Epictetus was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was probably born a slave at Hierapolis, Phrygia (present day Pamukkale, Turkey), and lived in Rome until his exile to Nicopolis in northwestern Greece, where he lived most of his life and died. His teachings were noted down and published by his pupil Arrian in his Discourses. Philosophy, he taught, is a way of life and not just a theoretical discipline. To Epictetus, all external events are determined by fate, and are thus beyond our control, but we can accept whatever happens calmly and dispassionately. Individuals, however, are responsible for their own actions which they can examine and control through rigorous self-discipline. Suffering arises from trying to control what is uncontrollable, or from neglecting what is within our power. As part of the universal city that is the universe, human beings have a duty of care to all fellow humans. The person who followed these precepts would achieve happiness.

An energetic new translation of an ancient Roman masterpiece about a failed coup led by a corrupt and charismatic politician In 63 BC, frustrated by his failure to be elected leader of the Roman Republic, the aristocrat Catiline tried to topple its elected government. Backed by corrupt elites and poor, alienated Romans, he fled Rome while his associates plotted to burn the city and murder its leading politicians. The attempted coup culminated with the unmasking of the conspirators in the Senate, a stormy debate that led to their execution, and the defeat of Catiline and his legions in battle. In How to Stop a Conspiracy, Josiah Osgood presents a brisk, modern new translation of the definitive account of these events, Sallust's The War with Catiline-a brief, powerful book that has influenced how generations of readers, including America's founders, have thought about coups and political conspiracies. In a taut, jaw-dropping narrative, Sallust pleasurably combines juicy details about Catiline and his louche associates with highly quotable moral judgments and a wrenching description of the widespread social misery they exploited. Along the way, we get unforgettable portraits of the bitter and haunted Catiline, who was sympathetic to the plight of Romans yet willing to destroy Rome; his archenemy Cicero, who thwarts the conspiracy; and Julius Caesar, who defends the conspirators and is accused of being one of them. Complete with an introduction that discusses how The War with Catiline has shaped and continues to shape our understanding of how republics live and die, and featuring the original Latin on facing pages, this volume makes Sallust's gripping history more accessible than ever before.

During the last half century there has been revolutionary progress in logic and in logic-related areas such as linguistics. HistoricaI knowledge of the origins of these subjects has also increased significantly. Thus, it would seem that the problem of determining the extent to which ancient logical and linguistic theories admit of accurate interpretation in modern terms is now ripe for investigation. The purpose of the symposium was to gather logicians, philosophers, linguists, mathematicians and philologists to present research results bearing on the above problem with emphasis on logic. Presentations and discussions at the symposium focused themselves into five areas: ancient semantics, modern research in ancient logic, Aristotle's logic, Stoic logic, and directions for future research in ancient logic and logic-related areas. Seven of the papers which appear below were originally presented at the symposium. In every case, discussion at the symposium led to revisions, in some cases to extensive revisions. The editor suggested still further revisions, but in every case the author was the finaljudge of the work that appears under his name.

Late Antique Epistemology explores the techniques used by late antique philosophers to discuss truth. Non-rational ways to discover truth, or to reform the soul, have usually been thought inferior to the philosophically approved techniques of rational argument, suitable for the less philosophically inclined, for children, savages or the uneducated. Religious rituals, oracles, erotic passion, madness may all have served to waken courage or remind us of realities obscured by everyday concerns. What is unusual in the late antique classical philosophers is that these techniques were reckoned as reliable as reasoned argument, or better still. Late twentieth century commentators have offered psychological explanations of this turn, but only recently had it been accepted that there might also have been philosophical explanations, and that the later antique philosophers were not necessarily deluded.

