Two conditions endow the study of Roman philosophy with historiographical interest. The first is that the philosophical conversations of the Hellenistic traditions carry on into the Roman period, which in the eyes of the historian of philosophy starts as early as the middle of the second century bce and may extend to include any number of Christian philosophers (e.g. Boethius or, at least, Augustine). The second is that the Mediterranean and its political orders radically changed over this same period, from Rome's expansion of imperium after the Second Punic War to the evolving imperial landscapes of late antiquity. The return of Platonism and the emergence of Christian philosophy are dramatic examples of how Hellenistic philosophy did not simply proceed, business as usual, in the Roman Mediterranean. Historians of philosophy have responded to this interplay of continuity and disruption in two ways. One is to track distinctive changes in philosophical discourse. From this perspective, the Roman context matters insofar as it affected a transfer of philosophical authority from scholarchs in Athens onto portable classical texts. This textual translation of authority defines the border between Hellenistic and Post-Hellenistic philosophy, and for these categories readers will look forward to the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Hellenistic Philosophy and the planned The Cambridge History of Post-Hellenistic Philosophy.
The other route is to measure how Roman power changed philosophy throughout the period of their interaction, and not only with respect to disciplinary trends. While Roman philosophy is rarely defined, its historiography has clear work to do: to study how realities of Roman rule (politics, the Latin language, literary developments, social and cultural norms, the law, et al.) shaped philosophical discourse. Though the editors’ preface is extraordinarily brief for a handbook that is the first of its kind, The Oxford Handbook of Roman Philosophy takes itself, partly, to do the work of the history of Roman philosophy. Rather than presenting comprehensive or connected narratives, the 34 chapters examine philosophy in the Roman Mediterranean from manifold angles, as diverse in scope and kind as the operations of Roman power itself. Accordingly, readers should not expect exhaustive coverage of possible subjects. There are no chapters that give sustained attention to, say, Antiochus, Varro, Favorinus or Sextus Empiricus. Further, each of the volume's four parts serves a variety of purposes, so that readers should rely not on the categorisation of the volume's four parts but rather on the titles of individual chapters for guidance. For instance, since A. Kaldellis's chapter in Part 4 is part of his broader research programme of renaming Byzantines as Romans (their preferred ethnonym), it also speaks to issues from Part 1 on identity. Kaldellis does well to stress the plasticity of Roman ethnic identity – surely relevant to the core question of what is Roman about Roman philosophy.
That said, some rough divisions can be drawn. Chapters mostly in Parts 1 and 2 cover philosophical authors of the Roman period: Pythagorean pseudepigrapha (P. Horky), Lucretius (T. O'Keefe and P. Gordon), Cicero (M. Schofield, M. Fox, O. Cappello), Seneca (G. Reydams-Schils), Diogenes of Oenoanda (Gordon), Cornutus and Epictetus (M. Erler), Plutarch (G. Karamanolis), Apuleius (J. Ulrich), Marcus Aurelius (J. Sellars) and Augustine (A.-I. Bouton-Touboulic). Chapters mostly in Part 3 treat the intersection of philosophy and other aspects of Roman society: Latin (C. Hoenig), politics (E. Malaspina & E. Della Calce), law (Kaldellis), rhetoric (E. Gunderson, D. Fields), sex and gender norms (Gordon, K. Lampe), religion (Ulrich), medicine (D. Leith) and poetry (G. Davis, A. Kachuck, C. Wiener). Chapters in Part 4 generally discuss aspects of reception in the later medieval (A. Kijewska), Italian Renaissance (Q. Griffin) and early modern (N. Meeker) periods.
The volume contains a mix of argumentative chapters and expository ones. And since we most enjoyed those that made compelling polemical claims (while also providing syntheses of central questions of study), we will selectively describe four standouts from this set (Ulrich, Hoenig, Malaspina & Della Calce, and Meeker). In the piece on Apuleius Ulrich focuses narrowly on demonology in this author, but is still able to address a central issue of cultural translation in Roman philosophy, precisely because the demon is an analogue for Apuleius’ mediating role as a translator of Platonism for popular audiences. Ulrich positions this chapter against ironic, self-promoting readings of Apuleius’ Platonist affiliation, preferring to read Apuleius as a Platonist-Roman intermediary working towards sincere engagement with Plato's doctrines. He applies this model to argue against satirical readings of the end of the Metamorphoses: rather than read its narrator's final word (obibam) as an inversion of Ovid's vivam, Ulrich sets it within Apuleius’ account of the demon's duties to mediate between human and divine.
