3

The uses of Clio

THE MUSES, daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, were the reputed goddesses of the several arts and sciences … They are represented young and very handsome, and are nine in number. Their names are, CLIO, CALLIOPE, ERATO, THALIA, MELPOMENE, TERPSICHORE, EUTERPE, POLYHYMNIA, and URANIA. Clio presides over history …

The Elements of Useful Knowledge … Short Systems of Astronomy, Mythology, Chronology, and Rhetoric; with a Brief Account of the Trial and Execution of Louis XVI … by the Rev. J. Adams, London, 1793.

… for the purposes I have in view

The English eighteenth century will do.

W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 1936.

What did Auden pay homage to in ‘Homage to Clio’? Why might a poet evoke the Muse of History? Who is she, and where does she come from? Answers to these questions come later, except to the very last, for we can demonstrate that she had been in these islands for a very long time and had by the end of the eighteenth century arrived in the Atlantic sea-board of the Americas, as both history and poetry. The Muse helps map the coming of History to the modern world, in the forms of it that Auden understood, used, and eschewed.

A name, or a chapter heading – ‘Clio’ – arrived with Herodotus. As ‘Herodotus most excelleth, both for the pleasaunt course of the story, and the plentifull knowledge conteyned therein, I thought him not unfit at his first entry into Englande’ said an English translator of 1584.¹ He explained that he had followed the convention of the ancients in dividing the text according to the names of the nine muses, and here presented the first two, Clio and Euterpe (by this time designated the Muse of lyric poetry).² This convention was retained by translators and printers throughout the eighteenth century. One Greek and Latin text of 1715 consisted entirely of the first book, Kleio, which gave the publication its title.³ Eight eighteenth-century imprints of Herodotus’ work used the Muses as chapter headings, the last of 1792 getting as far as the third, Thalia (Muse of comedy). Many more elite readers besides the Earl of Hardwicke may have known the work as ‘the Clio of Herodotus’; occasionally Herodotus himself was referred to as Clio.⁴ ‘Herodotus, in Clio tells us …’ was a common formulation derived from translations of Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des lois.⁵ ‘Herodotus, Clio’ appeared in the footnotes to Biblical exegesis, in travel writing, and in emergent anthropology produced by writers exploring the habits and manners of the ancients and newly encountered Others; they used the Histories as a great storehouse of social and cultural detail. Even a knowledge that only encompassed the first book, which largely concerned the origins and progress of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BCE), provided a wealth of detail on ‘customs of the Lydians … the Massagetae’, their history, dress, food, sexual conventions, and religious beliefs.

But Herodotus’ work was a minor port of entry for Clio; the commonplace knowledge was that ‘the first of the Muses takes her name from glory, [and] renown. Her province was to preside over history’ came from many other sources.⁶ Only scholars were in a position to learn that the ‘history’ ascribed to Herodotus was no such thing; that the word meant rather ‘careful inquiries’, or ‘careful researches’; that it acquired the signification of ‘history’ only with writers much later than Herodotus, and that The Histories themselves do not mention Clio or any other of the Muses.⁷

How do I know these things? I, who like Nelly Dean can make out only the odd Latin phrase and have no Greek?⁸ Clio’s modern research procedure is to enter ‘Clio’ into databases of digitised texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).⁹ In ECCO you will find 5,774 clios (you cannot search using an initial capital letter) from the eighteenth century. When you’ve discarded Cleo (short for Cleopatra in play-texts), the common clione (sea angel; pelagic sea slug), the number of naval ships and racing horses named Clio, and all the other enthusiasms of the search engine, about a thousand of these constitute some reference to, some teaching about, Clio the Muse. Using these procedures and then doing what it’s possible to do with EEBO (locate every English text mentioning Clio, or the Clio of Herodotus from 1534–1700; about 200), and BL 19th Century (a much more hit and miss affair, containing a mere 65,000 books from the British Library), I examined 305 appearances of Clio (I did not count reprints of texts). Clio appears exclusively as History in 65 of them, as Poetry in 55, and is both History and Poetry, or some other aspect of human endeavour in the arts and sciences, in the rest. Clio was both History and Heroick Poetry, and the narration of heroes and heroism for much of the eighteenth century, at the same time as she emerged as modern History. ‘The Goddess Clio will her Trumpet sound,/And loud Calliope Inspire her Sons,/In Numbers Mighty as the Theam to sing’, proclaimed a funeral idyll for that of William III.¹⁰ Or she was just a Muse without portfolio, as when Ovid was quoted to say that ‘Nor Clio nor her sisters have I seen,/As Hesiod saw them on the shady green’.¹¹ She was transmitted with and without function or attribute in Dryden’s Virgil and the Virgils of others (after Dryden, her dress – to be discussed – was a focus of attention); by Pindar as he appeared in the many ‘lyric repositories’ of the century (‘OH; Clio, warm me now to sing,/In strains sublime, heroic fire:/Oh, now from Helicon take wing,/ With Pindar’s flame my soul inspire’); and by much quotation of Horace’s lines: ‘Quem virum, aut heroa, lyrâ, acri/Tibia sumes celebrare, Clio?’. This was translated as ‘What man, what hero, wilt thou chuse, to celebrate his rising fame, And consecrate in verse his name?’ in 1742, and as ‘What man, what hero, wilt thou chuse,/Theme of thy lyre, immortal muse?/ What god shall Clio praise?’ in 1793.¹² (There was always a bit of amnesia about the fact that Clio and her sisters were gods.) Ausonius’ version of Clio was referred to in passing (his text was deemed responsible for the cither she holds, or the guitar she invented – for the lower end of the market, as we shall see), but no translation was published.¹³ Clio was usually named as ‘the first and chief Sister of the nine Muses’, or at least at the head of the list provided, though from the late seventeenth century onwards a significant minority of authorities put Calliope (epic poetry; eloquence) on top, for the sweetness of her voice.¹⁴ A schoolbook from 1799 had Clio and Calliope equal at the head of the line.¹⁵ In 1800, a text for young military men in training suggested that Clio was always triumphant in any contest between the Sisters because she possessed the power of writing: ‘When e’er Calliope recites,/Hoping to wear the Crown;/ Clio takes her pen and writes/Her fine Ideas down’.¹⁶ Clio was literate, or mostly literate, throughout the century; it is not clear from any of the literature through which the Muses flit during the long eighteenth century that any of them but Clio could write.¹⁷ Eighteenth-century children, other neo-literates, and those wishing to acquire polite learning, were told the meaning of her name: ‘Her name is derived from the Greek … glory, or … to celebrate’ (1742); ‘named from Glory … from the Famousness of the Things that she records’ (1747); the ‘particular Names of the Muses are also very significant, as Clio, from Clerou [Glory] – because great is the Glory of Learning’ (1766); ‘Clio which means glory’ (1780); ‘CLIO, so called from the glory which she gives to those heroes and great men, whose actions are described in History, over which she presides’ (1790).¹⁸ She provided a useful lesson for those learning their Latin, and for some few, their Greek: the name explained uses of Greek nouns of the feminine gender ending in ‘o’ in 1710, and the pronunciation of Latin words ending in ‘o’ in 1743, and at the end of the century.¹⁹

