This chapter discusses the social and professional contexts for the emergence of the Italian humanists as a new cultural “class,” and traces the classical and Christian antecedents of their formation of a substantive discourse on secular vocation.

This chapter investigates instances of personal divination in the ancient Greek world. This includes the use of oracles, omens, forms of technical divination and the occurrence of prophetic dreams in personal matters that do not articulate the concerns of the polis. The chapter explores what personal issues warranted a consultation of the gods, as well as the scope and limits for individuals to use the divinatory system to their advantage. The chapter shows that consultation with the gods about questions of personal concern (about health, travel and questions of everyday life) was not merely available to the upper classes and those in power, but conducted by everyday people, including women, metics and slaves. Throughout, the chapter carefully distinguishes between what we know about actual personal oracle consultations on the one hand, and their representation in works of literature on the other. At the same time, the chapter presents several themes that run through different kinds of evidence and explores what they reveal about the use and abuse of divine knowledge (and the actions it is made to sanction) in the ancient Greek world.

This chapter explores personal religion in some of Plato’s dialogues. First, focusing on the Apology and Euthyphro, it considers Socrates’ daimonic sign and how far Socrates expresses religious attitudes independent from, in line with, or opposed to those foregrounded or sanctioned in Athens. Second, it turns to Plato’s Laws and examines the Stranger’s vision for civic religion in the imagined city of Magnesia and his prohibitions of private worship. Finally, it considers how philosophical inquiry can itself constitute personal religion. Overall, it argues that Plato does not evince a single attitude towards all the phenomena we might classify as personal religion. That the Stranger outlaws some central aspects of personal religion does not mean that he proscribes all others; we should resist the old idea that Socrates would have fallen afoul of Magnesia’s laws. While the Stranger excludes a culture of free speech of which the Socrates of the early dialogues avails himself, Magnesia is not Athens. For Plato, how far expressions of personal religion should be countenanced, regulated, or proscribed by the city turns on the nature of the city in which that question is raised.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on clusters of re-narrated episodes in Cyril’s response to Julian. Chapter 5 is organized by one of Julian’s own categories: the “gifts of the gods” which, he had argued, were given in surpassing quality and quantity to the Hellenic people. This chapter groups Julian’s various iterations of gifts and Cyril’s sprawling responses in three, interrelated categories: exemplary characters, intellectual superiority, and military and political domination. In Cyril’s responses, Minos was no legendary hero but rather imitated the fallen angels’ lust for domination; the Attic language itself (not to mention the convention of writing) derived from proto-Christian sources; and the Jewish people’s turbulent history and the present ascendance of Roman superiority equally reflect the Christian God’s management of the cosmos.

This chapter argues against a dominant reading of the Stoics according to which all appropriate actions (kathēkonta), whether drinking when thirsty or standing firm at a critical juncture in battle, count equally as “duties” (officia). All scholars interpret the Stoic Sage’s perfection to imply that absolutely every token action of the Sage counts as a (morally) perfect action (katorthōma), with the result that there is no category of actions constituted by the morally permissible. Appreciating the significance of the misunderstood Stoic category of “intermediate appropriate actions,” however, makes clear that there are actions that follow nature, but that are simply concerned with pursuing “promoted indifferents.” Thus, it is argued that the Stoic position recognizes a class of permissible actions – even for the Sage, whose perfection consists rather in never acting contrary to virtue. The Stoics are thus much closer to Kant and their Socratic heritage than has been previously recognized.

Kant and the Stoics both rely on a momentous argument, set out in Plato’s dialogues, for the conclusion that nothing is unconditionally good but wisdom, yet they differ on how to interpret it. The Stoics identify this wisdom with the perfection of technical or productive knowledge of nature, and they regard it as the sole good. Kant identifies this wisdom with the perfection of practical knowledge of the good, and, analyzing this knowledge along the hylomorphic lines implicitly suggested in Plato’s argument, he locates wisdom’s unconditional goodness – its morality, or moral goodness – in its agreement not with the object it produces but with its form, morality’s principle. Two contrasting accounts of morality’s relation to perfection thus emerge. The Stoics see perfection in the knowledge of nature as entailing moral goodness, whereas Kant argues that moral goodness is the condition of all other goodness, including that of perfection.

This chapter analyzes the Republic’s theory of the tripartite soul regarding the question of self-rule and autonomy. Only when the soul is in the ideal position of having reason positioned as sovereign ruler can a person be seen as acting autonomously. But it is not clear that when reason rules, it also motivates actions. Christine M. Korsgaard has argued that personal decision-making should be seen as analogous to political decision-making. She conceives of political decisions as a process where requests for action spring from the people, while rulers suffice to say yes or no. This chapter claims that this analysis is inadequate as a theory of how Plato portrays the relationship between the parts of the soul and of decision-making in general, and offers an alterantive interpreation in terms of what is called the Complex Model of Decision-Making.

Plato’s Socratic dialogues depict Socrates as advocating for two conflicting requirements. Socrates sometimes says that a non-expert is required to retain autonomy and to think for herself. On other occasions he suggests that the non-expert is required to defer to the expert’s opinion. This paper offers a way to resolve the tension between these requirements. For Socrates, both intellectual requirements are dependent on the one’s intellectual aim. Socrates thinks that one is required to think independently if one’s aim is to acquire the expertise that the interlocutor professes to have. However, if one’s aim is simply to make a correct decision in a particular situation, one is required to defer to an expert opinion. If one’s epistemic aim determines which requirement one should comply with, then, for Socrates, what counts as a reason for belief is sometimes dependent on one’s (epistemic) aim.

