372 Philosophical Books Vol. 49 No. 4 October 2008 pp. 372–384 Philosophical Books Vol. 49 No. 4 © 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK PHIB Philosophical Books 0031-8051 1468-0149 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2008 XXX Original Articles XX XX BOOK REVIEWS HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Stoicism and Emotion By  .  University of Chicago Press, 2007. x + 290 pp. £22.00 Margaret Graver has followed up her translation of Cicero’s Tusculans 3–4 1 — the most coherent and informative ancient text on the subject—with a com- prehensive account of the Stoic theory of the emotions. Her new book offers by far the most detailed and historically informed reconstruction of the theory to date and will no doubt become the starting point of any further discussion. Though based on extensive historical and philological research, it is written in a clear and very readable style, with most of the scholarly detail relegated to the footnotes. Graver’s aim is not to give a philosophical defence of the Stoic doctrine, but to show that it is a sophisticated and subtle theory that deserves to be taken seriously (p. 13). Her sympathetic but by no means uncritical discussion admirably illustrates the difficulties of the Stoic attempt to produce a theory that is both empirically plausible and also satisfies two paradoxical theses of their ethics: that virtue, understood as perfect rationality, is the only good, vice the only evil; and that a human being’s happiness depends entirely on herself. This means, according to the Stoics, that the ideal person’s emotions will be exclusively directed at her own virtuous character and actions, and that she will experience neither grief nor pity, since she has no vices and will do no wrong. By contrast to these good emotions of the wise, ordinary peo- ple’s affective responses, mostly directed at objects other than virtue or vice, are based on erroneous value judgements and should be eliminated by moral education. Whether the Stoic Sage can be seen as a plausible or attractive moral ideal depends to a large extent on an assumption that is somewhat misleadingly introduced as the Stoic view of what their predecessors called ‘goods (or evils) of the soul’. Graver writes: “Objects determined by oneself are designated by Plato and Aristotle as goods (or evils) ‘of the psyche’; for our purposes, though, it will be less confusing to give a term more clearly opposed to ‘externals’. I will call them ‘integral objects’ ”(p. 47). Apart from the question whether Plato and Aristotle really thought that the ‘goods of the soul’ are 1. M. Graver, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 – 4 (University of Chicago Press, 2002).