Customer Reviews

Life of Cicero (Selected works of Anthony Trollope)

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Anthony Trollope is an English writer of the Victorian period most well-known for his unbelievably prolific fiction. So both the reader of Victorian literature and also the classicist may be somewhat surprised to find here a passionate defense of the 1st-century BC orator and statesman Cicero. This is all the more surprising because Trollope wrote at a time when Cicero was under attack, especially from German classicists. In these two volumes, however, Trollope discusses Cicero's speeches, compares Cicero's life to that of contemporary Romans, and decides that Cicero was a great man and a patriot whose reputation should be defended. Although Trollope may be a little over-lenient regarding the orator's famous pride and bombast, his glowing assessment is (ironically) closer to some modern views than that of his contemporaries who lambasted Cicero from their positions as professional classicists. I heartily recommend the set to Trollope enthusiasts and to Cicero partisans, but the average reader of Victorian literature may find the classical dicussions uninteresting, while the average classicist may not be satisfied with Trollope's non-scholarly approach.