After his reviews of Charles Merivale's History of the Romans (1851 and 1856), Trollope's interest in classical historiography disappeared for fifteen years until, in early 1870, he published a favourable review of Ancient Classics for English Readers. Spurred on by John Blackwood's invitation to contribute to this series, edited by the Revd W. Lucas Collins, Trollope began The Commentaries of Caesar, which was the beginning of his re-education in the classics: ‘Latin was not so familiar to me then as it has since become – for from that date I have almost daily spent an hour with some Latin author, and on many days many hours’ (Trollope 1999a: 338). By the end of the decade, his intensive study of the classics had yielded two articles on Cicero in the Fortnightly in 1877 (1877b, 1877a) and a full-length biography in 1880. The rejuvenation of Trollope's interest in Latin and in Cicero's works during the autumn of his life is intrinsic to the development of his late style. In particular, Trollope's portrayal of Cicero is an attempt to articulate a political alternative to the capitalist individualism of modernity. In Trollope's dark tableau, Cicero heroically refuses to succumb to the interests of the self and instead tries to advance the common good, all the while knowing that he is fighting an uphill battle.

This claim put Trollope at odds with most of his contemporaries. Victorian writing about Rome tended to either glorify Caesar or to focus on the development of Christianity. Trollope's depiction of Cicero challenges both positions. On the one hand, Cicero's politics as depicted by Trollope are a veiled version of civic republicanism, a tradition of political thinking which emphasises participation in public life and the positive freedom to develop citizen character. On the other hand, Trollope suggests that Cicero was a Christian before the First Coming, an idea which does not tally with orthodox Christian doctrines. More generally, Trollope is also swimming against the current insofar as Victorian writing about classical history focused on the language and culture of Greece. If the classics were ‘the furniture of the mind for the Victorian upper classes’ (Goldhill 2011: 2), this mind-set was predominantly Hellenic: ‘Greece provided familiar and idealised cultural touchstones for the classically educated Victorian gentlemen who considered themselves heirs to the Hellenic tradition’ (Hurst 2010: 484).