Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought

to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London, at the LMU

Munich, online at historyofilosvy.net. Today's episode, everything is mine and nothing,

lipseus and the revival of stoicism. You can tell a lot about a man by the title page of the

17th century edition of his collected works, especially if that title page was designed by the

great artist Peter Paul Rubens. Rubens gave this treatment to the opera omnia of Eustus

lipseus, published in 1637, 31 years after Lipsius's death. Tellingly, it shows the face of Lipsius

flanked by two other busts, one of the Roman historian Tacitus, the other of the Roman Stoic

philosopher, Seneca. Thereby, Rubens captures something of Lipsius' humanist achievement. He

gained renown as an editor and scholar of Tacitus and Seneca, and was a central figure in the

revival of Stoic thought around the turn of the 17th century, which had an impact upon Rubens

himself and many other European intellectuals. Lipsius was not the only figure of this period to

engage with stoicism, of course. In an earlier episode, I explained that Stoic ethics were of

interest to Italian scholars like Leonardo Bruni, and when we turn soon to Renaissance France,

we will meet figures like Guillaume de Vap, who was powerfully influenced by Epic Titus,

much as Lipsius drew on Seneca. Still, he was arguably Lipsius, who did the most to put the Stoic's

back on the map, facilitating the spread of their ideas to such famous early modern thinkers as

Descartes, Spinoza, Malavansche, and Leibniz. Lipsius wrote several works that were central

to this neo-Stoic movement, composing an introduction to the Stoic system that appeared in 1604,

and even more consequently, on Constancy, published back in 1584. It would be translated into

numerous languages and receive more than 80 editions. In this work, Lipsius is drawing on the

tradition of philosophical consolation, as we know it from such authors as Boethius and Seneca

...