The Quest for Civic Virtue

This chapter focuses on those eighteenth-century students of ancient history and literature who were mainly interested in Latin and Greek writings as moral edification. Recent decades have witnessed a growing awareness of the role played by models drawn from classical antiquity in the advancement of the concept of politeness in the eighteenth century. Much less attention has been paid to the connection between the popularizing works on antiquity that were read by the social and intellectual elites to form a conception of these classical models and contemporary scholarly debates. In order to tackle this question, I will discuss two eighteenth-century bestsellers. The first of these was the History of the Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero by Conyers Middleton (1683–1750) and the second was the Histoire Romaine (1738–48) by the Jansenist Charles Rollin (1661–1741). Although these men had vastly different religious outlooks—Middleton was a deist and Rollin a Jansenist—they each made an important contribution to the popularization of classical culture in the eighteenth century. It will be demonstrated that the life and work of both men was deeply influenced by the moralizing and popularizing approach to classical texts (philosophia), and that they created a conception of antiquity that found its way into the works of some of the foremost philosophes of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire and Montesquieu.