Had Marlowe Read Ctesias?
Christopher Marlowe has not yet departed that that little, little span the dead are borne in mind. We remember that he wrote Dr. Faustus and Tamburlane the Great and died in a drunken quarrel over a bar bill (and perhaps because he was part of the long tradition of English writers working as spies to pay the bills). Unlike Shakespeare he had a good formal education, not just grammar-school Latin but a Master of Arts from Cambridge, and unlike Shakespeare he could not keep his subversion in the mouth of fools and madmen. His life of Tamurlane was what J.J. Abrams would have done at an early modern theatre, with overblown rhetoric, battles, love affairs, and special effects. There was even a disappointing sequel driven by crass commercialism. Its full of ancient Greek flavour because Marlowe knew much more about ancient Greeks than modern Persians (emissaries of the English East India Company would reach Shah Abbas by 1614 after Marlowe’s timely death, and Robert Shirley arrived in Iran in 1598 a decade after the play was written). Several times Marlowe’s characters accuse Tamburlane of being a shepherd which sounds like a way to get a tower of skulls with your name on it.
COSROE. What means this devilish shepherd, to aspire
With such a giantly presumption,
To cast up hills against the face of heaven,
And dare the force of angry Jupiter?
… and later …
THERIDAMAS. Tamburlaine!
Both quotes are from the Project Gutenberg edition of Tamburlane the Great, Part 1 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1094/1094-h/1094-h.htm
A Scythian shepherd so embellished
With nature’s pride and richest furniture!
His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods;
His fiery eyes are fix’d upon the earth,
As if he now devis’d some stratagem,
Or meant to pierce Avernus’ darksome vaults
To pull the triple-headed dog from hell.
I don’t know if any Latin Christian writers emphasized that Tamurlane was a shepherd (he was actually born to a wealthy and influential father, and the only sheep he herded were the ones he was stealing, but nobody in England knew Farsi or Turkish). But one ancient text, as summarized in the tenth century, does accuse a famous conqueror of being a common herder: Cyrus the Great. This is Nicholaus of Damascus’s history of the world, which probably reworked Ctesias’ history of Persia for its ancient Persian history. We enter the story when Astyages the king of the Medes has learned that a young man named Cyrus has defeated one of his armies in Persia.
“And the king (Astyages) struck his thigh and said ‘Alas! I resolved often enough not to treat bad men well, but I have been ensnared by fine words all the same: I took on Cyrus, a wicked goatherd, a Mard by birth, and produced such utter destruction for myself. But now he shall not enjoy the pleasures he desires.””
Nicholaus of Damascus, Excerpta de Insidiis (= Ctesias Fragment F8d.30 Lenfant, translated by llewellyn-Jones and Robson p. 166)
I don’t think this detail appears in the better-known stories about Cyrus in Herodotus and Xenophon, or in collections of anecdotes and details like the Suda. Its not a very common slur in the ancient world, although Greek aristocrats accused each other of having been in business. I wonder if Marlowe (or his sources) might have gotten the idea of calling Tamburlane a Scythian shepherd from Astages calling Cyrus a Mardian goatherd.
Do any of my gentle readers know research on Marlowe’s classical sources? Were there Latin versions of Nicholaus of Damascus in Elizabethan England? Did Marlowe use any sources on Tamurlane derived from East Roman writers who were familiar with Ctesias? I am a versatile and productive scholar but Elizabethan drama is not one of the areas of my expertise!
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(drafted 1 May 2025)
Edit 2025-05-03: mentioned Robert Shirley
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“not just grammar-school Latin”: grammar school Latin would have had pretty high standards in those days. After all the “grammar” referred to is Latin grammar.
Heavens, in my father’s time they spent more hours a week on Latin than on, for instance, French. In my own time I avoided that only by giving up Latin as soon as I was allowed to.
Antigone has an article arguing that Shakespeare might have picked up some Greek at grammar school but it seems to be generally agreed that he could make his way through Ovid’s Latin but leapt on English translations whenever they were available (so reading unfamilliar texts, especially Greek if he had it, was probably a strain) https://antigonejournal.com/2022/05/shakespeare-greek-latin/
Maybe a reader can point me to other research on Shakespeare’s use of Latin texts.
I spent much of the past few days reading this blog and going through its archives, and I want to let you know that I appreciate it (and learned a thing or two).
Thanks! It seems that by creating an old-school academic and maker blog, I ended up appealing to people who are not very visible online in smartphone times.
I wish I could add more on Marlowe’s classical learning, beyond that he both translated and wrote Latin poetry.
Thanks for sharing the “tombstone” of L. Calidus Eroticus, which I’d not seen before!
Roma Gill‘s 1971 Oxford edition alludes to “Spanish and Italian historians.” She was physically disabled with MS but that could be code for “I knew someone who made a postgraduate find Marlowe’s sources and read them but mostly we just gesture at them.”
Tamburlane has some things which remind me of the Cyropaedia and others which remind me of the Alexander Romance both of which were much easier to obtain.