Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe (Classical Presences)

Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the 'global Renaissance'. However, global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship. Cover 1 Beyond Greece and Rome: Reading the Ancient Near East in Early Modern Europe 4 Copyright 5 Acknowledgements 6 Contents 8 List of Illustrations 10 List of Contributors 12 Introduction: Beyond Greece and Rome 16 PART I: Routes of Reception 42 1: The Well-Thumbed Attic Muse: Cicero and the Reception of Xenophon’s Persia in the Early Modern Period 44 Cicero on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and Oeconomicus 46 Cicero’s Recommendations 46 Passages Translated and/or Appropriated by Cicero 47 Cicero in Renaissance Schools 50 Humanist Readings of Xenophon through Cicero 52 Cyropaedia 53 Oeconomicus 59 Conclusion 66 2: Zoanne Pencaro, an Early Modern Italian Reader of the Ancient Near East in Herodotus 68 3: From ‘Custom is King’ to ‘Custom is a Metal: ’The Early Modern Afterlife of Ancient Scythian Culture 85 The Classical Scythians and Their Later Incarnations 88 The Trials of Custom in the Renaissance 92 Herodotus: The Sovereignty of Custom and Two Scythian Honour Killings 95 Lucian: A Contest of Greek and Scythian Customs 98 Edmund Spenser: Bending Custom in Ireland 102 4: Reading Ancient Fables from the East: Pierre-Daniel Huet’s Two-Origin Aetiology of Romance 108 PART I I: Materials and Traces 128 5: Reterritorializing Persepolis in theFirst English Travellers’ Accounts 130 6: Antiquarianism in the Near East: Thomas Smith (1638–1710) and his Journey to the Seven Churches of Asia 147 Introduction: From Oxford to Asia Minor 147 Septem Asiae Ecclesiarum Notitia (1672–1716) in Context 153 The Uses of the Ancient Near East: Smith’s Motivations and His Readership 164 7: Journeying to an Antique Christian Past: Holy Land Pilgrimage Narratives in the Era of the Reformation 178 Pilgrimage Treatises 180 Locating Christ in the Holy Land 186 The Reformation Context 190 Re-Rooting the Catholic Faith 197 Conclusion 201 PART I I I: Refiguring Sources 204 8: Richard Verstegan and the Symbol of Babylon in the Early Modern Period 206 The Tower I: Language 211 The Tower II: Tyranny 215 The Harlot 218 The Exile 221 Cities Real and Imaginary 224 9: Casting Models: Female Exempla of the Ancient Near East in Seventeenth-Century French Drama and Gallery Books (1642–62) 227 Artemisia 230 Tomyris 235 Zenobia 240 Conclusion 248 10: Assyria in Early Modern Historiography 250 Assyria as Transmitted Knowledge 252 Giovanni Boccaccio 255 Johannes Carion and Philip Melanchthon 259 Sir Walter Ralegh 264 11: Alexander the Great inEarly Modern English Drama 271 Heroic Alexander 277 Corpsing Alexander 289 12: Crises of Self and Succession: Cambyses in the English Theatre 1560–1667 297 Herodotus’ Cambyses and the Early English Theatre 297 Preston’s Early Elizabethan Cambises between Morality and History Play 302 The Evasive Diplomacy of Settle’s Restoration Cambyses 309 Conclusion: Cambyses and the Divided English Self 315 Bibliography 318 Primary Sources 318 Secondary Sources 328 Index 350 Though the subject of classical reception in early modern Europe is a familiar one, modern scholarship has tended to assume the dominance of Greece and Rome in engagements with the classical world during that period. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe, establishing the diversity and expansiveness of the classical world known to authors like Shakespeare and Montaigne in what we now call the 'global Renaissance'. However, global Renaissance studies has tended to look away from classical reception, exacerbating the blind spot around the significance of the ancient near east for early modern Europe. Yet this wider classical world supported new modes of humanist thought and unprecedented cross-cultural encounters, as well as informing new forms of writing, such as travel writing and antiquarian treatises; in many cases, and befitting its Herodotean origins, the ancient near east raises questions of travel, empire, religious diversity, cultural relativism, and the history of European culture itself in ways that prompted detailed, engaging, and functional responses by early modern readers and writers. Bringing together a range of0approaches from across the fields of classical studies, history, and comparative literature, this volume seeks both to emphasize the transnational, interdisciplinary, and interrogative nature of classical reception, and to make a compelling case for the continued relevance of the texts, concepts, and materials of the ancient near east, specifically, to early modern culture and scholarship Classical reception in early modern Europe is often perceived in modern scholarship as being dominated by engagements with Greece and Rome. The essays in this volume aim to challenge this prevailing view by collectively arguing for the significance and familiarity of the ancient near east to early modern Europe as part of a wider classical world.