J. Angelo Corlett's new book, Interpreting Plato Socratically continues the critical discussion of the Platonic Question where Corlett's book, Interpreting Plato's Dialogues concluded. New arguments in favor of the Mouthpiece Interpretation of Plato's works are considered and shown to be fallacious, as are new objections to some competing approaches to Plato's works. The Platonic Question is the problem of how to approach and interpret Plato's writings most of which are dialogues. How, if at all, can Plato's beliefs, doctrines, theories and such be extracted from dialogues where there is no direct indication from Plato that his own views are even to be found therein? Most philosophers of Plato attempt to decipher from Plato's texts seemingly all manner of ideas expressed by Socrates which they then attribute to Plato. They seek to ascribe to Plato particular views about justice, art, love, virtue, knowledge, and the like because, they believe, Socrates is Plato's mouthpiece through the dialogues. But is such an approach justified? What are the arguments in favor of such an approach? Is there a viable alternative approach to Plato's dialogues? In this rigorous account of the dominant approach to Plato's dialogues, there is no room left for reasonable doubt about the problematic reasons given for the notion that Plato's dialogues reveal either Plato's or Socrates' beliefs, doctrines or theories about substantive philosophical matters. Corlett's approach to Plato's dialogues is applied to a variety of passages throughout Plato's works on a wide range of topics concerning justice. In-depth discussions of themes such as legal obligation, punishment and compensatory justice are clarified and with some surprising results. Plato's works serve as a rich source of philosophical thinking about such matters. A central question in today's Platonic studies is whether Socrates, or any other protagonist in the dialogues, presents views that the author wanted to assert or defend. Professor Corlett offers a detailed defense of his view that the role of Socrates is to raise questions rather than to provide the author's answers to them. This defense is timely as intellectual historians consider the part played by Academic scholars centuries after Plato in systematizing Platonism. J. J. Mulhern, University of Pennsylvania

Despite its importance in the history of Ancient science, Menelaus' Spherics is still by and large unknown. This treatise, which lies at the foundation of spherical geometry, is lost in Greek but has been preserved in its Arabic versions. The reader will find here, for the first time edited and translated into English, the essentials of this tradition, namely: a fragment of an early Arabic translation and the first Arabic redaction of the Spherics composed by al-Mahani /al-Harawi, together with a historical and mathematical study of Menelaus' treatise. With this book, a new and important part of the Greek and Arabic legacy to the history of mathematics comes to light. This book will be an indispensable acquisition for any reader interested in the history of Ancient geometry and science and, more generally, in Greek and Arabic science and culture.

The Republic is Plato's best-known work. It's also considered to be one of the most historically influential works on philosophy and political theory.

The nature and existence of time is a fascinating and puzzling feature of human life and awareness. This book integrates interdisciplinary work and approaches from such fields as physics, psychology, biology, phenomenology, and technology studies with philosophical analyses and considerations to explain a number of facets of the perennnial question of time's nature and existence, both in contemporary and in its initial classical Greek context; and it then explores and explains two of the most influential investigations of time in classical Western thought: Aristotle's, as presented in his "Physics," and the (neo)Platonist Plotinus' in his treatise "On Time and Eternity," Original interpretative perspectives are argued in both cases, and special attention is paid to Plotinus as partly responding to and critiquing Aristotle's account.

If we know something, do we always know it through something else? Does this mean that the chain of knowledge should continue infinitely? Or, rather, should we abandon this approach and ask how we acquire knowledge? Irrespective of the fact that very basic questions concerning human knowledge have been formulated in various ways in different historical and philosophical contexts, philosophers have been surprisingly unanimous concerning the point that structures of knowledge should not be infinite. In order for there to be knowledge, there must be at least some primary elements which may be called a ~starting pointsa (TM).

This book offers the first synoptic study of how the primary elements in knowledge structures were analysed in antiquity from Plato to late ancient commentaries, the main emphasis being on the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition. It argues that, in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, the question of starting points was treated from two distinct points of view: from the first perspective, as a question of how we acquire basic knowledge; and from the second perspective, as a question of the premises we may immediately accept in the line of argumentation. It was assumed that we acquire some general truths rather naturally and that these function as starting points for inquiry. In the Hellenistic period, an alternative approach was endorsed: the very possibility of knowledge became a central issue when sceptics began demanding that true claims should always be distinguishable from false ones.

Reading Proclus and the Book of Causes, published in three volumes, is a fresh, comprehensive understanding of the history of Neoplatonism from the 9th to the 16th century. The impact of the Elements of Theology and the Book of Causes is reconsidered on the basis of newly discovered manuscripts and evidences. This second volume revises widely accepted hypotheses about the reception of the Proclus' text in Byzantium and the Caucasus, and about the context that made possible the composition of the Book of Causes and its translations into Latin and Hebrew. The contributions offer a unique, comparative perspective on the various ways a pagan author was acculturated to the Abrahamic traditions.

