When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

Chapter 5 turns the spotlight on the rather overlooked treatise Exhortation to the Study of Medicine. It argues that in this work Galen constructs or conjures up images of young readers, intending it to act as an educational manual in moral intensification for prospective medical students. It hence demonstrates how Galen’s concern for his reader’s acculturation might explain the appropriation of advice and the selection of relevant material from a long-established protreptic tradition. In discussing Galen’s moralising methods and the pedagogical elements of the essay, this Chapter also draws links between Galenic and Plutarchan moralism, dealt with in detail for the first time, and thereby arguing that Galen’s moral writings need to be construed in the light of Imperial-period practical ethics. That proposition receives further support from the special features of Galen’s protreptic discourse discussed in this Chapter, especially practicability and effectiveness resulting from the author’s philosophical leanings (e.g. his Platonic-Aristotelian background) and medical expertise (the mechanics of the body and his emulation of Hippocrates in the second part of the essay).

Chapter 4 examines Galen’s credentials as an ethical philosopher in the light of his recently discovered essay Avoiding Distress. It argues that his moral agenda which is expanded upon here makes him an active participant in the practical ethics of the High Roman Empire, with a more profound attentiveness to popular philosophy than is usually admitted. Galen’s dialogue with what has been termed ‘Stoic psychotherapy’ and the Platonic-Aristotelian educational model helps build up his ethical influence through an engagement with the past. On the other hand, his individual characteristics, such as the autobiographical perspective of his narrative and the intimacy established between author and addressee, render Avoiding Distress exceptional among essays (whether Greek or Latin) treating anxiety, especially when compared to the tracts on mental tranquillity written by Seneca and Plutarch. Another distinctive element of the treatise is that Galen’s self-projection as a therapist of the emotions corresponds to his role as a practising physician as regards the construction of authority and the importance of personal experience.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Modern theorists have seen the development of the concept of risk as reflecting a profound shift away from a belief in the divine determination of human fate. Modernity, it is also argued, has seen the introduction of new mega-risks, which are far larger than those before. The chapter challenges these views and argues both that the Romans were not simply fatalistic about the future, and also that it is impossible to quantify whether the ancients faced less risk.

This chapter is concerned with the way Hölderlin figures in Heidegger. It seeks to address the question of why Hölderlin is so significant for Heidegger. In order to answer this question, what has to be taken up is the way Heidegger constructs Hölderlin. Having examined that construction, what then has to be addressed is the question of another Hölderlin. The presence of this other Hölderlin on that distances Heidegger’s is examined in relation to the question of who the “us” is to whom poetry is directed.

Gambling affected the mental apparatus that people employed to understand the world around them as well as their own desires and compulsions. Casino gambling established a psychological dynamic perfectly calibrated to drive people to the edge of madness. The “storm” of despair generated by a loss, never compensated by a corresponding elation coming with a win, can overwhelm the player and leave them incapable of self-direction. Descriptions of the psychological effects of addiction – not only how those behaviors were formed through repetition but also how they resulted in a person whose entire world had shrunk – indicate how the machinery of Blanc-style casino gambling affected people in new and profound ways.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

The epilogue draws out some broader conclusions from this study, encouraging us to rethink traditional narratives of ancient literary history. Archaic poets already participated in a sophisticated and well-developed allusive system, and Hellenistic/Roman poets’ ‘footnoting’ habits are not as novel, bookish or scholarly as we might think. The epilogue further asks why these indices have not been identified or studied at such length before; it explores variation in indexical practice across genres and time; and it highlights further avenues for further research.

The Stoics break with Plato and Aristotle, who envisaged the value that makes a life worth living as a degree or part of the value that makes a life happy. Instead, they establish two separate axiological scales, one that determines whether a life is happy, and another one that determines whether it is worth living. The former contains virtue and vice, or what is good and bad, whereas the latter is defined by the so-called preferred and dispreferred indifferents, such as health, wealth or renown. This allows for the possibility that a virtuous and happy person sometimes ought to depart from life, when they do not have a prospect of a life worth living, while a vicious and unhappy person ought to stay alive, when they have such a prospect. This decoupling of the happy life from the worthwhile life is consistent with the Stoic view that life itself is a preferred indifferent, and hence the deliberations about staying alive should be referred to other preferred indifferents rather than to virtue and vice.