Those consulting dictionaries were told simple truths about Clio’s provenance and province: she was the first, the chief, the ‘mistress of history, and the patroness of heroic poets’. Those who adopted her name as a pseudonym (Addison for the Spectator was the most famous of these, and his use of ‘Clio’ to declare his faithful report of things, endlessly repeated) associated themselves and the reader with truth and truthfulness. Definitions became more nuanced and anthropologically informed, even for schoolchildren, towards the end of the century. In antiquity, explained the New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences in 1772, the Muses ‘were the fabulous divinities of the heathens, who were thought to preside over the arts and sciences … Under the name of Muse the poets only pray for the genius of poetry, and all the talents and circumstances necessary for the happy execution of their undertaking. So that the muses are of all ages, countries, and religions.’²⁰ The history of the Muses is ‘only filled with absurd traditions’ claimed the third edition of The Travels of Anacharsis in 1800; but their name indicated their origins: ‘It seems as if the first poets, enchanted with the beauties of nature, were led to invoke the nymphs of the woods, hills, and fountains; and that yielding to the prevailing taste of allegory, they gave them names relative to the influence they might be supposed to have over the productions of the mind.’²¹ ‘Feigned to inhabit Parnassus’, the fictional mistress of a boarding school says firmly to her girls in a text of 1790. Nevertheless, the task was to learn the names and spheres ‘of all the imaginary beings’. ‘Being blessed with an exceeding good memory’, one of the students completes the task quickly and repeats them the next day to Mrs Steward; ‘and then enquired of her, if she thought it possible for reasonable creatures ever to give credit to all that abominable nonsense?’. The mistress’s reply is judicious and thoughtful: ‘I will not … pretend to say that what you have now been learning about Pegasus and Helicon were ever really believed by any one, for the Graces, the Furies, and the Nine [Muses] were beings purely of the Poets [sic] imagination …’.²²

The translator who first brought Clio to the British Isles – so he said, in 1584 – dwelt on her sex. ‘Right courteous Gentlemen,’ he wrote, ‘we have brought out of Greece into England two of the Muses, Clio and Euterpe, as desirous to see the lande as to learne the language; whome I trust you will use well because they be women, and you can not abuse them because you be Gentlemen …’²³ Clio was not generally ill-used by the poets, gentlemanly or otherwise, who had need of her favours: ‘– O Clio! these are Golden Times;/I shall get Money for my Rhymes,/And thou no more go tatter’d’, wrote one in 1742.²⁴ The tatters (and in some cases Clio’s begging in the courtyards of the wealthy) were explained by reference to several translations of Juvenal: Clio stood in for the ‘starving poet, who is forced by his poverty, to leave the regions of poetry, and would fain beg at great men’s doors’.²⁵ As stories emerged about her being handmaiden to Apollo in his aspect as law-giver, lawyers entreated her aid, sometimes in a peremptory way: ‘INDITE, my Muse! – indict! Subpoaen’d thy lyre!/ The praises to record, which rules of Court require!/’Tis thou, Oh Clio! Muse divine,/And best of all the Council Nine, Muse, plead my cause!’ She was also useful in court because of her supposed connection (who wasn’t she connected to?) with Hermes/Mercury, the lawyer’s special friend: ‘In keen iambics, and heroic verse,/Clio will all the traitor’s crimes rehearse;/Will, to posterity, the fact transmit;/ With all the dignity of buskin’d wit’, in the stage play Poetical Justice of 1768.²⁶ Poets were equally demanding: ‘Madam CLIO! no resistance,/Come quickly, lend your best assistance’.²⁷ Historians, as they existed in the eighteenth century, were quiet about her; though towards its end, military men writing history appeared to prefer her in the aspect of Historia; those celebrating a victory in verse did not wish to

slight the Bard’s aspiring Lays,

But, ’tis to History they trust for Praise.

The Muse, alone, who the Historian guides,

Who shuns all Fiction, and o’er Facts presides,

The Record-Muse, alone, can best display,

Their multitudinous Names in bright Array.²⁸

For old generals remembering battles long ago, Clio was a kind of truth.²⁹ Some thought that Clio could not – would not – visit a modern battle field ‘Where thund’ring cannon vomit smoke and fire,/And balls and shells fly whistling o’er my head;/Say, will the muse her votary inspire?/ Will Clio deign midst scenes like these to tread?’ – so that particular soldier was really writing about the impossibility of his writing a scene of carnage.³⁰ On occasion, when the motives and intentions of combatants were deemed ignoble, Clio was made to tear the pages of military success from her book.³¹ A prisoner of war incarcerated on a British ship during the American Wars of Independence pleaded ‘ASSIST me, CLIO!/while in verse I tell/The dire misfortunes that a ship befell/’.³² High-ranking military and naval men were an exception to the general population: throughout the century, in numerous dictionaries, guides to life and literature, and school texts, Clio was History for the low much more than she was for the elite. And the word ‘historian’ was only rarely associated with Clio, and certainly not in the way that had been conventionalised by the mid nineteenth century when, describing statuary surviving in Rome, a scholar insists that Clio is a lesson in the historian’s adherence to honesty and factuality: ‘To the right of Apollo is Clio, who presides over history, and holds in her hand a trumpet, the symbol of historic fame: she is clothed in white, the emblem of truth, which should ever guide the pen of the historian.’³³

Sometimes she was denigrated, or caught in an attitude unbecoming to her high function (though for the main part dignity attached to her name). She was Satire, or at least satiric in 1714, when she was invoked to attack medical quackery (‘Dame CLIO! be glorious, draw/Out of thy Magazine, a Satyr’s Claw:/Thy sharpest Quills of Porcupines let fly,/With staining ink, against the insulting Fry/Of Emp’ricks, Quacks, and Charlatans, that kill/The Mob with Jargon’).³⁴ She’s a snuff-taking madam who must have pissed on the tongue of a failed poet in a rather rude one-sheet satire of 1725.³⁵ She smokes and drinks: in a mock tragedy of 1763 all the Muses take to drink when they hear that mortals are going to try writing without them; ‘CLIO smoaking by the Fire side,/Let drop her Pipe, fell back, and almost dy’d’.³⁶ Far from being lovely and glacial in her dignity, she’s a sunburnt and ordinary girl in 1751; or maybe that’s just the ‘unpolite and plain’ – and witty – woman the poet can love when he does not look at her with Clio’s eyes.³⁷ In the mid century she could have a pithy turn of phrase, as when a Poet calls out:

MUSES … descend your hill,

Assist my greatly daring quill!

That first attempts a Pudding’s praise,

Ye muses aid the novel lays.

A Pudding! sister, Clio cries,

He might as well have talk’d of pyes …

No, no, says she, with sneering look,

Invoke not us; consult the cook.³⁸

In Love of Fame (1753) ‘Daphnis, says Clio, has a charming eye:/What a pity ’tis her shoulder is awry’.³⁹ Satiric – or maybe sarcastic is a better word – on occasions then; but she was never funny. With incompetent poets she can be impatient, as when in 1776 she jeers that the poet may ‘Wish to recall a certain vow,/Which late you rashly made,/When, in a pettish mood, you swore/To leave off rhyming, and no more/Invoke the muses aid’. This is a polite way for the poet to tell the lady who requires him to write, that he doesn’t want to.⁴⁰ (The year before, a different poet had firmly stated that Clio had nothing to do with poetry: ‘Clio the Great, the celebrated Chief, Triumphant reigns in the historick Leaf;/In History alone does Clio shine, Exalted, fair, and eminently fine’.)⁴¹

She’s a practical girl – she’s a useful, handy Muse (after Swift, Cadenus and Vanessa, 1726), and much of her usefulness lies in her literacy. She writes, or indites, as early as 1710, using a quill (as noted) in 1714 and (anachronistically in 1794 – for you are looking at an ancient representation) a pen. She writes in both senses of the word, by indicting and composing. She is connected to books. How-to instructions for drawing her in 1701 insist on ‘a Coronet of Bays; in her right hand a Trumpet, in her left a Book, upon which may be written Historia her name is from Praise or Glory’; ‘always represented under the form of a young girl, crowned with laurel, holding a trumpet in the right hand, and a book in the left’, insisted Anne Fisher in 1788.⁴² She appears to be particularly connected to the kitchen (acquainted with puddings and pies, smoking by the fire …) certainly more so than the other Muses. This may be seen as an attempt to domesticate the Muse; one woman who invoked her in 1799 noted that her Clio had given way to Country Joan, and gave the reasons why:

I live at home, and only ask

More leisure for life’s active task.

