This chapter treats a selection of divine responses to impiety recorded in historiography, oratory, and letters from the late Republic. Considering influential claims for the stability of certain theological tenets regarding divine justice, the chapter examines the question of how and when gods punish individuals rather than communities. In this period, formulaic calls for the gods to punish the guilty individual rather than the state became weaponized. Although such utterances conformed superficially to normative theology, they undermined the traditional perception of the gods as concerned primarily with the welfare of the community as a whole, and as reacting to impiety in a consistent manner. The period of the late Republic thus sees the emergence of perceptions of the gods as being less predictable, stable, or moral than in the traditional scholarly view.

As a field, Classics relies heavily on translation. Many classicists believe that their translations are objective and neutral. However, translations, whether of ancient or modern texts, reflect the positionality of the translator. Therefore, translations cannot be neutral or objective. The translator must be transparent about their social location and positionality. If not, the epistemic injustice of colonialist, imperialistic discourse remains intact. Case studies drawn from Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Pliny illustrate this.

Hipparchus is often mentioned by ancient writers, but these reports vary greatly in quality and quantity. The two principal sources are Ptolemy and Strabo, who contribute most of what is known about the general scope of his astronomical and geographical work, respectively. By comparison, other writers tend to be less expert in their reporting or are very brief. These include Cicero, Geminus, Cleomedes, Pliny the Elder, Theon of Smyrna, Vettius Valens, Galen, Sextus Empiricus, Pappus, Firmicus, Theon of Alexandria, as well as several anonymous texts. However, they are still valuable in building up an overall picture of Hipparchus and his contribution to astronomy and mathematics. Many of these ancient sources are discussed here.

Provincial governance was never of great interest to Roman administrators or jurists. This begins to change only when jurists increasingly became administrators exposed to provincial claim. Jurists had to begin thinking about provincial contexts as raising important questions of governance - in particular, that key assumptions about law might be different in a world marked by extractive governance. Key among these is the late second/early third century jurist Ulpian of Tyre. Ulpian begins the process of transforming governance from an array of untheorized practices into something amenable to traditional juristic analysis. As a successful administrator, he did this knowing that such an account was otherwise lacking. His magnum opus, On the Office of the Proconsul, can be seen as an attempt to capture what was distinctly provincial about provincial governance. But Ulpian’s key text can also be read as a response to the challenge of provincial legalism.

This chapter delves into female influence on money and wealth from an individual perspective, using the concept of matronage as a framework. Cicero, who was often burdened by financial concerns, had two women as intermediaries: his wife Terentia and Teucris, possibly to be identified with Mucia Tertia. Mucia, by leveraging her personal and familial wealth, showcased remarkable agency in strategically deploying capital during her marriages to Pompey and Scaurus. Her career and influence highlight the power of matronage, particularly in times of crisis, when Scaurus relied on her network. The chapter calls for a re-evaluation of sources, which often take an androcentric perspective and neglect the significant role of women in power structures and their impact on political and economic events. Mucia epitomizes many elite women who exercised decisive influence through their networks and resources.

This chapter examines the three foundational strands that shaped early Christianity and, in turn, western thought: Judaism, Hellenistic philosophy, and Roman culture. It begins with Judaism, emphasizing its monotheism, prophetic self-criticism, and teleological view of history – features that deeply influenced Christian theology. The Book of Isaiah is central, offering themes of justice, suffering, and messianic hope later interpreted as prefiguring Christ. The chapter then turns to Hellenistic philosophy – especially, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism – which informed Christian ideas about the soul, virtue, and the good life. These schools stressed moral discipline and the pursuit of wisdom, values that Christianity absorbed and reinterpreted theologically. The Roman contribution centered on imperial power, civic virtue, and especially the Latin language, which became Christianity’s primary medium in the West. Roman thinkers like Cicero and Virgil helped transmit Greek ideas, emphasizing duty, eloquence, and destiny. These strands – Jewish, Greek, and Roman – were not seamlessly integrated, but their dynamic interaction laid the groundwork for a western intellectual tradition rooted in moral inquiry, historical depth, and a universalizing spiritual vision.

