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The original book has itself been a very influential one in the modern renaissance of Epicurean studies, and deservedly so. It tackles a series of fundamental questions concerning Epicurean psychology, principally in connection with its pathology of human unhappiness. Its nearest competitor was a series of seminal but hard-to-find Italian articles by Carlo Diano, which were never translated into English, and whose influence on Anglophone scholarship was therefore often diluted through the role of intermediaries. Since 1973 four relevant things have happened: a huge amount of new work has been published on Epicurean texts, largely but not entirely focused on the Herculaneum papyri; Epicurean psychology has become a mainstream subject in the study of ancient ethics, due especially to books by such influential writers as Julia Annas and Martha Nussbaum; Konstan himself has become one of the most prominent scholars of Epicureanism; and he has, in addition, become a world-leading authority on the emotions in ancient thought.
The new version is successful in deepening (without significantly changing) Konstan's main arguments by giving due weight to these four factors, and in particular by taking full account of the more recent literature. The footnotes have grown, and many new pages of confirmatory or clarificatory argument have been added, situating the book in its current scholarly context. Moreover, a welcome effort has been made to widen access, in particular by translating all the main passages of Greek and Latin quoted. The net result of this overhaul is a text which seems to me as smooth-running and readable as the original, and fits without any sense of anachronism into the climate of contemporary scholarship.
The new [edition] also includes one chapter, or rather 'introduction', which is entirely new as far as I know. It is a major contribution to the book's topic, offering a bold and rather attractive account of the term pathos in Epicureanism and how it fits into the dualistic rational-irrational psychology. I would expect it to be regarded as controversial, but to have a considerable impact on future discussions. Calling it the 'introduction' is somewhat artificial, because in reality it is a fully independent chapter. I suppose Konstan's motive for this slight misnomer is the desire to keep a match between the main chapter numbers in the first and second editions. It has to be admitted that this extra chapter works best in its present position, rather than if it had been tagged on at the end.
... There is likely to be a much larger readership for it now than for its 1973 predecessor, which in any case has long been virtually unobtainable. Even someone lucky enough to own the original book would recognize the need to replace it with this one, which entirely supersedes it.
... A leading authority on ancient moral psychology, David Konstan takes as this new book's skeleton his seminal 1973 monograph modestly entitled Some Aspects of Epicurean Psychology. By ambitiously fleshing it out with new material, and updating it in the light of more recent scholarship, he has produced a very substantial monograph on the Epicurean pathology of human unhappiness, destined to be a major player in the contemporary discussions of Epicureanism that his own work has done so much to shape.
—David Sedley
Christ's College, Cambridge
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