Thomas May, Lucan's Pharsalia (1627)
Buckley, Emma / Paleit, Edward 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 Caes...