This chapter claims that Atticus offers a fruitful case study of Epicureanism in the late Republic and can thereby contribute to broader questions of philosophical allegiance in the ancient world. There has, of course, been valuable discussion of philosophical allegiance in recent years. A reconsideration of Atticus’ Epicureanism will fruitfully extend these debates precisely because he is a not a perfect fit for any of these categories. He was not a professional philosopher; in any case, it is dangerous to assume that the thunderings of Lucretius or Philodemus on the Epicurean wise man map reliably onto the complexities of life, especially in the case of Atticus.

This book examines the role and influence of Greek philosophy in the final days of the Roman republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosopher of the day, and Lucretius, foremost among the representatives and supporters of Epicureanism at the time.

This chapter claims that Atticus offers a fruitful case study of Epicureanism in the late Republic and can thereby contribute to broader questions of philosophical allegiance in the ancient world. There has, of course, been valuable discussion of philosophical allegiance in recent years. A reconsideration of Atticus’ Epicureanism will fruitfully extend these debates precisely because he is a not a perfect fit for any of these categories. He was not a professional philosopher; in any case, it is dangerous to assume that the thunderings of Lucretius or Philodemus on the Epicurean wise man map reliably onto the complexities of life, especially in the case of Atticus.

This book examines the role and influence of Greek philosophy in the final days of the Roman republic. It focuses primarily (although not exclusively) on the works and views Cicero, premier politician and Roman philosopher of the day, and Lucretius, foremost among the representatives and supporters of Epicureanism at the time.

The chapter seeks to identify the triple historicity of Cicero’s relationship to philosophy. The first part presents Cicero the historian, who sought to clarify the history of philosophy and its reception in Roman society, as well as to analyze the resistance of his contemporaries to the practice of philosophy, which was considered incompatible with political action. The second part describes the intellectual revolution, under the designation of “reason,” which some of the Roman elite developed as a remedy to the crisis of the Republic; Cicero appears there as the witness par excellence of this intellectual experience in the service of the city. The third part of the chapter examines Cicero the philosopher himself, actor of this revolution. The analysis of his work allows us to see the multiple facets of this man who was also reader, translator, and disseminator of texts and ideas, and to identify his place in relation to his literary milieu, and in particular to his friend Varro.

This chapter transports us to Hellenistic Rome, and to the issuance of a legal privilege from the Senate of Rome to the polis of Delphi. The chapter shows how empirical formality and substantive rationality in law came together to enable ancient legal documents to work as instruments of legal power. In seeing how Rome deployed instruments of legal power - legal privileges that performatively created and memoralized patronage relationships with subordinated peoples - to forge an empire, we see how instruments of legal power were used to create governing communities and zones of exclusivity in Mediterranean antiquity. We also see how zones of exclusivity granted to city-states like Delphi are analogous to the zones of exclusivity granted to modern corporations like Facebook, in the form of intellectual property.