ABSTRACT
Human susceptibility to emotion, and the possibilities of pain and damage that it opens up, was never not a topic for serious public reflection in the ancient world. It is clear that philosophical writing and thinking about the passions in the period of the early and high Empire went on within relatively narrow limits. The main lines of the debate were those already long since fixed by the founders and classic exponents of the major haireseis, which left little room for further manoeuvre. The specific instance helps to show how, in general, Epicureans could maintain a position on the emotions not comfortably assimilable to one side or the other in the central dispute between Stoics and Peripatetics. The largest single argument, and the clearest polarization of competing positions, was that between Stoicism on the one hand, and the rival Platonic-Aristotelian version of the Socratic tradition on the other.
