Reconstructing a Circle of Reading of the European Antiquarians and Erudites: the Textual Corpora on the Stoic’s Ethics

Antiquarian and erudite idea of virtue as a substantial basis of the «nobility» was an adaptation of ethical concepts of Stoicism and an idea of wisdom as an altitude of the entire core of natural virtues in particular. The article reconstructs the hypothetical circle of reading distinctive for this group of the European intellectuals and specifies some texts which furnished possible ways of such reception. The author suggests two ways of the transmission of stoic’s ethics in the 16th-17th-centuries antiquarian and erudite discourse. On one side, the Stoic ideas were possibly borrowed from the texts of Italian humanists of the 15th century concerned with de vera nobilitate discussion. On the other side, an inspiration was derived from the 15th-16th centuries’ commentaries on the Cicero’s «Paradoxa stoicocum» right before the texts of Justus Lipsius were published.