Stoics), for I believe a comet is not a sudden and spontaneous fire, but one of the eternal works of nature.” Again, 7.3: “Apollonius Myndius, an expert in natural philosophy who claims to have studied with the Chaldeans, said that according to the Chaldeans the comets are stars and follow the stars’ courses.”) Meanwhile, Bentley emended 1.865–866 from Scaliger’s Sive illas natura faces sub iuncta creavit / Sidera per tenues caelo lucentia flammas to Sive illas natura faces ut cuncta creavit / Sidera, perpetuis caelo lucentia flammis, making it a bold maneuver to proceed to cite the word perpetuis as a proof of Manilius’s opinion. 9. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, preface (by Thomas Bentley), x: “suspicatur [sc. Richard Bentley] . . . eum fuisse alicubi forsitan ex Asia peregrinum, tum ex singulari eius quorumdam verborum constructione, tum quia nusquam apparet ipsos Romanos hisce artibus adeo mature operam dedisse.” (My uncle suspects that Manilius may have been a foreigner from someplace in Asia, both because of his unusual construction of some words, and because there is no evidence that the Romans themselves studied astrology at such an early date.) Joseph Scaliger had argued that Manilius’s distinctive doctrines derived from Egyptian sources mediated by a Greek tradition: Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983–1993), 1:198–215, 2:450–456. 10. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, note on 1.246 (emending distinguit et alligat, “distinguishes and binds,” to disiungit et alligat, “separates and binds”): “Disiungit et alligat: haec antitheta, et similia infinita, surgitque caditque, sequiturque fugitque, deliciae sunt hujus scriptoris” (“Separates and binds”: these antithetical terms, and countless similar ones—“rises and falls,” “follows and flees”— are beloved to Manilius); note on 1.318, emending Hinc vicina polis, caelique hinc proxima flammis (On one side neighboring the poles, on the other side

Notes

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near the heaven’s flames) to Hinc vicina gelu, caelique hinc proxima flammis (On one side neighboring the ice, on the other side near the heaven’s flames): Polis a Scaligero est: perperam. Inter hunc anguem, ait auctor, et zodiacum sidera veniunt e diversis frigoris et caloris viribus temperata. De nostro igitur polo hic agit, non etiam de antarctico. Libri omnes poli: sed noster aliique dativum hic usurpant: ut V, 174. Nunc cancro vicina canam. Facile est reponere polo: sed vide annon verius fit, Hinc vicina gelu, caelique hinc proxima flammis. Gelu et flammae ipsa per se opposita sunt: polus et flammae, non nisi per aliquod tertium. Polis [poles] is Scaliger’s reading, and the wrong one. The poet is saying that the stars travel between the Dragon and the zodiac, tempered by their differing powers of cold and heat. He is therefore referring to our pole, not the antarctic one. All manuscripts read poli [of the pole], but Manilius and some others use the dative in this construction. For example, Astr. 5.174: Now I will sing of the neighbors to the Crab. We could easily rewrite polo [to the pole]: but would it not be more truly rendered, On one side neighboring the ice, on the other side near the heaven’s flames. Ice and flames are opposites by their nature; not so the pole and flames, except with respect to some tertium quid. 11. Ibid., notes on 4.70 (per omnes) and 1.212 (in ipsa), cf., e.g., on 1.696. 12. Ibid., e.g., notes on 1.421 (“Virgilium imitatus est, ut saepe alias, et ex latinis solum”), 1.786, 1.790, 1.847. 13. Ibid., e.g., notes on 1.909, 4.63, 4.180, 4.643 (emendations creating Vergil allusions), and on 1.442 (a Vergil allusion by the interpolator). Scaliger did not emend or annotate the relevant parts of any of these lines, except 4.643– 644 (1600: p. 348, note on p. 99 line 32), where he proposed his conjecture as Bentley reported it. 14. Ibid., note on 1.421: “Repono igitur, quod ipse melius esse fateberis; et, si aequus es, ipsi auctori non mihi adscribes.” He emends Scaliger’s Emeritum magnis mundum tenet acta procellis to Emerita, et magnis tandem defuncta periclis, which alludes to Aeneid 6.83, O tandem magnis pelagi defuncte periclis. 15. Ibid., note on 1.27: “Clepere, verbum suo tempore probum; sed, cum auctor scriberet, nimis antiquum et cascum.” Cf., e.g., 1.343 (obelized because it contained the word aequant where aequantur was required, according to Bentley—a dubious claim) and 1.793 (emending to avoid nonelision of the final intervocalic m). Scaliger made no comment on 1.27, 1.343, or the relevant part of 1.793.

