SOURCE: Percy, Lee T. “George Sandys: A Translator Between Two Worlds.” In The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid, 1560-1700, pp. 37-70. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984.

[In the following essay, Percy examines Sandys's translation of Ovid and argues that in this work Sandys displays qualities associated with both the Renaissance and with modern times.]

In 1623, on a tiny ship crossing the Atlantic “amongst the roreing of the seas, the rustling of the Shroude, and the clamour of the Saylers,” George Sandys, newly appointed treasurer of the Virginia Company, sat down to translate two books of Ovid's Metamorphoses.¹ Later, in the midst of the distractions of government in the New World, he translated eight more. In 1626, soon after he returned from America, a small folio appeared containing his version of all fifteen books. The reading public, whose appetite had been whetted by the publication of the first five books in 1621, praised the 1626 translation enthusiastically, and in 1632 Sandys issued a second, enlarged edition.² This edition, which is the one most people have in mind when they refer to “Sandys's Ovid,” differs from its predecessor chiefly in the addition of some prefatory material, engraved plates before each book, and elaborate commentaries after. The translation itself received only minor modifications.³

Yet people are right to insist instinctively that the 1632 edition alone is to be called “Sandys's Ovid.” The commentaries take up as much room as the translation, interpose themselves between books, and demand the reader's attention. On the commentaries is based the conventional judgment on Sandys's place in the prolonged collapse of the medieval world view that we call the Renaissance. According to this judgment Sandys's place is little, if at all, in advance of Golding's. “In certain respects Sandys in his 1632 edition is the last great representative of the tradition of allegorized interpretation which began in the Middle Ages.”⁴ Or with less qualification:

His commentary becomes … a convincing illustration of how sharply the medieval tradition had etched itself into the consciousness of the men of the late Renaissance. The spirit of the anonymous redactor of the Ovide moralisé lives on in George Sandys.

But the commentary of Sandys was strictly an Indian summer flowering of the allegorical tradition, which in England and elsewhere was doomed to disappear. The forces which were eventually to destroy it had been gathering strength ever since the turn of the century.⁵

… I shall examine Sandys's use of Francis Bacon's mythology and his relation to some of the changes in Ovid's reputation which were taking place in his day. By so doing I hope to show that the qualification “in certain respects” is necessary to the truth of the first statement, and that the second view is altogether overstated. For while it is true that much in Sandys's commentary is drawn directly from the Ovid commentaries of Sabinus and Raphael Regius or from mythological handbooks like that of Natalis Comes, it is equally true that in several respects Sandys belongs to his own age more than to any other. Superficially, references to “Galileos Glasses” or stories with an American setting, like that of the man saved from a rattlesnake by the warning of a tame lizard, place the book in the early age of modern science and English colonization of North America.⁶

On a deeper level, Sandy's view of ancient myth, although it draws on many commonplaces of medieval and early Renaissance thought, cannot be wholly derived from them. Sandys formed his ideas on the historical origin and truth value of myths under the influence of Francis Bacon's writings. Recent scholarship has rightly drawn attention to the traditional elements in Bacon's thought,⁷ but it remains true that the later seventeenth century, with some justice, saw Bacon as the first of a new way of thinking rather than the last of the old. Sandys cannot be called the first modern translator any more than Bacon can be called the first modern scientist, but equally he cannot be called the last medieval allegorizer. Not only his Baconian view of myth, but also, as we shall see, the place of his Ovid in the literary revaluation begun by George Chapman of the Ovidian manner, forbid so simple an estimate of Sandys.

In fact, the phrase that Eduard Frankel used so well to describe Ovid may be applied equally to Sandys: he is a poet between two worlds. Ovid sat, sometimes uneasily, between republican and imperial Rome, between a literature of politics and a literature of rhetoric, between, in Frankel's view, pagan Rome and Christian Rome. Sandys likewise belongs neither wholly to the Renaissance nor to modern times; his conceptual world embraces witches and Galileo. Neither Ovid nor Sandys would have endorsed this description of their Janus-faces. We write from what we know, and we cannot know the future or read its books. But Sandys did, as it happened, sense that his Ovid belonged between two worlds. He is speaking of the geographical circumstances of its writing, but his words may apply as well to its spiritual location: “It needeth more than a single denization, being a double Stranger: Sprung from the Stocke of the ancient Romanes; but bred in the New-World, of the rudenesse whereof it cannot but participate; especially having Warres and Tumults to bring it to light, in stead of the Muses.”⁸

SANDYS AND BACON'S MYTHOLOGY

On an empty page (“so left,” as he tells us, “by the oversight of the Printer”) between his translation of Book 1 and his commentary on it, Sandys sees fits to mention the “principall Authors” out of whom he has compiled his commentaries. He names twenty-six: nine Greek (Plato, Palaephatus, Apollodorus, Aratus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pausanias, Plutarch, and Lucian); four Roman (Cicero, Hyginus, Pliny, and Macrobius); four church fathers (Lactantius, Eusebius, Augustine, and Fulgentius); and nine moderns (Geraldus, Pontanus, Ficinus, Vives, Comes, Scaliger, Sabinus, Pierius, “and the Crowne of the latter, the Viscount of St. Albons”).⁹ Francis Bacon died in the year in which the first edition without commentary of Sandys's complete translation was published. All Bacon's published works were available to the commentator; what did he owe to the author with whom he crowned his list of sources?

On one level the debt is obvious. We would not need Sandys's specific citation of Bacon at the beginning of this passage on the River Styx from the commentary on Book 2 to tell us how much it draws from Bacon's interpretation in chapter 5 of De Sapientia Veterum.¹⁰

But perhaps more accurately by the Viscount of Saint Albons: how leagues betweene Princes, though confirmed by oath, together with the bonds of merit, nature, or aliance, are commonly no longer of validity then they stand with the Reasons of state, and peculiar utility. Onely the obligation of necessity (represented by Styx, that fatall and unrepassable river) abideth firme and unviolable.

Fabula de foederibus et pactis principum conficta videtur: in quibus illud nimio plus quam oporteret verum est, foedera quacumque solemnitate et religione iuramenti parum firma esse; adeo ut fere ad existimationem quandam et famam et ceremoniam, magis quam ad fidem et securitatem et effectum adhibeantur. Itaque unum assumitur verum et proprium fidei firmamentum, neque illud divinitas aliqua coelestis: ea est Necessitas … Necessitas autem per Stygem eleganter repraesentatur, flumen fatale et irremeabile.

No fewer than seventeen of Sandys's interpretations of myth come in this way directly from Bacon.¹¹

Differences, omissions, and additions may be as illuminating as similarities. In the preceding paragraph I have quoted more than half of Bacon's interpretation. All of it is directed toward explaining how the myth of the River Styx represents the truth about treaties and leagues between princes. But Sandys, although he allows that Bacon's interpretation is perhaps nearer the heart of the myth than others, presents it as only one in a series of interpretations and comments. That the pagan gods swore by the river of Hell argues their mortality, as Lactantius says. The Styx is a river in Arcadia, and its water is so corrosive a poison that nothing can contain it but a mule's hoof. Perhaps it acquires its poisonous character from some such subterranean exhalation as Sandys himself saw, “in a dry and lightsome cave betweene Naples and Putzoll, to kill a dog in as short a time as I am in telling of it.” The name “Styx” means “sorrow,” says Regius. There is a story that Styx sent her daughter Victory to aid the gods in their war with the giants; in return for this assistance, Jupiter granted Styx the privilege that whoever swore falsely by her name should be banished from the festivals and councils of the gods. Aristotle says that this myth signifies that water is the first and most ancient element, for nothing is to be preferred to the sanctity of an oath. Only after all this commentary and more do we come to Sandys's presentation of Bacon's interpretation.

Sandys condenses Bacon's explication, and his selection from it reveals that he was no mere recorder of another man's opinions. He tones down Bacon's Machiavellianism and is altogether less skeptical of the sanctity of a prince's oath. Bacon says that princes' promises are not, unfortunately, to be depended on, no matter what the solemn oaths by which they are bound: illud nimio plus quam oporteret verum est, foedera quacumque solemnitate et religione iuramenti munita parum firma esse. These promises are commonly undertaken only to advance the prince's reputation and not from considerations of honesty, security, or effect: adeo ut fere ad existimationem quandam et famam et ceremoniam, magis quam ad fidem et securitatem et effectum adhibentur. Further, even ties of kinship, which are Nature's sacraments, or mutual good services are rated by many below ambition, utility, and unbridled exercise of power: Quin si accesserint etiam affinitatis vincla, veluti Sacramenta Naturae, si merita mutua, tamen omnia infra ambitionem et utilitatem et dominationis licentiam esse apud plerosque reperiuntur. The words of princes, in fact, cannot be trusted; since they are accountable to no one, they can always find some pretext to mask their bad faith: Tanto magis, quod principibus facile sit per praetextus varios et speciosos cupiditates suas et fidem minus sinceram (nemine rerum arbitro, cui ratio sit reddenda) tueri et velare.

