I start this review, which focuses for the most part on publications on Hellenistic philosophy, with a survey of some recent studies on Stoicism. René Brouwer's The Stoic Sage Footnote ¹ introduces itself as ‘an attempt to bring the early Stoic notions of the sage and wisdom to the fore again’ (1). ‘Again’ alludes to the fact that those notions, which attracted considerable philosophical and scholarly interest at various stages since antiquity, have not received sufficient attention in recent times (specialists in the area will judge the merits of this assessment). The book is divided into four chapters, dealing respectively with the Stoic definitions of wisdom; the ancient puzzles surrounding the nature and very possibility of the change from ‘folly’ to ‘wisdom’; the controversial question of whether the Stoics themselves believed they had achieved the ideal of perfect wisdom; and the intellectual, Socratic background against which the Stoics developed their notion of wisdom. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 contain, in expanded and revised form, material published by Brouwer in self-contained essays between 2002 and 2008. Chapter 1, with its analysis of the Stoic definitions of wisdom as ‘knowledge of human and divine matters’ and ‘fitting expertise’, is fundamental to set the stage for the more focused inquiries of the rest of the book. From this point of view, it succeeds only partially. It helpfully covers a reasonable amount of ground, but because of Brouwer's choice to focus exclusively on the Stoic definitions of wisdom (sophia) at this stage, and not, say, on the descriptions of the Stoic wise man (sophos: Brouwer's preferred translation ‘sage’ hides the etymological connection), it also problematically leaves some fundamental aspects untouched. I was especially surprised not to see the key notion of infallibility discussed at all in this context, despite the fact that Brouwer correctly clarifies that Stoic wisdom is not to be interpreted as a form of omniscience (33–4). This ultimately springs from an insufficiently detailed analysis of the Stoics’ notions of katalēpsis (which Brouwer translates as ‘cognition’, without ever explaining its distinctive status), and then, in turn, of epistēmē and technē, and their Stoic definitions (see also the puzzling reference to ‘weak cognitions’ on p. 62). (I only note here that Paolo Togni's 2010 monograph Conoscenza e virtù nella dialettica stoica Footnote ² examines much more extensively and systematically the psychological and epistemological ground which needs to be covered by a discussion of Stoic sophia.) The attempt to map exhaustively the three key terms of the first definition – knowledge, human and divine – into the three parts of Stoic philosophy, respectively logic, ethics, and physics, is ingenious but too crude and ultimately unconvincing, since logic had for the Stoics its own separate subject matter (not to be identified with ‘human and divine matters’, and not even with knowledge itself, pace Brouwer), and ethics and physics can themselves be described as forms of knowledge. The interconnected nature of Stoic philosophy, which is helpfully emphasized throughout the book, need not be mirrored in the very definition of wisdom. From a broader methodological point of view, the attempt to reconstruct an early Stoic theory of wisdom constantly clashes with the nature of our evidence, and although in several cases Brouwer does carefully justify why a certain late source can be taken to bear witness to such an early theory, in other cases the reader is left to wonder whether such a justification could be given (for example, in the case of some passages from Seneca). There is still much worth pondering in Brouwer's insightful analyses in Chapters 2–4, although one is left to wonder how much added value has been generated by integrating this previously published material into a single monograph.

The volume Plato and the Stoics,Footnote ³ edited by Alex Long, is not only a valuable offspring of the growing scholarly interest in the topic, which has blossomed especially in the last decade, but also a stimulating contribution to the methodological reflection on the complex variety of ways in which we can (and ought to) approach the question of Plato's influence upon the Stoics, or the Stoics reception of, and attitude towards, Plato and his dialogues. Long's short introduction (1–10) is admirably lucid and thoughtful from this point of view. Instead of mapping the existing scholarly terrain and summarizing the seven essays, he places them within a network of conceptual distinctions and methodological questions which should be considered seriously by anyone who engages in research on Plato's influence/reception in Stoicism (or, indeed, on any X's philosophical influence/reception in Y). The essays themselves cover distinct episodes of the interaction between the Stoics and Platonic philosophy and texts, which straddle ethics (Scholfield on the Stoics on cardinal virtues), politics (Long on Zeno on the Republic), physics and cosmology (Reydams-Schils and Bryan on use of the Timaeus in Stoicism), ontology and metaphysics (Scade on Plato and the Stoics on limits and mereology and Boys-Stones on Seneca on Platonic metaphysics), and meta-philosophy (Bénatouïl on the shadow of the Theaetetus on the conception of theoria and scholē in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius). One can immediately notice, and perhaps lament, the absence of any case study on Plato and Stoic epistemology, but clearly the volume does not aim for any kind of comprehensiveness in the treatment of its subject. (Togni's monograph mentioned above offers useful material to begin a reflection on the epistemological side of the Stoic reception of Plato.) Boys-Stones's essay on Seneca's letters 58 and 65 is an excellent example of the kind of theoretical sophistication brought to the table by some of the contributors. He argues that the inclusion of several elements of Platonic ontology in letter 58 is not to be interpreted, as typically done, as an example of a later Stoic ‘rapprochement’ to Plato, ‘an attempt at bringing Stoicism and Platonism closer together’ (135). On the contrary, that inclusion results in such a ‘hopeless mess’ that Lucilius (Seneca's addressee) is supposed to realize, by himself, the dangers of a Platonic ontology driven and inflated by the incorrect ‘hypostasization’ of what are actually ‘merely classificatory categories’ (136–7). The realization will then be reinforced by Seneca's overt criticism of Plato's theory of causation in letter 65, which, because of its subtle structural parallels with the Phaedo, is at the same time another indirect criticism of the ontology of the Forms, Plato's ultimate causes. I am sure that different readers will form very different views on whether such a pedagogic move is too indirect and ‘devious’ to be attributed to Seneca, given the kind of philosophical sensitivity and textual familiarity with Plato's work that it demands not only from Seneca himself but also from Lucilius (one's liberality, or lack thereof, in the use of the principle of charity will, of course, influence one's judgement here). But, whatever the verdict, Boys-Stones's essay reminds us of how important the close analysis of the context (including the broad context – in this case, the whole corpus of Seneca's letters) of a certain use of Platonic material is in determining the extent and nature of the reception and appropriation of Plato in Stoic texts.

