This chapter examines the reception of the Meditations in early modern Europe, focusing primary on the period from the first publication of the Meditations in 1559 to the end of the eighteenth century. In particular it discusses the way in which the text was read as either a generic source of ancient moral maxims or a serious work of Stoic philosophy. Key figures in the early modern debate include Isaac Casaubon, his son Meric, Thomas Gataker, the Cambridge Platonists Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and on the Continent Joannes Franciscus Buddeus and Johann Jakob Brucker.

This chapter outlines the methodological approach for reconstructing the top of the wealth distribution of early-imperial Italy. Traditional social-table models are deemed inadequate for this purpose. Instead, I advocate for an economic model that assumes the top of the Italian wealth distribution can be represented by a simple mathematical function– a power law.

This chapter assesses wealth inequality among the elites of the Italian civitates, using four sets of wealth proxy data. The analysis reveals significant variation in the implied inequalities, which nonetheless fall within the same range as those implied by other premodern datasets. Interestingly, these levels of inequality do not appear to correlate with the size of the civitas.

The Introduction sets out the theme of the book. It discusses the census qualifications (wealth minimum requirements) that prevailed in the Roman timocratic political system.

This chapter introduces a new model to represent the heterogeneity of the Italian civitates. The model is based on the abundant archaeological evidence of the inhabited areas of their administrative centres, using it as a proxy for various economic and socio-political aspects of the civitas. This new variation model surpasses previous ones by being continuous (rather than categorical) and by formally incorporating the uncertainties associated with missing data.

This chapter uses Diogenes Laertius’ doxographical overview of Stoic natural philosophy as a starting point to examine the role of physics in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Contrary to a common misconception, all the central aspects of Stoic physics, except for some more technical issues, are well represented. The chapter discusses Marcus Aurelius’ treatment of the telos-formula of ‘living according to nature’; the two fundamental Stoic principles of reality, god and matter; the scale of nature; and the relation between Providence, fate, necessity, change, human action, and freedom. Marcus Aurelius’ distinctive touch comes through in certain areas of emphasis, such as the centrality of sociability, human and divine, or the many implications of the view that the processes of change that also entail human mortality actually constitute the order of the universe.

This chapter investigates the relationship between wealth and officeholding in Pompeii. It presents a new reconstruction of the wealth distribution among the Pompeian elite, combining an economic model with archaeological evidence from the local housing stock. The findings suggest that there were significantly more households in Pompeii with curial and senatorial wealth than there were Pompeian decurions and senators.