Notes

Preface

1. For an introduction to ancient Greek education, H. I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956) is still the standard. Stephen Miller, “Training: The World of the Gymnasion and the Palaistra,” in Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 176–195, uses archaeological and literary sources to survey the educational aspects of ancient gyms in particular. For an in-depth look at the relation of public speaking and the gym, see Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

2. I will focus on the United States as the education system I work in and know best. While I think Greek moral philosophy is particularly useful for the bind US education is currently in, I do not mean to limit its usefulness to the United States alone.

3. The older curriculum sought out authors, such as Xenophon and Caesar, who helped solidify the value system of elite US culture. Classicists today more commonly seek out ancient texts to challenge cultural norms and help us think beyond our own horizons. This has led to a much more expansive approach to the ancient literary canon, paying more attention, for instance, to the experiences of ancient women and the impact figures in North Africa and other regions beyond Greece and Italy had on classical culture.

4. This process was complex. For a solid introduction, see Fareed Zakaria, “A Brief History of Liberal Education,” in In Defense of a Liberal Education (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 40–71. For more in-depth analysis, see James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America (New York: Basic Books, 1991), and The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2000). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), offers an even earlier critique of the status quo, focusing on academic ethicists who, according to MacIntyre, got buried in the details and lost sight of the big picture.

5. William Deresiewicz was an early and vocal critic of this problem. In Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014), he narrates how he left his position as an English professor at Yale University because he was so fed up with his students who could “do school” but not think for themselves.

6. Richard Arum, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

7. Martin Seligman, the founder of the field, offers a great introduction in Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Paperback, 2011). His student Angela Duckworth builds on his work in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016). We will return to Duckworth in part 3. For application of positive psychology to education, the classic discussion is William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life (New York: Free Press, 2008).

8. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-Being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 38 (September 2010): 16489–16493, whttps://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011492107. $75k is a rough figure, which varies depending on cost of living in one’s particular context.

9. For discussion of such a course at Yale University, see Molly Oswaks, “Over 3 Million People Took This Course on Happiness; Here’s What Some Learned,” New York Times, March 13, 2021.

10. “Network for Vocation in Undergraduate Education (NetVUE),” Council of Independent Colleges, accessed March 17, 2021, https://www.cic.edu/programs/netvue. Colleges within this group draw from their own faith traditions with everything from spiritual classics such as Augustine’s Confessions to popular films. James Martin, The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life (New York: Harper One, 2010), is a fun addition for Roman Catholic readers.

11. For an outside assessment of the program, see Tim Clydesdale, The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

12. NetVUE’s publication, David Cunningham, ed., Hearing Vocation Differently: Meaning, Purpose, and Identity in the Multi-Faith Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pushes beyond Christianity to explore concepts of vocation in other faith traditions. This is a step toward greater inclusion, yet it is still tied up in theological language, which will present barriers for many students today.

13. Edith Hall, Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change your Life (London: Penguin Press, 2019); Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

14. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Basic Books, 2006).

15. Heather Reid, Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), sets out much of the groundwork I build on here. Where Reid’s work and mine differ most is in their respective purposes. Reid is working against centuries of cultural drift to argue that philosophy and athletics were once connected in meaningful ways and can be again. I continue the project by using the gym lens to present existing scholarly debates from fresh perspectives. What is more, Reid writes for readers with prior background in Greek philosophy. This book is written for those coming to Greek philosophy for the first time.
 Reid has also organized and published conferences on athleticism in Plato. See Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller, eds., Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020). Similar work on Aristotle is still lacking.

Part I

1. Socrates’s distrust of written philosophy is set out at Plato, Phaedrus 274c-278b. Throughout, citations of Plato’s works are given in “Stephanus numbers.” These refer to page numbers and column letters in the first printed, rather than handwritten, edition of Plato’s works, published in the sixteenth century. They refer to the Greek text and are used as a common frame of reference for translations into modern languages.

1. Bravery

1. For translation and overview, see Rosamond Kent Sprague, trans., Plato: Laches and Charmides (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).

2. Because this book is aimed primarily at students with no background in the Greek language, all Greek words will be given in Latin letters. I have adapted spellings to draw out parallels with English words—for example, psychē rather than psukhē for “soul.” Unless there is compelling reason to do otherwise, such as with plural forms, words will be given in their “dictionary form” (present, singular, nominative, etc.). For readers wanting to dive deeper into original texts, detailed citations are provided throughout.

3. Matthew Sears, “The Hoplite Phalanx: The Rise of the Polis,” in Understanding Greek Warfare (New York: Routledge, 2019), 31–59.

4. Stephen Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 176–195. Plato argues for the philosophical uses of this curriculum at Republic 376c-412c (see chapter 8 of this book). The comic playwright Aristophanes sets out a detailed, if somewhat silly, account of this same approach to education at Clouds 961–1023.

5. While this phrase today is often associated with small, elite colleges, the liberal-arts tradition manifests itself in the breadth of knowledge sought by general-education courses that are characteristic of American undergraduate education across the board.

6. Angela Hobbs, “Arms and the Man: Andreia in the Laches,” in Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness, and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 76–112, reads Laches, in part, as an attempt to distinguish between courage and manliness. For a review of older scholarship on this question, see Walter Schmid, On Manly Courage: A Study of Plato’s “Laches” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).

7. Gareth Matthews, “Getting Perplexed about the Virtues,” in Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 19–30, describes this passage as Socrates capturing Nicias in a “conceptual vise” that he cannot escape.

8. This idea will recur in Plato’s Charmides (see chapter 2). Plato’s dialogue Protagoras is the other main source. For discussion, see Terry Penner, “The Unity of Virtue,” Philosophical Review 82, no. 1 (January 1973): 35–68. The Stoic school looked to Socrates as the origin of this idea, which the Stoics made central to their ethical theory (see the epilogue).

9. I will return to this point at length in the introduction to part 3.

10. For an introduction to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), see Martin Seligman, “How You Think, How You Feel,” in Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Paperback, 2011), 71–91. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), argue that current parenting and educational practices, from a culture of safety and trigger warnings to trophies for participation, are doing the opposite of what CBT advises. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a detailed analysis of trends in US culture and education. They advocate teaching something like CBT in schools and end with a quick overview of CBT techniques (275–274).

11. Carol Dweck, Mindset: Changing the Way You Think to Fulfil Your Potential (Boston: Little, Brown Book Group, 2017).

12. I defend this reading in “Socrates at the Wrestling School: Plato’s Laches, Lysis, and Charmides,” in Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, ed. Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020), 51–66. “Care for virtue” (epimeleomai aretēs) recurs in Plato’s Apology. See chapter 5.

13. For a more in-depth discussion of Laches, see Francisco Gonzales, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 19–61.

2. Discipline

1. For an overview of the ancient gym and descriptions of the various rooms in figure 3, see Stephen Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 176–195. For a selection of primary sources, see Stephen Miller, ed., “Gymnasion, Athletics, and Education,” in Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 126–152. Matthew Evans, “Architectural and Spatial Features of Plato’s Gymnasia and Palaistra,” in Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, ed. Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020), 31–50, discusses gyms from Plato’s dialogues in detail.

2. For ancient sources, see Steven Miller, ed., “Nudity and Equipment,” in Miller, Arete, 16–22.

3. Pausanias 1.44.1.

4. For the connection of nude sports and democracy, see Heather Reid, “Boxing with Tyrants,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), 32–42, and Paul Christensen, “Sports and Democratization in Sixth- and Fifth-Century BCE Greece,” in Sports and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 164–183.

5. Christopher Moore and Christopher Raymond have provided an excellent new translation and commentary, Plato: Charmides (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2019).

6. See N. B. Crowther, “Male ‘Beauty’ Contests in Greece: The Euandria and Euexia,” L’antiquité classique 54 (1985): 285–291.

7. Charmides 155c-d. The Greek uses ēporoun, a verb form of aporia, i.e., “was perplexed.”

8. Moore and Raymond, trans., Charmides, xxvii-xxxvii.

9. Cf. Laches 188d-e.

10. For extended discussion, see Christopher Moore, “Charmides: On Impossibility and Uselessness,” in Socrates and Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 54–100.

11. The Greek term epistēmē refers to any structured body of knowledge such as geometry or medicine. Its Latin equivalent is scientia, which is the root of our term science. Rosamond Kent Sprague, trans., Plato: Laches and Charmides (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), therefore translates Critias’s final definition of discipline as the science of science. This is confusing insofar as people today use “science” as shorthand for “empirical science,” which is as much a process as it is a body of knowledge. I thus follow Moore and Raymond with “knowledge of knowledge.”

12. CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria writes eloquently about this in In Defense of a Liberal Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). In his chapter “Coming to America,” 15–39, he recounts growing up in India and coming to the United States to pursue an undergraduate degree at Yale. Through this bit of autobiography, he provides a compelling view of the US educational system from the outside.

13. Erik Kenyon, “Philosophy for Children and Community-based Pedagogy,” in Intentional Disruptions: New Directions in Pre-college Philosophy, ed. Stephen Miller (Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press, 2021), 35–48.

14. Susan Ambrose et al., “How Do Students Become Self-Directed Learners?,” in How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), 188–216.

15. American Association of Colleges and Universities, “Value,” https://www.aacu.org/value, accessed March 20, 2021.

3. Friendship

1. For detailed discussions, see Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Thomas Scanlon, Eros and Greek Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

2. See chapter 9 for discussion of marriage age for young women.

3. Working with limited data and a very high infant mortality rate, scholars calculate life expectancies in Socrates’s Athens as ranging from twenty-five to forty-five years. Ben Akrigg, “Demography and Classical Athens,” in Demography and the Greco-Roman World: New Insights and Approaches, ed. Claire Holleran and April Pudsey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 37–59.

