Insight 2018

THE QUEEN’S COLLEGE LIBRARY
Issue 8 Michaelmas Term 2018
Inside this issue:
New Light on a Forgotten Astronomer—Will Poole
David Constantine on Modern Poetry in Translation
Archibald H. Sayce and his Papers at The Queen’s College, Oxford

W
elcome to Issue 8 of Insight. After the
new building special of last year we
have reverted to our normal format of
articles associated with the Library’s collections.
The first article is by Will Poole of New College who
last wrote a piece for Insight five years ago. Will, a
regular reader of our special collections, has recently
been to Queen’s Library several times to consult a
series of tiny seventeenth century mathematical
notebooks by Richard Rawlinson, student and
Fellow of Queen’s during the turbulent years of the
Civil War and the Cromwellian Protectorate. Will’s
article casts
light on this
fascinating
and little
known
astronomer
of the
seventeenth
century
scientific
revolution.
One of
Rawlinson’s
exquisite
manuscripts
Rawlinson Mathematical Notebook, circa 1646.
(Queen’s MS346)
(pictured) has recently featured as our “book of the
month” in the New Library.
Earlier this year, our thematic exhibition installed in
both the Upper Library and the New Library was
entitled Opening the Frontiers: Modern Poetry in
Translation in the Sixties and Since. It was co-curated by
David Constantine, who has expanded on the
associated talk he and co-curators gave at the launch
of the exhibition to write about the lasting political
and cultural importance of translating and
disseminating poetry around the globe. The article
and the exhibition celebrate the fact that Queen’s
Library has recently received a substantial run of the
journal Modern Poetry in Translation which David and
Helen Constantine co-edited from 2003-12.
L-R: Helen Constantine, David Constantine and Clare Pollard pictured
in discussion at our exhibition event.
Our final substantive article is by Silvia Alaura and
Marco Bonechi from the Consiglio Nazionale delle
Ricerche (CNR) in Rome. Marco and Silvia spent
several weeks last December investigating the Sayce
Papers kept in the College Library, and have written
a wide-ranging account of the life and career of one
of the fascinating late nineteenth/early twentieth
century personalities of Queen’s, for whom the
University created a Chair of Assyriology in 1891.
The final pages of this issue highlight the current
library exhibition curated by recent graduate Sarah
Gouldesbrough, which is based on her DPhil
subject and is entitled Images of Epic: Representations of
Homer and his Works from the Archive to the Comic Book.
I am very grateful to all the contributors who wrote
for this year’s issue and to my colleague, Sarah Arkle,
who took many of the photographs and undertook
the typesetting. I would also like to express my
gratitude to the college’s Director of
Communications, Emily Downing, for the new
design.
If you have ideas for future articles or indeed
would like to contribute, please contact me
E-mail: amanda.saville@queens.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 01865 279213
Amanda Saville, Librarian, October 2018
2

O
n 12 August 1654, in one of the
opening conflicts of the Russo-Polish
War of 1654–1667, a Polish-Lithuanian army
conquered a numerically superior Russian force in
the Battle of Skhlow. Just as the Russians began to
cross the Dnieper river, the Polish surprised them,
driving them back into the water. In seizing the
element of surprise, the combined Polish forces were
assisted by an unlikely ally—a solar eclipse.
setting, three dons had gathered to observe the
eclipse. They were the Savilian Professor of
Geometry, John Wallis, and two younger dons ‘most
expert in mathematical matters’, Christopher Wren
of All Souls, and Richard Rawlinson of Queen’s. The
three men set up a telescope to project the image of
the sun onto a piece of paper, so that the progress of
the eclipse could be marked at regular intervals on
the paper. Rawlinson later engraved onto a brass
plate the observations they had made, and the image
was published as part of Wallis’s later account of the
eclipse. Wallis was not a natural acknowledger of
assistance, but Rawlinson memorialized his own role
by signing his engraving: ‘Ri: Rawlinson cælavit’,
‘Richard Rawlinson engraved this’.
The names of Christopher Wren and John Wallis
remain well known, but who was this forgotten
astronomer of Queen’s?
Richard Rawlinson was born, probably in 1618, in
Milnthorpe, Westmorland, one of the college’s
traditional recruiting territories, and entered Queen’s
in 1636 as an eighteen year-old of plebeian rank. It is
very likely he was the first member of his family to
attend university. In 1640 he was elected a Taberdar,
and the next year he took his BA. Life in Oxford was
soon to be turned upside-down, however, with the
outbreak of civil war, and in late 1642 the king and
his troops were forced to retreat to Oxford, which
became for the next three and a half years the
headquarters of the royalist campaign. This is when
we hear our first distinctive news about Rawlinson,
who had evidently been reading books on
fortification, which he then put to good use. As the
Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood recalled,
Plate from Wallis’ Opera Mathematica in Queen’s College Upper Library,
depicting the solar eclipse observed by Rawlinson in 1654. (40b.B.3)
The Poles reckoned by the Gregorian calendar, but
in Oxford, still on the Julian calendar, that same day
was 2 August 1654. There, in a more peaceful
The Works and Fortifications also did now go on
apace, and those in St Clement’s Parish, on the East
side of Oxford, were about this time begun. Which,
with other Fortifications about the City, were mostly
contrived by one Richard Rallingson, Bach. of Arts of
Queen’s College, who also had drawn a Mathematical
Scheme or Plot of the Garrison. (History and
Antiquities, vol. 2, p. 462)
3

Rawlinson (he is frequently encountered as
‘Rallingson’) successfully managed to attract royal
attention, and in recompense for his work Charles I
ordered that he be created MA at once, a degree duly
conferred upon Rawlinson by Convocation.
Rawlinson was soon made a full fellow of the
college, and at about this time he ought to have
taken holy orders too. He dragged his feet, however,
seemingly out of nervousness about the future
direction of the Anglican Church, facing defeat, and
by the time he was fully ordained, albeit in secret,
Royalist Oxford was indeed on the brink of
surrender to the Parliamentary forces. When the
town fell, Rawlinson was prudently granted leave by
the governing body of Queen’s to absent himself for
one year, or even longer ‘should it prove necessary’.
Indeed, when the Parliamentary Visitors came
soberly to the doors of
the college, Rawlinson
could not be found.
The Provost of
Queen’s, Gerard
Langbaine, described
him as ‘a very excellent
yong man, extremely
studious, a general
Scholar; but a most
eminent
Mathematicien’—but in
the same letter to the
authorities Langbaine
was making feeble
excuses for Rawlinson’s
nonappearance,
blaming it on
aristocratic
intervention. What
seems to have
happened is that
Rawlinson was whisked
off as a private tutor to
Henry Pierrepont,
Marquess of
Dorchester, a safe way
4
of getting a promising young man with undeniable
royalist sympathies out of town at a difficult time.
Rawlinson did not stay away for too long, however:
we find notices of him in the college records
throughout the 1640s and 1650s, serving variously as
a tutor, as one of the two annual treasurers, and as
‘Magister puerorum’, or the choristers’ schoolmaster.
The college accounts show that he drew his fellow’s
stipend of £4 per annum every year until 1665/6,
without exception. Rawlinson, in other words, was
one of those royalist dons who found a way of living
under an unpalatable Parliamentary regime by
keeping out of the sight, and largely out of the mind,
of the new authorities. In this way, the man who was
said to have designed the royalist defences of Oxford
(pictured below) was never formally ejected from his
fellowship.
Iconographia Oxoniae, showing Oxford’s defences, from Wood’s Historia et antiquitates Vniversitatis Oxoniensis
(Queen’s Upper Library 52.f.13)