Sandys omits this last damning suggestion altogether. He will not allow a prince to break an oath from ambitio, and Bacon's dominationis licentiam becomes “Reasons of state”—which is hardly the same thing. Sandys compresses the rest of Bacon's indictment of princes' reliability into a single concessive clause, omitting as he does the uncomplimentary suggestion that princes in taking oaths look more to their reputation than to the demands of honesty, and transforms the vigorous metaphor in solemnitate et religione iuramenti munita into “confirmed by oath.”

“Leagues betweene Princes, though confirmed by oath, together with the bonds of merit, nature, or aliance, are commonly no longer of validity then they stand with the Reasons of state, and peculiar utility.” Sandys has not, in fact, given us Bacon's interpretation but instead a muted and dignified transformation of it. He enjoyed and expected the patronage of royalty, but even though a desire to avoid offending his patron may account for his handling of Bacon's remarks on the perfidy of princes, we must still ask what implications there are in the fact of the transformation. Sandys has not merely condensed; he has selected and criticized. If Bacon is consistent in his interpretation of the myth, Sandys is equally consistent in the drift of his reworking of Bacon. Seeing what Sandys admired in the Viscount St. Albans's mythology may help us to understand why he undertook the translation of Ovid.

References to ancient myths appear throughout Bacon's works. For him, as for every other educated man of his time, the old stories were part of the mind's furniture, there to be used if required as readily as modern or ancient history, and in the same way:

For let a man look into the errors of Clement the seventh, so lively described by Guiciardine, who served under him, or into the errors of Cicero painted out by his own pencil in his Epistles to Atticus, and he will fly apace from being irresolute. Let him look into the errors of Phocion, and he will beware how he be obstinate or inflexible. Let him but read the fable of Ixion, and it will hold him from being vaporous or imaginative.¹²

Bacon, as we might expect, uses myth for more than mere decoration of ideas; in fact, he explicitly condemns the indiscriminate exploitation of myth by those who are more concerned with manufacturing support for their own ideas than with discovering the truths conveyed by the myths:

Not but that I know very well what pliant stuff fable is made of, how freely it will follow any way you please to draw it, and how easily with a little dexterity and discourse of wit meanings which it was never meant to bear may be plausibly put upon it … that many, wishing only to gain the sanction and reverence of antiquity for doctrines and inventions of their own, have tried to twist the fables of the poets into that sense; that this is neither a modern vanity nor a rare one, but old of standing and frequent in use.¹³

The quest for the truths behind the myths occupied Bacon at intervals throughout his life, especially in his fifth decade and again shortly before he died.¹⁴ The study of mythology was a quest, not an idle pastime. Bacon would have dismissed as worse than idle Cervantes's “humanist,” whose classical learning had produced a book of “seven hundred and three devices with their colours, mottoes and ciphers,” from which “gentlemen of the court could extract and use whatever they pleased at festival time and celebrations, and would then have no need to beg their liveries from anybody, or to rack their brains, as they say, to invent them to suit their desires and purposes.”¹⁵ Behind the ancient myths lay truth which the stories themselves had been designed to convey and conceal.

Bacon never abandoned his belief that the myths whose purpose it was to conceal truth had been formulated after the truths they concealed; he did, however, assert it with varying degrees of conviction.¹⁶ In a frequently quoted passage from The Advancement of Learning, Bacon says,

I do rather think that the fable was first, and the exposition devised, than that the moral was first, and thereupon the fable formed.¹⁷

The context makes it clear that he is not talking about all myths but only some literary manifestations of them. He condemns Chrysippus for his attempt to fasten Stoic doctrine onto ancient poetry, then continues,

But yet that all the fables and fictions of the poets were but pleasure and not figure, I interpose no opinion. Surely of those poets which are now extant, even Homer himself (notwithstanding he was made a kind of Scripture by the later schools of the Grecians), yet I should without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had no such inwardness in his own meaning; but what they might have upon a more original tradition, is not easy to affirm; for he was not the inventor of many of them.

The reference to Chrysippus redirects us to the preface of the De Sapientia Veterum, where Bacon again uses him, along with the alchemical allegorizers, as an example of tendentious interpretation.

Chrysippus long ago, interpreting the oldest poets after the manner of an interpreter of dreams, made them out to be Stoics. … [T]he Alchemists more absurdly still have discovered in the pleasant and sportive fictions of the transformation of bodies, allusions to experiments of the furnace.¹⁸

The existence of these frivolous and wrong-headed interpretations does not detract from the honor due to myths, for some of them contain truths from the beginning.

I do certainly for my own part (I freely and candidly confess) incline to this opinion,—that beneath no small number of the fables of the ancient poets there lay from the very beginning a mystery and an allegory.¹⁹

Perhaps because we are misled by the fact that the conflict between ancients and moderns in the later seventeenth century was a conflict between emerging modern thought and the classical antiquity we know, it is easy for us to forget that the veteres of De Sapientia Veterum are not, in fact, Virgil, Plato, or even Homer. Chrysippus interpreting Homer was in Bacon's view a mere somniorum interpres, an interpreter of dreams. If Chrysippus is an interpres, then the fables of Homer are no more than somnia. “He was not the inventor of many of them.” There is, of course, truth in dreams, as well as much that is false or irretrievably lost in confusion. Bacon believed that many of the myths had originated in a period after the Fall but before the earliest Greek thinkers. The ancient wise men of this time had set down as myths their insights into the true nature of the world. Later, when men began to study words and not things, the truth of these insights was lost.²⁰

By studying the myths and discovering the truths in them, Bacon hoped to recover something of the power that man had held over nature before the Fall. The source of this power, an eloquent passage from the Valerius Terminus suggests, is language:

And therefore it is not the pleasure of curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor ambition of honour or fame, nor inablement for business, that are the true ends of knowledge; some of these being more worthy than other, though all inferior and degenerate: but it is a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.²¹

Adam's naming of the animals was a perfect matching of Word and World. The recovery, so far as possible, of this “commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things”²² that existed before the Fall will give man power over the World through his understanding of the Word. Adam gave the animals names that were in perfect accord with their natures; they were, essentially and absolutely, what he called them. From the moment of his creation he knew the world, and because he knew it he could speak and command it. If we can recover Adam's words from the myths of the ancients, we too can command the world. Only God's name is secret and ineffable.²³

These are deep and dangerous waters. A course can be plotted across them leading in one direction to the Royal Society and its search for a real character and universal language, and in the other to Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and the Renaissance magi. Further, understanding Bacon's almost mystic idea of language as a necessary means of knowing and using the power of truth makes it easy to understand how his scientific method cannot be separated from his rhetoric and dialectic.²⁴ But we must return to Sandys, and to an illustration of the way in which Bacon's mythology affected not only the translator's interpretations of and comments on specific myths but also his explicit statement of the meaning of his work.

Opposite the frontispiece to the 1632 edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis Sandys placed an explanation in verse, “The Minde of the Frontispiece, and Argument of this Worke.” The explanation proper, in large type, is both conventional and sweeping and does not altogether succeed in avoiding confusion of the physical and moral interpretations of myth. This confusion reveals Bacon's influence on the 1632 Metamorphosis. According to Sandys, Love, uniting the four elements, creates out of Chaos the harmony of Nature, “who, with ravisht eye, / Affects his owne-made Beauties.” I take this last somewhat confusing expression to mean that Love (who is masculine, as in Bacon's De Sapientia Veterum, chapter 17, despite the prominence of Venus in the frontispiece itself) causes an affect, or appetite, in the natural and harmonious world which he created. Sandys's enigmatic expression can be traced back to chapter 17 of De Sapientia Veterum, “Cupido, sive Atomus,” where we find the same confusion of physical and moral interpretation of myth.²⁵

In Bacon's interpretation of the myth of Cupid, the Amor of the fable is nothing less than the natural motion of the atom, the primal, unique force that fashions all things from matter. It has no parent, that is, no antecedent cause (God, of course, excepted).²⁶ This ultimate natural cause lies beyond the range of human inquiry; hence it is represented as having hatched from the egg of Night. Love is perpetually a child, because things compounded of the atomic seeds of matter are large in relation to them and suffer aging and decay, whereas the seeds themselves are both incomprehensibly small and perpetually unchanging, that is, young. Love is naked, because things compounded of atoms are clothed in attributes and qualities, but the atoms themselves have none of the features that clothe their compounds. Bacon's language is not altogether clear at this point. As often, he uses language that is itself metaphorical (personata et induta, nudum) to describe allegory, so that his interpretation amounts to a restatement of the myth.²⁷ His brief remarks in the De Sapientia Veterum must be read in the light of his extended treatment of the myth of Cupid in the De Principiis atque Originibus secundum fabulas Cupidinis et Coeli. There he uses Cupid's nakedness as the starting point for a refutation of the idea that secondary qualities can be assigned to primary matter.²⁸ Love is blind, because the motions of atoms are not governed by foresight but only be mechanistic cause and effect. Love is an archer, because the virtus atomi must act through the distances, however minute, between atoms.