4. For a translation and brief introduction, see C. D. C. Reeve, Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, and Alcibiades with Selections from Republic and Laws (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006). For a detailed analysis, see Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe, Plato’s Lysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5. For an introduction see Nigel Spivey, “Sweet Victory,” in The Ancient Olympics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 129–173. See also the introduction to part 3 of this book.

6. Andrea Nightingale, “The Folly of Praise: Plato’s Critique of Encomiastic Discourse in the Lysis and Symposium,” Classical Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1993): 112–130, argues that Lysis offers Plato a vehicle for contrasting Hippothales’s speech writing with Socrates’s approach to flirting through discussion.

7. David Wolfsdorf, “Φιλία in Plato’s Lysis,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 103 (2007): 235–259, takes the hidden-message approach, arguing that Lysis presents a positive, philosophical account of friendship and that the text’s aporia is meant merely to uproot everyday conceptions. Gary Alan Scott, “Setting Free the Boys: Limits and Liberation in Plato’s Lysis,” disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory 4 (1995): 24–43, and Benjamin Rider, “A Socratic Seduction: Philosophical Protreptic in Plato’s Lysis,” Aperion 44 (2011): 40–66, argue that it is the act of seduction rather than a “right answer” about the nature of friendship that ultimately drives Lysis. This seduction, however, forms part of a broader philosophical project in line with what I argue for below.

4. Justice

1. For the political implications of sports in Egypt and early Greece, see Heather Reid, “Athletic Heroes,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), 11–21.

2. For an influential but controversial account of modern, race-based slavery, see Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017). Kendi’s basic thesis is that in the fifteenth century, white, Christian Europeans justified enslaving black, Muslim Africans as a way of saving them from false religion. Over time, skin color replaced religion as the main marker of difference.

3. A “book” in this context is what would fit on an ancient scroll.

4. See Charles Kahn, “Proleptic Composition in the Republic, or Why Book 1 Was Never a Separate Dialogue,” Classical Quarterly 43 (1993): 131–142, and Christopher Rowe, “The Literary and Philosophical Style of the Republic,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s “Republic,” ed. Gerasimos Santas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 7–24.

5. For an elaboration of the “trailer” view, see Rachel Barney, “Socrates’ Refutation of Thrasymachus,” in Santas, Blackwell Guide to Plato’s “Republic,” 44–62.

6. United States Census Bureau, “Quick Facts,” https://www.census.gov/quickfacts, accessed March 22, 2021; Federal Bureau of Prisons, “Inmate Race,” https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp, accessed March 22, 2021.

7. Amanda Dick, “The Immature State of Our Union: Lack of Legal Entitlement to Prison Programming in the United States as Compared to European Countries,” Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law 35, no. 2 (2018): 287–324.

8. Death Penalty Information Center, https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/costs, accessed December 20, 2022.

9. David G. Myers, “A Satisfied Mind,” in The Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 47–67.

10. For discussion based on evidence from around the world, see Martin Seligman, “The Politics and Economics of Well-Being,” in Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being (New York: Atria Paperback, 2011), 221–241.

11. This is what Gregory Vlastos, “The Socratic Elenchus,” in Plato, vol. 1, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36–63, has dubbed “the problem of the elenchus.” Hugh Benson, Socratic Wisdom: The Model of Knowledge in Plato’s Early Dialogues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), responds that the goal of the elenchos is not to arrive at knowledge but to test individuals’ overall set of beliefs. Harold Tarrant, “Socratic Method and Socratic Truth,” in A Companion to Socrates, ed. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 254–272, argues that the elenchos is meant primarily to test people, not establish beliefs. Gareth Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), carefully analyzes different forms of perplexity and argues that they have value in themselves; see especially “Shared Perplexity: The Self-Stinging Stingray,” 43–54, for his response to Vlastos.

12. For “logic of domination,” see Coleen Zoller, “Plato’s Rejection of the Logic of Domination,” in Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, ed. Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020), 223–238. See also Roslyn Weiss, “Wise Guys and Smart Alecks in Republic 1 and 2,” in Cambridge Companion to Plato’s “Republic,” ed. G. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 90–115. For “cooperative inquiry,” see Lee Coulson, “The Agones of Platonic Philosophy: Seeking Victory without Triumph,” in Reid, Ralkowski, and Zoller, Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, 211–222, esp. 215.

13. Zoller, “Plato’s Rejection,” 228.

14. Kevin Crotty, “Why Is Thrasymachus So Angry?,” in The City-State of the Soul (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 1–26, praises Thrasymachus’s account of justice for its philosophical generality and insight into the values of the democratic culture he represents. To show the shortcomings of these values, Crotty argues, Socrates must become a “culture-critic,” laying out a theoretical framework within which to view democracy, which Socrates finally returns to in book 8 of Republic.

5. Wisdom

1. For a translation and discussion of Plato’s Apology and other ancient depictions of Socrates’s trial, see Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas Smith, The Trial and Execution of Socrates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

2. Stephen Miller, “Delphi,” in Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 95–101.

3. For an overview, see Angela Duckworth, “Interest,” “Practice,” and “Purpose,” in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), 93–168.

4. For a more detailed discussion, see my “Socrates at the Wrestling School: Plato’s Laches, Lysis, and Charmides,” in Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, ed. Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020), 51–66.

5. Miles Burnyeat, “The Impiety of Socrates,” in Brickhouse and Smith, Trial and Execution of Socrates, 133–144.

6. William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life (New York: Free Press, 2008), presents a classic discussion.

7. It is possible that the wealth necessary to pay for a chariot team may itself have been seen by the public as an expression of aretē. If that is right, Socrates here seems to take a potshot at this public perception. See the introduction to part 3 for discussion.

8. These ideas return in the Hellenistic period, as both the Stoics and the Academic skeptics look to Socrates as their moral role model, albeit in very different ways. See the epilogue for a brief discussion.

Part II

1. For detailed discussion of the halma, see Stephen Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 63–68.

2. We might note that the English word invention comes from the Latin inventio, literally “a coming into,” which can mean either “a discovery” or “a creation.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the English word invent once had both meanings, but the “discovery” sense has become obsolete.

3. Modern psychologists describe such experiences in terms of flow. This is the feeling of time slowing down when people throw themselves into an athletic or musical performance in ways that fully engage their capabilities without overtaxing them. The classic discussion is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008).

4. A probably apocryphal story recounts that Pythagoras discovered musical intervals by noticing that anvils struck by certain hammers produce harmonies. Upon examination, he discovered that it was the size of the hammers that made the difference. He was able to describe this in terms of whole-number ratios and translate it into different media such as strings. See Christopher Riedweg, Pythagoras: His Life, Teaching, and Influence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 27–30.

5. Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics, 83–84.

6. Heather Reid, “Plato’s Gymnasium,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), 55–68, breaks this trend by exploring ways in which Plato reimagined traditional aspects of the Greek gymnasium for the cultivation of virtue. Her chapter serves as a synoptic introduction to themes explored in part 2 of this book. See also the collection of essays in Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller, eds., Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020).

7. Stephen Miller, The Berkeley Plato: From Neglected Relic to Ancient Treasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

8. Richard Kraut, “Introduction to the Study of Plato,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–50.

9.Republic 617e. See Miller, Berkeley Plato, 12–16.

10. See David Sedley, “Divinization,” in Plato’s “Symposium”: A Critical Guide, edited by Pierre Destrée and Zina Giannopoulou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 88–107.

11. This text, along with Polykleitos’s original bronze sculptures, has been lost. Scholars have reconstructed Polykleitos’s mathematical schemes based on Roman copies of his work. For discussion, see Warren G. Moon, Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

12. Laurence Totelin, “Therapeutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. Peter Portmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 200–216, argues that Hippocratic doctors of the time borrowed many of their prescriptions and practices from existing folk traditions and midwives. Where they differed was in the explanations doctors gave for why these prescriptions and practices worked.

13. Plato uses a similar image at Republic 611a-612b where he likens the sea god, Glaucus, who is encrusted with shells, seaweed, and rocks, to the human soul as we experience it in everyday life. To see Glaucus’s divinity and the soul’s immortality, Plato argues, we must chip away the outer crust to reveal what is within.

14. These are presented as true arts. Plato extends the analogy in another dimension by laying out the “knacks” that resemble these arts: cosmetics and pastry baking for the body; sophistry and oratory for the soul. Among other things, this elaborate design presents the very Greek advice “If you want to seem beautiful, wear makeup; if you want to be beautiful, get to the gym.”

15. For detailed discussion, see T. A. Cavanaugh, Hippocrates’ Oath and Asclepius’ Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

16. Elizabeth Craik, “The ‘Hippocratic Question’ and the Nature of the Hippocratic Corpus,” in Portmann, Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, 25–37.

17. Totelin, “Therapeutics,” 211.

18. The Roman physician Galen, for instance, was particularly fond of the treatise “Nature of Man.” Craik, “Hippocratic Question,” 25–37.

19. For a clear and engaging introduction to the history of medicine, East and West, see Gary B. Ferngren, Medicine and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

20. For a detailed discussion of ancient Greek and Roman medicine, see Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine (New York: Routledge, 2004).

21. Elizabeth Craik, “Plato and Medical Texts: Symposium 185c-193d,” Classical Quarterly 51, no. 5 (2001): 109–114, argues that “Nature of Man” and “Regimen for Health” were likely in wide circulation in the early fourth century BCE. In “Hippocrates and Early Greek Medicine,” in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, ed. Paul Keyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 215–232, Craik argues that “Airs, Waters, Places” has some claim to be written by Hippocrates himself. J. Chadwick and W. N. Mann, Hippocratic Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), provide translations for “Nature of Man” (260–271), “Regimen for Health” (272–276), and “Airs, Waters, Places” (148–169).

