Temple Stanyan

Career Stanyan entered government service after leaving Oxford and by 1715 was under-secretary for the Northern Department (the department responsible for foreign relations with Northern European countries). He transferred to the Southern Department (the department for Southern Europe) as under-secretary in 1717, but he lost this position a year later. In 1719, he became Clerk of the Privy Council, succeeding his brother Abraham in the post. In 1724, he also regained the under-secretaryship at the Southern Department. Abraham Stanyan was a prominent member of the Kit Kat Club, as was his cousin Richard Temple, 1st Viscount Cobham and some sources state Temple was also a member.

In 1731, he was succeeded as Clerk of the Privy Council by Gilbert West, leaving the Southern Department in 1735.

He was survived by his third wife. His daughter Catherine later became the second wife of Admiral Charles Hardy in 1759. Their eldest son, Temple Hardy, was likely named after Temple Stanyan and was a notable Royal Navy officer during the French Revolutionary wars.

Works The first volume of his two-volume book Grecian History, from the Original of Greece, to the Death of Philip of Macedon was published in 1707 by Jacob Tonson; there was a 32-year gap before the publication of the second volume in 1739. This was published alongside a second, revised, edition of the first volume.

The Grecian History was the first major English work on ancient Greece that was aimed at the general public and it became very successful. It was the standard work on the topic during the 18th century

Towards the end of the 18th century, Stanyan's history was superseded by William Mitford's History of Greece, the five volumes of which were published, one by one, between 1783 and 1810. Although later in the 19th century, that work itself came to be seen as flawed as it reflected the author's reactionary politics and his anti-democratic and anti-Jacobin views.

Stanyan made a contribution to a collaborative translation of Ovid's, Metamorphoses edited by Samuel Garth, that was published by Tonson in 1717. Other contributors to the work were Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and Nicholas Rowe. He also contributed to a 1726 collection of English and Latin poems on archery and the Royal Company of Archers and composed the Latin inscription on the plinth of John Michael Rysbrack's 1735 statue of George II at Greenwich Hospital.