The sources mention many Athenians who settled abroad during the troubles to quietly go about their business, or remained in the city, secluded in their oikos, without joining either camp. To take an interest in these ‘nonaligned’ individuals is to give their place in history back to the many protagonists who resisted the all-encompassing logic of the stasis and the contradictory injunctions that it gave rise to: Choose your side, comrade! But not everything is political in the same way and with the same intensity, either today or in the past: Even in the midst of turmoil, politics does not invest all spheres of existence and all the different layers of society in equal measure. Indeed, orators readily stigmatized the Athenians expelled by the Thirty who, instead of rallying to the democrats in Piraeus, had preferred the comfort of exile; symmetrically, many Athenians who remained in the city tried to demonstrate that they had not participated in any way in the exactions of the oligarchy. Socrates represents in this respect a case that is both common and exceptional: common, in that he was far from being the only one not to take sides during the civil war; exceptional, in that he declared this neutrality loud and clear, even if it meant arousing suspicion on both sides. A final question remains: Did all these ‘neutral individuals’ form a chorus in their own right? What links can be established between people who have remained outside the field of political confrontation – strangers to the ‘bond of division,’ to paraphrase Nicole Loraux? To put it another way: Is it possible to ‘make community’ out of abstention, even if it is an active choice?

Although there is no equivalent term for ‘essay’ in either Greek or Latin, ancient literature was instrumental to the development of the English essay in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in three principal ways. First, some classical prose works provided stylistic models for early English essayists. Second, some ancient authors (Seneca in particular) processed information in a way that resonated with later essay writers; even if there were not ancient essayists, there were ancient ways of reading and writing that were fundamentally essayistic. And finally, the essay became one of the principal ways that readers gained access to ancient texts and ideas.

To the modern political philosopher Amartya Sen, democracy appears a universal good, but others have seen it as a product of European and American thought bound up with colonialism, and have looked for qualities better attuned to ‘Asian’ values like consensus or the connection of human beings to nature. Gandhi presented himself as a man of transparent truth and integrity, so echoing Socrates, the Christian puritan tradition and (except in regard to violence) Robespierre. He disliked Parliamentary democracy, but needed it in order to secure independence. His encounter with Charlie Chaplin highlights the central problem: Was the Mahatma a staged role that he played, or an expression of his authentic self? Many were impressed, but some like Jinnah and Ambedkar were not. Rabindranath Tagore shared Gandhi’s objections to metropolitan Western-style electoral democracy, but distrusted Gandhi’s authoritarianism. As an artist, Tagore saw performance as an essential feature of human nature. He found no way in which he could himself enter the political arena, and fell back upon being an educator.

Socrates often said that he was merely a human being with no share in divine wisdom or virtue; but Socrates himself lived a life of superhuman self-control, wisdom, and virtue. There is an ironic contrast between his verbal professions of humility and the commanding power of his own heroic life. For example, despite his avowals of ignorance, Socrates also claimed to receive personal admonitions directly from the gods. My portrait of Socrates is based on the contrast between how he saw himself (in the Apology of Plato) and how he was viewed by his students (in Alcibiades’ memoir in Plato’s Symposium). Socrates presents himself as all-too-human, but his students saw him as quasi-divine. Despite his verbal modesty in the face of divine wisdom, Socrates’s own life and death became the very paradigm of how a human being can become godlike by means of rational discipline.

This book has tried to bring out the richness and complexity of the ethical fabric of Sophocles’ plays. Moral issues are not merely motifs, but inform the dramatic structure, and are developed with care and subtlety on the linguistic level. A multiplicity of ethical standpoints is presented in such a way that their implications and practical results are dramatised through choice and argument. While it may be true that an obviously unpleasant character tends to express sentiments contrary to conventional Athenian values, these plays are not melodramas in which only the virtuous command our sympathy and the villains our distaste.

The Gorgias ends with Socrates telling an eschatological myth that he insists is a rational account and no mere tale. Using this story, Socrates reasserts the central lessons of the previous discussion. However, it isn’t clear how this story can persuade any of the characters in the dialogue. Those (such as Socrates) who already believe the underlying philosophical lessons don’t appear to require the myth, and those (such as Callicles) who reject these teachings are unlikely to be moved by this far-fetched tale. This raises the question of who the myth is told for and what function it is meant to serve. This chapter argues that the myth is aimed not at Callicles, but at Socrates and those who aspire to follow him. There are uncertainties about the philosophical life deriving from the nature of embodiment, as well as reasons to doubt the connection between happiness and virtue. The myth assists with the former by presenting an image that draws a philosopher away from the goods of the body toward the goods of the soul. It assists with the latter by presenting an image of cosmic justice, thereby securing happiness in proportion to virtue.

Plato’s Gorgias presents philosophy as primarily the Socratic elenchos as practiced in large swathes of the Gorgias and other elenctic dialogues. So understood, unlike rhetoric, philosophy promotes the just life by encouraging the pursuit of knowledge necessary for the just life by eliminating the false conceit of believing that one already possesses it. This is not the only way the elenchos can promote the just life. Nor is philosophy only displayed in its elenctic form in the dialogue. Nevertheless, philosophy’s elenctic ability to encourage the pursuit of knowledge necessary for the just life by eliminating one’s false conceit of having it is a principal way in which Plato takes philosophy to promote the just life in the Gorgias. In this way, the victory of the just life over the unjust life grounds the victory of philosophy over rhetoric.