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2 results

Veiling in the Late Antique World
  • Susanna Drake
  • Published online:
    26 November 2025
    Print publication:
    18 December 2025
  • Veiling meant many things to the ancients. On women, veils could signify virtue, beauty, piety, self-control, and status. On men, covering the head could signify piety or an emotion such as grief. Late Roman mosaics show people covering their hands with veils when receiving or giving something precious. They covered their altars, doorways, shrines, and temples; and many covered their heads when sacrificing to their gods. Early Christian intellectuals such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa used these everyday practices of veiling to interpret sacred texts. These writers understood the divine as veiled, and the notion of a veiled spiritual truth informed their interpretation of the bible. Veiling in the Late Antique World provides the first assessment of textual and material evidence for veiling in the late antique Mediterranean world. Susanna Drake here explores the relation between the social history of the veil and the intellectual history of the concept of truth as veiled/revealed.

  • Chapter 11 - ‘Everyone has a price at which he sells himself’

  • from Part III - Human Feeling and Ethical Development
  • Edited by Melissa Merritt, University of New South Wales, Sydney
  • Book:
    Kant and Stoic Ethics
    Published online:
    18 July 2025
    Print publication:
    07 August 2025, pp 187-205

  • Summary

    “Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Immanuel Kant quotes this remark in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, attributing it to “a member of English Parliament.” This chapter argues, however, that the context of the quotation in the Religion alludes to the arresting pedagogical practices of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “different people sell themselves at different prices.” The chapter argues that there are two sides of Epictetus’ pedagogical strategies: a jolting side meant to expose self-deception and practical inconsistency; and an uplifting side meant to arouse the resources by which it is possible to progress towards virtue – specifically, our sense of kinship with the divine insofar as we are rational. This chapter argues that Kant develops a conception of self-respect in later practical works that plausibly draws on Epictetus, and his distinctive version of the traditional Stoic account of rational agency.