| Summary: | This book explores from different but mutually informing disciplinary viewpoints the rise at Rome in the first centuries bce and ce of philosophy as a distinctly Roman mode of discourse; a central objective (albeit not to the exclusion of Greek philosophical writing at Rome) is to examine the ways in which, and the extent to which, the expressive capabilities of the Latin language gave distinctive shape and character to Roman philosophical discourse. While the birth of philosophical discourse in Latin is naturally implicated in Rome's ongoing negotiation with Hellenistic cultural influence, this volume seeks to stress the confidence and enterprise with which Republican practitioners, Lucretius and Cicero most obvious among them, embarked on their pioneering philosophical projects; and then to stress the strategies with which Imperial writers, Seneca most prominent among them, built on or modified the advances made by their Republican forebears. On this approach, Latin philosophical authors do not simply receive, absorb, or passively transmit the Hellenistic models on which they draw. They mold, control, and react to or against those models, experimenting with the inherited systems and reformatting them as part of an assured assimilation of imported modes of thought. A key aim of this volume is therefore to picture this positive development at Rome through a series of chapter-by-chapter snapshots, all of which diversely contribute to our exploratory vision of what is Roman about Roman philosophy.
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