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The Aristotelian Asapasius (2nd century CE) objected that his fellow-Aristotelian Andronicus (1st century BCE) should not have conceded to Chrysippus that emotion requires assent as well as appearance. He accepts only two generic emotions — pleasure and distress — but he overlooks desire which Aristotle adds, and appetite and fear favoured by the Stoics and sometimes Plato. For the Stoics, appetite and desire are not additional to judgement, but are judgements that pursuit is appropriate. The Stoics omit backward-looking emotions on the grounds that concern about past adversity lasts only as long as one thinks one's present or future affected. Like Philodemus and the Christian Lactantius, Aspasius denied the Stoic view that anger (e.g., with one's children) must include the idea that retaliation is appropriate. Plotinus the Neoplatonist (3rd century CE) objected that mystical love involves no judgement, and that Stoics underestimate the contribution of body.

The Stoic advocacy of freedom from emotion (apatheia) is opposed to Aristotle's of moderate emotion (metriopatheia), which was the majority preference, although Plato has shifting emphases. Some saw the two states as ideals for different people or (Plotinus) for different stages of progress. Freedom from emotion is associated with Anaxagoras, the Socratics and Cynics. Pyrrhonians claimed to free themselves from emotion but not from unpleasant sensation. Philodemus' ‘natural anger’ is not so far from Stoic freedom from anger, but the substantive dispute was wrongly called merely verbal. This was part of an attempt not to take opponents seriously, which also often misunderstood the idea of first movements, good emotions (eupatheiai), or selection of indifferents as if these let in emotion, and tendentious paraphrases of the idea of emotion as perturbation or disease were exploited to make the dispute seem verbal.

According to Seneca, the arts, including tragedy and music, can only produce first movements. So Aristotle's claim that tragedy and comedy produce catharsis by arousing emotion is wrong, as is Posidonius' belief in wordless music changing emotion without changing judgements. But, pace Seneca, there is a residue of cases of genuine emotion about the content of the play or about the melody, and a better defence of Stoicism in these cases would be that the relevant judgements are there. But when wordless music changes emotion, Posidonius prefers to say that the emotion is non-judgemental; Philodemus, his Epicurean contemporary, says that the emotion persists and one is merely distracted. The debate involved Pythagoreans, the Stoics Zeno and Diogenes of Babylon, and later Augustine.

This chapter explores the various historical ‘ways of seeing’ the genre of iambos in ancient scholarship after Aristotle. It begins with an overview of the Hellenistic scholarship on iambos and the views emerging from ancient etymologies, before turning to late antique definitions of the genre. Since generic concepts are explicit in works that belong to what the ancients considered the realm of grammar rather than philology, in order to find iambos within something akin to systematic treatments of genres, we will have to go backwards and forwards in time: from the grammarian Diomedes (4th cent. BCE), to Photius' (9th cent. CE) summary of a handbook by Proclus (5th cent. CE, or 2nd cent. CE), and back to the late Hellenistic period through the testimony of Philodemus of Gadara (1st cent. BCE). Three main historical ways of conceptualizing literary genres and the ensuing views of iambos are proposed.

This chapter examines Philodemus' diatribe On Anger, a principal piece of On the Passions and an important contribution to the philosophical literature on that subject. The first section supplies some semantic and historical context for Philodemus' discussion. The next section presents the methodological objections raised by Timasagoras, one of Philodemus' professional rivals, and shows how Philodemus responds to them. The chapter then discusses how Philodemus accounts for the nature and symptoms of anger, the beliefs, and feelings that it involves, and its consequences. The next section after that is devoted to Philodemus' refutation of certain Peripatetics whom, rightly or wrongly, he takes to encourage one to lose one's temper. In addition, this section discusses the case of people who give the appearance of irascibility without really being irascible. The chpater then deals with the issue of whether anger is a good or a bad thing. Finally it examines whether the sage experiences no less anger than the common man. It discusses three arguments in the form of έπιλογισμός (translit. epilogismos, pl. epilogismoi) to the effect that the sage feels as much anger as the common man, and then another three arguments whereby Philodemus rebuts the epilogismoi of his opponents.

This chapter focuses on the surviving part of the fourth book of Philodemus' treatise On Death. It also makes brief mention of Philodemus' treatment of superstitious fears concerning death in [On Choices and Avoidances]. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first surveys certain distinctive features of the Epicurean treatment of the fear of death and sketches out Philodemus' original contributions to that topic. The second part focuses on Philodemus' discussion of cases in which the thought of death appears particularly hard to bear. The third studies the main themes of the peroration, the grand and solemn ending of the treatise: our vulnerability to death, the ephemeral character of human existence, the sage's daily contemplation of death itself, his preparedness to die at any time, but also his supreme capacity to enjoy life. To conclude, the chapter speculates about a reference at the very end of the treatise to what looks like an all-important spiritual act, a brief and clear focusing on the value of life and the truth of death, which enables the sage to depart from life at once with serenity and contentment.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of Philodemus and his works. The chapter then describes the conventions followed in the analyses of Philodemus' writings. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.

