Peter Brunt was and remains a major Roman historian, unusual among historians in his knowledge of ancient philosophy, above all Stoicism. He was particularly interested in Stoicism at Rome, and like the Roman Stoics themselves, in Stoicism as an ethical system, especially one concerned with the translation of its basic tenets into practice. Just how Stoicism did or did not impact on social life or on political thought and action was perhaps B.'s central preoccupation.
It was the topic of the most important of all his contributions to its understanding, his 1975 PBSR paper (ch. 7 in the present volume) ‘Stoicism and the Principate’: the published version of his inaugural lecture as Camden Professor at Oxford, and a tacit declaration of intent to differ from his immediate predecessor Ronald Syme, for whom ideas were of no significance for political analysis or action. In this posthumous collection that essay is joined by several other previously published papers, mostly from the 1970s, which work out that preoccupation in various ways. They include studies of Dio Chrysostom's Euboicus (ch. 4) and of Epictetus' pupils, Arrian in particular (ch. 9; now complemented by an innovative essay on ‘High-Ranking Roman Stoics under the Principate’, hitherto unpublished: ch. 8), and the classic article on Cicero's officium in the civil war (JRS 1986: ch. 6). There are three essays on Marcus Aurelius: B.'s majestic study of the Meditations (JRS 1974), and treatments of his track record as emperor in areas (slavery, Christianity) where philosophy might have been expected to do something to shape policy (chs 10–12).
But B. had also hoped to write a book on Stoicism (whose focus and make-up appear to have changed in his mind over time). This plan was never realized. In its stead he envisaged in his declining years a collection of his essays on Stoics and Stoicism, to include all the published material just listed and a number of substantial unpublished pieces written at various times (it seems) between about 1975 and 1998. The editors give succinct explanations of the way the six previously unpublished chapters now presented were selected by them.
The unpublished material is much of it rather different in character from the published articles, which are typically essays raising and then addressing some particular nexus of questions. Most of the ‘new’ pieces are conceived as systematic presentations of their subject matter: more expository and book-like. There is some overlap in their coverage both with each other and with some of the published chapters, and not surprisingly there is in consequence a certain amount of repetition. However all are of high quality, and all argue strongly in uncompromising style for interesting theses, even if few of them quite got this reader's adrenalin flowing as the key published items did.
One that did is ‘Chrysippus on Practical Morality’, which was perhaps significantly a lecture in origin. The editors have shrewdly made it the opening chapter. This attractively written essay performs two functions within the economy of the volume. First, it gives particularly striking expression to a main theme: the essential continuity of doctrine throughout the history of Stoicism from Zeno to Marcus. B. regarded periodization into early, middle and Roman as highly misleading. Here he makes the provocative argument that Chrysippus' focus in ethics was no less practical than Epictetus', who is represented as in most respects a loyal Chrysippean. Second, it articulates B.'s conviction that the framework within which the Stoics invariably did their ethics was a cosmic and providentialist theology, resulting in a thoroughly conservative stance on the political order, and a focus on the rôle the individual must accordingly play in society: ‘the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate’.
B. resumes these themes most systematically in the final chapter ‘Late Stoic Moralists’. But they make themselves felt throughout, not least in ch. 3, ‘Morality and Social Convention in Stoic Thought’, a study at once magisterial in its command of a great variety of textual material and consistently readable, and already in ch. 2, the longest piece in the volume, entitled ‘The Political Attitudes of the Old Stoa’. This meticulous, and to my mind convincing, examination of the evidence ends with a trenchant demolition of Erskine's attempt to find democratic and egalitarian strains in Stoic thought (and corresponding impact on politics at Sparta and in Rome).
Panaetius is a major presence in the book, on account of the persona theory expounded and illustrated in Cicero's De officiis, which is a work crucial to the argument of ‘Stoicism and the Principate’, and in ch. 5 (‘Panaetius in De officiis’) emerges in B.'s hands as nearly all (in Books 1 and 2) translation or paraphrase or abridgement of Panaetius — indeed the closest we get to a complete surviving treatise by a Greek Stoic. As is observed by the editors, to whom thanks are owed for labours as strenuous and meticulous as B.'s own, this view is not the current flavour of the month. B.'s vigorous restatement of the case for it deserves to launch further reconsiderations.
As a whole, Studies in Stoicism presents a profound, always challenging, wide-ranging and extraordinarily knowledgeable account of Stoicism, especially at Rome. It offers a unique and deeply considered view of its subject matter, which interests many more scholars now than it did when B. was first publishing in this area — as historians and scholars of literature and philosophy have found a common ground, before B. little explored.