In the interregnum Queen’s specialized in this kind
of temporizing. While Rawlinson was discreetly
clinging to his fellowship, the college became a home
for many young men of royalist cloth, for instance
the well-to-do pair Robert Southwell and Joseph
Williamson, both students in the 1650s, both future
knights, and both future Presidents of the Royal
Society of London. (Southwell’s student poetical
notebook survives in the Bodleian, and offers a
fascinating glimpse of Queen’s literary life in this
decade.) Occasionally royalist sympathy lost its
restraint: in 1657, for instance, one of Rawlinson’s
own pupils, Lancelot Addison—we will encounter
him again—delivered a supposedly comic oration in
the university so inflammatory against the puritans
that he was forced to recant in Convocation upon
his knees. But in general Rawlinson’s milieu
cultivated tact, and scholarly energies were directed
to pursuits that were, or at least seemed, politically
neutral.
And so in the 1640s and ’50s Rawlinson devoted
himself to mathematics, principally to geometry. We
know this because an extensive set of little
manuscripts, all in his hand, survive in Queen’s
College Library. These eight pocket volumes work
systematically through Euclid’s Elements and
Theodosius’s Spherics, and are so carefully compiled
and presented that they most probably functioned
too as Rawlinson’s own textbooks for his pupils, or
at least for his more mathematically inclined charges.
He may have intended them for the press. Rawlinson
also busied himself with the experimental philosophy
clubs springing up in Oxford around this time, and
in the 1650s he became acquainted with the
intelligencer Samuel Hartlib and the scholar John
Selden in London, as we learn from surviving letters
sent by Gerard Langbaine to Selden, and from letters
addressed to Hartlib by Rawlinson himself.
Langbaine enlisted Rawlinson to copy out ancient
Greek musical manuscripts in Oxford for Selden,
who was assisting a continental editor of the ancient
musical theorists. When in 1652 London’s Gresham
Professor of Astronomy, Samuel Foster, died,
Langbaine put in a good word with Selden for
Rawlinson as a potential successor, hoping that the
universally respected Selden might amplify this praise
in the right ears. The great physician, inventor, and
statistician William Petty, whom Rawlinson must
have got to know at Oxford, also wrote in support
of Rawlinson’s candidacy, noting in Rawlinson’s
favour the ‘Bookes of his Owne compiling &
Instruments of his owne hands making’. In the event
the far superior Lawrence Rooke of Wadham got the
job.
An example of one of Rawlinson’s little geometry notebooks in the Special
Collections at Queen's College Library. (Queen’s MS427)
Petty referred to Rawlinson as a maker of scientific
instruments. None of these has been recovered, but
we can be sure that Rawlinson knew how to handle
brass and burin, because, as we saw, he engraved his
own plates. His correspondence with Hartlib shows
that he engraved not only eclipse plates but also a
more extended work he called his ‘short
Trigonometry’. This turns out to have survived,
albeit seemingly in a sole printed copy. It was
probably engraved by Rawlinson in or just before
1656, as he sent it to Hartlib in a letter of that year,
along with the request to send further enclosed
copies to the Dutch mathematician Frans van
Schooten, and the French and Polish astronomers
Ismaël Boulliau and Johannes Hevelius. We do not
know if Hartlib deigned to send Rawlinson’s tiny
5

work to these three grand men, but the sole
surviving copy now in the British Library came from
the books of the eighteenth-century collector Sir
Hans Sloane, and Sloane plausibly acquired it from
the library of the experimentalist Robert Hooke.
Now Hooke was in Oxford in the 1650s too, and
moved in the same circles as Rawlinson; Christopher
Wren, for instance, was one precocious friend they
shared. At this time Hooke also attended the lectures
of the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, Seth Ward,
who taught the young Oxonians the geometry
necessary for the astronomer, especially the
mathematics of ‘spherical triangles’. In 1652 Ward
published for his students a short textbook in plane
and spherical trigonometry, the Idea Trigonometriæ
Demonstratæ. It was popular both within and outside
Oxford—Isaac Newton, for instance, studied it at
Cambridge. Now Rawlinson’s surviving manuscript
works, as I noted, consist chiefly of expositions of
Euclidean geometry, as well as the Spherics of
Theodosius, the pioneering work of spherical
geometry. Likewise if we inspect the content of his
‘short Trigonometry’, with Ward’s little textbook
open beside us, it is immediately obvious that
Rawlinson was in effect reducing Ward’s already
brief work into a series of handy tables for students.
The ‘short Trigonometry’ is Ward miniaturized and
tabulated. It seems to me quite likely that Rawlinson
and Hooke attended Ward’s lectures, and Rawlinson
may well have given Hooke a copy of his little work.
‘A maker of scientific instruments’. Above and on the right—examples of
Rawlinson’s mechanical illustrations from his mathematical notebooks.
(Queen’s MS430)
After the 1650s, Rawlinson somewhat fades from
view. In the Restoration he was proposed, but not
elected, to the Royal Society. He was however
granted another honorary degree, that of Doctor of
Divinity, in 1661, and he also found employment as
private tutor to Josceline Percy, son and heir of
Algernon Percy, 10th Earl of Northumberland. In
late 1665 he became Rector of St Mary’s,
Pulborough, in West Sussex, a not particularly
lucrative living. The next year Rawlinson married a
much younger woman, Bridget Croke of the Crokes
of Chequers, and reading between the lines of
Rawlinson’s will, which he made in 1668, his parents
-in-law—who must have been about the same age as
their new son by marriage—were not convinced that
their daughter had done as well as she might. (Their
house, as the name suggests, is indeed now the
country retreat for the serving Prime Minister.)
Rawlinson died in 1668. There was some talk among
the mathematical community, notably John Collins,
John Pell, and Francis Vernon, about the fate of his
papers and books. But the general feeling was that
no great original works were lurking among
Rawlinson’s nachlass, and so no sustained effort was
made to secure his papers for posterity. In 1671 the
Oxford mathematician and orientalist Edward
Bernard informed Collins that Rawlinson’s papers
were now in the hands of Alan Carr, a fellow of All
Souls. The next year Rawlinson’s executor, having
evidently heard a rumour from Oxford, reopened the
enquiry, asserting in vain his rights to the papers. We
know Rawlinson’s papers ended up back in his
college, but the final piece of the jigsaw—what
happened between Carr and Queen’s—has been
elusive until now.
6