It is when he turns to the younger Cupid, Venus's son, that Bacon falls into the confusion which is reflected in Sandys's “Minde of the Frontispiece.” Bacon recognizes that in the person of this younger Cupid the allegory moves from natural to moral philosophy, from the Eros who reconciles cosmic strife to the Cupid who makes us fall in love, but his correlation of the two is unsatisfactory. Later he would maintain that each myth conveyed a truth either natural, political, or moral and would avoid mixing the three philosophies.²⁹ In chapter 17 of the De Sapientia Veterum, he attempts to reconcile the two Cupids by suggesting that the older, cosmic binding force and the younger, personal divinity who makes human beings fall in love are one and the same. The impulse to love one fellow creature as opposed to another comes from causes that, because they are obscure, resemble the virtus atomi, the older Cupid. From Venus comes the general disposition toward mating and procreation, and from her son comes the specific sympathy directing our affections to one particular person.

For Venus excites the general appetite of conjunction and procreation; Cupid, her son, applies the appetite to an individual object. From Venus therefore comes the general disposition, from Cupid the more exact sympathy. Now the general disposition depends upon causes near at hand, the particular sympathy upon principles more deep and fatal, and as if derived from that ancient Cupid, who is the source of all exquisite sympathy.³⁰

But are the causes of the general, Venereal disposition nearer because they are always readier to hand, being more generally distributed than the specific, Erotic impulse, which may or may not be present in any individual? Or are they nearer because the general disposition from Venus in each person is somehow the immediate cause of love or affection for another, while the specific impulse from Eros acts farther up the chain of causation in ways that we cannot understand? No matter how we interpret such difficult phrases as a causis magis propinquis or exquisita sympathia, it is evident that Bacon's exposition here is far from lucid. Subest tamen quaedam eius cum illo antiquo conformitas, he says, speaking of the younger Cupid, and earlier in quem [sc., iuniorem] antiquioris attributa transferuntur, et quodam modo competunt. The hedging quaedam and quodam modo betray his uncertainty.

Bacon's confusion has left its mark in Sandys. The translator's swift movement from the four elements, harmonized from Chaos by Love, to the “Will, Desire, and Powres Irascible” of men, ordered by the skill of Pallas, takes place in the phrase isolated earlier, in which Love “with ravisht eye, / Affects his owne-made Beauties.” Sandys has not even attempted to separate the older, cosmic Cupid from the younger divinity who works in our hearts, and Bacon's suggestion of quaedam conformitas between them lies behind the compressed argumentation of the “Minde of the Frontispiece.” Further, a trace of Bacon's description of the actions of Venus and Cupid as an affectum coniunctionis and affectum ad individuum can be seen in Sandys's choice of the verb “affects.”

The rest of the “Minde of the Frontispiece” continues in a conventional vein. Those who follow Pallas, “who the mind attires / With all Heroick Vertues,” will aspire to fame and glory and gain immortality. Those “who forsake that fair Intelligence, / To follow Passion, and voluptuous Sense,” will be as nearly beasts as Pallas's followers are nearly gods. The choice of Hercules is duly adduced. We should not expect detailed argumentation from what is after all only Sandy's brief guide to his frontispiece; still, we notice that the question that threw Bacon into confusion has, after receiving a characteristic moralizing tint from Sandys's brush, been left unanswered. What is the connection between macrocosm and microcosm, between “powerfull Love,” on the one hand, which unites the four elements, and “Passion, and voluptuous Sense,” on the other, which, if men follow it, reduces them to beasts? There is no answer in Sandys.

In smaller type below the explanation of the elements, Love, and Pallas, Sandys sets out the relation of the Metamorphoses to these truths:

Phoebus Apollo (sacred poesy)
Thus taught: for in these ancient Fables lie
The mysteries of all Philosophie.
Some Natures secrets shew; in some appeare
Distemperes staines; some teach us how to beare
Both Fortunes, bridling Joy, Griefe, Hope, and Feare.
These Pietie, Devotion those excite;
These prompt to Vertue, those from Vice affright;
All fitly minging [sic] Profit with Delight.

The premise is Baconian: “as hieroglyphics were before letters, so parables were before arguments.” The myths convey truths whose discovery antedates any expression of them in antiquity; hence the ancient stories must be attributed to Phoebus Apollo, not to Ovid or any other ancient author.

A bit farther on in his address “To the Reader” Sandys elaborates on these ideas:

… in this second Edition of my Translation, I have attempted (with what successe I submit to the Reader) to collect out of sundrie Authors the Philosophicall sense of these fables of Ovid; if I may call them his, when most of them are more antient then any extant Author, or perhaps then Letters themselves; before which, as they expressed their Conceptions in Hieroglyphickes, so did they their Philosophie and Divinitie under Fables and Parables: a way not un-trod by the sacred Pen-men; as by the prudent Law-givers, in their reducing of the old World to civilitie, leaving behind a deeper impression, then can be made by the livelesse precepts of Philosophie.

In its assertion that myths originated in a time before the earliest extant remains of antiquity and in its belief that myths were designed to teach truths which would be difficult of access if expressed prosaically, this passage bears the print of Bacon's mythology.

Bacon believed that myth had a twofold function: to teach, so that “inventions that are new and abstruse and remote from vulgar opinions may find an easier passage to the understanding,”³¹ and to conceal, “to disguise and veil the meaning.” Sandys's implicit rejection of this second function forms one of the major differences between his approach to myth and Bacon's. Sandys sees himself as an educator, not a Baconian explorer after truth. Hence he concentrates on explicating myths whose purpose agrees with his own. He directs his work to a wide and not greatly learned public.

I have also added Marginall notes for illustration and ease of the meere English Reader, since divers places in our Author are otherwise impossible to be understood but by those who are well versed in the ancient Poets and Historians; withall to avoid the confusion of names which are given to one person, derived from his Ancestors, Country, Quality, or Achievements.

By “meere English Reader” Sandys means not those who have no Latin at all but those for whom Latin is more a memory from school days than an everyday habit.

The educational tenor of Sandys's work accounts for his emphasis on the moral and political interpretation of myth at the expense of the physical or scientific. His belief that books should “informe the understanding, direct the will, and temper the affections” leads him to emphasize those aspects of myth interpretation that will most directly advance this purpose. Sandys does not, however, neglect physical interpretations of myth, especially in Book 1 where Ovid's account of the creation of the world demands such explanations. He is always ready to record natural phenomena that he has seen or heard from others; indeed, personal, anecdotal narrative plays a larger part in Sandys's commentary than in any earlier Renaissance Ovid, and this characteristic of the commentary reveals the influence of Bacon's emphasis on the value of collecting observations. An extended quotation will give the flavor of Sandys's treatment of natural phenomena. He is discussing Metamorphoses 1.32-35:

What God soever this division wrought,
And every part to due proportion brought;
First, least the Earth unequall should appeare,
He turn'd it round, in figure of a sphere.

Sandys comments that the earth is

… made round, that it might be equall in it selfe; and equally distant from the celestiall bodies, from whence it receaveth her virtue. That it is so, is apparent by the Eclypse of the Moone, for such as the substance such is the shadow: effected by the naturall preferring of all parts to the Center; if not of the World, yet of her owne body. For the former is denied by Copernicus and his followers, who would rather place the Sunne in the Center: & alleadging the Moone to be a heavy body, with rising and depressions, like our vallies and mountaines as since discovered by Galileos Glasses. And perhaps to a Menippus in the Moone, the Earth, according to Aristotle, would appeare another such Planet. Our poet before described the earth to hang in the Ayre, ballanced with her owne weight: and Lucretius of the same under name of Cybel:

The sage Greek Poets sung, that she was by
Yok't Lyons in her Chariot drawne on high
By which they taught that this huge masse of mold
Hung in the Ayre: nor earth could earth uphold.(32)

Yet would the Ayre give it way, were it not at rest in her proper Center. Some have marveiled that it fell not: but that fall would have proved an ascension; for, which way soever, it must have fallen into heaven; which our Hemisphere would have done as soone as the other. Yet Lactantius and S. Augustine with acerbitie deride the opinion of the Antipodes, as if men could goe with their heads downward, and the raine upward; but heaven is every where above us, and upward and downeward are only words of relation in sphericall bodies, the superficies on every side, being the extreame, and the middle the Center. Yet Virgilius Bishop of Salsburg, was deprived of his Bishopricke for maintaining this opinion: now discovered by daily navigations, as long since by reason.³³

In its lucid prose and its care to make everything clear to the Latinless reader, as in its fundamental conservatism and respect for authorities, this passage is representative of Sandys's commentary. It may also represent his age; I know few clearer examples to refute the popular notion that seventeenth-century man needed only to learn to use his eyes for the scales of medieval cosmology to fall away. The scientific revolution was a revolution of ideas, not observation.