My numbers are impeded oft

By peeping in the apple loft.

A chicken by the kite is taken;

The felon rats despoil the bacon;

The blackbirds on the cherries seize;

The pigs have rooted up the peas;

Away the unfinish’d ode is thrown,

And Clio yields to country Joan.

But still: though in housewifry she is ‘no pattern,/I scorn the name of rhyming slattern’.⁴³ Clio had been a bit of a feminist since 1754 – or at least allowed a man to celebrate a notable woman in feminist terms – when John Duncombe asked her to bear him to the Kentish strand, where stood ‘Miss Eiza C – … equal’d by few of either sex for strength of imagination, soundness of judgment, and extensive knowledge. Tho’ mistress of the ancient and modern languages, an excellent poet, and a natural and moral philosopher; so great is her unaffected modesty, ’tis to be fear’d that even this impartial praise will offend her. She has translated, from the Italian, Algarotti’s Dialogues on Light and Colours, and has an admirable nocturnal ode to Wisdom, in Dodley’s Miscellanies.’⁴⁴ Only Clio can take him to the side of this paragon. Learned and literate, her ‘tow’ring mind’ was evoked at the same time as the inadequacies of her education (but only when Apollo had been in charge of it).⁴⁵ Or she is just a name: for a beloved woman, for a child in her christening ode, or for a 3-year-old in a stage play.⁴⁶

Some laughed at the uncertain politesse acquired by getting the Muses’ names by heart from the almanacs and schoolbooks. ‘ “Mr. Tickle,” said Mr. Mawworm, “I am assured … will sing nothing to stimulate the pruriency of the passions, to exacerbate resentment, or make the understanding tollutate, or titu-bate. I love, as my learned brother says, the divine Polyhymnia as much as I do Clio, Terpsichore, or Urania.” – “So, so,” said Aaron, “wine will let out the secret. – You love Polly Plymsy, do you? O you are an arch one!” ’.⁴⁷ As an entity who had grown as earthly children do, she was given the birthday of 1 May.⁴⁸ Who has departed, in The Charmer. A Collection of Songs from 1782? – ‘AH whither, my Clio! ah whither hast fled?/What grove dost thou visit, what vale dost thou tread?/ Ah! return; no more from your fond poet stray./My lyre is quite tuneless, when Clio’s away.’ Is it a woman who’s dun gone? – a Muse? – the poet’s talent? All three of them is the answer.⁴⁹

Contradictory, then, is the word for Clio’s attributes and aspects in eighteenth-century England: wife, virgin, spinster, girl, dame; she is often imagined along with her sisters as a schoolgirl; sharp-tongued and dulcet-toned; cares for nothing but the truth, and only cares for fame; learned and a bit dim; loquacious and silent; strict, mournful, serious, grave; makes men famous in poetry and prose – though there was a commentary on Sappho translated in 1789 that settled that one, if anyone cared to read it: should any one wonder about the author’s invocation of Clio in a work about a poet, he should reflect that ‘that the whole literary discipline belongs to these virgins, amongst whom Clio is the especial protectress of historic writers’. Clio wrote; her writing transcended the divisions between history and poetry.⁵⁰

There was a little flurry of complaints from gentleman scholars in the 1760s about the very great difficulty of seeing – imagining – Clio. ‘As to [all] the muses, it is remarkable that the poets say but little of them in a descriptive way, though they invoke them so often’, said Joseph Spence in 1764. Thomas Blackwell agreed: ‘They seem in themselves wild and incoherent – rambling from image to image, taking the marque of Fable, and shewing their real Face but by starts’ – until Horace got hold of them, he thought, and composed ‘those striking Odes to CLIO, and the Sister-Muses that are Master-pieces of Lyric Poetry’.⁵¹ Things were not much better when you looked to theatrical representation, or to the plastic arts. There were the robes, the laurel crown, she was usually young; she carried a book and/or a lyre/plectrum (for her guitar) or a trumpet (for purposes of proclamation) or a pen/quill. She was young, but not particularly lovely; always ‘a little grave’ – serious certainly: Clio does not laugh.⁵² Even when scholars explored her representation in earlier eras, her image remained occluded, as in ‘The Magnificent Entertainment: Giuen to King James, Queene Anne his Wife … Upon the day of his Maiejeties Tryumphant Passage … through his Honourable Citie … 15 of March I603’, from which the 1795 scholar learned only that ‘at one end [were] the Nine Muses, at the other, the Seven Liberal Arts’.⁵³ There were complaints about her clothing: the leopard-print onesie acquired from Dryden’s translation of Virgil (‘girt with Gold, and clad in particolour’d cloth’) had become leopard print robes in 1754, ‘spotted skins and radiant gold’ in a play script of 1764, ‘variegated skins’ in a new translation of Virgil in 1784.⁵⁴ On stage she usually wore buskins (quasi-historical knee-high boots), so showed some leg, though covered well enough.⁵⁵ Buskins were often associated with the performance of tragedy, so when ‘all the dignity of [Clio’s] buskin’d wit’ was referred to in 1768 (in poetry, not playscript) there may have been some allusion to the Tragedy of History, only full realised a century later in a fiction of the law: ‘Would that I were Light as air’ says a Clio in 1887; ‘But the burden that I bear Would break a merry heart in twain. I am Clio, Muse of History. Ah, the gods know why Mine eyes are ever wet with gathering mist: For mine it is to chronicle events …’⁵⁶

Who knows what she looked like in a pantomimic ballet of 1791? No details of costume are given and the only thing to distinguish Clio from her sisters is her book, ‘the page of History glowing with the fame of her heroes’.⁵⁷ And who, watching a street pageant in Coventry or Birmingham, would know that the white robed girls with leaves in their hair were the Muses? – for all of them bore a remarkable resemblance to the Queen of the May.⁵⁸ ‘They were a frequent ornament for libraries of old, and are often seen, and very properly, on the tombs, either of poets, or philosophers, or musicians, or astronomers’, observed Joseph Spence. ‘On these you often meet with all the nine muses, with some deity, particularly Apollo, in the midst of them.’ The gentleman scholars who surveyed the antiquities of the ancient world, from their writing table or in person, those who visited the monuments and antiquities of the British Isles, said much the same. Arthur Young was muted in his praise of a Clio he viewed in Oxford (‘Statue of Clio sitting. Turn of the head and neck fine; and the attitude good’), having just waxed lyrical about a partially draped, ‘exquisite’ Venus.⁵⁹ Eighteenth-century commentators were not as much concerned with her nakedness as the nineteenth-century historians and readers who pondered her exposed bosom: what did it mean? The naked truth? Maternal succour?⁶⁰ The eighteenth-century textual Clio always had her clothes on.

Difficult to make out; of versatile function (verse? heroic verse? history? the narratives of the renowned only?); most of her commentators were, nevertheless, convinced of her long residence in Albion. Perhaps, a poet mused in 1795, her entry had been the first stopover in the making of a vast empire:

When Calliope and Clio to Britain’s rude isle

Perchance on a visiting came,

All then was confusion, till they deigned to smile,

And hoist here the standard of fame.