It is provided by a series of letters now in the State
Papers between Rawlinson and Joseph Williamson,
whom we encountered above as a student. At the
start of their surviving correspondence, in early 1660,
Rawlinson was still Williamson’s college senior,
advising him on how to deal with tutorial students in
Rawlinson’s absence. But Williamson was heading
for great things, and within months was summoned
to London by the Restoration government; in 1674
he became Secretary of State for the Northern
Department. Rawlinson too soon left Oxford to take
up his tutorship, splitting his time between his
employer’s residences at Petworth and
Northumberland House, and latterly his living at
Pulborough. Rawlinson’s letters show that
Williamson sent Rawlinson weekly ‘Letters of
intelligence’ compiled by ‘Muddiman’; these are the
manuscript newsletters of the political journalist
Henry Muddiman (1629–92). Rawlinson, as
Williamson evidently hoped, volunteered to send
back any intelligence in return. Rawlinson also
complained mightily of a being he sneeringly called
the ‘Sultan of Queenes’, who was said to be wasting
the college’s money. Presumably this was Thomas
Barlow, the Provost, himself one of the great
benefactors of the college’s library. Rawlinson’s last
two letters ask for news about Lancelot Addison, his
former pupil, now chaplain to the garrison in
Tangier, and enclose a letter to be forwarded to him.
Addison is the link. After Rawlinson’s death his old
pupil, who had returned to England from Tangier in
1670, wrote to (now Sir) Joseph Williamson in 1672,
asking for his advice on what to do about
Rawlinson’s papers, which he now held:
Dr Rawlinson dying made it his last desire, that all his
Mathematique MSS. should be deliver’d into my
hands, which after some difficulty I haue got effected . .
. they contain a whole Cursus Mathematicus in
English fairly writ with his own hand. I conceive he
intended to have them made publiq, which is a thing I
dare not attempt till I haue advised with you whom I
know had a great respect for the Author. The work I
conceive will be considerable, and the printing with
Symbols of no small charge . . .
7
Williamson evidently did not respond with the
requisite enthusiasm or money, and Addison, I
propose, then decided to deposit the manuscripts
not only somewhere safe, but where they might also
do some good: in the Taberdars’ Library of Queen’s.
A further example of Rawlinson’s notes on geometry. (Queen’s MS429)
This was a significant choice. College libraries in
Oxford and Cambridge at the time were for graduate
fellows, not for students still studying for their
degrees—in Oxford at the start of the seventeenth
century there were in effect no undergraduate
libraries at all. Queen’s was one of the first colleges
to find a solution to this problem. The Taberdars
were students on scholarships, usually between the
degrees of BA and MA, and not yet full fellows. A
library specifically to assist their study was set up
perhaps as early as the 1620s, and by Rawlinson’s

time, it boasted a wide range of the kinds of texts
needed by those studying for their MAs, including
several mathematical books. (Over two hundred
books marked as from the Taberdars’ collection
survive in the library today.) When the great union
catalogue of English and Irish manuscript
collections, known as ‘Bernard’s Catalogue’, was
finally published in 1697/8, it included a special
category in Queen’s for the Taberdars’ manuscripts,
containing the writings of two and only two
Queensmen: the Aristotelian treatises of the wellknown
college scholar Richard Crakanthorpe (1568–
1624), and Rawlinson’s ‘Cursus Mathematicus’, as
Addison helpfully called it. That Rawlinson’s ‘Cursus
Mathematicus’ was placed specifically in the
Taberdars’ collection suggests that it was recognised
as suitable for these kinds of readers, and not just a
set of posthumous papers to be buried in the college
library’s manuscript series.
Close up of a sketch in one of Rawlinson’s notebooks on geometry. (Queen’s
MS425)
Whether Rawlinson’s ‘Cursus’ was really studied by
any future Taberdar, we do not know. In the late
1660s and 1670s Edward Bernard was planning a
huge series of mathematical editions, and tucked
away in the corner of one of his prospectuses for
this venture we find a mention of Rawlinson’s name
on account of his notational brevity: the volume on
Euclid was to contain ‘Demonstrations set out
concisely in symbols, from the editions of Isaac
Barrow [the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, and
editor of Euclid], and from the writings of masters
Oughtred [William Oughtred, the algebraist and
reformer of notation], and Rawlinson’. But Bernard’s
plans never got off the ground. The only subsequent
mention of Rawlinson I have found among the
mathematical community is that of the historian of
mathematical notation Florian Cajori, who remarked
in the early twentieth century that Rawlinson appears
to have been the first to designate the sides of a
triangle by the same letters as the angles opposite,
the former expressed by A, B, C, and the latter by a,
b, c. This is still what is taught in schools today.
We started with Rawlinson the astronomer, and we
should end on that angle too, as the majority of
Rawlinson’s mathematical work was concentrated in
the areas of geometry that in his day serviced
technical astronomy. For there is one further piece
of evidence that Rawlinson kept up actual
observations of the skies into the Restoration, and in
Queen’s College itself. In the college accounts for
the year 1663/64, there is recorded the payment of
the sum of £1 11s 6d ‘Ægidio Syvers pro opere circa
domum a Doctore Rallinson astris obervandis
designatam’—‘to Giles Syvers for work on the room
appointed by Dr Rawlinson for stargazing’.
William Poole, Fellow Librarian, New College
Endnotes
1. Fuller information on Rawlinson, with references,
may be found in ‘A Royalist Mathematical
Practitioner in Interregnum Oxford: The Exploits of
Richard Rawlinson (1616–1668)’, The Seventeenth
Century 32 (2018). I have taken this opportunity to
add some new information to this piece, however,
especially my concluding remarks on the provenance
of Rawlinson’s papers. As ever, there is valuable
material on Rawlinson in J. R. Magrath, The Queen’s
College, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1921).
2. Rawlinson’s eight surviving letters to Williamson
are: State Papers 18/221, fol. 2 (1 May 1660, on
pupils); SP 29/134, fol. 21 (3 October 1665, from
Petworth); SP 29/134, fol. 164 (16 October 1665,
8

