Hobbes's Thucydides and the Colonial Law of Nations

This article attempts to make sense of Thomas Hobbes's 1628 translation of Thucydides, published as Eight Bookes of the Peloponesian Warres, in terms of seventeenth-century interest in and debates over the law of nations, or ius gentium. Its aim is to shift the scholarly focus on Hobbes's translation from its most often assumed context, that of royalism, to what I will argue is a more fitting context, that of the law of nations, and by extension, the intellectual history of international law. Among Hobbes scholars, the fact that the first publication to which Hobbes gave his name was a classical translation is often noted but rarely considered in much depth.1 For many years, orthodoxy held that Hobbes started his brilliant philosophical career with a humanistic period before he encountered the Euclidean geometry that would occasion his turn from humanism to 'political science' - a turn variously construed as virtue to vice or vice to virtue, depending on the critic. Recent scholarship has rightly questioned such narratives, noting for instance that Hobbes late in his life wrote a verse autobiography and an anticlerical poem in Latin and translated Homer from the Greek. The insistence that Hobbes's humanism persisted throughout his lifetime, however, does not fully account for the Thucydides translation: acknowledging Hobbes the humanist only spawns further questions. 2 Now that Hobbes's Thucydides translation is seen less and less as something from which Hobbes would later turn, questions of what sort of project was signalled by the Thucydides translation come to the fore. Recent work by Jeffrey Collins and Kinch Hoekstra, taking aim, on the one hand, at the story of Hobbes's purportedly consistent royalism, and, on the other, at Hobbes's supposed turn to de facto-ism in Leviathan (it turns out it was there all the time), has made interpreting Hobbes's intentions with the Thucydides volume all the more significant.3 In this vein, a number of diachronically conceived studies have linked Thucydides and Hobbes's later work, Leviathan in particular, yet they have often treated Hobbes's encounter with Thucydides as an inevitable communion of like political minds rather than as an encounter encouraged and surrounded by other texts and historical events.4 It remains an open question, in other words, why Hobbes chose to translate Thucydides in the first place. This article therefore takes a more synchronic approach and seeks to reconstruct the intellectual context in which Hobbes translated and then published his Thucydides, asking two interrelated questions: why Thucydides? And why 1628? Ultimately, I will argue, Hobbes's translation should be seen not just as a precursor to his later treatises but as part of broader attempt on the part of English humanists in the mid-1620s and early 1630s to make available to English readers the stories and exempla - the raw materials - necessary to underpin an ethical, English law of nations. Hobbes's Thucydides, it will be suggested, was vitally concerned with the law of nations and concerned particularly with the legal justifications and moral obligations of empire.In making such an argument, this article will develop in three stages. First, identifying some limitations of existing literature on the context for Hobbes's Thucydides translation, I will propose that Hobbes's Thucydides should be seen not solely in terms of domestic English politics, but in more global terms that, while encompassing domestic English politics, also resonate out into England's growing empire. This section will briefly discuss Parliamentary politics in 1627-28, not for its own sake but for the wider purpose of dislodging some prevailing assumptions about Hobbes's intentions with the Thucydides volume. I will then turn to two theorists of the ius gentium, Alberico Gentili and Hugo Grotius, both of whose works could be found in the library Hobbes tended in the 1620s, to explore the unique demands the genre of the early modern Latin ius gentium tract made on ancient histories, which were seen to hold the potential to speak about the ius gentium by indicating the laws 'common to all known legal systems' and 'all known peoples. …