Floyer Sydenham
LC name authority rec. n79054709
LC Heading: Sydenham, Floyer, 1710-1787
Biography:
Sydenham, Floyer (1710–1787), translator, was born in Devon, the third son of Humphrey Sydenham of Combe in Dulverton, Somerset, and his second wife, Katherine, daughter of William Floyer of Berne, Dorset. He was educated at Oxford; having matriculated from Wadham College on 31 May 1727, he graduated BA on 25 June 1731 and MA on 30 April 1734. He was elected a probationary fellow on 30 June 1733 and became a fellow, probably in the following year. He was admitted to the Inner Temple in 1729 and called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn on 12 April 1735. He held the rectory of Esher, Surrey, from 1744 to 1747.
Details of Sydenham's life during the next ten years are very vague. He is reported to have had ‘strange travels’ in the ‘country of the blacks’ (John Upton writing to James Harris; Yolton, Price, and Stephens), and by another source, to have joined the navy when he made no headway at the bar, and to have worked his passage back to England as a common sailor (Thomas Taylor; Dyce, 324). In 1757, persuaded by John Upton to begin a translation of Plato in order to earn some money, he devoted himself to the work, finding support, spiritual and financial, in his college contemporary James Harris (1709–1780), who had dedicated one of his Three Treatises to him (Concerning Happiness, 1741). One of Harris's earliest friends, Arthur Collier (1707–1777), worked in conjunction with Sydenham on the translation of six dialogues (Probyn, 50). Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), the Platonist, made his acquaintance at this time, and described how Sydenham was impoverished and partially insane. According to Taylor, Sydenham committed suicide the night before he was to be imprisoned for his debts, although other authorities say that he died in prison, on 1 April 1787. It was ‘to expiate the grief and shame of the event, by a monument to his memory’ that David Williams (1738–1816) founded the Literary Fund (Cross, 10). The varied scholarly interests which Sydenham cultivated all through his unfortunate life appear in the MS catalogue of his library, sold by auction in 1788 (Yale, Beinecke X348 571, 1788/2/28–3/1).
An excellent Greek scholar, Sydenham was the first in England to undertake a complete translation of Plato, publishing A Synopsis or General View of the Works by Plato along with Proposals for Printing by Subscription in 1759; but the public response failed to match the reviewers' enthusiasm. Due to difficulties with subscribers, by 1780 only nine translations with commentary were eventually published, first separately (Io, Greater and Lesser Hippias, Banquet, Rivals, Meno, First and Second Alcibiades, Philebus) and later collected in three volumes (Dialogues of Plato, 1767–80). Two complementary studies respectively illustrated Plato's rejection of relativism (A Dissertation on the Doctrine of Heraclitus, 1775) and theology (Onomasticum theologicum, or, An Essay on the Divine Names According to the Platonic Philosophy, 1784). An unfinished poem in blank verse entitled Truth, or, The Nature of Things and two philosophical poems in Latin hexameters remain unpublished (BL, Add. MSS 45181–45182).
Sydenham's Platonic scholarship, commended by Samuel Parr, was credited with ‘just criticism and extensive learning, an elegant taste, and a genius naturally philosophic’ by Thomas Taylor, who incorporated all nine translations (revised) in his first complete Works of Plato (1804, cvii).
E. I. Carlyle, rev. Anna Chahoud
E. I. Carlyle, “Sydenham, Floyer (1710–1787),” rev. Anna Chahoud, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, 2004, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/26861 (accessed December 18, 2015).