I am very happy and proud to have been given the opportunity of presenting the following papers, for the most part translated from French, to an English-speaking readership. At a time when voices are heard in my country, sometimes with distinctly chauvinistic overtones, standing out against the socalled tyranny of the ‘Publish in English or perish’ injunction, I do not feel any urge whatsoever to apologize, especially since a similar, if not exactly identical, collection is about to be published by the Presses Universitaires de France. But I must confess that I am by no means displeased that the present volume will slightly anticipate it. This is because its publication is something of a tit-for-tat: for my taste for Hellenistic philosophers and my attempts to work on them have been, if not wholly aroused, at least enormously stimulated and fostered by the powerful revival of interests which they have enjoyed in Englishspeaking countries (not to mention others, Italy in particular) for the last twenty years or so. Not that French scholarship and academic teaching have neglected them: witness the works of Victor Brochard on the Sceptics, of Emile Brehier on the Stoics, of Victor Goldschmidt on the Stoics and Epicurus: pioneering works indeed, as everyone would agree, I believe, and not in the least dated.