Covers the creative, but often neglected, period between the mid first century BCE and mid first century CE.

Covers the last century of the school’s activity, including lesser-known figures such as Euphrates, Hierocles, Cleomedes, Philopator and Aurelius Heraclides, as well as Marcus Aurelius. Emphasizes the amount of activity in physics and logic as well as in ethics.

Includes some aspects of Diogenes of Babylon’s philosophy, but focusses on the impact of the Academic Carneades on Stoicism from Antipater of Tarsus onwards. Extensive coverage of Panaetius of Rhodes and his students, including Hecaton. Balances the contributions of both innovative thinkers and more conservative Stoics.

Provides a rationale for the new periodization of Stoicism’s history and explains the thematic and chronological organization of the book.

Selections from the full range of Seneca’s philosophical works, including extensive material from the Natural Questions, On Benefits and the Letters to Lucilius as well as the ‘Dialogues’, esp. On Anger.

The chapter is devoted to the work of Posidonius in all its aspects and argues that he created a second major synthesis of Stoic thought, expanding the school’s attention to the sciences and history while making innovations in logic, physics and ethics. Argues that Posidonius was a more conservative Stoic than is often thought.

Representative selections from the Discourses, the Handbook and some fragments.

Essay 10 of Proclus’ commentary focuses on one of the passages in Plato’s Republic that has generated the most scholarly controversy – the argument through which Socrates distinguishes genuine philosophers from pretenders to that title.1 This argument is a key part of Socrates’ response to the third and greatest of the three questions put to him by his friends: the question of how the ideal city-state might come about. Socrates’ famous answer is that philosophers must become rulers or rulers must take up philosophy (473d–e), and this answer, in turn, requires that we distinguish genuine philosophers from those who are simply in love with learning. Proclus characterises this distinction as one between philosophia and philomathia and for him, as for Plato, it is a matter of ontological commitment rather than temperament or motivation. Those who genuinely love wisdom are those who recognise the necessity of forms and are capable of coming to understand them (476a–b).

Essay 7 principally concerns Republic IV 427d–444a in which Socrates and his interlocutors first look for justice and the other virtues within the city they have described and then turn to the question of whether the soul admits of a similar tripartite structure with analogous virtues within the individual.1 Plato’s discussion in Book IV is apparently innocent of the metaphysics and epistemology of the middle books – though of course the ensuing discussions of philosophers and Forms will deepen the understanding of what it is for the reasoning part to rule in the soul.2 Nonetheless, as with the function argument of Book I (352c–53e), Socrates’ reasoning proceeds from admissions that the none-too-philosophical Glaucon and Adeimantus make and does not presuppose the theory of Forms or any idea of the soul as an incorporeal substance that is more akin to the Forms than to the body. The same, of course, is at least superficially true of Aristotle’s function argument in Nicomachean Ethics I, chapter 7.

Essay 13 is a wide-ranging commentary on the short speech of the Muses in Republic VIII 546a1–547a5 and 547b2–c4. Proclus names this essay after the bee, because bees are sacred to the Muses and display a kind of appropriately ruled society.1

Plato has just completed the central books of the Republic (V, VI, and VII), in which he has advocated that women should share the philosophical rule with men and has laid out the three famous analogies of the Sun, Divided Line, and Cave. He now embarks on the decline from the government of the ideal city through to four lesser forms: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. The Muses’ speech explains the reasons behind the decline of the ideal city, stating that it occurs because of strife between the auxiliary and guardian classes after these two classes are no longer able to select the correct time for breeding the new generation.