The chapter examines Kant’s complex assessment of Stoic ethics in Religion part two. It focuses first on how Kant contests the modern legacy of Stoicism in Rousseau and others who suppose that we may develop to virtue if we simply stop getting in the way of provident nature. Kant replies that the Stoics themselves rightly saw that there is an enemy we must actively fight – adducing the ‘battle’ metaphor for moral life that he draws from Seneca, and which commentators have largely misunderstood owing to underestimation of Kant’s engagement with Stoicism. The chapter then examines Kant’s striking claim that Stoic ethics provides a necessary ‘preparatory exercise’ (Vorübung, 6:58) for moral development, demonstrating that this propaedeutic is the cultivation of self-respecting character that figures distinctively in Epictetus’ Discourses, and which forms the basis of Kant’s own account of character in the Anthropology. The chapter concludes by considering Kant’s recognition of kindred conceptions of the progressor’s humility in Stoicism and Christianity, and in that light tracks Kant’s evolving critical appraisal of Stoic ethics in the 1790s.

Stoic psychology is distinctive in the ancient tradition: it takes the mentality of a mature human being to be rational through and through, rejecting Platonic and Aristotelian commitments to distinct rational and non-rational parts of the soul. Critics who assume the implausibility of psychological monism typically fail to track the distinction between (a) what is rational in the sense of requiring the resources of a rational mind (rational-1) and (b) what is rational in the sense of meeting a normative standard of rationality (rational-2). The chapter isolates a common core to Stoic and Kantian conceptions of what it is to be rational-1 as the basis for interpreting Kant as a psychological monist. This interpretation is elaborated through the demonstration of its compatibility with Kant’s threefold faculty psychology. Kantian psychological monism is rooted in a claim about apperceptive self-consciousness as the fundamental resource of a rational-1 mind, and which transforms the powers of cognition, desire, and feeling in us. The final section examines Kant’s explicit endorsement of Stoic apathy as evidence of his clear-sighted appropriation of elements of Stoic psychology.

The chapter examines how Kant draws upon and reworks the demanding cosmopolitan ideals of Stoic ethics, focusing on the human duty to establish the ‘ethical commonwealth’ in Religion 3. It first demonstrates how Kant’s understanding of the underlying problem – namely, the moral corruption endemic in human communities – draws on ancient Stoic sources. It then considers Seneca’s account of friendship between progressors as an approximation of the demanding cosmopolitan ideal. Although Kant gives every sign of having thought deeply about Seneca’s conception of such friendship, he rejects the idea of virtue as a common resource in his 1793 lectures on moral philosophy. Yet the idea figures in the Religion’s account of ethical commonwealth as a duty that the species, ostensibly as a corporate agent, has to itself. Virtue (the human developmental telos) is reconceived as a collective resource. The chapter considers what this might mean, and concludes with doubts about how Kant’s normative ideal of the ethical commonwealth can avoid attracting the charge he most consistently laid against the Stoics: namely, that their standard of virtue calls for the transcendence of human nature.

Chapter 7 discusses anger in relation to gender. A character’s ability to display or suppress anger is tied to expectations of external judgment. In the Iliad, male characters frequently express anger; mortal women do not. Homer’s text highlights the gap between a female character’s words and her inner thoughts, creating an ambiguity that puzzles male audiences and characters attempting to read their minds. The chapter surveys theories of anger (from Aristotle to cognitive science) and analyses Homeric emotional expressions, including the emotional ‘script’ of anger. It focuses on ancient readings of Achilles’ anger. Aristotle’s influential definition of anger, presupposing Achilles as a model, shaped scholarly understanding but excluded anger from the emotions women could feel. Later, Seneca and Plutarch opposed this, linking anger to a lack of self-control, associating it particularly with women and barbarians. Ancient theories consistently stressed the connection between anger, rationality, and revenge.

