Nero's personality and crimes have always intrigued historians and writers of fiction. However, his reign also illuminates the nature of the Julio-Claudian Principate. Nero's suicide brought to an end the dynasty Augustus had founded, and placed in jeopardy the political system he had devised.
Miriam T. Griffin's authoratitive survey of Nero's reign incorporates both a chronological account, as well as an analysis of the reasons for Nero's collapse under the pressure of his role as emperor.

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Nero's personality and crimes have always intrigued historians and writers of fiction. However, his reign also illuminates the nature of the Julio-Claudian Principate. Nero's suicide brought to an end the dynasty Augustus had founded, and placed in jeopardy the political system he had devised. Miriam T. Griffin's authoratitive survey of Nero's reign incorporates both a chronological account, as well as an analysis of the reasons for Nero's collapse under the pressure of his role as emperor.

The role of philosophy as a valued and effective part of the culture of civilized Romans has aroused an increasing amount of scholarly interest in recent years. In this volume, which gathers together nine papers delivered at a series of seminars on philosophy and Roman society in the University of Oxford, scholars of classical literature, Roman history, and ancient philosophy investigate the place of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Roman intellectual, cultural, and political life from the second century BC to the third century AD. In addition to chapters on such important figures as Cicero, Varro, Plutarch, Favorinus, Celsus, and Porphyry, the book contains essays on the tradition of Aristotle's library at Rome, the theory of the mixed constitution, and the anonymous commentary on Plato's Theaetetus. It thus forms a complement to Philosophia Togata I which addressed the importance of the doctrines of the Hellenistic schools to Roman society during the first century BC.

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 Stoicism contains 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.

The mutual interaction of philosophy and Roman political and cultural life has aroused more and more interest in recent years among students of classical literature, Roman history, and ancient philosophy. In this volume scholars from all three disciplines investigate this interaction in the late Republic and early Empire. The analytical bibliography has been completely revised and updated for this paperback edition.

To the student of ancient philosophy Cynicism may seem little more than a debased version of the ethics of Socrates, which exaggerates his austerity to a fanatic asceticism, hardens his irony to sardonic laughter at the follies of mankind, and affords no parallel to his love of knowledge. Diogenes was 'Socrates gone mad'. On the other hand, for the student of ancient social history and thought from the 4thcentury BC to the close of antiquity, and even beyond, the mind-set of cynicism is still a constant or ever-recurring theme.