Thomas More Research

In 1505 got married and moved to a house on the present site of the Bloomberg building in Bucklersbury. There he translated Lucian’s Dialogues. 

Concepción Cabrillana, Tomás Moro: Diálogos de Luciano. Introducción, traducción del original latino y notas

Moreana, Volume 60 Issue 1, Page 141-145, ISSN 0047-8105

Available at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/more.2023.0144

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Concepción Cabrillana’s is a translation into Spanish of one of the first Latin works of More which includes More’s “Dedicatory Letter to Thomas Ruthall”; the translation from the Greek of three “Dialogues of Lucian: Cynicus, Menippus, and Philopseudes”; and his “Declamation on Tyrannicide”; as well as More’s own response to Lucian’s declamation.

The Translations were made while Erasmus stayed in More’s house, soon after More’s marriage. They were published for the first time at Paris in 1506, and republished several times during More’s lifetime. That first printing included the six pieces by More preceded by many more from Erasmus. The two of them provided their own translation of Lucian’s Tyrannicide, and their response to it.

Professor Cabrillana holds the Chair of Latin Philology in the Department of Latin and Greek of the University of Santiago de Compostela, and has published extensively on Latin syntax and semantics through books and articles in specialized journals such as Philologia Classica, Graeco-Latina Brunensia, Euphrosyne, and Journal of Latin Linguistics. Cabrillana makes use of this expertise to aid understanding of More’s Latin texts. For the translation of the four pieces which are translations into Latin of Lucian’s Greek, Cabrillana makes frequent reference to Lucian’s originals, for More himself had tried to include in his Latin version every nuance found in the Greek though at time he made his own different reading.

A superficial approach might assume that the book is merely a Spanish text of something that was already available in English. This is far from the case. Thompson’s edition published within The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More is a critical edition of the six Latin pieces by More; it includes also Thompson’s translation into English of the Dedicatory Letter and of More’s response to Lucian’s Tyrannicide. As Thompson’s edition did not include an English translation of More’s Latin translations from the Greek, the editors of the 1500-page Essential Works commissioned such a translation from Malsbary.

Cabrillana has made so deep a scholarly study of More’s Latin that now researchers count with three key reference sources. Chronologically these are: (1) Thompson’s critical Latin edition of the six pieces by More, and his English translations of the Dedicatory Letter and of More’s response to Tyrannicide; (2) Malsbary’s English translations of More’s four Latin translations; and (3) Cabrillana’s entire translation into Spanish of all six Latin pieces by More. I want to emphasize that Cabrillana’s work is of relevance and value not only to a Spanish readership but also to the worldwide scholarly community. This is a very considerable contribution made by Cabrillana.

An example may serve to illustrate this. In his letter to Ruthall, More, after saying that St. John Chrysostom was “a man of the most acute judgement, of all learned men perhaps the most Christian and […] of all Christians the most learned,” writes that Chrysostom was “viro gravi, vereque Christiano,” which Thompson translates as a “grave and truly Christian man.” Is “grave” really an adequate translation in context? “Grave” means “serious or solemn in manner” (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2003), which does not properly fit a man whom a sentence earlier More seemed to have taken as his mentor. Cabrillana translates into Spanish as “cabal,” and writes “un hombre cabal y verdaderamente cristiano.” “Cabal” means “upright,” and that seems to this reader a proper English translation corresponding to the Latin “gravis.” This leads to another consideration: the editors of Essential Works envisage a further volume containing the entire collection of More’s letters. This should certainly take into account research such as Cabrillana’s.

In choosing those three dialogues, More had a purpose that he explains in the Dedicatory Letter:

Refraining from the arrogant pronouncements of the philosophers as well as from the wanton wiles of the poets, [Lucian] everywhere reprimands and censures, with very honest and at the same time very entertaining wit, our human frailties. […], but in my opinion he has done it exceptionally well in these three dialogues, which for this very reason I have chosen to translate, from such an abundance of exceedingly pleasant ones; though perhaps other persons might much prefer other dialogues. For just as, among maidens, all men do not love the same one, but each has his own preference as fancy dictates and adores not the one he can prove is best but the one who seems best to him—so of the most agreeable dialogues of Lucian, one man likes a certain one best, another prefers another; and these particularly struck my fancy, yet not without reason, I trust, nor mine alone.The selection and the Christian reading that he made of them was enough for More. This differed from Erasmus’ aim: he, the professional editor, translated as many as possible: twenty-eight for the first edition; seven others for the second edition. Let us focus on the content of the Dialogues.

The first dialogue is between Cynicus and Lucian. Cynicus despises worldly goods, and practices detachment to an extreme degree. The reader is rather led to conclude that Cynicus is intemperate in practicing temperance.

The second is between Menippus, a young cynic searching how to conduct his life, and Philonides, a friend of his. Two main topics are brought up by Lucian. First, the bodies of the wealthy who perpetrate many crimes in life despising the poor are to be punished in Hades along with other criminals, but their souls are to be reincarnated as donkeys driven about by poor people. So, the rich who oppressed the poor are to be humiliated by those they humiliated. Contempt for riches and detachment from earthly goods are themes considered by More not only here and in the first dialogue but also in Utopia, the Treatise on the Four Last Things, and the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation.

