Ancient epics, Renaissance translations (Homer, Greece, Virgil, Roman Empire)

I demonstrate how humanists in Italy reintroduce Homer to the Latin West by means of translation and how their translation methods influence subsequent vernacular translators of Virgil. The humanist devotion to eloquence---a quality shared to varying degrees by all the Latin translators whom I consider---mediates access to the ancient world in Latin Iliad translations, despite Latin humanism's professed desire for an unalloyed reconnection with classical literature. Adopting Latin humanist assumptions as my theoretical framework, I prove that Renaissance vernacular translations and imitations of Virgil in Britain direct humanist translation away from its rhetorical emphasis to attend to an ancient text's historically determined meaning. In essence, the vernacular authors I examine embrace the foreign in Virgil's text and resist domesticating tendencies.; In Chapter One, I situate Quattrocento Homer translations in the context of the Trecento literal translations of Leonzio Pilato and establish two diametrically opposed conceptions of humanism and, implicitly, of translation. In Chapter Two, Leonardo Bruni's conviction that ancient Greece and contemporary Florence share rhetorical splendor and a commitment to democratic debate, I maintain, determines his prose translation of three speeches from Iliad 9 to confirm resemblance between ancient and modern. In Chapter Three, Lorenzo Valla's devotion to humanism's Latin linguistic "imperium" prompts his martial view of translation, I argue; his prose Iliad translation affirms humanist Latin eloquence and Latin's linguistic dominance. I compare Angelo Poliziano's and Nicola della Valle's Latin hexameter Iliad translations in Chapter Four to suggest humanism's new appreciation of poetic form. In Chapter Five, I argue that Gavin Douglas's insistence on reproducing Virgilian "sentens" in his Scots translation, the Eneados, discards humanist rhetoric in order to unpack Virgil's compressed Latin and refine Scottish culture. In Chapter Six, I contend that Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queene of Carthage challenges standard critical interpretations of the Aeneid as a means to weaken humanist cultural authority.