[3] Philemon Holland was educated at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford,[4] before going on to Trinity College, Cambridge about 1568,[3][5] where he was tutored by John Whitgift, later Archbishop of Canterbury.

[10] On 24 October 1632 the mayor and alderman granted him a pension of £3 6s 8d for the ensuing three years, "forasmuch as Dr. Holland, by reason of his age, is now grown weak and decayed in his estate.

He died at Coventry on 9 February 1637 and was buried at Holy Trinity Church, where he is remembered in an epitaph of his own composition, lamenting the deaths of the six sons who had predeceased him.

These were taken from the edition of Livy published in Paris in 1573; by translating them, Holland was making available in English a great learned compendium of historical knowledge, not simply a single ancient author.

[1]In 1601 Holland published in two folios "an equally huge translation" from Latin, Pliny the Elder's The Historie of the World,[1] dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil,[6] then the Queen's Principal Secretary.

[12] Considine says of it: This encyclopaedia of ancient knowledge about the natural world had already had a great indirect influence in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but had not been translated into English before, and would not be again for 250 years.

[7]Summing up this early period of extraordinary productivity, Considine points out, "In all, over the four years 1600–1603, Holland published 4332 folio pages of translations of the very highest quality.

[1][14] In 1609 he published his translation of the surviving books of Ammianus Marcellinus's history of the Roman Empire in the later 4th century AD, dedicating it to the mayor and aldermen of Coventry.

[17] Philemon in turn found a patron in Elizabeth, Lady Berkeley, whose son, George, he would later tutor: she appears to have offered £20 towards the publication, and considered doubling this to £40.

[18] However, when the first printed pages were circulated, it was reported that Camden "misliketh it & thinketh he [i. e. Holland] hath don him wrong", and Lady Berkeley may have reconsidered her support: her patronage is not mentioned in the published volume.

In the following year he published Theatrum Imperii Magnae Britanniae, a translation from English into Latin of Speed's The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine.

[1][3] Holland's translation style was free and colloquial, sometimes employing relatively obscure dialect and archaic vocabulary, and often expanding on his source text in the interests of clarity.

He justified this approach in prefaces to his translations of Livy and Pliny, saying that he had opted for "a meane and popular stile", and for "that Dialect or Idiome which [is] familiar to the basest clowne", while elaborating on the original in order to avoid being "obscure and darke".

John Aubrey, reading his translations of Livy and Pliny as an undergraduate in the 1640s, compiled lists of examples of what he saw as quaint and archaic terms.