ABSTRACT
Rome was an Elizabethan obsession. Or, rather, there were two, or even three, Romes that haunted the political unconscious of Tudor England and were revisited obsessively in ideological discourses revealing and concealing the obsession at the same time: contemporary Rome, the ‘Whore of Babylon’, and classical Rome. The latter, in turn, was split into two Romes, republican and imperial Rome, and both were represented and discussed in highly controversial ways, thus pluralizing notions of Rome even further. Both the Roman respublica and the Roman imperium became privileged objects of humanist learning: English humanists avidly studied and translated the classical historians of Rome, Suetonius, Tacitus, Livius or Plutarch, as well as the epic poetry of Rome such as Lucan’s Pharsalia, and they produced their own synopses of Roman history, most notably Richard Reynold’s Chronicles of all the Noble Emperours of the Romaines (1571), William Fulbecke’s Historicall Collection of the Continuall Factions, Tumults, and Massacres of the Romans (1601), and Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614, which, however, only made it to the early republic). All these Tudor commentaries, translations, adaptations, and compilations suggested, or spelt out, Rome as a crucial point of reference for comparison and contrast, an ideal for contemporary England that was apt to trigger or reinforce a traumatic sense of cultural inferiority or to stimulate imitation and emulation, or, respectively, a cautionary tale in its history of dissensions and decadence. Elizabethan England in particular came to consider itself as a second Roman Empire and its capital London not only as the ‘New Troy’, the Troynovant, of legendary medieval historiography but also as a ‘New Rome’ emerging from the ashes of an England devastated by civil war and against the background of a Europe torn by religious strife and national rivalry. The Imperium Romanum seemed to lie just beneath the surface of contemporary Britain – quite literally, as the antiquary William Camden tried to show in his ‘attempt to discover beneath the roads and villages of modern England traces of a more civilized Roman Britannia’.1
