English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture

For 17th-century English intellectuals, the ancient Epicureans and Stoics spoke clearly and forcefully to the kinds of problems they most wanted to solve. Whether seeking to define divinity, kingship, nobility or liberty, to determine how people should live, govern, worship, form societies and interpret nature, or to mediate between pleasure and virtue - early Stuart writers time and again adapted and transformed the rival yet crossbred legacies of Epicureanism and Stoicism. In this book, Reid Barbour offers a full account of the lively but hazardous transmission of these Hellenistic philosophers over the first half century of Stuart rule, including the cataclysmic years of civil war that forever changed the role of classical culture in English intellectual life. Ranging from science and ethics to politics and religion, he shows how in many discourses - plays and poems, biblical commentaries, political essays, scientific treatises, texts about health and the good life - the Epicureans and Stoics seemed to spring as many traps as they posed solutions. In response to these dangers, English writers from Francis Bacon and Robert Burton to John Milton and Lucy Hutchinson revised and at times resisted the very philosophies they cared most about.