John Owen

John Owen (born c. 1560, Plas-du, Llanarmon, Caernarvonshire, Wales—died 1622, London, Eng.) was a Welsh epigrammatist whose perfect mastery of the Latin language brought him the name of “the British Martial,” after the ancient Roman poet.

Owen was educated at Winchester School and at New College, Oxford. He was a fellow of his college from 1584 to 1591, when he became a schoolmaster, first at Trelleck, near Monmouth in Wales, and then in about 1594 at Warwick, where he became headmaster of the school endowed by Henry VIII. He became distinguished not only for his mastery of Latin but also for the humor and point of his epigrams. Being a staunch Protestant, he could not resist the temptation of turning his wit against Roman Catholicism. This practice caused his book to be placed on the Roman Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Forbidden Books”) in 1654 and led a rich Roman Catholic uncle to cut him out of his will.

Owen’s Epigrammata are divided into 12 books, of which the first 4 were published in 1606 and the rest at four different times. Owen frequently adapted the lines of his predecessors in Latin verse, and one such borrowing become celebrated as a quotation: “Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis” (“Times change, and we change with them”). After his death a monument was erected to his memory in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, where he was buried.