Christopher Gill offers a wide-ranging and original account of what is new and distinctive in Hellenistic and Roman ideas about selfhood and personality. He focuses upon Stoic and Epicurean philosophy and its relationship to earlier Greek thought (especially Plato) and comtemporary literature.



Christopher Gill offers a new analysis of what is innovative in Hellenistic - especially Stoic and Epicurean - philosophical thinking about selfhood and personality. His wide-ranging discussion of Stoic and Epicurean ideas is illustrated by a more detailed examination of the Stoic theory of the passions and a new account of the history of this theory. His study also tackles issues about the historical study of selfhood and the relationship between philosophy and literature, especially the presentation of the collapse of character in Plutarch's Lives, Senecan tragedy, and Virgil's Aeneid. As all Greek and Latin is translated, this book presents original ideas about ancient concepts of personality to a wide range of readers.