Hoenig addresses the Roman translation of philosophy more literally by bringing concepts from translation studies to an examination of some Latin philosophical translators. She looks at Cicero's domesticating translations in TD 1, which are taken to appropriate Plato's voice for Roman philosophy. Likewise, Lucretius adapted Epicurus, using elaborative images and a poetic language that set him apart from the prose translators who drew Cicero's criticism (TD 4.6–7). Furthermore, Lucretius Epicureanised a range of Greek sources, as when he gives unflattering translations of Greek epithets for different kinds of girlfriends (DRN 4.1160–70) or adds horror to Thucydides’ plague account (DRN 6.1138–285). For Apuleius, Hoenig uses aspects of his theology as gleaned from De Platone to argue that alterations in his translation of the Peripatetic De mundo (38.1–5) function as Platonising interpretations. She concludes with an excerpt from Calcidius’ translation and companion commentary of Timaeus (27d6–28a4), both of which explicate their source in tandem. Summing up, Hoenig argues for a chronological shift of aims in translation from cultural appropriation to more narrow exegesis. The chapter is densely reasoned and filled with useful observations.
Wide ranging (on political ideas of Roman historians, Roman political philosophy, mirrors of princes and political disengagement by Roman Epicureans, Stoics and Sextians) and refreshingly open about methodology, Malaspina and Della Calce's chapter opens with the observation that a handbook to Roman philosophy is a conscious rejection of the denigration of Roman thought voiced by Horace's Graeca capta. The authors warn those working within this scholarly turn against reducing Roman philosophy to a philosophy of mere practice that concedes the superiority of Greek theory. On the contrary, political philosophy of Hellenistic Greeks was either utopian or ‘little more than an a posteriori justification’ (p. 326) for political realities determined by others. Roman political philosophy, by contrast, placed greater value on the practical because it was practicable. At the same time, Malaspina and Della Calce do not want us to stake the success of Roman philosophy on the question of whether its political visions were actualised; consider the fates of Gaius Blossius, Tiberius Gracchus and Cicero's constitutional republicanism. After all, Malaspina and Della Calce observe, the last was necessary for the mixed form of government in the US. We find the criticism of Greek philosophy as utopian and the special pleading for the contemporary salience of Cicero's political ideas unnecessary. Why judge any philosophical theory by its adoption in the world? By these standards, perhaps no political idea was more successful than a doctrine of political disengagement, consensus for which Della Calce traces in the concluding section.
Similarly probing, Meeker approaches important questions in Lucretian scholarship about attachment, emotion and rationality from an unexpected angle: early modern debates about the relationship of libertinism to materialism. Meeker begins by mapping out the way in which these two ideas became disconnected over the course of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries: not only did materialism begin to imply a level of rational detachment that libertinage did not, but the former denoted a set of beliefs, whereas the latter was marked by a ‘style of nonadherence’ (p. 602), a refusal to endorse any one specific belief. Turning back to Lucretius, Meeker finds in this staunch materialist the seeds also of libertinism, reading Lucretian ‘voluptas not as the final affirmation of a secular human subject but as this subject's delightful dissolution or dispossession’ (p. 603).
By contrast, many of the chapters do not lay out a unified, original argument, but instead serve as overviews of a certain topic or author. Of these, a number struck us as pedagogically useful. For instance, O'Keefe's chapter would serve as a helpful classroom introduction to Lucretius’ psychological theories and rhetorical strategies. Adventurous instructors might assign Lampe's chapter to advanced undergraduates: this chapter demonstrates how three separate theoretical approaches to sexuality (Stoic virtue ethics, Michel Foucault's sociological lens and the feminist psychoanalysis of Julia Kristeva) could be applied to Musonius Rufus’ On Sex; this juxtaposition of theories would provide a healthy spark to classroom conversation, while also giving a clear overview of Stoic sexual morality. Gunderson on the rhetorical culture of the Roman elite could also serve a broad set of readers. The chapter is graced by Gunderson's style, with oblique polemics against philosophers who want to extract the philosophy from the rhetoric-philosophy cocktail of Roman gentlemanly culture. It is also reliable, thanks to Gunderson's ability to generalise without distorting – one can keep reading without continuously glancing at the notes. Where Malaspina and Della Calce warn against reducing Roman philosophy to the practical, Gunderson takes the stereotype to be revealing of Roman high culture.
We noted above that we enjoyed most the chapters that make an original argument about the topic. Of the ten authors whose chapters we felt to be the best of this group (and from which we drew our selections of summaries), half are earlier career scholars, a ratio higher than that for the volume as a whole. That is encouraging. However, by our estimate there are only two of these early career contributors currently working in permanent academic posts. Whatever the causes, we find the small number of early career contributors who have remained in the field worrisome. The history of Roman philosophy needs the full breadth of Classics and ancient Mediterranean area studies and the respective scholars. We owe the editors – all trained Classicists committed to cultivating the study of Roman philosophy – thanks for shepherding this long-awaited project to its conclusion.