This chapter outlines the fundamental principles of Philodemus' ethics in connection with the canonical views of the Epicurean school, and points to his own original contributions. It examines the central features of Philodemus' hedonism, which sometimes are stated but often merely presupposed, and also looks at elements of his approach to the virtues and friendship. It draws evidence from the text [On Choices and Avoidances] and from the eulogy On Epicurus both of which can confidently be attributed to Philodemus, and also from the first and the second books of Cicero's De finibus.

This chapter examines the central concepts of Philodemus' moral psychology: notably, his conception of vices, which is compared with that of the virtues, of harmful and unacceptable emotions or passions, and of corresponding acceptable emotions, or ‘bites’.

This chapter examines Philodemus' method of analysis and treatment in the ethical treatises. It comments on some general features of Philodemus' empirical approach to ethics, many of which are developed in his work On Signs and are also found in his treatment of various arts and sciences, moral education, and even religion. These features comprise Philodemus' reliance on observation and experience, and his use of methods of reasoning that are focused on experience or directed towards it; the development of the medical analogy in connection with such methods; the kind of definitions intended to describe ethical concepts; and Philodemus' appeal to preconception in order to solve problems in practical ethics. On these counts, Philodemus remains close to the canonical tradition of his school, and expands it in ways appropriate to his own project.

The theoretical analysis of vices and emotions has a practical goal: namely, their detection and removal. This chapter offers a rapid survey of Philodemus' methods of treatment and determines the place that they occupy in the therapeutics of the Hellenistic era. There are at least two ways of doing such a survey: vertical and horizontal. A vertical treatment could be a matter of going through the treatises one by one and studying the methods employed in each treatise concerning a single trait or a cluster of related traits. Horizontal approaches are broader and more conceptual. They cut across long time periods, geographical areas, schools, and objects of treatment.

This chapter examines the practice of frank speech or candid criticism, the principal educational method of late Epicurean schools and a major tool of moral and psychological therapy. The chapter is divided into four sections, corresponding to the following topics: first, the nature, scope, kinds, and circumstances of application of parrhēsia; second, the characters of the students and their positive or negative reactions to parrhesiastic criticism; third, the dispositions of the teachers and the ways in which these dispositions affect the use of frank speech; and fourth, the confessional and corrective practices applied at every level of hierarchy of the Epicurean school, and especially among the sages. Philodemus' discussion of these topics presents both historical and theoretical interest. It gives a fairly detailed idea of life in an Epicurean school in Zeno's and Philodemus' times, the interchange between teachers and students, and the methods used for the assimilation of the Epicurean values and way of life. On Frank Speech also advances challenging views about central problems of philosophical psychology and the philosophy of education.

On Flattery is, in all probability, the opening treatise of Philodemus' composition On Vices and the Opposite Virtues and the People in whom they occur and the Situations in which they are found. Its subject is developed in two books, passages of which are found in several papyri. This chapter attempts to piece together the extant remains of On Flattery and provide a sense of what Philodemus' arguments might be. It appears that Philodemus' treatment of flattery is incisive and in places original, and emphasizes aspects of flattery not always found in the relevant literature. These include, for instance, the conceptual relations between flattery and cognate traits, the interactions between flatterers and their victims, and the reinterpretation of literary figures in the light of the hypothesis that they act as flatterers or as people susceptible to the flatterers' arts.

This chapter examines On Arrogance, which is probably the full title of the tenth book of Philodemus' On Vices. The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section presents Philodemus' outline of arrogance, as well as the principal characteristics of that vice, the ways in which it influences one's attitudes and relationships to others, and its consequences. It also discusses the contrast between the sage and the arrogant man whom the sage is sometimes accused of being. The next section concerns Aristo's treatment of people who are arrogant on account of their good luck and Aristo's therapies for arrogance. The third section shows how arrogance is further individuated by being compared and contrasted with other traits. The next section focuses on Aristo's account of the characters of which arrogance is an important constituent. In particular, it analyses Aristo's conception of complex vices containing arrogance, speculates on their nature, and gives reasons why Aristo's typology can be considered an appropriate end for Philodemus' treatise.

This chapter considers three prose-writers each of whom, in his own way, evaluates poetry in relation to prose. Gorgias' Helen, itself a kind of prose-poem, makes poetry fully part of a larger realm of discourse, logos. The capacity of logos in all its forms embraces both truth and deception; contrary to a prevailing line of interpretation, it is argued that Gorgias' conception of language does not collapse into a version of psychological relativism. Isocrates' more muted attitude to poetry, including his downgrading of its imaginative and emotional powers, is interpreted as a reflection of his own priorities of pragmatic utility. Finally, an analysis of the contentious views of Philodemus diagnoses in them an imperfectly realized desire to negotiate a path between moralism and formalism and also to separate the value of poetry definitively from that of prose.

A clarification of the various ways in which it is possible to fear ‘death’: fearing dying, fearing being dead, regretting being mortal, fearing premature death. An initial examination of the viability of a rational therapy of these fears and of the Epicureans' awareness of the distinct ways in which it is possible to fear death.

Epicurus’ appeal to nature to show that our final end is pleasure is less crude than often thought. Instead of formulating a hedonic calculus, he distinguishes between desires in terms of what is natural and what is necessary. He produces a revisionary, ideal account of nature, illustrated by Philodemus’ work on anger.