Philosophy in a Roman Context

This paper argues that in epistemology and ethics, Cicero and Augustine are not diametrically opposed. In Contra Academicos, Augustine attempts to disprove the skepticism of Cicero’s Academica.

This paper argues that Epictetus’ “On Freedom” (IV, 1) departs from conventional Stoic writings, subversively confronting Roman politics with an Aesopic stance against authority. Standardly, Stoicism has been seen as largely apolitical with its signature focus on the self regardless of political circumstance. Although potential moral equality for all might be democratizing in theory, as a matter of practice the elite Stoic was no boundary-smasher.

This paper will trace the relationship of Seneca the Younger to a mode of thought that has come under recent scrutiny in the humanities, referred to as “paranoid reading” (Sedgwick 2003) or “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (Felski 2015).

For a dialogue clothed in retrospection and even nostalgia, Cicero’s de Senectute looks remarkably toward the future (contra Blom 2010). Writing in the final weeks of Caesar’s dictatorship, Cicero dramatizes the intergenerational crisis threatening the Republic (cf. Syme 1980) by accentuating the difference between “Cato’s” ability to envision, from the dramatic past, the future of a happy old age and his own inability to do the same from the compositional present.

In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates offers an argument for the soul’s immortality, dubbed the ‘Affinity Argument’ (78c-80b). Socrates argues that since the soul shares its essential properties with the invisible and the divine, it necessarily shares the further property of immortality. There was already debate among the Neoplatonists about the correct interpretation of the argument (Gertz 2011). The early history of the reception of the Affinity Argument, however, is often overlooked.

In De beneficiis 6.32, Seneca recalls the banishment of Julia the Elder in 2 BCE and claims that she engaged in prostitution. Moreover, he locates her adultery in the political center of Rome: in the forum and on the speaker’s platform.