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16. Ibid., preface, xiii: “[Quoting Bentley’s note to Terence, Andria 2.1.20] Veteres in nominibus substantivis exeuntibus in ius vel ium semper genitivos casus i simplici efferebant.  . . . Cum igitur Noster [i.e., Manilius] habeat consilium, auxilium, ingenium, imperium, pretium, vitium, principium, connubium, coniugium, solstitium, spatium, hospitium, officium, supplicium, studium, odium, spolium; numquam vero consilii, auxilii, &c. licet ceteris casibus obliquis saepissime utatur: omnino concludendum est illum vixisse ante hunc inductum morem [of pronouncing the genitive with –ii and the vocative with –i]. Neque enim credibile est eum adeo religiose ab usu horum genitivorum, qui quidem tantas sibi attulissent commoditates, abstinere voluisse, si quidem sibi ex more sui saeculi iis uti licuisset.” ([Bentley’s note on Terence:] In Old Latin, the genitives of substantive nouns ending in –ius and –ium were always pronounced with a single –i.  . . . Therefore, since Manilius uses consilium, auxilium, ingenium, imperium, pretium, vitium, principium, connubium, coniugium, solstitium, spatium, hospitium, officium, supplicium, studium, odium, and spolium, but he never uses consilii, auxilii, etc., even though he very often uses the other oblique cases, we must conclude that he lived before this custom was introduced [of pronouncing the genitive with –ii and the vocative with –i]. For we cannot believe that he would have chosen to abstain so completely from using these genitives, which would have been highly convenient for his purposes, if the custom of his age had permitted their use.) Compare Bentley’s note on 4.123, where he removed the word studii from the received text. 17. Ibid., note on 1.155–156, where Scaliger read fluctusque natantes / aequora perfudit and explained “Trajectio Maniliana: id est, fluctus natantes fudit per aequora” (This is a Manilian transposition: he means fluctus natantes fudit per aequora): “O miseram auctoris sortem; si sic toties excusandus est.” Sors (fate, lot) is an astrological pun; see Astr. books 3–4 passim. 18. Ibid., preface, xvi, selectively quoting and repunctuating Scaliger, ed., Astronomica (1655), prolegomena, 20–21: “Poeta ingeniosissimus, nitidissimus scriptor, qui obscuras res tam luculento sermone, materiam morosissimam tam iucundo charactere exornare potuerit: Ovidio suavitate par, maiestate superior; uno vincitur, quod non potest manum tollere de tabula, et numquam scit desinere; in quo peccat, non iudicio sed fertilitate et indulgentia styli. Est et aliud non leve vitium in Nostro, quod nimius in verborum iteratione; cum posset aut parcius eadem, aut alia pro illis usurpare. Hisce exceptis, nihil ad perfectionem absoluti operis in hoc auctore requiras. In primis omnia eius prooemia et parekbavsei~ extra omnem aleam posita sunt. Nihil illis divinius, nihil copiosius, gravius et iucundius dici potest.” (It took a most ingenious poet and most elegant writer to adorn obscure matters with such rich language, the most tedious of subjects with such a pleasing style. He equals Ovid in sweetness and surpasses him in majesty. In one regard Manilius is inferior: he cannot lift his hand from his tablet and never knows when to end. In this he errs not in his judgment, but by indulging the fecundity of his style. Another fault of our poet, and not a light one, is his too frequent repetition of words, even when he could have used the same words more sparingly or substituted others for them. With these exceptions, you could desire nothing in this author to

