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After Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics, from the third century BCE onwards, developed the third great classical conception of wisdom. This book offers a reconstruction of this pivotal notion in Stoicism, starting out from the two extant Stoic definitions, 'knowledge of human and divine matters' and 'fitting expertise'. It focuses not only on the question of what they understood by wisdom, but also on how wisdom can be achieved, how difficult it is to become a sage, and how this difficulty can be explained. The answers to these questions are based on a fresh investigation of the evidence, with all central texts offered in the original Greek or Latin, as well as in translation. The Stoic Sage can thus also serve as a source book on Stoic wisdom, which should be invaluable to specialists and to anyone interested in one of the cornerstones of the Graeco-Roman classical tradition.

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(UK). I thank the organisers and the participants on both occassions for their comments. I am also grateful to Peter Cane (Christ's College, Cambridge, UK) for an inspiring discussion of an earlier version as well as constructive written comments, and to the anonymous referees of this journal for saving me from a number of imprecisions. The all too sweeping statements that remain are my responsibility, of course. 1 Academic goes back to Academy, which originally refers to the research centre, just outside Athens, founded by Plato (c. 427-347), in an ancient grove dedicated to the hero Akadēmos, who allegedly had saved Athens from destruction. In the 15th century, upon the rediscovery of Plato's work in western Europe, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and other Florentine admirers of Plato used it for their Academy in Fiesole. The popularity of this institution has turned it into a term that is at least on the European continent often used interchangeably with university. 2 J. Smits makes a case for the study of law as an 'argumentative' discipline, for which reference can be made to his 'Redefining Normative Legal Science: Towards an Argumentative Discipline', in F. Coomans et al. (eds.

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