This chapter explores the interplay of voices, poses, and masks that mark all of Nietzsche’s writings, but especially his later writings. His models are the ancient Cynics and “Lui,” the titular hero of Diderot’s satirical dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau. A latter-day Cynic, Lui is a pantomime artist who uses physical and vocal mimicry to expose social hypocrisy through a shameless display of parrhēsia. Both Lui and the Cynics, literary artifacts themselves, explore philosophical problems in a performative mode that is hostile to conventions of all kinds, including those that govern literature and philosophy. Nietzsche follows suit with his own polyphonic and multi-gestural style of presentation, now directed at a late nineteenth-century audience. A self-conscious poseur and master of the falsetto, Nietzsche is supremely aware of his ability to trigger and lay bare his contemporaries’ ideas, fantasies, and fears by giving voice to them, not least by “sampling” them through a kind of theatrical extroversion of roles that are even today routinely mistaken for his own. A cultural pathologist whose primary object is the material of cultural fantasy itself, Nietzsche is ultimately concerned to critique the conventions that produce the very categories of literature and philosophy.

In his discussion of decorum Cicero supposes that most people would agree to the general principle that in our speech, bodily deportment, and actions we should avoid giving offence to others. This is because we possess a sense of shame or verecundia. The particular details are very culture-specific: customs and conventions largely set the parameters of verecundia, and we do well to follow them. Cicero also admits that philosophical figures often flaunt established customs and conventions: he points to Socrates, who is justified in doing so owing to his great and godlike virtue, and the Cynics, who are not justified in doing so at all (1.148). He then sets out a bold thesis: ‘Indeed the reasoning of the Cynics must be rejected absolutely; for it is inimical to a sense of shame (verecundia), without which nothing can be upright (rectum), nothing honourable (honestum)’. For the Cynics, verecundia is not natural; hence we are justified in flaunting customs and conventions. Cicero develops a counter-argument against the Cynics: the source of shame or verecundia is indeed natural. I explore his argument for this thesis (which appears at 1.126ff.) and assess his critique of the Cynics.

This chapter offers an account of the state of Roman law and Hellenistic philosophy at the beginning of the period of interaction, for which the Roman embassy of the Athenian philosophers in 155 BCE offers a convenient starting point. In the 2nd century BCE the inegalitarian and expert-guided manner of dispute resolution in Rome is secularised, with case law becoming its main product. In philosophy the most important schools that attract the attention of the Romans are the dogmatic Stoics and their sceptical adversaries, the Academics.

This chapter deals again with the influence of law on philosophy, now with regard to a substantive issue. Under the influence of the Roman jurists, for whom private property was an important topic, the ‘Roman’ Stoics followed suit, and awarded private property a novel, central place in thinking about justice, a place which would have a decisive influence on modern, Western political thought.

“Cynics and Stoics” is an investigation into ecological aspects of both schools’ injunction that individuals should practice “self-sufficiency” (autarkeia) and live “according to Nature.” The relationship of autarky to the sustainability of systems on a global scale is considered in light of Cynic and Stoic cosmopolitanism and virtue ethics. The relationship of subsistence to sustainability is illuminated by Cynic practice and grounded in the modern concept of “appropriate technology.” The Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis (“proprioception”) is presented as an early instance of an “environmental ethics” that still speaks to the manifold relationships that human beings have to one another and that our species has to the rest of the natural world.