More describes the second topic in his Dedicatory Letter as “the silly fictions of poets and the fruitless contentions of philosophers.” Years later Vives, commenting on the City of God, wrote:

We are mostly influenced by the example of those whom we respect, for we always endeavor to imitate them, whether gods or men. The people affect the manners of the prince; the scholars strive to copy the men whom they respect; and mankind invariably aims at the morals of those they revere as gods. For this reason, our holy religion proposes for our imitation, the example of Christ, and the saints.

Here Vives inserted a quotation taken from More’s translation of Menippus:

Therefore I, says he, when a boy, hearing Hesiod and Homer relating the wars and seditions, not merely of the demigods, but even of the gods themselves; their adulteries likewise, their violations, tyrannies, expulsion of parents; their marriages of brothers with sisters; by Hercules, I thought all these were good and honorable, and therefore I imitated them most zealously. For I never could suppose that the gods would themselves become fornicators and adulterers, or would excite quarrels and broils amongst one another, if they had not allowed men to do the same, as good and honorable.Confronted with the fables of the poets and the conflicting theories of the philosophers, More’s suggestion is to study their arguments, and he expands on this in the following dialogue.

Cabrillana emphasizes topics that are also present in More’s Epigrams, which she translated in a previous work: manifestations of incoherence, the difficulty of self-knowledge, greed, and so on. They point to the overall coherence and unity that exists in More’s thought from early on.

In the last dialogue Lucian attacks those who invent lies for the sake of it, as explained by Philocles. His interlocutor, Tychiades, concludes, “We have a great remedy against such things: the right truth and reason in everything; if we use them, we will not be disturbed by any vain and stupid lie of this kind.” More makes use of this dialogue to correct those who invent lies while writing biographies of saints:

We are to have unquestioning faith in the narratives commended to us by divinely inspired Scripture. On the contrary, we should carefully and attentively examine the rest according to the doctrine of Christ […] and accept or reject it if we wish to be free from both vain confidence and superstitious fear.Cabrillana’s translation, with its footnotes and commentary, amounts to a significant contribution to scholarship. In commenting on the Greek original, Cabrillana offers much more detail than Malsbary and highlights several points missed in his English translation. I have looked more closely at Cynic, and found that there in particular Cabrillana picks out an “ethical flavor” which More gives to the dialogue through specific word choices, as well as in explaining places in which the Latin is unable to convey multiple meanings present in the Greek. I indicate here some notable points made in her footnotes to Cynic:

• Footnote No. 10: Use of frugalitate—claim that it gives a moral character to the text.

• No. 11: Where the Greek has “need” and “what is enough,” More introduces more radical binomial terms, inopia (penury) and copia (abundance).

• No. 21: Cabrillana notes the difference between probus, used by More, which she translates as “honesto,” and the Greek original φρονιμός (prudent).

• No. 22: Though the Greek uses a term which could be translated as “sensible,” More chooses a Latin word, temperans, with a more ethical meaning.

• No. 27: Cabrillana comments on the translation of εὐδαίμονες as beati to emphasize the irony, as opposed to going for the more obvious Greek sense of “rich.”

• No. 29: Notes More’s use of miserias mortales for πράγματα—More’s term is much stronger.

• No. 39: More gives a moral interpretation to κρατεῖν, translating it as moderate vivere.

• No. 44: Change from προαίρεσις to institutum—gives it a more practical character.

• No. 47: Potentially another instance in which More opts for the stronger ironic translation, translating ἄθλιος as miser.

• No. 49: Notes More’s clever alliteration to recreate a parallel present in the Greek. More translates νόσος … τόπος as morbes … mores.

Lucian’s Tyrannicide presents a person who claims the reward of tyrannicide for having got rid of two tyrants, father and son. In fact, the claimant went to the citadel, killed the son, and fled leaving his sword behind; when the father arrived and saw the sword next to the body of his dead son, he killed himself.

In his reply, More takes the case on behalf of the city and opposes the claimant of the reward. More argues that the reward for tyrannicide was meant for the person who kills the tyrant, there can only be one tyrant, and the claimant was a coward who having gone to the citadel was afraid and fled. Therefore, he was not entitled to receive the reward. Indeed, he had murdered the son and had exposed the city to the wrath of the tyrant. Having established the truth of the case, though, More asks the judges to forgive the claimant and to thank the gods for having liberated the city from the oppression of the tyrant.

Interestingly, in each of the three dialogues Lucian names the main speaker and his interlocutor but he does not in Tyrannicide. In More’s response, however, the claimant is identified as Tiresias, the soothsayer whom Menippus goes to consult in Hades. More opposes him as a coward and an inventor of lies. This suggests that More did not side with the advice given by Tiresias to Menippus of just spending life seeking his own comfort without any concern for others. In More’s response Tiresias appears as seeking his own benefit over and above the good of the city.

The meaning of the two original pieces by More, the Dedicatory Letter and the Response to the Tyrannicide, is straightforward, and he intended the three dialogues to convey the reading he explains in the Dedicatory Letter. Paraphrasing Tychiades in Menippus, we can say, “We have a great remedy against the distortions by biographers and other authors: the right scholarly translations.”

The Spanish publishing house is to be praised for having published many of the works of More, but I do have a criticism to make of this edition. The front cover should have given all the information provided on the inside title page; the spine should include also the name of the translator and editor; and the back or inside cover should offer a brief profile of the translator herself: a new printing should include this information.