This chapter shows how competing notions of care shape ethical, political, and amorous life in Shakespearean drama. If care is a virtue, it seems unique among other classically recognized virtues such as courage, justice, and temperance, in that care is more ubiquitous as a feature of normative life and yet less conceptually distinct. While sometimes appearing as a virtue in itself — or as a precondition to the sharpening of any particular virtue — care just as often shows up in Shakespeare’s plays as a demanding expenditure of psychosomatic energies that shades into anxious worry or self-consuming attachments. This chapter in turn illustrates how ancient Greek and Roman virtue ethics inform Shakespeare’s articulations of care as an innate and omnipresent facet of human experience, which can benefit self and others but in its extreme forms also weigh upon body and soul to cause harm. Despite cultivating skepticism concerning our human abilities to know and to exercise the virtues of care, Shakespearean drama also stages encounters with care in its rarest guise: as a benefit that alleviates forms of suffering or distress to which human life is invariably susceptible, and which cultivates our capacities for virtue.

Stoic virtue relies on the judgment of internal impressions. This aesthetic and ethical process echoes Shakespeare’s theatrical art, which frequently focuses on its own artifice and capacity to affect reality. While early modern dramatists frequently mocked Stoicism as stuffy and impractical, a closer look at fundamental texts by Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius reveals their interest not in attaining perfect sagacity but instead in the day-to-day reality of attempting to live better. Stoicism, thought of in this way, becomes what Pierre Hadot calls “a way of life,” and allows us to read Shakespeare’s drama more charitably as a mode of philosophical exercise. This chapter surveys Stoic understandings of virtue before turning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream to examine how the play’s testing the imaginative powers of theatricality mirrors the Stoic’s internal processes of judgment. Drawing on key Stoic texts as well as the 1581 translation of Seneca’s Hippolytus, a source for Midsummer, I propose that the play reveals the potential for imaginative impressions to become mere fantasy — but also admits to their power over our consciousness. While this may appear anti-Stoic, Midsummer in fact mounts its apology for the imagination by practicing mercy, a key Stoic virtue.

Heir to a shared Indo-European eudaimonist thoughtworld, Shakespeare’s Hamlet dramatizes the interplay of Buddhist, Skeptic, and Stoic philosophies at the affective-cognitive interface indispensable for virtue in action. Hamlet’s search for appropriate response — in the role of “scourge and minister” thrust upon him to redress regicide — requires equanimity, and equanimity, as the play suggests, ultimately requires other-focused compassion to counteract affective-cognitive affliction: the emptying of self-engrossed mental proliferation prepares the mind for virtuous action. Our ability in Greco-Buddhist wisdom traditions to stand firm by judgment and detachment from destructive emotions and mental disturbances is encapsulated in Hamlet’s famous line in banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “There’s nothing either good / or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.244-45). This key idea from Buddhist, Skeptic, and Stoic philosophies compresses therapy for emotional control through skepticism, or suspension of judgment. This equanimity in Buddhist-Stoic spiritual practices, moreover, interacts closely with two primary virtues: compassion and wisdom. Throughout most of the play, Hamlet’s quandary is exacerbated by his overactive ruminations until finally in Act 5, his feelings of compassion toward another, Laertes, relieves and releases Hamlet from his psychohumoral affliction and lends him the emotional equanimity and mental clarity to take virtuous action.

The De re publica contains a sophisticated strain of reflection on the place of the honor motive in a good life, and in particular in the good life of public service. Cicero finds a way for a conscientious public servant to be interested in receiving honor while still directing his actions at the public good and that only. Further, he finds a use for merited honor and merited shame in the moral education of citizens and political leaders. The chapter argues that Cicero’s account of how honor motivates a person, both ordinarily and in the normative case, is fundamentally more similar to the views on honor put forward by the Hellenistic Stoics than it is to the tripartite model of psyche used by Plato in his Republic. As so often in De re publica, what we have is Platonism filtered through and modified by subsequent Stoic thought. But Cicero’s own experience in politics has also given stimulus to his reflections; and conversely, the philosophical position on honor that he develops in his writing becomes part of his self-representation as a public figure.

