Opinion: Why Elizabeth I was a committed classicist

Kate Maltby, a PhD student studying Elizabeth I at UCL, explains why a Tudor queen who had a nation to rule and enemies to fight spent so much time wrestling with classical literature. Elizabeth I was a 16th-century girly swot. On her accession to the throne at 25, she endured vicious public debate about whether a woman was fit to be a sovereign and for the first two years of her reign, when other rulers might have partied, she chose to spend several hours a day in the schoolroom. Public celebrations of her abundant education were part of the propagation of the humanist credentials of the Tudor dynasty even before she became queen. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to Elizabeth's work as a classical translator in the last decade of her life. New evidence shows that, at 65, she translated Tacitus. Why would a queen, with a nation to rule and enemies to fight, spend so much time wrestling with classical literature? At first it was about proving she had the brains to govern.