SAPERE Synthesen

For twenty-five years, SAPERE has been exploring texts from the late Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods concerned with philosophy, religion, and ethics by means of an innovative interdisciplinary editorial and commentary method - within the horizons of literary studies and art history, medicine and psychology, archaeology and history, pedagogy and jurisprudence. The authors discussed range from Plutarch and Dio of Prusa, Epictetus and Maximus of Tyre, Lucian and Galen, to Philo of Alexandria, the Qumran texts, and the Sapientia Salomonis, and further to Justin, Tatian, the Hermetic literature, Sallustius, Julian, and Libanius. The "SAPERE Syntheses" explore, within the interdisciplinary horizon indispensable to the series, how the impulses that SAPERE has developed both with respect to individual authors and transversal topics help to articulate with increasing nuance the map of the religious-philosophical intellectual world of the Imperial period. In this anniversary volume, this is done with regard to the relationship between myth and historiography, to religious philosophy as the quest for (true) life, as well as to anthropology and cosmology. In accordance with SAPERE's concept of bringing different academic fields into conversation about the texts, this volume likewise brings together prominent contributors from Religious Studies, Theology, Jewish Studies, Classical Philology, Philosophy, History, and Political Science. Thus a fascinating dialogue of research emerges, grounded in ancient voices, on the themes of "truth," "life," "the human being," and "the world."