complaints about the ‘Sultan’); SP 29/148, fol. 128 (2
February 1665/6, from Petworth, requesting a
certificate against the pressing of two of his ‘men’);
SP 29/164, fol. 118 (25 July 1666, from Petworth,
with the offer of venison); SP 29/188, fol. 133 (14
January 1667); SP 29/195, fol. 40 (27 March 1667,
now at Pulborough, asking after Addison’s letters);
SP 29/208, fol. 54 (3 July 1667, from Pulborough,
with a letter for Addison).
3. SP 29/314, fol. 131 (28 August 1672).
4. Thomas Smith, Vita . . . Edwardi Bernardi (London,
1704), sig. F2r: ‘Demonstrationes symbolis
brevissimè expressæ ex editis D. Barovii, & scriptis
D.D. Oughtredi & Rawlinsoni’.
William Poole is Galsworthy Fellow and Tutor in English,
and Fellow Librarian, at New College, Oxford. His interests
lie mainly in seventeenth century literary and intellectual
history, and his two most recent books are Milton and the
Making of 'Paradise Lost’ (2017) and John Fell’s New
Year Books, 1666–1686 (2018).
T
his essay is my word of thanks, on behalf
of Modern Poetry in Translation, to Queen’s
Library, the people who work there and
the building itself, for the recent
exhibition celebrating the first half century of the
magazine’s life and times. Ideal venue! The sum total
of all the issues of MPT since the first in 1966 is in
spirit certainly, and perhaps also in practice, a
miniature of this great library with its holdings from
many lands and eras, its many languages, creeds and
voices and its countless points of view. The
endeavour is kindred: to collect, safeguard, make
available. Translation is reading upon reading. The
translator reads, translates, and the work continues
its life, its ability to be further read, across frontiers
of space and time.
The first editors of MPT were Ted Hughes and
Daniel Weissbort. Hughes was the prime mover, it
was his idea; but after only a few years he left most
of the work of it to Weissbort, always however
keeping in touch and, by founding a world-wide
annual festival, Poetry International, in 1967, greatly
extending its reach. Weissbort soldiered on; but for
his hard work and faith there would have been no
half-centenary celebrations. When Helen and I took
over in 2001 we shifted the home of the magazine
from King’s, London, to Queen’s, Oxford; Sasha
Dugdale, who succeeded us, read German and
Russian here and as Editor at once saw what new
directions were needed; the present Editor, Clare
Pollard, introduced herself in the Shulman
Auditorium with a recitation from her version of
Ovid’s Heroines, so following Hughes and his Tales
from Ovid (after the Metamorphoses) but with a choice
– women’s voices – and a slant completely her own.
In the beginning MPT was notably male and white
and Eurocentric. Over the last twenty years, as a
matter of editorial policy, it has become steadily
more various, closer to the way the world is. Now it
girdles the earth and sends out feelers to all points of
the compass. More than a hundred languages have
been ‘englished’ in its pages. Work comes in more
abundantly from Africa, the Indian sub-continent,
the Far East; women and men (poets and translators)
are far more equally represented; and a far wider
range of humanity’s and the long-suffering earth’s
social, political, ecological (= existential, life-ordeath)
problems and crises are addressed. The joys
are abundantly and variously celebrated too. Poetry
is in the midst of it, saying what it is like, and where
poetry is there is also its good companion,
translation. The chief – perhaps even the only –
tense of poetry is present. Reading it, hearing it, we
are affected now. But its makers, its material, its
shapes and tones and voices go back, even in this
one magazine’s pages, deeper than Homer. The
principle – ‘I am human, I count nothing that is
human foreign to me’ – applies not just across the
world now, but down through the strata of the
centuries also. Perhaps ways of being human, of ever
having been human, never quite become extinct.
Once tried, they will continue, for good or ill, as
possibilities, for ever. The Four Horsemen of the
9

Apocalypse gallop tirelessly to and fro. And people
fall in love. People look around them like John Clare
in the days of Enclosure and still may wholeheartedly
say: ‘I love to see’ – the birds, beasts and flowers, the
cosmos, the dance of life. MPT taps into the dizzying
mix of past and present days and gives glimpses of
what it is like being human.
Queen’s and our sister college, Pembroke,
Cambridge (Ted Hughes’s old college) both
contributed generously to our celebratory year– to
the publication of our anthology Centres of Cataclysm
and to the upgrading of our website, for example.
And so doing, they helped us ensure that the
commemoration of past achievement also aided the
magazine’s future. Queen’s now has an almost
complete run of the magazine from 1966 to the
present day, and also a small archive (being added to)
of MPT material, which, we hope, may encourage
translation studies in the College. MPT launches,
readings, and discussion of work translated from
many languages, have become a regular item in the
Shulman’s annual programme. All this – and more! –
amounts to a presence of MPT in the College, it
consolidates the existence of the magazine, which is
to say enables it into further life. It’s a good motto
generally, and an essential one for a magazine of
poetry in translation, that if you are not busy living,
you are busy dying. So: loyalty to the tradition, to the
spirit of the origins, in the freedom to change, to
move with, and answer the demands of the times, a
continual self-translation to engage with the here and
now. It is good to be doing that with the generous
encouragement of a college nearly seven hundred
years old.
Ted Hughes, in 1982 looking back on the
beginnings, located the enthusiasm for translation,
out of which MPT was born, fully in the midst of the
sex, drugs and rock n’ roll of the Sixties. ‘It was a
spring-time feeling,’ he said, ‘and the Beatles were
like the song-bird sexual overspill of it, an
accompaniment that kept the party atmosphere
going for years.’ (And that upsurge of revolutionary
energy should itself be understood as a Blakeian
‘contrary’ to the deathly legacy of two world wars,
10
“[The sixties were] ‘a spring-time feeling,’ he said, ‘and the Beatles were
like the song-bird sexual overspill of it’…”
the genocides and the division of Europe by the Iron
Curtain.) Hughes spoke of ‘the tidal wave of poetry
translation in the early Sixties’ on which, he says, the
magazine came into being. There was no need to
search out contributors; they came flooding in of
their own accord. In Hughes’s words ‘it seemed
easier to let the Magazine take off than to keep it
grounded. The sheer pressure of material forced the
issue.’
Translation is a good deed. That was the Editors’
stated belief, intention and practice from the start.
So, in the first issue, important poets such as Miłosz,
Lalić, Voznesensky and Holub were lifted from
behind the Iron Curtain into a wider circulation in
English in the West. In 1968, after the Prague Spring
and its crushing in August by Soviet tanks, poetry
was got out across the Czech frontier like vital
contraband. The dissident writer George Theiner,
going into exile, became a translator of his
compatriots into English, so preserving and
extending his homeland’s living word. But this

export was not a one-sided act of charity. Hughes
and Weissbort were clear from the outset, in the very
conception of the magazine, that the good deed
would be one of mutual aid. British and American
poetry needed the shock of the poetry of Eastern
Europe and beyond (Amichai in Israel, for example).
Hughes noted, ‘Their poetry is more universal than
ours.’ It had been up against harder facts of life,
taken on a more public responsibility. Western poets
could learn from it.
arise out of ignorance or misunderstanding. We
operate amidst imprecision, evasiveness, half-truths,
downright and deliberate lies, fake news and
alternative facts. We don’t see one another properly.
Often we aren’t allowed to: the managers, elected or
not, make sure we don’t. In the view of the
philosopher Emmanuel Levinas our primary
existential state as human beings is responsibility.
‘Being with others’ – that is, being in the world with
any other human being – is a state of unconditional
responsibility. Responsibility itself comes from
proximity, from the fact of being near, from the first
sight of the face of a fellow human being. Levinas
says, ‘The face orders and ordains me.’ Translation
brings us face to face.
Poetry became ‘like contraband’ in sites of conflict and revolution.
Translating teaches not just the translators but also
their readers what the foreign language can do, what
its peculiar resources are. And learning that, you
begin to see what you might do to and with your
own. The native tongue is wonderfully resourceful,
in this sense: it has in it resources unknown until a
writer discovers and deploys them. And very often it
is the act of translating, or the arrival of a translation,
that makes that discovery. As Hölderlin wrote, ‘What
is our own has to be learned as much as that which is
foreign to us’; and he learned his own (quite
unmistakeably his own) poetic language by
translating from Ancient Greek.
Rightly, Hughes and Weissbort felt in the 1960s and
70s an urgent need for translation. MPT rode the
flood tide of it. But really, recognized or not, acted
upon or not, there always has been and always will
be such a need. It helps us to know one another, the
living and the dead. Most often it is a pleasure,
always it is a necessity. Bigotry, hatred, war,
expulsions, genocide and the thousand-and-one
other milder ways of living badly together, very often
11
Hughes and Weissbort began their endeavour in
times of ‘cataclysm’, as the old order broke up under
the irresistible demands for change. The times were
no less uneasy when Helen and I took over, but they
had a new hallmark, a new mark of Cain: the biggest
displacement of people since the end of the Second
World War. And those are the times, ever worsening,
we are in still. Wars, refugees, colossal and increasing
inequalities in wealth, people on the move to
improve or save their lives. And, part of that, part of
the cause of that: the unleashing and running out of
control of ‘market forces’.
Translators are – unashamedly, indeed polemically –
citizens of the world. Pace our Prime Minister, that
does not mean they are citizens of nowhere. You
translate well only if you are steeped in your mother
tongue, dyed in the love of it. And best if you have a
homeland, a beloved native habitation. Rooted like
that, gladly you welcome in the foreign. It won’t
harm you, it will strengthen and enrich you.
Encountering the foreign, you will learn and develop
your own identity, fashion it better in a continual
dialect with the native speech, customs, beliefs of
‘abroad’. Hölderlin thought of the translator as a
journeyman, travelling for years abroad, to learn the
craft. Then coming home, to serve. Perhaps the
citizens of nowhere that the PM really had in mind
were the non-doms, the tax-exiles, the off-loaders
off shore, the shunters of capital from one hidey-

