Self-Mastery, Piety, and Reciprocity in Xenophon’s Ethics

“Self-Mastery, Piety, and Reciprocity in Xenophon’s Ethics” focuses on the following aspects of Xenophon’s ethics. Xenophon’s interest in leadership makes ethics a central concern across his wide-ranging body of work. The foundation of virtue, for Xenophon, is enkrateia (self-mastery), which he believed could be squared with Socratic intellectualism as it was required both for the acquisition of knowledge and for the successful application of knowledge in the face of non-intellectual drives. Xenophon’s famous piety is also of ethical import, as he argues that the gods designed the world to our benefit, benefit the pious through divination, and established unwritten laws which should regulate our conduct. Among those laws is one rewarding reciprocity, which is the central factor in successful interpersonal relationships and friendship. Xenophon, despite his emphasis on self-mastery, believed that the best life was also the most pleasant life, though he also distinguished between pleasures.

Antisthenes and Allegoresis

“Antisthenes and Allegoresis” examines the question of Antisthenes’ allegoresis. First, the chapter shows that persistent disagreement among scholars on this topic arises from divergent understandings of what qualifies as allegorical interpretation. Subsequently, the chapter demonstrates that those Antisthenean interpretations that are most frequently categorized as allegorical illustrate broader controversies in research on allegoresis such as whether allegoresis should be defined in terms of its intentionality and whether allegoresis should be defined in terms of its obviousness. Finally, the chapter suggests that Antisthenes’ diversified approach to epic poetry and traditional mythology was conducive to the development of two distinct traditions: a rationalist one and an allegorist one.

Prodicus on the Choice of Heracles, Language, and Religion

“Prodicus on the Choice of Heracles, Language, and Religion” begins with an examination of Plato’s portrait of Prodicus in his Protagoras, and a few biographical details. It then addresses three main points for which Prodicus is generally known: 1) he told a story about Heracles’ choice between Virtue and Vice; 2) he paid much attention to fine distinctions among terms that most people would regard as synonymous; and 3) he offered explanations of the origins of religious belief that resulted in his being labeled an atheist. On the first, the story is read (as Xenophon, our source, read it) as an argument in favor of virtue, and in some ways as a forerunner of Aristotle’s approach to ethics. On the second, it is argued that ethical terminology was an important dimension of his linguistic interests. By contrast, the third does not appear to have been seen by Prodicus himself as having ethical significance.

Ethical and Political Thought in Antiphon’s Truth and Concord

“Ethical and Political Thoughts in Antiphon’s Truth and Concord” argues for a unitarian reading of Antiphon’s treatises Truth and Concord. Three concepts are significant to the discussion: nature (physis), law (nomos), and intelligence (gnōmē, nous). Antiphon’s point of departure is physis, which he does not regard as source of social, that is, interpersonal, or civic normativity. In the face of the absence of nature as a guide to social or civic life, Truth and Concord each entertain two distinct responses to the problem. In Truth Antiphon suggests, in contrast to the convictions of many contemporaries, that nomos is not capable of solving the problems of physis. In Concord, gnomē is presented as providing a criterion for engendering good character and conducting a successful life. Even leaving aside the problem of the identity of the sophist and the oligarchic rhetor, this defense of intelligence, when combined with the attack on nomos, implies an antidemocratic polemic.

Responsibility Rationalized

Three tetralogies attributed to Antiphon survive, and while all three depict trials for homicide, the second and third are often treated en bloc. Antiphon’s third tetralogy describes a case in which the defendant is accused of intentional homicide. Though commentators typically read the tetralogy as a discussion of causation as such, “Responsibility Rationalized: Action and Pollution in Antiphon’s Tetralogies” reconstructs it as an early attempt to deal with issues of intention and action surrounding around what twentieth-century philosophy came to call the doctrine of double effect. While Antiphon does not articulate the doctrine, he develops a nuanced view that addresses the same concerns about responsibility for consequences that motivate its defenders.

