Abbé d’Olivet - Pensées de Cicéron - 1754

CICÉRON / OLIVET (Joseph Thoulier d')
The Thoughts of Cicero, translated to serve the education of Youth. By M. the Abbé d'Olivet, of the French Academy. Second Edition.
In Paris, at the Widow Gandouin's, Quai des Augustins, at the Belle Image, 1754.

One volume in 12mo, bound in full brown speckled calf of the period, spine with raised bands decorated with gilt floral motifs, title-piece in red morocco, red edges, marbled guards. The work opens with a title page printed in black, adorned with a typographic vignette engraved representing a floral crest. The period binding in speckled calf shows rubbing and wear at the headcaps and corners, while the interior offers a very fine freshness, with generous margins and well-set type.

This remarkable second edition of the Thoughts of Cicero was prepared by the Abbé Joseph Thoulier d'Olivet (1682-1768), a distinguished member of the French Academy. Explicitly designed “to serve the education of youth,” the work gathers a thematic anthology of the most beautiful maxims and philosophical reflections of the Roman orator (treating religion, man, probity, etc.), presented in a bilingual or structured format with the Latin text on the opposite page and an educational notes apparatus. The volume opens with a savory narrative preface in which the Abbé d'Olivet recounts his visit to an English boarding school where humanities were taught.

The Abbé d'Olivet, a great and respected Hellenist and Latinist of the eighteenth century, was known for his rigorous pedagogical methods and his concern to render classical authors accessible and formative for young minds. In the preface of this collection, he tells a charming anecdote about a stroll a few miles from London where he casually discovered a school run by a French exile teaching Latin to children. It is this encounter that inspired him to refine his moral anthologies to stimulate the intellectual rivalry of Europe’s youth.