The interest in Presocratic philosophy, and the scholarly output on it, have been rising again in the last few years. I start this review with a sample of recent publications in the area. It is easy to expect that Daniel Graham's collection of The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy,Footnote ¹ in two volumes, will become a popular tool for the study of Presocratic philosophy (for some qualifications on this expectation see below). The sourcebook aims to present ‘the complete fragments and a generous selection of testimonies’ for the major early Greek philosophers. English translations (all by Graham himself) are set opposite to Greek and Latin texts (with slim textual notes identifying substantive textual variants), with succinct introductions for each philosopher, and brief commentaries and basic bibliographies following the texts. The Diels-Kranz (hereafter DK) collection is the starting point for this sourcebook, but Graham is quite selective in his shortlist of those who deserve a place in his sourcebook: out of ninety DK sections, he includes only nineteen philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Diogenes of Apollonia, Melissus, Philolaus, Leucippus, Democritus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Antiphon, Prodicus, and Pythagoras, the last being relegated to an appendix) and two anonymous texts, the Anonymus Iamblichi and the Dissoi Logoi. Although the sourcebook includes some fragments and testimonies that did not appear in DK (e.g. the Strasbourg papyrus for Empedocles), and only a selection of the testimonies included there, the major difference in terms of the material included for the selected philosophers is the order in which fragments and testimonies are presented. The fragments are incorporated within the context of the broader testimonies containing them (and signalled in bold), rather than listed separately, as in DK; the numbering of fragments and testimonies does not correspond to DK, but the DK numbers are given in addition, and volume 2 includes a list of concordances (besides an index of sources, an index of other passages quoted by Graham in his end-of-chapter commentaries, and a short general index of names and topics). Graham's choice is definitely a healthy step forward from DK's largely artificial strategy of separating fragments and testimonies into two different sections; one might wonder whether the decision to signal in bold words, phrases, sentences, and sections that supposedly count as original fragments within the broader context in which they occur is still too heavily indebted to the DK model. For each author the texts are organized in four main sections: life, works, philosophy, and reception, with the philosophy section typically structured into thematic subsections. Of course the strengths and shortcomings of a monumental work such as Graham's can be fully appreciated only over time, once you use it repeatedly in your teaching and research. I have mentioned Graham's approach to the distinction between fragments and testimonies: some sustained methodological discussion, and explanation of the criteria guiding the distinction, would have been welcome. Unavoidably some readers will find Graham's shortlist of philosophers and selection of texts unsatisfactory and too narrow: some qualms about notable exclusions – such as Solon, Alcmaeon, Archytas, Pherecydes, the Orphics, and the Derveni author – have already been voiced (for example, by Jason Rheins in his review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews). As far as I could see, the translations are reliable, and the short introductions, commentaries, and bibliographies provide just enough information for readers to contextualize the authors and texts within the philosophical tradition (less so within the broader archaic Greek cultural and literary tradition), and appreciate some of the key exegetical and philosophical issues that they raise. Just enough, and this brings me to what I find to be the less convincing aspect of such an enterprise as Graham's. His collection will certainly be of some use as an accessible reference tool for advanced students and researchers, but its selectivity will prevent it from becoming a research tool in its own right, and standard editions of individual Presocratics will remain the first port of call (for example, the second edition of Coxon's The Fragments of Parmenides, reviewed below). At the same time, the breadth of the material that it contains, coupled with the relative thinness of the apparatus of introductions and commentaries, does not make The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy the kind of introductory sourcebook that could be used on its own in an introductory undergraduate course on ancient philosophy, or on the Presocratics. It is difficult to imagine lecturers of such courses prescribing to their students more than a small fraction of the material offered by Graham; and those students will still need to use standard introductions to Presocratic philosophy such as Kirk–Raven–Schofield, Barnes, McKirahan, or Warren to make real sense of the evidence presented by Graham, placing it within a unified narrative about the nature and development of early Greek philosophy. From this point of view, Graham's collection risks falling into no man's land from the point of view of its readership: it is neither a ground-breaking, research-shaping tool such as, for example, Long and Sedley's collection on The Hellenistic Philosophers has been for three decades now, nor an introductory textbook easily accessible (for both sheer bulk and price) to undergraduate students. That said, Graham's work still deserves a place in all university libraries and on the shelves of ancient philosophy scholars.

Some of the individuals who, thanks to DK's selection, made the list of Vorsokratiker and whom Graham excluded from his exclusive shortlist of early Greek philosophers (e.g. Solon) appear in Johannes Engels’ book on the Seven Sages.Footnote ² The reader will learn from Engels’ little monograph that the so-called Seven Sages might actually have been up to twenty-three in number, if we consider all the evidence included in several different ancient lists and traditions (some of which, Engels argues, are early and pre-Platonic). The discussion of our sources and the methodological questions that they raise is the high point of the book, and in itself more instructive than the following brisk overview of the main extant information on the life, thought, and sayings of the Sages: the extended list of twenty-three is dealt with in the space of thirty-four (small) pages. The book closes with an interesting, if selective, discussion of the ancient iconography of the Seven Sages, including the Roman world, with eleven black-and-white pictures.