hole to the next. They really do belong nowhere.
A month after the Referendum, we presented Centres
of Cataclysm in Paris at Shakespeare & Co. Since 1919,
with a gap between 1941 and 1951, at two locations
before the present one, that bookshop has been a
house and home of world literature, an
internationalist centre, generous, lively, youthful,
enterprising and courageous. Founded by Sylvia
Beach, it closed under the city’s occupation by the
armies of an ideology set on extirpating the very idea
of cosmopolitan humanism. Many of the works that
bookshop championed and disseminated were fed by
storm-troopers, students and professors to the Nazi
fires. George Whitman who opened his shop first in
the spirit of Sylvia Beach’s then (as a gift from her)
with its very name, once described Shakespeare &
Co. as ‘a socialist utopia, masquerading as a
bookshop’. But what a bookshop! Run by his
daughter now, another Sylvia, named after the first,
run in the same brave and generous way, young
people of the world lodging there among the books,
free board in exchange for their help.
We presented Centres of
Cataclysm in the early
evening of 26 July 2016,
introduced by Fergal
Keane, then with readings
of poems from half a
dozen languages, to an
audience of at least three
score and ten outside the
shop with the Seine and
Notre Dame behind
them. We read, they
attended, in the
The centres of cataclysm cover
knowledge that near
Rouen, in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray,
at early mass that morning, the priest, Father Jacques
Hamel, a man of eighty-five, had been murdered,
had had his throat cut, in front of the altar before his
small congregation, by two local young men in the
service of Islamic State.
‘World,’ said Louis Macneice, ‘is incorrigibly plural.’
12
So therefore is the spirit of poetry. Poetry in
translation is a furthering, extending, ramifying of
that instinctual bid to assert the fact and virtue of the
living world’s plurality. Father Jacques Hamel was a
victim of the untrue evil opposite.
Fundamentalists, believing their creed to be the only
true one, become iconoclasts, image-breakers, in the
simple logic that everything made before their own
one true faith arrived is by that arrival rendered
redundant and offensive. In that spirit, our own
British Reformation destroyed at least 90% of our
Medieval art and the Taliban blew the Buddhas of
Bamiyan to smithereens. There has never been any
shortage of wreckers and murderers with God on
their side. Daesh/Islamic State, having begun the
destruction of the temples and friezes at Palmyra, on
18 August 2015 they publicly beheaded Professor
Khaled Mohamad al-Asaad, Curator of Antiquities at
Palmyra Museum, because he refused to disclose to
them the whereabouts of some particular treasures in
his care which they intended either to destroy, or to
sell on the black market to fund their crusade against
civilization or, indeed, against human life altogether.
Khaled Asaad was eighty-one. He had looked after
the collection for more than forty years.
The Romans sacked Palmyra in 273 AD, not to
assert the one true faith but just as part of the usual
conduct of a war. The city ‘vanished’; that is, the
ruins of it stood in the desert unvisited by Western
travellers, until Robert Wood and James Dawkins
‘discovered’ them in 1751. They measured, drew and
published them, engraved and with copious notes, in
a handsome folio, The Ruins of Palmyra, in 1753
(Queen’s has a copy). Doing so, they fed them back
into the understanding of classical architecture and
its revival in the 18th century. Robert Wood, by 1756
Undersecretary of State to William Pitt, was not only
a traveller and discoverer but also the author of An
Essay on the Original Genius of Homer, a book which,
appearing in abbreviated form (Wood, a busy man,
was still working on it) in only half a dozen copies in
1769, was translated, amplified from Wood’s own
notes, into German in 1773 (two years before any
completed English edition) and powerfully affected

Herder and Goethe in their enthusiasm for ‘primitive
song’.
The Ruins of Palmyra.
Poetry – native or translated – won’t save the world;
a humane and intelligent politics will be necessary.
Poetry lives and works now in a context – of lies,
commodification, widespread war, the trashing of
the lovely earth – which is hostile to its very survival.
But it answers back, it is one very important part of
the whole ecology of human and humane life. MPT,
the magazine itself, is one bearer of poetry, an agent
by which poetry, the good of it, is furthered. And a
library is an ark, still afloat, freighted with colossal
and vital treasures among which are not just such
precious books as a Shakespeare First Folio or
Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra, but also runs of periodicals
and magazines. Václev Havel, dissident playwright
before he became Czechoslovakia’s President, wrote
an open letter to Gustáv Husák, General Secretary of
the Czechoslovak Communist Party, objecting to the
closure or driving into extinction of literary
magazines. They made a web, the loss of any one of
them is ‘an interference … in the complex system of
circulation, exchange and conversion of nutrients
that maintains life in the many-layered organism
which is society today.’ His image is that of an
ecology. We are lessened by the loss of every species
(c.27, 000 a year) and every language (one a
fortnight). In the case of magazines, he said, the loss
is real even if few people ever read them – strictly,
even if they had till their loss been read by nobody
but their writers and editors. Why? Because a
possible resource, an agent of society’s selfknowledge,
has been extinguished. We can’t even
know, once it has gone, how it might have served us
in our worsening plight. The loss of any species of
plant or animal, the loss of any language, has the
same unhappy effect, even if we had not known of
their existence till we heard the news of their
extinction. A part of the whole ecology, of Gaia’s
web, of the whole interconnected, interdependent,
variously beneficent living system, has gone, and we
are the poorer even though the particular material
loss might be minute, unappreciable. T. S. Eliot felt
that all works of literature, whatever their language
and age, coexist in an accessible present, they have ‘a
simultaneous existence’ and compose ‘a
simultaneous order’. By the arrival of a new work
‘the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly,
altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of
each work of art towards the whole are readjusted.’
A bit far-fetched perhaps, and I shouldn’t like Eliot
himself to be in charge of these adjustments; but the
idea of not only continuity in literature but also of a
simultaneity of works alive in present time is deeply
congenial. Such co-operating life is manifest in the
workings of a single poem. Studying Hölderlin’s
manuscripts I have seen close up and in the act his
faith that every line-break and stanza-break, every
sentence, word and punctuation mark contributes
livingly to the whole. All choices, all changes matter.
More or less palpably, the replacement anywhere in
the poem of one word by another causes a shift.
Hence his habit of piling up possible epithets,
holding them potentially in play, until, for the whole,
he must choose.
Earth is a living system, not a machine. We and every
living thing on and in and above the earth (even
those living not in the least the way we do) are
interdependent, co-operating parts of the web. That
is why every extinction hurts. So thanks be to
Queen’s Library, whose holdings (I love that word!),
among them MPT, keep countless possibilities alive.
David Constantine read French and German at Wadham
College and taught German Language and Literature at the
University of Durham and at Queen’s. Since 2000 he has
worked as a freelance writer and translator. With his wife
Helen he edited Modern Poetry in Translation 2003-12.
13