In Ennead II.1 (40) Plotinus is primarily concerned to argue for the everlastingness of the universe, the heavens, and the heavenly bodies as individual substances. Here he must grapple both with the philosophical issue of personal identity through time and with the rich tradition of cosmology which pitted the Platonists against the Aristotelians and Stoics. What results is a historically informed cosmological sketch explaining the constitution of the heavens as well as sublunar and celestial motion. This book contains an extensive introduction aimed at providing the necessary background in Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic cosmology, the text itself, and a line-by-line commentary designed to elucidate its philosophical, philological and historical details.

What role did the performance of poetry, music, song, and dance play in the political life of the ancient city? How has philosophy positioned itself and articulated its own ambitions in relation to the poet tradition? The Polis and the Stage poses such questions through a reading of Plato last, longest, and unfinished work, the Laws. Plato's engagement with the Greek poetic tradition has long been recognized as foundational in the history of literary criticism, but the broader critical and philosophical significance of the Laws has been largely ignored. Although Plato is often thought hostile to mimetic art, famously banishing poets from the ideal city of the Republic, this book shows that in his final dialogue Plato made a striking about-face, proposing to rehabilitate Athenian performance culture and envisioning a city, in which poetry, music, song, and dance are instrumental in the cultivation of philosophical virtues. The psychological underpinnings of aesthetic experience and the power of mimetic art to predispose a society to specific kinds of constitutions are central themes throughout this study. Plato's views of the performative properties of language and genre receives systematic treatment in this study for the first time. Performance as a mechanism of sexual construction-a network of social practices uniquely suited to communicate and enforce normative conceptions of gender and erotic pleasure-is another focus, with special attention given to positions occupied by women in the culture envisaged in the Laws. As a whole, Marcus Folch's book provides an integrated interpretation of Plato's final dialogue with the Greek poetic tradition, an exploration of the dialectic between philosophy and mimetic art, which will be of interest to anyone concerned with understanding ancient Greek performance and the emergence of philosophical discourse in fourth-century Athens.

This book offers a radical reappraisal of the reputation of Plato in England between 1423 and 1603. Using many materials not hitherto available, including evidence of book publishing and book ownership, together with a comprehensive survey of allusions to Plato, the author shows that the English were far less interested in Plato than most historians have thought. Although the English, like the French, knew the `court' Plato as well as the `school' Plato, the English published only two works by Plato during this period, while the French published well over 100 editions, including several of the complete Works. In England allusions to Plato occur more often in prose writers such as Whetstone, Green, and Lodge, than in poets like Spenser and Chapman. Sidney did take his `Stella' from Plato, but most English allusions to Plato were taken not directly from Plato or from Ficino, but from other authors, especially Mornay, Nani-Mirabelli, Ricchieri, Steuco, and Tixier.

Forms and Concepts is the first comprehensive study of the central role of concepts and concept acquisition in the Platonic tradition. It sets up a stimulating dialogue between Plato s innatist approach and Aristotle s much more empirical response. The primary aim is to analyze and assess the strategies with which Platonists responded to Aristotle s (and Alexander of Aphrodisias ) rival theory. The monograph culminates in a careful reconstruction of the elaborate attempt undertaken by the Neoplatonist Proclus (6th century AD) to devise a systematic Platonic theory of concept acquisition."

This book brings together a selection of Kevin Corrigan's works published over the course of some 27 years. Its predominant theme is the encounter with otherness in ancient, medieval and modern thought and it ranges in scope from the Presocratics-through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and the late ancient period, on the one hand, and early Christian thought, especially Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine and, much later, Aquinas, on the other. Among the key questions examined are the relation between faith and reason; the nature of creation and insight, being and existence; literature, philosophy and the invention of the novel; personal, human and divine identity; the problem of evil (particularly here in Dostoevsky's adaptation of a Platonic perspective); the character of ideas themselves; women saints in the early Church; love of God and love of neighbor; the development of Christian Trinitarian thinking; the strange notion of philosophy as prayer; and the mind/soul-body relation.