Michela Sassi's Gli inizi della filosofia. In Grecia Footnote ³ is not, despite its compact format and the breadth of its historical content, a general introduction for beginners. It is rather a fascinating ‘viaggio di esplorazione’ (‘exploration journey’; 9), to borrow the author's own words, through the birth of philosophy in Greece, in which key methodological questions concerning the very identity and nature of ‘Presocratic philosophy’ constantly lead the way in the process of identifying and clarifying the unity and distinctiveness of early philosophical discourse, its plurality and variety, and its fundamental cultural context. The book is divided into five chapters, which follow different threads in the birth and development of philosophy in Greece: (1) the ancient identification of Thales as the ‘father of philosophy’, with the influential historiographic and philosophical presuppositions reflected in that choice; (2) the interrelation between Presocratic cosmogonies and cosmologies and traditional mythological theogonies; (3) diverse styles of early philosophical writing; (4) early conceptions of the soul; (5) the complex interplay between authority, reason, and authoritativeness in the development of philosophy as a discipline in competition with other ancient forms of wisdom. The judicious choice of these thematic nuclei and the selectivity of exempla are refreshing, Chapters 3 and 5 appearing especially commendable from this point of view. Although all the chapters can be read separately – almost as self-contained essays – the book does not lack unity, not only thanks to the frequent use of cross-references but, more importantly, by virtue of its methodological focus and approach. It is pervaded, for example, by a keen interest in the history of the scholarship and of the major exegetical trends in the interpretation of Presocratic thought, starting from the seminal Platonic and especially Aristotelian reflections on the birth of philosophy (I signal here Sassi's nuanced critical discussion of Cornford's and Burkert's approach to the relationship between Presocratic logos and traditional Greek and eastern ‘myth’ on pages 36–50). As I said, this is not an easy and comprehensive introduction to the Presocratics, but advanced students and scholars will find much food for thought in Sassi's learned and sophisticated approach to the interpretation of the origins of Greek philosophy against its broader historical, political, and cultural background.

Readers who are looking for a more basic introduction might be attracted by a book such as Giannis Stamatellos’ Introduction to Presocratics,Footnote ⁴ which, according to the author, ‘targets non-experienced readers and people who are interested in Presocratic philosophy’ quite broadly (ix). Stamatellos tries to pack quite a lot into the 162 pages of his book. After two short chapters setting the stage and introducing the main protagonists, the book is structured thematically (like Sassi's) into six (equally short) chapters on principles, the cosmos, being, soul, knowledge, and ethics. Three appendices offer a useful (if extremely selective) translation, by Rosemary Wright, of some main fragments (several are referenced within the main chapters, but regrettably consultation is not as straightforward as it should be, since the DK reference is used in the text, whereas the fragments are presented in a different order in the appendix); a summary list of our main sources (but without any discussion of the methodological issues raised by their use); and an extremely succinct survey of the legacy and reception of Presocratic philosophy. The book's planning and structure are commendable; the execution is less convincing. I will not focus here on the endemic lack of precision, only part of which can be discounted as the unavoidable result of the volume's introductory nature. An introduction such as Stamatellos’ is successful especially in the measure in which it manages to motivate readers into further exploration of its subject (the author expresses exactly this hope in his preface [ix]). But Introduction to Presocratics reads more like an ancient doxography in which, for some key themes, we are simply told who said what, but too often without a clear sense of why they said what they said, in response to what questions or problems, against what broader cultural and philosophical background, and on the basis of what reasons or arguments. The book does not convey with sufficient strength and in a cohesive narrative the sense of the vibrant dialectic in which Presocratic thought was rooted and developed, nor the exciting challenges raised by our attempts to reconstruct and interpret it. At the same time, the thematic approach tends to compartmentalize the various doctrines and arguments of a certain Presocratic philosopher, without offering a sense of how that philosopher had a coherent worldview of which those doctrines and arguments are interconnected parts. For example, Heraclitean views feature in the chapters on principles, cosmos, being, soul, and knowledge, but no unified picture of Heraclitus’ distinctive philosophy emerges from these scattered treatments. This is partially the price to pay for the (possible) benefits of the thematic approach, but also the result of the almost complete absence of cross-referencing between chapters. The book closes with glossaries of Greek and philosophical terms, and a relatively extensive bibliography. I found some of the glossary explanations puzzling, and reflecting the same kind of general lack of attention to the detail mentioned above: for example, ‘agnosticism: the view that true knowledge is unattainable to humans’; ‘effluence (Democritus): the idea that the sense organ is contracted [sic] by the sensory image emitted by the sense organ’; ‘pantheism: the belief in infinite gods’; ‘wisdom: true knowledge; epistemic and psychic cognition of reality’.

James Luchte's Early Greek Thought. Before the Dawn Footnote ⁵ exemplifies yet another approach to the study and presentation of Presocratic philosophy. The book is driven by the specific aim to ‘call into question a longstanding mythology…tragically alive in both the Analytic and the Continental traditions – that the “Pre-Socratics had the grandiose audacity to break with all traditional forms of knowledge”’ (ix). This is supposedly achieved by practising a hermeneutical method and style somehow inspired by early German Romanticism, Nietzsche, and Heidegger against anachronistic ideological readings (Platonic-Aristotelian, ‘scientistic’) pervasive in the scholarship, a method that will disclose an ‘indigenous’ interpretation of the ‘early Greek tragic thought’ of pre-Platonic philosophers (x). The reader will probably not be surprised to hear, at this point, that Luchte's treatment of the Presocratic, starting from his methodological preface, reveals all its ideological charge. Luchte's book opens and closes with two poems (I suppose, by the author himself). Interestingly, these poems seem to have nothing in common with those archaic poems with which, according to Luchte, early Greek philosophy never broke completely. The same allusive, impenetrable quality of Luchte's poems characterizes the dense prose of the rest of the book. According to his Democritus, for example,

Readers who believe that some important insight can be learned about Democritus from lines such as these, might want to read Luchte's book: in fact, they will find passages like this on every page. But I would urge those readers first to ask themselves, seriously, what exegetical or philosophical gem they think to have found in those lines. Those who, like me, cannot even make sense of them, will soon lose patience with Luchte's work. Whatever one thinks of his approach, the ‘longstanding mythology’ against which Luchte directs his polemics, and which he tries to dispel (or perhaps replace?) is, in any case, in large measure, a straw man: Luchte seems to ignore how the best scholarship on the Presocratic (in both ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ traditions) has taken into account the broad historical and cultural background and poetic traditions in the context of which, and in constant conversation with which, early Greek philosophy developed, construing the relationship in much more sophisticated terms than Luchte himself allows. But Luchte's bibliography includes more Nietzsche, Heidegger, and German philosophy than scholarly studies on Presocratic thought published in the last thirty to forty years.