While Plato and the Stoics looks at the Stoic reception of and response to Plato, Christopher Gill's Naturalistic Psychology in Galen and Stoicism Footnote ⁴ takes its starting point from Galen's response to Stoic (mainly Chrysippean) psychology, and investigates ‘the relationship, actual and potential’ (2) between Galenic and Stoic psychological thinking (Chapter 2), under the main headings of the relationship between the body and psychological functions (Chapter 3), the interaction of reason and emotion (Chapter 4), and the ‘therapy of emotions’ (Chapter 5). Gill's overall original proposal is that, despite Galen's fierce criticism, the ‘two theories have a good deal in common and…are complementary in important respects’; paradoxically, a combined Galenic–Stoic psychology ‘might have been the most compelling account of human psychology in antiquity’ (1). Chapter 2 sets the stage by construing the two psychologies as distinct but comparable versions of ‘high naturalism’ (a combination of a designed-centred and a biological view of the natural world, including human beings), and the final chapter investigates the philosophical dividends and modern parallels of a notional unified ‘Galenic–Stoic’ psychology. There is much more in Gill's extremely rich book than can be summarized or discussed here (the book is lengthy, and this can only very marginally be attributed to Gill's tendency to repeat his key suggestions multiple times even within a single chapter, clearly for the sake of reinforcement). I only suggest here that, from a methodological point of view, one might wonder whether and how, to borrow Gill's own words, ‘exploring counterfactual combination of ideas’ is philosophically and exegetically fruitful, and not ‘a mere exercise in historical fantasy’ (7–8). Gill suggests that the attempt to combine Chrysippean and Galenic psychology serves especially to illuminate the consistency or inconsistency of the two separate parts. To use his favourite example, the Stoic idea that the ‘mind forms a single psychological centre, combining rational and emotional functions’ (8) is more consistent with Galen's brain-centred psychophysiology than Galen's own adoption of a version of Platonic tripartition of the soul. But the Stoic position does not reveal the inconsistencies and shortcomings of Galen's psychological theory; if that position is judged to be (surprisingly) fitting for Galen, this is because of an antecedent and independent assessment of the intrinsic problems of Galen's own position, and independent judgement on what Galen should have thought. The real question, then, seems rather to be why Galen could not see the potential of the Stoic psychological tenets to support his medical theories; and one answer might be that, in fact, our independent judgement hinges on some misunderstanding of Galen's medical theories or motivations (Gill himself offers answers of a different order in Chapter 4, mentioning differences in methodology and the significance and force of one's intellectual allegiance). In other words, if the analysis of Galen's criticism of the Stoics promises to bear philosophical and exegetical dividends, it is more likely to do so by understanding the deep reasons of that criticism than by explaining that the criticism was actually unwarranted. Whatever one may make of Gill's syncretistic project, there is an enormous amount to be learnt from his book for anyone interested in ancient medicine, Hellenistic psychology, or their complex interactions.

I briefly note now two recent publications that focus on the importance of Stoic political thought, its development, and its influence in public life, from the perspective of ancient historians. The second edition of Andrew Erskine's The Hellenistic Stoa. Political Thought in Action Footnote ⁵ simply reproduces the text of the first edition (1990), with the sole addition of a three-page preface and a bibliographical supplement. Since the preface correctly stresses how much work has been done on Stoic political thought since 1990, a point clearly illustrated by the bibliographical supplement, one may wonder whether some attempt should have been made to review and update at least some of the chapters (or whether the book should have been more appropriately marketed by Bloomsbury as the paperback edition, with updated bibliography, of the original).

The bulky collection of Studies in Stoicism Footnote ⁶ by the late Peter Brunt, edited by Miriam Griffin and Alison Samuels, does contain much new material (six chapters, amounting to a total of about 270 pages), together with reprints of essays published between 1973 and 1998 (in some cases slightly revised by the editors on the basis of Brunt's own annotation to the offprints). The idea and title for the collection came from the author himself, and the thirteen essays, which focus on the intersection between Stoic ethics and political philosophy (especially, but not exclusively, in the Roman world), are arranged in roughly chronological order of the material discussed, from ‘Chrysippus on Practical Morality’ to ‘Late Stoic Moralists’ (both previously unpublished). The editorial work made to bring the unpublished material to fruition is impressive. In their introduction, Griffin and Samuels briefly but helpfully reconstruct the genesis of the volume and their editorial practices, and identify some key traits of Brunt's approach to Stoic political thought: his perception of an essential doctrinal continuity between early and later Stoics; his appreciation of the systematic character of Stoic philosophy, even in the imperial period; his attention to differences in language and style of teaching; and his concern for a nuanced understanding of the influence of Stoic doctrine on Roman state and society. His explicit engagement with the secondary literature in his writings was always absent or minimal, and so the unfinished state of much of the previously unpublished material, or the mostly unrevised nature of some essays first published thirty or forty years ago, need not hinder our appreciation of Brunt's own intended approach and ideas. Specialists in the area, more than students in need of compact and state-of-the-art accounts of Stoic political thought, might profit by engaging with some of the insights offered by Brunt's remarkable knowledge and painstaking analyses of the Stoic texts.