inextricably linked to the Queen’s College, and his
portrait, painted by George Fiddes Watt in 1919, still
stands out on the wall above the fireplace in what is
now the College Office, which was for many decades
the ‘Sayce Room’.
At 19 Sayce came to Oxford from Bath and was
elected to a Classical Scholarship at Queen’s. His
arrival is vividly depicted in his 1923 wide-ranging
autobiography:
Archibald Henry Sayce, painted in 1919 by George Fiddes Watt
A
mong the outstanding figures in the
history of the University of Oxford is
to be counted the Anglican clergyman
Archibald Henry Sayce (Shirehampton,
Bristol 1845 ‒ Bath 1933), comparative philologist,
religious scholar, Assyriologist, Hittitologist, and
Egyptologist. Many of his books were pioneering
milestones in Near Eastern studies, such as An
Assyrian Grammar for Comparative Purposes (1872), Fresh
Light from the Ancient Monuments (1884), The Hittites.
The Story of a Forgotten Empire (1888), and The “Higher
Criticism” and the Verdict of the Monuments (1893).
Sayce’s prominence as a public intellectual, and his
very many contacts with leading contemporary
scholars, politicians, and artists for most of his long
life, placed him in the thick of that intense network
that formed the backbone of the Victorian and
Edwardian establishment. Sayce’s life and career is
“My name had long been entered for matriculation on
the books of Brasenose College, and in the early spring
of 1865, accordingly, I went to Oxford, and after
swearing belief in the Thirty-nine Articles which I had
never read, I duly became a member of the University.
It so happened, however, that I had noticed an
announcement of an examination for scholarships at
Queen’s which was to commence the day after my
matriculation, and accordingly, instead of returning to
Batheaston I tried my luck at it, and was elected
Scholar of the College along with Charles Tait. When
I reached home, instead of being congratulated on my
success, I was received with frowns; my father’s
recollections of Oxford belonged to a time when Queen’s
was the abode of rough North-countrymen who had an
unsavoury reputation among their fellow-collegians. It
was the period when, according to current report, there
was a special suffrage in the Litany in use in
University College on the opposite side of the High
Street: ‘From the gentlemen in the back-quad at
Queen’s, Good Lord, deliver us!’ When I first joined
the College there were still some untutored specimens of
humanity in it, and there were still traditions extant of
a recent member of the community who had been
detected, after a riotous evening, dancing in a state of
nudity at midnight on the altar of the College
Chapel.” (A.H. Sayce, Reminiscences, London,
1923, p. 29).
At Queen’s Sayce attended the lectures of Friedrich
Max Müller (the Oxford-based German Professor of
Comparative Philology) and became his disciple and
friend. In 1868 Sayce obtained a First Class in
Greats, and the following year was elected to a
Fellowship at Queen’s and was at the same time
14

appointed Classical Lecturer. In 1870 this became a
Tutorial Fellowship, and in 1876, when Max Müller
partially retired, Sayce was appointed Deputy
Professor of Comparative Philology, a University
post which he retained until 1889. His delicate health
forced him, from 1879, to spend long periods in
warm countries of the Near East, so that he resigned
his College Tutorship (though retaining the
Fellowship). From 1881 onwards he went regularly
to Egypt. First he settled at Abydos, then in 1884-
1885 he hired a dahabeeyah on the Nile and at the
same time took a house in London to share with his
brother and sister. Sayce very much liked the
sparkling, cooperative and cosmopolitan atmosphere
of the London milieu. Here he was used to spend his
time between the British Museum and the Savile and
Athenaeum Clubs, where politics and science found
their meeting point. Although Sayce was seldom to
be seen in Oxford, his presence at the Queen’s
College was regular and significant, as recalled in this
appreciation after his death, written by his own
College and published in The Oxford Magazine of
February 16th, 1933:
“To us he was a wandering star, rising and setting with
absolute regularity. [...] He appeared at the beginning
of May, went away on the morrow of the Summer
Meeting (in old days Ascension Day,) reappeared for a
summer season of one month in August, and vanished
once more, to rise above the horizon for All Saints’
Day, and then migrate to the South. The rest of the
year he spent in visits; at one time he had a flat in
London, but for some years past he owned a house in
Edinburgh.”
In 1889, when Sayce’s father died and he became
financially independent, Sayce resigned the Deputy
Professorship of Comparative Philology and bought
his own dahabeeyah, (pictured below) named after the
F.B. Attwood-Matthews, A.H. Sayce’s Dahabeevah, Istar, Assouan, Egypt. Image reproduced with permission from Newport Museum and Art Gallery,
Newport (Wales).
15

Babylonian goddess Ishtar, fitted out with a library
and with a crew of 19, where he lived for long
periods studying and writing, and also entertaining
friends and other orientalists, among them the
renowed Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. In May 1891
Sayce received in Egypt the news that the University
of Oxford had created for him, then 45 years old, a
Chair of Assyriology, to which no duties either of
residence or of teaching were attached:
“The following form of Decree was proposed: That the
Rev. Archibald Henry Sayce, M.A., Fellow of
Queen’s College, be appointed Professor of Assyriology
under the provisions of Statt. Tit. XIX §6 cl. 6 for a
period of five years, his duties being to lecture or give
instruction during some part of each year and his
stipend to be £100 a year.” (Oxford University
Gazette, 5th May 1891)
Sayce was in the habit of delivering two public
lectures, one in the spring and one in the autumn,
before leaving for Egypt. The professorship was
renewed every five years until his retirement in 1915.
Therefore, the establishment of Assyriology as an
academic discipline in England is due to a Fellow of
The Queen’s College, since Sayce before 1891
lectured on Assyrian and Egyptian philology in the
London rooms of the Society for Biblical Archaeology,
and then from 1891 onwards he held the Oxford
chair.
Notwithstanding his many stays in Egypt and travels
all around the world, the emotional bond that joined
Sayce to Queen’s was deep and life-long, as indicated
for instance by his generous donations of precious
incunables to the College Library. Sayce loved so
much the spectacular view of the chief buildings of
Oxford from the windows of the Upper Common
Room at Queen’s that he begged, unsuccessfully,
Holman Hunt, the co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, to paint it. As we know from Sayce’s
autobiography, he was convinced that no one except
Hunt “could have done it with the spiritual vision
and carefulness of detail that it demands” (A.H.
Sayce, Reminiscences, p. 303). Years later, this view was
painted by the hand of John Piper, and it has been
reproduced by Ridler Vivian in The Oxford Almanack
of 1972.
The Sayce Papers kept in six boxes at The Queen’s
College, ordered and catalogued in July 2005 by the
Librarian Amanda Saville, are almost all unpublished.
They throw light on aspects not previously known of
Sayce life and of his religious and professional
activities. They are also relevant for a better
understanding of the worldwide intellectual milieus
and networks he frequented. We began the study of
these important archival materials, together with
those kept at the Griffith Institute and the Bodleian
Library during a stay at Oxford in late autumn 2017,
granted by the CNR Short Term Mobility Program,
in the framework of the research “Aspects of Near
Eastern Studies in Victorian Age” of the initiative
‘Gruppo di Ricerca Interdisciplinare di Storia degli
Studi Orientali’ (GRISSO) of the ISMA, Roma. Our
first recognition allows us to offer some highlights of
the Sayce Papers at Queen’s.
Example of Sayce’s juvenile insect sketches
The oldest manuscript is a notebook of Sayce’s
juvenile verses of the late 1850s; other, and even
mature, poems are in loose folios, also including
juvenile pencil and watercolour sketches of insects,
mainly butterflies
Furthermore, there are two youth diaries, dating
back to the age of 19 and 20, when Sayce entered
Queen’s, and six notebooks of undergraduate lecture
notes and writings, including his first drawings of
16