In process of time, by the muses grand aid,

Our i’land extended her sway

O’er empires and kingdoms; no land ever made

Of commerce and arts such display.⁶¹

She was in Albion to celebrate victory and mourn the fallen in 1760.⁶² A practical girl, she had usually disembarked in Kent, the closest shore line to Helicon, was glimpsed in Fulham and Chelsea, expected in Oxford and Cambridge, and a lady once asked Clio to come and sit by her on a mountainside, presumably not in Norfolk where she dwelled, perhaps in Wales, where lived the gentleman to whom she addressed her poem.⁶³ She had been bid hasten to Suffolk in 1747 to view architectural and artistic delights in the environs of Bury St. Edmund’s.⁶⁴

Most interesting was her entry into Scotland and Wales, where one of her uses was to inscribe local dialects and languages, as Thomas Chatterton did, discreetly, in 1770.⁶⁵ A retrieval of Dunbar’s poetry in 1775 entreated ‘Juno, Latona, and Proserpina,/Diana the Goddess of Chest and Wods grene,/My Lady Clio, that Help of Makers bene,/Thetis se grene and prudent Minerva …’, in a kind of Middle Scots.⁶⁶ In ‘Jamie and Willie. A Pastoral’ (1797) two lads (probably shepherds, though nobody says) discourse upon reading, for Jamie is ‘Unskill’d in beuks, I kennae whilk to read’. Willie recommends a few ‘fav’rite anes’ of his own ‘an’ o’ a favour’d muse’ (‘Clio, lovely maid’), including Shakespeare, Cowley, ‘Arbuthnot, Swift, Rowe, Young, Steele, Garth, an’ Gray’, and ‘Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and … Chaucer’. This way will Jamie learn how all the ‘shepherds e’er Arcadia own’d,/Kend how to gie the past’ral pipe to sound’. (They have to be shepherds.)⁶⁷ She was used as the pseudonym for a lover, as by Thomas Blacklock who wrote several epistles to Clio, including the most pedestrian ‘answer to one in which she informed me of her departure from Dumfries’.⁶⁸ She could be used in Scotland as in England (and in strict Southern English) to regret having not become a poet: ‘’Tis true, we’re torn from the harmonious maid,/To whom our youth its first devotions paid’, wrote Lord John Maclaurin Dreghorn to a friend in 1798;

But had we still continued her to woo,

Should we have been as happy as we’re now?

Had I still haunted the Parnassian rills?

Could I have liv’d so near to Pentland hills?

And, did you still to Clio pay your vows,

You would not, trust me, keep so good a house.

Let us be happy rather, that, in time,

We left the captivating love of rhyme.⁶⁹

Mainly, she stood in for an augury of the poet’s success, whichever riverbank he was wandering along: ‘If CLIO smile, while at her shrine I bow,/In happier notes succeeding lines shall flow’.⁷⁰ In Wales, however, and towards the close of the eighteenth century when Historia operated so powerfully in her antiquarian mode, Clio was asked to perform a more distant and scholarly role:

Recording Clio, leave the classic climes,

Where war and havoc swell the roll of crimes;

Where Mecca triumphs in a barb’rous reign

And Learning shuns the desolated plain

Come, where the Arts illume th’ alluring way …

Here the thoughtful Clio stops the gay,

And shews the little place where greatness lay.⁷¹

How Clio was imagined, seen, and understood depended almost entirely on a gentleman’s (or lady’s, or Caledonian shepherd’s) schooling: on the version of Clio’s parentage and province that had been transmitted in their dual Latin/English text, or the compendium of useful knowledge purchased; on the translator their particular dictionary or compendium had relied upon. There was no conflict between poetry and history in these representations: Clio could represent both forms of thinking and writing, and one or the other. The difference was that poets and aspiring poetasters courted Clio, invoked her to help with their endeavours; those writing about past events (we will call them historians for the moment) declared her name as a guarantee of truth, and to signal the high seriousness of their narrative, whether it be in prose or poetry; whether it concerned victory or defeat, or simply the endeavours of the local hunt, as in ‘Record their Actions, and preserve their Praise./What Clio sings … shall last,/In spite of Jove, or Fire, or Envy’s Blast’. This was a praise song to Albion, with Dorset hunting country as its guise.⁷² Or, for the narration of tragedy, you could invite another of the Sisters to accompany her, as at the death of General Wolf:

Haste, CLIO, to thy native plains,

Which now victorious blood distains,

Where MARS, undaunted god of war,

With fury drives his rattling car,

Where ALBION’S glorious ensign courts the gale,

And ALBION’S thunders shake th’affrighted vale;

And with thee bring the sadly-sighing maid

MELPOMONE – for she must close the song.

(Melpomene was originally the Muse of song, later of tragedy.) Military men were the most likely to employ Clio to record recent history, whether of battles lost or won.

No historian – what, after the long nineteenth-century professionalisation of the discipline, we now understand by ‘historian’ – evoked Clio. David Hume’s History of England (1754–1761) did not; Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) did not mention Clio, though he discussed the religious beliefs of the ancients. Adam Ferguson, John Millar, William Robertson – not a word about her in their works of history. Devoted admirers and family commissioned a vast statue of Catharine Macaulay wearing Clio’s robes, and she was often referred to as a modern Clio; but a recent assessment is that such identification served to silence Macaulay; ‘her fame as the Muse of History trivialised the history she wrote, making her more of a novelty and less of a serious historian than her male contemporaries’.⁷³ Under such circumstances you’d not mention Clio; and Macaulay never did. As a recognisably academic history emerged from the late eighteenth century onwards, Clio lost her usefulness for those writing about the past, for the past became the historian’s terrain, not hers.

Why do this? Spend so much time on what we all really, somehow, knew anyway? That it was good fun, and that it’s pretty easy to do for the eighteenth century, are not answers. The point is this: that towards the end of the eighteenth century, the curriculum was put in place for those who would study the classics in the public schools (and in some other less-elite settings) for the next century and a half.⁷⁴ During the course of the nineteenth century, a cultural regime of Hellenism favoured Greek over Latin in the universities and elite schools; towards its end, Latin came to be understood as mind-training and mental discipline for middling-sort children; Auden acquired the classical languages at a time when it had become relatively unusual to be taught Greek. New translations (of Homer, Virgil, and Horace, of Juvenal and Perseus, of Livy and Lucian) were available for use in the preparatory and public schools by 1915, when Auden went off to his. More classical writers were added to the school reading lists. But an introduction to the Ancient World and its culture of thinking and feeling was effected by the same texts, for schoolboys of the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century, when W. H. Auden was introduced to Greek and Latin. This was not done for the main part at his resolutely ‘modern’ public school, but at his preparatory school in Sussex. All of this, then, is a staging post on the long road to understanding who Auden’s Clio was, and what his History may have been. And a point to note in this excursion along Clio’s by-ways is that it was far less likely that ordinary aspiring readers of the early twentieth century encountered Clio (the word; the name for Fame; the ‘history’ she never really was) in the course of everyday life, as earlier readers might have done by consulting the guides to polite learning which had flourished in the eighteenth-century book market; now, learning and the acquisition of knowledge was the school’s province, in a system of increasingly compulsory education.⁷⁵

Herodotus, who did not deal with Clio, was referred to often in the eighteenth century because ‘Clio’ (as the first book of his Histories was named) was an invaluable source for ethnographers and historians. Thucydides (c.460–c.400 BCE) was not so well known: there were fewer translations and much less distribution of his work than that of Herodotus. The History of the Peloponnesian War was done into Latin in the mid-fifteenth century and a Greek text appeared in 1502. Thomas Hobbes translated his writings into English directly from the Greek in 1628 (2nd edn 1676). There had been a translation from the French Histories in 1550. Hobbes’ was reissued several times; and then in 1753, William Smith, Rector of Holy Trinity, Chester, made a new one (by subscription). ‘It will be … needless to tell the English Reader, how many versions have been made of Thucydides into Latin’, he said. Those translations had been designed to ‘bring the author more under the observation of what is generally stiled the learned world’. What the Revd Smith wanted to do was not so much what translators into the European languages had done (introduce him ‘into general acquaintance, as an historian capable of innocently amusing most ranks of men’), but rather to ‘usefully instruct … the persons, who from duty and from passion would guard the rights or secure the welfare of public communities. The grand business of History is to make men wiser in themselves and better members of society.’ He really was not against other ranks or innocent amusement; but he thought that readers must go beyond their own experience; History could do this: not only open ‘past ages to their view’ but also provide individuals with ‘a more extensive scope to reflexion than any personal experience can’.⁷⁶ Clio had never been asked to make men and women better creatures, or give them a view of culture and society beyond their immediate context. Smith’s appears to have be the last new translation of Thucydides into English for more than a century. Yet Clio was occasionally introduced to Thucydides. In 1742, Thomas Broughton high-handedly insisted that ‘She is usually represented under the form of a young woman, crowned with laurels, holding a trumpet in her right hand, and a book in her left, with the name of Thucydides written in it.’⁷⁷ In her 1792 book for the girls’ educational market, Mrs Taylor of Manchester said the same.⁷⁸ Taylor had done well, thought the Critical Review, in providing ‘a general knowledge of objects subservient to liberal education … particularly useful to young ladies, by saving them the trouble of having recourse for information to other books’.⁷⁹