Marcus Aurelius’ Stoicism, and its relationship with his imperial practices and politics, features prominently in several chapters of Brunt's collection. Marcus’ Meditations Footnote ⁷ are now available again in the Oxford World's Classics series, with Robin Hard's translation (a revised version of the one published in the 1997 Wordsworth Classics edition) and an introduction and notes by Christopher Gill. This compact paperback, which also includes an appendix containing some selected (earlier) correspondence between Marcus and his oratory teacher and friend Fronto, replaces the 1989 OWC edition with Farquahrson's translation and introduction, and notes by Rutherford. Hard's declared aim is to offer an English translation that is ‘consistently lucid and accessible’, ‘as close and accurate as possible’, but without attempting ‘to reproduce all the more awkward features of Marcus’ style’ (xxv). As far I can tell from an admittedly selective survey of the translation, by and large he achieved his aim. I wonder, however, whether Hard could actually have been closer to the Greek text without hurting his pursuit of accessibility and readability. Let us take the final section of the Meditations (12.36) as an example. Hard translates the first two sentences as follows: ‘My friend, you have been a citizen of this great city [of the universe]. What difference if you live in it for five years or a hundred?’ (121). But there is nothing in Marcus’ Greek corresponding to Hard's ‘you live in it’, and the implicit verb is still epoliteusō (‘you have been a citizen’) from the first sentence. Later in the same section, the translation reads: ‘For the one who determines when it [your life] is complete is he who once arranged for your composition, and now arranges for your dissolution (ho tote men tēs sunkriseōs, nun de tēs dialuseōs aitios), while you for your part are responsible for neither (anaitios amphoterōn)’ (121). The translation of ho aitios as ‘he who arranged/arranges’ does not capture with sufficient strength Marcus’ fundamental suggestion here that the divine is the ultimate ‘cause’, ‘responsible’ for our existence, and fails to pick up the parallel qualification of a human being as an-aitios. (Incidentally, in both cases just mentioned Farquahrson's translation appears more accurate.) As for Gill, he manages to pack a considerable amount of useful information on Marcus, his life, style, philosophical method, and cultural context, and on the recurrent themes of his ‘diary to himself’, in his concise introduction and explanatory notes. The book, which also contains a good five-page select bibliography, will be a useful tool for students and an accessible way into Marcus’ fascinating life and thought for general readers. I will have to leave it to experienced teachers of Marcus’ Meditations to judge its worth in comparison with the previous OWC edition and several other existing annotated English translations.

Cicero's political philosophy has been the focus of extensive scholarly attention in recent years. In the introduction to A Written Republic,Footnote ⁸ Yelena Baraz argues that Cicero's ambitious enterprise of ‘romanizing Greek philosophy’ starting from the mid-40s bc, when he wrote the largest portion of his philosophica, was not merely prompted by his ‘forced retirement from politics as a result of Caesar's new order’ (1); it served as an alternative form of political engagement in its own right. Philosophy could ‘stabilize’ the structure of the res publica, providing a ‘theoretical backbone’ (2) that would be able to support the Roman traditions and values, the mos maiorum, by preventing their misappropriations and distortions in dangerous times of political turmoil. The book focuses on the sophisticated ways in which Cicero tried to explain and justify to his Roman audience his project of ‘proposing a philosophical solution to Roman political troubles’ (3), especially by means of the prefaces of several philosophical works that he produced under Caesar. The main focus on ‘the rhetoric of prefaces’ stems from Baraz's consideration that doing justice to the corpus of Cicero's philosophica as a whole in a single monograph would be impossible and, more importantly, from her suggestion that prefaces are the privileged place to look for ways in which an author tries to explain, vindicate, and negotiate the aims and nature of his project with his intended audience in mind (4–8). With its aim to understand Cicero's philosophica written in the 40s as a unified project and within its ‘synchronic’ (10) historical, political, and cultural framework, Baraz's book presents itself as an approach complementary to those who seek to ‘inscribe Cicero the philosopher within the…context, both synchronic and diachronic, of Hellenistic philosophy’ (4). I agree that Baraz's subtle analyses of the rhetoric of the prefaces in Chapters 3–6, and her contextualization of Cicero's efforts to justify his intellectual and philosophical occupations with reference to broader contemporary discourse (Chapter 1) and his own strategy in his letters (Chapter 2), will be of some use also for the most philosophically minded readers of Cicero. One might wonder, however, whether, despite Baraz's cautious self-limitation of the scope of her analysis, drawing a bit more extensively on relevant material from Cicero's philosophica, or at least from those works whose prefaces are discussed in the monograph, would have helped to further illuminate both the prefaces and Cicero's overall project. For example, in what way could a work such as the Academica have been meant as a contribution to the construction of the ‘theoretical backbone’ for a regenerated and stabilized Roman republic?

Because of her focus on what she takes to be an essentially new philosophical project initiated in the mid-40s bc, during Cicero's forced political retirement, the three dialogues composed by Cicero in the 50s, De oratore, De republica, and De legibus, are not included in Baraz's discussion. Jed Atkins’ Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason Footnote ⁹ aims to provide a fresh interpretation of the latter two dialogues as carefully constructed works of political philosophy in which ‘Cicero deftly appropriates, transforms, and, at times, transcends Greek philosophy’ as they ‘probe the limits of reason in political affairs and explore the resources available to the statesman given these limitations’ (1–2). Atkins’ original suggestion is that Cicero's central concern with ‘the limits of reasons’ – namely, ‘the limitations placed on perfectly just and rational rule by chance, necessity, historical contingency, and human nature’ (4) – explains away some of the perceived inconsistencies within the Republic and the Laws, and between them. Chapter 1 explores the connection between dialogue form and philosophy, and Cicero's own use of the genre, with special reference to the Republic. Chapters 2–4 focus on the content of the Republic, and on Cicero's development of a political science which at the same time envisages the ideal of fully rational rule (represented at the end in Scipio's Dream), and questions its practicability, since political affairs necessarily have to negotiate some degree of irrationality. Cicero's version of mixed constitution (which Atkins shows to be distinctively non-Polybian) as the best practical regime is interpreted as the fruit of this acknowledged but unresolved tension. Chapters 5 and 6 return to the problem from a different angle, reconstructing how in the Laws Cicero negotiated the relationship between reason, on the one hand (natural law of Book 1), and custom, contingency, and necessity, on the other (conventional law of Books 2 and 3): ‘reason and nature may “preserve and protect” that which necessarily encompasses the conventional, practicable, contingent, and irrational’ (11). The book's conclusion briefly touches upon the question of whether Cicero's approach ‘has relevance for present points of debate in contemporary political philosophy’ (229), especially between idealism/utopianism, realism, and conservativism, offering a balanced positive answer. Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason, which emerges from Atkins’ 2009 Cambridge doctoral thesis, is not only an impressive first book but an excellent book tout court. It makes its original case in a clear, focused, and coherent way, is sensitive both to textual and argumentative details and to the philosophical traditions with which the Republic and the Laws converse, and will be of great interest for all students of Cicero's philosophy, ancient political thought, and the history of political philosophy more broadly.

