The epilogue explores the evidence for dissection and anatomical literature in Late Antiquity. It addresses the seeming hiatus in anatomical activity after Galen, introducing the topic via Vesalius’ retrospective thoughts, which blame Galen’s enervating authority. It starts with fourth-century evidence, pictorial and textual, observing that Galen, while a dominant voice, was not the lone authority; major figures considered include Vindicianus, Nemesius of Emesa, Oribasius, and Gregory of Nyssa. It then turns to the fifth to seventh centuries, addressing the medical curriculum in Alexandria and the evidence from Stephanus of Athens and Paul of Aegina. Finally, it contrasts the absence of evidence for anatomical activity in the Late Antique West after the seventh century with the modest but more vibrant interest in the East, addressing the question of whether human dissection reemerged as an option in Byzantium in this period; major figures considered include Meletius, Theophilus Protospatharius, Michael Choniates, and George Tornikios. The epilogue ends with Hunayn ibn Ishaq and his Syriac and Arabic translations, representing the beginning of the next chapter in anatomical history.

The opening chapter examines the forebears of Cicero’s notion of will in Greek thought and Roman usage in the period before his birth, with special attention given to the playwrights Plautus and Terence. There was no “will of the people” in classical Greece. The demos wielded power not by delegation but in active, autonomous decision. There is no special discourse of representation in classical Athens, because in classical democracy (unlike today) there is no permanent governing class. In the Republic, Plato proposes that reason and appetite reside in different parts of the soul; though we succumb to appetite despite “knowing better,” in a harmonious soul as in a just city, reason must rule. Plato’s star student is the first to propose a full theory of human action, but neither Aristotle’s boulesis (the desire for ends) nor his prohairesis (the choice of means) map onto the faculty that Latin speakers would call voluntas. It is the Stoics, and particularly Epictetus, who have been credited by some as inventors of the will due to their intense focus on regulating our inner responses to events and forming the correct intention.

The Roman emperor ruled one of the largest empires in world history. It consisted of different peoples living in wildly different contexts. They had different expectations of who the emperor was and how he should behave, although the range of those expectations was limited. Views of emperorship were locally dependent. The image of the emperor was not the same throughout the empire, and was often closely bound to his visibility in and his relationship with a specific region. How emperors were represented through statues, historical reliefs, triumphal arches, temples and other monuments, and through the ceremonies that surrounded emperorship, had an enormous impact on how the people who encountered these monuments or participated in these ceremonies perceived their emperors. As the number of monuments accumulated over time, they created an increasingly stable local ‘memoryscape’. Existing imagery influenced both the creation of new local images and the expectations of imperial behaviour.

It was often said of Cicero that he was eclectic rather than systematic; that his treatises are devoid of originality; that even to call him a philosopher is overgenerous. In the eyes of these critics, his primary contribution to Western thought is as a translator, more prolific than precise. Thankfully, the shadow of anti-Ciceronian sentiment cast by 19th‑century scholars – the caricature of grandiose orator, failed statesman, and unserious thinker – has lifted in recent years. In this moment of resumed appreciation of his philosophy, I hope this study has affirmed two major innovations for which he deserves credit.

This chapter explores the practice of dissection in the first and second centuries AD, based largely on the evidence of Galen but drawing a picture beyond his activities alone. Divided into sections according to the contexts of and motivations for dissection, it begins with private dissections for practice and research. It next turns to performative dissections, beginning with those for public display. These public dissections occurred at different scales, and this section considers their contents, their diverse practitioners, and the size and make-up of their various audiences, including a discussion of venues, such as auditoria, and their capacities. The chapter then turns to examples of dissection specifically for medical advertisement, including evidence for public surgery, and then to two instances of dissection in the context of formal competition, one attested textually, the other epigraphically. Finally, it zeroes in on the competitive motivations of Roman dissection and its use in the adjudication of medical and philosophical debates, as well as in the jockeying between rivals.

This introductions sets out the key notions underlying a systematic analysis of Roman emperorship over six centuries. It focuses on the sources available for such an analysis and the pitfals in using them. Much attention is paid to the way Roman emperors were remembered, and how these expectations influenced the actions of later emperors.