But in the main Sandys is less interested in natural science than in politics and morality; “It should,” we recall that he says, “be the principall end in publishing of Books, to informe the understanding, direct the will, and temper the affections.” His political interpretations reveal a Machiavellian concern with the proper conduct of a prince and a desire to justify and analyze monarchy. Jove's parliament shows that “we may conclude with Plato, that the Monarchicall government is of all the best: the type of God, and defigured in the Fabrick of mans Body.”³⁴ The fable of Phaethon “to the life presents a rash and ambitious Prince, inflamed with desire of glory and domination.” The beasts of the zodiac who frightened Phaethon on his career across the sky are too powerful subjects, and the horses of the sun are the common people, “unruly, fierce, and prone to innovation: who finding the weaknesse of their Prince, fly out into all exorbitancies to a generall confusion.”³⁵ The example of Actaeon shows “how dangerous a curiosity it is to search into the secrets of Princes, or by chance to discover their nakedness.”³⁶ This last interpretation comes from Bacon's “Actaeon et Pentheus sive Curiosus” in the De Sapientia Veterum. Although Sandys toned down Bacon's Machiavellian realism in his interpretation of the myth of the River Styx, we cannot doubt that his careful study of Bacon's mythology explains why so many of his political interpretations have a realistic and monarchistic cast.³⁷ Experience of the Stuart court no doubt confirmed his study, or prompted it.

In his moralizing interpretations Sandys is more conventional, and his sources harder to trace in the windings and ramifications of Renaissance mythologies and Ovid commentaries. And why not? The old stories provided a wealth of illustrations and archetypes for truths which experience confirms. When Juno disguises herself as the nurse Beroe in order to deceive Semele, we learn that “No treachery is so speeding as that which makes under the visard of friendship.”³⁸ Juno's peacock signifies “proud and ambitious men who attempt high things; riches, which morally is Juno, being their tutelar Goddesse; having need of many eyes to sentinell their wealth, and prevent their downfall.”³⁹ Sandys took this interpretation from Natalis Comes's Mythologiae, that storehouse of eclectic interpretation.⁴⁰ But sometimes a myth generates its own interpretation so readily that no external source need be sought. Because the oracles of Themis were put in riddling language, the Thebans neglected them and preferred the easier oracles of the naiads. Who could mistake the meaning?

The oracle of Themis signifies good and wholsom advice, (shee being the Goddesse of Counsel, perswading onely what is just and honest) as that of the Naiades foolish. So while the Thebans forsake the better to follow the worse, they draw on themselves a publique calamity: in all estates not rarely exemplified.⁴¹

No one can read Sandys's commentary without noticing how often and how enthusiastically he reconciles myth and scripture. His own announcement of his efforts is altogether too modest. “[H]ere and there,” he says in “To the Reader,” he has given “a touch of the relation which those fabulous Traditions, have to the divine History, which the Fathers have observed, and made use of in convincing the Heathen.” In fact, almost every page of his commentary shows an example of his eagerness to discover consonances between Ovid and holy writ. The myth of Astraea, who was taken up into heaven, perhaps alludes “to the righteous Henocks miraculous and early assumption.”⁴² The goddess Pallas Athena “is taken for the intelligence of Jupiter; (A notion, as some Authors report, derived by Tradition, of the second person, and soberly delivered by the Sybils, Trismegistus, and other Ethnicks, but after defaced by admixture of the Grecian vanities.)”⁴³ (Here again we notice Sandys's acceptance of Bacon's history of mythology, which held that the divine truths found in myths originated in a period of remote antiquity, after the Fall but before the “Grecian vanities” of classical times.) Stories like that of Apollo's love for Hyacinthus or Jupiter's for Ganymede, in which Marlowe took such evident delight, might have embarrassed Sandys's search for the germs of theology in Ovid. It was not to be so. “The Poets, shaddowing under their fables Philosophicall and Theologicall instructions, by the love of the Gods unto boyes expresse the graciousnesse of simplicity and innocency: and like little children, or not at all, must we ascend the celestiall habitations.”⁴⁴ All in all, Sandys sees no reason to doubt that although Ovid may differ in some respects from Scripture, he yet “appeares in the rest so consonant to the truth, as doubtlesse he had either seene the Books of Moses, or receaved that doctrine by tradition.”⁴⁵

Bacon's attitude toward the reconciliation of the truths of myth and divinity differed radically from Sandys's. Bacon, we recall, believed that the truths found in myths were derived from the discoveries of ancient wise men in a time after the Fall and before any records known to modern man. The knowledge of these ancient sages had approached that of Adam before the Fall, and Bacon hoped that his Instauratio would restore man to this ancient and happy state of knowledge, which was the closest possible approximation to the irretrievable knowledge enjoyed by Adam when Word and World were one. Adam's knowledge had been physical, not theological:

For it was not that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety, which gave occasion to the fall. It was the ambitious and proud desire of moral knowledge to judge of good and evil, to the end that man may revolt from God and give laws to himself, which was the form and manner of the temptation.⁴⁶

It followed then that the knowledge to be won from the myths bore on the natural world and on man's ethical and political acts rather than on the divine sphere.

In chapter 10 of the De Sapientia Veterum, “Actaeon et Pentheus, sive Curiosus,” Bacon finds in the myths themselves an indication that those who investigate the nature of God as though He were a problem in physics are doomed to failure. Pentheus spied on the rites of Bacchus and was punished by the god. This myth demonstrates that “the punishment assigned to those who with rash audacity, forgetting their mortal condition, aspire by the heights of nature and philosophy, as by climbing a tree, to penetrate the divine mysteries, is perpetual inconstancy, and a judgment vacillating and perplexed.”⁴⁷

Sandys could not accept Bacon's assertion that it was futile to attempt to understand the divine mysteries. His handling of the story of Pentheus shows how his thought diverges from Bacon's on this point and at the same time how his careful study of Bacon leaves traces throughout his commentary. Discussing Pentheus's ascent of Cithaeron, Sandys digresses to provide information on the mountain: it is named after Orpheus's lyre or cithara, because it was on Mt. Cithaeron that Orpheus initiated the mysteries of Bacchus, which he had brought from Egypt. The descendants of Ham had planted idolatry in this ancient land, and from it the Greeks had taken many of their customs; Egypt, in fact, with its traditions stretching back into an antiquity before the flood, links the post-Adamic sages and classical antiquity. But the traditions of Egypt are not to be preferred to the truth of Genesis: “what Tradition delivers obscurely and lamely, is in the scripture entire and perspicuous.”⁴⁸ Sandys follows this digression with a discussion of the politics of religious zeal as exemplified in the myth of Pentheus.

There is nothing more plausible to the vulgar then the innovations of government and religion. To this they here throng in multitudes. Wise princes should rather indeavour to pacifie, then violently oppose a popular fury: which like a torrent beares all before it; but let alone exhausteth it selfe, and is easily suppressed. Reformation is therefore to be wrought by degress, and occasion attended: least through their too forward Zeale they reject the council of the expert, and incounter too strong an opposition, to the ruine of themselves and their cause; whereof our Pentheus affords a miserable example. The blind rage of Superstition extinguisheth all naturall affection.

The main lines of this interpretation were suggested not by Bacon's interpretation of the Pentheus myth but by chapter 18 of the De Sapientia Veterum, “Diomedes, sive Zelus.” There Bacon suggests that those who attempt to suppress a religious sect by violence rather than by reason, doctrine, and example “are by the vulgar (who can never like what is moderate) celebrated and almost worshipped as the only champions of truth and religion.”⁴⁹ But their period of popular favor seldom endures, and if an alteration in the state brings the suppressed sect to power, the suppressors' honor turns to dust, and they are as hated as once they were glorified. Further, “the murder of Diomedes by the hands of his host alludes to the fact that difference in matter of religion breeds falsehood and treason even among the nearest and dearest friends.”

In chapter 26, “Prometheus, sive Status Hominis,” Bacon asserts not merely the futility of probing divine mysteries but the necessity of keeping separate the methods of human learning and divine. For making an attempt on the chastity of Minerva, Prometheus was sentenced to have his liver perpetually torn by vultures.⁵⁰ The Titan's crime and punishment illustrates the folly in learned men

of trying to bring the divine wisdom itself under the dominion of sense and reason: from which attempt inevitably follows laceration of the mind and vexation without end and rest. And therefore men must soberly and modestly distinguish between things divine and human, between the oracles of sense and of faith; unless they mean to have at once a heretical religion and a fabulous philosophy.⁵¹

At the conclusion of his interpretation of the Prometheus myth, Bacon firmly rejects the harmonizing of myth and scripture which, as we have seen, plays so important a part in Sandys's commentary.