We modern historians love Herodotus, for his engaging interest in the world, the wealth of ethnographic detail he provides, the attention he pays to women, and for his careful, cheerful insistence, that though he was told the strange things he recounts, that does not mean he believes they happened that way, or that there ever were giant ants roaming India. For example, in Argos, at the beginning – not of things, but of his History – there was a quarrel between the Greeks and the barbarians, which arose from the abduction of Io. There followed a half a century of response, revenge, repercussion, to- and fro-ing, and small wars, which involve much more famous abductions than that of Io. Herodotus tells us, now, as he begins, that this is the Persian account. There is at least one other version of these events, but Herodotus is quite clear that they are not the ones he is recounting here. It is for textual strategies like this in the writing of his Histories – his admission that his account is not a definitive one; that things may have happened another way – that Herodotus has become a (fairly new) hero of modern cultural history.

The antiquaries of eighteenth-century England probably provided us with more of our modern concerns and methodologies than did the likes of Hume and Robertson. Their preoccupation with coins and pottery shards and other material artefacts, with field systems, archaeological traces, and ancient documents as evidence of the habits and manners of the past, their deep devotion to the footnote (or the endnote; but the profound importance of having notes as the mark of honesty and traceability) is entirely congenial to modern academic historical researchers. ‘One cannot account for changes in historical knowledge, methodology and interpretation between the early modern period and the nineteenth century without recognising the enormous importance of “antiquarian” research’, says Rosemary Sweet; but the antiquarians did not evoke Clio, or use Herodotus as epigraph or emblem, though very occasionally a symbolic History or Historia sat hard by some ruin, preserving the monuments of antiquity with her book and pen, in illustrations inserted by the printer/ bookseller. In the frontispiece to George Raymond’s New, Universal and Impartial History of England (1787), a pleasant-looking young woman in contemporary dress is supplied by Genius and Industry with the records of antiquity, to transcribe in her book. As she writes, Britannia bends from her throne to crown History – for it is she – with a laurel wreath.⁸⁰ Thucydides, on the other hand, became the choice of the newly professionalised historians of the nineteenth century. Leopold von Ranke and other positivist historians praised his high seriousness, his ‘scientific’ objectivity in the handling of documentary evidence. ‘Thucydides’ evoked a world in which power was played out between generals and senators; a world of high politics and very important battles; there are no women, no children, no weird habits and manners of ordinary or extraordinary people in Thucydides. It has been said that his History was favoured in the US during the Cold War era: his ‘terse skeptical manner … deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists … engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire’ confirmed readers to themselves as hardheaded realists in global politics.⁸¹ Clio as a Cold War Muse – strange daughter attributed to severe father – will return in the second part of this book.

1 The Famous Hystory of Herodotus Conteyning the Discourse of Dyvers Countreys, the Succession of Theyr Kyngs, the Actes and Exploytes Atchieved by Them. The Lawes and Customes of Every Nation with the True Description and Antiquitie of the Same. Devided Into Nine Bookes, Entituled with the Names of the Nine Muses, Thomas Marsh, London, 1584.

2 Jessica Priestley, Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture. Literary Studies in the Reception of the Histories, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014, p. 192. The divisions of Herodotus’ work acquired the Muses’ names in the late Hellenistic period (last century BCE).

3 Herodotus, Herodotou Kleio, in Usum Regiæ Scholæ Cantuariensis, R. Knaplock, London, 1715.

4 Philip Yorke Earl of Hardwicke, Athenian Letters; Or, the Epistolary Correspondence of an Agent of the King of Persia, Residing at Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Containing the History of the Times, in Dispatches to the Ministers of State at the Persian Court, J. Walker, London, 1792.

5 Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws … With Corrections and Additions Communicated by the Author, trans. Thomas Nugent, J. Nourse and P. Vaillant, London, 1750, Vol. 2, p. 70.

6 L’Abbé de Tressan, Mythology Compared with History; Or, the Fables of the Ancients Elucidated From Historical Records. … to Which is Now First Added, An Enquiry into the Religion of the First Inhabitants of Great Britain. Together with Some Account of the Ancient Druids. … Translated From the French by H. North, T. Cadell and W. Davies, London, 1797.

7 William Desborough Coolley (ed.), Comments on the History of Herodotus … from the French of P. H. Larcher … in Two Volumes, Whitaker and three others, London, 1844, Vol. 1, p. 1: ‘Herodotus has no appeal to the Muses. And consequently informs his audience of the restricted parameters of his knowledge, often expressing uncertainty, conjecture’. Or outright ignorance: Jon Marincola, ‘Herodotus and the Poetry of the Past’, Carolyn Dewald and John Marincola (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, pp. 13–28; 15.

8 Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, p. 128. Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights (1847) is able to read any book that takes her fancy, she says, ‘unless it be that range of Latin and Greek and that of French – and these I know one from another, it is much as you can expect of a poor man’s daughter’.

9 https://historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/home.

10 John Oldmixon, A Funeral-idyll, Sacred to the Glorious Memory of K. William III, Nicholas Cox, London, 1702.

11 Ovid’s Art of Love. In Three Books. Together with His Remedy of Love. Translated Into English Verse, by Several Eminent Hands. To Which Are Added, the Court of Love and the History of Love. With Copperplates, for the booksellers, London, 1793.

12 Virgil, The Works of Virgil. Containing His Pastorals, Georgics and Æneis. Translated into English Verse; by Mr. Dryden. In Three Volumes, J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, London, 1748; John Dryden, The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Esq. In Three Volumes. With the Life of the Author, Apollo Press, Edinburgh, 1794; Virgil, Virgilii Maronis Opera. Interpretatione et Notis Illustravit Carolus Ruæus, … Jussu Christianissimi Regis, Ad Usum Serenissimi Delphini. Juxta Editionem Novissimam Parisiensem. Huic Editioni Accessit Index Accuratissimus, Antè Editis Longè Locupletior, C. Bathurst and twelve others, London, 1777; The Lyric Repository: A Selection of Original, Ancient, and Modern, Songs, Duets, Catches, Glees, and Cantatas, Distinguished for Poetical and Literary Merit; Many of Which are Written by Dr. Johnson, Peter Pindar, J. Johnson, London, 1788; James Brown, Odes, Elegies, Songs, &c, for the author, Bristol, 1786; Thomas Broughton, An Historical Dictionary of All Religions from the Creation of the World to this Present Time. … Compiled from the Best Authorities, C. Davis and T. Harris, London 1742; Horace, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace. Translated Into English Verse by William Boscawen, Esq, John Stockdale, London, 1793.

13 Joseph Spence, A Guide to Classical Learning; Or, Polymetis Abridged. In Three Parts … Being a Work, Necessary, not only for Classical Instruction, but for All Those who wish to have a True Taste for the Beauties of Poetry, Sculpture and Painting. By N. Tindal, Translator of Rapin, J. Dodsley, and R. Horsfield, London, 1764.