The nundinal and intercalary cycles were probably intended to operate with great regularity, and scholars often assume that they did so. Ancient calendars, however, were often managed calendars, and officials often intervened in their operations for a variety of purposes. There is virtually no evidence for the nundinal cycle, but the pontiffs, who were in charge of the calendar, intercalated with some irregularity. One can also find traces of criticism of pontifical practice, which was often conducted in terms of speculation about ideal political orders and the gods. In this way, it reveals a long-term tension between ideals and the actual conduct of public and cultic activity.

Chapter 3 focuses on liberty and servitude, and the way in which these conditions – defined in Roman law in terms of the status of individual persons – are predicated of collective bodies described as civitates and populi in Roman political philosophy. Machiavelli’s relationship to this particular conception of liberty has been at the centre of much recent literature on classical, early modern, and contemporary republicanism, but his theory of freedom requires closer scrutiny, not least because of its relationship to a line of thinking about popular self-government which had been used by humanists to articulate a theory of popular sovereignty from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century in Renaissance Florence. This chapter shows how the key concepts of this thesis come from Cicero’s philosophy, which conveys to the humanists an influential account of how to constitute the entity which he calls the populus as the ultimate bearer of public authority. Cicero’s view of ‘the people’ as the master of its own affairs informs his definition of the res publica as res populi – literally, a ‘thing of the people’ – and this chapter shows how it informs the very basis of the classical republican tradition which Machiavelli inherits and reworks.

Any proper investigation of Machiavelli’s conceptualization of the state has to commence where his own investigation begins: with his definition of what states are. Accordingly, this chapter elucidates the particular theory of definition which informs Machiavelli’s theory of lo stato. Machiavelli is continually preoccupied with what we ‘call’ things – or how we ‘nominate’ them, as he sometimes puts it. These are matters of definition in a technical sense, pursued according to a set of argumentative procedures derived from the pages of the ancient Roman rhetorical theorists Cicero and Quintilian. This chapter reconstructs their theory of definition, showing how they classify things in rhetorical argument, before turning to illustrate the theory in action in Roman antiquity by examining how the concept of the civitas – the crucially important political noun used in classical Latin to denote ‘the city’, ‘city-state’, or ‘citizenry’ – is handled in the writings of Cicero, Seneca, and Augustine. The second section of the chapter analyses the reception of this theory and its application to the idea of the civitas in medieval and Renaissance political culture in order to explain how and why Machiavelli comes to rely upon it.

This chapter discusses the social and professional contexts for the emergence of the Italian humanists as a new cultural “class,” and traces the classical and Christian antecedents of their formation of a substantive discourse on secular vocation.

This chapter further situates my Kantian account of thought experiments among competing views. I identify problems for contemporary accounts and contrast epistemological questions (How do thought experiments justify?), which guide most of the current scholarship, with Kant’s emphasis on cognition [Erkenntnis] (What makes concepts meaningful?). I note that metaphilosophical questions on the relationship between conceivability and possibility are not relevant for thought experiments if they are an apparatus for cognition, which is neutral toward the truth or actuality of the objects of cognition. Contemporary accounts that begin with Kuhn’s epistemological question differ on what the basis of knowledge might be. Leading approaches appeal to logic, stored knowledge, and intellectual intuition. I will briefly sketch here some of the basic approaches.

For Cicero, effective Republican leadership entailed both morality and agency. Morality meant actions that supported the Republic, while agency was required for such actions to be carried out. It is difficult to subsume any theory of leadership under a single word, but I argue that Cicero’s leadership theory can be signified by consilium. This term encapsulates the best mental and moral aspects of leadership as well as the actions and results of acting on behalf of the Republic. It is inherently tied to the practice of Republican politics, a practice that was fundamentally transactional. Cicero used this idea of consilium to support his acceptance of Octavian as an ally against Antony. According to his theory of consilium, Cicero acted correctly against Antony, but Octavian ultimately exposed the flaws in Cicero’s theory when he refused to participate in traditional Republican transactional politics.