It is true that there are not a few things beneath which have a wonderful correspondency with the mysteries of the Christian faith. The voyage of Hercules especially, sailing in a pitcher to set Prometheus free, seems to present an image of God the Word hastening in the frail vessel of the flesh to redeem the human race. But I purposely refrain myself from all licence of speculation in this kind, lest peradventure I bring strange fire to the altar of the Lord.⁵²

Sandys read Bacon's mythological writings, especially the De Sapientia Veterum, carefully and attentively. He accepted Bacon's view of the origin of myth in a post-Adamic, preclassical age of wisdom and used it to guide his own interpretation of Ovid. In the myths there is truth which it is the commentator's task to discover. This premise lies behind Sandys's decision to translate the Metamorphoses and influenced even the style of his verse. It is a premise received from Bacon, who may himself have been stimulated to form his theory by the preface to Comes's Mythologiae.

There was much, of course, in Bacon's mythology that Sandys ignored or rejected. His Baconian Machiavellianism, however moderated, and his emphasis on the moral and political truth in myths accompanies a lack of interest in systematic search for physical or scientific truths. Bacon would have seen this lack as an opportunity missed, especially since Sandys's wide travels and extensive acquaintance had allowed him to record a multitude of the observations on natural phenomena that were so essential to Bacon's scheme for the advancement of learning. Sandys thought of his work as essentially didactic and so emphasized one of Bacon's functions of myth, teaching difficult truths, at the expense of the other, concealing unpopular ones. Bacon would not have scorned this emphasis as emphatically as he would have deplored Sandys's constant reconciliation of myth and scripture. In Bacon's view, the two were better kept separated.

The differences between the two interpreters of myth go deeper still. Sandys chose to translate Ovid instead of some other ancient mythological author for, we may speculate, a variety of reasons: there is no more copious store of myths, the style commands admiration and provokes delight, the work had behind it a long tradition of interpretation, so that there was the attraction of seeing a familiar work in a new way. Sandys may have felt also that Ovid's varied and imaginative presentation of the myths would go well with his eclectic interpretation of them. Golding's version of 1565-1567 was no doubt beginning to show its age, and Sandys was fit to undertake its replacement. The translations that appear in A Relation of a Journey show him accomplished in translating various styles, and the travel book reveals his interest in antiquity. His admiration for Bacon may have had its roots elsewhere: in personal ties (his brother, Sir Myles Sandys, had been a member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge with Bacon in 1614)⁵³ or in a general acceptance of Bacon's rational approach to myth and belief that myths contained important truths.

But Sandys's choice of author might not have met with Bacon's approval. References to Ovid are almost absent from Bacon's works, and his occasional oblique references to the kind of poetry represented by the Metamorphoses reveal a profound lack of sympathy for the unstable surface and fluid categories of the Ovidian universe. In Book 4 of the De Augmentis Scientiarum, for example, Bacon condemns the neo-Pythagorean doctrines that were the philosophical basis—insofar as one can talk of such a thing in this author—for Ovid's works. (As Sandys says, the teachings of Pythagoras set forth in Metamorphoses 15 contain a “diversity of changes agreeable to his [sc., Ovid's] argument”) Bacon is discussing the doctrine that men have two souls, one corporeal and shared with brute beasts, the other spiritual, rational, and divine:

Let there be therefore a more diligent inquiry concerning this doctrine; the rather because the imperfect understanding of this has bred opinions superstitious and corrupt and most injurious to the dignity of the human mind, touching metempsychosis, and the purifications of souls in periods of years, and indeed too near an affinity in all things between the human soul and the souls of brutes.⁵⁴

Bacon's view of myth influenced Sandys's presentation of Ovid in outline and in detail. The very real differences between the two men's mythologies did not prevent Sandys from absorbing Bacon's ideas on the origin and purpose of myth, and those ideas resurface on almost every page of his commentary. Sandys was telling no more than the truth when he gave the Viscount St. Albans primacy in his list of authors. In comparison with Bacon's deep mark, the other authors in his list have only a broad, but superficial and intermittent, influence. To retrace Sandys's steps through his library from the track left in his commentary would teach one much about Renaissance learning and methods of reading, but the reward might turn out to be not worth the effort. Sandys seems to have used the other authors as storehouses from which now one, now another interpretation could be drawn to add to his armory of understanding.

Consider his use of Regius and Sabinus, two of the best-known Renaissance commentators. In his interpretation of Achelous's story at the beginning of Book 9 we find on one page a story of Hannibal's meeting with Scipio that is found in Sabinus's notes on the passage, but not in Regius's.⁵⁵ On the next page the details and phrasing of Sandys's note on the strife between the Aetolians and Acarnanians reveal his dependence on Regius; the general rationalization of the myth is in Sabinus, but not the details.⁵⁶ “Eclectic,” insofar as it implies a weighing of several possible interpretations and a final decision for one or another, is perhaps the wrong word for Sandys's procedure here. He stretches out his hand to Regius, then to Sabinus, then to another book and another. All interpretations are worthy of his consideration, and neither his Baconian belief in the ancient truth in myths nor his un-Baconian desire to reconcile myth and scripture obliges him to exclude anything he finds.

SANDYS AND THE REVALUATION OF OVID

By his willingness to include a variety of interpretations and information from a multitude of sources—ancients, moderns, church fathers, “a fellow, who six or seaven yeares had been a slave to the Spanjard in the West-Indies”⁵⁷—Sandys places Ovid in the tradition of Renaissance polymathic poetry, of which Du Bartas's Divine Weekes and Workes is perhaps the best-known example. The title page of Thomas Lodge's Learned Summary (London, 1621) on that poem reveals the range of knowledge such poems were expected to embrace:

                                        A Learned
                                        SUMMARY
                              Upon the famous
                    POEME of William of
          Saluste Lord of Bartas.
          Wherein are discovered all the
excellent secrets in Metaphysicall
                    Physicall, Morall, and Historicall
                                                            knowledge.
          Fitt for the learned to refresh theire me-
mories, and for younger students to abreviat
                                        and further theire studies:
          Wherein nature is discovered, art disclosed
                                        and history layd open.

Lodge's claims (p. 2r) that in Du Bartas's compendium of knowledge “the learned shall meete with matter to refresh their memories, the younger Students, a Directory to fashion their discourse; the weakest capacity, matter of wit, worth, and admiration,” would have been endorsed by Sandys as a description of his Ovid.

But Sandys and Lodge would have parted company over the question of Ovid's value as an author “wherein are discovered all the excellent secrets in Metaphysicall, Physicall, Morall, and Historicall knowledge.” Sandys, as we have seen, saw nothing in Ovid's poetry incompatible with divine truth. Lodge, on the other hand, rejected any suggestion that pagan writers might convey the same truth that had been handed down in scripture. “We are now falne into such a time,” he wrote,

wherein the study of Piety, of Sacred and true Antiquitie, of Liberall Sciences and true Philosophy, are misprized, & rejected. In their place Satans impostures are admitted, who by his subtilties hath in such sort bewitched the worst part of men, that nothing is in more esteeme with them, then that which is fabulous, and obscene; neither any thing in lesse repute then the fruitful lustre of truth.⁵⁸

By “true Antiquitie” and “true Philosophy” Lodge means the biblical subject and theological doctrine of his admired Du Bartas, “as much delightful as any Greeke, Latine, or French Author that we can light upon.” He might have prayed as did Josuah Sylvester in his translation of Du Bartas:

O! furnish me with an unvulgar style.
That I by this may wain our wanton Ile
From Ovid's heires, and their un-hallowed spell
Here charming senses, chaining soules in Hell.

Sylvester's translation, which Douglas Bush has called “the epic of middle-class Protestantism,”⁵⁹ and Lodge's Learned Summary represent one aspect of a rejection of Ovid and Ovidian poetry which took place in the early seventeenth century. Sandys's 1632 Metamorphosis defiantly reasserted Ovid's claim to be taken seriously. His Baconian Ovid was to be for the seventeenth century what the allegorical Ovid had been for the fourteenth: a source of truth, endorsed by its consonance with that revealed in scripture.

Sandys on one side and Lodge, Sylvester, and their master Du Bartas on the other resume an old debate which was taking on fresh energy in the early seventeenth century. Whether Christians should have anything to do with pagan arts and letters, animated as these were by a mythology to which Christianity professed itself both alien and superior, was a question which had exercised Tertullian, and the debate had continued, waxing or waning in intensity, to Sandys's day.⁶⁰ Ovid's Metamorphoses came into the debate early on and was impelled to the center by its position as the most copious and readable source of pagan myths. But here the general question of the compatibility of Christian doctrine and pagan culture assumed a particular form. As with the similar case of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and its resemblance to the messianic prophesies of Isaiah, the striking agreement between the narrative of Genesis and Ovid's account in Metamorphoses 1 of Creation and the Deluge led thoughtful men to wonder whether the whole Metamorphoses could be shown to be consonant with scripture. The anonymous Ovide moralisé and the Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter … explanata ascribed to “Thomas Walleys,” the latter widely read in the early sixteenth century, exemplify the results of this speculation.