One instructive lesson of Atkins’ monograph is that the ‘sceptical’ epistemology of the Hellenistic Academy (in its Philonian version) underlies a good deal of Cicero's political inquiry (especially his investigation of Stoic natural law in De Legibus [179–85]), which is far less ‘dogmatic’ than interpreters have suggested. The first chapter of Jonathan Zarecki's monograph on Cicero's Ideal Statesman in Theory and Practice Footnote ¹⁰ also argues for the ‘profound influence which Academic skepticism exerted on Cicero's political philosophy’, and in particular on ‘the creation of his concept of the ideal statesman’ (2) – some misgivings about the quality of the argument are noted below. The following four chapters investigate Cicero's construction of this ideal statesman, the rector rei publicae, as a hypothetical ideal and political ‘template’, and track the ways in which this regulative ideal remained central to Cicero's political theory and practice between 52 and 43 bc, and was used by him to determine the best course of action through the vicissitudes of the rapidly decaying Roman Republic, both during the war between Pompey and Caesar and later under Caesar's dictatorship and Antony's power. Zarecki weaves an interesting narrative, although one feels at times that he overemphasizes the centrality of the ideal statesman in the Republic, and his presence in later works written in the 40s. I also found his proposal about the role of Academic scepticism in Cicero's creation of the ideal of the rector rei publicae difficult to follow, and I suspect that it might be partially based on Zarecki's incomplete understanding of the Academic tradition (for instance: ‘Cicero's perception of the ultimate goals of Academic inquiry was the same as that of Arcesilaus, Carneades, Philo, or even Antiochus…verisimilitude, the discovery of that which was closest to absolute knowledge’ [25]). The fact that Cicero ‘was open to new ideas’ (42) and that the Republic contains some arguments ‘on both sides’ hardly amounts to proof that all the conclusions and ideas of the dialogue, including the rector rei publicae, were informed by the methodology of Academic scepticism.

The scholarly interest in Epicurus and the Epicurean tradition also remains lively. Francesco Verde's Epicuro Footnote ¹¹ is a useful introduction, in Italian, to all the main aspects of Epicurus’ life, works, and philosophy (under the general headings of ‘canonic’, natural science, and ethics), with a final minimalist overview of some other main Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic figures of the Epicurean school. The book takes into due account our main sources (including key papyrological ones) and appears well informed about the current scholarly discourse; the thirty-five-page bibliography, thematically organized, will be an excellent tool for students. Verde's declared approach is primarily ‘storico-filologico’ (‘historico-philosophical’ [226]), with the aim to reconstruct and expound the key tenets and arguments of Epicurus and their development, more than to examine their philosophical distinctiveness and worth, or their theoretical difficulties. The section on freedom, self-determination, and the clinamen (195–211) is a good illustration of the merits, and possible shortcomings, of this approach. Much attention is devoted to a nuanced discussion of whether the doctrine of the swerve was originally introduced by Epicurus, and at what stage of his philosophical career, and how it relates to his apparently different defence of human responsibility against a form of Democritean necessitarianism in On Nature 25. But the essential philosophical question of how the introduction of a form of uncaused, random sub-atomic motion at the level of the atoms of the mind could help Epicurus’ case for human responsibility, understood either as mere autonomy or as some more robust form of freedom of will, is only lightly touched upon, and some of the fundamental conceptual distinctions involved are either overlooked or mentioned too briefly, without the kind of supporting explanation which would be necessary for a student to appreciate fully the philosophical implications of Epicurus’ proposal and the fascinating exegetical debate surrounding it. As perhaps hardly avoidable in a wide-ranging introductory study such as this, some finer distinctions are misrepresented: for example it is not the ‘validità del giudizio disgiuntivo’ (‘the validity of the disjunctive judgement’; namely, I suppose, Verde's imprecise label for the law of the excluded middle) that Epicurus primarily rejected in order to avoid falling into a form of logical determinism (198), but the validity of the principle of bivalence (and such a logical determinism would not imply, anyway, that one of the alternative propositions must be ‘logically necessary’).

Verde is also the co-editor, with Stéphane Marchand, of a recent collection of eight essays on Épicurisme et scepticisme.Footnote ¹² In the short (French) introduction, the editors present the volume as an attempt to explore the ‘historical, philosophical and theoretical’ relationship between Epicureanism and scepticism in the wake of Marcello Gigante's approach in his 1981 monograph Scetticismo e epicureismo. Per l'avviamento di un discorso storiografico (vii). In fact, the variety of approaches and methodologies of the individual contributors is evident, and indeed welcome. The way in which the ‘relationship’ is construed is equally broad: some essays explore similarities between Epicureanism and various forms of scepticism (Erler on argumentative strategies; Giovacchini on ‘therapeutic scepticism in Epicureanism’ [in French]; Marchand on causation, the truth of the senses and belief [in French]); others focus on differences and criticisms (Warren on Cyrenaics and Epicureans on the role of opinion in pleasure and pain; Machuca on Sextus’ attack on the Epicurean criterion of truth); the final two essays examine how sceptical sources can be used to reconstruct the details and development of Epicurean doctrines (Verde on the sceptical account of the Epicurean attitude towards geometry; Spinelli on Sextus on pleasure as the Epicurean goal [in French]). Svavarsson's chapter on tranquillity in Democritus and Pyrrho has, surprisingly, nothing to say on the Epicureans and Epicurean ataraxia. With its focus on some general strategies of arguments, rather than views, concepts, terminology, or arguments, Erler's essay is a particularly interesting approach to the exploration of the similarities between Epicureanism and scepticism. He argues that the strategies of ‘accumulation of arguments’ and multiple explanations were adopted both by the Epicureans and by the Pyrrhonists with an ultimately therapeutic aim: the persuasion of the audience (in the former case, towards the acceptance of Epicurean tenets; in the latter, away from certain dogmatic theories). He traces the use of both strategies back to Plato, and suggests that they were ‘most probably…borrowed from traditional rhetoric in forensic context’ (39). It is regrettable that Erler does not examine and classify with full precision the argumentative strategies that he focuses upon. ‘Accumulation of argument’ need not have the form of a linear sequence in which different arguments for the same conclusion are merely juxtaposed (think, for example, of ‘concessive’ chains of the form: P, therefore Q; and even if not Q, S (because R); and even if not S…), and should be distinguished from dilemmatic or plurilemmatic arguments (the title of Erler's essay ‘Chain of Proof in Lucretius, Sextus and Plato’ is thus slightly misleading). Erler's use of the Phaedo as a Platonic illustration of the strategy of using a sequence of arguments for the immortality of the soul with a therapeutic function is convincing, whereas his adoption of the Apology for multiple explanations (‘death is either finis or transitus’ [35–6]) appears strained. He refers to Libanius and Quintilian to support the claim that Greek orators used accumulation of arguments and multiple explanations to defeat their adversaries and persuade the judges; but of course he could have looked no further than Gorgias’ Enconium of Helen, Defence of Palamedes, and On What is Not to support his point and connect more firmly the rhetorical use of these strategies with the later philosophical tradition.

