Roman philosophy has arrived. What better stamp of approval could there be, what more reliable attestation that an area of study has made it as a bona fide academic field, than the publication of an Oxford Handbook? Gone are the days of apologetics and barely masked inferiority complexes vis-à-vis the celebrated achievements of the Greeks: the editors in their Preface breezily wave away such timidity, stating as a fact not only that “Roman thinkers have developed in new and stimulating directions the systems of thought they inherited from the Greeks,” but also that they “offer a range of perspectives that are of philosophical interest in their own right” (p. ix).

Nothing demonstrates this new self-confidence better than the fact that the volume starts not with the rehashing of such aetiological tales as the philosophers’ embassy of 155 BCE and other potted narratives of the transmission of Greek philosophical doctrine to Rome. Instead, Phillip Sidney Horky leads off with a survey of “Italic” philosophy: Pythagorean pseudepigrapha ascribed to such autochthonous thinkers as the Lucanians Aresas, Occelus, and Eccelus. This fascinating material dovetails with the Roman belief that rather than being a late Hellenistic import, philosophy had been at home on their peninsula for centuries before the arrival of Carneades et al. Cedite, Grai!