The Stoics were temporalists: they relativised the truth of propositions to time and held that propositions vary in truth-value over time. On their view, to say that a proposition is true is to say that it is true now (where now is understood as the time at which the truth of the proposition is being assessed). It has further generally been agreed that this must entail that they think that any proposition, including those about the past or the future, is true by virtue of some present state of the world. This chapter suggests that this needn’t be the case and offers an alternative to views that appeal to present truthmakers for past and future truths by way of causal chains of events. I do this by means of a reconstruction of the Stoic theory of tense. I show that the Stoics had developed a tense logic far more sophisticated than usually recognised with tense operators which themselves relativise the truth of a proposition to the time at which it is evaluated. This removes the need for present truthmakers and saves the Stoics from biting unnecessary bullets.

This chapter argues for the Sophist’s background role in the genesis of the Stoic lekton. It shows the Stoics engaged critically with the ‘gigantomachy’, siding with the Giants by making bodies the sole beings, while introducing ‘something’ (τι) as a supreme genus. The chapter then explores how the Sophist’s question about sentence signification (261d–262e) likely prompted the Stoic reply that a sentence signifies an incorporeal axiōma, a proposition that subsists but may not hold.

The opening chapter orients the study in relationship to previous scholarship. I seek to show how previous scholarship has long recognized a tension between John’s Christology and his concurrent emphasis on Jesus’s impending absence but often neglects the way in which this tension pervades John’s narrative and drives the plot. In particular, I argue that studies which understand John’s Christology in terms of a heavenly redeemer figure, the temple, or Stoicism, as well as studies reconstructing the Johannine community, all propose (in various ways) that John eliminate the tension created by Jesus’s absence by minimizing the reality of his absence. In contrast, this study will argue that John uses the tension between presence and absence as a central conflict throughout the narrative. I then lay the groundwork for this argument by briefly describing my understanding of John’s Christology as one focused on divine presence and illustrating how that understanding activates motifs of divine absence underappreciated by previous Johannine scholarship.

This chapter reframes veneficium not as a form of magic but as a Roman category for theorizing causation at a distance, tracing how philosophers, jurists, and poets grappled with the conditions under which harm could occur without observable contact. By treating “witchcraft” as a comparative prompt rather than an emic term, the chapter shows that debates over veneficium reveal Roman efforts to manage uncertainty about agency, efficacy, and the mechanics of harm.

Chapter 20 focuses on Lima Barreto’s 1915 masterpiece, Triste fim de Policarpo Quaresma. The novel pits the ethical ideal of Policarpo Quaresma against the widespread corruption of Brazilian society under the First Republic. It suggests that individuals tend to act with more integrity when alone than when part of a group. The story reaches a dead end when Quaresma, with his naive idealism, tries to apply his values within society. His “sad end” raises key questions about the tension between personal ethics and collective action – questions that reveal Lima Barreto’s conservative perspectives, as the chapter demonstrates. This chapter deepens the conversation on ethics and praxis by interpreting the novel through the lens of ancient Stoicism contrasted with modern Marxism. The result is an ironic effect: Lima Barreto hopes to inspire social change through literature, yet his literary hero fails to bring that change to life.

In the spring of 1964, just before the opening of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the French government made the exceptional decision to loan the Venus de Milo to Japan. Some 1,750,000 people were able to admire the famous statue in Tokyo and Kyoto, many of them only after waiting in line for hours. At the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, where it was displayed from May 21 until June 25, the average number of visitors reached 24,700 per day, a figure comparable to the daily number of admissions at the Louvre Museum. Only the Tutankhamun exhibition presented the following year, again in Tokyo and Kyoto, attracted larger crowds.1 What are we to make of the attraction that the Greco-Roman patrimony has exerted not only in Japan, but also, more recently, in Korea, China, and Singapore? From a European point of view, there is a great risk in seeing this interest as an homage to Western civilization, indeed as a recognition of its superiority. A kind of condescending self-satisfaction creeps in: “They admire us. That’s perfectly normal, of course. But don’t they see that they demean themselves by behaving in this manner? And all the more since they cannot understand.

So much patience for so little gain ... ” The embarrassment that is felt in the West at how much trouble other nations have gone to to appreciate the culture of antiquity is associated with a paradoxical sentiment, namely, that Greece is the place where the human mind achieved its fundamental liberty, but that this place belongs to “us.” The freedom that was first discovered in Greece points toward autonomy, but it is under copyright – as though the people of the West were to say, “Feel free to feel free, but don’t forget to pay the fees you owe us!”