Since antiquity Epicureanism has often been represented as an especially dogmatic philosophy, not only in the sense that it proposed and defended positive philosophical tenets against sceptical attacks, but even more so because, over several centuries, the members of Epicurus’ school did not make any serious attempt to revise and develop their revered founder's doctrines. The collection of essays on Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition Footnote ¹³ edited by Jeffrey Fish and Kirk Sanders proposes to help correct this misperception, exploring ‘various aspects of the interplay between tradition and innovation within Epicureanism’ (1). It is fair to notice that over the last few decades much has already been done to rectify this misperception, and so the volume, rather than setting a new research agenda, serves as a welcome addition to, and reinforcement of, an existing scholarly trend. Another essay by Erler sets the stage, offering a useful overview of examples ‘that Epicurus’ claim to originality does not conflict with openness to other viewpoints, and a strict adherence to Epicurus’ doctrinal system precludes neither flexibility nor individual emphases among his followers’ (26), and even ‘original contributions…provided that they are in accord with the master's doctrine’ (27). The following eight chapters explore some examples of this exegetical and theoretical flexibility, and even originality, with special focus on Epicurean theology (Sedley, Konstan, and Essler), political philosophy (Fish and Armstrong) and theory of emotions (Asmis and Tsouna on anger, and Sanders on fear). Case studies with broader thematic spread (e.g. epistemology) and involving more key Epicurean figures (e.g. Colotes and Diogenes of Oenoanda) would have been welcome (but Sedley's chapter does touch upon key epistemological issues – see below). The measure in which individual contributions engage with, or at least loosely fit, the volume's declared project is actually rather uneven; in fact some, such as Essler's, Armstrong's, and Tsouna's, seem to deal mainly with the (mis-)reception of Epicurean ideas outside the school. The three chapters on Epicurus’ theology are a good illustration of this. In Chapter 3 Sedley offers a detailed and nuanced defence of his version of the ‘idealistic’ interpretation of Epicurus’ theology, according to which the gods are not ‘biologically immortal beings living outside our world’, as the ‘realist’ interpreters have it, but ‘pre-conceptions’ (prolēpseis) formed in the mind as the result of our innate predispositions, ‘projections of human thought’, ‘our own graphic idealization of the life to which we aspire’ (29). Sedley's interpretation is based on subtle readings of some Ciceronian and Lucretian evidence, but also requires, in order to bear credence, an acknowledgment of the fact that clearly Epicurus’ statement that ‘there are gods’ ‘lent itself to a realist interpretation’ outside the Epicurean school, ‘perhaps not unintentionally at least so far as the school's public reputation was concerned’, and ‘may well also have misled some of his own followers’ (50), including Lucretius and Cicero's Epicurean source in De natura deorum, or at least have become a delicate and contentious matter of Epicurean exegesis. Konstan's defence of the realist interpretation in Chapter 4 illustrates, by contrast, how the idealist case becomes prima facie untenable if we are less attentive to issues of reception and development (surprisingly, it fails to engage directly with Sedley's argument in the volume, but refers to the less articulated position sketched by Sedley in 1987 in The Hellenistic Philosophers). Finally, Essler's examination of ‘Cicero's use and abuse of Epicurean theology’ is more a study of Cicero's polemical methodology and an exercise in Quellenforschung for De natura deorum 1 (with special focus on Philodemus’ On the Gods) than a study of Epicurean theology in its own right.

The history of the ancient (Greek and Roman) reception of the Epicurean outlook, particularly among unsympathetic or hostile non-Epicureans, is the subject of Pamela Gordon's The Invention and Gendering of Epicurus.Footnote ¹⁴ Although the Epicureans’ alleged atheism, their supposedly impoverished understanding of friendship, and a tradition of withdrawal from politics were very frequent targets, Gordon argues that Epicurean hedonism was the ‘focal point’ of anti-Epicurean ‘discourse’ (5), understood not only as explicit criticism and counter-argument, but taken to include, broadly, ‘literary allusion, rhetoric, cliché, stereotype, innuendo, the engagement with intertexts…the repetition of particular catchwords’ and ‘tendentious translation’ (9). In turn, the (alleged) Epicurean excessive fondness for pleasure was frequently intimately associated in the anti-Epicurean discourse with ideas of effeminacy, licentiousness, and unmanliness (hence the ‘gendering’ of the title). This kind of discourse is the focus of the five chapters of Gordon's monograph, informed by judicious application of the conceptual tools of ‘critical discourse analysis’ and ‘new historicism’ to the ancient evidence – philosophical and literary, as well as visual. The chapters are organized thematically: the first ‘lampoons’ and criticisms of Epicurus, especially in the New Comedy (Chapter 1); the tradition which connected the Epicureans with Homer's effeminate and ‘soft’ Phaeacians (Chapter 2); the controversial ancient evidence for the presence and role of women in Epicurus’ Garden (Chapter 3); the Roman anti-Epicurean discourse in the late Republic and early Empire, in which Epicurean pleasure is gendered and opposed to Roman virtue and manliness (Chapter 4); and the representations of the Epicureans’ physical appearance by hostile observers (dominated by effeminacy, unmanly decorum, and self-procured illness) and by the Epicurean themselves (Chapter 5). The book is a pleasure to read, and will be accessible to both specialists and students. Gordon wears her scholarship lightly, and is admirably cautious not to overstate the implications of her nuanced analyses of the anti-Epicurean discourse for a possible reconstruction of the actual Epicurean attitude towards gender and women: for example,

Even when readers do not agree on specific readings of some of the ancient evidence in light of Gordon's overarching gendering theme, they will certainly learn a great deal about the cultural reception of Epicureanism in (pre-Christian) antiquity.