One book that surprisingly does not appear in Luchte's bibliography, despite the fact that he devotes one full chapter to Parmenides and makes several references to him throughout, is Coxon's seminal critical edition of Parmenides’ fragments published in 1986. A revised and expanded edition appeared in 2009Footnote ⁶ to replace the long-out-of-print first edition. It includes a new short preface by Malcolm Schofield, new translations of the testimonia by Richard McKirahan, several revisions that Coxon himself had made in handwritten notes to two copies of his first edition (the text of the first edition is preserved in the footnotes), and various student-friendly improvements (all Greek words are now translated; line numbers have been inserted in the testimonia for ease of reference; a Greek–English index and an English–Greek glossary have been added). The philological rigour with which the task of preparing the second edition has been approached is laudable, and in itself an apt tribute to the importance of Coxon's work. Coxon's Parmenides is renowned for its success in wedding first-class philology to sensitivity to the literary context and unassuming philosophical lucidity. His painstaking identification of Homeric and other poetic influences upon, and allusions in, the language and imagery of Parmenides’ poem has long been recognized as one of the achievements of the work; it has opened for scholars the possibility to pursue exactly that kind of reflection on the position of Parmenides within the early Greek poetic tradition that scholars such as Luchte (see above) and Atwood Wilkinson (see below) wrongly believe to be absent from the scholarly agenda. The availability of Coxon's revamped edition to future generations of scholars will allow them to (continue to) explore those research avenues in a more informed and constructive fashion.

In Parmenides and To Eon Footnote ⁷ Lisa Atwood Wilkinson aims to offer a novel reading of Parmenides’ poem by taking into full account its relationship with archaic oral poetry, especially Homeric, thus challenging the well-known distinction ‘between mythology and philosophy, or between muthos and logos’ (7). The specific assumption that the author challenges at the outset is that ‘mythology stands to orality as philosophy stands to literacy’ (8), and that the written-ness of Parmenides’ poem is by itself an element that distinguishes it from oral poetry. I am not sure, however, that such an (unreasonable) assumption (and a too rigid muthos/logos dichotomy) is operative in modern studies of Parmenides. The first two chapters set the stage, by introducing the relation between orality and written-ness in Homer. As far as I can judge as a non-specialist myself, none of the discussion is based on first-hand knowledge of the poems and archaic Greek culture, language, and history (for example: ‘in the nominative, mousa is synonymous with the Muses, the collective daughters known as “Memory”’ [36]; the author seems to believe that Magna Grecia includes, broadly, the Greek world in the archaic period, and that ‘formula’ can be used as the plural of ‘formula’; Greek accents and breathings are consistently incorrect throughout the book). In her discussion of Homer and early Greek philosophy, Atwood Wilkinson collects a quite pedestrian farrago of familiar (but sometimes ill-digested) ideas to be found in authors such as Detienne, Frankel, Havelock, and Vernant. Along the way, the reader will also find surprising statements such as the one according to which ‘in the modern world, something unknown cannot be true because for us truth is a matter and manner of judgment about what is known. For us, truth entails knowledge: in the absence of knowledge there can be no truth’ (11). I would be curious to know who is meant by this ‘us’: while living in the modern world, I do not seem to have been invited to join this community. The opening chapters set the general tone for the rest of the book. After an attempt to qualify the common view of Xenophanes as a humanist ‘demythologizer’ (Chapter 3) and a new foray into the nature of ‘sung speech’ and orality (Chapter 4), Atwood Wilkinson finally moves to the discussion of Parmenides’ poem in the final two chapters. The discussion appears slightly more focused, in the beginning, on the ‘mythical’ nature of the proem (including its Homeric resonances), but the main aim seems to remain that of deconstructing sharp dichotomies (‘myth’ vs. ‘logos’ and ‘religious’ vs. ‘allegorical’ [74]) that are not, in fact, shaping the most recent and best scholarship on the poem anyway. The way in which Atwood Wilkinson approaches the task betrays, if anything, a quite simplistic understanding of what is entailed by those dichotomies: for example, she claims that ‘to assume the proem is allegory is to assume the proem is false, or as false as muthos is false’ (75). The attempt to treat the whole poem as a unitary muthos on the basis of Aristotle's desideratum of plot unity in the Poetics, and on the assumption that we can take ‘Aristotle's analysis as indicative of an ancient understanding of the practice and purpose of storytelling’ (82), is anachronistic at best. And the author seems to lose her own plot when she lets Heidegger, and his notorious truth as ‘unconcealment’ and ousia as ‘presence’, flood in through the gates. The disappointing conclusion – if I understood it correctly – is that certain familiar exegetical issues concerning the logic of Parmenides’ argument (including the import of the verb einai) can somehow be sidestepped given ‘the non- or preliterate environment of Parmenides’ composition and performance’ (115). Atwood Wilkinson's monograph was published by the same press and in the same series as Luchte's, and regrettably shares some of the same flaws. One would hope, in the future, for more rigorous refereeing (and much more professional editing) from a serious publisher.