other sources, traces the history of the founders of
cuneiform studies, including Henry Creswick
Rawlinson (1801-1895), Austen Henry Layard (1817-
1894), who also was British ambassador at
Constantinople from April 1877 to May 1880, and
George Smith (1840-1876), as well as their
prominent German and French colleagues Jules
Oppert (1825-1905), Eberhard Schrader (1836-
1908), François Lenormant (1837-1883) Friedrich
Delitzsch (1850-1922), and Paul Haupt (1858-1926).
Pages from Sayce’s 1864 diary.
cuneiform signs with their meanings.
The Sayce Papers also include many manuscripts of
lectures and articles on a broad gamut of topics
(philology, archaeology, history, and theology), with
Sayce’s own straight titles. Among the unpublished
texts dealing with the ancient Near Eastern studies
stands out in importance the lengthy undated
manuscript entitled The Heroic Age of Assyriology. Here
Sayce, mentioning episodes that do not feature in
Sayce’s unpublished sermons, which cast new light
on his involvment in the debate between religion and
science deserve a special mention. First insights on
these matters are given by Roshunda Lashae Belton
in her 2007 Louisiana dissertation “A Non-
Traditional Traditionalist: Rev. A. H. Sayce and His
Intellectual Approach to Biblical Authenticity and
Biblical History in Late-Victorian Britain.”
Box with Sayce’s letters and his portrait by Hetty J. Dallin.
Sayce’s The Heroic Age of Assyriology.
Of particular interest is a small box containing the
correspondence between Sayce and Isaac Taylor
(1829-1901), the anglican clergyman author of a
famous book on the ancient alphabets (The Alphabet,
1883) who, during the 1870s, was rector of
Settrington, North Yorkshire. The box also contains
a medallion with the portrait of Sayce dated 1902,
(above) painted by Hetty J. Dallin, daughter of
Thomas Francis Dallin, Fellow of The Queen’s
College (1864-1871), then Professor of Rhetoric at
17

London and Public Orator at Oxford (1877-1880).
Approximately 100 letters were exchanged by Sayce
and Taylor between 1874 and 1893. Among their
topics worthy to be mentioned are discussions of the
Etruscan inscriptions and of the written sources and
monuments from Anatolia and Northern Syria to be
attributed to the Hittites. Friendship and general
freedom of expression characterize the
correspondence between the two scholars. The box
was donated to The Queen’s College on June 29,
1954 by the brothers Oliver (1905-1986) and Martin
Davies (1908-1975), at that time respectively
Professor of the University College, Achimota
(Accra, Ghana), and Deputy Keeper (he will become
Director) of the National Gallery, London. Sayce’s
intimacy with the Davies family is shown by a letter
he wrote from Egypt in 1904 to “Ms. Davies”, also
kept in this box.
Other important Sayce papers to come to Queen’s
are those presented as a legacy by the Anatolian
scholar Richard David Barnett (1909-1986). The
papers were presented on June 26, 1979 at the
suggestion of John Oswald Prestwich (1914-2003),
Fellow and Librarian at Queen’s. It contains Sayce
materials, ranging from 1880s to 1910s and later,
once in possession of the archaeologist John
Garstang (1876-1956), who was a faithful
collaborator of Sayce. Among them there are many
drawings and photographs mainly of Anatolian
hieroglyphic inscriptions, and a little correspondence.
Interesting is a letter to Sayce from Arthur Nicolson
(1849-1928) ‒ the well-known British diplomat and
politician ‒ who at the beginning of September 1879,
when he was second secretary at the embassy at
Constantinople, confirmed to Sayce that Layard
would be available to meet him at the summer
residence of the British embassy at Therapia, a
decisive event that enabled Sayce to travel for the
first time to the Near East. Sayce used the back of
this letter to make travel notes including his first
impressions of the monumental Karabel Relief,
Western Anatolia, written in pencil, but still legible.
In the Sayce Papers this is not the only example of
his reusing of letters, hotel receipts, and tickets to
make painstaking drawings and notes during his
travels, including those he made during the winter
1911-1912 in Japan and one year later in India,
Burma, and China.
The Sayce Papers of The Queen’s College also
include the copious correspondence he exchanged
with Lady Mary Lilian Boyd Dawkins (nee Poole),
the second wife of Sir William, Professor of Geology
at Manchester. Among the sixty letters there is what
it likely to be Sayce’s final script. In a pencil missive
sent from Bath a few days before dying, on a Sunday
afternoon he wrote:
“I have been very ill. It would have been better to have
passed to a world where there is no need of breathing”.
Some of the correspondence between Sayce and Taylor. This image shows a
letter from Sayce to Taylor, September 27, 1882.
Sayce’s legacy is not only kept at The Queen’s
College, but also at the Bodleian Library (his passive
18

The letter from Nicolson to Sayce confirming his meeting with Layard in Therapia (left) and the back of the letter, where Sayce made his travel notes (right).
correspondence), Griffith Institute (mainly his
papers on Egyptological topics), and The Sackler
Library (his books and off-prints, deposited by the
Queen’s College on loan at the Ashmolean Museum
in 1933). It is to be mentioned that Sayce’s books
and papers suffered great losses and damages on
December 11, 1886, during the fire that burnt down
the western front Quadrangle of Queen’s. As we
learn from his autobiography, Sayce had unusually
decided to spend in England the winter of 1886, and
he remained at Oxford also in order to attend the
Boar’s Head Procession on Christmas Day:
“the great fire took place which destroyed the staircase
next to mine and threatened at one time to consume the
whole of that side of the ‘Front Quad’ of the College in
which my rooms were situated. It was the evening after
the undergraduates had gone to their homes; a violent
wind was blowing, when between eleven and twelve,
while I was busy with the manuscript of my lectures,
one of my brother-Fellows came to my rooms with a
pale face and told me that the porter had just discovered
a fire in the Bursar’s rooms. We found subsequently
that the fire had been due to an exposed beam of wood
in the chimney which had, no doubt, been smouldering
for some time; the gale which was blowing fanned it into
a flame, and owing to the deserted state of the College
the fire was not discovered until too late. By the time
the fire-engines had arrived the whole staircase was in a
blaze, and the fire was running along the roof, over the
Provost’s lodge and my own rooms, and threatening our
Common-rooms and Library. Meanwhile such
undergraduates as were left in Oxford had congregated
at the burning College and were busily engaged in
removing the silver from the Buttery, and books and the
like from the Provost’s house and the adjoining rooms.
19

