This book examines ideas about personality and self in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and the possible influence of these ideas on Greek and Roman literature. The book is subdivided into three parts. The first part focuses on the question of what is new and distinctive in the Hellenistic philosophical conception of self, especially in Stoicism and Epicureanism. A shared or converging set of ideas (the structured self) is analyzed in these two theories, centred on a combination of radical (Socratic) ethical claims and on psychophysical and psychological holism. This view of selfhood is contr ... More

This book examines ideas about personality and self in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy, and the possible influence of these ideas on Greek and Roman literature. The book is subdivided into three parts. The first part focuses on the question of what is new and distinctive in the Hellenistic philosophical conception of self, especially in Stoicism and Epicureanism. A shared or converging set of ideas (the structured self) is analyzed in these two theories, centred on a combination of radical (Socratic) ethical claims and on psychophysical and psychological holism. This view of selfhood is contrasted with the non-holistic, part-based conception of personality found in the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical tradition in this period. The second part illustrates this broad contrast with special reference to the Stoic theory of passions and its critical reception by thinkers in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, such as Plutarch and Galen. It is suggested that the Stoic theory and its critics are both influenced by different strands in Plato’s thought about psychology. The third part of the book discusses theoretical issues about concepts of selfhood. It argues against the common view that Hellenistic-Roman thought shows a shift towards a subjective-individualistic notion of self. This part also considers the possible influence of the philosophical ideas discussed here on literature in this period. It identifies contrasting Platonic-Aristotelian and Stoic-Epicurean ways of thinking about collapse of character, and traces the possible influence of these patterns in Plutarch’s biography, Senecan tragedy, and Virgilian epic.