John Palmer has produced original research on Parmenides and his prominent place in the history of Greek philosophy for some fifteen years now. His latest monograph, Parmenides and Presocratic Philosophy,Footnote ⁸ develops a new ‘modal interpretation’ of the poem according to which Parmenides was the first to distinguish rigorously the modalities of necessary being (what is and cannot not be), necessary non-being (what is not and must not be) or impossibility, and contingent being (what is and is not), and the related epistemological modalities (‘unwandering understanding’ or ‘conviction’ [‘Aletheia’], ignorance, and ‘wandering understanding’ or opinion [‘Doxa’]). In his first monograph (Plato's Reception of Parmenides, 1999) Palmer had looked at Parmenides, and rejected several traditional strict monistic interpretations, from the vantage point of a painstaking reassessment of Plato's reading of the Presocratic philosopher. Now he reconsiders the relation between Parmenides and other Presocratics, on the basis of the reasonable expectation that a defence of his own modal interpretation (but, one might add, of any interpretation) should go beyond issues internal to Parmenides’ poem, and justify its consistency with what we know (or think we know) about the way in which later Presocratics were influenced by, and reacted to, the strictures of Parmenides’ logic and ontology. Palmer's book is a scholarly tour de force (from this point of view, his hope that his work could be accessible to advanced undergraduates [vi] might be slightly too optimistic), but a rewarding one. It displays deep knowledge of, and insightful reflection on, the vast literature on Parmenides, starting from the first chapter, which provides an admirably lucid status quaestionis of the modern and ancient interpretations of Parmenides and his place in the development of Presocratic thought, followed by an outline of Palmer's own ‘modal interpretation’. That interpretation is then developed in great detail through a close analysis of the poem in Chapters 2–4 (in an excellent appendix Palmer also offers his own Greek texts of all the fragments, with substantial philological introduction, translations, and textual notes). Parmenides emerges as a ‘generous monist’: the nature of necessary being must include its being everlasting, unchanging, whole, uniform, and one, but this does not preclude the existence of a multiplicity of contingent beings that are, but need not be. One of the dividends of Palmer's reading is thus that we no longer need to postulate that the world described in the ‘Doxa’ is somehow non-existent, or an illusory appearance – more ‘simply’, that world is not suitable material for stable understanding. The remaining chapters aim to defend Palmer's interpretation by showing that it is compatible with the later developments of early Greek philosophy. Zeno and Melissus departed from Parmenides’ original project, and the later developments in natural philosophy either were not dictated, as typically suggested, by the strictures of Parmenidean logic (Anaxagoras and Empedocles) or were a reaction to distinctively post-Parmenidean (e.g. Zenonian and Melissean) forms of Eleatism (Leucippus and Democritus). This is not the place to offer the detailed critical review that the book deserves; what I can say is that Palmer's Parmenides, with his consistent and intelligible philosophy, left me intellectually more satisfied than most of the other interpretations of Parmenides I have met in the past (more, rather than fully: even accepting all the details of Palmer's sophisticated reading – some of which are bound to be controversial – many questions still remain open, including the identity of Parmenides’ ‘necessary being’ as an object of theology or metaphysics rather than physics or logic [345–9].) I hope my summary of Palmer's argument will suffice to convey the importance of his book, not only in offering a new respectable interpretation of Parmenides but in indicating new directions to rethink the whole history of Presocratic philosophy in a methodologically mature way, by abandoning overly simplistic models of linear development.

Definition in Greek Philosophy Footnote ⁹ is a welcome addition to the literature on ancient logic, epistemology, and philosophical method. As the editor, David Charles, notes in his introduction, despite the fact that definition was a major preoccupation in Greek philosophy from Socrates onwards, the topic has received relatively little attention in recent scholarship. This volume fills the gap admirably, by offering wide-ranging (if by no means exhaustive) discussion of how ancient philosophical theories of definition interconnected with one another diachronically and were intimately related to key aspects of ancient epistemology and metaphysics. The fourteen chapters, varying in length but all substantial and written by leading experts in the field, are articulated into three parts, focusing respectively on Plato, Aristotle, and ‘Post-Aristotelian writers’ on definition. Despite the well-known Aristotelian claim that Socrates initiated the search for definitions, it would have been interesting to find a chapter investigating the pre-history of definition (or at least clarifying why various Presocratic concerns with principles, causes, and explanations fell short of qualifying as, or leading into, definitional inquiries). Some discussion of the way in which definitions played a role in ancient geometry and mathematics – and the possible relations between these and philosophical approaches to definitions – would also have been welcome, as would a concluding overview on the legacy of ancient theories of definitions in the history of Western philosophy. But, again, what is included in the volume already provides more than enough food for thought and will stimulate further fruitful research in the area. Charles's introduction is extremely effective in identifying and putting together some of the main questions raised in the context of the discussion of the ancient theories investigated in the book: what are the objects of definition (linguistic expressions, concepts, entities in the world)? What counts as a good definition? Is there more than one type of (good) definition? What function(s) do definitions have? At the same time, he also identifies more specific questions that are not directly or extensively tackled in the chapters, but that would deserve further investigation to provide a well-rounded history of ancient theories of definitions. From this point of view, Charles offers an excellent example of how to make the most of the difficult task of writing the introduction to a collection of essays such as this. (One relatively minor quibble here: I found Charles's parenthetical suggestion that, ‘on the Stoic account, we simply find ourselves at birth with a set of preconceptions’ [26] misleading: preconceptions are not innate, not even that small set of ‘implanted’ or ‘connaturate’ preconceptions mentioned by some ancient sources.) While the edited volume deserves study as a whole, Part III is especially important for the way in which it engages with authors and texts that have received far less attention than Plato and Aristotle. Crivelli's long Chapter 10 on ‘The Stoics on Definitions’ is bound to become the definitive study on the subject, which is explored in all its relevant dimensions; Sorabji, Hood, and Schiaparelli cover important ground on definitions in their respective chapters on the Commentators, Galen, and Plotinus. In the final chapter, ‘Sceptical Enquiry’, Fine proposes a lucid analysis of the opening sections of the second book of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, in which Sextus confronts the dogmatic (especially Stoic) challenge that Pyrrhonian sceptics cannot really be philosophical inquirers, since they confess not to ‘grasp’ (katalambanein) what their dogmatic rivals claim with their doctrines (or, conversely, if they grasp it, then they cannot claim to be in a state of aporia and suspension of judgement). After reconstructing the logic of the argument, emphasizing important structural affinities with Meno's paradox, Fine makes the point that the way in which Sextus tackles the challenge can be instructive about the vexed question of the scope of Pyrrhonian suspension of judgement. The proposal is interesting, and deserves more space than is allowed here. I limit myself to remarking that Sextus’ claim that a Pyrrhonist can have thoughts about the dogmatic concepts and doctrines, without beliefs or knowledge, should be connected not only to the fourfold ‘observance of appearances’ as a criterion of action (Sext. Emp. Pyr. 1.23–4) but also to the pre-sceptical life that every Pyrrhonist must have lived before his ‘conversion’ (Pyr. 1.26–9), from which all kinds of concepts, also philosophical, are inherited. One might object that Fine's article, with its focus on concepts, meaning, and understanding, does not really fit the theme of the collection, but the Stoics’ own shift from essences and explanations to (pre-)conceptions and meanings in their understanding of definitions can help to bridge the gap.

