Abstract

While critics have relied upon bibliographical data and his translation of Thucydides to establish the early Thomas Hobbes as a humanist, this essay argues that substantive evidence to support this conclusion can be found in the comparatively neglected discourses of the Horae Subsecivae. Reading Hobbe's contribution to the Horae alongside his translation of Thucydides reveals a consistent concern with the political potential of both verbal and visual images and with the dangers rhetorical manipulation could pose to individual and sovereign authority. Together these texts demonstrate an early Hobbes already deeply invested in the political debates and crises of his era.