Trollope's interest in the Latin classics was intensified by his search for an alternative political model, but grew out of his concern with ethics. Ruth apRoberts and Jane Nardin, among others, have suggested that Trollope's focus on moral problems in his late novels owes much to his reading of Cicero's De Officiis. In Cousin Henry, for instance, Trollope harks back to Cicero's presentation of the philosopher Diogenes’ claim that in moral reasoning one ought to consider the role of expediency (apRoberts 1969: 95): ‘it is one thing to conceal, another to be silent’ (De Officiis 3.52). Cicero's adage neatly encapsulates the novel's antihero's conundrum. Believing himself to be the heir to the Llanfeare estate, Henry Jones discovers a second testament, hidden in a volume of sermons, according to which the vast bulk of the property is transferred to his niece, Isabel Brodrick. Jones cannot bring himself to disclose his discovery, and his mind echoes Diogenes’ words: ‘Was it his duty to produce the evidence of a gross injustice against himself?’ (Trollope 1993b: 47; De Officiis 3.57). ApRoberts thus suggests that Cousin Henry embroiders on Cicero's ideas, actualising them and providing them with a narrative elaboration. Although she does not use the term, her observation indicates that Trollope's novel is a paraphrase, that is, in an extension of the sense in which the term is used in rhetoric, a free rendering of something written or spoken ‘using different words, especially to achieve greater clarity’ (Stevenson 2010: 1289).

Paraphrases are essential ingredients in Trollope's late style and add a number of specific flavours: the principles of paraphrasis are at work in his creation of certain allusions and certain motifs, in his development of the form of the novella (Cousin Henry, An Old Man's Love, and Dr Wortle's School), and in the methodology of his literary criticism (The Life of Cicero and The Commentaries of Caesar).