Philodemus was an important Epicurean philosopher active in southern Italy in the first century B.C.E. His treatise On Property Management, whose surviving part is completely translated here into English for the first time, focuses primarily on the vices or virtues involved in the acquisition and preservation of property and wealth. The extant remains of the work contain the most extensive and thorough treatment of property management found in any Hellenistic author. Philodemus criticizes rival writings by Xenophon and Theophrastus on the subject of oikonomia, or property management, and defends his own Epicurean views on the topic. More systematic and philosophical than rival approaches, the treatise clarifies many moral issues pertaining to the possession and preservation of property and wealth and provides plausible answers to a cluster of moral questions.

Voula Tsouna is Professor of Philosophy at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of [Philodemus]: [On Choices and Avoidances] (Bibliopolis Press), The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School (Cambridge University Press), and The Ethics of Philodemus (Oxford University Press) as well as many articles on Plato and the Hellenistic philosophers.