Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely, he said, when his mother heard the Armada was coming, so that fear and he were twins. He was tutor to the Cavendish family, met Galileo, translated Thucydides, and fled to Paris in 1640 as the civil war approached, where he tutored the future Charles II and wrote Leviathan. It argues from the war of all against all in the state of nature to the necessity of an absolute sovereign, and it is the founding work of modern political philosophy. He was accused of atheism, feared burning, and played tennis at seventy-five. He lived to ninety-one and translated Homer at eighty-six.