The Stoics argued for women’s moral equality, companionate marriage, education, and participation in philosophy. And yet we have no writings from Stoic women, even from the Roman imperial period, when we know of several who could be considered Stoics. This silence of the written record coheres with the centrality within Stoicism of manliness (virtus), exemplified by heroes like Hercules. We must therefore examine indirect evidence, including writings by Stoic men on marriage and society, in order to glean anything about Stoic women. But this chapter suggests that writing tragedy provided the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the opportunity to stage the voice of a Stoic woman facing the most crucial choice – between life and death – and responding as her own moral agent. Acting as a Stoic exemplar, Megara, Hercules’ wife, chooses death over a life inconsistent with her ethically determined role.

Covers the creative, but often neglected, period between the mid first century BCE and mid first century CE.

It is greatly tempting to speak of a specifically ‘Trajanic’ moment in Alexander reception, as this is the only moment in Greek literature in which an ‘idealised Greek’ Alexander appears. This chapter concentrates on his unusual figuration as a philosopher by Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch, which is both decisively Hellenocentric and at the same time motivated by Trajan’s own profile as a philhellene who admired Alexander as a military hero. The uniqueness of this image is suggested by contrast with other near-contemporary texts that are decidedly philosophical – those of Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Pseudo-Diogenes and Maximus of Tyre – but that either ignore Alexander or see him as a philosophical anti-type. Idealising Alexander required opportunity, which I suggest came quickly in the form of Trajan, was seized upon by a couple of experimentalists, and disappeared just as quickly, at least within secular literature.