22. See Totelin, “Therapeutics,” 207–211, for discussion.

23. Brooke Holmes, “Body,” in Portmann, Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, 63–88.

24. See Totelin, “Therapeutics,” for extended discussion.

25. Jim Hankinson, “Aetiology,” in Portmann, Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, 89–118, discusses “Regimen for Health,” which is closely connected to “Nature of Man” in the manuscript tradition (116), yet contradicts theories laid out in the treatise “On Ancient Medicine,” which also dates to the earliest stage of the Hippocratic corpus.

26. The new movement in value-based care seeks to integrate typical medical treatment with human service agencies, referring patients to agencies that can help remove causes of illness, such as substandard housing. Given the complexity of our medical industry, funding such measures is challenging. See Arvin Garg, Charles J. Homer, and Paul H. Dworkin, “Addressing Social Determinants of Health: Challenges and Opportunities in a Value-Based Model” Pediatrics 143, no. 4 (2019).

27. T. A. LaVeist et al., “Environmental and Socio-Economic Factors as Contributors to Racial Disparities in Diabetes Prevalence.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 24, no. 1144 (2009).

28. Merlin Chowkwanyun and Adolph L. Reed Jr., “Racial Health Disparities and Covid-19—Caution and Context.” New England Journal of Medicine 383 (2020): 201–203.

29. David Cantor, “Western Medicine since the Renaissance,” in Portmann, Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, 362–383.

30. Deanna Anderlini, “The United States Health Care System Is Sick: From Adam Smith to Overspecialization,” Cureus 10, no. 5 (2018): e2720, discusses our current situation as “Fordism applied to health care.”

31. This emphasis on holistic, preventative medicine is well established in current discussions. See Sharon K. Hull, “A Larger Role for Preventive Medicine,” AMA Journal of Ethics 10, no. 11 (2008): 724–729. The health-care (and insurance) industry, however, is so cumbersome that bringing about such reforms is, as they say, like trying to repair an engine while it is running. Jennifer Trilk et al., “Including Lifestyle Medicine in Medical Education: Rationale for American College of Preventive Medicine/American Medical Association Resolution 959,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 56, no. 5 (2019): e169-e175, argue that reforms of the medical school curricula are coming much too slowly. Charles Preston et al., “Role of Preventive Medicine Residencies in Medical Education: A National Survey,” American Journal of Preventive Medicine 41, no. 4, Supplement 3 (2011): S290-S295, point out that existing resources are underused.

32. Special thanks to Jacob Riegler for his help relating Hippocratic medicine to current challenges and discussions in health care.

6. Drinking Games

1. Heran Mamo, “Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl Halftime Show Is Now the Most-Watched of All Time,” Billboard, May 22, 2023, https://www.foxsports.com/presspass/blog/2023/02/13/fox-sports-presentation-of-super-bowl-lvii-scores-six-year-high-with-113-million-viewers/.

2. This is likely an exaggeration, yet the relative sums are close enough for scholars to debate the claim. David Pritchard, “Costing Festivals and War: Spending Priorities of the Athenian Democracy,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 61 (2012): 18–65, argues that during wartime, Athens actually spent five to fifteen times more on the military than on religious festivals. To put that into perspective, in 2019, the US federal government spent 16 percent of its annual budget on defense (https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/where-do-our-federal-tax-dollars-go), while .003 percent went to the National Endowment for the Arts (https://www.arts.gov/about/appropriations-history).

3. For a critical discussion of tragedy and Dionysiac religion in Plato’s Symposium, see Marie-Élise Zovko, “Agōn and Erōs in Plato’s Symposium,” in Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, ed. Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller (Sioux City, IA, Parnassos Press, 2020), 143–156.

4. We find a similar idea in today’s fraternities with the system of big and little brothers. While the hazing and other abuses of today’s system tend to make the news, a fair amount of mentoring goes on as well. For a critical but sympathetic look at the modern fraternity system, see Alexandra Robbins, Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men (Boston: Dutton, 2019). It is the educational aspect of the symposium that survives in the English word, which almost always refers to a gathering of “academics” to discuss big ideas.

5. Less relevant here is agapē (Latin, caritas), which centuries later becomes a central Christian virtue: the love of God and neighbor, which is expressly nonsexual.

6. Richard Seaford, “Dionysiac Drama and the Dionysiac Mysteries,” Classical Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1981): 252–275.

7. Luc Brisson, “Agathon, Pausanias, and Diotima in Plato’s Symposium: Paiderastia and Philosophia,” in Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, ed. James Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006), 229–251, presents what we know about the relationships of the actual people on whom these characters are based, and uses that to interpret Plato’s stance on homoerotic relationships as a social institution.

8. “Gays in the military” has been a point of controversy in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Phaedrus’s idea, however, was actually put into place by the Thebans, whose “Sacred Band” was a special force made up entirely of homosexual couples. They remained undefeated for forty years.

9. The story is best known today through Euripides’s play Alcestis.

10. The story culminates in a burial with funeral games including boxing, wrestling, discus, archery, and a chariot race (Iliad 23). Among other things, this is one of the earliest pieces of textual evidence for the development of Greek sports. See Heather Reid, “Athletic Heroes,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), 11–21.

11. Playing hard to get was a key feature in heterosexual courtship as well, as was ritualized in various footraces for young women of marriageable age. See chapter 9.

12. There may be innuendo at play with this talk of hiccups. Coleen Zoller, Plato and the Body (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), 88–90, sees Eryximachus’s three cures as symbolizing different strategies for dealing with sexual desire.

13. See the introduction to part 2 for discussion of Hippocratic theory.

14. A number of scholars have dismissed Eryximachus’s speech as merely comic relief, which does nothing to advance the work’s central exploration of erōs. Against this thinking, Franco Trivigno, “A Doctor’s Folly: Diagnosing the Speech of Eryximachus,” in Plato’s “Symposium”: A Critical Guide, ed. Pierre Destrée and Zina Giannopoulou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 48–69, sets Eryximachus’s speech against the context of Hippocratic medicine, and argues for taking its philosophical contribution to the dialogue seriously.

15. The exact meaning of the “wrinkles” left in the stomach is unclear. For a different interpretation, see Elizabeth Craik, “Plato and Medical Texts: Symposium 185c-193d,” Classical Quarterly 51, no. 5 (2001): 109–114.

16. In many readings of this speech, Zeus tends to come across as somewhere between bumbling and wicked. For a compelling pessimistic reading of Aristophanes’s speech, see Suzanne Obdrzalek, “Aristophanic Tragedy,” in Lesher, Nails, and Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium, 70–87. For a more optimistic reading of Aristophanes’s speech as a Platonic myth, see Gábor Betegh, “Tale, Theology, and Teleology in the Phaedo,” in Plato’s Myths, ed. Catalin Partenie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 77–100.

17. In other sources, Agathon is presented as somewhat effeminate. In the comedy Thesmophoriazeusai, Aristophanes presents Agathon dressing in women’s clothes to get himself into the right mood for writing female characters.

18. As with Eryximachus, scholars tend to dismiss Agathon’s contribution to Symposium’s philosophical project. Against this, Francisco Gonzales, “Why Agathon’s Beauty Matters,” in Destrée and Giannopoulou, Plato’s “Symposium,” 108–124, argues that Agathon represents a model philosophical student and that the aspects of his speech that scholars like to dismiss, for example, his playful use of poetry (115), are the sort of things that Plato’s Socrates does all the time without being dismissed by scholars.

19. This is a driving question in scholarship on Symposium, including those studies cited so far. Jeremy Reid, “Unfamiliar Voices: Harmonizing the Non-Socratic Speeches and Plato’s Psychology,” in Destrée and Giannopoulou, Plato’s “Symposium,” 28–47, offers an ingenious scheme in which the main points of the first four speeches line up with the main objectives of the educational program laid out in Plato’s Republic: instilling a sense of shame (Phaedrus), lawfulness (Pausanias), and balance (Eryximachus), while curbing desires that manifest themselves in the original humans’ attempt to overtake Olympus (Aristophanes). Within Symposium, in turn, Agathon ends up embodying these qualities, making him the prime example of a philosophical beloved, while Alcibiades, whom we will meet shortly, does not. As with any great work of literature, there is more than one way to see the connections between the parts of Symposium. While Reid finds an order through parallels with Republic, the reading I present seeks to make sense of Symposium as a self-contained whole. The two readings need not be mutually exclusive.

20. Mark McPherran, “Medicine, Magic, and Religion in Plato’s Symposium,” in Lesher, Nails, and Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium, 71–95, undertakes a similar project, by situating the speeches of Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Agathon within the context of the whole. The three threads he traces (medicine, magic, and religion) partly overlap with my analysis here, making our two readings mutually compatible.

21. Brooke Holmes, “Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. Peter Portmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 87, discusses “the presentation of the [Hippocratic] physician as a knower whose knowledge or thought bears no explicit relationship to the state of his body.”

22. The original phrase, by the poet Juvenal, is mens sana in corpore sano.

23. Andrew Gregory, “Pythagoras and Plato,” in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, ed. Paul Keyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 147–170, situates Plato’s cosmological ideas about harmonies of opposites against the background of the earlier theories of Pythagoras, Philolaus, and Archytas, who see similar continuities between physics, music, and mathematics.

24. The definitive study is Hugh Benson, Clitophon’s Challenge: Dialectic in Plato’s “Meno,” “Phaedo,” and “Republic” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). In this study, Benson limits himself to dialogues in which the method of hypothesis is explicitly reflected on and discussed. I go beyond that project by applying Benson’s model to Symposium, which, I argue, uses this method but does not call it by its name. See chapter 7 of this book for further discussion.

25. In Plato’s Meno, for instance, Socrates explains a slave’s ability to solve a geometry problem without ever having been taught geometry by way of the hypothesis that we have all lived multiple lives, and thus the slave is making use of ideas he learned in a former life.

