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Publication: Taylor Institution Library, one of the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford, 2025. XML files are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . Images are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

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Editorial principles

Uniomachia was composed in 1833 as a response to a schism in the history of the Oxford Union Society, Oxford University’s famous affiliated debating society and members’ club. In protest at the election of a Liberal Standing Committee, the Society’s executive body, several Tory ex-committee members formed a new debating club which they named the Ramblers. Concerned that the latter was drawing away Union members, the incumbent committee motioned to expel all Ramblers from the Oxford Union in an acrimonious debate.

Concerned that this schism would tear both the Society and their friendships apart, two undergraduates of St Mary Hall, Thomas Jackson and William Sinclair, decided that the best way to heal the rift would be to immortalise the debate in poetry. The resulting work, Uniomachia or ‘Battle at the Union’ is a pastiche of Homeric epic, composed in Homeric hexameters and an absurd macaronic Anglo-Greek; the poem’s name recalls discrete battle episodes or -machies in early Greek hexameter poetry (such as the 'Theomachy' of Iliad Book 20 or the 'Titanomachy' of Hesiod’s Theogony 664-728) as well as ancient satires of the Homeric poems such as the Classical Batrakhomyomakhia or ‘Battle of the Frogs and Mice’. The text quotes liberally from Homer’s Iliad, equates its protagonists – various Union committee members – with Homeric heroes, and satirises Homeric style and narrative features for comic effect to turn what must have been a fairly unpleasant and petty argument into an honour-dispute between mighty warriors. The result lionises and legitimises both sides of the schism while exposing the fundamental triviality of the disagreement by contrast with the real tragedy and pathos of the Homeric original.

Upon its publication Uniomachia was an instant hit, with several improved editions published in the same year and a Popean translation following thereafter, which has been published on Taylor Editions by Dr Laura Johnson. Indeed, the poem as a whole owes much to Pope’s Dunciad (1728-43). Posing as a scholarly edition of an antiquissimum poema or 'most ancient poem', the Greek text is supplemented by a line-by-line translation into dog-Latin prose and a set of critical notes in which Jackson and Sinclair, as ‘editors’ under the pseudonyms Habbakukius Dunderheadius and Heavysternius respectively, puzzle over aspects of their text; this fourth and most complete edition was supplemented by a set of additional notes produced by Robert Scott (of the later Liddle and Scott Greek Lexicon) under the pseudonym Slawkenbergius. Intended partly to satirise contemporary textual and literary-historical scholarship, the notes provided by Jackson, Sinclair and Scott give the impression of a pretentious faux-erudition, with recondite Latin vocabulary, strong personal opinions unsupported by evidence, frequent insults directed at the intelligence of editorial ‘predecessors’, and shoehorned references to Classical sources.

There are obvious barriers to reading and enjoying the humour of Uniomachia. It is written in two ancient languages, and many of the jokes contained within it depend either on a knowledge of Classical philology or of the Oxford Union and city of Oxford in the 1830s. This edition attempts to surmount these barriers by offering a critical transcription of the text alongside a translation into modern English prose, both of which have been encoded with a high level of functionality to allow access by classicists and non-classicists alike.

Transcription. Uniomachia was composed by able students and printed in Oxford by a printer who did not himself read Greek. This shows in a number of small errors in the text, notably inaccuracies in Greek rough and smooth breathings (the difference between an initial h or not) and accents. Unfortunately, it is also evident that some ‘mistakes’ in the text are intentional: for example, the repeated rendering of ‘Union’ as Hunion is the subject of jokes in the critical notes, and misattributions of classical sources may likewise contribute to the overall tone of humorous faux-erudition; updating these ‘mistakes’ therefore risks losing something from the text. On the other hand, a text rendered in nineteenth-century orthography necessarily needs some updating for the twenty-first century. In order to produce a clearer text I have adopted modern orthographic conventions: spelling out the ligatures æ and œ (laetatus vs lætatus) and rendering semivowel j as i (iam vs jam) and omitting macrons showing long vowels, among other changes. To make vocabulary clearer for the reader, I have likewise updated out-of-date renderings of Latin words – for example, concio replaced by contio. All editorial decisions either to update or retain the original text, as well as brief explanations of any significant issues, are clearly marked in the transcription using drop-down text notes, which can be accessed by hovering your mouse over or clicking on the relevant superscript number. Hovering over a line of the Greek or Latin text will highlight its corresponding line in the other language; clicking a word for which there is a corresponding note in the apparatus criticus will take you to that note, and vice versa; and the text has been adorned liberally with external links to illuminate people, places, and historical and textual references; these have largely been repeated in the translation. Page breaks, line indentation and columns have been preserved unless otherwise noted.

Translation. My translation of the text of Uniomachia attempts to render the text in straightforward English that is both faithful to the Greek and retains the macaronic English words as far as possible; reference to the Latin text, which occasionally offers clarification on the meaning of the Greek, is clearly marked in the notes. My translation of the critical notes always offers a transliteration of Greek text, with Greek, ‘Anglo-Greek’ (hellenised macaronic English words) and Latin words translated either in the run of the text or in an explanatory note. In the translation, superscript notes may be hovered or clicked to access drop-down commentary notes, explaining references, quotations and jokes, with reference to relevant primary sources. As in the transcription, external links have been placed throughout the text to offer contextual and bibliographic information. So that references within the text can be easily located, my English translation, like the Latin of the original text, is laid out line-by-line, with correspondences between the English and Greek lines and the translations and relevant transcriptions of the pseudo-critical notes.

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