ABSTRACT
This intervention constitutes but one in a whole host of similar narratorial contributions to Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) in which a sobering meditation upon the nature of time is placed squarely before the reader. Here, Ralegh’s concern to ‘provide for the future’ through writing itself is underpinned by the humanist investment in the notion of the circuitus temporum which had been inherited from classical writing and was most particularly associated with the Stoics. Exposure to this thinking might be gained from a reading of Cicero’s De Re Publica, De Divinatione and the letters to Atticus, for example; from Virgil’s fourth eclogue, Ovid’s Fasti or Seneca’s De Brevitate Vitae.2 Amongst Ralegh’s contemporaries, it is clear that Francis Bacon pondered ‘these turning wheels of vicissitude’, and later in the Religio Medici Sir Thomas Browne argued that ‘commonweals and the whole world, run not upon an helix that still enlargeth, but on a circle’.3 From this perspective, the future, like the past, was repetitive and predictable; and, in ‘times succeeding’, conditions of existence would re-present themselves and demand strategic human intervention as they had in antiquity. Thus, the writing of history by the erudite and judicious scholar was seen to generate a dynamic and endlessly didactic resource for humanity locked into a future which reenacted the past.
