In this chapter I argue that Adam Smith’s moral, social and economic thought was influenced by both Stoic and Epicurean sources with surprising and fruitful results. Although these schools of thought conflicted in most respects, Smith adopted and adapted elements from each to creatively construct a kind of ‘benign-realist’ social science able to explain the order of the human universe while comprehending humans as they really were rather than as we might wish them to be. By combining the Stoic idea that all of nature is both divine and benign with a pragmatic Epicurean moral psychology, Smith not only reconciles his own realist intuitions with his sincere faith in a designed universe, but produces a compelling account of how economies and societies should operate. I show this by exploring how Smith responded to the Stoic and Epicurean approaches to virtue, self-interest, benevolence, justice and our obligations to others, especially strangers and foreigners. I also explore how he applied an Epicurean sensibility to reimagine Stoic cosmopolitanism.

For many in the late nineteenth-century Pater was a by-word for sensual pleasure and sexual licence, and it is this Pater that dominates Decadent Studies today. But many Victorians read Pater as recommending austere discipline and sensuous continence. Restraint can be read as central to Pater’s attempt to base a practical ethic on sceptical, aesthetic principles. Sense experience was crucially important to this ethic. But Pater repeatedly distinguishes between healthy, productive sensuousness, and a harmful sensuality that he associates with an excess of transience, disease, and death. He represents continence as evidence of the personal discipline that allows the aesthete to effectively filter the good from the bad, the healthy from the unhealthy, in objects or periods or people; as he put it, to make ‘use of the flower, when the fruit perhaps was useless or poisonous’. And although Pater always leaves interpretative space for continent eroticism, especially homoeroticism, in his texts, attending to restraint is crucial for understanding his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception.

Cicero, Lucretius, and Catullus employ the comic adulescens to examine love as a physical and mental disorder. According to David Konstan, the traditional Roman line held that “amor was tolerated in a young man, but that it was but a transient seizure which would not corrupt the responsibility of a Roman citizen (i.e., of an aristocrat) toward his republic, his family and his dignity.” Cicero and Lucretius both toe this line, using the comic adulescens to drive wayward Roman youths back into the fold to perform according to the conservative norms of their respective communities. Catullus, by contrast, explores the character from the perspective not of one trying to cure another but of a person going through the experience of the lover and trying to make sense of his complex and contradictory thoughts. In trying to think not with the comic adulescens but as him, Catullus displays something altogether new for a member of the Roman elite: a sustained interest in the potential interiority of individuals from Roman comedy and how their staged experiences might be used to reflect on personal struggles.