In his De re publica and De officiis, Cicero discusses the conditions that must exist for a war to be justly commenced and waged. In developing his account, Cicero lays the groundwork for many of the principles of the later just war tradition. However, commentators have detected inconsistencies between Cicero’s account of ‘the justice of going to war’ and his reliance on the competitive honor code of the ancient Mediterranean world, which undergirds much of his account of conduct within war. Commentators usually see Cicero’s commendation of wars undertaken for the sake of glory as inconsistent both with the legal and religious principles undergirding his account and with the Stoic account of justice derived from Panaetius, whom Cicero follows in De officiis. In this chapter, I reconstruct Cicero’s account of just war theory and explain why he could plausibly see coherence where the modern commentators see incoherence.

Chapter 2 explores how Sidney uses literary form for passionate experimentation and develops a sophisticated affective vocabulary that intersects with the reformation of contentment. Neither The Old Arcadia nor the revised New Arcadia reproduce Protestant concepts of contentedness or proselytize an idealized Christian psychology. Instead, in The Old Arcadia Sidney pursues the strategies of romance, including the “wandering,” “error,” and “trial” described by Patricia Parker, and arrives at counter-intuitive and potentially scandalizing conclusions about the emotion. More specifically, Sidney aligns both sexual satisfaction and virtuous endurance with contentment, and he makes the character Pyrocles’s erotic fulfillment in Books 3 and 4 instrumental to his pious suffering in Book 5. However, in The New Arcadia, Sidney displaces the most extreme manifestations of desire from the four young lovers onto their antagonists, and he disentangles contentment and constancy in the face of adversity. By pushing contentment to the pastoral peripheries to emphasize the revised work’s more chivalric tenor, Sidney recoils from his most innovative contribution to the Renaissance discourse.

The Romans adaptation of Greek philosophy was illustrated by the Stoics and Epicureans. The Stoics held that humanity is determined by the fates of nature, while the Epicureans believed that happiness came from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Plato was revived by Plotinus and dominated Roman philosophy during the early years of Christianity. Both the missionary zeal of early Christians and the tranquility of Roman administration rapidly spread Christianity. The teachings of Jesus were bolstered by defenders, who gave Christianity form and content. St. Augustine successfully reinterpreted Platonic thought within Christian theology, and the consequent influence on psychology continued well beyond. With the fall of the Western empire, intellectual life came to a virtual halt, and only the monastic movement preserved remnants of Greek and Roman civilization. The papacy assumed a leading role in spiritual direction and civil administration. The power shift to the East saw the Byzantine Empire assume a distinctive Greek character. The rise of Islam threatened the survival of Christianity in the Middle East and in North Africa. But, at the same time, much of the Greek heritage of scholarship was preserved and extended in the great academic centers of medieval Islam.

Nearly everyone considers death to be a terrible harm and mortality a very sad feature of human existence. Consistent with this attitude, most people seem to believe that getting older (at least once we have grown up) is regrettable insofar as it brings us closer to death. Is it sensible to fear death and the ageing process that brings us closer to it? After rejecting one philosophical strategy for stoicism about death, I will contend that it is most reasonable not to fear death and ageing if we reach, or are likely to reach, the age of life expectancy with a decent quality of life. My first argument for this thesis appeals to what we can reasonably expect out of human life. My second argument appeals to the wisdom of overcoming what I will call our tendency towards “cosmic narcissism.”

Chapter 3 considers the various divisions of moral virtue. This chapter describes Thomas’s response to the Stoic thesis that the virtuous person lacks passions. Aristotle states that some moral virtues are about the passions. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Neoplatonic thesis that there are different kinds or stages of virtue that lead to contemplation.