Tusculans 1 offers a multi-faceted refutation of the proposition ‘death is an evil’, accomplished in part through a detailed doxography of a wide range of philosophers of different schools. This survey is far from a jumble of contradictory views, however: Cicero avoids dogmatic insistence on the arguments of any single school and has instead crafted a minimally sectarian protreptic designed to convince readers of any philosophical persuasion that death is not an evil, an approach whose origin he traces back to Socrates’ reflections on death in Plato’s Apology. Furthermore, I argue that this approach amounts to a direct challenge to Cicero’s philosophical rivals, a group of Epicurean authors writing in Latin – including, I speculate, Lucretius – whom Cicero had criticiaed in several prefaces for their narrow-minded dogmatism. In Book 1 Cicero therefore tackles a topic of perennial interest, illustrates how philosophy can and should be written, and attempts to marginalise his Epicurean opponents.

In Tusculans 1 Cicero gives a lengthy rebuttal of the thesis that death is an evil. This raises a puzzle: how can such a one-sided presentation aspire to reveal whether it is more plausible that death is or is not an evil? Invoking the Tusculans’ practical aim – the removal of emotional disturbance – does not fully satisfy, since it is unclear how effective persuasion can be if the contrary position does not receive a fair hearing. I show that as main speaker in the book Cicero warns against over-confidence in embracing positions that one wishes to be true; and I argue that as author Cicero portrays the interlocutor of Tusculans 1 as a salutary example of how not to approach the kind of questions about death with which the work engages. We are encouraged to see the interlocutor’s failure as one not of character but of inexperience in philosophical method.

The definitions of the emotions in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations 3 which refer to magnitude are not meant to represent Stoic orthodoxy, and should not be read as direct evidence for the Stoic theory. Cicero’s aims and methods in the Tusculans led him to use non-Stoic accounts of the emotions, in order to offer a kind of consolation that is neutral between Stoic and Peripatetic theories of value. This chapter also discusses the structure of the Tusculans as a unified whole.

An introduction to the historical and philosophical context of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations and an overview of some general questions to be investigated in the volume, particularly: the question of Cicero’s ‘Socratic method’, his use of dialogue, his claim to argue on both sides of a question, and the relationship between this and his Academic scepticism.

The Tusculan Disputations can be read as a complex of four projects: (1) a set of formal exercises in the schola genre; (2) a therapeutic operation directed against the emotions, and fear in particular, with an agonistic relation to Epicurean predecessors; (3) a project of edification, aiming to reinforce the reader’s commitment to virtue; and (4) an exhibition or advertisement of the powers of philosophy and its advantages to Rome. Together, these dimensions of the Tusculans explain the peculiarities of its argumentation and literary approach. It is plausibly the aspiration to advertise philosophy to Rome (4) which is most fundamental: therapy (2) and edification (3) are projects in which philosophy can usefully display its powers, and the schola form (1) is convenient for doing so. These projects are to be distinguished from that of philosophical inquiry; the Tusculans is informed more by Cicero’s patriotic pragmatism than by his scepticism.

The aim of this chapter is to investigate the teaching of the so-called Peripatetics in the Tusculan Disputations with regard to their views on passions. Such views serve Cicero’s dialectical purposes and his wish to present the debate in Books 3–5 as primarily a dialectical exchange between Stoic ‘lack of passions’ (apatheia) and Peripatetic ‘moderation of passions’ (metriopatheia). Moreover, the Peripatetics are presented as siding with the early followers of Plato, and in particular with Crantor, in a unified camp against the Stoics. I argue that, despite the polemical features of Cicero’s presentation of the Peripatetics in the work, the metriopatheia view merits serious consideration, being much more than just a foil for an argument in favour of Stoicism.