Thomas Hobbes

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes was born in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, the son of a vicar. His early education, which was partly private, and partly at Malmesbury School, turned him into a precocious classicist: he was learning Greek and Latin at the age of six, and at thirteen translated Euripides’ Medea from Greek into Latin iambics. He studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and for the next twenty years served at Chatsworth and on the continent as tutor (and later secretary) to William Cavendish (who became the second Earl of Devonshire); after the second Earl’s death in 1628, Hobbes became tutor to his son William Cavendish, the third Earl. In 1640 Hobbes completed a controversial political treatise, and fled to France to escape the wrath of Parliament. He lived in France until 1651, when he fled back to England to escape the wrath of the churchmen occasioned by the publication of Leviathan. He submitted to the Commonwealth government, and after the Restoration was granted a royal pension. At the age of eighty-four he wrote his autobiography in Latin verse, and two years later he completed his translation of Homer’s epics.