Peter Jones

We could certainly do with a Tacitus now

issue 07 December 2019

As a contemporary John Clapham reported, Queen Elizabeth I ‘had pleasure in reading the best and wisest histories’, and translated the Roman historian Tacitus as a ‘private exercise’. This has been confirmed by a manuscript of a translation of Tacitus corrected by her, recently discovered in Lambeth Palace. But what on earth was she doing that for?

It was nothing as juvenile as showing that she was the equal of any man in the education stakes.

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