Interest in Theophrastus, Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the Peripatetic School, has increased considerably since the 1992 publication of "Theophastus of Eresus: Sources for his Life, Works, Thought and Life." Now comes an extensive commentary on the ethical sources. It considers Theophrastus in relation to Aristotle, to other members of the Peripatos and to the Stoic philosophers who became Theophrastus' rivals. Special attention is given to Theophrastus' insistence that virtue by itself cannot guarantee happiness. Also to the difference between manners and moral virtue, the relation between innate character and fate, the value of marriage and how animal behavior relates to that of human beings.

W.K.C. Guthrie has written a survey of the great age of Greek philosophy - from Thales to Aristotle - which combines comprehensiveness with brevity. Without pre-supposing a knowledge of Greek or the Classics, he sets out to explain the ideas of Plato and Aristotle in the light of their predecessors rather than their successors, and to describe the characteristic features of the Greek way of thinking and outlook on the world. Thus The Greek Philosophers provides excellent background material for the general reader - as well as providing a firm basis for specialist studies.

Plato's doctrine of the soul, its immaterial nature, its parts or faculties, and its fate after death (and before birth) came to have an enormous influence on the great religious traditions that sprang up in late antiquity, beginning with Judaism (in the person of Philo of Alexandria), and continuing with Christianity, from St. Paul on through the Alexandrian and Cappadocian Fathers to Byzantium, and finally with Islamic thinkers from Al-kindi on. This volume, while not aspiring to completeness, attempts to provide insights into how members of each of these traditions adapted Platonist doctrines to their own particular needs, with varying degrees of creativity.

In his teachings and through his choice of the dialogue-form as a mode of communication, Plato emphasized the communal aspect of intellectual work. The need for having a community work together is nowhere more apparent then when the intellectual task set is that of interpreting the ancient philosophers. Those of us who were fortunate enough to spend some of our years as students at Oxford found that among our most inspiring experiences were the meetings of the Oxford Aristotelian So ciety, as well as the seminars in which B.PhiI. students discussed Plato and Aristotle. Up until the past few years no such group existed on the West Coast. In the fall of 1970 some of us got together to form the West Coast Greek Philosophy Conference, which was within a short time renamed by Prof. T. Rosenmeyer as 'the Aristotelians of the West, Unincorporated'. In our monthly meetings we translate and discuss Greek philosophic texts. For the past two years the group has been working on Aristotle's 'Physics'."

Plato's Phaedo has never failed to attract the attention of philosophers and scholars. Yet the history of its reception in Antiquity has been little studied. The present volume therefore proposes to examine not only the Platonic exegetical tradition surrounding this dialogue, which culminates in the commentaries of Damascius and Olympiodorus, but also its place in the reflections of the rival Peripatetic, Stoic, and Sceptical schools. This volume thus aims to shed light on the surviving commentaries and their sources, as well as on less familiar aspects of the history of the Phaedo's ancient reception. By doing so, it may help to clarify what ancient interpreters of Plato can and cannot offer their contemporary counterparts.

There are many fallacious arguments in the dialogues of Plato. The author argues that Plato was fully conscious of the fallacious character of at least an important number of these arguments and that he sometimes made deliberate use of fallacy as an indirect means of setting forth certain of his fundamental philosophical views. Plato introduces them, the author maintains, for the purpose of working out their implications. Plato is thus able to expose them for what they are, to clear away possible lines of attack upon his own position, and even to show that when the proper correction is applied his own views receive support.

Studies of Plato's metaphysics have tended to emphasise either the radical change between the early Theory of Forms and the late doctrines of the Timaeus and the Sophist, or to insist on a unity of approach that is unchanged throughout Plato's career. The author lays out an alternative approach. Focussing on two metaphysical doctrines of central importance to Plato's thought - the Theory of Forms and the doctrine of Being and Becoming - he suggests a continuous progress can be traced through Plato's works. He presents his argument through an examination of the metaphysical sections of six of the dialogues: the Euthyphro, Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, Timaeus, and Sophist.

This book provides an introduction to Plato's work that gives a clear statement of what Plato has to say about the problems of thought and life. In particular, it tells the reader just what Plato says, and makes no attempt to force a system on the Platonic text or to trim Plato's works to suit contemporary philosophical tastes. The author also gives an account that has historical fidelity - we cannot really understand the Republic or the Gorgias if we forget that the Athens of the conversations is meant to be the Athens of Nicias or Cleon, not the very different Athens of Plato's own manhood. To understand Plato's thought we must see it in the right historical perspective.