Notes

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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make his entire work perfect. In particular, all of his prooemia and digressions are excellent beyond any question. Nothing could be called more divine, more copious, more weighty, or more pleasant than these.) Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, note on 1.527 (obelizing the entire line Nec motus puncto currit, cursusque fatigat): “Veteres libri, curvat, currat. Quin et hic versus ablegandus a textu. Huiusmodi autem interpolationes, quae pro Manilianis se ostentant, hanc ab acutissimo Scaligero censuram extorserunt, quod non posset Manilius manum tollere de tabula, et numquam sciret desinere. Vere dictum: si has nugas ipsius auctoris esse concedimus: falso, si emuncta nare scimus a genuinis spuria discernere.” I lack the stamina to discuss Bentley’s nasal metaphors in the detail they no doubt deserve, but they should call to mind, for example, Slawkenbergius’s Latin treatise on noses in Tristram Shandy, and via that route the prophetic nose of Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children. The sense of scent is also at the metaphorical root of the Latin word sagacitas, one term for the instinctive insight into poetry that Bentley ascribed to himself. Ibid., e.g., notes on 4.47 (ad and quod), 2.290, 4.745, 4.757 (astrological signs standing for words). For Scaliger’s reconstruction of Manilius’s archetype, see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:448–449. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, preface, xv: “Et si forte editor certissima ductus conjectura longius paulo a recepta lectione aliquando deflexisse videatur; reminiscendum tamen est hunc poetam esse omnium scriptorum quotquot sunt corruptissimum, adeo ut variae in eo lectiones verborum fere exaequent numerum, versuum certe longe exsuperent.” (If the editor, led by certain conjecture, should appear sometimes to have departed rather far from the received reading, it should nevertheless be remembered that this poet is the most corrupt of all writers in existence, to the degree that his text has nearly as many variant readings as it has words, and certainly far more variant readings than lines of verse.) For the 1579 edition, see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 1:185–192; meanwhile, Scaliger assigned central importance to manuscripts in the prolegomena to his 1600 edition, remarking, “If I had been able to obtain the Gemblacensis manuscript before, this second edition would not have been necessary” (p. 7), and representing himself as conjecturing (“certissimam coniecturam admouimus”) only when the Gemblacensis failed to provide a satisfactory reading (p. 20). Scaliger did not see the Gemblacensis itself, but used a collation by Jacobus Susius: see Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:437–438. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, note on 1.435–436: “Versus barbari et adulterini; ex margine in locum alienam intrusi. . . . Voluit tamen hos interseri post versum 428.” See also, e.g., note on 1.803–804. Ibid., e.g., notes on 1.269 (barbarism), 1.235 (logic: “nonne dialectice loquitur, ut nihil supra?”), 1.442 (Vergil). For Bentley’s dating of Manilius’s manuscripts—he placed the earliest, the Gemblacensis, in the tenth century (“DCCC annorum”)—preface, xiv. Ibid., note on 1.524: “Gestiebant olim falsarii suos, ubicumque poterant, versus intrudere.”

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26. Ibid., e.g., notes on 1.128–131, 1.378–379. 27. Ibid., e.g., notes on 1.478 (correction), 1.483 (Bentley conjectures singula, rejecting the received sidera as a gloss), 1.463 (error from a near-parallel), 4.47 (error from abbreviation). 28. Euclid: see Enrico Giusti, Euclides reformatus: La teoria delle proporzioni nella scuola galileiana (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993); Homer: see Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, note on 5.415, p.  163: “But I hold to that point, that Homer [i.e., Milton] himself did not write This, but Choerilus his Editor”; Ovid: see Nicolaas Heinsius, ed., Operum P. Ovidii Nasonis editio nova, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1658–1661), and Bentley’s copiously annotated copy of this edition, BL shelfmark 686.a.5–7. 29. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, note on 1.458: “mihi nullum dubium est, quin interpolator sic dederit.” 30. “Charles Boyle” (i.e., Francis Atterbury), Dr. Bentley’s Dissertations . . . Examin’d (London, 1698). 31. Hesychius: see Richard Bentley to J. C. Biel, Cambridge, 10 July 1714 n.s., in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 481–483; and see also Bentley’s annotated copy of Hesychius in TCC, shelfmark Adv.c.2.6. Casaubon: see Peter Needham, ed., Theophrasti Characteres ethici (Cambridge, 1712), “Syllabus locorum, quibus Casauboni commentarium interpolavit Editor Brunsvicensis: quos quidem uncis includendos curaveram, nisi serius animadversi fuissent” (“List of passages interpolated into Casaubon’s commentary by the Braunschweig editor, and which I would have printed enclosed in brackets had they not been noticed too late”; page preceding half-title for Casaubon’s commentary). Bentley most likely read Needham’s edition in proof. 32. Katherine Philips to “Poliarchus,” Cardigan, 29 January 1663/1664, in her Poems (London, 1667), preface, sig. A2vo; she refers to the unauthorized London 1664 Poems. See in general Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 33. See, e.g., R. J. Tarrant’s suggestive “The Reader as Author: Collaborative Interpolation in Latin Poetry,” in Editing Greek and Latin Texts, ed. John N. Grant (New York: AMS, 1989), 121–162, where the narrative ends abruptly with the introduction of printing. 34. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, note on 1.29: “Postremi duo versus [i.e., Quis sua disposuit per tempora, cognita ut essent / Omnibus et mundi facies, caelumque supernum, which Bentley printed under obelization as 1.38–39] a libris omnibus absunt; credo eos a Bonincontrio, qui primus Manilium cum commentario edidit, fuisse confictos.” Quis was Scaliger’s conjecture replacing Qui. 35. The term interpolator: ibid., e.g., notes on 1.245, 1.284, 1.458. 36. Ibid., note on 4.105, emending Scaliger’s Astra novant formas, caelumque interserit ora (of monstrous births) to Astra novant formas, caelumque interpolat oras:

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Astra novant formas, caelumque interserit oras. Ut in centauro, inquit Scaliger, homo interseritur equo. Immo non interseritur, sed connectitur. Repone, Astra novant formas, caelumque interpolat ora. Nonius: Interpolare, est novam formam e vetere fingere; ut Plautus Amphitryone, Ille homo me interpolabit, meumque os finget denuo. Ecce hic habes interpolare et os. Vide nos, si curae est, ad Terentii Heautont. ii, iii, 48. (The stars make new forms, and heaven inserts their faces. “As in a centaur, a man is inserted onto a horse,” explains Scaliger. In fact a man is not inserted, but connected. Write instead, The stars make new forms, and heaven renews [interpolat] their faces. According to Nonius, “Interpolare [to renew] is to create a new form out of an old one,” as in Plautus’ Amphitryo: That man will renew me and make me a whole new face. [Amph. 1.1.161] Observe that here we have both interpolare [to renew] and face. If you care to, see my note on Terence, Heautontimorumenos 2.3.48.)

37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

On the two senses of interpolare, see also Giorgio Pasquali, “Interpolazione” (Enciclopedia italiana, 1933), repr. in Pasquali’s Rapsodia sul classico, ed. Fritz Bornmann, Giovanni Pascucci, and Sebastiano Timpanaro (Rome: Istituto della Encl. It., 1986), 267–270, esp. 267–268. Bentley, ed., Astronomicon, note on 1.214: “Versus spurius: et frustra vir magnus interpolare voluit.” Scaliger had substituted Sic stellis glomerata manet mundoque figura, which Bentley printed in italics to denote spuriousness, for the previous reading Sic stellis glomerata manent mundumque figura (Scaliger, ed., Astronomicon [1600], p. 38, note on p. 7, line 28). Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, preface, sig. a2ro: “this suppos’d Friend, (call’d in these Notes the Editor)”; examples in Bentley’s notes on 1.234, 1.251, and 1.290. Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, preface, sig. a2vo; his use of the Book 1 manuscript was first pointed out by Helen Darbishire, “Milton’s Paradise Lost,” in her Somerville College Addresses and Other Papers (London: Blackwell, 1962), 125. The manuscript itself is now in TCC; see also Darbishire’s facsimile edition, The Manuscript of Milton’s Paradise Lost Book I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931). Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, preface, sig. a1ro–a2vo, esp. a2ro. Milton, Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (London, 1674), in the library of TCC. At the bottom center of the title page, a handwritten name that seems to have read “Tho. Bentley” has been spiraled through in ink. Also on the title page, between the printed lines “same Author” and “LONDON,” Bentley has written

Notes

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

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in his middle-aged hand: “Tibi lecta potenter erit res. / Nec facundia deseret hunc nec lucidus ordo” (Horace, AP 40–41). Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton, 2 vols. (London, 1720); Bentley’s copy of the first volume, containing Paradise Lost, is Cambridge UL shelfmark Adv.b.52.12. Addison’s Paradise Lost essays were Spectator nos. 267, 272, 279, 285, 291, 297, 303, 309, 315, 321, 327, 333, 339, 345, 351, 357, 363, and 369; I will cite them from Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). Addison, Spectator no. 297 (9 February 1712), 3:58, 61–62 (italics in original). See Homer, Iliad 3.6. Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge UL Adv.b.52.12), 548; see in general Simon J. Alderson, “The Augustan Attack on the Pun,” Eighteenth Century Life 20.3 (1996): 1–19. Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge UL Adv.b.52.12), 29. Bentley underlined the printed word Infantry and wrote “Cavalry” in the adjacent margin; at the foot of the page, he added, “575 Insidentes arietum caprarumque dorsis.” The quotation is from Pliny’s Historia naturalis, 7.ii.26. Ibid., 29. Bentley marked square brackets like this onto the printed text: Met such imbodied force, [as nam’d with these Could merit more than that small Infantry Warred on by Cranes:] tho’ all the Giant brood

Beside the underlined word Giant, he wrote “d” (dele, “delete”). 47. Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 25–26. 48. Ibid., 25. 49. See René Bray, La Formation de la doctrine classique en France (Paris, 1927; repr., Paris: Nizet, 1963). 50. Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge UL, Adv.b.52.12), 544. Bentley underlined the key word in Addison (“I must likewise take notice, that there are in Milton several Words of his own Coining, as Cerberean, miscreated, hell-doom’d, Embryon Atoms, and many others”) and wrote at the top of the page, “Miscreated is often in Spencer.” The Addison essay is Spectator no. 285, 3:13–14. 51. Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 63: And we have been told, that Milton first coin’d the Word Miscreated; but Spenser used it before him, as I.2.3. Eftsoons he took that miscreated fair. And II.7.42. Nor mortal Steel empierce his miscreated Mold. 52. Ibid., 161; Addison, Spectator no. 285, 3:10–11. 53. Addison, Spectator no. 285 (3:15) and no. 357 (3:330–331); for accent, see Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 46 (note on 2.261); for further examples, see 41 (on 2.132) and 44 (on 2.210). The most extensive discussion of Bentley on Milton’s meter is in Paul Fussell, The Theory of Prosody in Eighteenth-Century England (New London: Connecticut College, 1954), although Bentley’s work

Notes

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69.