The two volumes of Explorations in Ancient and Modern Philosophy Footnote ¹⁰ collect twenty-seven articles published by Myles Burnyeat between 1971 and 1998, plus one published critical review and one previously unpublished article. While Burnyeat is modest when he claims that this is ‘just about every publication [of his]…still worth reading’ from that period (some worthwhile publications are left out), it is true that this beautifully produced collection includes most of the seminal work he composed over about three decades spent between University College London and Cambridge.Footnote ¹¹ The articles are reprinted virtually without changes, with only a very small number of minor additional notes by the author; for ease of reference the original pagination is indicated at the top of each page and page divisions are marked within the text. The collection is structured into four parts: ‘Logic and Dialectic’, ‘Scepticism Ancient and Modern’ (volume I), ‘Knowledge’, ‘Philosophy and the Good Life’ (volume II). A quick scan of the table of contents is sufficient to remind us of the impressive amount of landscape-changing work on the history of ancient philosophy (and on some key chapters of its later influence) with which Burnyeat contributed to shaping the subject in those decades (in this sense, ‘explorations’ is a most apt choice for the title). This corpus includes classics such as his quadrilogy on the self-refutation argument, his seminal work on signs and rhetorical arguments, his enlightening reconstruction and penetrating philosophical assessment of the distinctive character of ancient scepticism, his unsurpassed studies on the Theaetetus, and a number of other gems covering the whole range of philosophical discourse, from logic to ethics, from epistemology to political theory, and a chronological span going from Heraclitus to Augustine. This is among the best-known, most cited, and most influential scholarship on ancient philosophy, and deservedly so, and needs no review. (I am honoured to be able to mention here the deep imprint of Burnyeat's scholarship on the argument of my first monograph, on Ancient Self-refutation Footnote ¹² – just a small example of how influential and fecund Burnyeat's work on ancient logic and epistemology continues to be.) The two volumes give a clear sense of the intellectual breadth, depth, and integrity of Burnyeat's work (‘Sphinx without a Secret’ is a spirited defence of the virtues of intellectual integrity when we do ancient philosophy, against ideologically driven distortions of Platonic political thought by Strauss and his school). In the only previously unpublished chapter, ‘The Passion of Reason in Plato's Phaedrus’, originally written in the 1970s, Burnyeat identifies, in his typically perceptive way, the question of how it is possible that the philosophical activity that leads to recollection is presented in the Phaedrus as a form of divine love madness, along the same lines as poetry and prophecy, whereas recollection was sharply distinguished from divinely inspired prophetic and poetic gifts in the Meno. Burnyeat's convincing solution is that divine love and recollection are an ‘inspiration from a deity within’ (ii.243), that is, our mind, with an ‘astonishing fusion of reason and madness, mind and deity’ (ii.242). In the process of arguing for his conclusion, Burnyeat produces one of the most lucid analyses of the psychology and epistemology of the charioteer myth, in comparison to other Platonic models (e.g. in the Republic, the Phaedo, and the Timaeus), that I can recollect having read. The article has immediately entered the bibliography of my undergraduate course on memory and recollection in ancient philosophy, and is a contribution with which any future research on the topic should engage. As a whole, the collection is a luminous example for present and future generations of scholars of how to do philosophy with the ancients. If anything, one can only regret that other unpublished work by Burnyeat that has been widely mentioned or discussed by scholars in the last three decades (e.g. ‘All the World's Stage Painting’ or ‘Carneades Was No Probabilist’) was not included (this would have added extra value to a pricey set of volumes).