The flames shot up above the spire of St. Mary’s, and
the white stone statues which stand on the College wall
facing the High Street looked like martyrs at the stake.
Fortunately the wind, which had been blowing furiously
from south to north, suddenly shifted to the opposite
quarter and so enabled the firemen on the roof to drive
the flames back towards the staircase in which the fire
had broken out, and eventually to confine it there. But
the night was very cold, with occasional showers of sleety
rain, and the result of exposure to it in my case was a
chill and an attack on the lungs. My books and papers
also had suffered grievously, partly from the water with
which my staircase and rooms had been deluged, partly
from their hurried conveyance in the dark to a place of
safety, and contact also with the fire. Most of my
correspondence from the scholars and other ‘celebrities’ I
had known was destroyed; a considerable part of my
books was injured by water, and for many years
afterwards I was constantly finding that individual
parts of a series in the case of learned periodicals, or of
volumes in the case of a literary work, were missing. A
collection of Oriental gems, moreover, which I had
placed on a table in one of my rooms ready to take to
London, where they were to be photographed and
published in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
Archaeology, was entirely lost, doubtless trampled
underfoot in the sodden grass of the ‘quad.’ Some day
they will probably be recovered, and the archaeologists of
the future will be tempted to weave theories about the
Oriental connections of Queen’s College.” (A.H.
Sayce, Reminiscences, pp. 245f.).
This detailed account by Sayce as an eyewitness
complements the page written just after the events
by the Queen’s Provost John Richard Magrath in
“Letters of Richard Radcliffe and John James of
Queen’s College, Oxford. 1755-83,” Margaret Evans
ed., Oxford, 1888, pp. 276f., where Sayce is not
mentioned.
In conclusion, the study and publication of the Sayce
Papers at The Queen’s College will substantially
contribute to highlight the life and career of a scholar
who was dubbed by his contemporaries as one of the
three “Eastern Sages” of Oxford scholarship,
together with his teacher and lifelong friend Max
20
Müller and the Sinologist James Legge.
The three ‘Eastern Sages’ of Oxford Scholarship, with Sayce on the left,
and Müller and Legge at the centre and to the right respectively. Image
reproduced with permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.
It has been a great pleasure for us to be able to work
on the Sayce Papers at Queen’s. We wish to express
all our gratitude to Amanda Saville, without whose
extraordinary help and kind availability our work
would have been impossible; we are also deeply
indebted to the members of the College Library
staff, and particularly to Sarah Arkle, for the time
they have dedicated to us.
We warmly thank Christopher Metcalf, Associate
Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Classical Languages
and Literature at The Queen’s College, for
stimulating conversations about our research. Last
but not least, we are very grateful to Jacob Dahl,
Professor of Assyriology at the Oriental Institute,
University of Oxford, and Fellow of the Wolfson
College, for his warm hospitality during our stay in
Oxford.
Silvia Alaura and Marco Bonechi are both Researchers at the
Istituto di Studi sul Mediterraneo Antico (ISMA) ‒
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Roma. Silvia is
an Hittitologist and she has extensively published on the
history of Near Eastern studies. Marco is an Assyriologist and
his interest lies also in the nineteenth-century intellectual
history. Silvia and Marco are shortly to publish an edition of
the correspondence and papers of Archibald H. Sayce.

The following images and captions are a selection
from our Summer 2018 exhibition, curated by
former DPhil student Sarah Gouldesbrough.
The exhibition explores the various ways that
illustrators, printers and artists have represented the
Greek poet Homer and his famous poems,
the Iliad and the Odyssey; the texts on show stretch
from the 1500s to the present day. The Iliad deals
with the story of the Trojan War, the war fought by
the Greek and Trojan heroes over Helen, the most
beautiful woman in the world; and the Odyssey tells
the story of one of those war heroes, Odysseus, as he
tries to get home and encounters monsters and
mayhem along the way.
Left: the title page of Tickell’s translation of Homer, and
above, a closer look at the engraving of Homer from the title
page. From: Queen’s College, P.i.764(2).
Thomas Tickell (1685—1740) The First Book of
Homer’s Iliad, Translated by Mr Tickell (1715)
Recent scholarship has rejected the idea of one
fantastically talented ‘Homer’ as the author of the
poems, instead outlining a model of multiple poets
working in an oral culture who created these poems
over many years, but historically ‘Homer’ was a
revered and respected literary figure. He is usually
represented as a blind old man, as in the image to the
left, printed on the front cover of Thomas Tickell’s
translation of the first book of the Iliad. Tickell was a
fellow of Queen’s, and his portrait still hangs in the
Hall.
Linked event
The exhibition was launched with a talk by Sarah
about her DPhil thesis into representations of
Homer both classical and contemporary. This talk
was held in the Shulman Auditorium, and was the
second in our series of events linked to our
exhibition (the first being the Modern Poetry in
Translation event which David Constantine discussed
in his article).
The poster advertising the exhibition and the linked
talk forms the back cover of this issue of Insight.
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The opening lines of the Iliad, ftom Queen’s College Library, Sel.e.86
Homer’s Iliad (1524)
This beautifully printed edition of Homer’s Iliad is
open to the first lines of the poem, which famously
begins:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω
Ἀχιλῆος…
Sing, goddess, of the wrath of Achilles,
The Iliad focuses on a few weeks towards the end of
the Trojan War when Achilles, the aristos Achaion, the
‘best of the Achaeans’ (Greeks), argues with the
commander of the Greek armies, Agamemnon. The
beauty and richness of this edition of the poem, seen
in the careful printing of the text and the gilded
edges of the pages, reflects the esteem that the poem
has traditionally been held in: the Iliad and
the Odyssey have often been considered to be
foundational in the Western canon, and cornerstones
of European literature
the son of Peleus…
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Odysseus and The Cyclops
One of the most memorable passages of
Homer’s Odyssey is Odysseus’ encounter with the
Cyclops, Polyphemus, an enormous one-eyed
monster. The Cyclops traps Odysseus and his men in
his cave and eats Odysseus’ men in a graphic,
grotesque description:
He snatched up two of my men and dashed them
against the earth
ike puppies. Their brains ran out onto the ground and
wetted the earth.
He sliced them up, limb from limb, and made his meal.
He ate them like a mountain-raised lion, and he left
nothing behind,
eating the entrails and the flesh and the marrow-filled
bones.
A contemporary depiction of the Cyclops, from ODY-C by
Matt Fraction and Christian Ward (private collection), which
shows the enduring legacy of Odysseus’ encounter with the
cyclops.
A depiction of Odysseus giving wine to the cyclops, who becomes drunk enough to allow Odysseus and his remaining men to escape
from certain death. From Queen’s College Sel.g.110
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