But during the sixteenth century the belief that the Metamorphoses were the Bible through a glass, darkly, began to seem old-fashioned, even faintly ridiculous. The twenty-eighth letter in the collection of Epistulae Obscurorum Virorum, which was published in 1515 or 1516, satirized the practice of reading the Metamorphoses as a multi-level allegory. Petrus Lavinius, whose tropological analysis of the Metamorphoses routinely graced Renaissance editions, cut short his accommodation of Ovid to scripture with the first book, as did Golding in the verse letter accompanying his translation. The parallel between Metamorphoses 1 and Genesis was too obvious to reject. The sixteenth century's tendency to go no further in discovering parallels was a harbinger of the seventeenth century's eventual rejection of the allegorical tradition which had given life and color to early Renaissance art. Allegory finds and often forces correspondences between superficially dissimilar things. Its structure, rigid but frail, could not stand up to the seventeenth century's growing demand for truth absolute and directly apprehended. Both scientific rationalism and Puritan hostility toward paganism sprang from this desire to know what is actively and directly, without interference from authority or superstition.⁶¹

Against the seventeenth century's rejection of Ovid, or rather of the allegorical interpretation of Ovid, Sandys set his 1632 Metamorphosis. Far from being a late flowering of the allegorical interpretation, his Ovid showed how ancient myths could be compatible with the new desire to know divine truth as directly as possible. Bacon's interpretation of myth was the key to Sandys's new Ovid. By showing that pagan mythology preserved truths revealed to man in a time before the Flood and passed down in a twin stream, lucidly through divine scripture and opaquely in heathen myth, Bacon demonstrated that an author like Ovid could be used as a vehicle to carry men to the truth. Bacon's and Sandys's interpretation of myth is not quite the same as the old allegorical reading. The allegorical reading asserted that by Deucalion, for example, is signified Noah; Sandys and Bacon saw in Deucalion a representation of the same divine truth that is delivered in the story of Noah. Scripture, of course, is true and plain; myth is false, heathenish, and requires interpretation. But behind both lies divine truth, and it was on the path leading to that truth through Ovid that Sandys wished to set his readers.

We should not overestimate the originality of Sandys. Just as he took his theory of myth from Bacon, so he had a predecessor in his assertion that a pagan author, translated and interpreted, could lead men to divine truth. George Chapman in the epilogue to his Iliads of 1611 lifts Homer as near to scripture as any pagan book could be:

But where our most diligent Spondanus ends his worke with a prayer to be taken out of these Meanders and Euripian rivers (as he termes them) of Ethnicke and prophane writers (being quite contrarie to himselfe at the beginning), I thrice humbly beseech the most deare and divine mercie (ever most incomparably preferring the great light of his truth in his direct and infallible Scripture) I may ever be enabled, by resting wondring in his right comfortable shadows in these, to magnifie the clearnesse of his almighty appearance in the other.

Chapman, like Sandys, believed that the author he was translating could be read as a vehicle for divine truth, a “comfortable shadow” of scripture's bright light. In both translators the idea can be traced to Ficino and the prisca theologia of the Florentine Neoplatonists. Chapman, a pricklier character and a better poet than Sandys, sets himself more emphatically against his predecessors in interpretation. His rejection of Spondanus in the passage just quoted is of a piece with his scorn for earlier translators and commentators in his letter “To the Reader” prefixed to his Iliads. Sandys no less than Chapman was concerned to offer a new valuation of his author, but he announced his intention by declaring his adherence to Bacon, not by rejecting earlier commentators.

There is another way in which Chapman may have showed Sandys how a translation could work against the prevailing view of the translated author. Sandys believed that his author's style was important because it was the medium through which the truth-bearing myths came down to us. His author presented truth which is God and from God, inspired by divine poesy: “Phoebus Apollo (sacred Poesy) / Thus taught: for in these ancient Fables lie / The mysteries of all Philosophie.” Chapman had similar views on Homer's style. It was as divine as Homer's matter: “Then let lie / Your Lutes and Viols, and more loftily / Make the Heroiques of your Homer sung; / To Drums and Trumpets set his Angel's tongue.”⁶² Truth in Chapman's view is inseparable from poetry and equally perfect:

                                                                                And, as in a spring
The plyant water, mov'd with any thing
Let fall into it, puts her motion out
In perfect circles, that move round about
The gentle fountaine, one another raising:
So Truth and Poesie worke, so Poesie, blazing
All subjects falne in her exhaustlesse fount,
Works most exactly, makes a true account
Of all things to her high discharges given,
Till all be circular and round as heaven.(63)

Chapman, it has long been recognized, was one of the first to reject the poetic use of mythology as mere decoration,⁶⁴ and in his emphatic linking of “Truth and Poesie” he revealed that he shared the desire of many in the early seventeenth century to know the truth as directly as possible. But Chapman, and Sandys as well, differed from writers like Lodge and Sylvester in that, far from being reluctant to break with paganism, they willingly embraced pagan poetry as a vehicle of truth.

In asserting, then, that a pagan author could be a vehicle for divine truth, Sandys was doing nothing that Chapman had not done before him. But by putting forward Ovid as such a vehicle Sandys sets himself in opposition to two developments in English poetry of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The popularity of the Ovidian eroto-mythological poem during the last quarter of the sixteenth century assured that the seventeenth century's rejection of pagan frivolity would be a rejection of Ovid as well. The rejection of Ovid against which Sandys set his 1632 Metamorphosis can often be seen in the career of a single writer. The same Thomas Lodge who inveighed against pagan writers in his commentary on Du Bartas's Divine Weekes and Workes wrote as a young man Scillae's Metamorphosis: Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus (1589). Together with Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, it established the Ovidian erotic and mythological poem as an important mode of expression. These elaborately wrought narratives may carry a certain amount of conceptual baggage, but they are designed to flash through the reader's mind, leaving a trail of color behind. Delight rather than instruction is their purpose.⁶⁵

And delight, as we have seen, was viewed with increasing suspicion by the time Sandys set out to translate the Metamorphoses. The Ovidian eroto-mythological poem had died or been transformed. Sandys may have wondered if it was not possible to transform Ovid's great poem of transformation itself and to turn it from a source of delightful pagan tales into a source of divine truth. Here too Chapman, as he had in making his translation of Homer into a kind of scripture, may have pointed the way to Sandys. His transformation of the Ovidian eroto-mythological narrative from a celebration of sensual pleasures into a vehicle for the exposition of divine truth, seen in the contrast between Venus and Adonis and Ovid's Banquet of Sense or between Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Chapman's continuation, showed what a translation of the Metamorphoses might become.

Another aspect of the anti-Ovidian trend in poetry of the early seventeenth century may be seen in the rise of “metaphysical” poetry. Despite the difficulties of formulating an exact definition for this adjective, it is still possible to chart in early seventeenth-century lyric a movement away from mythological referents and toward direct experience, away from allegory and toward conceit, away from narrative style and toward dramatic.⁶⁶ If Ovidian matter appears in these poems, it is subordinated to genuine feeling, human conflict, and movement toward point and paradox, as in John Cleveland's “The Antiplatonick”:

What though she be a Dame of stone
The Widow of Pigmalion;
As hard and un-relenting she,
As the new-crusted Niobe;
Or what doth more of statue carry,
A Nunne of the Platonick Quarry!
Love melts the rigour which the rocks have bred,
A flint will break upon a Feather-bed.

Like the Puritan epic poets and the scientists, the Metaphysicals sought to know the truth directly and from experience. They had little use for decorative mythology, allegory, or the Ovidian manner.

By 1620, then, the English-speaking world was ready for a new Metamorphoses to replace Golding's late medieval version of more than half a century before. The allegorical tradition was dead; so too was the erotic and mythological poem on Ovidian themes. The search for truth that could be directly apprehended was beginning to shape not only religion and science but also poetry and the interpretation of ancient myth. In this situation nothing less was needed than a revaluation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It is often true, especially in the case of classical authors, that when we approve or disapprove of an author we are responding more to critical tradition about the author and to this reputation than to any inherent qualities. It is also true that a translation, representing as it does a fossilized critical reading and a total transformation of a work from an alien to a familiar dress, may prompt readers to look at a work anew. Sandys's Metamorphosis offered such a revaluation.

