*The Care of the Self* was the last work published during Michel Foucault’s lifetime and, in a sense, his philosophical testament. The subject of the study is the genealogy of the "subject of desire"—or the moral subject—as it confronted the issue of sexual behavior at a specific stage of its development. Through an analysis of various Greek and Latin sources from the first two centuries AD (works by Artemidorus, Galen, Pseudo-Lucian, and others), Foucault concludes that it is possible to conceive of morality independently of the Judeo-Christian concept of sin, in which desire is inherently culpable and subject to condemnation. Ancient physicians and moralists developed a different form of ethics—one that was essentially individual in nature and linked virtue to a "style of existence," an "art of living," or a "culture of the self," centered not on prohibitions but on positive values. Another key theme of the third volume of *The History of Sexuality* is the outline of the connection between this ancient ethical tradition and Christian morality, the latter having absorbed and radically reinterpreted certain elements of the former.