Chapter 5 is about the properties of virtue. These properties follow upon a virtue by the simple fact that it is a virtue. There are four such properties that seem rather loosely connected: the mean of virtue, the connection between the virtues, the order of the virtues, and the duration of virtue after this life. Despite this somewhat loose ordering, each of these properties must be studied if we are to understand Thomas’s account of virtue as a whole.

The somewhat neglected Wisdom of Solomon, or ‘Book of Wisdom’, contains concepts important not only for understanding wisdom in the rest of the OT but also for understanding how wisdom bridged both testaments. Joachim Schaper gives priority to the book’s theology and its place in Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian thought. He provides an overview of the book’s structure and versions, its intellectual context, its universalistic conceptions of God and humans in history, and how the book exhibits a ‘spiritual exercise’. Most important here are Wisdom’s use of πνευμα (‘spirit’) and its amalgam of Platonic, Stoic and Egyptian elements. It offers a distinct interpretation of the exodus, with which Schaper accounts for ideas of liberation and eschatology. As for the book as spiritual exercise, the discussion turns to matters of genre and literary function, disclosing its purpose to fortify religious beliefs and one’s self-mastery.

This chapter provides one of the first accounts of Cavendish’s theory of the passions in her later works of natural philosophy, mainly the Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1663) and her Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668). We argue that reading Cavendish’s philosophy in light of a Stoic-inspired model of causation highlights what is most original and distinctive about her theory of the passions. We analyze Cavendish’s ideas against the backdrop of her theories of occasional and principal causes, and highlight significant differences between Cavendish’s philosophy and the then-popular Cartesian account of the passions. We also examine how her philosophical ideas are put into practice in her dramatic work, “The Unnatural Tragedy” (1662). We maintain that the dramatic genre enables Cavendish to demonstrate how sociable passions might be communicated through sympathy, and unsociable passions discouraged through antipathy. In light of both the theoretical and practical aspects of her philosophy, we conclude that Cavendish stands as a significant innovator among theorists of the passions in the mid-seventeenth century.

This chapter explores the dialogue between civic rhetoric and literary texts, especially works of history and geography, in the later Hellenistic world. It argues for complex processes of mutual exchange and influence between the particularist civic ideology preserved in poleis’ inscribed decrees and the cosmopolitan ideas and projects of intellectuals. Citizens of some later Hellenistic poleis, such as Priene, strove to reconcile particularist and universalist perspectives, taking account of the cosmopolitan arguments and language of Hellenistic philosophers and other intellectuals. At the same time, later Hellenistic literary authors drew on, and reimagined, local civic ideals and institutions in order to give more concrete form to the abstract cosmopolitan ideals developed earlier in the Hellenistic period. The two main authors studied here, Diodorus and Strabo, were both deeply imbued with the values and forms of thought characteristic of the later Hellenistic poleis, which left their imprint even on those thinkers’ contrasting moves to transcend the small-scale polis and advocate more expansive forms of literary and political community. Whereas Diodorus strove to preserve aspects of the civic ideal within his cosmopolitanism, Strabo’s cosmopolitanism was more of a reaction against polis particularism – which remained, nonetheless, a foundational point of reference for him.

This chapter examines two aspects of Strabo’s self-definition, both of which are indirect and reveal the twin preoccupations with intellectual distinction and political utility, especially in connection with the value of Greek education for the Roman imperial project. The geographical aspect of Strabo’s self-definition inscribes him in a tradition whereby Asia Minor is the main source of intellectual capital, from where it flows largely towards Rome. Strabo’s philosophical self-definition ranges much more widely than the doctrines of the Hellenistic schools: the Geography opens with an argument aimed at demonstrating that geography is a philosophical pursuit, which appeals to a tradition of wisdom going back to Homer. Geography’s philosophical credentials also include ‘wide learning’ (exemplified primarily in technical mathematical knowledge), as well as manifold benefits under the general umbrella of the ‘art of living’. The chapter nevertheless argues that there is more than ‘pseudo-philosophisation’ in Strabo’s work, in the form of clear Stoic echoes, albeit not centred around the theme of divine providence, where Strabo makes innovative, ‘un-Stoic’ remarks.