26. For a helpful discussion of this particular strategy, see Frisbee Sheffield, “The Role of the Earlier Speeches in the Symposium: Plato’s Endoxic Method,” in Lesher, Nails, and Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium, 23–46. Like Sheffield, I explore the relation of Socrates’s speech to the first five in what follows. Unlike Sheffield, I take the intermediate step of looking at how Agathon’s speech functions similarly to Socrates’s, and I set both within the context of the method of hypothesis. Sheffield is right, I think, in seeing parallels between Socrates’s method in Symposium and the “endoxic” method later developed by Aristotle (see chapter 11).

7. Mysteries of Love

1. The Latin root for cult (colo) means “to care for or nurture”; it is the root of agriculture (care of fields), cultured (describing someone whose artistic manners and attitudes have been nurtured), and by extension culture itself. In the ancient context, cult was simply caring for the gods.

2. For discussion, see Helene Foley, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary, and Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. 65–76.

3. The Greek for “plenty” is poros. Its negative form provides aporia (perplexity).

4. Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Permanent Beauty and Becoming Happy in Plato’s Symposium,” in Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, ed. James Lesher, Debra Nails, and Frisbee Sheffield (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2006), 96–123, at 98, 120.

5. Frisbee Sheffield, “Erōs and the Pursuit of Form,” in Plato’s “Symposium”: A Critical Guide, ed. Pierre Destrée and Zina Giannopoulou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 125–141, reads Diotima’s account of spiritual pregnancy within the educational context of ancient homoerotic relationships. Andrea Nightingale, “The Mortal Soul and Immortal Happiness,” in Destrée and Giannopoulou, Plato’s “Symposium,” 142–159, argues for the ongoing nature of the philosophical undertaking.

6. Aristotle, perhaps in responding to this problem from Symposium, presents a similar train of thought at NE 1.10–11. See chapter 11.

7. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 1, credits Aristotle with articulating the experience now referred to as “flow.” I suspect that passages in Plato such as Symposium’s account of beauty provide the background to Aristotle’s thinking.

8. Heather Reid, “Athletic Beauty as Mimēsis of Virtue: The Case of the Beautiful Boxer,” in Looking at Beauty: To Kalon in Western Greece, ed. Heather Reid and Tony Leyh (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press), 77–91, identifies this middle stage of Diotima’s ascent at play in later ancient reflections on the famous Terme Boxer statue. While the statue of a brawny, bruised, and bleeding boxer does not fit classical ideals of physical beauty, it provides spectators a visual means of understanding the virtues of endurance and self-control.

9. David Sedley, “Divinization,” in Destrée and Giannopoulou, Plato’s “Symposium,” 88–107, defends this reading in terms of human beings striving for divine understanding, setting Aristophanes’s account of our original wheeled nature against another philosophical myth in Plato’s Timaeus that likens the spherical motions of the heavens to the spherical motions of thinking within the human head.

10. Later reprinted as Gregory Vlastos, “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato,” in Plato, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:137–163.

11. See, for instance, Frisbee Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 204.

12. For a reading along these lines, see Guilherme Domingues de Motta, “What Beauty Is Socrates Seeking by Chasing Handsome Youths?,” in Reid and Leyh, Looking at Beauty, 149–159.

13. Radcliffe Edmunds, “Alcibiades the Profane: Images of the Mysteries,” in Destrée and Giannopoulou, Plato’s “Symposium,” 194–215.

14. Mateo Duque, “Two Passions in Plato’s Symposium: Diotima’s To Kalon as a Reorientation of Imperialistic Erōs,” in Reid and Leyh, Looking at Beauty, 95–110, makes a compelling case for dispensing with talk of a “ladder” and, instead, referring to steps in an ascent.

15.Symposium 210b. The Greek kataphroneō is sometimes translated as “disdain,” though it can also be the weaker “look down on” or “think slightly of” something. This is an instance when details of translation matter for how we understand the passage as a whole. See Coleen Zoller, Plato and the Body (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), 83–86.

16. So argues Frisbee Sheffield, “The Symposium and Platonic Ethics: Plato, Vlastos, and a Misguided Debate,” Phronesis 57 (2012): 117–141.

17. Sheffield, “Symposium and Platonic Ethics,” 127.

18. Richard Kraut, “Eudaimonism and Platonic Erōs,” in Destrée and Giannopoulou, Plato’s “Symposium,” 235–252.

19. See esp. Zoller, “Beauty, Education, and Erotic Ascent in the Symposium and Phaedrus,” in Plato and the Body, 59–104.

20. Kraut, “Eudaimonism,” 252. The reference is to Republic 2. See chapter 8.

21. Kraut, “Eudaimonism,” 243 and 248.

22. Duque, “Two Passions.”

23. Edmunds, “Alcibiades the Profane,” argues that in performing the mysteries outside of Eleusis, Alcibiades attempted to take something that belonged to the city as a whole and make it his own. According to Edmunds, Alcibiades makes a similar mistake in Symposium, when he sees Socrates’s wisdom as a possession to be acquired by swapping sexual favors.

24. Nicola Stafano Galgano, “Logoi Kaloi: The Method of Philosophy at Symposium 210a-212b,” in Reid and Leyh, Looking at Beauty, 111–121, extends this thinking about proportionality to Diotima’s “beautiful speeches,” which are “truthful, non-contradictory and harmonic argument[s]” (120).

25. By the medieval period, the liberal arts were sorted into a canonic list of seven: the so-called trivium, or “three roads,” of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and the quadrivium, or “four roads,” of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. In earlier centuries, though, these lists were more fluid. Some sources list nine liberal arts (one for each Muse), including medicine and architecture. See Danuta Shanzer, “Augustine’s Disciplines: Silent diuitius Musae Varronis?,” in Augustine and the Disciplines, ed. Karla Pollmann and Mark Vessey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 69–112. Plato, and the speech he writes for Eryximachus, sit at the early stages of all of this. Eryximachus presents medicine as a sort of umbrella for the whole quadrivium.

26. Brooke Holmes, “Body,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. Peter Portmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 63–88.

27. Konstantinos Gkaleas, “Ἔρως and Γυμναστική in the Platonic Corpus: The Quest for the Form of Καλόν,” in Reid and Leyh, Looking at Beauty, 123–131, offers a reading in line with my own. He assumes, however, that the first five speeches do not represent Platonic thought (124), and thus looks to other Platonic works for thinking about gymnastikē rather than going to Eryximachus’s discussion of it in Symposium itself.

28. Undergraduates often find this the most impressive part of the work. Given that Alcibiades also stresses Socrates’s endurance on the battlefield, such details presumably serve some philosophical purpose beyond merely recounting anecdotes about Socrates.

29. Ruby Blondell, “Where Is Socrates on the ‘Ladder of Love’?,” in Lesher, Nails, and Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium, 147–178.

30. Sheffield, “Symposium and Platonic Ethics,” 127–128.

8. Music, Gymnastics, and Moral Development

1. We might be tempted to distinguish eating cookies from the pleasure eating them brings, and to see this pleasure as a consequence of the eating. Glaucon’s point seems to be, rather, that we do not need to bring other factors into play in order to explain the value of cookies. It is not necessary, for instance, for someone else to see me eating cookies for me to enjoy the pleasure of eating them. While cookie envy may bring additional pleasure, this pleasure would be different from the one Glaucon refers to here.

2. It may seem odd that Glaucon places exercise (gymnazō) in the final category. The consequences of gym exercise are clearly valuable: health, strength, people to talk with about philosophy, etc. But why does Glaucon say that exercise is not also good in itself? Granted, gym exercise is not always pleasant. Still, is it not possible to come to enjoy not only having strong quads but leg day itself? Judging by other dialogues, the historical Socrates seems to have been fond of gym work. Perhaps this just reflects Glaucon’s own views. The issue does not come up again in the text, so we are left without much to go on.

3. This is likely the inspiration for Tolkien.

4. For detailed discussion of Republic 2’s setup, see Terence Irwin, “Republic 2: Questions about Justice,” in Plato, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:164–185, and Christopher Shields, “Plato’s Challenge: The Case against Justice in Republic II,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s “Republic,” ed. Gerasimos Santas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 63–83.

5. Malcolm Schofield, “Music all pow’rful,” in Plato’s “Republic”: A Critical Guide, ed. Mark McPherran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 229–248, analyzes the relations between musikē (rhythm and harmonies) and grammata (reading, writing, and literature) within Republic, and those between Republic and educational practices of the time.

6. My former student Halie Jo Fuller was inspired by this passage of Plato and used it to create an audition tape for American Ninja Warrior, which alternates between scenes of her in an evening gown playing a flute concerto and kickboxing to rap music and other athletic pursuits (https://youtu.be/a86qXhgxTaA). Stamatia Dova, “On Philogymnastia and Its Cognates in Plato,” in Athletics, Gymnastics, and Agon in Plato, ed. Heather Reid, Mark Ralkowski, and Coleen Zoller (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2020), 107–126, explores the dangers of overdevotion to either the gym or music throughout Plato’s writings.

7. For this two-part division of athletic training, see James Wilberding, “Curbing One’s Appetites in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato and the Divided Self, ed. Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 128–149. While this division is not given much attention in Republic 2–3, its significance will become clear when we move to discussing the soul’s virtues later in the work.

8. See Fareed Zakaria, “The Natural Aristocracy,” in In Defense of a Liberal Education (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015), 106–134.

9. Tad Brennan, “The Nature of the Spirited Part of the Soul and Its Object,” in Barney, Brennan, Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self, 102–127, argues that, at a psychological level, spirit’s most basic role is to negotiate concepts of honor and shame within social interactions. This vocabulary of honor and shame, however, can also be turned onto one’s own soul as a way of controlling one’s own appetites. In sociological terms, spirit starts out with other-directed shame, which is then turned to self-directed guilt.

