In ‘The Place of Concepts in Socratic Inquiry’, Terence Irwin examines Socrates’ question ‘What is F?’, which is often taken to be a request for some sort of definition or account of what F is. When Socrates asks, ‘What is courage?’, ‘What is piety?’, ‘What is temperance?’, does his discovery that everyone, including himself, cannot answer such questions in a satisfactory manner imply that these answerers do not know what the words mean? If one cannot answer the ‘What is F?’ question, does it follow that one lacks the concept of F? Irwin argues that conceptual argument has an indispensable role in the arguments that lead to Socratic definitions, but it will not take us all the way to them. To understand Socratic definitions, Irwin compares them with Aristotelian real definitions, and with Epictetus’ views on the articulation of preconceptions.

Chapter 4 is primarily devoted to the influence of rhetoric on historiography. Here, too, the struggle for truth remains at the center, albeit in a dialectical relationship to the fictional, which Gorgias, the first great theoretician of rhetoric, was already aware of. Since the most important representatives of this new historiographical approach, Ephorus and Theopompus, have only survived in fragments, the first focus is on Isocrates, who was considered their teacher. His handling of history can be analyzed surprisingly clearly, and he shows a closeness to the rational-critical method, not least in his striving for truth and the awareness of the difficulties of searching for it. After a closer interpretation of the above-mentioned historians in this sense, the chapter treats another new tendency of historiography in the Hellenistic epoch. In the so-called tragic historiography, the representation of history again approaches the poetic. The striving for truth is now directed towards the most vivid representation of the real event, as if the recipient had been present at it.

The fifth chapter is chiefly concerned with the creative instantiations of Hyperborea in the Hellenistic and later periods, studied there as examples of a more thoroughly textualised, literary process of worlding. It looks at changing strategies of composing worlds through an archive of libraries and canons. The first section of the chapter starts with an overview of the transformations of the Hyperborean material in geographical literature after Herodotus, from Eratosthenes and Strabo to Pliny the Elder. The second section examines two equally productive, creative strategies of appropriation of the Hyperborean nexus in the post-Classical archive: Solinus' De mirabilibus mundi and the Philippica of Theopompus. The third section is concerned with the distinctive cosmographical usages of Hyperborea in early Hellenistic utopias, and their deep engagement with the archive: Hecataeus of Abdera's On the Hyperboreans, Callimachus' Hymn to Delos, and Simias of Rhodes' Apollo. All support the wider considerations of the chapter on the continued relevance of Hyperborea for thinking the worlds of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms. The fourth section brings us back to Athens, with detailed study of two cosmographical texts written over and through the archive: the Delian Oration of Lycurgus and the pseudo-Platonic Axiochos.

Chapter Six focuses on the figure of the orchēstris (sympotic female dancer) in the Greek cultural and literary imagination. Since these women have received little attention as a distinct category of performer, I begin by surveying both visual and textual evidence to build up an understanding of how orchēstrides were eroticized, objectified, and largely silenced by extant Greek sources. I then argue that both Xenophon’s Symposium and Theopompus’ On the Funds Plundered from Delphi use the figure of the orchēstris to address questions about gender, social order, agency, and authority. I show that these two strikingly different texts (philosophical and historical) both hint at the unsettling power of the attractive yet unruly female dancer.