The Platonic cosmogony and zoogony of the Timaeus is distinctive in that the actions of the Demiurge and the lesser gods are modelled on a wide variety of skills, some obeying mathematical principles, some being modelled on more empirical crafts. Focused on Tim. 30c-34a, this chapter examines the reasons provided by Timaeus to account for some key properties attributed to the body of the World Animal (uniqueness, completeness, composition out of four elements, sphericity) and considers in detail Timaeus’ arguments to account for the actual composition of the World Body out of four elements unified by the mathematical bond of analogia. It is suggested that these arguments belong to a broader Platonic reflection on how to bind multiple parts into unified and coherent wholes. This broader Platonic reflection is here labelled ‘desmology’, a word coined on the Greek noun desmos (bond) frequently used in the Timaeus to refer to cosmogonical and zoogonical processes. This chapter also argues that making sense of how Plato uses desmos and other cognate terms in the Timaeus is key to understanding to what extent the cosmo-zoogony of the Timaeus as a whole actually fulfills Socrates’ strong teleological requirement for natural science expressed in the Phaedo (99b-c), as he criticizes earlier Presocratic accounts.

This chapter explores Aristotle’s criticism of the Platonic idea of a cosmic soul as a first principle of motion, in the theory of animal voluntary motion that heoffers in theDe Motu Animalium. According to Aristotle, animal self-motion and the movement of the heavens are alike in that they both depend on an unmoved mover. But it is not immediately clear how this comparison works in detail, since for Aristotle the unmoved mover in animal motion is not directly an external object of desire but the animal’s thinking about an object of desire. Hence, there must, for Aristotle, be some parallel thinking involved in the movement of celestial bodies. Such an account, however, is missing from the De Motu Animalium. To find one, we need to consider the metaphysical cosmology set forth in Lambda, chapters 6–10 of Metaphysics, which posits a soul for each of the moved heavenly bodies, a soul which thinks of the sole absolutely unmoved mover of the universe, indesiring it through a form of rational desire. Thus Aristotle departs sharply from both Plato in the Timaeus and the subsequent Platonic, Stoic and Neoplatonic traditions, according to which celestial motion is not be explained by individual souls in each of the moved celestial bodies but by a single soul of the cosmos as a whole , located at the outermost sphere of the cosmos.

Emphasis on the ‘craftsmanlike’ character of creation in the Timaeus can give the impression that the cosmos is no more an ‘animal’ than Dr Frankenstein’s monster. But Middle Platonists took more seriously the biological implications of the claim that the god is the world’s father as well as its maker, implanting a soul in matter which (as in all animals) brings the cosmos to maturity through its own creative agency. Entailments of the view are that the world soul is first and foremost the ‘nutritive’ soul of the cosmos and that the soul must be a structural feature of the cosmic body rather than a distinct substance.

This chapter offers an account of the state of Roman law and Hellenistic philosophy at the beginning of the period of interaction, for which the Roman embassy of the Athenian philosophers in 155 BCE offers a convenient starting point. In the 2nd century BCE the inegalitarian and expert-guided manner of dispute resolution in Rome is secularised, with case law becoming its main product. In philosophy the most important schools that attract the attention of the Romans are the dogmatic Stoics and their sceptical adversaries, the Academics.

This study examines the evidence for the celestial afterlife in Greek philosophy before Plato. Starting from Plato’s Phaedo myth, where we find evidence for three levels of life for souls (our level, the ‘aithêr-dwellers’ above us, and, above that, a more mysterious third level), it argues that such a stratified cosmos was not original to Plato, but can be found in certain of his predecessors. The two best-documented instances of it occur in Heraclitus and the new, Strasbourg papyrus of Empedocles. Both thinkers, in attempting to frame the place of soul in the order of nature, also adopt a stratified, hierarchical cosmic scheme, with rewards and demotions along the vertical axis. But they also thereby take up positions on the nature of soul: What stuff is it made of? Is it (essentially) immortal or not? And if not, can its immortality be secured? Against Plato’s later doctrine of an essentially immortal soul, both conceive of soul as somehow physical and, for different reasons, appear to deny its full or essential immortality.

This chapter deals again with the influence of law on philosophy, now with regard to a substantive issue. Under the influence of the Roman jurists, for whom private property was an important topic, the ‘Roman’ Stoics followed suit, and awarded private property a novel, central place in thinking about justice, a place which would have a decisive influence on modern, Western political thought.

In dialogues ranging from the Symposium to the Timaeus, Plato appears to propose that the philosopher’s grasp of the forms may confer immortality upon him.  Whatever can Plato mean in making such a claim?  What does he take immortality to consist in, such that it could constitute a reward for philosophical enlightenment?  And how is this proposal compatible with Plato’s insistence throughout his corpus that all soul, not just philosophical soul, is immortal?  In this chapter, I pursue these questions by applying the distinction between general and earned immortality to the Phaedo and the Symposium.  I argue that, while Plato attributes general immortality to all souls in the Phaedo, he proposes in the Affinity Argument that the philosopher’s soul can achieve earned immortality through contemplating forms.  It is this form of immortality that Plato claims is unavailable to humankind in the flux passage of the Symposium.  At the same time, in the ascent passage, he holds out the possibility – albeit with significant reservations – that the philosopher’s soul may transcend its humanity and achieve earned immortality through its communion with the forms.

I argue that the conversation in Plato’s Phaedo operates on two levels, and appeals to two different notions of immortality, one temporal (continuing life after death or before birth) and one atemporal (immunity from death, time and all sequential events). Socrates and his friends are concerned about whether the soul will survive beyond the present life, and whether it existed prior to birth. While this looks like a concern about temporal survival, I argue that Plato, as author, is identifying another kind of immortality, proper to the soul alone, as a being outside time, to which 'before' and 'after' do not apply. By examining exactly what is meant by its immunity to death (in a number of senses of ‘death’) and its association with life (in one sense of ‘life’), I consider in what sense the soul could have a kind of atemporal being akin to that which pertains to the Forms, and examine some puzzles about how such a being could enter into temporal experience in conjunction with a sequence of bodies.

The Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria speaks of death and immortality in several different ways. He may refer to the higher or lower part of the soul or the body, and mean either moral or ontological death. Not all combinations are possible; e.g., Philo never says the soul’s leading part could cease to exist, and the body can neither undergo moral death nor avoid the physical one. Three types of Philonic discourse are discussed: human mortality caused by the body, the soul’s moral corruption that Philo calls its death, and the ontological immortality of the mind. Despite the last one, Philo speaks of attaining immortality. This is not an inconsistency but refers to the mind’s liberation from its mortal companions (the body and the mortal portion of the soul) so that only its congenital immortality remains. Attaining immortality also means the end of the repeated deaths in the cycle of reincarnation, and the mind’s restoration to its original state of blessedness.

This chapter rounds off the volume in two ways. It deals with, first, the more sporadic interaction between jurists and philosophers in the early imperial period, and second, with the influence of the late Republican interaction on law and philosophy as they are both practised today.

In this chapter, the influence of Hellenistic philosophy on Roman law is discussed in terms of method: with the help of the Stoic dialectical methods of classifying and defining the Roman jurists could start to systematise the organically grown output of their civil law and turn the resolution of disputes into a scientific enterprise, producing systematic overviews along the way. In the 6th century CE, the Roman Emperor Justinian took the influential decision that an updated version of one of these accounts itself be given the status of law.