10. Scholars have differing responses to Republic 4’s division of the soul into three. John Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,” in Fine, Plato, 2:186–206, sees the three-part soul as psychologically insightful from an empirical standpoint. Brennan, “Nature of the Spirited Part,” 121–125, argues that spirit is a necessary middle term, binding together reason and appetite in an embodied soul. Because of this, the soul must have three parts. On other readings, the human soul only sometimes has three parts. Christopher Shields, “Plato’s Divided Soul,” in McPherran, Plato’s “Republic,” 147–170, and Jennifer Whitting, “Psychic Contingency in the Republic,” in Barney, Brennan, and Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self, 174–208, argue that having three parts is a mark of the soul’s unjust status, and that a just soul has only one part: the rational one. Because of this, Shields takes the soul to be essentially only one part. Kevin Crotty, City-State of the Soul (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), agrees that the soul does not have a fixed number of parts, yet he argues that its attaining three parts is a great accomplishment and a mark of its justice.

9. Women at the Gym

1. International Olympic Committee, “Gender Equality through Time,” https://olympics.com/ioc/gender-equality/gender-equality-through-time/at-the-olympic-games, accessed June 23, 2023.

2. What follows is drawn from Stephen Miller, “Women and Athletics,” in Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 150–159. See also Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 120–128. For more in-depth discussion, see Thomas Scanlon, “Racing for Hera—A Girls’ Contest at Olympia,” “‘Only We Produce Men’—Spartan Female Athletics and Eugenics,” and “Race or Chase of ‘the Bears’ at Brauron?,” in Eros and Greek Athletics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 98–174.

3. The Spartan princess Kyniska famously entered and won the chariot race at the main Olympic festival. Yet this merely means that she owned the horses, chariot, and driver; she herself was not present during the competition.

4. Heather Reid, “Heroic Parthenoi and the Virtues of Independence: A Feminine Philosophical Perspective on the Origin of Women’s Sports,” Sports, Ethics and Philosophy 14, no. 4 (2020): 511–524.

5. See Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics, 11–14, for the origins of nude athletics.

6. See the introduction to part 2 for discussion of Hippocrates and social determinants of health.

7. “Nature” (physis) in this argument can be taken in a few ways. The default might be to talk about “human nature,” which does not vary between men and women apart from questions of reproduction. Kevin Crotty, The City-State of the Soul (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 37–43, argues for taking nature to mean an individual’s “native ability” or “distinctive talent,” which can be developed into a professional skill.

8. Julia Annas, “Plato’s Republic and Feminism,” in Plato, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:265–279, argues against the common view that Plato was the “first feminist” on the grounds that in making women into guardians Plato has the good of the state, not women’s individual freedom and happiness, in mind. Furthermore, since his reforms are directed only at the guardian class, Annas takes Plato as content to leave “potters’ wives” in their traditional household roles, rather than allowing them to pursue careers as potters themselves. Annas is right to point out Plato’s silence on women in the productive class, as well as the casual misogyny of the culture around him that Plato echoes in passing, e.g., women being weaker than men on the whole. Still, her view of Plato’s city as an “authoritarian state,” which treats its citizens as nothing more than resources, misses Republic’s overarching approach to what people today call purpose exploration, that is, the process of aligning individuals’ skills and interests with needs of the broader community. Granted, Plato focuses more on skills than interests, so it is possible that guardians could try to shoehorn women into roles they are good at but do not enjoy. But given the goal of making the city as happy as possible (its individual citizens included), an ideal ruler, as laid out by Socrates, would look for more creative approaches to helping all citizens find a purpose around which to build their own meaningful lives. Heather Reid, “Plato on Women in Sport,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 47, no. 3 (2020): 344–361, offers a more positive view on Plato’s account of women in Republic and Laws. Rather than see the works’ casual misogyny as indicative of Plato’s view, she sets it within the dialogical context of figures easing their discussion partners into radical new ideas, as “the sugar of apparently sexist statements helps the medicine of logic to go down” (348).

9. This term is applied to Lysis at Lysis 206c.

10. Reid, “Heroic Parthenoi,” 511.

11. Reid, “Heroic Parthenoi,” builds a case for Plato’s Republic as influencing these shifts in Hellenistic athletics.

12. Coleen Zoller, given her focus in Plato and the Body (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), devotes considerable attention to analyzing the apparent paradoxes in “the rare, quirky sort of people” that become philosophers (122–130), and applying Republic’s account of the philosopher to Socrates himself (130–147).

13. See the discussion of “finding a rhythm” in the introduction to part 2.

14. See William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life (New York: Free Press, 2008), and Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), esp. chapters 6 and 7.

15. The reading I set out is in line with Gail Fine, “Knowledge and Belief in Republic 5–7,” in Fine, Plato, 1:215–246, who argues that understanding the form of the good amounts to holistic, synoptic understanding of how all basic ideas fit together in an organic whole.

16. For an overview of play in Greek culture, see Armand D’Angour, “Plato and Play: Taking Education Seriously in Ancient Greece,” American Journal of Play 5, no. 3 (2013): 293–307.

17. For a discussion of this history, see Eric Chaline, The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym (London: Reaktion Books, 2015).

18. In chapter 7, I argued for reading the first five speeches in Symposium as creating a progression in line with Plato’s use of the mathematical sciences in Republic 7. Ideas of numerical proportion were limited to Eryximachus’s talk of balance in medicine, gym training, music, and related arts, but did not get into details of the math. One way to defend my reading of Symposium is to see it as focused on the initial “play” stages of Republic’s more expansive ascent to the good. While the role of harmonies is made explicit in Symposium, the rationale for them is left for a more in-depth analysis. Whatever the relation between Symposium and Republic in terms of theory building and order of composition, both reflect a common constellation of ideas drawn from Hippocratic medicine, gym training, and music theory. Heather Reid, “Sport and Moral Education in Plato’s Republic,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 34 (2007): 160–175, corroborates this view. On her reading, the rhythmic motions involved in sports and dance provide instances of the soul’s control over the body. In children, who are prone to follow appetites over reason, this is especially important as external rules provide a way for children to practice keeping their appetites in check.

19. For discussion of the “ruler’s choice,” see Richard Kraut, “Return to the Cave: Republic 519–521,” in Fine, Plato, 2:235–254, and Nicholas Smith, “Return to the Cave,” in Plato and the Divided Self, ed. Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 83–102.

20. My reading of Plato’s curriculum, particularly the role of mathematical studies within it, is in line with Mitchell Miller, “Beginning the ‘Longer Way,’” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s “Republic,” ed. G. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 310–344.

21. Unlike Symposium, Republic explicitly engages in the language of hypothesis. For analysis, see Hugh Benson, “Plato’s Philosophical Method in the Republic: The Divided Line (510b-511b),” in Plato’s “Republic”: A Critical Guide, ed. Mark McPherran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 188–208.

22. C. D. C. Reeve, “Blindness and Reorientation: Education and the Acquisition of Knowledge in the Republic,” in McPherran, Plato’s “Republic,” 209–228, walks through Republic’s education program largely along the same lines as I do. Given that Republic does not complete the inquiry to arrive at a nonhypothetical first principle, Reeve concludes, “Republic itself is best seen as a raft only—a splendid prototype to use in thinking about education” (227).

23. Benson, “Plato’s Philosophical Method,” 200, points out that the confirmation portion of the method is “notoriously obscure.” He suggests that Socrates, by disclaiming knowledge at this point in Republic, shows himself to be someone engaged in the true, albeit incomplete, pursuit of understanding, as opposed to people who have mistaken their hypothetical “knowledge” for nonhypothetical “understanding.” In this respect, the gaping hole in the middle of Republic’s argument ends up being a strength akin to “human wisdom” in Apology—i.e., Socrates does not take himself to know (or, in Republic 6’s terms, “understand”) things that he does not.

10. Justice as Civic and Mental Health

1. David Sachs, in an influential article, “A Fallacy in Plato’s Republic,” Philosophical Review 72, no. 2 (1963): 141–158, argues that Socrates has actually failed to do this. Sachs distinguishes the common conception of justice as set out by Glaucon (not robbing temples, not murdering people, etc.) from the Platonic conception of justice (each part of the soul doing its own task). For Socrates’s response to Glaucon to work, Sachs argues, Socrates would have to show that all people who perform actions commonly thought of as just embody Platonic justice in their souls, and vice versa. Since he finds no such arguments, Sachs suggests Plato is motivated by the idea that rules of conduct (i.e., common justice) always have exceptions, which is why Socrates shifts his focus onto states of the soul. Rachana Kamtekar, “Ethics and Politics in Socrates’ Defense of Justice in Plato’s Republic,” in Plato and the Divided Self, ed. Rachel Barney, Tad Brennan, and Charles Brittain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 65–82, responds that there are aspects of common justice in Republic that do not have exceptions, e.g., do not harm friends. On her reading, Socrates’s shift into psychology brings questions of motivation into the discussion, since the Platonically just person who performs commonly just actions is in fact happier than someone with a disordered soul who performs commonly just actions out of coercion, e.g., out of fear of enraging a vicious ruler. Kamtekar argues that Republic is not providing the kind of demonstrative proof Sachs seems to want but rather setting out an account of justice as the most plausible hypothesis.

2. James Wilberding, “Curbing One’s Appetites in Plato’s Republic,” in Barney, Brennan, and Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self, 128–149.

3. Compare Pausanias’s concern for customs (nomoi) in Symposium.

4. These competing constitutions were in use during Plato’s lifetime. Zena Hitz, “Degenerate Regimes in Plato’s Republic,” in Barney, Brennan, and Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self, 103–131, sees Republic 8 and 9 as Plato’s attempt to make sense of the political chaos of his youth by presenting each constitution in terms of the ultimate standard it uses in making political choices.

5. In the political sphere this comes about as the impoverished masses overthrow the wealthy elite. Coleen Zoller, Plato and the Body (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), 148–153, relates Republic’s discussion of poverty to wealth disparity today.