The first two volumes of Jonathan Barnes's collected papers are no less impressive. As a set, the four planned volumes will contain most of the papers published by Barnes over more than four decades (excluding short book reviews and encyclopaedia entries). All the papers have been revised by the author, some lightly (misprints, style infelicities, reference conventions), some more substantially (with new titles, new material incorporated, new or updated references to ancient and modern material); papers originally printed in French or Italian have been translated into English. Throughout, the original page numbers are indicated within square brackets for ease of referencing. While several papers are very well known and were originally published in familiar and easily accessible Classics or philosophy journals, a substantial number appeared in journals or edited volumes more difficult to get hold of, especially for those who are not fortunate enough to benefit from a world-class library. In light of this, the collected papers are a must-have for any university library, and because of the revisions they might also provide good value for money for advanced students and scholars in the field (more so, from this point of view, than Burnyeat's collected papers). The first volume, Method and Metaphysics,Footnote ¹³ includes twenty-six essays. The first thirteen are on ‘method’, which includes ‘both the ways in which modern interpreters tackle ancient texts’ (Chapters 1–8) and ‘the ways in which ancient authors tackled philosophical problems’ (Chapters 9–13); the last thirteen include papers on ‘metaphysics’ (‘intended in its normal sense – as a dustbin word’ [x]), from Parmenides to the late Platonists. There is much to be learned from each chapter, and Barnes is always a joy to read. I will draw readers’ attention here in particular to Chapters 2–8 because they represent, as a whole, a sustained and fascinating methodological reflection on what it means to study ancient philosophy, and on the complex interrelationships between history of ideas, history of philosophy, philosophical exegesis, and philosophy itself. Barnes approaches these issues in his typically insightful way, challenging commonplaces and tired distinctions (e.g. analytical vs. continental approaches to ancient philosophy, or philosophical vs. non-philosophical histories of ancient philosophy) not on the basis of grand theorems but often through concrete examples and illustrations (some of these chapters are in fact, to begin with, ‘robust’ [142] critical reviews of ancient philosophy publications, including Heidegger's Platos Lehre von der Warheit in Chapter 6). Whether one agrees with all, part, or only little of Barnes's methodological considerations, hopefully the availability of these chapters in a single place will challenge at least some students of ancient philosophy to reflect upon their methodology (and to write about it) more consistently than they usually tend to do.

Logical Matters,Footnote ¹⁴ the second instalment of Barnes's collected papers, surpasses the first in size (being one chapter and 175 pages longer), and is certainly not inferior in terms of quality. Barnes is best known for his ground-breaking work on ancient logic, and it would be difficult to find relevant authors, texts, or topics that the essays in the collection have not at least touched upon, and more often substantially illuminated, over the span of forty years, from his first discussion of Aristotle's law of contradiction in 1969 (Chapter 11) to his latest work on Priscian on connectors, published in 2009 (Chapter 24). Together with his monograph Truth, etc. (2007), Logical Matters contains the summa of a unique body of work that anyone interested in ancient logic, or more generally in the history of logic, will keep studying and engaging with for years to come. Although the volume is not, of course, a unitary or exhaustive history of ancient logic, detailed indexes of passages and of terms and topics will allow readers to consult it thematically, and not only to read individual chapters in isolation. What is striking when one reads (or re-reads) Barnes's papers is the variety of complementary angles from which he has been able to tackle ancient ‘logical matters’. Some chapters engage with broad and fundamental meta-logical questions discussed since antiquity (including the seminal and monograph-size ‘Logical Form and Logical Matter’ [Chapter 3]); others focus on specific topics or aspects of ancient logical theory, or specific texts (e.g. Chapter 17); some chapters explore the relationships between the main logical systems in antiquity (Aristotle, Theophrastus, the Stoics: Chapters 3, 13–15), or later less-known logical developments (Chapters 23–7); others investigate ancient attitudes towards the study of logic and its position in the philosophical discourse (especially Chapters 1 and 2). Barnes puts to good use his extensive knowledge of logic and its later history, avoiding easy anachronism, but at the same time without being timid in his assessment of the shortcomings of ancient theories and arguments. Even in the context of the most technically demanding discussions, his distinctive prose strives for clarity and flair, and often achieves brilliance, breathing life into a subject matter that some readers, even ancient philosophy scholars, sometimes find difficult to warm up to. In his short preface, Barnes explains that, for the purpose of the selection of the papers in the volume, ‘logic’ should be ‘understood in a broad and Oxonian sense’ (xii). In light of the absence of classics such as his articles on Aristotle's theory of demonstration and Philodemus’ treatise on signs, it is clear that ‘broad’ here is not to be intended as broadly as to include epistemology – which makes us await even more eagerly the next two instalments of his collected papers.

Michael Frede was, alongside Burnyeat and Barnes, one of the towering figures in the development of ancient philosophy studies for forty years. A Free Will Footnote ¹⁵ is a posthumously edited version of the six Sather lectures (‘On the Origins of the Notion of Will’) that he delivered at the University of California in 1997. Anthony Long edited the book, splitting and reorganizing the material of the lectures into ten chapters, and compiling a limited number of notes and a slender bibliography. Frede modestly presents his ‘inquiry as purely historical’ (6): to trace the birth of the notion of free will in antiquity, by reconstructing ‘what purpose’ the notion ‘originally was supposed to serve, how it was supposed to help our understanding, and whether it was flawed right from its beginnings, as we might now see in hindsight’ (1). His view is that the notion of free will (as opposed to common-sense intuitions concerning the responsibility for actions performed in normal circumstances) is not an intuitive and ordinary concept, nor was it introduced as early as Plato and Aristotle – as some scholars had supposed in the past. Nor is it a notion that entered the history of philosophy only as late as Augustinian Christianity, as several other scholars (e.g. Dihle) have proposed. According to Frede, the notion of free will emerged in late Stoicism (Epictetus), which deeply influenced contemporary and later Peripatetic, Platonist, and Christian versions of the notion. Chapter 2 explains why, with his views on akrasia, choice (prohairesis), and responsibility (to hekon) Aristotle did not possess a notion of will (or, a fortiori, free will):