The book’s final chapter argues that the various elements of fairy belief as we might recognise it, including belief in an underground otherworld inhabited by sometimes pygmy-sized otherworlders, the connection between fairies and fate, and the sexual aspects of fairy activity, were brought together as a direct result of the Norman Conquest. The key role played in the Conquest by Breton nobles who felt a cultural affinity with the Cornish and Welsh, combined with the Normans’ desire to escape the English past, resulted in the crafting of a new ‘British’ identity for the whole island of Great Britain by authors with a Brittonic cultural background such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map. These authors united elements of English and Brittonic folklore to fashion a new fairy world that was subsequently adopted as the setting for literary romances and became the background to late medieval popular belief.

This chapter provides an introduction to poet and composer Ivor Gurney’s responses to war, predominantly in poetry, but also in his music.It explores the strategies used by Gurney in the face of war; his sense of fate; his use of, and response to, place; his representation of the ordinary soldier; and his responses to the conflict through the lens of writings by Walt Whitman and Leo Tolstoi.

In the Oresteia’s central scene, Cassandra tells of being cursed by Apollo to foretell the future but be disbelieved. The Trojan princess, who “cheated” the god in a violent sexual encounter, who survived her city’s extirpation, goes to her own known doom bravely, predicting Agamemnon’s death and vengeance to come. Yet there is an unexplored aspect to this famous and moving scene – Cassandra’s hint of her own continuation in the afterlife. It seems (eoika) to her that she will soon be singing prophecies in Hades. This chapter argues that attention to Cassandra’s potential afterlife changes how we view her prophecies of death and vengeance, her rebellion against Apollo and Clytemnestra, her bravery, her language of closure, and the ironies each of these entail. Moreover, the “poetics of plurality” uncovered in Cassandra’s statement and its uncertain status sophisticate and perhaps even reverse our understanding of her fate.

An in-depth analysis of ageing can assist us in developing a deeper understanding of human temporality and its relevance for the good life. The experience of growing old makes clear that life is essentially a process in time with a particular temporal extension and structure that has important eudaemonic implications. Taking ageing as the starting point and frame of reference, I distinguish three ethically relevant levels of human temporality that become manifest in the process of ageing: the fundamental co-ordinates and parameters of human existence in time; the culturally variable models of the life course and life stages; and the unique individual trajectory through life and its narrative interpretation. These considerations underline the need for a more appropriate appreciation of the temporal dimension and structure of human existence in ethical discussions about the good life.

Mark Ford’s chapter on the prose style of Thomas Hardy’s fiction discerns something involuntary and dishevelled about Hardy’s style. Early reviewers lamented its bad taste and haphazard manner. But this chapter shows that therein lies a source of the novels’ power. Moments of scenic description and unexpected encounters are reviewed to reveal that the achieved faltering of Hardy’s style suggests the prose recognizing its own struggling efforts to come to terms with overmastering nature and fate.

In his treatises De divinatione and De fato, Cicero discusses the possibility of the prediction of future events. His understanding of divination in these philosophical works differs significantly from accepted Roman practice. Thus, De divinatione should not be read as a handbook on Roman divination. Rather, it should be read alongside De fato as an exhortation to act in the service of the res publica after the death of Caesar. Rather than denying outright that divination is real, Cicero seeks to refute the more superstitious divinatory practices current in Rome, all of which he attaches to the individual rather than to the political community to which he has dedicated his life. Among these superstitious views are the belief that humanity is subject to impersonal fate and therefore that human responsibility is curtailed. In writing for a Roman audience, Cicero denies both the notion that men cannot be responsible for their own actions, thus rejecting the idea of fate, as well as the existence of divination in the context of a deterministic worldview.

This chapter examines Calcidius' position vis-à-vis and use of Stoicism, focusing on the themes of Providence and fate, the human soul, and matter, and argues that the Stoic influence is much stronger than commonly assumed, despite an overt polemic.