Often viewed as derivative, philosophy written in Latin has in recent years been enjoying a scholarly renaissance, as critics realise that philosophical thought does not develop in a vacuum but is intrinsically linked to the time, place and language in which it is expressed.This chapter brings a historicising approach to the phenomenon of Roman philosophy, combining a diachronic narrative with a focus on particular themes.After considering the Roman adoption of Greek philosophy in the second century BCE, I use Lucretius as a case study for the Latinisation of Greek thought and Cicero as an example of the political and cultural uses of philosophy in the late Republic.I explore some of the many appearances of philosophy in Latin poetry – evidence of the saturation of the Roman cultural imaginary with philosophical ideas and the fact that Latin philosophical writing was not restricted to genres viewed as philosophical.Moving into the Empire, I discuss Seneca as a proponent of philosophy as a way of life and consider the self-representation of philosophers, with a focus on Apuleius, before concluding with an exploration of the Christianisation of philosophy in late antiquity.

This chapter reexamines the question of Caesar’s putative Epicureanism. While there is no reason to believe that Caesar was a committed Epicurean, there exist tantalizing pieces of evidence that he may have adopted for himself a version of the tenet that “death is nothing to us.” These include his observation, in his speech about the convicted Catilinarians (as reported by Sallust), that death is not a punishment but the endpoint of all experience, and his late-in-life statement (versions of which are found in Cicero’s Pro Marcello and in Suetonius) that he had “lived enough.” The chapter concludes by considering the criteria scholars typically employ for gauging philosophical affiliation in antiquity, arguing for a broadening of definitions and for considering even a some-time Epicurean as Caesar as part of the history of Epicureanism.

This chapter examines Cicero’s Pro Marcello of 46 bce, a speech of thanksgiving to Julius Caesar for pardoning his civil-war for M. Claudius Marcellus. I argue that Cicero cleverly uses philosophical arguments to, as it were, entrap Caesar into working towards the restoration of the Republic. Philosophical wisdom is a leitmotif of the speech, and Caesar in particular is called sapiens or associated with sapientia nine times. The basic argument that underlies Pro Marcello, without ever being made explicit, is the following syllogism: The wise man will act virtuously. Caesar is a wise man. Therefore, Caesar will act virtuously. In defining what acting virtuously would mean for his addressee, Cicero argues vigorously against Caesar’s own statement that he had already ‘lived enough for either nature or glory’ (satis diu uel naturae uixi uel gloriae, 25), painting the dictator as an Epicurean whose wrong ideas about both virtue and glory the orator seeks to combat.

This chapter reexamines the question of Caesar’s putative Epicureanism. While there is no reason to believe that Caesar was a committed Epicurean, there exist tantalizing pieces of evidence that he may have adopted for himself a version of the tenet that “death is nothing to us.” These include his observation, in his speech about the convicted Catilinarians (as reported by Sallust), that death is not a punishment but the endpoint of all experience, and his late-in-life statement (versions of which are found in Cicero’s Pro Marcello and in Suetonius) that he had “lived enough.” The chapter concludes by considering the criteria scholars typically employ for gauging philosophical affiliation in antiquity, arguing for a broadening of definitions and for considering even a some-time Epicurean as Caesar as part of the history of Epicureanism.

The Astronomica of Marcus Manilius, a Latin didactic poem in five books composed in the early second decade CE, is our earliest extant comprehensive treatment of horoscopic astrology, containing highly technical discussions of such matters as the characteristics, divisions and influences of the signs of the zodiac, the computation of the ascendant and the significance of extrazodiacal constellations. However, despite its (pseudo-)scientific subject matter, the work is far more than a compendium of “sums in verse” (to use the derisive words of Manilius' famous editor A. E. Housman): it is what is sometimes referred to as a Weltgedicht, a poem that projects a larger vision of the nature of the universe and man's place in it. The cosmos that Manilius' text presents is indeed a kosmos, a realm of order and beauty that is governed by fate, the nexus of cause and effect that the astrologer attempts to uncover through observation and interpretation of the heavenly bodies. Painting an image of the universe as a living and divine organism in which all parts are interconnected, the Astronomica shows great affinities to Stoic physics, which views the world as a corporeal continuum informed by the sympatheia (“feeling together”) of its constituents. It is this underlying cosmology that enables the poet's claim that the stars are capable of causing events on earth and that humans are at all times affected by and, to some extent, able to affect their cosmic surroundings. As I shall attempt to show in what follows, this intimate interaction with the universe is one that engages human beings through all their senses.

Astrology, a “science” now wholly discredited, but one that enjoyed enormous prestige from antiquity up to the Enlightenment, is predicated on the idea that heaven and earth are not two separate entities, but are intrinsically connected. Everything that happens in the upper reaches of the sky, every change in the alignment of heavenly bodies, will have an effect on the terrestrial realm, including, crucially, the lives and fates of human beings. There is thus a continuum between the high and the low, an unbroken chain of cause and effect, but also a strict hierarchy: The stars above are all-powerful and eternal, whereas the men and women below are mortal and subject to a fate that they themselves cannot control.

Developed in Babylon and refined by the Hellenistic Greeks, astrology became popular in Rome toward the end of the Republic. In the second decade of the first century c.e., Marcus Manilius, a Latin author about whose life we know nothing, wrote a lengthy didactic poem titled Astronomica, which – owing to the serendipities of textual transmission – now happens to be the earliest extant complete treatment of astrological thought and method. Manilius did not shy away from the more technical aspects of his topic: As his famous editor A. E. Housman dryly remarked, he had an “eminent aptitude for doing sums in verse.”