Plutarch is just one in the swarm of critics of Epicureanism populating the pages of Gordon's monograph. Eleni Kechagia's fine study of his anti-Epicurean treatise Against Colotes Footnote ¹⁵ is not only an extremely valuable analysis of some key sections of the work but also a contribution to the ongoing ‘rehabilitation’ (3) of Plutarch as a philosopher, interpreter, critic, and historian of philosophy. Plutarch's writings are among our richest sources for ancient philosophy, but until recently, as Kechagia remarks, ‘the tendency has generally been to extract a fragment or a testimony about a specific philosophical thesis from Plutarch's work, but to say little about its context and next to nothing about Plutarch's treatment of it’ (4). This is certainly true of Against Colotes, which has been used as a mine of information on Epicureanism and several other ancient philosophers and philosophical schools, but rarely analysed in its own right. The third-century bc Epicurean Colotes had written a polemic against a number of philosophers, ranging from Parmenides to Arcesilaus, accusing them all that it would be impossible to live a life in accordance with their tenets; in his treatise Plutarch argues systematically against Colotes’ accusations, thus providing invaluable information on the content of Colotes’ lost work and, indirectly, on those philosophers. Kechagia approaches Plutarch's treatise as a philosophical and literary unity, and as a ‘lesson in history of philosophy’ (as the subtitle of her book has it), arguing, on the basis of sustained analysis of the text, that ‘Plutarch delivers a “master-class” on how to read critically the philosophical theories of the past and how (not) to go about building philosophical argument’ (294). Part I investigates Plutarch's reasons for selecting Colotes’ polemic as his target (Chapter 1), and tries to reconstruct Colotes’ Epicureanism as it emerges from other sources and from Plutarch himself (Chapters 2 and 3). Part II focuses on the methodology and content of Plutarch's attack on Colotes: the structure of the work (Chapter 4), Plutarch's preferred argumentative strategies (Chapter 5), and a selection of Plutarch's arguments against Colotes’ attacks on Democritus (Chapter 6), Plato (Chapter 7), and the Cyrenaics (Chapter 8). Three appendices collect all the ‘reports’, ‘quotations’, and ‘echoes’ of Colotes’ work which, according to Kechagia, can be extracted from Plutarch's treatise (I find the tri-partition rather artificial, and its criteria opaque); a short discussion of, and negative answer to, the question of whether, and in what sense, Colotes’ pamphlet should be labelled ‘anti-sceptical’; and an examination of the Democritean uses of the phrase ou mallon (‘no more’), as attested by other ancient sources and Plutarch himself. I have learnt a great deal from Kechagia's book, which weds constant methodological reflection, attentiveness to textual and philosophical details, and exegetical creativity (her compact discussion of Plutarch's argumentative strategies and their philosophical antecedents is extremely lucid, and she manages to distinguish correctly ‘overturning arguments’, inconsistency charges, and self-refutation arguments, which are too often conflated in the literature [174–8]). Anti-Epicurean arguments that at first sight appear weak, fallacious, or founded on gross and unfair misinterpretations of Epicurean tenets are carefully unpacked and reinterpreted in the light of Platonist assumptions which we may safely assume were operative in Plutarch's mind, and which he could have expected his audience of students to share. In that light, they reveal unexpected coherence and strength, although one might still wonder why, at least in some cases, the tacit adoption of those assumptions should not qualify as begging the question on Plutarch's part. Kechagia herself is perhaps too lenient in this respect: for example, she explains Plutarch's refusal to take seriously the Epicurean reductionism of mental entities and capacities, thus transforming it into a crude form of eliminativism, on the basis of his Platonist dualistic leanings (205), but she fails to ask how justified that refusal was after all. Those readers who will be disappointed not to find some important sections of Against Colotes (such as those on Empedocles or Arcesilaus) among the case studies examined will still benefit from Kechagia's insightful discussion of the context, structure, methods, and motivations of the complex unity to which they belong (and might check out the comprehensive collection of essays on Against Colotes published in the online journal Aitia in 2013Footnote ¹⁶ and Aurora Corti's 2014 Italian monograph L'adversus Colotem di Plutarco,Footnote ¹⁷ which I hope to discuss in a future review).

Philodemus’ texts are the main source for and focus of the last four chapters of Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition. The ever-growing field of Philodemean studies has recently seen the new addition of Voula Tsouna's first full English translation (with Greek text, extensive introduction, and notes) of the extant papyrological remains (twenty-two columns) of Philodemus’ On Property Management,Footnote ¹⁸ a treatise discussing the vices and virtues involved in the acquisition, preservation, and use of property and wealth from a philosophical (Epicurean) perspective. Tsouna does not offer a new edition, but adopts Jensen's text, emended on the basis of some new readings and conjectures by Tsouna herself and other interpreters. The art of ‘property management’ (oikonomia) had been the subject, in the pre-Hellenistic age, of works by Xenophon and Theophrastus, and Tsouna highlights and clarifies the critical intertextuality of Philodemus’ text, on the one hand, and his dismissal of the Cynics’ utter rejection of property, on the other. An interesting picture of philosophical oikonomia coherent with all the key tenets of Epicurean ethics and psychology emerges clearly, although Tsouna's introduction (xi–xl) is more narrative than analytical, and devotes surprisingly little space to the Epicurean conceptual and theoretical background of Philodemus’ views and arguments, and to obvious issues of development and innovation (for example, in light of the influence possibly played by Philodemus’ desire or need to talk to Roman audiences).

