Thomas May, Lucan's Pharsalia (1627)

Lauded after his death as 'champion of the English Commonwealth', but also derided as a 'most servile wit, and mercenary pen', the poet, dramatist and historian Thomas May (c.1595-1650) produced the first full translation into English of Lucan's Bellum Ciuile shortly before a ruinous civil war engulfed his own country. Lucan, whose epic had lamented the Roman Republic's doomed struggle to preserve liberty and inevitable enslavement to the Caesars, and who was forced to commit suicide at the...