The Life of Cicero – Anthony Trollope (1880)

S$129.00

The Life of Cicero – Anthony Trollope (1880)

S$129.00

Title: The Life of Cicero
Author: Anthony Trollope
Publisher: Chapman and Hall, 1880. First edition.
Condition: Quarter leather with marbled boards. 2 vols, complete. Covers worn on both volumes, with missing title to spine on vol 1. Gilt to top edge. Some foxing to blank fly leaves and title pages, text mostly clean.

About the book (from the Trollope Society):

The Life of Cicero was in some ways an attempt to remake himself as a classicist, an ‘opus magnum for my old age’. His intention here is to reclaim Cicero’s reputation from the clutch of Victorian historians whom he saw as venerating Caesar at the expense of Cicero.
He traces Cicero’s career as a student, a lawyer, a solider and politician, as well as his private life, and he does so in a narrative that is warm and witty. But Trollope remains throughout a cool observer, and – as he so often did in his novels – he brings up the eternal moral question of how to shape a course of action through an engaged public life wherein the decisions are not easy, and right and wrong are not immediately apparent. This view of Cicero, somewhat unorthodox and unpopular at the time, has increasingly become the accepted line. R H Super called the book Trollope’s ‘genuine masterpiece.’

About the author (from Wikipedia):

Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works, collectively known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote perceptive novels on political, social, and gender issues, and on other topical matters.

Trollope’s literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he regained the esteem of critics by the mid-twentieth century.