Epilogue

Hume’s naturalistic moral philosophy and rejection of moral theology represented a challenge to which his Scottish contemporaries sought to respond. Almost all did so with reference to Cicero—whom they sought to re-appropriate for a broadly Stoic ethical tradition which was held to be amenable to a polite Presbyterian Christianity. Drawing together the discussions in the foregoing chapters, the Epilogue illustrates how Locke, Middleton, and Hume were central provocateurs in a full-blown Ciceronian controversy in eighteenth-century Britain. Edward Gibbon was well-read in this debate and contributed to it in his earliest publications; but the later volumes of the Decline and Fall indicate a movement away from an interest in late Hellenistic philosophies—including the Ciceronian—as living traditions which might provide answers to pressing contemporary questions. By the early nineteenth century, indeed, this earlier debate over Cicero’s ‘real’ philosophical commitments had come to seem strange indeed.