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on Terence is not taken into account here, nor is it shown beyond doubt that Milton’s “elisions” were purely the invention of his uncomprehending commentators. In particular, Bentley’s claim that Milton “gives a Tone to some Words, different from the present Use” (Paradise Lost, preface, sig. a1vo) is precisely what Bentley had argued about Terence (and Isaac Vossius had argued about Homer): see Chapter 6 in this volume. For example, PL 6.498–520. See Addison, Spectator no. 333 (3:229), and Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 200–201 (on 6.513), emending “They found, they mingled, and with subtle Art” to “They pound, they mingle, and with sooty Chark.” Addison, Spectator no. 297, 3:63 (“a kind of Jingle in his Words”), 3:60–61 (“Digressions”). Bentley, Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge UL, Adv.b.52.12), 562; Addison, Spectator no. 321, 3:175. Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 121. Addison, Spectator no. 297 (3:60–61); Bentley did not mark this section of Addison in his copy. Angels eating (PL 5.404–433): Addison, Spectator no. 297, 3:61; Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 162–163 (rejecting 5.415–426). Limbo (PL 3.427–498): Addison, Spectator no. 315, 3:144–146; Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 93–95 (rejecting 3.444–498). Bentley did not mark either of the passages in Addison. See, e.g., Addison, Spectator no. 303 (3:87), no. 321 (3:172–174), no. 333 (3:229–234), no. 351 (3:312); Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, e.g., notes on 5.198 (Tasso), 5.214 (Spenser), 1.621 (Sidney, Ovid), 1.72 (New Testament), 2.352 (Homer), 2.309 (Callimachus), 10.309 (Manilius). Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 365; compare Richard Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus (Cambridge, 1712), notes, 7, ad Ode 1.3.18, and Chapter 5 in this volume. Addison, Spectator no. 333, 3:229. Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Cambridge UL, Adv.b.52.12), 567; see also Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 205–206. Bentley, ed., Paradise Lost, 227, 11. Ibid., 18 (on 1.370); see also 19 (on 1.376). On Bentley’s distaste for Milton’s syncretistic passages, see also William Kolbrener, Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Hume’s commentary appeared in The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton . . . together with Explanatory Notes on Each Book of the Paradise Lost (London, 1695); see, most recently, Marcus Walsh, “Literary Annotation and Biblical Commentary: The Case of Patrick Hume’s Annotations on Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 22.4 (1988): 109–114. Poetical Works (1695), note on 4.276, p. 143: Cham was “the most Ancient and Renowned of all the Jupiters: He of the Grecians and Romans, being an Upstart in Comparison, living not long before the Trojan War, as is evident by his Sons, Castor, Pollux, Herucles, Sarpedon, and others employed in it.” See, e.g., Poetical Works (1695), note on 7.243, p. 217; on 7.389, pp. 221– 222; on 7.451, p. 224.

p 317

Notes

70. Poetical Works (1695), note on 1.386, pp. 22–23: “Jehovah, KEFE, The peculiar and most expressive Name of GOD, describing him by Essence and Eternity, explain’d well by St. John, Revel. 1.4. ’Αpov tou` oJ w[n, kai; oJ h\n kai; oJ ejrcovmeno~, see Exod. 3. 14. and Chap. 6. 3. and Isai. 42. 8. Its Root is EFE [sic, for EKE] to be, to exist. The Jews had this Name in so great Veneration, that, as often as it occurr’d in reading the Mosaick Text, they pronounc’d ADOK Adonai in stead of it, thence call’d ETRKUV VP [sic, for EPRFUV VP] the explain’d Name, and from the number of its Letters (which the Greeks learn’d of ’em) the Τetragravmmaton. The sacred Concealment of this Name, was not unknown to the Heathens. Joh. Melala, Lib. 3. Cronic. tells us, Orpheus made his Boasts, that he had heard from the Oracle the ineffable Name of God, HERI KEPEO. The Cabalists among their Arithmetical Traditions, have this Numeral of the Name Jehovah, TRF KEPEO, which they deduce thus, &c. T K nKNQR K, that K = 10 × 10 gives 100. E = 5 × 5 = 25. behold 125. And so F = 6 × 6 = 36, which added to 125, makes 161. Lastly, E = 5 × 5 = 25, which with 161, makes 186 by the Hebrew Numeral Letters thus exprest, TRF,, to which prefixing the Note of Admiration EUF, behold 186, is a Numeral Expression of that Sacred Name of GOD, (not to be pronounc’d but once a Year by the High Priest, on the Day of Expiation) and the meaning of the Oracles Τa; e[ri Κevpew.” 71. James Gregory, Opuscula: Or, Notes & Observations upon Some Passages of Scripture (London, 1650; first pub. Oxford, 1646), 146–147, ch. 33, cited in Edward Chilmead’s annotation on Joannis Antiocheni cognomento Malalae Historia Chronica (Oxford, 1691), 90. 72. Bentley, Epistola ad . . . Millium, in Joannis Antiocheni cognomento Malalae Historia Chronica, 2–3, and see also 90 (corroborating Gregory on the nonGreek origin of the word “Erikepaios”). Quotation from 4: “Nam quid ego censeam de illorum sententia, qui significationem mendosi verbi ’Εrikepew; ex anilibus Cabbalistarum nugis conantur exsculpere? sed nolo aliquid inclementer dicere. Non nostrum est keimevnoi~v ejpembainein.” 73. On Homer and Vergil in antiquity, see, respectively, Robert Lamberton and John J. Keaney, eds., Homer’s Ancient Readers: The Hermeneutics of Greek Epic’s Earliest Exegetes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), and Robert Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). On early modern commentary in the same vein, see, e.g., Craig Kallendorf, In Praise of Aeneas: Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989). 74. Addison, Spectator no. 321.