Roberto Polito's first edition of the extant evidence on the Pyrrhonian philosopher AenesidemusFootnote ¹⁹ is a most welcome addition to the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries series (which has also recently featured Tiziano Dorandi's new edition of Diogenes Laertius). As the founder of the Pyrrhonian movement in the first century bc, Aenesidemus is a key figure in the history of Western philosophy; because his works have been lost, however, the version of Pyrrhonism attested by Sextus Empiricus’ later writings has for a long time attracted the lion's share of the scholarly attention. Attempts to reconstruct Aenesidemus’ original brand of scepticism, disentangling it from later accretions and developments, have been made in the past, and have intensified over the last three decades, but the lack of a comprehensive and reliable collection and edition of the ancient evidence has not helped the project. From this point of view, Polito's work fills a real gap in the scholarship. He should thus not feel the need to perpetuate the ultimately ungrounded topos that Sextus ‘is hardly a creative and independent mind’ (1) in order to justify the importance of his effort to recover Aenesidemus’ original Pyrrhonism. After a concise introduction sketching some essential information on Aenesidemus, his works, and his philosophical context, a helpful section on our main sources (Photius, Sextus, Diogenes Laertius, Aristocles of Messene, and Tertullian) introduces their nature, motivations, interrelations, reliability, and textual traditions. Polito's proposals appear exceedingly conjectural at times here: when he suggests, for example, that Photius chose to summarize Aenesidemus’ work, rather than, for example, that of Sextus, primarily as ‘a token of his erudition and fondness for the rare’ (16); or that his selection of Aenesidemus’ material was guided by the aim of making the work appear ‘nothing more than a collection of fallacies’ (17), and this explains why he remained silent, for instance, on Aenesidemus’ positive use of the phainomena. However, the section has the merit of clarifying for the readers Polito's approach to the sources and his methodological assumptions, and in particular his reasonable decision not to attempt to distinguish artificially between Aenesidemean ‘fragments’ and ‘testimonia’. The criterion of inclusion of all the testimonia is, straightforwardly, that Aenesidemus be named. As Polito acknowledges, this has the ‘unwelcome consequence…that a large part of the evidence on the ten tropes regrettably had to be left out, with only Aristocles’ short and messy account included’ (10–11); Annas and Barnes's 1985 monograph on The Modes of Scepticism thus remains essential for the study of this area of Aenesidemus’ contribution. The testimonia are subdivided into two main sections: ‘Life’ and ‘Works’. In the latter, much more substantial section, the testimonia are further subdivided and ordered either by book title and number, when known, or thematically (with a substantial subsection collecting the evidence relevant to Aenesidemus’ mysterious ‘Heracliteanism’, an area already discussed at length by Polito in his 2004 monograph The Sceptical Road. Aenesidemus’ Appropriation of Heraclitus). The translations are precise, and clearly their primary aim is to mirror as closely as possible the grammar and syntax of the original texts rather than achieve elegance. The author's analysis of each testimonium is articulated into a discursive ‘overview’ and a running ‘commentary on selected words or sentences’. Although he is extremely cautious (perhaps at times too cautious) in advancing any firm interpretation of Aenesidemus’ philosophy as a whole, the broad picture of a form of ‘phenomenism’ influenced by medical empiricism, and substantially different from Sextan scepticism, appears to emerge progressively as an interesting option from Polito's comments. I would have liked to see this picture sketched more openly and systematically, and pitted against alternative ones, in a suitable concluding chapter, or in a meatier introduction. Nevertheless, whatever readers may make of the plausibility of Polito's proposals, his commentary will be an invaluable source of information on a wealth of textual, historical, and exegetical issues for anyone who embarks upon further research into the subject. The book is pricy, but beautifully produced, and is a must-have for any university library and for all specialists in the history of ancient scepticism.

In light of the role that Gisela Striker played in the renaissance of the scholarship on Hellenistic philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s, it is not surprising that the Hellenistic period and later antiquity are the focus of eight of the fifteen essays in Greek and Roman ethics, epistemology, and logic edited by My-Kyoung Lee in Strategies of Argument,Footnote ²⁰ a tribute to Striker's career. Like several other recently published Festschrifts for some of the most influential ancient philosophy scholars of the last four decades,Footnote ²¹ this collection includes original contributions by some of Striker's distinguished colleagues and former students (including, among others, Harte and Whiting on the Philebus, Barnes and Bobzien on Peripatetic logic, Allen and Inwood on Hellenistic theories and classifications of goods and evils). The volume ends with a full bibliography of Striker's own publications (an encouraging reminder for younger scholars of how much can be achieved, intellectually, through a relatively compact career's output). Strategies of Argument has no overarching thematic thread (despite the expectations that its title might produce) and the spread of topics is wide: the essays are articulated into five sections covering Plato, Aristotle's ethics, Aristotelian and Peripatetic logic, Hellenistic ethics, and Hellenistic epistemology. Given the overall quality of the contributions, readers with widespread interests will certainly find something to catch their attention. I myself learnt a great deal from the impressive triad of contributions on Aristotelian logic (Malink on deduction in Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations 6, Barnes on Boethus on ‘finished syllogism’, and Bobzien on Alexander of Aphrodisias on Aristotle's theory of Stoic indemonstrables). I also note Brittain's fresh examination of the question whether Stoic cognitive impressions necessitate assent, and whether the Younger Stoics’ suggestion that sometimes we do not assent to cognitive impressions was a deviation from Chrysippean orthodoxy and a dangerous concession to Carneades’ challenges to Stoic epistemology, or a useful clarification of the original Stoic doctrine. Brittain makes a compelling case to accept, against the position articulated by Striker herself, that the Younger Stoics were in fact defending orthodoxy: not only, as a matter of fact, that sometimes human beings do not concede their assent to cognitive impressions, but that there are even some cases (for example, under the threat of impending diseases or soritical progressions) in which the Stoic wise man ought not to give assent to his cognitive impressions. I was less persuaded by Svavarsson's contention that, according to Sextus Empiricus, although the Pyrrhonist always finds contrary accounts and arguments equally persuasive, and thus suspends judgement, he can still ‘be persuaded by one account rather than the other’ (357) while remaining ‘unable to decide by which account he ought to be persuaded’ (366). If to be persuaded that p implies to come to believe that p, then the Pyrrhonist cannot at the same time be persuaded that p and suspend judgement about p. To say that a certain argument appears persuasive (at the moment, and to a certain degree) is not to say that one is persuaded (not even temporarily, or weakly), and Svavarsson seems to overplay the consequences of Sextus’ dialectical move of the ‘safe answer’ at Math. 8.473–5, where admittedly the two ideas seem to be connected. If ‘to be persuaded’ is, on the other hand, the involuntary ‘yielding’ described at Pyr. 1.230, which does not imply assent and belief and corresponds to the adoption of appearances as criteria of action, then Svavarsson's suggestion that a Pyrrhonist can be persuaded (that is, to acquiesce in some appearance) while thinking that he ought not to be persuaded (that is, ought not to give assent to it) ultimately exploits what Sextus himself has recognized as homonymous uses of ‘to be persuaded’.