But simple translation, the presentation of English verses that would describe the same events and mimic the rhetorical colors of Ovid's Latin, would not, however well done, give the world a new Metamorphoses. Indeed, a simple translation might mislead the world into believing that Sandys wanted to be numbered among those heirs of Ovid whom Sylvester had criticized. Sandys was not reworking Ovid but rather the Ovid tradition. For him the myth, not the medium, was the message; like Bacon, and unlike Chapman, he was more interested in the ancient stories and the truths behind them than in the author by whom they had been handed down to us. Hence his decision to add to the bare translation of 1626 the elaborate apparatus of prose explanations, marginal glosses, and engraved plates of the 1632 edition. All these must be taken as part of the “text.” Sandys himself declares in his dedication “To the King” that this apparatus gives intellectual life to his translation: “To this have I added, as the Mind to the Body, the History and Philosophicall sense of the Fables (with the shadow of either in picture). …”

Sandys's parenthesis deserves some consideration, for it suggests yet another way in which Sandys's text offers the reader a revaluation of the Ovid tradition. Editions of Ovid had been decorated with simple woodcuts before, but the engravings in Sandys's Metamorphosis were unprecedented in their elaborate compression of a book's events onto a single page and in their integral place in his text. Through them, he implies in his introduction, the reader—for these plates must be read, not seen—might attain an understanding of the myths beyond that given by the word:

And for thy farther delight I have contracted the substance of every Booke into as many Figures … since there is betweene Poetry and Picture so great a congruitie; the one called by Simonides a speaking Picture, and the other a silent Poesie: Both Daughters of the Imagination, both busied in the imitation of Nature, or transcending it for the better with equall liberty: the one being borne in the beginning of the World; and the other soone after, as appeares by the Hieroglyphicall Figures on the Aegyptian Obelisques, which were long before the invention of Letters: the one feasting the Eare, and the other the Eye, the noblest of the sences, by which the Understanding is onely informed, and the mind sincerely delighted. …

The Neoplatonic tenet of vision's primacy among the senses, the citation of Simonides' epigram, and above all the reference to hieroglyphs suggest an affinity between Sandys's plates and the Renaissance emblem-book.⁶⁷ Certainly Sandys's remarks to his readers imply a power for his plates beyond anything claimed by Sir John Harington, despite the strong resemblance in style and layout between Sandys's figures and the illustrations to Orlando Furioso:

The use of the picture is evident, which is that (having read over the booke) you may read it (as it were againe) in the very picture, and one thing is to be noted which everyone (haply) will not observe, namely the perspective in every figure. For the personages of men, the shapes of horses, and such like, are made large at the bottome and lesser upward, as if you were to behold all the same in a plaine, that which is nearest seemes greatest and the fardest shewes smallest, which is the chiefe art in picture.⁶⁸

From a dozen or so feet away, even a sharp-eyed person might be pardoned for mistaking one of Harington's plates for one of Sandys's. Both would show mythological or heroic figures grouped in actions from the book, the earlier episodes in the foreground and the later spiraling away into the distance. But the two translators expected their readers to make very different uses of their figures. Looking at Harington's illustrations would simply recapitulate the action of the book, whereas Sandys's emblematic figures would sincerely delight the mind through their appeal to the eye, “noblest of the sences, by which the Understanding is only informed.” The “farther delight” which Sandys promises his readers is no purely sensual pleasure.

Many reasons might be given to account for the difference between Harington and Sandys: the development, charted by Rosemary Freeman, of the emblem tradition in England, or even the fact that as illustrated books became widely available in the early seventeenth century, readers became more sophisticated in their ways of looking at illustrations. (Even so, Harington's delighted explanation of the trick of perspective must have seemed naive in 1591.) But Sandys's belief in the emblematic power of his illustrations owes less to these general causes than to his personal belief in the truth of ancient myths. Because the old stories contain the truth, they are valuable of themselves and give the value of truth to whatever rightly conveys them—Ovid, Natalis Comes, or Sandys's engravings. The engravings have a power like that of the “Hieroglyphicall Figures on the Aegyptian Obelisques,” and the fables themselves, as Sandys tells us earlier in the same passage, resemble those same hieroglyphs:

I have attempted … to collect out of sundrie Authors the Philosophicall sense of these fables of Ovid; if I may call them his, when most of them are more antient then any extant Author, or perhaps then Letters themselves; before which, as they expressed their Conceptions in Hieroglyphickes, so did they their Philosophie and Divinitie under Fables and Parables.⁶⁹

Ut pictura poesis, in fact, but in Sandys's hands the trope has Bacon's stamp on it. “As hieroglyphics were before letters, so parables were before arguments”; further, pictures and translated verses are alike because they share in the truth of the ancient stories which they convey. The medium, the style or manner in which they are conveyed, is important only insofar as it reveals or obscures the truth in the myth.

It is easy to exaggerate the degree to which Sandys's Metamorphosis represents a reworking of the view of Ovid's Metamorphoses current when he began the translation. Much in his commentary is conventional, Neoplatonic, Boethian, Hermetic, Christian and humanistic, and might be found in works written forty years before, or, though less frequently, forty years after 1632. Sandys no less than Bacon shows the paradoxical Renaissance cast of mind wherein commonplace and unoriginal doctrines become the vehicles of dearly won, deeply held, original belief. Sandys's Ovid would not have been unintelligible to Golding, but it would have given the older translator much to think about.

Yet Sandys's belief that in the myths Ovid is telling the truth, and that the truth, not Ovid, is what matters, sets him apart from previous interpreters of the Metamorphoses and from Chapman, his predecessor in revaluing Ovid. This belief, as I have tried to show, arose out of Sandys's careful reading of Bacon's mythological works, especially the De Sapientia Veterum. Sandys makes and sustains a far more sweeping claim for the value of his author than any previous English Ovidian. In transforming Ovid from a medieval auctour whose works might be read as allegories of moral and scriptural truth or as sources of encapsulated wisdom (Ovidius sententiarum floribus repletus, as Hugh of Trimberg called him) into a modern author whose myths were as near as mortals after Adam could come to the wisdom of the ancients, Sandys helped Ovid to pass unscathed through the change of taste that in prose cast the copious and moral Cicero out of fashion and replaced him with the terse, pointed Seneca. Readers in the seventeenth century cared more and more for truth told directly and less and less for adornment. Sandys showed them how Ovid might seem true, or suggest truth. John Aubrey records that “reading of Ovid's Metamorphy in English by Sandys” was a wonderful help to his imagination, and that his friend Francis Potter conceived the idea of transfusing the blood while reading Ovid's story of Jason and Medea.⁷⁰ In his palaeontological writings Robert Hooke placed Ovid's views of the origin of the world beside the evidence of fossils, for he valued him as heir to “the most ancient and most knowing Philosophers among the Aegyptians and Greeks.”⁷¹

Notes

1. Susan M. Kingsbury, ed. Records of the Virginia Company of London, quoted in Richard Beale Davis, George Sandys: Poet Adventurer (1955), p. 140.

2. No copy of the first edition of Books 1-5 is extant, but the translation was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1621. A second edition, the only known copy of which is in the Folger Library, appeared in the same year; Davis, pp. 201-3.

3. Davis, pp. 209-14. My own collation of Book 5 in the 1621 (represented by the third edition of 1623), 1626, and 1632 versions confirmed his conclusions.

4. Davis, p. 208.

5. Davis P. Harding, Milton and the Renaissance Ovid (1946), pp. 24-25.

6. Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures … by G[eorge] S[andys] (1632), p. 20 (Galileo's glasses), and p. 194 (the rattlesnake). Hereafter, references in the form 1632, p. -, are to this edition.

7. See especially Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974); Paolo Rossi, Francesco Bacone, dalla magia alla scienza (1957) = Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, tr. S. Rabinovitch (1968).

8. 1632, “To the most High and Mightie Prince Charles, King of Great Britaine, France, and Ireland.”

9. For a more detailed discussion of Sandys's sources, see Davis, pp. 218-19.

10. Sandys, 1632, pp. 65-66. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, eds. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath (1858), 6: 634. All citations of Bacon are to this edition, hereafter Works.

11. Grace Eva Hunter, “The Influence of Francis Bacon on the Commentary of Ovid's Metamorphoses by George Sandys” (1949).

12. Advancement of Learning 1.2, 4 = Works 3: 271-72.

13. Neque me latet quam versatilis materia sit fabula, ut huc illuc trahi, imo et duci possit; quantumque ingenii commoditas et discursus valeat, ut quae numquam cogitata sint belle tamen attribuantur … multi enim, ut inventis et placitis suis antiquitatis venerationem acquirerent, poetarum fabulas ad ea traducere conati sunt. Atque vetus illa vanitas et frequens, neque nuper nata, aut raro usurpata est (De Sapientia Veterum praef. = Works 6:626).

14. Extended discussion of myth appear in Cogitationes de Scientia Humana (written ca. 1605 but not published until 1857), The Advancement of Learning (1605), De Sapientia Veterum (1609), De Augmentis Scientiarum (finished in 1622 but not published until the following year), and De Principiis atque Originibus secundum Fabulas Cupidinis et Coeli (written perhaps in 1623 or 1624 and published in 1653).

15. Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part 2, chapter 22.

