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ABSTRACT Edmund Bolton's commentary on Tacitus's Annals, books 1-6, in his Averrunci or The Skowrers (1634) represents the first scholarly challenge to Tacitus's authority as historian of the Roman Empire and the earliest revisionist portrait of the emperor Tiberius. While expanding on a number of themes in the introduction to the 2017 edition of Bolton's manuscript, this essay focuses on his reappraisal of Tiberius's reign and on the dual perspectives Bolton brings to his work, as a devoted (Catholic) monarchist examining a crucial stage in the consolidation of the principate, and as a historian of Rome reflecting upon "the most ponderous worldlie controversie" of his own day.
KEYWORDS: Catholicism; Edmund Bolton; lex maiestatis; republicanism; principate; Tacitus; Tiberius; toleration
IN APOLLO'S REALM on Mount Parnassus, the imaginary setting of Traiano Boccalini's Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612-13), the Roman historian Tacitus is arrested and questioned, at the instigation of certain powerful Princes, for spreading seditious arguments.1 As John Florio's English version (1626) relates:
The apprehending of the person of Cornelius Tacitus,... a man so remarkable in Parnassus, so deare vnto Apollo, prime Counseller of State, chiefe Chronicler, and his Maiesties Master of Sentences. . . . hath happened by reason of some complaints exhibited against him by certaine most potent Princes, who haue grieuously complained and aggrauated, that Tacitus with the seditious argument of his Annals, and of his Histories, hath framed a kinde of spectacles, that work most pernitious effects for Princes; for so much as being put vpon the noses of silly and simple people, they so refine and sharpen their sight, as they make them see and prie into the most hidden and secret thoughts of others, yea euen into the centre of their hearts.2
In Boccalini's account, Tacitus is eventually set free by Apollo, with a warning not to produce any more of those diabolical spectacles. But it was not long before the author of the Annals was summoned before another court, this time by the English historian and antiquary Edmund Bolton (1575-after August 29, 1634) in a manuscript titled Averrunci or The Skowrers. Ponderous and new considerations, vpon the first six books of the Annals of Cornelius Tacitus, concerning Tiberius Caesar (MS A IV 5, Biblioteca Durazzo, Genoa, Italy).3 Here, Tacitus was...