The introduction addresses questions about Kant’s access to Stoic philosophy and other matters about Stoicism in his immediate intellectual context. After this biographical and historical contextualisation, the individual chapters are introduced.

This chapter situates Kant’s rejection of Stoic eudaimonism within his overarching anti-eudaimonist agenda. The chapter begins by emphasizing the importance of the Stoic tradition for Kant’s critical reception of ancient ethical theory. It then reconstructs the central commitments of ancient Stoic eudaimonism and of Christian Garve’s quasi-Stoic eudaimonism. Turning to Kant’s anti-Stoic argument in the Dialectic of the Second Critique, the chapter argues that the primary target of Kant’s error of subreption (vitium subreptionis) is the Stoic Seneca, specifically his account of joy (gaudium) as an accompaniment of one’s consciousness of virtuous activity. After reconstructing Kant’s argument in detail, the chapter offers a new way to understand its anti-eudaimonist implications: practical illusion leads the Stoic to rationalize and, ultimately, to disfigure the moral law. Even in their moral ardor – or, rather, propelled by it – the Stoic commits an error of self-love.

The question explored in this chapter is this: Is there a foothold, or even a toehold, in Stoic and Kantian texts that gives us purchase for developing an account of moral anger? I answer “yes,” although the positive argument in both Stoic and Kantian texts is not obvious. In the Stoic tradition, the overall normative demand is modeled on the character and conduct of a good and wise person, that is, the sage. Can the Stoic sage feel moral anger as part of how full virtue is expressed? The Stoic sage is typically modeled on concrete historical examples that display a fuller gamut of emotions than is often acknowledged. Moral anger and vicarious distress are, I argue, Stoic “good emotions” compatible with the rational desires and emotions characteristic of full virtue. Despite Kant’s Stoicizing tendencies at various junctures, he leaves room for moral anger as a way we express our duties of sympathy and become aware of the constraints of the moral law.

The concept of a ‘formula’ (Formel) plays an important, if complicated, role in Kant’s ethics, especially in the Groundwork. The concept of a formula also plays an important role in Stoic accounts of moral reasoning in the Latin sources, Cicero and Seneca. This chapter explores the place and function of this concept in Stoic ethics and its origins in Roman legal theory and practice. It then raises the question of the relationship between the Kantian and Stoic uses of the concept, asking whether this is a case of direct influence of Stoicism on Kant’s moral philosophy. The chapter comes to no definite conclusion on the question, but aims to provide comparative materials that may help others to address the question.

At least since Pauline Kleingeld’s defining work, scholars recognize that Kant’s aims in his philosophy of history are practical as well as theoretical: not just to describe history, but also to provide a view of it that supports moral action. Often scholars understand this support to be similar to that provided by the postulates of practical reason: the progressive view of history Kant articulates is taken to be a belief necessarily presupposed in moral agency, supporting the more general belief that the agent’s moral ends are realizable. Prompted by Kant’s description of his view as “consoling,” this chapter considers whether his view in Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim may instead be interpreted as a form of Stoic consolation on the model of Seneca’s consolatory writings, with a different practical import: to relieve the moral agent from grief concerning large-scale historical events, thereby freeing her to act effectively within her own sphere.

This chapter discusses the role of law in the representational program of the emperor Augustus. First I consider a poem by Horace, in which Horace argues with the jurist Trebatius Testa about his potential liability for defamation, before claiming that the new emperor will protect him from legal judgments. I suggest that Horace casts Augustan order as superseding legal rules, but that he offers a language for imagining imperial judgment as better, or fairer, than law. I next discuss a coin that commemorates Augustus restoring leges et iura to the Roman people, and argue that this coin should be read in connection with an edict recorded in Cassius Dio that voided all illegal actions taken during the triumviral period. I then discuss the story of Vedius Pollio, an enslaver whose plan to feed a slave to lampreys was foiled by Augustus, and show how this story can be read as a justificatory folktale for imperial control over enslavement practice and for expanding imperial jurisidiction more broadly. I finally discuss the interplay between Augustus’ marriage legislation, with its extreme penalties for adultery, and his own punishment of his adulterous daughter Julia.

