Professor Rist's short introduction to the philosophy of Epicurus combines scholarship with clear exposition. All Greek in the text is translated, and discussion of more specialised problems of interpretation is relegated to appendices. In an account which mediates between the extremes of approval and opposition traditionally accorded to him, Epicurus emerges as an ideologist, a pragmatic philosopher whose most notable achievement perhaps was to reject much of the prevailing social ethos of Hellenism and assert the rights and claims of the individual against those of the community or state.

Literature on the Stoa usually concentrates on historical accounts of the development of the school and on Stoicism as a social movement. In this 1977 text, Professor Rist's approach is to examine in detail a series of philosophical problems discussed by leading members of the Stoic school. He is not concerned with social history or with the influence of Stoicism on popular beliefs in the Ancient world, but with such questions as the relation between Stoicism and the thought of Aristotle, the meaning and purpose of such Stoic paradoxes as 'all sins are equal', and the philosophical interrelation of Stoic physics and ethics. There are chapters on aspects of Stoic logic and on the thought of particular thinkers such as Panaetius and Posidonius, but ethical problems occupy the centre of the stage.