Conclusion 1. On Newton, see Mordechai Feingold, The Newtonian Moment: Isaac Newton and the Making of Modern Culture (New York: New York Public Library, 2004).

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2. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson L.L.D. (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 35 (year 1729), 658–659n (year 1776). 3. William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated (1738– 1741; repr., London, 1846), 3 vols., 1:180–190 (book 2, section 3). For an appropriately dim evaluation of Warburton’s scholarly credentials, see Mark Pattison, Essays, ed. H. Nettleship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1889), 2:119–176. 4. Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, 2 vols. (New York: Dingwall-Rock, 1925), Chesterfield to Stanhope, London, 10 May 1751 (2:9), and Chesterfield to Stanhope, London, 1 November 1750 (1:342). 5. A. Drakenborch to M. V. de Lacroze, Utrecht, 19 March 1726, in Thesaurus epistolicus lacrozianus (Leipzig, 1742–1746), 3 vols., 1:120: “Ipsum opus uidere nondum contigit; nunciant tamen amici, uirum eruditissimum ubique antiquum obtinere, id est, summum ingenium et acumen eius undique elucere, maiorem tamen in corrigendo modestiam non posse non desiderari.” 6. J. C. Wolf to M. V. de Lacroze, Wittenberg, Kal. Mart. 1711, in Thesaurus epistolicus lacrozianus, 2:22. 7. David Ruhnken, Elogium Tiberii Hemsterhusii, ed. H. Nikitinski (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2006), 11. See Richard Bentley to Tiberius Hemsterhuis, [Cambridge], n.d., and Cambridge, 9 June 1708, in Bentley’s Correspondence, ed. John and Christopher Wordsworth, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1842; repr., 1 vol., Hildesheim: Olms, 1977), 219–225, 270–293. 8. Johann Hermann Benner, De censura Richardi Bentleii in Horat. Carm. I.1 (Giessen, 1741), 5: “Vix ullum fore puto, qui medicinam tam praecipitem adhibeat, quam adhibitam videt ab Anglorum Aristarcho.” 9. G. Hermann, De metris poetarum Graecorum et Romanorum (Leipzig, 1796) and Elementa doctrinae metricae (Leipzig, 1816). See also his Dissertatio de Richardo Bentleio eiusque editione Terentii (1819), in Richardi Bentleii et doctorum virorum epistolae, ed. F.  T. Friedemann (Leipzig, 1825), additamenta 74–98. 10. See, e.g., Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Griechische Verskunst, 4th ed. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1921), 80 (“Erst Bentley macht Epoche”); Paul Maas, Greek Metre, trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 5. 11. For Hermann, see C. Bursian, “Gottfried Hermann,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 12 (1880): 174–180; for Ritschl, see O. Ribbeck, “Friedrich Ritschl,” in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 28 (1889): 653–661. 12. For an overview, see O. F. Gruppe, Aeacus: Über die Interpolationen in den römischen Dichtern mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Horaz (Berlin, 1872). 13. F.  A. Wolf, Darstellung der Altertumswissenschaft nach Begriff, Umfang, Zweck und Wert (1807; repr., Berlin: Acta humaniora, 1986). 14. F. A. Wolf, Kleine Schriften, ed. G. Bernhardy, 2 vols. (Halle, 1869), 2:1030– 1094, esp. 1085–1086. Wolf also wished that Bentley had edited Hesychius and followed his Callimachus with more fragment collections; he did not praise Bentley’s Latin works. 15. Richard Bentley, Dissertatio de Phalaridis . . . Epistolis, trans. J. D. von Lennep (Groningen, 1777).