14 Horace, The Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace, Translated into English Prose … Together with the Original Latin from the Best Editions, by David Watson MA, J. Oswald, London, 1712; Alexander Adam, A Summary of Geography and History, Both Ancient and Modern … with an Abridgement of the Fabulous History or Mythology of the Greeks … the Second Edition, Corrected, to Which is Added, A Geographical Index, Containing the Latin Names of the Principal Countries, Cities, … Illustrated with Maps, A. Strahan and T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies, London and W. Creech, Edinburgh, 1797. For Calliope on top, François Pomey, The Pantheon, Representing the Fabulous Histories of the Heathen Gods, and Most Illustrious Heroes; in a Short, Plain, and Familiar Method, by Way of Dialogue. The Sixteenth Edition. Revised, Corrected, Amended, and Illustrated with New Copper Cuts … for the Use of Schools. By Andrew Tooke, A. Ward and four others, London, 1747 (further edn 1778); The Universal Pocket-book; Being the Most Comprehensive, Useful, and Compleat Book of the Kind, Ever Yet Publish’d. Containing … A Map of the World … A List of Places At Court, with Their Salaries and in Whose Gift …, T. Cooper, London, 1740; Glossographia Anglicana nova: or, a dictionary, interpreting such hard words of whatever language, as are at present used in the English tongue, with their etymologies, definitions, &c, Daniel Brown and seven others, London, 1707.

15 ‘Calliope and Clio are first in the train,/And Euterpe, Erato o’er harmony reign./Behold Melpomene next; and then, hand in hand,/Polyhymnia, Terpsichore grace the fair band.’ Harriet English, Conversations and Amusing Tales. Offered to the Publick for the Youth of Great Britain, Hatchard, London, 1799.

16 Samuel Nash, Juvenile Epigrams, and Poems, Written by Samuel John Nash, LLD and Addressed to the Gentlemen of the Army, and the Navy, for the author, London, 1800.

17 For writing in the training of late eighteenth-century naval officers, Elodie Marie Duché, ‘A Passage to Imprisonment. The British Prisoners of War in Verdun under the First French Empire’, PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2014.

18 Broughton, An Historical Dictionary of all Religions; François Pomey, The Pantheon; D. Gordon, The Young Man’s Universal Companion. Containing, among many other Necessary and Entertaining Particulars. I. A Geographical Description of the World; the Fourth Edition … With An Accurate Map of the Whole World, P. Hill, S. Payne, and D. Davidson, London, 1766; Charles Marriott, The New Royal English Dictionary; Or, Complete Library of Grammatical Knowledge. Containing a Full and Copious Explanation of all the Words in the English Language. … to Which is Prefixed, A Copious Grammar of the English Language, J. Wenman, London, 1780; Mythology Made Easy; Or, A New History of the Heathen Gods and Goddesses, Demi-gods, and Other Fabulous Deities of the Ancients, … Designed to Facilitate the Study of History, Poetry … &c., G. Riley, London, 1790.

19 Robert Blau, The Accidences of the Parts of Speech; Or, the Rudiments of Etymology. After a New and Easie Method. Containing, 1. The Alphabet with its Division, and the Definitions of the Eight Parts of Speech most Intelligible by Youth; … 2. The Accidences of Noun and Pronoun with their Examples and all that Relates to Them; … 3. Verb & its Accidences, with Four Regular Examples & Some Irregular. … 4. Participle with all that Relates Thereto, Adverbs, Prepositions, Interjections and Conjunctions, with their English, for the author, Edinburgh, 1710; John Milner, An Abstract of Latin Syntax; Together with Directions for Construing, Parsing; and Making Latin by the Signs of Cases. To Which is added, Prosody, … for the Use of Schools, John Noon, London, 1743; F. Decan, The Quantity; Or, Measure of Latin Syllables, Interspersed with Useful and Familiar Rules, to Assist Young Poets in the Composition of Pentameters and Hexameters, F. & C. Rivington, London, 1795; John Carey, Latin Prosody Made Easy; Or, Rules and Authorities for the Quantity of Final Syllables in General, and of the Increments of Nouns and Verbs, for the author, London, 1800.

20 A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Or, Complete System of Human Knowledge. Containing … A Very Great Variety of Useful Discoveries, … the Anatomical, Chemical, and Medicinal Parts by M. Hinde, … the Mathematical Parts by W. Squire, … Gardening and Botany by J. Marshall, … Criticism, Grammar, Poetry, Theology, &c. By the Rev. Thomas Cooke … and the Other Parts by Gentlemen of Eminence, J. Cooke, London, 1772.

21 Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, The Travels of Anacharsis the Younger, in Greece, during the middle of the fourth century before the Christian æra. Abridged from the original work of the Abbé Barthelemi. Illustrated with plates, designed and engraved by H. Richter, Vernor and Hood and five others, London, 1800.

22 Dorothy Kilner, Anecdotes of a Boarding-school; or, An Antidote to the Vices of those Useful Seminaries … in Two Volumes, for the author, London, 1790, Vol. 2, p. 92.

23 Famous Hystory of Herodotus, ‘To the Gentlemen Readers’.

24 The Summer Miscellany; or, A Present for the Country. Containing the Pin, An Epigram. Physick and Cards, T. Cooper, London, 1742.

25 Juvenal, A New and Literal Translation of the I, II, IV, VII, VIII, XIII, XIV Satires of Juvenal, with Copious Explanatory Notes; … by the Rev. M. Madan, for the author, Dublin, 1791; also edn 1789; Juvenal, The Original Text of Juvenal and Persius, Printed for the Most Part, According to Henninius’s Edition; Cleared of All the Most Exceptionable Passages; … by Edward Owen, MA, Rivington and three others, London, 1786.

26 François de Callières, Characters and Criticisms Upon the Ancient and Modern Orators, Poets, Painters, Musicians, Statuaries, & Other Arts and Sciences. With An Heroick Poem (in Blank Verse) Intituled the Age of Lewis the Great. Written Originally in French by the Archbishop of Cambray, and made English by J. G., Richard Smith, London, 1714; ‘ODE, BY THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL’, John Hawkins, Probationary Odes for the Laureatship: with A Preliminary Discourse, by Sir John Hawkins, Knt, James Ridgway, London, 1791.

27 Samuel Whyte, Poems on Various Subjects, Ornamented with Plates, and Illustrated with Notes, Original Letters and Curious Incidental Anecdotes, for the author, Dublin, 1795.

28 George Twisleton Ridsdale, An Ode, Congratulatory, Monitory, and Epistolary, on the Ever-memorable Victory Obtained by Lieut. General Johnson, at Ross, Over the Rebels, on the 5th of June, 1798. Composed for the Anniversary Rejoicing on the Ensuing Fifth of June, 1799, for the author, London, 1799. Risdale was celebrating the Battle of New Ross, County Wexford, during the Irish Rebellion of 1798, fought between the United Irishmen and British Crown forces.

29 Sydney Swinney, The Battle of Minden, A Poem. In Three Books … Enriched with Critical Notes by Two Friends, and with Explanatory Notes by the Author, Dodsley and four others in London, Merril, Cambridge, Tessaman, and York, 1769–1772.

30 ‘Written in the Trenches Before Valenciennes, and Enclosed in the Preceding Letter’, A Sketch of the Campaign of 1793. Part I. Letters From an Officer of the Guards, on the Continent, to a Friend in Devonshire, T. Cadell and W. Davies, London, 1795.

31 Abbé Jean Baptiste du Bois, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music. With an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Theatrical Entertainments of the Ancients. Written in French by the Abbé du Bois … Translated Into English by Thomas Nugent, Gent. From the Fifth Edition Revised, Corrected, and Inlarged by the Author, John Nourse, London, 1748.