The Logos of Ethics in Gorgias’ Palamedes, On What is Not, and Helen

While Gorgias’ surviving speeches take few positions on ethics, they can be viewed as thought experiments about the psychological, epistemological, sociological, and metaphysical presuppositions of ethical thought. “The Logos of Ethics in Gorgias’ Palamedes, On What is Not, and Helen” attempts to illuminate those thought experiments by taking inspiration from a range of interpretive traditions of early Greek sophistics. The chapter argues that this “metaethical” approach allows us to appreciate the ambition and subtlety of Gorgias’ longest speech, which has received little attention hitherto; moreover, it reveals one sense in which his three surviving speeches belong to a unified ongoing project.

The Ethical Life of a Fragment

Throughout antiquity, Protagoras’ Man Measure statement has been understood predominantly as espousing an epistemological doctrine, i.e., a doctrine about the conditions of truth and knowledge. “The Ethical Life of a Fragment: Three Readings of Protagoras’ Man Measure Statement” adduces three ancient approaches to the Man Measure statement that evince an ethical outlook on the statement: the ethical relativist interpretation set out by Plato in his Theaetetus; a normative-quantitative interpretation of “measure,” found in allusions to the Man Measure statement; an axiological interpretation, featured in the biographical tradition around Protagoras and in Aristotle’s implicit polemics. The three ethical readings show the manifold ways in which an ancient source author interacts with a lost corpus author. Verbatim quotations are only one form of text reuse; paraphrases, allusions, imitations, and biographizing statements—although undertheorized in approaches to fragmentary authors—can be equally informative about early interpretations of Protagoras’ Man Measure statement.

Xenophanes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Arrogance

Xenophanes famously advanced certain views that found celebrated expressions in classical ethical philosophy. Most notably, his remarks on poetic depictions of gods and the social veneration of athletes echo the later criticisms of Plato’s Socrates. “Xenophanes on the Ethics and Epistemology of Arrogance” argues that the repeated echoes of Xenophanes in the words of Plato’s Socrates reflect an affinity that runs deeper than has been recognized. Xenophanes confronts us with a systematic attitude toward the ethical aspects and consequences of epistemic arrogance; in particular, he anticipates the central Platonic insight that epistemic arrogance manifests in, and leads to, ethical failure in human thought and action. Furthermore, Xenophanes—like Socrates—does not counter the arrogance he diagnoses with meek humility, but, instead, espouses a disillusioned recognition of human epistemic limitations while, at the same time, affirming the superiority of his own insight and value to human communities, partly on the basis of that very recognition.

Music and the Soul

The belief that music can affect the human soul was deeply rooted in ancient Greece. Many philosophers tried to describe the sympathetic responses of human beings to musical performances and their ethical consequences, even without framing their remarks within a consistent and systematic theory. “Music and the Soul” aims at analyzing the cultural background and the contemporary intellectual milieu in which Plato operated, in order to assess earlier or alternative views of the ethical power of mousikē overshadowed by his influential theorization. To this end, the chapter focuses on the role of music in the early Pythagorean environment and the evidence for sophistic (in the broadest sense) epideixeis on the psychagogic effects of music and the anti-ethical reaction documented by the fourth-century Hibeh papyrus.

Ethics in Early Greek Medicine

“Ethics in Early Greek Medicine” consists of two parts. The first examines analyses of emotions, character, and ethical conduct in the Hippocratic treatises; precisely in chapter 9 of Humors and its echoes in the Epidemics; and various theories of the physiology of ethical emotions developed in the Sacred Disease, Airs Waters Places, and On Regimen. The second part examines the ethics prescribed for the physician, his entourage, and patients; precisely the ethical function of the myth of Asclepius (particularly in terms of the question of the pursuit of profit and the limitations of medicine in the face of incurable diseases), the ethics of assisting nature (in view of the problem of violent therapies), and the duties of the physician and patient (in view of the—admittedly difficult to date—Hippocratic Oath).