This chapter is dedicated to the theory of selfhood Cicero presents in the De officiis: each person being a player of four personae. The allegory of four dramatic roles or masks (from the Greek prosopon) is borrowed from the Stoic Panaetius, whose ethical theory adapts the stringent demands of the sage to a morally imperfect and multifarious public. He who wishes to progress, Cicero explains, must play the roles of reason, of nature, of fortune, and, finally, the role “we ourselves may choose sets forth from our will” (quam personam velimus, a nostra voluntate proficiscitur). In this final treatise, the will comes most clearly into view as a mental capacity and rational force. I argue that when read in conjunction with related uses of voluntas and persona in other texts, Cicero’s will serves a recursive purpose within each of the other personae. Whether in actualizing reason, refining our inborn qualities, or navigating the forces of necessity and civic duty, voluntas creates a dialectic of actor and mask from which emerges a conscious moral self. Though the will develops richly as a moral faculty and principium individuationis in the hands of later thinkers, its terrestrial purposes disappear as divine ones take hold.

In this chapter, we see how Cicero, as a rising Roman politician, uncovers hidden lines of influence, pinpoints shades of political support, and frames partisan divides in the Roman Republic. Here, Cicero uses voluntas both to analyze politics as he finds it and to argue for its rational improvement. Descriptively, Cicero uses voluntate and summa voluntate to identify subtler shades of opposition or support and to trace lines of unseen influence among Rome’s leading men like Pompey and Caesar. Through his gifted pen, will becomes a measurable force as it had seemingly not been before. To measure will is to rationalize it, and Cicero builds new philosophical arguments for the primacy of voluntas over violence and for a vision of politics that transacts power rationally by the intersecting wills of magistrates and people. I use powermapping, a tool of modern advocacy, as a lens to examine Cicero’s political strategy and use of language. This vision, at once old and new, is upended by the ascent of Caesar, whose sole voluntas undoes Cicero’s rational framework, exerting will by brute force and eliminating the old pluralist order.

With the Tusculan Disputations, willpower enters Western thought. This chapter departs from a peculiar decision Cicero makes in his account of the human soul. In previous centuries, Platonists and Stoics had bitterly disagreed on whether the soul was unified or divided into rational and nonrational parts. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero announces that he will combine Stoic moral stricture – predicated on the soul’s unity – with Plato’s divided, self-moving soul. The result is a new narrative of inner struggle in which voluntas gains a formal definition at last: “that which desires with reason” (quae quid cum ratione desiderat) (Tusc. 4.12). While drawing importantly on the Hellenistic schools of philosophy, the Latin “force” of volition is foremost. Here, Cicero links together lines of debate that in Greek had run in parallel, rendering hekon, boulesis, and prohairesis by voluntarius and voluntas. His “struggle for reason” thus moves originally beyond Greek accounts of askesis, moral training that emphasized education and cognitive clarity over present effort. An orator zealous to persuade, Cicero paints his account of reason in Roman colors of honor, endurance, and painstaking progress.

At the beginning of the debate over free will, freedom is nowhere to be found. In the Hellenistic period, the question of human autonomy is not one of freedom (eleutheria) but instead, given the nature of the universe, what is “up to us” (eph’emin) and thus left to our choice (prohairesis). It is Cicero and the Epicurean poet Lucretius who first turn the debate into one specifically over man’s freedom from fate. But Cicero’s idea of the will’s libertas – its opportunity to conquer vice and win honor – is very different from that of Lucretius in De rerum natura, a text Cicero read and may even have edited. De fato, one of the last in his corpus, returns to the question of a libera voluntas explicitly to refute the Epicurean doctrine of the swerve (clinamen) and their abandonment of civic duty. For Cicero, free will is the locus of public virtue, the justification of “praise and honors,” and the power to strengthen ourselves against natural vice. Cicero’s letters reveal, in turn, that this technical treatise on fate has decidedly political stakes for the Roman Republic.