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Cicero’s Catilinarians in the Eighteenth Century: Constructing a Political Experience

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Katie EastORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.This article explores how early modern editors of ancient texts used the tools available to them to curate a political experience of the text for the reader. In particular, it considers how the paratextual material prefacing the ancient text provided an opportunity to shape the reader’s perception of the work before they had even begun to read it. Using early modern English translations of Cicero’s speeches against Catiline, this article argues that paratexts could prepare the reader’s expectations to ensure that they experienced it as a ‘political’ piece. The Catilinarians prove a particularly interesting example of this process, both due to their complicated transmission from antiquity which had depoliticised their meaning, and due to the political resonance they acquired in eighteenth-century England following the perceived threats posed by conspiracy (principally from the Jacobites) and corruption. The process of influencing the reader to experience these texts as political is explored in this article.

Publication metadata

Author(s): East KA

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: History of European Ideas

Year: 2025

Pages: epub ahead of print

Online publication date: 11/07/2025

Acceptance date: 02/04/2018

Date deposited: 21/07/2025

ISSN (print): 0191-6599

ISSN (electronic): 1873-541X

Publisher: Routledge

URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2025.2528404

DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2025.2528404

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