6. We noted above that scholars disagree about how best to read Republic 4’s three-part division of the soul. At least part of that disagreement stems from trying to make book 4’s account fit with what Socrates lays out in books 8 and 9. Jennifer Whitting, “Psychic Contingency in the Republic,” in Barney, Brennan, and Brittain, Plato and the Divided Self, 174–208, takes a hybrid approach. She argues that in book 4 Socrates relies on musical and Hippocratic medical language to describe the relationships between parts of the soul. In an ideal state, bodily humors are mixed in proper proportions; when illness occurs, individual elements are separated out in ways that they are not meant to be (e.g., the phlegm noticeable in winter). This separation, she argues, transitions into political language of rival parties, which gets picked up in books 8 and 9. Thus, according to Whitting, the soul has one part when healthy and multiple parts when ill.

7. Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

8. This contrast between Plato’s thinking and people such as Popper is mirrored in Plato’s thinking about astronomy. As Andrew Gregory puts it in “Pythagoras and Plato,” in The Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World, ed. Paul Keyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 147–170, “For Plato, regular and orderly motion was characteristic of intelligence, while irregularity was characteristic of matter on its own. In contrast, we take mechanism, in particular clockwork, to be a paradigm of regularity and contrast that with human frailty.” This parallel in astronomical and moral thinking matters, given that Plato’s guardians are trained through a rigorous course of astronomy and other mathematical sciences so as to condition them to thinking in certain ways.

9. Kevin Crotty, “Freedom,” in The City-State of the Soul (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 227–253, presents the same general reading, though he points out that the philosopher also enjoys freedom from opinion.

10. Richard Perry, “The Unhappy Tyrant and the Craft of Inner Rule,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s “Republic,” ed. G. Ferrari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 386–414, presents Republic 9’s critique of the tyrannical soul and sets it within the context of Republic as a whole.

11. Crotty, City-State of the Soul, 124–126; cf. Republic 596–597.

12. Granted, carpenters do not go beyond knowledge of the form of the couch to understanding of goodness. Because of this, they are not qualified to rule the city as a whole. Yet, on Crotty’s reading at least, this does not stop them from obtaining a degree of personal virtue. This is all the more likely to happen when they live by the rules set for them by wise rulers. For a less optimistic account of the nonphilosopher’s virtue, see Rachana Kamtekar, “Imperfect Virtue,” Ancient Philosophy 18 (1998): 315–339.

13. Scholars disagree on what keeping parts of the soul “in check” amounts to. Zoller, Plato and the Body, 115–122, contrasts “austere dualism,” which recognizes rational goods as the only goods with “normative dualism,” which recognizes spirited and appetitive goods as goods, albeit of less worth than rational ones. Scholars who read Plato in terms of austere dualism tend to see reason ruling in a tyrannical manner. Against this, Zoller rightly points out that reason’s role in Republic is to care for the goods of each part of the soul in a way that keeps the whole in balance.

14. This passage looks to poetic content and music theory to argue that poets must be banished from the ideal city. Malcolm Schofield, “Music all pow’rful,” in Plato’s “Republic”: A Critical Guide, ed. Mark McPherran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 229–248, argues that Socrates’s account of music’s power to harmonize the soul through rhythms and harmonies is more central to Republic’s argument than the critique of poetic content we find in books 2, 3, and 10, even if the critique of poetic content takes up considerably more space. Schofield buttresses this reading by looking to Plato’s later work, Laws, which presents Republic 3’s account of music but sets the critique of poetry aside. Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Plato on Learning to Love Beauty,” in The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s “Republic,” ed. Gerasimos Santas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 104–124, connects both categories. On her reading, appearing beautiful provides a forum for spirit’s love of winning. In a context where people see material wealth as beautiful, a child will strive to appear beautiful by being wealthy, likewise in a context that presents military prowess, cunning, or virtue as beautiful. The content of beautiful poems may thus help harmonize the soul by presenting virtuous and good people as beautiful, thus giving the spirited part of the soul role models that will help direct the whole soul to virtue and the good, which are the ultimate objects of the rational part.

15. For discussion, see G. R. F. Ferrari, “Glaucon’s Reward, Philosophy’s Debt: The Myth of Er,” in Plato’s Myths, ed. Catalin Partenie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 116–133.

16. Crotty, City-State of the Soul, is the major exception to this. His central message is that the kind of thinking that goes into Socrates’s founding of an ideal city provides a model, inviting talented young people to think about themselves as “founders” of their own souls.

17. According to Richard Kraut, “Eudaimonism and Platonic Erōs,” in Plato’s “Symposium”: A Critical Guide, ed. Pierre Destrée and Zina Giannopoulou (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 235–252, one of Plato’s main ethical insights is that “one should live one’s life in response to something superior to oneself.”

18. See the introduction to part 2.

19. For a current discussion of sustainability and Greek theories of happiness, see Bruce Stephenson, Portland’s Good Life: Sustainability and Hope in an American City (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021).

Part III

1. Citation schemes for NE abound. For general passages, I will use the format NE book.chapter (e.g., NE 1.8). For specific passages, I will use Bekker numbers, which refer to the first print edition of the Greek; I will use the following format: page number/column letter/line number (e.g., 1099a3).

2. We first encountered this term in chapter 3, as Socrates’s first question about a new gym was about attractive (kalos) men there. Kalos is the masculine form of the word. In what follows, I will use the neuter form, kalon, which is Aristotle’s default for talking about actions, virtues, and other attributes.

3. The traditional start date for the Olympic Games is 776 BCE. This marked the first Olympiad, i.e., the four-year period until the next set of games. Each Olympiad was subsequently referred to by the winner of the games’ founding competition, a 200-meter sprint known as the stadion.

4. For a detailed account of ancient sources for the myth, see Emma Stafford, “Monsters and the Hero I: The Twelve Labors,” in Herakles (New York: Routledge, 2012), 23–50. For visual sources, see Jenifer Neils, “Myth and Greek Art: Creating a Visual Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, ed. Roger Woodard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 286–304, esp. 296–297.

5. For a detailed discussion of the connection between ancient virtue theory, Herakles, and the Olympic Games, see Heather Reid and Georgios Mouratidis, “Naked Virtue: Ancient Athletic Nudity and the Olympic Ethos of Aretē,” Olympika 29 (2020): 29–55.

6. This meaning shows up often in Homer. Given the formulaic nature of Homer’s poetry, phrases such as “in good order” and “not in order” are repeated several times. See, for instance, Iliad 10.472 and 2.214. Homer typically uses the verb form in military contexts, e.g., “to set in order the horses and the shield-bearing men” (Iliad 2.554).

7. This sense appears at NE 3.3, 6.7, and 10.3. Translation of these passages is not controversial.

8. At Olympian 11.13, Pindar addresses the champion in a boys’ wrestling contest, saying, “I will add a sweet-voiced kosmos to your crown (stephanos) of golden olive.”

9. The gender charge here is unfortunate. While women did compete in various games (e.g., the Heraian Games, which were also held at Olympia in honor of Hera), neither Pindar nor any other poet wrote victory poetry for them that has survived. The main exception is Kyniska, princess of Sparta, who won the Olympic chariot race in 396 BCE. The few surviving sources, however, seem to contradict one another on the value of this victory. In this particular event, it was the owner of the team, rather than the driver, who was considered victor. According to one source, Kyniska’s brother Agesilaos talked her into entering the race “to show the Greeks that an equestrian victory was the result of wealth and expenditure, not in any way the result of aretē” (Plutarch, Agesilaos 20.1, in Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources, trans. Stephen Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), no. 151c). Nevertheless, Kyniska herself took the opportunity to erect a statue at Olympia, on whose base she inscribed, “Kings of Sparta were my fathers and brothers. Kyniska, victorious at the chariot race with her swift-footed horses, erected this statue. I assert that I am the only woman in all Greece who won this crown” (IvO 160, in Miller, Arete, no. 151b). While neither source uses the term kosmos, Kyniska’s own reflection on the event seems more in keeping with the term’s athletic sense, while her brother’s seems closer to the cosmetic.

10. Gianna Stergiou, “Ponos and Aretē in Pindar’s Poetry,” in Ageless Aretē, ed. Heather Reid and John Serrati (Sioux City, IA: Parnassos Press, 2022), 91–108. Given that Pindar was writing for tyrants such as Theron, it is perhaps unsurprising that he blurs the line between inherited wealth and personal excellence. Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, seems somewhat more skeptical (see chapter 5). Aristotle finds one way around this ambiguity in his account of the virtue of magnificence (megaloprepeia) or big spending, as I will call it. See chapter 13.

11. Anthony Verity, Pindar: The Complete Odes (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2007), 143. In what follows, I use Verity’s translation with alterations.

12. Amphitryon was Herakles’s mortal father in the same way Joseph was Jesus’s.

13. It is possible to contest this translation. Yet our end goal at present is to understand NE, which explicitly says that the crown goes not to the fastest or the strongest, but to the one who competes. Whether Pindar meant virtues or deeds of virtue, Aristotle clearly meant the latter.

14. Heather Reid, “Aristotle’s Pentathlete,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), 69–80, gives a brief survey of some of the main ideas I will discuss.

11. A Sketch of the Good Life

1. Pew Research Center, “What Makes Life Meaningful? Views from 17 Advanced Economies,” November 18, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/11/18/what-makes-life-meaningful-views-from-17-advanced-economies/.