Plato was the initiator, in the philosophical literature, of the idea that punishment should look to the future, not to the past. It must be beneficial and serve some useful purpose. Beneficial to whom? The first part of Plato’s answer is striking: ‘to the offender’. Punishment should be directed at reforming offenders rather than simply penalizing them because they had offended. This idea was accepted by a succession of (non-abolitionist) thinkers. It is still with us today. Plato was presumably unaware that he was opening a loophole that could be exploited by later reformers who sought a reduction, and then finally abolition, of the death penalty: an offender sentenced to a programme of rehabilitation was not a prime candidate for execution. However, a further possible answer to Plato’s question might be: ‘(beneficial) not for the criminal but for society as a whole’. Plato also held that punishment might serve as a deterrent, and this opened the door to harsh treatment, including death, of some offenders, namely, those who were judged ‘incurable’. One might kill a murderer, or a disparager of the gods, to deter others.

In the course of advocating forward-looking punishment, Plato opened up a specific line of attack on retributivism. He characterized backward-looking punishment as irrational, bestial, and motivated by revenge. This gave rise to a debate over the moral status of revenge and the closely associated emotion of anger, which drew in and divided philosophers from Aristotle to Camus and beyond. Of our two pioneer abolitionists, it was Pelli rather than Beccaria who attacked retributivism directly, following a line taken by the Stoic Seneca on vengeance and anger in succession to Plato. Pelli and later opponents of retributivism have been unable to deliver it a knock-out blow, for the reason that, like its standard-bearer the Lex Talionis, retributivism is grounded in the gut feeling, part rational, part emotional, that we are responsible for the evil that we do, that crime merits equivalent or proportionate punishment: that there is in effect a ‘good’ vengeance. This was, and is, reflected in public opinion and in the attitude and practice of judicial and political establishments, whatever some philosophers might argue.

Chapter 6 is Senecan in theme. While it includes some discussion of various classical concepts – casus and occasio in particular – which are picked up by Machiavelli to talk about the effects of chance and contingency in the world of states which he wishes to analyse, the chapter is mainly devoted to staking out the philosophical opposition which Machiavelli’s contentions about fortuna in his theory of the state are designed to overturn; and that opposition is deeply Senecan. The chapter lays out an account of the role of fortuna in Seneca’s moral philosophy. It illuminates the providentialism and determinism underpinning all his thinking about the concept, and draws particular attention to Seneca’s persistent tendency to personify Fortuna as a mistress of slaves and to pictorialize a tyrannical realm under her arbitrary government. The chapter then shows how this Senecan treatment becomes central to humanist thinking about Fortuna from Petrarch onwards and explains why Machiavelli is profoundly bothered by its currency in his own day. Machiavelli takes it as a form of delusion emanating from beliefs about a providentialist world emptied of all the contingencies which must be countered by any truly virtuoso agent in charge of governing the state.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

Machiavelli assigns a complicated role in his political theory to the concept of the beneficium (or benefizio in Machiavelli’s Italian) in order to describe the benefits that the power of the state can bring; and this chapter focuses on one philosophical language which is used throughout the Italian Renaissance to discuss this idea and which comes to shape Machiavelli’s own thinking decisively. That language is classical in origin; and it is intimately associated with one text in particular: Seneca’s On Benefits. In the first section of the chapter, Seneca’s thinking about generosity and gratitude is explicated within the wider context of his social philosophy to show how it forms part of a theory of moral obligation, informed by a firmly Stoic notion of natural human sociability. The second section shows how Seneca’s contentions are subsequently retrieved and put to work in pre-humanist and humanist political thought to discuss the moral relationships between members of civil associations and to underline the perils of the vice of ingratitude in political society. Once the place of Seneca’s theory in Renaissance discourse is elucidated, it becomes easier to see how Machiavelli manipulates its contentions into a theory of political obligation within his account of the state.

This chapter shows that the faculty of the will was presented as a ubiquitously dangerous facet of selfhood in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, when used to gratify selfish or sinful desires. ‘Punishing the Transgressive Will’ explains how this convention helped define how the limitations of human ambition and the boundaries of moral transgression were depicted. I do so primarily through a comparative analysis of the notorious acts of wilfulness performed in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. Enticing as it was dangerous, the capacity for the will to incite violence or disorder was commonly shown to be the primary cause of its own ruin. This literary topos is, however, importantly refuted in Cary’s play through the character of Salome. Among all of the excessively wilful characters who feature in Renaissance drama, Salome proves to be an exceptional type of Neo-Senecan villain whose will functions without limit: her will is not self-defeating, nor is she punished for exercising it. I propose that Salome’s fate can help to redefine our understanding of transgressive acts in Renaissance tragedies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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