The eleventh volume of the Studia Praesocratica series presents a welcome challenge to scholars of early Greek philosophy to get to grips with the exciting and valuable material found in the Herculanean testimonia.Footnote ¹ These texts provide a resource that has often been overlooked even by those seeking relatively recently to present comprehensive collections of texts and evidence on the Presocratics, and Christian Vassallo has done a great service in producing this extensive collection of textual evidence, along with English translations and commentary. As Vassallo makes clear in his introduction and individual commentary sections, a close study of the reception of early Greek philosophy in the Epicurean tradition throws up exciting new perspectives that may well provide a basis to challenge standard narratives, particularly with respect to early epistemology and theology. The work is explicitly designed to be of value not just to papyrologists but to scholars of early Greek philosophy too. With this in mind, Vassallo presents the evidence separately for each individual Presocratic, with separate commentary sections aiming to put the evidence into its Epicurean context. He extends the coverage of his already monumental work by including a useful appendix on ‘Diogenes of Oinoanda's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy’ (595–645). Any scholar of early Greek philosophy seeking to undertake a comprehensive survey of the textual evidence will be grateful to Vassallo for the work he has done and for how accessible he has rendered these texts.

Like Vassallo, albeit in a different way, Livio Rossetti has sought to challenge established narratives about early Greek philosophy, particularly Eleatic philosophy. Verso la filosofia. Nuove prospettive su Parmenide, Zenone e Melisso is a testament to Rossetti's influence.Footnote ² The volume has its origins in the tenth meeting of the Eleatica conference, held in 2017, at which Rossetti presented three lectures on Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus respectively. In these lectures, which form the central part of the book, Rossetti develops on the interpretation of Parmenides he has set out elsewhere, with an emphasis on the significance of the philosopher's scientific thinking, and in opposition to reading the fragments of his poem as presenting a systematic philosophy. As elsewhere, Rossetti presents a valuable challenge to the tradition, well entrenched within Anglo-American scholarship on the Eleatics in particular, of focusing on the logical aspects of these thinkers at the expense of a richer understanding of their project. The nature of this challenge is well demonstrated by the second half of the volume, which presents ten diverse responses to Rossetti's account. Some focus on its details in relation to specific passages. Others consider the value of Rossetti's general conceptual framework in approaching these thinkers. The final chapter in the volume is Rossetti's response to those responses, so that the collection as a whole gives a lively account of the state of scholarship on the Eleatics, and the valuable provocation that Rossetti continues to offer with his work.

In Aristotle on Shame and Learning to be Good, Marta Jimenez presents a fascinating and original account of the place of shame in Aristotle's ethics.Footnote ³ She considers how he incorporates both the positive and negative aspects of this difficult, but undoubtedly important, emotion, and grants it a fundamental role in ethical progress. Jimenez's central claim is that ‘shame for Aristotle is not just a helpful aid to learning to be good, but an essential part of that process’ (2). It is, in fact, what Jimenez calls a ‘proto-virtue’. By encouraging reflection on our own behaviour and responsiveness to external moral views, shame inspires moral reflection and reasoning and, thus, ethical progress. Jimenez finds in Aristotle a defence against the concerns that a focus on shame may encourage ethical superficiality or capitulation to external pressures. Most significantly, she argues that it is shame which provides the means to explain how, in Aristotle's view, we can use habituation to achieve virtue. It is a common worry that Aristotle creates a problem for himself by suggesting both that it is through acting virtuously that the non-virtuous can progress towards virtue and that acting virtuously requires understanding and correct motivation. How can we act virtuously without yet being virtuous? Jimenez argues persuasively that it is the ‘proto-virtue’ of shame which enable learners to act with the correct goal and motivation, without yet having achieved the understanding of full virtue. This is a valuable addition to both the scholarship on Aristotle's ethics and the literature on the place of shame in ancient and modern ethics.

Pavel Gregorić and George Karamanolis have co-edited a collection of essays which combine to present a careful and interesting commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian De Mundo.Footnote ⁴ These chapters go beyond the common questions about authenticity or source identification to treat the work on its own terms, presenting a collection of valuable insights into the purpose and argument of this intriguing, stylistically varied, protreptic text, ostensibly addressed to Alexander III of Macedon. The eight essays are generally dedicated to individual chapters of De Mundo, except where topics spread over more than one chapter, and the contributors are united in an attempt to illuminate the essentially Aristotelian nature of the work's explanation of the relation between god and the cosmos. This is work that will be of great value to those with an interest in the Aristotelian tradition, and ancient protrepic, cosmology, and theology. It more than fulfils the editors aim ‘to highlight what is distinctive and valuable in De Mundo’ (6).