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16. For Euripides’ Heracles, see Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff’s second edition in 3 volumes (Berlin, 1895). 17. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship (1921), trans. Alan Harris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 78–81; Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 143–158; E. J. Kenney, The Classical Text: Aspects of Editing in the Age of the Printed Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 71–74, 100–101; see also C. O. Brink, English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1985), 41–83. 18. See C. O. Brink, Horace on Poetry, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963–1982), esp. vol. 2 on the Ars poetica; D. R. Shackleton Bailey, ed., Q. Horati Flacci Opera, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1995). 19. William Empson, “Milton and Bentley: The Pastoral of the Innocence of Man and Nature,” in Milton: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Louis Martz (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 19–39. (Revised version of the essay in Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral [London: Chatto & Windus, 1935].) For some factual shortcomings of this essay, see Robert Martin Adams, Ikon: John Milton and the Modern Critics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955), 114–117. 20. See Simon Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen: Shakespearian Textual Criticism and Representations of Scholarly Labour, 1725–1765 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995); Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: PrintCapitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the Editing of Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). 21. Kenney, Classical Text, 115; see also 100–101. 22. Wilamowitz, History of Classical Scholarship, 81. 23. Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 54–55. 24. See Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen, and Kramnick, Making the English Canon, who both rely on Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); further, on a figure who has often been portrayed as Bentley’s emulator, see Seary, Lewis Theobald. As Bentley’s case shows, palaeographical ingenuity of the kind Theobald occasionally displayed does not imply any particular historical assumptions at all, beyond the necessary one that Shakespeare’s plays were printed at some point from manuscripts. On both Theobald and Bentley, a more persuasive account is R. F. Jones, Lewis Theobald: His Contribution to English Scholarship (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919); for another skeptical view about Bentley and “historicism,” see Glenn W. Most, “Classical Scholarship and Literary Criticism,” in Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 742–757.

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25. “The Answer of Mr. Hobbes to Sir Will: D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert,” in William D’Avenant, Gondibert, ed. D.  F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 45–55. 26. Jarvis, Scholars and Gentlemen. 27. See, e.g., William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 28. Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 29. For Bentley’s use of Cruquius’s Horace edition, see Demmy Verbeke, “Horace from Bruges to Cambridge: The Editions by Jacobus Cruquius and Richard Bentley,” in Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Gilbert Tournoy, ed. Dirk Sacré and Jan Papy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 461–471. 30. Anthony Grafton, “Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 241–267, esp. 265. 31. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 32. For example, an account of “parody” (parodia) virtually identical to Genette’s is in Julius Caesar Scaliger, Poetices libri vii (Lyon, 1561). 33. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 10–56. 34. Here I am not considering the case in which a text is rewritten absolutely verbatim, as in Borges’s “Pierre Ménard”; this is the aim of so-called diplomatic editing, which aspires to reproduce a text exactly as it appears in some manuscript or printed version. 35. Genette, Palimpsests, 44. The passages in braces are added by the translators. 36. Ibid., 73–85. 37. Silvia Rizzo, Il lessico filologico degli umanisti (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1973), 230. 38. Richard Bentley, ed., Q. Horatius Flaccus (Cambridge, 1712), preface, sig. c2 ro: “Horum [sc., Bentley’s readers] ego ut praejudicio & ajnqo&lkh/` occurrerem; fuse pleraque & prolixe praeter morem meum in adnotationibus deduxi: ut vel indignantes ac reluctantes cum rationum pondere tum exemplorum numero obruerem, inque meam tandem sententiam vel obtorto eos collo traherem.” 39. On the early modern professoriate and its elite, see Kristine Louise Haugen, “Academic Charisma and the Old Regime,” History of Universities 22 (2007): 199–228.

Acknowledgments

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o many thoughtful and erudite people have helped in this project that it ought to be far better than it is. Friends have poured out cornucopian riches before me in the form of their time, their knowledge, and their generous advice. I can thank them only in the most cursory way here, far out of proportion to what they have individually and collectively given me.