32 ‘THE BRITISH PRISON SHIP. Written 1780. CANTO I. The CAPTURE’, Philip Moron Freneau, The Poems of Philip Freneau. Written Chiefly During the Late War, for the author, Philadelphia, 1786. Guides to ancient mythology and handy pocket companions to the classics were published in New York in the 1790s; for example, John Fellows, The Lady & Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine of Literary and Polite Amusement, J. Lyon & Co, New York NY, 1796.

33 Jeremiah Donovan, Rome, Ancient and Modern, and its Environs, 4 vols, for the author, Rome, 1842–1844, Vol. 2, p. 478; Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio. A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. Donovan was describing a statue of Clio. Most of Clothing of Clio considers the plastic arts, rather than textual representation.

34 Thomas Boydell, Medicaster Exenteratus; Or, the Quack’s Pourtrait. A Poem, for the author, London, 1714.

35 Elegy on the Much Lamented Death of Ch--les Co--ey, the Poet, [A satire on Charles Coffey, one sheet], Dublin, 1725.

36 George Downing, The Temple of Taste; Or, A Dish of All Sorts. Consisting of Prologues, Epilogues, Songs … &c. … to Which is Annex’d a New Farce, Call’d Newmarket; Or, the Humours of the Turf. With A Sketch of One Year’s Account of the Life of the Author, for the author, London, 1763.

37 Vocal Melody; Or the Songster’s Magazine in Three Parts. Being A Collection of Two Thousand of the Most Celebrated English and Scotch Songs, R. Baldwin, London, 1751.

38 Thomas Hudson, of Blakiston, Poems on Several Occasions. In Two Parts. By Mr Hudson, Thompson, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1752.

39 Edward Young, Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. In Seven Characteristical Satires, for the author, London, 1753, p. 62.

40 Though he does: ‘On Being Desired by Lady Camden to Write Verses on Bayham Abby, the Seat of John Pratt, Esq., Near Tunbridge Wells. By the Same’, John Almon, An Asylum for Fugitives. Published Occasionally, Vol. I, for the author, London, 1776 (later called An Asylum for Fugitive Pieces).

41 Robert Hill, Poems on Several Occasions, Chiefly Miscellaneous; Calculated to Please the Admirers of Taste, … to Which are Added Some Pastorals, for the author, London, 1775.

42 William Salmon, Polygraphice; Or, the Arts of Drawing, Engraving, Etching, Limning, Painting, Varnishing, Japaning, Gilding, &c in Two Volumns [Sic]. … the Eighth Edition. Enlarged, A. and J. Churchill and J. Nicholson, London, 1701; Anne Fisher, An Accurate New Spelling Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language. Containing a Much Larger Collection of Modern Words than Any Book of the Kind and Price Extant, for the author, London, 1788.

43 Jane West, Poems and Plays, Longman and Rees, London, 1799. In 1739, Clio polishes the sea like glass, in order that some beauty or other may see her own face. But this was not housework as Jane West knew it. Charles Carthy, ‘A Poem Inscribed to the Right Honourable Lord Howth, On the Birth of a Son’, A Translation of the Second Book of Horace’s Epistles, Together with Some of the Most Select in the First, with Notes. A Pastoral Courtship, from Theocritus. One Original Poem in English, and a Latin Ode Spoken Before the Government on His Majesty’s Birth-day, for the author, Dublin, 1730.

44 John Duncombe, The Feminiad. A Poem, M. Cooper, London, 1754.

45 Beni. Hederici, Lexicon Manuale Graecum, Omnibus Sui Generis Lexicis Longe Locupletius: in Duas Partes Divisum: Quarum Prior Vocum Graecarum Ordine Alphabetico Digestarum … Interpretationem Latinam Continet. Altera Vocum Phrasiumque Latinarum … Interpretationem Graecam Exhibet, H. Woodfall and thirty-one others, London, 1756; George Colman, The Connoisseur. By Mr. Town, Critic and Censor-general, George Faulkner, Dublin, 1756.

46 Samuel Bentley, Poems on Various Occasions; Consisting of Original Pieces and Translations, for the author, London, 1774, p. 181; ‘The Register Office’, in A Collection of the Most Esteemed Farces and Entertainments Performed on the British Stage, W. Thompson, North Shields, 1786–1787, p. 240.

47 Anon., Berkeley Hall; or, the Pupil of Experience. A Novel. In Three Volumes, J. Tindal, London, 1796, Vol. 2.

48 ‘Three thousand years ago, on this sweet day,/ … Clio, whom contending nations praise,/Embloom’d, by her sweet birth, the first of May’. Aaron Hill, The Works of the Late Aaron Hill, Esq.; in Four Volumes, for the author’s family, London, 1753, Vol. III; Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill, The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003.

49 The Charmer: A Collection of Songs, Chiefly Such As Are Eminent for Poetical Merit; … in Two Volumes, J. Sibbald, Edinburgh, 1782, Vol. 1.

50 Alessandro Verri, The Adventures of Sappho, Poetess of Mitylene. Translation from the Greek Original, Newly Discovered, T. Cadell, London, 1789.

51 Joseph Spence, A Guide to Classical Learning; Or, Polymetis Abridged. In Three Parts … Being a Work, Necessary, Not Only for Classical Instruction, but for all Those who Wish to Have a True Taste for the Beauties of Poetry, Sculpture and Painting. By N. Tindal, Translator of Rapin, J. Dodsley, and R. Horsfield, London, 1764; Thomas Blackwell, Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, A. Millar, London, 1764.

52 Oliver Goldsmith, The Bee. A Select Collection of Essays, on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects, by Dr. Goldsmith, W. Lane, London, 1790.

53 A Collection of Scarce and Interesting Tracts, Tending to Elucidate Detached Parts of the History of Great Britain; Selected From the Sommers-collections, and Arranged in Chronological Order, R. Edwards, London, 1795.

54 Virgil, The Works of Virgil, Containing His Pastorals, Georgics and Æneis. Translated into English Verse; by Mr. Dryden. In Three Volumes, J. and R. Tonson and S. Draper, London, 1748; Virgil, The Works of Virgil, in Latin and English … The Æneid Translated by … Christopher Pitt, the Eclogues and Georgics, with Notes … by … Joseph Warton. With Several New Observations by Mr. Holdsworth, Mr. Spence, and Others. Also, A Dissertation on the Sixth Book of the Æneid, by Mr. Warburton. On the Shield of Æneas, by Mr. W. Whitehead. On the Character of Japis, by … Dr. Atterbury, … And, Three Essays … by the Editor. In Four Volumes, Dodsley, London, 1753; Samuel Foote, The Patron. A Comedy. In Three Acts. As it is Performed at the Theatre in the Hay-market. By Samuel Foote, Esq., P. Wilson and four others, London, 1764; William Mills, The Georgics of Virgil, translated into English blank verse by William Mills, for the author, London 1780,

55 Valerie Cumming, C. W. and P. E. Cunnington, The Dictionary of Fashion History, Berg, Oxford and New York NY, 2010. It had, however, been long established that Clio usually went in barefoot: Sir John Harington, Nugæ Antiquæ. Being a Miscellaneous Collection of Original Papers in Prose and Verse. Written in the Reigns of Henry VIII, … James I, &c. By Sir John Harington, … with An Original Plate of the Princess Elizabeth, W. Frederick, Bath, Vol. 2, 1775.

56 Poetical Justice; or, The Trial of A Noble Lord, in the Court of Parnassus, for An Offence, Lately Found Bailable in the Court of King’s Bench, J. Murdoch, London, 1768; F. Herondo, The World’s Argument; Or, Justice and the Stage. A Dramatic Debate, Selwyn, London, 1887.

57 Jean Bercher Dauberval, Amphion and Thalia; Or, Amphion, the Pupil of the Muses: A Pantomimic Ballet, in One Act. Composed by M. d’Auberval, … Represented for the First Time At the King’s Theatre in the Pantheon, the Seventeenth of February, MDCCXCI, Reynell, London, 1791.