2. There is some controversy as to whether Aristotle is in fact following the endoxic method in NE. Terence Irwin, trans., Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 326–327, and Richard Kraut, “How to Justify Ethical Propositions: Aristotle’s Method,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 76–95, take Aristotle at his word. As does C. D. C. Reeve, “Aristotle’s Philosophical Method,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle, ed. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 150–170, who lays out how the endoxic method fits into Aristotle’s larger methodology and theory of knowledge. Against this interpretation, Gregory Salmieri, “Aristotle’s Non-‘Dialectical’ Methodology in the Nicomachean Ethics,” Ancient Philosophy 29 (2009): 311–335, argues that since NE is explicitly written for readers who were brought up “the right way,” the work does not rely on the preexisting opinions (endoxa) of Aristotle’s predecessors or contemporaries but on the current observations of his select readers. Siding with Salmieri, Dorothea Frede, “The Endoxon Mystique: What Endoxa Are and What They Are Not,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 43, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 185–215, argues that in practice NE rarely “starts from” the endoxa but merely uses others’ opinions to “confirm” Aristotle’s own views. On her reading, the endoxic method is a fairly formal matter, while what NE demonstrates is merely careful thinking of the sort any rational person should aspire to. This debate has practical implications for how we approach NE. If, as Aristotle claims, NE follows the endoxic method, beginning inquiry into happiness from commonly held beliefs, then people today who are looking for guidance in life, e.g., undergraduates taking an Intro to Ethics course, may simply start at the beginning and puzzle their way through it. If NE is not following the endoxic method but, say, working out the implications of theories of human nature defended in other Aristotelian texts, then NE’s use in ethics curricula around the world is misguided. I, for one, take Aristotle at his word and structure my discussion accordingly.

3. D. S. Hutchinson and Monte Ransome Johnson, “Protreptic Aspects of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 383–409, esp. 389–393. The basic setup appears to go back to Pythagoras, who is quoted centuries later by Cicero at Tusculan Disputations 5.8–9. John Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 11, presents Pythagoras’s version but then draws what seems to be the wrong conclusion: “The most honorable (the noblest most kalon) form of life is to contemplate with the mind alone, in the middle is the life of business and ‘affairs,’ and the least honorable is the man whose life is devoted to the body.” While Hare does not cite his source for this, to dismiss Olympic athletes as simply devoted to the body and therefore less honorable than businessmen seriously misunderstands what goes into being an elite athlete, and the high regard in which Olympic athletes were held in Greek society. Cicero’s report that athletes compete “for the sake of glory and the nobility of a crown” seems more accurate in both regards. (It also lines up with how Hutchinson and Johnson, 389, read the passage.) Hare’s study makes valuable contributions to bringing Aristotle’s thinking about divinity back into scholarly discussions. Yet his downplaying of athletics, as seen here and elsewhere, leaves out an important aspect of how pre-Christian Greeks approached the divine.

4. The psychological toll of social media on girls has been well documented. Alex Hawgood, “What Is ‘Bigorexia’?,” New York Times, March 5, 2022, discusses media’s impact on boys, focusing on fitness models who associate self-worth and follower counts in ways that encourage body dysmorphia.

5. Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), explores this athletic/religious/philosophical connection at length.

6. Given current pressures to see higher education as career preparation, critics within the world of Catholic colleges, who tend to sympathize with Aristotle, have gone so far as to praise education aimed at “useless” pursuits. John E. Jalbert, “Leisure and Liberal Education: A Plea for Uselessness,” Philosophical Studies in Education 40 (2009): 222–233.

7. This is sometimes referred to as a “monolithic” understanding of happiness, which is advocated by C. D. C. Reeve, “Beginning and Ending with Eudaimonia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 14–33, and Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).

8. This is sometimes referred to as an “inclusive” or “compound” understanding of happiness. William Francis Ross Hardie, “The Final Good in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Philosophy 40 (1965): 277–295, initiated this line of thought, and John Ackrill, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 15–33, made it popular. For a useful discussion of how the debate emerged from the preoccupations of twentieth-century ethics, see Nicholas White, “Conflicting Parts of Happiness in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Ethics 105 (January 1995): 258–283. Terence Irwin, “Conceptions of Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics,” in Shields, Oxford Handbook of Aristotle, 495–528, reviews more recent developments.

9. Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016). I look to Duckworth not because she presents a particularly insightful analysis of Aristotle. Indeed, her two mentions of Aristotle (146 and 271–272) are brief to the point of being misleading. Nevertheless, she has arrived at many of the same conclusions about the well-lived life and how to pursue it.

10. Duckworth, “How Gritty are You?” in Grit, 53–78.

11. Duckworth, Grit, 61.

12. Richard Arum, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

13. These students are the target of William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & the Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014).

14. In terms of methodology, it is at this point that Aristotle seems to stray the furthest from his endoxic method as he draws on ideas that he has established in his own previous works. Frede, “Endoxon Mystique,” 191–192, criticizes Aristotle for importing such views without treating them as endoxa in need of scrutiny. That said, the larger argument in this passage can be spelled out in terms that are fairly intuitive, even if his talk of plant souls strikes modern ears as odd. For more detailed discussion, see Terence Irwin, “The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 35–54.

15. Samuel Baker, “The Concepts of Ergon: Towards an Achievement Interpretation of Aristotle’s ‘Function Argument’,” in Inwood, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 227–266, argues that we should read ergon in NE 1.7 as meaning “work,” which may apply to actions and products. In this he pushes against the scholarly consensus that reads ergon as “function” or “characteristic activity” and thus focuses on activities alone. In the end, Baker admits that the conclusion to Aristotle’s argument is that happiness is an activity not a product. Yet Baker’s careful reading helps us understand how Aristotle arrives at this conclusion. See also Baker, “A Monistic Conclusion to Aristotle’s Ergon Argument: The Human Good as the Best Achievement of a Human,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 103, no. 3 (2021): 373–403.

16. The Latin root excello literally means “to rise up above another.” For the cultural antecedents of this idea, see Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

17. Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 17.

18. Duckworth, Grit, 119–120.

19. Plato sets out the term in Republic 8, though his account of this person’s character is the main subject of Republic 5–7. See chapter 10 for discussion. Aristotle explicitly embraces aristocratic thinking in his discussion of justice in NE 5. See chapter 14 for discussion.

20. Thanks to my former student Gavin Clark for pointing me to this line of questioning. I started pairing readings from NE and Grit in courses shortly after Grit was published. It was only after several terms of this that Clark questioned the usefulness of professional athletes and billionaire tech moguls as role models for people in general. While his critique was aimed at Duckworth, it applies to Aristotle as well, as I have spelled out here.

21. On its cosmetic reading, kosmos could easily have been used here. Given that Aristotle chooses to use charm bracelet (periaptos) instead provides at least some evidence that he is reserving kosmos for a noncosmetic sense when it appears a few pages later at NE 1.10.

22. Heather Reid and Georgios Mouratitidis, “Naked Virtue: Ancient Athletic Nudity and the Olympic Ethos of Aretē,” Olympika 29 (2020): 29–55, trace the socioeconomic factors at play in the Olympics over the millennia, pointing out that ancient victors tended to come from wealthy families, while modern victors tend to come from wealthy countries (35).

23. Aristotle lays this idea out more fully at NE 10.1–5, where he sets out forerunners to contemporary thinking about flow. See chapter 17.

24. The last of these is not recorded by Homer but appears in various vase paintings. See, e.g., Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 520–510 BCE, from Vulci, Louvre, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, Sully, room 39, case 6.

25.NE 1.3, 1094b19–27 claims that ideas in political science “usually” hold good. Later, in discussing the kind of thinking that goes into planning and executing activities, NE 3.3, 1112b3–4 claims, “We deliberate about what comes about through our agency but in different ways on different occasions.”

26. Pindar, Olympians 1.23 and 8.83. Richard Kraut, “An Aesthetic Reading of Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 231–250, cites NE 1.10 to connect kosmos with kalon as he builds a case against overly moral readings of kalon. He even points out that a virtuous person “sparkles” (lampei). Yet he does not set these notions of beauty within the athletic context that Pindar helps bring into focus.

27. In calling this person great-spirited (megalopsychos), Aristotle invokes a virtue that was not part of the Socratic or Platonic canon. He will turn to defining it in NE 4, where it is closely connected with NE’s other three controversial instances of kosmos. See chapter 13.

28. In more formal terms, Aristotle seems to waffle between the strict consequentialism adopted by the later Epicurean school and the strict nonconsequentialism adopted by the Stoics. See the epilogue.

29. There are two notable exceptions. Anthony Long, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia, Nous, and Divinity,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: A Critical Guide, ed. Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 92–113, reads NE 1.9 in light of NE 1.6’s passing mention of divinity and intellect (nous) to suggest that this divine thing within us might just be our intellect, which fits with NE 1.7’s account of happiness in terms of rational activity. Hare, God and Morality, 19–20, points out that the word “divine” appears nearly twice as often in NE as “happy” does. He also helpfully talks about the god within us as that which is “human but not merely human” (25–27). This nicely captures what I refer to as NE’s aspirational account of happiness.

30. Reid and Mouratidis, “Naked Virtue,” 36, point out the explicit connection between athletic agōn and Herakles’s labors in Pindar, Isthmian 4.47.

31. Martin West, “Heracles,” in East Face of Helicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 458–472, esp. 470–472.

12. Training

1. Pausanias 6.14.5–8, in Arete: Greek Sports from Ancient Sources, trans. Stephen Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 111.

2.Anthologia Graeca 11.36, in Miller, Arete, 29.

3. Athenaeus, The Gastronomers 10.412F, in Miller, Arete, 112.

4. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 1.9.5.

5. Bodybuilders will also appreciate Milo’s fame for vascularity. According to Pausanias 6.14.5–8, Milo could tie a ribbon around his forehead, hold his breath, and break the ribbon merely by the strength of his veins. (See Miller, Arete, no. 163a).

6. Most translations render ethos and the related term ethismos as “habit” and “habituation.” NE 2, however, is full of examples drawn from the gym. I thus follow Heather Reid, “Athletic Virtue and Aesthetic Values in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 47, no. 1 (2020): 63–74, esp. 67, by translating both as “training,” which covers both the process (ethismos) and the state to which it leads (ethos). While this comes at the price of making Aristotle’s language somewhat less precise, context should make it clear which is being referred to, and the payoff is to make Aristotle’s account much more concrete and readily understood by modern readers.

