One of his older brothers was Abraham Stanyan, who would later serve as the British ambassador to Switzerland, the Ottoman Empire and to Austria.
Stanyan's uncle-by-marriage (the husband of an aunt) was Sir Richard Temple, 3rd Baronet, after whom he may have been named.
[7] The Grecian History was the first major English work on ancient Greece that was aimed at the general public and it became very successful.
In the work, Stanyan, in common with better-known thinkers such Montesquieu and Rousseau, lavishes praise on Sparta, for being a strong stable state that was immune from factionalism and political unrest.
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.
[11] Stanyan made a contribution to a collaborative translation of Ovid's, Metamorphoses edited by Samuel Garth, that was published by Tonson in 1717.
[13] Other contributors to the work were Alexander Pope, John Dryden, Joseph Addison, William Congreve and Nicholas Rowe.