Two new edited volumes present diverse perspectives on ancient political thinking. In Utopias in Ancient Thought, we find a wide-ranging collection of chapters on utopian thinking in antiquity, going well beyond Plato's Republic and, indeed, explicitly philosophical texts.Footnote ⁵ The editors, Pierre Destrée, Jan Opsomer, and Geert Roskam, bring together fourteen interesting discussions that consider where we find utopias or utopian thinking in antiquity, as well as its legacy in the utopian tradition of Thomas More and others. In doing so, they offer new perspectives on how we might categorize ‘utopian thinking’ in the first place. Two chapters are dedicated to the place of utopian thinking in Greek comedy. Giulia Sissa (‘The Quest for the Best: Praise, Blame, and Utopia’, 1–36) considers the role of utopias as all-encompassing political structures presented in specific contexts to reflect on and critique contemporary societies. Comedy is a natural home for a project that aims to criticize and deflate the tendency for unreflective patriotism, and Sissi argues that Greek utopian thinking has its origins as a comic response to the Athenian tendency toward excessive self-praise. By creating a better society somewhere else, Aristophanes aims to force his audience to reflect on their current surroundings. Thornton Lockwood also looks beyond explicitly philosophical texts, to argue that Herodotus can justifiably be considered a utopian political theorist (‘What Thomas More Learned from Herodotus about Utopia’, 56–76). In doing so, he aims to challenge narrow modern notions of what constitutes political theory, and argues that Herodotus should be considered a political theorist on the grounds that he incorporates political theory and evaluation of societies in a manner that is recognizably utopian. Lockwood makes the useful observation that Herodotus, like other Greek thinkers, is likely to be prompted to such considerations by the sort of blank-slate thinking encouraged by the contemporary practice of colonization.

It is unsurprising that Plato gets a fair amount of attention within this volume, including from Julia Annas (‘Plato's Ideal Society and Utopia’, 103–20), who sets out to challenge the common claim that the Laws represent a pessimistic revision of the utopian optimism of the Republic. Annas argues that the Republic has two central, but distinct, aims: first, to give an account of the ideally just society and individual and, second, to present a utopia. Those passages in Republic which set out practical arrangements in Kallipolis are not aimed at helping us to be just in this non-ideal world, but rather at developing ‘the first philosophical utopia’ (108). The question remains of how we get from here to there: that is, from this non-ideal world to the utopia of Kallipolis. The Laws attempts to answer this question by suggesting that a combination of new citizens and a new law code might enable the practical foundation of a state that combines Spartan respect for the law with Athenian commitment to political participation. Annas is particularly interesting in her brief discussion of Atlantis, and the observation that Plato's vicious anti-utopia seems to hold an unfortunate attraction for the reader (as the history of its reception indicates).

Christoph Horn discusses the degree to which Aristotle can be regarded as a utopian thinker (‘Aristotle's “City of our prayers” within the History of Political Utopianism’, 167–83). Focusing on the reference to a ‘City of our prayers’ in Politics 7.4, Horn suggests that this is intended as a reference to the ideal of a political constitution, rather than as picking out any particular constitution as ideal. Aristotle's utopia is one which enables its citizens to develop their virtues, so that we can measure the success of individual constitutions by the degree to which they facilitate this progress. Sean McConnell offers an interesting discussion of Cicero's response to philosophical accounts of the Golden Age, especially that of Dicaearchus of Messana (‘Cicero and the Golden Age Tradition’, 213–29). While Cicero may seem to be pessimistic in his treatment of ‘ideal states’, there is reason to think that he is responding to narratives of the Golden Age as informing his analysis of Roman political virtue and politics. In the final chapter of the volume, David Engels set out an illuminating comparative study of ‘Tao Yuanming's “Peach Blossom Source” and the ideal of the “Golden Age” in Classical Antiquity’ (277–303). Engels describes the context and content of the Chinese utopian text to demonstrate both its similarities to and differences from Greek Golden Age narratives. He notes the specific differences from Greek thinking in a tendency of Chinese utopias to exclude an active role for the gods and to incline towards the apolitical. The editors are to be commended for the range of topics and texts they have included within this volume, which offers a great many fascinating points of dialogue and diversity.

In State and Nature, Peter Adamson and Christof Rapp present seventeen chapters, divided across four chronological sections, tracing the relationship between nature and political thinking in ancient and medieval philosophy.Footnote ⁶ As the editors make clear in their introduction, their goal is to scrutinize and challenge the common assumption that ancient and medieval philosophy always considered political and social institutions in terms of their ‘naturalness’ or, indeed, ‘unnaturalness’. The collection aims to provide nuance to this view by showing that the notion of sociopolitical institutions as potentially artificial can be found much earlier in the history of philosophy than is often assumed. In the first of two chapters on Plato's Republic, Oliver Primavesi (‘Human Nature and Legal Norms: Antiphon the Sophist as Anonymous Target in Plato's Republic’, 3–33) argues that the description (at 588b–d) of the soul as a fusion of three animals (or natures) whose growth is to be regulated by legal norms specifically targets Antiphon's theory of the antithesis between physis and nomos. This, Primavesi suggests, indicates that Book 9's hypothetical proponent of the idea that injustice can be beneficial is Antiphon himself.