I would never have ventured to start a book on Bentley without Anthony Grafton’s personal encouragement and his magnificent example as a scholar. Nor would I have continued or finished it. The world knows well the unsurpassed scholarly contributions he has made over the course of decades, but his generosity toward his students and friends is superlative and equally rare. In the case of Bentley, he has always been marvelously willing to listen to new developments and to respond with acute ideas and an inexhaustible store of vital information. Where his inspiration is concerned, one can only quote Machiavelli: in order to hit the mark, the archer must aim above it. I also mention Mordechai Feingold with the highest gratitude. Not only has he tirelessly and selflessly helped in my Bentleian labors for many years. His daily encouragement and his unflagging interest in my progress have made Caltech a splendidly apt place for working since the day I arrived. No one better personifies scholarship that is both omnivorous and exact, and if I cannot possibly know as much as he does, at least I can find him in the office just next door. His contribution has been extraordinary. Of the many other people I ought to thank, several were kind enough to read my entire Bentley manuscript at various times. They are Hans Aarsleff, Robert Kaster, Jill Kraye, Jonathan Lamb, Rhodri Lewis, Thomas P. Roche Jr., Richard

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Serjeantson, and Nigel Smith. I am intensely grateful for their attention, for their patience, and for their many penetrating comments. G.  W. Pigman III, Jonathan Sheehan, Gerald Toomer, and Martha Zebrowski have likewise helped significantly by reading selected chapters. I received valuable information from Maria Rosa Antognazza, Constance Blackwell, Adam Budd, James Chandler, Peter Davidson, Jane Griffiths, Leofranc Holford-Strevens, Sarah Hutton, Simon Keynes, Peter Lake, Christopher Ligota, David McKitterick, Paul Needham, Jean-Louis Quantin, Harvey Shoolman, Christopher Stray, Andrew Taylor, Howard Weinbrot, and Susan Wolfson. Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman allowed me to study a book annotated by Bentley that was then in their private collection. And the superb hospitality of Richard Serjeantson in Trinity College, Cambridge made it possible for me to spend as much time as I needed in the very place to which Bentley was a shining ornament and a demonic terror. The audiences at many presentations have produced extremely astute questions and suggestions about Bentley; I regret that I cannot thank most of the participants by name. I can mention at least some of the brilliant friends who have discussed this book with me over time: Noga Arikha, Monica Azzolini, Diana K. Buchwald, Jed Z. Buchwald, Robert Goulding, J. Paul Hunter, Jack Lynch, Gregory Lyon, Gideon Manning, Spyros Papapetros, Nick Popper, François Quiviger, Zur Shalev, Noel Swerdlow, Dirk van Miert, Sophie van Romburgh, and Nicolás Wey Gómez. The late Joseph M. Levine was also a fascinating and generous interlocutor, even at moments when our views diverged. For favors granted and for high efficiency in the ordinary course of affairs, I am grateful to the staffs of the Huntington Library, the Caltech Library Services, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Wren Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Warburg Institute library, the libraries of Christ’s College and Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, the Bodleian Library, Dr. Marsh’s Library, the Herzog August Bibliothek, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, the Leiden University Library, the University of Chicago Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Butler Library of Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania Library, the Speer Library of Princeton Theological Seminary, and above all the Princeton University Library and its Department of Special Collections. It is also a pleasure to acknowledge the philanthropic support I received while working on Bentley: at Princeton, a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, the Donald and Mary Hyde Fellowship, and the P. O. Jacobus Fellowship, and at the Warburg Institute, a three-year Frances Yates Postdoctoral Fellowship. My parents have also been my benefactors, and the travel and book collecting that this project entailed would certainly not have been possible without them. Finally, I thank all of my colleagues at Caltech for the exceptionally warm welcome they extended to me years ago and for their friendship ever since. I cannot imagine a more congenial setting for learning new things and thinking freshly about old ones. It is a supreme privilege as well as a pleasure to work with them. Figure 1. Johannes Pricaeus’s index to authors cited in the lexicon of Hesychius, printed in Pricaeus’s edition of Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Gouda, 1650). Pricaeus includes his own and others’ conjectures to the names of lost poems. In the entry

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for Epiphanius, Pricaeus first notes that according to Isaac Casaubon, Hesychius twice cites Epiphanius; but, Pricaeus confesses, “I have failed to find these passages.” © The British Library Board, shelfmark 1079.k.10. Figure 2. Bentley’s annotations in his printed copy of Joseph Scaliger’s correspondence (Leiden, 1627). In his youthful hand, he identifies “Manilius” as the project that Scaliger complains is taking a long time to print. In a later hand, Bentley notes that Franciscus Junius is the critic “who doesn’t even know Latin, far less does he understand astronomy.” © The British Library Board, shelfmark 1086.b.1. Figure 3. Bentley’s heavily annotated working copy of Aristophanes (Basel, 1547), which he mined for quotations of lost poetry. In the massive scholia that surround the text of the comedy, Bentley underlines the names of authors cited (“Plutarch,” “Aristotle,” “Cratinus”). In the margins, his youthful hand notes several of the words that are discussed in the commentary. At the top of the page, Bentley’s older hand records a conjecture. © The British Library Board, shelfmark 676.h.13.