Subversive Virtue

* Book: James Francis. Subversive Virtue: Asceticism and Authority in the Second-Century Pagan World.

Description

John Michael Greer:

"chronicles how the imperial Roman government came to treat the asceticism of Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophers as an unendurable threat to its authority. They were quite correct to do so; a system that maintains itself in power by bribing the lower classes with panem et circenses and the middle and upper classes with the more lavish entertainments chronicled in Petronius’ Satyricon has no convenient lever with which to control those who have no interest in these things." (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.fr/2012/05/twilight-of-protest.html)