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The third and fourth books of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations deal with the nature and management of human emotion: first grief, then the emotions in general. In lively and accessible style, Cicero presents the insights of Greek philosophers on the subject, reporting the views of Epicureans and Peripatetics and giving a detailed account of the Stoic position, which he himself favors for its close reasoning and moral earnestness. This book gives the Stoics' analysis of the causes of grief, their classification of emotions by genus and species, their lists of oddly named character flaws, and by the philosophical debate that develops over the utility of anger in politics and war. This translation makes Cicero's work accessible. The accompanying commentary explains the philosophical concepts discussed in the text and supplies many helpful parallels from Greek sources.

Despite their influence in our culture, sports inspire dramatically less philosophical consideration than such ostensibly weightier topics as religion, politics, or science. Arguing that athletic playfulness coexists with serious underpinnings, and that both demand more substantive attention, this book harnesses the insights of ancient Greek thinkers to illuminate contemporary athletics. The author contends that the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus shed important light on issues—such as the pursuit of excellence, the concept of play, and the power of accepting physical limitations while also improving one's body—that remain just as relevant in our sports-obsessed age as they were in ancient Greece. Bringing these concepts to bear on contemporary concerns, he considers such questions as whether athletic competition can be a moral substitute for war, whether it necessarily constitutes war by other means, and whether it encourages fascist tendencies or ethical virtue. The book philosophically explores twenty-first-century sport in the context of its ancient predecessor, revealing that their relationship has great potential to inform our understanding of human nature.

An enormous amount of literature exists on Greek law, economics, and political philosophy. Yet no one has written a history of trust, one of the most fundamental aspects of social and economic interaction in the ancient world. This volume explores the way democracy and markets flourished in ancient Greece, not so much through personal relationships as through trust in abstract systems—including money, standardized measurement, rhetoric, and haggling. Focusing on markets and democratic politics, the book draws on speeches given in Athenian courts, histories of Athenian democracy, comic writings, and laws inscribed on stone to examine how these systems worked. It analyzes their potentials and limitations and how the Greeks understood and critiqued them. The book links Greek political, economic, social, and intellectual history and examines contemporary analyses of trust and civil society.

This study explains how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. The book argues that philosophy was ironically responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth because it could not be declared true or false and because it was inferior to argumentation, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegorical exegesis. The book shows to what degree allegory was employed among philosophers and how it enabled myth to take on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical. This book also describes how, during the first years of the modern era, allegory followed a more religious path, which was to assume a larger role in Neoplatonism. Ultimately, the book explains how this embrace of myth was carried forward by Byzantine thinkers and artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; after the triumph of Christianity, the book argues, myths no longer had to agree with just history and philosophy but the dogmas of the Church as well.

In 1815 a manuscript containing one of the long-lost treasures of antiquity was discovered—the letters of Marcus Cornelius Fronto, reputed to have been one of the greatest Roman orators. But this find disappointed many nineteenth-century readers, who had hoped for the letters to convey all of the political drama of Cicero's. That the collection included passionate love letters between Fronto and the future emperor Marcus Aurelius was politely ignored—or concealed. And for almost 200 years these letters have lain hidden in plain sight. This book rescues these letters from obscurity and returns them to the public eye. The story of Marcus and Fronto began in 139 ce, when Fronto was selected to instruct Marcus in rhetoric. Marcus was eighteen then, and by all appearances the pupil and teacher fell in love. Spanning the years in which the relationship flowered and died, these are the only love letters to survive from antiquity—homoerotic or otherwise. The translation reproduces the effusive, slangy style of the young prince and the rhetorical flourishes of his master.

For centuries, since its inception in fact, rhetoric has been conceived of as an exclusively human art. Only humans, after all, could artfully use language, the very definition of rhetoric. And yet pre- and early-modern treatises about rhetoric are crawling with animals of the nonhuman variety. This book examines the enduring presence of nonhuman animals in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. In doing so, it brings rhetorical studies into ongoing conversations about animals in the humanities while also offering a counter-history of rhetoric and rhetorical education, one that resists the usual reason-based, cerebral approach and focuses instead on sensation and movement. The book therefore offers a new theoretical perspective on rhetoric’s history: rather than presuming, as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as reasoned argumentation, this history stresses energy, bodies, and sensation, all crucial components of language and communication. Without these components, and without the nonhuman animals that draw them out, words are dead and lifeless, unable to perform any of the three basic aims ascribed to the art of rhetoric by the ancients: to teach, to delight, and—above all—to move.

This book investigates the concept, value and poetics of variety, with a particular focus on the Roman concept of varietas and on Latin literature. It divides into two parts, the first belonging to the field of the history of ideas and the second to literary criticism. It argues that a combination of synonyms, antonyms, metaphors, commonplaces and conceptual issues form a distinctive cluster around the Latin word varius and its vernacular derivates, and identifies this ‘variety complex’ in its ancient and modern incarnations with particular reference to ideas of nature, creativity (human and divine), aesthetics and politics. The second part of the book begins by considering how the concept of variety functions in the work of particular Latin authors (Pliny the Younger, Lucretius and Horace); it proceeds to examine how the literary forms of the list and the priamel frame the experience of variety in different genres of Latin poetry, and, finally, describes how variety functions in the genre of the miscellany, with particular attention to the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius. The study has its roots in Latin literature and language but ranges widely over European literature and thought of all periods to analyse the significance of an important but neglected value.