16. A certain amount of controversy attaches to the question whether Bacon's views on the purpose of myth changed considerably or hardly at all between the Advancement of Learning and the De Sapientia Veterum; see Barbara C. Garner, “Francis Bacon, Natalis Comes, and the Mythological Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33 (1970): 264-91, esp. 268ff., for a detailed discussion with references to earlier literature.

17. Advancement of Learning, 2.4, 1 = Works 3: 345.

18. Nam et olim Chrysippus Stoicorum opiniones vetustissimis poetis, veluti somniorum aliquis interpres, ascribere solebat; et magis insulse Chymici ludos et delicias poetrarum in corporum transformationibus ad fornacis experimenta transtulerunt.

19. Fateor certe ingenue et libenter, me in hanc sententiam propendere, ut non paucis antiquorum poetarum fabulis mysterium et allegoriam iam ab origine subesse putem.

20. “Here therefore is the first distemper of learning, when men study words and not matter,” Advancement of Learning 1.4, 3 = Works 3: 284. On Bacon's view of the history of knowledge, see Garner, pp. 277-78.

21. Works 3: 222.

22. Proemium to Instauratio Magna = Works 4: 7.

23. Rossi, pp. 162-74.

24. As demonstrated by Jardine (above, n. 7).

25. On Bacon's account of Cupid, see Howard B. White, Antiquity Forgot: Essays on Shakespeare, Bacon, and Rembrandt (1978), pp. 109-36.

26. Although Bacon attributes the myth to unspecified poetae, all the features of his account can be found in Hesiod's Theogony or the Orphic Argonautica, except for the suggestion that Cupid hatched from the egg of Night. This is a fancy of Aristophanes, Birds 695. (A nonnullis traditur, says Bacon.) Hesiod, “Orpheus,” and Aristophanes, with Plato (Phaedrus), are the first four authors cited by Natalis Comes in his account of Cupid, Mythologiae 4.14. On Comes as Bacon's principal source, see C. W. Lemmi, The Classical Deities in Bacon: A Study in Mythological Symbolism (1933), pp. 55-72.

27. Jardine, pp. 63-75.

28. Works 3: 86.

29. Garner, p. 281; Works 4: 318.

30. Venus enim generaliter affectum coniunctionis et procreationis excitat; Cupido eius filius affectum ad individuum applicat. Itaque a Venere est generalis dispositio, a Cupidine magis exacta sympathia; atque illa a causis magis propinquis pendet; haec autem a principiis magis altis et fatalibus, et tanquam ab antiquo illo Cupidine, a quo omnis exquisita sympathia pendet (Works 6:656-57).

31. … nimirum ut in inventis novis et ab opinionibus vulgaribus et penitus abstrusis, aditus ad intellectum magis facilis et benignus per parabolas quaeratur, De Sapientia Veterum praef. = Works 6: 628.

32. De Rerum Natura 2.600-603.

33. 1632, p. 20.

34. 1632, p. 29.

35. 1632, p. 67.

36. 1632, p. 100.

37. On Machiavellianism in Bacon's mythology, see Rossi, pp. 110-12.

38. 1632, p. 101.

39. 1632, p. 71.

40. Comes says (I quote from the edition published at Lyon in 1605, p. 138), Sacer est illi [sc., Iunoni] pavo, quod superbum, quod ambitiosum, quod alta petens, utpote aereo temperamento animal, quod variis coloribus ornatum, quod multos habet oculos; quia superbi sunt, ambitiosi, rerum arduarum appetentes, qui divitiarum Deam habent tutelarem, quos multos homines observare necesse est ad rerum suarum custodiam.

41. 1632, p. 263.

42. 1632, p. 26.

43. 1632, p. 217.

44. 1632, p. 359.

45. 1632, p. 19.

46. Neque enim pura illa et immaculata scientia naturalis, per quam Adam nomina ex proprietate rebus imposuit, principium aut occasionem lapsui dedit. Sed ambitiosa illa et imperativa scientiae moralis, de bono et malo diiudicantis, cupiditas, ad hoc ut Homo a Deo deficeret et sibi ipsi leges daret, ea demum ratio atque modus tentationis fuit (Instauratio Magna praef. = Works 1:32).

47. Works 6: 719-20, 646.

48. 1632, p. 111.

49. Works 6: 733, 658.

50. The usual version of the Prometheus myth makes Prometheus's gift of fire to mankind the cause of his punishment. Bacon's source for the story about Minerva, as for much of the rest of his account of Prometheus, was Natalis Comes, Mythologiae 4.6. Comes attributes the story to Duris the Samian (ca. 340-ca. 260 b.c.). Duris did not survive from antiquity, and Comes's ultimate source was probably the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius 2.1249 = Felix Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (1923), ii.A.76, fr. 77.

51. Illud non aliud esse videtur, quam quod homines artibus et scientia multa inflati, etiam sapientiam divinam sensibus et rationi subiicere saepius tentent; ex quo certissime sequitur mentis laceratio et stimulatio perpetua et irrequieta. Itaque mente sobria et submissa distinguenda sunt humana et divina; at que oracula sensus et fidei; nisi forte et religio haeretica et philosophia commentitia hominibus cordi sit (Works 6:675).

52. … neque tamen inficiamur, illi subesse haud pauca, quae ad Christianae fidei mysteria miro consensu innuant; ante omnia navigatio illa Herculis in urceo ad liberandum Prometheum, imaginem Dei Verbi, in carne tanquam fragili vasulo ad redemptionem generis humani properantis, prae se ferre videtur. Verum nos omnem in hoc genere licentiam nobis ipsi interdicimus, ne forte igne extraneo ad altare Domini utamur (Works 6:676).

53. Davis, p. 92.

54. Itaque de hac doctrina diligentior fiat inquisitio; eo magis, quod haec res non bene intellecta opiniones superstitiosas et plane contaminatas, et dignitatem Animae Humanae pessime conculcantes, de Metempsychosi et Lustrationibus Animarum per periodos annorum, denique de nimis propinqua Animae Humanae erga animas brutorum per omnia cogitatione, peperit (Works 1:606).

55. 1632, p. 319. I have consulted Sabinus in P. Ovidii Metamorphosis, seu fabulae poeticae: earumque interpretatio ethica, physica & historica Georgii Sabini (1589). Sandys might, of course, have taken the story directly from Livy, but to have done so would be contrary to his usual practice.

56. 1632, p. 320; I have consulted Regius in P. Ovidii Nasonis poete ingeniosissimi Metamorphoseos libri xv. In eosdem libros Raphaelis Regii luculentissime enarrationes (1560). Compare Sandys's note with Regius's:

    Now the strife between the	Bella inter Aetolos &
    Aetolians and Acarnanians	Acarnanes vicinos ciebat
    (whose countryes are	[sc., Achelous]. Cumque
    watered by that River)	arbitrii nulli essent, armis
    concerning their bounders	non iudicio decertabant.
    (arbitrated for want of	Victoriam vero reportabant
    umpires by the sword,	qui plus viribus valebant.
    wherein the stronger pre-	Quare cum Hercules
    vailed) was the ground of	fluvium damnose labentem
    this fiction of Hercules his	aggeribus fossis intra
    subduing of Achelous: Dei-	alveum cohibuisset tanquam
    anira the daughter of	debellare: Acheloum
    Oeneus (for it should seeme	victoriae praemium
    the Aetolians had the better)	reportavit Oenei filiae
    the reward of his victory.	Deianirae nuptias.

57. 1632, p. 481.

58. A Learned Summary, p. 3r.

59. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, p. 245.

60. See M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900 (1957), pp. 34-53; E. K. Rand, Founders of the Middle Ages (1928). Sandys cites Tertullian on this topic, 1632, p. 29.

61. See Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (1953), pp. 42-49.

62. George Chapman, “To M. Harriots,” accompanying Achilles Shield = The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (1941), p. 382; see also Millar Maclure, Chapman: A Critical Study (1966), p. 165.

63. George Chapman, “Epistle Dedicatory” to the Iliads = Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (1957) 1: 5.

64. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, p. 199.

65. On these poems see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (1977).

66. The term “metaphysical” would have to be abandoned if it weren't so useful. See, among others, Jean-Jacques Denouain, Thèmes et Formes de la Poésie “Metaphysique” (1956); Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “A Critique of Some Modern Theories of Metaphysical Poetry,” Modern Philology 50 (1952): 88-96; Rosemund Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (1947); F. R. Leavis, “English Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,” Scrutiny 4 (1935): 236-56; and W. Bradford Smith, “What is Metaphysical Poetry,” Sewanee Review 42 (1934): 261-72.

67. See Liselotte Dieckmann, “Renaissance Hieroglyphics,” Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 308-21; Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (1948); D. C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant (1981).

68. Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, translated into English heroical verse by Sir John Harington (1591), ed. Robert McNulty (1972), p. 17.

69. 1632, “To the Reader.”

70. John Aubrey, “Brief Lives”, ed. Andrew Clark (1898) 1: 36, 2: 166.

71. Quoted in Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (1975), p. 20.