In De Officiis, Cicero undertakes sustained engagement with Roman exemplary ethics. He uses dozens of different exempla to serve a variety of functions including as inspirational paradigms as means of illustrating abstract concepts and to communicate the important principle of situational variation. In addition he reflects upon some of the challenges of exemplary ethics when viewed within the Stoic context and also develops new techniques for utilising exempla and exemplary modes within a Stoic framework. He achieves this partly by incorporating into his philosophical discussion some key features of Roman exemplary ethics including a sense of particularity and historical specificity emotional charge and injunction and indeterminacy. De Officiis anticipates to some extent ideas later developed more explicitly by Seneca; identifying these enables us to better appreciate the unfolding dialogue between Stoicism and exemplary ethics.

This chapter argues that Plutarch’s moralising works (especially the Progress in Virtue and Parallel Lives) show signs of having been significantly influenced by Roman exemplary ethics. Plutarch brings Roman ideas about exemplary ethics and imitation to bear on the Greek philosophical tradition, and his critique of Platonic mimesis is emboldened by the critical Roman framework which he must have encountered as a lived Roman tradition, not just in the Latin literature that he may have read as a source for his Roman lives and other writings, but also in day-to-day experiences with his Roman friends, such as Sosius Senecio, to whom he dedicates both Progress in Virtue and the Parallel Lives.