This chapter explores Augustine’s intellectual formation and conversion to Christianity in the context of late antiquity’s philosophical, religious, and political transformations. Tracing his journey through Manichaean dualism, Neoplatonism, and finally Pauline Christianity, the chapter highlights Augustine’s struggles with the nature of evil, the limits of human will, and the role of divine grace. Drawing on the Confessions, it examines Augustine’s dialogue with Platonism, particularly Plotinus, whose hierarchy of being and emphasis on inner ascent deeply influenced him – but could not resolve the question of the incarnation. Augustine’s embrace of Christ as both divine and human offered a radically new model of wisdom grounded in humility and love (caritas), unavailable in pagan philosophical traditions. The chapter contextualizes Augustine’s thought within Roman imperial history, the codification of Christian scripture, and the evolving notion of philosophy as a way of life. Ultimately, it shows how Augustine’s life and writings forged a new intellectual synthesis, in which classical reason and biblical faith coalesced into a powerful vision of human transformation, one that would shape Christian anthropology, literary practice, and theological reflection for centuries.

The protagonist of Chapter 4 is the Ciceronian concept of the persona civitatis, an idea which comes to be associated with the ‘person of the state’ in Renaissance political philosophy. The first section of this chapter identifies the firmly theatrical role which this idea delineates in Cicero’s political thinking about the character of civil associations and the duties of the executive magistrate in the Roman Republic. It also illuminates how Cicero derives the idea from the same Stoic theory of personae which is subsequently developed by Seneca in a more markedly monarchical vein. The second section of the chapter then recounts the historical career of the persona civitatis, which comes to act as the pivot of a highly influential theory of representation in Renaissance political thought – a theory which proved indispensable to the humanist task of sustaining classical claims about liberty and the res publica in this transformed post-classical environment. In Renaissance Florence, Bruni, Palmieri, Manetti, and Alberti all recur to this theory to talk about how the republic can be embodied and articulated as a person. This is a line of thinking which Machiavelli will refuse to endorse: he never accepts that the state can be represented.

This chapter examines the three foundational strands that shaped early Christianity and, in turn, western thought: Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, and Roman culture. It begins with Judaism, emphasizing its monotheism, prophetic self-criticism, and teleological view of history – features that deeply influenced Christian theology. The Book of Isaiah is central, offering themes of justice, suffering, and messianic hope later interpreted as prefiguring Christ. The chapter then turns to Hellenistic philosophy – especially, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism – which informed Christian ideas about the soul, virtue, and the good life. These schools stressed moral discipline and the pursuit of wisdom, values that Christianity absorbed and reinterpreted theologically. The Roman contribution centered on imperial power, civic virtue, and especially the Latin language, which became Christianity’s primary medium in the West. Roman thinkers like Cicero and Virgil helped transmit Greek ideas, emphasizing duty, eloquence, and destiny. These strands – Jewish, Greek, and Roman – were not seamlessly integrated, but their dynamic interaction laid the groundwork for a western intellectual tradition rooted in moral inquiry, historical depth, and a universalizing spiritual vision.

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.

Melissa Merritt aims to locate one of the limits of Kant’s Aristotelianism. While it is widely supposed that Aristotle is the most relevant ancient reference point for Kant’s conception of virtue as “moral strength of will” (6:405), Merritt argues that Kant draws primarily on Stoic ethics. Much of what may seem Aristotelian in Kant’s remarks about virtue — such as his likening it to “the state of health proper to a human being” (6:384) — should be read as nods to a pervasive tendency of ancient Greek thought, which views ethics as a dimension of natural teleology. Ethics, so conceived, is centrally concerned with how the human being develops naturally towards the telos of virtue, conceived as the completion of our essentially rational nature. While this is a feature common to Aristotelian and Stoic ethics, Merritt argues that Kant favors a specifically Stoic approach, one that has a notion of “appropriate” or completion-promoting action — officium — at its heart.

In 1739, the author who wanted to go by the name of Sophia, A Person of Quality, published a text called Woman Not Inferior to Man: Or, A short and modest Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men. This title gives voice to what has become an established way of thinking about the history of liberation, and of feminism in particular – that is, as a history of the vindication of rights, as Mary Wollstonecraft would go on to echo in her own titles, A Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, and then, when it appeared that women were not included in mankind, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.

It is common to read that the concept of rights did not exist in ancient times. The most influential proponent of this thesis in the past half-century or so may be Alasdair MacIntyre but he is hardly alone. In a more recent discussion, Tom Campbell says this: “Rights (as distinct from the more general ideas of right and wrong) were unknown to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, although the idea developed in the course of medieval theorizing concerning Roman law.” A slightly more nuanced view is put forward by William Sweet: “The history of the ‘discourse’ of human rights is fairly well known. While the existence of ‘natural rights’ is implied in works of antiquity, it is only in the Middle Ages that we begin to see an acknowledgment of rights as distinct from ‘the right.’”

The definitions of the emotions in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 3 which refer to magnitude are not meant to represent Stoic orthodoxy, and should not be read as direct evidence for the Stoic theory. Cicero’s aims and methods in the Tusculans led him to use non-Stoic accounts of the emotions, in order to offer a kind of consolation that is neutral between Stoic and Peripatetic theories of value. This chapter also discusses the structure of the Tusculans as a unified whole.

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.