That is, there is no will that can make a free choice between the conflicting sides; rather, ‘how the conflict gets resolved is a matter of what happened in the past, perhaps the distant past’ (24), namely of ingrained habits of the mind that result from previous choices and actions. Frede's treatment is short but especially incisive here. Since, however, this chapter (together with the introduction) sets the stage for his quest for the notions of will and free will in later philosophers, a more clear definition of those notions would have been welcome at the outset. A reader who is already acquainted with the topic can probably extrapolate this from Frede's pages, but readers who are not conversant with the modern literature on free will, and with scholarly debates on the ancient origins of the notion, might be baffled and ask, for example, why one's ‘willing’ on the basis of reason is not already a (free) ‘will’. The following chapters show how the emergence of a notion of will in Stoicism ultimately depends on a unitarian psychology according to which all human desires and impulses are based on reason, and how the concept of a will was imported and adapted by later Peripatetics and Platonists within their different frameworks of a bipartite or tripartite soul, by giving reason two separate roles in moral psychology: reason ‘has or forms its own view as to what would be a good thing to do, and it judges whether to assent or refuse to assent to the impulsive impressions which presents themselves’ (52–3) both from reason itself and from non-rational parts of the soul. It is only starting from Chapter 5 that free will is tackled. Frede approaches the Stoic position starting from the notorious Stoic paradox that only the wise person is free, whereas everyone else is a slave of false beliefs and the inappropriate impulses derived from them. The approach to the Stoic theory of free will chosen by Frede – that of moral psychology against the background of Stoic theological providentialism – is refreshing and instructive, but also rather limited. It is surprising not to find any real discussion of Stoic physical determinism and fatalism, and the way in which this was seen in antiquity as a danger for human responsibility and freedom (equally surprising is Frede's almost complete – and related – silence on the Epicurean concerns about physical determinism for human agency and responsibility). In fact, Frede stresses that for a Stoic only the wise person (and thus, potentially, no human being, or an extremely limited number) has in fact free will, as opposed to a potentiality for it; but in modern discussions free will is intimately connected with moral responsibility, and our evidence shows that the Stoic main preoccupation was exactly to show how our choices and actions are in normal circumstances ‘up to us’, and human beings are thus morally responsible even within the framework of universal physical and theological determinism (this has been reconstructed by several scholars as an ancient form of compatibilism). In other words, Frede seems to focus too narrowly on a late (Epictetan) notion of free will, without clarifying how this is situated in the context of earlier Stoic fatalism. For example, the key regress problem mentioned on page 81 is not discussed in the context of the Stoic theory of causality, and is simply sidestepped by Frede's ‘solution’ based on God's providential creation: ‘God must set things up in such a way that neither human nature nor our individual nature nor the circumstances into which we are born, either separately or jointly, prevent us from becoming wise and free’ (84). To salute the theory underlying the Stoic paradox that only the sophos is free is wise as the emergence of a notion of free will seems slightly perverse, since such a narrow notion does not respond to the kind of questions that are asked in modern debates between libertarians and compatibilists. It is not surprising, then, that the Stoic position about what is in our power, and thus under our responsibility, enters the picture only briefly in Chapter 6, devoted to the Platonist and Peripatetic criticism. Frede has little sympathy for Alexander of Aphrodias’ criticism of Stoic compatibilism and his defence of libertarian freedom as the possibility to choose otherwise, considering them philosophically confused and tangled. Interestingly, the very labels ‘compatibilism’ and ‘libertarianism’ are not used by Frede himself; the fact that his reconstruction of ancient ideas is not regimented by modern taxonomies is refreshing, but at the same time problematic in the context of a project that is supposed to trace the ancient ‘origins of the notion’, and should be of great interest to philosophers who are engaging with the notion today. The book closes with three further chapters on the influence of late Stoic ideas on the Platonist and early Christian tradition (Origen, Plotinus, and Augustine). Particularly original, and bound to be more controversial, is the suggestion that Augustine's was not ‘a radically new notion of will that was inspired by a Judaeo-Christian tradition of thinking about God and the world’; ‘his view of the will is pervasively Stoic but embedded in a Platonist notion of the world’ (155). Regrettably, Frede could not complete his revisions to his Sather lectures for publication, and despite Long's excellent editorial work, the published product is not as refined as it could have been. Frede was generally sparing in the use of footnotes and references to secondary literature, but one can imagine that he would have tried to engage with at least some of the outstanding work produced in the area in the last fifteen years (in particular, Bobzien's 1998 article,Footnote ¹⁶ which deals with exactly the same wide-ranging questions that occupy Frede's study, reaching partially similar conclusions as far as the pre-Christian traditions are concerned). Even so, A Free Will displays more than enough of Frede's distinctive and insightful brand of scholarship to make it fundamental reading for anyone interested in the topic (that is, for everyone interested in philosophy and its history).

Scholars such as Frede have shaped the subject not only through their published research but also through their inspirational and generous teaching. The Summer 2011 volume of the Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy contains sixteen Essays in Memory of Michael Frede Footnote ¹⁷ written by some of his students and colleagues, and prefaced by a short memorial by Wolfgang-Rainer Mann. What is immediately noticeable when one browses the volume is that the majority of articles are devoted to Hellenistic (Bobzien, Lorenz, Brittain, Blank, and Morison) or post-Hellenistic philosophy (Reinhardt, Boys-Stones, Emilsson, Meinwald, and King), with a single article on Plato, offering a Plotinian reading of the philosopher's return or ‘descent’ to the cave in the Republic (Caluori). This is in itself a tribute to the legacy of Frede's efforts in broadening the field of enquiry, first to Hellenistic philosophy and then to later antiquity. Meinwald's article on the relationship between two notions of consent in the Stoics and Augustine, and Boys-Stones’ article on Origen and the Platonists on time, creation, and the mind of God, nicely exemplify the trend, encouraged by Frede's later work (and embodied in the final chapters of A Free Will), to examine anew, or reassess from a fresh philosophical perspective, specific structural parallels and interactions between the philosophy of late antiquity and early Christian thought, shedding light on both. The function of Origen's Son in solving the puzzle of ‘temporal’ creation is instructively compared by Boys-Stones to that of Plutarch's forms – and then we are shown how the model is adapted by Origen to solve a further problem distinctive of Christian theology, the eternal God's metaphysical responsiveness to the created world.

