A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1450-1700

Abstract

It is a historical commonplace that Renaissance historians studied and modelled their works on the histories of the great historians of Greece and Rome. But these ancient historians were not equally popular in this period, nor with the same people, nor for the same reasons. It is with these variations that this survey is concerned. It attempts to chart the variations in their popularity, by counting their editions and classifying them by countries and phases; to work out the varying reasons for their popularity, by means of the analysis of their reputations; and to take some steps toward the discovery of the audience of these ancient historians. The period for which these attempts will be made is 1450 to 1700: between the invention of printing, when edition analysis becomes possible, and the victory of the moderns in the Battle of the Books, when the ancients cease to be considered as greater than any modern historians. This study is, then, a small contribution to the study of the diffusion or reception of the classical historians, and also an attempt to find some quantitative evidence for statements about changing tastes in history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Editions of twenty-one works of seventeen historians were analyzed (Sallust, Tacitus, Josephus, and Xenophon each being represented by two works, the others by one). The figures here, as elsewhere in this note, are taken from a single source: F. L. A. Schweiger, Handbuch der classischen Bibliographie, three volumes (Leipzig, 1830-4). This source is not complete; it can be shown to lack a considerable number of Spanish translations, for example. However, I have used it because it would take many years' work to produce a complete list, and because I hope that the relationships expressed in the figures I have drawn from it are generally valid, even if the precise figures are not. If it is biased in any way, it is likely to be in over-representing German editions and translations, as Schweiger gleaned most carefully in that field.