Pleasure was a problem for members of the Roman elite – or so moralists felt. In his treatise on the good life, Seneca stresses the insidious threat posed by the attractions of sensual pleasure, while asserting that only the subhuman will want to surrender themselves completely ... Seneca’s language presents pleasure as fluid, both engulfing and invading its hapless victims. His insistence on its seductive dangers could be read as betraying a certain fascination with pleasure.

This chapter examines Pauline letters in the light of Seneca’s fictive Moral Epistles addressed to his pupil “Lucilius.” It indicates the various authorial strategies deployed in the development of basic letter elements, such as addressees, situational discourse, and addressor, that serve in the promotion of disciplinary teachings and compares those strategies among the two collections. The chapter argues that the letter genre is in many ways an ideal medium for the advancement of disciplinary teachings by an authoritative instructor. The benefits of adopting the letter genre for persuasive teachings include its friendly and trustworthy domain, its appeal to external readers naturally drawn to incidents seemingly meant for others, and that it easily permits and even anticipates the promotion of self. It likewise highlights the versatility of the genre, its historic use in philosophical teachings, and its easy accommodation to a wide range of subgenres, including biography, autobiography, dialog, and narrative. Similarity in the use of epistolary features across the two collections contributes to the book’s thesis that Pauline authors, like Seneca, exploited the genre for teachings to secondary readers.

This chapter explores the relationship between the Four Quartets (1936–42) and Eliot’s roughly contemporaneous Greek-inspired verse plays, The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949). The author traces the development of Eliot’s programmatic use of increasingly distant reading, and of his implicit argument for not translating Greek. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale reveal that Eliot deliberately thought about the use of Greek prototypes in the late 1930s, assessing both his own earlier effort with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and other Greek-inspired plays. The author examines the theoretical questions that prompt and frame Eliot’s approach and that tie the plays together with his last great poetic work. She thus outlines major aspects of his late poetics which surprisingly depend on his treatment of Greek materials, showing how they bring to a close his first foray into such materials in the late 1910s/early 1920s. Finally, she suggests that Eliot’s own Herakles character in The Cocktail Party is indebted to H.D.’s portrayal of Freud in Tribute to Freud.

Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

In Satire 1.6, Horace depicts himself as a private citizen free to move around as he wishes in opposition to another character who does not enjoy such freedom of movement, owing to the fact that he is a politician. Seneca, in De clementia (perhaps recalling Horace), extols the freedom of movement he enjoys in the urban space thanks to the emperor, who, on the contrary, complains about the limitations imposed on him by his role. In Xenophon, Hiero, who was a private citizen before becoming a tyrant, is questioned by Simonides about the joys and woes of the two conditions: private citizens can go anywhere, while for tyrants everywhere they go is like travelling in enemy territory. In Horace’s sermo, the concrete space of the city refers to a potentially open political space: the figures we see moving around the streets of Rome are free to choose between political abstention and participation on the basis of their own personal inclinations. But the political and social situation was uncertain and unstable. Situations and characters tend in fact to transcend their immediate concreteness, referring to something else as well: something suited to satisfying the search for a principle of authority.

Chapter 5 locates the Younger Seneca and Lucan in a shared conversation about the long-term ramifications of sole rule. It opens with a reading of Seneca’s De Clementia, which is the first text to theorize the metaphors of the healer and head of state. Using both to construct a persuasive ideal of imperial interdependence, Seneca described a body politic whose health vacillates in proportion to the virtue of its princeps. The sick heads and overzealous surgeons that crop up in his other works, however, confirm the risks of such an arrangement. Lucan took this idea as his point of departure in the Bellum Civile, which responds to the imagistic framework of De Clementia through the characters of Sulla and Pompey. Portraying the former as a surgeon who makes excessive use of the scalpel and the latter as a head who suffers the mutiny of his limbs, he portrayed a body politic that was harmed but yet unable to survive without its rulers. He thereby conveyed the futility of politics in a society doomed to civil war.