As I remarked in a previous review (G&R 2013), historically the bulk of the articles published biannually in the Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy have been devoted to Plato and Aristotle, with relatively rare forays into Presocratic and post-Aristotelian philosophy. A retrospective look at the run of the last four issues (from Summer 2013 to Winter 2014)Footnote ²² might attest to a slight deviation from this trend, and reflect the ever-expanding scholarly attention towards post-Aristotelian philosophy, with eight of the thirty-two articles devoted to Academic scepticism (Perin in Winter 2013 and Wynne in Winter 2014), Stoic metaphysics (Bailey in Summer 2014), Galen (Kaufman in Winter 2014), Plotinus (Noble in Summer 2013), and the commentators of Aristotle (Chiaradonna, Rashed, and Sedley, and Eliasson in Summer 2013; Kukkonen in Summer 2014). The edition, translation, and commentary of the fourteen preserved pages of the anonymous commentary on Aristotle's Categories rediscovered in 2005 in the Archimedes Palimpsest is worth mentioning, since it proposes for the first time to the attention of a wide scholarship a text which promises to offer some new insights on the ancient Categories tradition. In their introduction and commentary, Chiaradonna, Rashed, and Sedley make a strong, albeit unavoidably conjectural, case for attributing the text to Porphyry's lost large commentary on the Categories, Ad Gedalium. The ancient commentary itself covers a very small portion of Aristotle's text, consisting of only two lemmata, commenting upon 1a20–b15 and 1b16–24. While readers who expect to find in this recovered text a wealth of ground-breaking new information on the late antique reception of Aristotle's Categories might be sorely disappointed, it is still exciting to see a substantial philosophical text re-emerge from oblivion after more than a millennium. The authors have the merit of offering us a text, translation, and commentary that are the striking condensate of several years of substantial work and findings, but at the same time are meant to function primarily as an essential tool for further research.

The third instalment of Jonathan Barnes's collected essays in ancient philosophy, Proof, Knowledge and Scepticism,Footnote ²³ is as remarkable and awe-inspiring – for sheer bulk, breadth of coverage, and philosophical quality – as the previous two, devoted to ‘method and metaphysics’ and ‘logical matters’ (reviewed in G&R 2013). As in those volumes, the papers have been revised by the author, mostly very lightly (for misprints, stylistic infelicities, reference conventions, and addition of Greek and Latin texts or English translations), 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. Broadly speaking, the twenty-two chapters all deal with epistemological matters: Chapters 1–3 focus on some late ancient views on the relation between logic, knowledge, and science (by the Imperial Platonists, Galen, and the early Fathers of the Church respectively), thus functioning as an ideal bridge between volumes 2 and 3 of Barnes's essays; Chapters 4–13 examine the complex role which evidence, reasons, proofs, and signs play in the acquisition of knowledge and the construction of a science according to Plato (Chapter 4), Aristotle (Chapters 5–9), Galen (Chapters 10–12), and the Epicureans (Chapter 13); Chapter 14 discusses the Pyrrhonian attacks on proof, and effectively serves as the transition to the final group of chapters (15–21), which focus on various forms of ancient scepticism (especially Pyrrhonian) and sceptical arguments, their critics, and their later influence. The absence of Presocratic epistemology from such an extensive oeuvre might appear puzzling; this is, however, the contingent result of the fact that Barnes devoted extensive sections of his The Presocratic Philosophers to the subject, at least as much as a reflection of his intellectual predilections. Some of the essays are (slightly revised versions of) Barnesian classics, such as ‘Socrates and the Jury’ (Chapter 3), ‘Proof and the Syllogism’ (Chapter 6), ‘Epicurean Signs’ (Chapter 13), ‘Proof Destroyed’ (Chapter 14), and the extensive ‘Pyrrhonism, Belief and Causation’ (Chapter 17). Others are less well known (and sometimes published for the first time in English), and include little gems such as ‘Scepticism and Scandal’ (Chapter 20), in which Barnes argues with his trademark lucidity and flair that the Humean and Wittgensteinian challenges that radical scepticism is ‘idle’, and therefore does not even require our attention and refutation, rely on opposite but equally false or at least unproved suppositions on what a radical sceptical life (such as the life of a ‘rustic’ Sextan Pyrrhonist) would look like. Some readers will want to own the volume especially to gain access to these less well-known contributions; others will wish to have up-to-date versions of the classics conveniently at hand; either way, it is difficult to imagine that individual buyers will be disappointed, and serious research libraries should own at least one copy of the volume (and of the whole collection). In the characteristically provocative conclusion of his ‘Unpopular Postscript’ to Chapter 21 (‘An Aristotelian Way with Scepticism’), Barnes writes:

Barnes tirelessly analyses, probes, debunks, clarifies, muses, amuses, and provokes; the study of his work is certainly demanding (if not devouring), but I would urge all students of ancient philosophy to undertake it in the very safe expectation that it will assist them in their quest for some exegetical and philosophical enlightenment. How delicious the feast will be wholly depends, of course, on their philosophical taste buds.