Author Description

S. T. Joshi is acknowledged as a leading authority on supernatural fiction; he has also published books on atheism, race prejudice, and politics. But it is not widely known that he was a classical scholar early in his career, studying Greek and Roman history, literature, and especially philosophy while at Brown and Princeton. In this collection of his classical papers, never before published, Joshi exhibits a thorough familiarity with both ancient texts and modern scholarship. He also engages in interdisciplinary studies, as evidenced by his long paper on the satirical element in Lucretius and Juvenal's relation to philosophy. Key moments in Roman history are analyzed in depth, especially the conflict of Julius Caesar and Cicero at the end of the Republic. The Presocratics and Stoics come in for examination, especially as embodied in the writings of Panaetius, Posidonius, and Seneca. In all, Joshi has made significant advances in classical scholarship, and this research laid the groundwork for his later studies in other fields.