Ovid reinvented Roman cultural memory by re-constructing the memories of Servius Tullius, the sixth mythical king of Rome. In so doing, he joined historians, antiquarians, poets, and even the emperor Augustus in their efforts to rebuild and recover the Roman past.1 Furthermore, Ovid commemorated their collective endeavours in the Fasti, a didactic poem which discusses the aetiologies of Roman festivals (fasti) and highlights how Augustus appropriated Rome’s calendar by filling it with festivals dedicated both to his own achievements and those of his family, the domus Augusta.

Stoicism before Chrysippus believed in radical determism, but Chrysippus reintroduced the notion of human responsibility. He argued that it is in our power to assent to an impression or otherwise and work with it, and it is likewise in our power to assent to or to reject World Fate, working with or against it. He illustrated this with his analogy with the top that needs a spin: its spinnability is its inherent cause, but needs an external cause to activate it. In this way, he further posited, we can assign good or bad morality to humans, judging by their will to live Stoically, that is, ‘in accordance with nature’, the Stoics’ highest virtue. Virgil adopts this model in the Aeneid, so that Aeneas can be seen as learning to assent to World Fate, while Juno, Dido and Turnus can ignore or reject it. Virgil in fact incorporates Chrysippus’ analogy in a simile depicting Amata driven by her inherent desire and by the daemonic goddess Allecto to deny her assent to World Fate. However, he locates deviations from World Fate within the Stoic category of ‘events in suspension’, ‘indifferents’ or individual fortunes, which might temporarily challenge World Fate but never negate it.

Renaissance thinkers affirmed that also in terms of justice and friendship the relationship between the human couple reflected what it was that held together the citizens in the city. This chapter examines the immense importance of thinking about friendship and love for political reflection, and it shows the relationship of civic concord and friendship with the domestic sphere, and particularly with the conjugal relationship. This chapter studies early modern commentaries on Cicero’s De officiis as well as celebrated works of the ‘civic tradition’, namely Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia and Matteo Palmieri’s Della Vita Civile, showing that the learned Aristotelian tradition we have so far studied found its echoes also in the Ciceronian tradition as well as in the volgare. These commentaries and vernacular writings serve as part of the context necessary to understand more fully Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought on family, friendship, and sociability, which has so far not found adequate attention in historical scholarship. Re-examining some of the ways that Machiavelli constructed masculinity and femininity, and setting them into their intellectual context, this chapter aims to show that Machiavelli’s political thought was characterised by a remarkable openness towards the idea of women as dominant agents in the political sphere and by a sense of what we can term, in a postmodern manner, ‘fluidity’ of gender conceptions, in which ‘biology’ was certainly no determining factor. The chapter thus contributes to the question of the nature of Machiavelli’s stato.