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Virtue & Power

Eras

Ancient World

Athens, Rome, Jerusalem — the historical world that produced the classical tradition, read as the soil in which the texts grew.

The Ancient World section sets the philosophers and their works inside the polities, religions and wars that shaped them. The Republic is unintelligible without the Peloponnesian War; the Politics is unintelligible without the Macedonian conquest; the Stoic and Epicurean schools are unintelligible without the world the conquest produced.

We do not treat history as decoration around the texts. The history is part of the argument.