58 James Potts, The Historical, Political, and Literary Register. Containing An Account of Every Public Transaction. … of the Year, printed by the author, London, 1796, also for a delicate sneer at young provincial women attempting to display their learning and politesse by bringing Shakespeare and the Muses into their conversation.

59 Spence, Guide to Classical Learning. This had been the opinion in 1745: ‘It is indeed surprising, how confus’d and indistinct the Dress, Symbols, Instruments, and often even the very Characters, of many of the Muses appear, wherever they are either introduc’d by the old Poets, or treated of by the Mythologists, or represented by their Statues …’, Samuel Madden, Boulter’s Monument. A Panegyrical Poem, Sacred to the Memory of That Great and Excellent Prelate and Patriot, the Most Reverend Dr. Hugh Boulter, for the author, London, 1745; J. Salmon, A Description of the Works of Art of Ancient and Modern Rome, Particularly in Architecture, Sculpture & Painting. To Which is Added, A Tour Through the Cities and Towns in the Environs of That Metropolis, London, 1800; Edward Burch, A Catalogue of One Hundred Proofs From Gems, Engraved in England, by E. Burch, for the author, London, 1795; Richard Gough, British Topography. Or, An Historical Account of What Has Been Done for Illustrating the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland, T. Payne and J. Nichols, London, 1780; Arthur Young, A Six Months Tour Through the North of England. Containing, An Account of the Present State of Agriculture, Manufactures and Population, … in Four Volumes, W. Strahan and three others, London, J. Balfour, Edinburgh, London, 1774, Vol. 3.

60 Bann, Clothing of Clio, pp. 1–7, 11–13.

61 The Charms of Melody; Or, Siren Medley. Being the Most Extensive Collection of Love … Political Songs, Old English, Irish, Scotch and German Ballads, Legendaries, &c. Ever Brought Together in a Single Publication, Selected from the Best Poets and Most Admired Writers, for the author, Dublin, 1795.

62 Robert Lloyd, The Tears and Triump[hs] of Parnassus. An Ode for Musick, As It is Perform’d at the Theatre-royal in Drury-lane, Vaillant, London, 1760; Gentleman of the University of Oxford, An Agreeable Companion for a Few Hours, Either on the Road or at Home. In Several Fugitive Pieces, F. Newbery and two others, London, 1773.

63 G. Pearch, A Collection of Poems, in Four Volumes by Several Hands, for the author, London, 1775, Vol. 4; Hederici, Lexicon Manuale Graecum, for the author, London, 1756; A Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry. Vol. XVI, for the author, London, 1797; Anne Francis, Miscellaneous Poems, by A Lady, printed for the author, and sold by the booksellers in Norwich and Norfolk, Norwich, 1790.

64 John Winter, Bury, and its Environs, A Poem, Written in the Year MDCCXLVI, W. Owen, London, 1747.

65 ‘For Clio, the historic muse,/Two authors bid with equal views;/The one in female vestments clad,/The other wrapped around in plaid;/Long they contended for the field,/Too headstrong both and proud to yield;/At length exclaimed the bonny Scot,/ Suppose, Fair lass! We share the lot?’ Thomas Chatterton, The Auction A Poem: A Familiar Epistle to a Friend, George Kearsley, London, 1770.

66 The Caledoniad. A Collection of Poems, Written Chiefly by Scottish Authors, 3 vols, William Hay, London, 1775, Vol. 2.

67 Robert Buchanan, Poems on Several Occasions, for the author, Edinburgh, 1797.

68 Thomas Blacklock, Poems on Several Occasions, for the author, Edinburgh, 1754.

69 The Works of the Late John Maclaurin, Esq. of Dreghorn: One of the Senators of the College of Justice, … in Two Volumes, for the author, Edinburgh, 1798, Vol. 1.

70 James Alves, The Banks of Esk; Or, A Saunter from Roslin to Smeaton. A Poem, Descriptive, Historical, & Moral; with An Introductory Canto, … to Which is Added, Drummond Castle; A Poem of the Same Kind. With an Address to Impudence, for the author, Edinburgh, 1800.

71 Richard Llwyd, Beaumaris Bay. A Poem; with Notes, Descriptive and Explanatory; Particulars of the Druids, Founders of Some of the Fifteen Tribes of North Wales, the Families Descended From Them, … with An Appendix, for the author, London, 1800. A long footnote explains the lost history of Joan, Princess of Wales, who mediated between her husband and father in the quarrel that divided the Welsh forces fighting King John. This happened in 1212. Joan was another discrete and accomplished woman – like Clio. For the eighteenth-century antiquaries who laid the foundations of modern historical method, Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries. The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Hambledon, London, 2004.

72 William Churchill, Officer in General How’s Regiment, October; A Poem. Inscrib’d to the Fox-hunters of Great Britain. In Two Books, for the author, London, 1717, Book I.

73 Cecile Maccuzzo-Than, ‘ “Easier than a Chimney Pot to Blacken”. Catharine Macaulay, “the celebrated female historian” ’, Paula R. Backscheider and Timothy Dykstal (eds), The Intersections of the Public and Private Spheres in Early Modern England (1996), Routledge, Abingdon, 2013, pp. 78–104.

74 Steedman, Master and Servant, pp. 110–130 for the classics curriculum in one West Riding parochial school in the later eighteenth century. Also Martin Lowther Clarke, Classical Education in Britain, 1500–1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1959; Richard S. Tompson, Classics or Charity? The Dilemma of the 18-century Grammar School, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1971; Ian Michael, The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 317–320; Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998; Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (eds), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Volume 4, 1790–1880), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015.

75 Clarke, Classical Education; Stray, Classics Transformed. For nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the culture of Ancient Greece – Hellenism – Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1980; Frank Miller Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 1981; Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics. The Feminine of Homer, Oxford University Press, London, 2006.

76 Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Translated From the Greek of Thucydides … by William Smith, for the author, London, 1753. In making one reference to Herodotus, Clio did enter the text, in a note: ‘Herodotus relates this remarkable piece of history, in Clio.’

77 Broughton, An Historical Dictionary.

78 ‘CLIO, goddess of history, drawn young, crowned with laurel, with a trumpet in the right, and a book with Thucydides’ name in the left’; Mrs Taylor of Strangeways Hall, Manchester, An Easy Introduction to General Knowledge and Liberal Education … for the Use of the Young Ladies, at Strangeways Hall, Manchester, for the author, Warrington, 1791. See Carol Percy, ‘Learning and Virtue. English Grammar and the Eighteenth-Century Girls’ School’, Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain. Beliefs, Cultures, Practices, Ashgate, Farnham, 2009, pp. 77–98.

79 The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, Vol. 6, London, 1792, p. 480.

80 Sweet, Antiquaries, pp. xv–xvi; George Frederick Raymond Esq., A New, Universal and Impartial History of England, From the Earliest Authentic Records, and Most Genuine Historical Evidence, to the Summer of the Year 1786 … Embellished … with Upwards of One Hundred and Twenty Beautiful Copper Plate Engravings … Raymond … assisted by Alexander Gordon and Hugh Owen, Esqrs. and others, J. Cooke, London, 1787. Historia appears (unnamed) on the front cover (before binding) of an abridgement of Hume’s six volumes made for the educational market: Parson’s Genuine Pocket Edition of Hume’s History of England, with a Continuation to the Death of George II by Dr Smollett & a further Continuation to the Present Time by J. Barlow Esq. Embellished with Historical Engravings & Delicate Portraits of all the English Monarchs, & most Eminent Characters of the Present Reign, Vol 5, J. Parsons, London, 1793.

81 Daniel Mendelsohn, ‘Arms and the Man’, New Yorker, 28 April 2008; Katherine Harloe and Neville Morley (eds), Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 10–12; Richard Ned Lebow, ‘International Relations and Thucydides’, idem, pp. 197–213.