MIRROR FOR CIVIC ETHICS: THOMAS HOBBES ON EPIC POETRY

Epic poetry has long served as a privileged forum for negotiating the interdependence of literary form and political power. Concentrating on Thomas Hobbes’s mid-seventeenth-century contributions, his epistolary dialogue with Sir William Davenant surrounding Gondibert and the theoretical manifesto prefacing his English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the present study reconstructs the philosophical scaffolding that informs Hobbes’s poetics of the epic. Hobbes reconfigures the genre as a civic instrument whose fundamental aim is the fostering of virtue through pleasurable imitation. He articulates seven interlocking features: lexical transparency, syntactic perspicuity, architectural contrivance, disciplined fancy, ethical impartiality, meticulous description, and ample variety. Each functions as a component within an integrated didactic system designed to align the passions of heterogeneous readerships with the rational principles requisite for commonwealth stability. By situating Hobbes’s aesthetic theory within its broader intellectual and political contexts, this study indicates that the epic, under his guidance, becomes a calibrated vehicle for shaping collective behaviour, thereby illuminating the genre’s enduring capacity to accommodate shifting ideological climates without relinquishing its ethical function.