Cicero's Ears, or Eloquence in the Age of Politeness: Oratory, Moderation, and the Sublime in Enlightenment Scotland

Abstract

This paper argues that Hume's essay, "Of Eloquence," should be read as part of a Scottish Enlightenment attempt to accommodate the sublime to commercial modernity. Hume inherits the sublime of ancient oratory not as a matter for narrow stylistic regulation—to be rejected in a new age of politeness, as some have argued—but as a moral problem at the heart of modern subjectivity. Hume looks to taste to regulate and contain the sublime, but it is Adam Smith who solves the problem of the sublime by recouping its excess as a mark of the possibilities for virtue in the modern age.

Recent scholarship on classical literature and the eighteenth century

“…Thanks to the recent revival of interest in Pope's Homer the only major area of eighteenth‐century classicism that still feels substantially underexplored is the period's interest in Cicero as both a moralist and a rhetorician. These aspects of his reception have been discussed (Fox, 2013; Hedrick, 2021; Ingram, 2015; Packham, 2013; Stuart‐Buttle, 2019), often in connection to Burke (Bullard, 2011; Vasunia, 2013, pp. 257–60; Rolli, 2019), but not currently to the extent that reflects Cicero's prominence in the period.…”