ABSTRACT
Stoicism, like the other major Hellenistic sects, Epicureanism and Skepticism (both Academic and Pyrrhonian), played only a marginal role in the philosophy of the Italian Renaissance (Kraye 2007). Stoicism neither challenged the long-standing dominance of Aristotelianism in the universities, nor made the kind of inroads into the wider philosophical culture of the period which Platonism was able to achieve. Despite remaining on the sidelines from the perspective of most Renaissance philosophers, Stoicism attracted attention from humanists eager to learn about the history of ancient philosophy. Humanists also helped Stoic doctrines to become better known through their Latin translations of previously unavailable Greek works: Diogenes Laertius’s “Life of Zeno” and Epictetus’s Handbook, along with the preface to Simplicius’s commentary on it. This influx of new information did not displace the writings of Cicero and Seneca, however, which continued to be the main sources consulted and cited, as they had been in the Middle Ages, by those seeking to understand or explain the tenets of Stoic philosophy. Nor was there an appreciable shift in the almost exclusive focus on the sect’s ethical doctrines until the late fifteenth century, when their views on epistemology, psychology and natural philosophy began to be explored, and the early decades of the sixteenth century, when the translation of On Fate by the ancient Greek Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias generated some interest in Stoic determinism.