There is much more Plato (Chapters 1–5), but still a large proportion of contributions on Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic philosophy (Chapters 7–12), in Ancient Models of Mind,Footnote ¹⁸ a collection of essays in honour of Anthony Long by several of his former students (I was fortunate enough to be invited to participate in this tribute). Long has done more than anyone else in the last fifty years to advance the study of Hellenistic (and especially Stoic) philosophy, including Roman Stoicism, and he is yet another outstanding member of that ‘golden generation’ of scholars who have transformed our approach to the subject, widening its breadth and achieving new depth at the same time, wedding exquisite philological and literary sensitivity to philosophical perceptiveness. The thematic unity of the volume is perhaps slightly less marked than the title and the editors’ crafty introduction might make readers expect (some of the chapters touch only tangentially upon the broad theme of ‘human and divine rationality’, articulated into the three headings of studies on ‘the divine intellect’, ‘a perfected human being’ [Socrates or the idealized Stoic sage], or ‘the inherent powers and structure of human reason’ [5]). But a subtle interweaving of the themes emerges when one reads the volume as a whole, and the quality of individual contributions makes the volume a valuable addition to the field, reflecting throughout the deep and beneficial influence of Long's own scholarship and dedication to teaching. I have myself learned much, for example, from Nightingale's opening chapter on Socratic aporia and self-knowledge, and from Morgan's re-examination of the vexed question of why in the Phaedrus poetic and prophetic madness are exalted for their divine status, but then the lives of the prophet and the poet appear low in the ranking of human lives (a question that nicely complements the one explored by Burnyeat in the paper mentioned above). The volume also includes a complete and impressive list of Long's publications for the period 1963–2009 – it is a pleasure to say that the list has kept growing since the volume's publication.

Yet another collection of essays honouring another leading scholar in the field, Julia Annas, was published with the title Virtue and Happiness Footnote ¹⁹ as a supplementary volume to the Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy. Unlike the tributes to Frede and Long, which either do not aim at thematic unity or are connected by a thin fil rouge, ‘virtue’ and ‘happiness’ clearly identify the two cornerstones of ancient philosophical ethics as the scope of the volume. Although Annas has produced and stimulated original work in all areas of ancient philosophy (she was the founding editor of the Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy), the focus of the volume is an apt tribute to her especially extensive and influential focus on ancient ethics and its legacy in modern reflections. The collection gathers an impressive line-up of Annas’ colleagues and former students, with a mix of ‘big names’ (including Barnes and Long, plus – among others – Taylor, Schofield, Hursthouse, and Inwood) and younger scholars. Mirroring closely some of Annas’ own main research interests, Platonic ethics (six articles), Stoics ethics (four articles), and the relationship between ancient eudaimonism and modern ethical theories (three articles) occupy most of the volume. The engagement of most contributors with Annas’ own work is evident and in some cases very direct. The group of four articles dealing with Plato's Republic offers an especially good example of this general trend, given the influence of Annas’ Introduction. From this point of view, Barnes's ‘Justice Writ Large’ is particularly stimulating: Annas has cast a very critical eye on the city–soul analogy, but Barnes outduels Annas, arguing how misleading the analogy actually is (often for reasons different from those identified by Annas), and concluding that ‘Socrates offers an outrageously false account of the nature of justice’ (49). Whether or not one will agree with all of Barnes's arguments, or with his trenchant conclusion, the philosophical engagement and provocative openness with which a ‘sacred’ text and its author are dissected are in themselves a most appropriate homage to Annas’ own approach to philosophical analysis.

Besides hosting the two collections for Frede and Annas, in the last three years the Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (OSAP) has continued, under the editorship of Brad Inwood, to publish substantial ancient philosophy articles bi-annually. Thirty years since the appearance of the first issue under Annas’ editorship (1983), OSAP remains, with Phronesis, the most respected journal in the field, and deservedly so. As such, it might offer an interesting, albeit partial, snapshot of the directions in which the discipline is moving. Looking retrospectively at the run of the last six issues (from Winter 2009 to Winter 2012),Footnote ²⁰ it is surprising to find that the kind of breadth that has been achieved and encouraged by some of the influential figures whom I have mentioned above is not equally represented in the best recent scholarship on display in OSAP. Out of forty-six articles, I counted thirty-eight devoted to Plato or Aristotle, against only eight focusing on the earlier or the later philosophical traditions. From a thematic point of view, however, all areas (including ancient formal logic and ancient biology) have received fair coverage. As usual, size does not matter in OSAP's world when the breadth and quality of analysis justify it, with several very substantial contributions (I signal Scott's deconstruction of the idea of philosophical madness in the Phaedrus as an example of playfully misleading rhetoric [Winter 2011], to be fruitfully read in parallel with Burnyeat's and Morgan's articles mentioned above), and occasional explorations of exciting new areas of research (e.g. Horky on Plato's associates and Persian Zoroastrianism in Winter 2009). Extensive critical (and typically constructive) discussions of major recent publications (including, for example, Palmer's and Frede's monographs [Huffman in Winter 2011 and Mansfeld in Summer 2012]) by established scholars remain a welcome and distinctive trait of OSAP. (Interestingly enough, in the light of the trend of published articles, the large majority of the monographs reviewed are not about Plato and Aristotle.)