Aristotle features in four chapters. In the last of these, Béatrice Lienemann (‘Aristotle on the Rationality of Women: Consequences for Virtue and Practical Accountability’, 135–56) considers what underlies Aristotle's views on women as possessing a nature unsuited to politics. She suggests that, although Aristotle thinks women are capable of a certain type of limited practical wisdom, it is their natural lack of the type required for politics which limits them to virtue requiring rule by another. Two chapters are dedicated to Cicero, including Raphael Woolf's subtle reading of De republica, De officiis, and De legibus (‘Unnatural Law: A Ciceronian Perspective’, 221–45) as indicating a balance between Cicero's commitments to the existence of general moral principles and his understanding that societal differences may affect the way in which conformity to those principles is cashed out in different societies.

In the last of three chapters on late antiquity, George Karamanolis (‘Early Christian Philosophers on Society and Political Norms’, 317–40) considers the development of early Christian thought on the relationship between the Christian community and non-ideal contemporary political institutions. While some set up Christian ethics as running parallel to or in some sense compatible with pagan politics, others sought to reject pagan norms altogether. Augustine's City of God marks a shift in drawing together political and ethical norms to identify a Christian ‘city’ existing within and across different political regimes. In the first chapter of the final section, on medieval philosophy, Peter Adamson focuses on the Abū Bakr al-Rāzī and Judah Hallevi, who present strikingly similar critiques of naturalism in arguing for direct divine action as a superior explanation of ‘natural’ phenomena. Both treat god as a direct ruler of the cosmos, rather than as a legislator. The impressive scope of this volume, both in chronological terms and in methodological approaches, ensures that it will be appreciated by a wide audience.

There has been a greatly welcome boom in scholarship on Cicero's philosophy over the last decade. This trend is supported and further encouraged by the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Cicero's Philosophy.Footnote ⁷ The editors, Jed Atkins and Thomas Bénatouïl, collect eighteen chapters by an impressive range of scholars, which serve well to demonstrate, in particular, that there is more to Cicero than political philosophy. The chapters on philosophy in his letters and speeches will, I hope, prove of particular benefit in encouraging further appreciation of the complexity of Cicero's philosophical style and interests.

Susanne Bobzien is our most important scholar of determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility in ancient philosophy. Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility collects her nine irreplaceable essays on various aspects of this topic, covering the period from Aristotle to Alexander of Aphrodisias, all of which have been revised for inclusion here.Footnote ⁸ The first chapter (‘The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem: Aristotle to Alexander of Aphrodisias’, 1–50), originally published in 1998, provides a valuable overview of both the shape of the questions and Bobzien's general approach and commitments. Here, as in the individual chapters dedicated mainly to specific texts or schools, Bobzien demonstrates with admirable clarity, not only the ways in which ancient debates on these issues have much to contribute to modern discussions, but also the degree to which those ancient versions take a very different form, built on very different preconceptions (particularly in respect to the significance of free will).

Calcidius on Plato's Timaeus is the product of twenty years’ work on Calcidius’ partial Latin translation of and commentary on the Timaeus.Footnote ⁹ Gretchen Reydam-Schils's detailed study focuses on a Latin text of particular significance for the later philosophical tradition in order to provide a better understanding of the broader intellectual context and commentary tradition with which it engages and, most importantly, of the text itself. In doing so, she provides a challenge to those who have tended to treat Calcidius as a sourcebook, by providing a lucid account of Calcidius’ methodology, as well as of the work's central themes and interpretative position.

Richard McKirahan has done invaluable spadework in producing A Vocabulary of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle.Footnote ¹⁰ He mines the Greek–English indexes of the first one hundred volumes published in Bloomsbury's Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, published over the last forty years, to produce a dictionary of philosophical terms (with more than 12,000 entries) from post-Hellenistic late antique philosophy (from the second to the seventh centuries ce). For each term, McKirahan lists the range of translations employed across the series, indicating frequency and location. Readers can then cross-reference terms in the index of a particular volume. This is a really useful resource for philologists, translators, and students of ancient philosophy. It is also an interesting ‘meta-project’, providing information about the sorts of choices and preferences made by translators of individual volumes. This is not a dictionary as such, because it goes beyond what a dictionary can do in what it reveals about modern scholarship on the commentators on Aristotle.