Often viewed as derivative, philosophy written in Latin has in recent years been enjoying a scholarly renaissance, as critics realise that philosophical thought does not develop in a vacuum but is intrinsically linked to the time, place and language in which it is expressed.This chapter brings a historicising approach to the phenomenon of Roman philosophy, combining a diachronic narrative with a focus on particular themes.After considering the Roman adoption of Greek philosophy in the second century BCE, I use Lucretius as a case study for the Latinisation of Greek thought and Cicero as an example of the political and cultural uses of philosophy in the late Republic.I explore some of the many appearances of philosophy in Latin poetry – evidence of the saturation of the Roman cultural imaginary with philosophical ideas and the fact that Latin philosophical writing was not restricted to genres viewed as philosophical.Moving into the Empire, I discuss Seneca as a proponent of philosophy as a way of life and consider the self-representation of philosophers, with a focus on Apuleius, before concluding with an exploration of the Christianisation of philosophy in late antiquity.

This chapter investigates the peculiar human habit of attributing political qualities to honeybees. It shows that by distinguishing a ‘queen bee’ from ‘workers’ we continue a tradition that has its roots in classical antiquity and in Aristotle’s inclusion of honeybees among the zōa politika (the ‘political animals’). The chapter asks why honeybees ‘need’ politics and why human politics ‘needs’ honeybees. The answer to these questions in the context of the ancient world shows what is at stake in current attempts to draw lines between humans and other social animals. The chapter shows that for the purpose of theorizing about human politics as well as in the scientific study of the natural world itself, to naturalize often means to normalize. The chapter shows that this frequently occurs in ways that resonate with what has been called ‘the naturalist fallacy’: the idea that because something occurs in nature it is by definition good.

Chapter 4 examines Galen’s credentials as an ethical philosopher in the light of his recently discovered essay Avoiding Distress. It argues that his moral agenda which is expanded upon here makes him an active participant in the practical ethics of the High Roman Empire, with a more profound attentiveness to popular philosophy than is usually admitted. Galen’s dialogue with what has been termed ‘Stoic psychotherapy’ and the Platonic-Aristotelian educational model helps build up his ethical influence through an engagement with the past. On the other hand, his individual characteristics, such as the autobiographical perspective of his narrative and the intimacy established between author and addressee, render Avoiding Distress exceptional among essays (whether Greek or Latin) treating anxiety, especially when compared to the tracts on mental tranquillity written by Seneca and Plutarch. Another distinctive element of the treatise is that Galen’s self-projection as a therapist of the emotions corresponds to his role as a practising physician as regards the construction of authority and the importance of personal experience.

Chapter Three begins with a reading of Everyman, and deals with the persistent narrative use of disability as a kind of metaphorical death. This is not just the case in medieval or early modern drama, but persists in the present day where it is still evident in the dangerous (and deadly) ideological fantasy that insists that disabled people’s lives are less worth living than those of enabled people. As well as examining this trope in texts like Seneca’s Oedipus, and through characters such as Lamech in biblically-inspired drama, this chapter also begins to address some of the problems of the model of a classical tradition as a way of figuring reception. The chapter closes with some thoughts on the relationship between this eugenicist conflating of disability and closeness to death, and gender.

The author checks the firmness of the foundations of the negative appraisal of the historian Ephorus. Topics include Ephorus’ Isocratean apprenticeship, the concept of rhetorical historiography, Ephorus and Diodorus, ancient judgements questioning Ephorus’ reliability as a historian, Ephorus’ ‘Cymocentrism’.

Written during his Catholic years, Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall (1603) portrays the tyrannical regime of the Roman Emperor Tiberius and his favourite Sejanus, who aggressively lay claim to the inward secrets of their political opponents. Despite the play’s ostentatious historical accuracy, its concerns and vocabulary are thus frequently reminiscent of Elizabethan Catholic complaints about religious persecution under Elizabeth I. However, rather than simply condemning dissimulation as a response to persecution, Sejanus His Fall offers a rationale for prudent accommodation of a tyrannical regime that is grounded in a neo-Stoicist disjunction between inward and outward self and in a differentiated understanding of parrhesia, the rhetoric of free speech. Even though Jonson’s attitude towards dissimulation thus merits reconsideration, Sejanus simultaneously expresses deep distrust in theatricality, which is grounded not only in neo-Stoicist ethics but also in the Platonic association of the theatre with tyranny and the inherent theatricality of Machiavellian power politics.