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 Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about Lipsius and the early modern reception of stoicism with John Sellers, who's a reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway in London. Hello, John.

Hi, Peter.

We were just talking about the fact that as we're doing this interview, it's almost exactly 10 years to the day since your last appearance on the podcast about the Roman Stoics, which went up on February 19, 2012.

And we're now recording this in the middle of February 2022. So thank you for coming back.

Oh, no, very pleased. It's amazing how much ground you covered in the last decade is going to be interesting to see where you are in another decades time.

That's for sure. Yeah, I'll have to I'll interview you in 10 years from now. So you have to make sure to acquire a specialism on something in maybe the 19th century.

Okay, but today we're not going to be talking about that. We're going to be talking about the early modern reception of stoicism and especially Lipsius before we come to him.

Can you tell us something about what was known about stoicism in the Renaissance prior to Lipsius?

In fact, if we start a little earlier, if we think about the Middle Ages in Europe, I guess the most important sources for stoicism were the works of Seneca and history.

And these were both in Latin. They both circulated widely. And there were a few other sources, someone like Augustine, for instance, makes a very wide range of passing remarks about stoicism, some positive, some negative.

And those were of course influential, but for detailed accounts, sister and Seneca were key. Seneca in particular was very important because there was a correspondence with some Paul that people thought was genuine.

Obviously, they don't anymore. And he was praised by Saint Jerome. So Seneca was regarded very highly.

And if we think about the very early Renaissance figures like Petrach or Salutati, their image of stoicism was really shaped by these Latin sources.

It's once we get into the 15th century that we see things start to develop. We see Greek texts become available in Italy for the first time.

And I guess the most important of these is going to be the lives of the philosophers by D'Argine Slehesius, which is translated into Latin in the 1430s and then becomes really widely accessible.

And there's one really quite interesting figure in this period that's worth mentioning, I think, a humanist called Francesco Filofo.

He spent time in Constantinople. He learned Greek. He read D'Argine Slehesius, a sexist empiricist, and Plutarch, a number of key sources for stoic ideas.

And Filofo's book on exile contains extended translations from sexist empiricists into Latin that report ideas from Zeno and Quasipus, the early Greek stoics.

I mean, he's almost plagiarism by modern standards. He just lifts passages from sexists and translates it.

But what's interesting about Filofo, as a kind of a watershed moment, I think, is when he talks about the stoics, he's talking about Zeno and Quasipus, whereas up until that point, when people talked about the stoics, they were primarily thinking of Seneca and Cicero.

So people are beginning to rediscover the Greek stoa around this time. And then as the 15th century continues and into the early 16th century, we get a range of other Greek texts become available in Italy in particular.

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