Studies in Stoicism

This important volume fulfills one of Peter Brunt's (1917 - 2005) last wishes: a collection of his most important papers in the area of scholarship that had occupied him in his earliest years of research, and which largely absorbed his attention after his retirement from the Camden Chair of Roman History at Oxford University in 1982. Brunt was interested primarily in Stoicism in the Roman period, and his chief concern was the practical influence of its ethical teaching on political and social life. Although his investigations were historical, they required a complete mastery of the Stoic texts and doctrine. Basing his work almost entirely on the ancient sources, Brunt provides the most complete account and comparison available today not only of the ideas of the Roman Stoic moralists, but also of the political philosophy of the Greek founders of the Stoa. He believed that the ideas of the Stoics of the Roman period were essentially continuous with the thinking of the founders, and he did not accept that the concern with practical everyday morality in later Stoicism was a new development. Studies in Stoicismcontains six unpublished and seven republished essays, the latter incorporating additions and changes which Brunt wished to be made. The papers have been integrated and arranged in roughly chronological order and by subject matter, with an accessible lecture to the Oxford Philological Society serving as Brunt's own introduction.

P. A. Brunt was formerly Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford.

Miriam Griffin is Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

Alison Samuels is Associate Lecturer at the Open University.

Editors' Introduction Miriam Griffin & Alison Samuels
1. Chrysippus on Practical Morality
2. Political Attitudes of the Old Stoa
3. Morality and Social Convention in Stoic Thought
4. Aspects of the social thought of Dio Chrysostom and the Stoics
5. Panaetius in De Officiis
6. Cicero's Officium in the Civil War
7. Stoicism and the Principate
8. High Ranking Stoics under the Principate
9. From Epictetus to Arrian
10. Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations
11. Marcus Aurelius and Slavery
12. Marcus Aurelius and the Christians
13. Late Stoic Moralists
Bibliography of the works of P.A.Brunt Michael Crawford
Bibliography to the unpublished papers
Index