Thomas Gray Manuscripts : Thomas Gray, Genealogy of the Early Roman Emperors

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray Manuscripts

Alongside his annotated books, pocket books, and Commonplace Book, Gray made notes on his reading and observations on loose leaves of paper. He usually used these at an earlier stage in his studies of a particular topic, or to organise information as he collated it from multiple sources. This example of Gray’s loose notes relates to his interest in the classical world and his study of genealogy, in this case the genealogy of Ancient Rome. On the first page of the folded bifolium, he drafted a genealogy of Roman emperors in the form of densely packed family trees, beginning at the top with Augustus and his sister Octavia, then jumping back historically in the middle of the page to begin again with Julius Caesar, before adding a small tree for Mark Anthony towards the bottom. The format is crowded and the lines of familial and marital connection branch mazily, with several individuals reappearing in different parts of the page. In contrast, the information Gray copied on the remaining three pages of the bifolium is more carefully and openly spaced, with a list of some of the important Roman gentes – that is, families or tribes – down the left-hand margins opposite brief and not always accurate Latin notes on key members of each gens, with enough room left to add further such notes as required. The gentes selected by Gray are various, from the most ancient patrician families such as Fabia, Valeria, Aemilia, and Cornelia, to lesser known plebeian families such as Sallustia and Apuleia.The interest this manuscript reveals in tracing the lineages of both individuals and families is coherent with Gray’s habits in other genealogical studies, which he pursued extensively over many years under the head ‘Genealogia’ in his Commonplace Book, and it is with those ‘Genealogia’ entries that these notes can be most fruitfully compared. What such comparison reveals is a textual as well as methodological connection: Gray drew up a neater, simplified, smartly rubricated version of the same family tree as the first entry under the head ‘Genealogia’ in volume I of his Commonplace Book (ff. 35v-36r), with the sub-heading ‘Octaviae gentis’ (<a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00001/78'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00001/78</a>; <a href='/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00001/79'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-PEMBROKE-GRA-00001-00001/79</a>). His Commonplace Book ‘Genealogia’ entries were global rather than solely Roman in focus, collectively offering a history of the world’s leaders and empires, and like many of his other scholarly compositions they rearranged information from many sources to make new assemblages of knowledge. Here an early, rougher stage in that process can be directly compared to its later, more systematic reworking, illuminating Gray’s drafting process and the effort that went into first assembling and then reorganising scholarly information to produce the formal fair copy compositions in his Commonplace Book.Like other items in this collection, such as the extensive classical entries throughout the Commonplace Book and the many other notes and compositions in Greek and Latin Gray recorded on loose sheets, this manuscript also sheds a more general light on his skills and interests as a classical scholar. As an instance of rough preliminary work in this field, it rewards particular comparison with the loose sheets on which he made notes on Herodotus under the title ‘Melpomene. Difficulties’ and jotted notes on Ancient Greek biographical chronologies, both also published in this collection (GBR/1058/GRA/4/8 and GBR/1058/GRA/4/10). It was published in this digital edition in September 2025, with editorial and bibliographical metadata by Ruth Abbott, and images courtesy of The Master and Fellows of Pembroke College, Cambridge.Ruth Abbott University of Cambridge <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a> How to cite: Thomas Gray, ‘Genealogy of the Early Roman Emperors (GBR/1058/GRA/4/7)’, ed. Ruth Abbott, in Thomas Gray Manuscripts, ed. Ruth Abbott, assoc. ed. Ephraim Levinson, <a href='/collections/thomasgray'>https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/thomasgray</a>