7.Hexis derives from the verb “to hold” (echō), so we might think of it as how a person holds herself. This is sometimes translated as “habit,” which follows conventions of Latin philosophy. I follow Heather Reid’s suggestion in calling this a condition (pers. comm., November 20, 2022).

8. Lesley Brown, “Why Is Aristotle’s Virtue of Character a Mean? Taking Aristotle at His Word (NE ii 6),” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 64–80, argues that NE’s talk of deficiency, mean, and excess indicates that all have both descriptive and normative senses, and that in likening ethical virtues to crafts, Aristotle means to invoke the normative sense. Such things are not merely middling but appropriate or just right.

9. Lesley Brown, “What Is ‘the Mean Relative to Us’ in Aristotle’s Ethics?,” Phronesis 42, no. 1 (1997): 77–93. The distinction matters insofar as some modern virtue theorists have read Aristotle as seeing the virtues themselves, rather than the individual choices that result from them, as varying from individual to individual. Brown rightly argues that this goes too far.

10. The function of NE 3.1–5 in the work’s overall argument is controversial. I build on the reading of Michael Pakaluk, “Actions as Signs of Character (Nicomachean Ethics 3.1–5),” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 118–150. For a critical overview of such readings and a detailed reconstruction of the passage’s argument, see Suzanne Bobzien, “Choice and Moral Responsibility (NE iii 1–5),” in Polansky, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 81–109.

11. This is a catchphrase of the American Association of Colleges and Universities for communicating the value of a general education. The goal is not to prepare students to perform tasks with existing scripts (e.g., long division) but to perform tasks for which no scripts (yet) exist. See, for instance, Carol Schneider, “Carol Geary Schneider on Educating Students for Unscripted Problems,” https://youtu.be/WVQdVVFyLA4.

12. Pakaluk, “Actions as Signs,” 139.

13. Many readers, myself included, may find this conclusion problematic. As we saw in part 2, Hippocrates and Plato took social determinants of health seriously. It is well within Aristotle’s intellectual horizons to reply that some people are born into situations that force them into bad habits before they are old enough to think rationally about what they are doing. Are these people responsible for their vices? Such questions are outside of Aristotle’s current focus. Rather than ask whether it is ever fitting to hold people accountable, he simply assumes that it is and then sets out criteria to determine when we should do so. As Pakaluk, “Actions as Signs,” 144n16, argues, Aristotle is not here raising the questions of free will and determinism that will be central to debates between the Epicureans, Stoics, and Academic skeptics.

14. Hendrik Lorenz, “Virtues of Character in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 37, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Summer 2009), 177–212, cites various scholars who have defended this reading and responds to them in detail, setting NE 3.1–5 within NE’s broader account of reason’s role in virtues of character.

15. This could be problematic for those of us not involved in literal combat, as it would make bravery irrelevant for our lives. Alternatively, we might follow Pakaluk, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 152–153, in seeing Aristotle as looking at “central-cases” of a virtue as a way of illustrating that virtue’s structure. If this is right, then bravery might be at play in noncombat scenarios as well.

16. There is some confusion about whether confidence and fear are meant to be two distinct axes or continua or the two ends of a single axis or continuum. I take the former view. For discussion and defense of this position, see J. O. Urmson, “Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean,” and David Pears, “Courage as a Mean,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 157–170 and 171–187, respectively. Charles Young, “Courage,” in A Companion to Aristotle, ed. George Anagnostopoulos (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 442–456, translates the pair as “fear” and “cheer,” and argues that Aristotle treats them as a single continuum in Eudemian Ethics and as two continua in NE.

17. Aristotle does not spell out the exact content of confidence. I follow Lawrence Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral Theory (Belmont, CA: Thomson-Wadsworth, 2008), 272–273, in taking it to be confidence “in our own ability.” Young, “Courage,” 447–452, lays out several options as the object of “cheer” (confidence): the prospect of danger, the prospect of safety, the prospect of success at whatever one is trying to accomplish. Young cites J. L. Stocks, a philosopher whose experience fighting in World War I changed his reading of NE, as he learned of the possibility of cheerfulness in the face of imminent evil (Young’s first option).

18. Pears, “Courage as a Mean,” 176, calls this hypothetical virtue “darage” and claims, “It is dysfunctional and might well extinguish the species.”

19. Anna Lännström, Loving the Fine: Virtue and Happiness in Aristotle’s “Ethics” (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), and Terence Irwin, “Beauty and Morality in Aristotle,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: A Critical Guide, ed. Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 239–253, place kalon toward the morality end of the spectrum and default to translating it as “fine.” Richard Kraut, “An Aesthetic Reading of Aristotle's Ethics,” in Politeia in Greek and Roman Philosophy, ed. Verity Harte and Melissa Lane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 231–250, responds to Irwin, arguing that ideas of beautiful shape, order, and size are at work in many more passages of NE than Irwin allows. Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Aristotle on Moral Virtue and the Fine,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 116–136, takes a similar approach but stresses that in Aristotle beautiful order is always directed at some purpose or end (telos) and that, unlike mere goodness, the kalon is necessarily visible. There is a related question around the phrase kalokagathia. Literally, this means “beautiful and good,” but as a technical phrase it may be translated as “nobility” or “gentlemanliness” (on the moral side of the spectrum) or “beautiful goodness.” Reid, “Athletic Virtue and Aesthetic Values,” 63–74, and Nigel Spivey, “In Training for ‘Beautiful Goodness’,” in The Ancient Olympics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 31–70, place it on the beauty side of the spectrum. Reid’s focus is the final chapter of Aristotle’s less well-known work, Eudemian Ethics, yet she suggests ways of approaching NE as well.

20. Pindar, Olympian 1.23 and 8.83.

21. Acting for the sake of reputation itself, either to earn a good reputation or to avoid a bad one, is sometimes referred to as “civic courage.” Zena Hitz, “Aristotle on Law and Moral Education,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 42, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 263–306, reviews the scholarly literature on the subject. She contrasts Miles Burnyeat, who argues that civic courage is a “pre-philosophical virtue, grounded in good habits and proper pleasures,” with Gabriel Richardson Lear, who holds it to be a “waystation in the process of correct habituation” (270). To put it in athletic terms, an entry-level bike vs. training wheels. Against both, Hitz argues that civic courage is a “defective virtue” (i.e., a broken bike), which she uses to draw out implications for the educational system laid out in Aristotle’s Politics.

22. Kraut, “Aesthetic Reading,” 243, makes the same general point: “It is a beautiful thing to master fear by combining it with practical wisdom … because it is the occasion for his exercise of that skill.”

23. On this reading, NE comes closer to Plato’s Symposium than is normally acknowledged. While Plato focused on the immortal nature of beauty, which for him is tied up in questions of mathematics, Aristotle’s athletic example invokes a set of associations that sidestep mathematics and draw on aspects of hero culture. Aristotle concludes his discussion by returning to states that resemble bravery (3.9). From a current perspective, the most provocative claim is that hopeful people (euelpis) are not brave. He compares them to drunks who appear brave in emergencies but crumble when things get tough. Given that hope is both a central Christian virtue and a major theme of positive psychology, it would be nice if Aristotle had said more about hope. From the paragraph we have to go on, his critique seems to be that hopeful people are confident in a groundless and therefore excessive way. On the basis of his comment about drunks, he seems to think hope lacks the depth of character that bravery has.

24. Older translations render this “temperance,” and its opposite “intemperance.” For the sake of contemporary English and the connection to athletics, I will use “discipline” and “lack of discipline” throughout.

25. Gavin Lawrence, “Human Excellence in Character and Intellect,” in Anagnostopoulos, Companion to Aristotle, 419–441, suggests combining each of these categories to form a star to guide our deliberations.

26. Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), 63.

27. Kraut, “Aesthetic Reading,” 244–246, argues that this may go beyond mere limiting conditions: deliberations over how to achieve ends can be seen as analogous to craftsmen constructing houses or furniture, making every piece just right.

28. Brown, “Mean Relative to Us,” 83–84, argues against older interpretations that take this passage to state that the mean for an individual depends on that individual’s temperament. Rather, she argues, this passage shows that there is one correct mean for all human beings in relatively comparable circumstances, but that some people struggle more than others to hold to that mean.

29. Aristotle’s second discussion of sōphrosunē has to do with the process by which we get there. See chapter 15.

13. Greatness of Spirit

1. The Latin word magnanimitas means the same thing as the Greek, though it is not clear that the English magnanimity does. That said, Terence Irwin, “Magnanimity as Generosity,” in The Measure of Greatness, ed. Sophia Vasalou (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 21–48, defends this translation as not totally off point insofar as magnanimity, like megalopsychia, involves letting go of slights.

2. Dirk Held, “Mεγαλοψῡχία in Nicomachean Ethics iv,” Ancient Philosophy 13 (1993): 95–110, draws from anthropology to contrast modern “guilt culture” with ancient “shame culture” and argues that greatness of spirit, as Aristotle presents it, makes better sense in the latter. Since Held published this piece, social media has changed everyday life, bringing the world more closely in line with one where “moral integrity and social worth are closely bound to honor” (103) and people are “figuratively speaking always on stage” (104). Susanna McGrew, “Carving Out Space for Aristotle’s Megalopsychos,” Episteme 31 (2021): 44–56, attempts to approach greatness of spirit via the social sciences, in this case drawing on political ideals of equality, to defend NE against older critiques.

3. Howard Curzer, “Aristotle’s Much Maligned Megalopsychos,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 2 (1991): 131–151, systematically reviews these complaints, stretching back to David Ross in the 1920s, and responds to each. He concludes by “speculating” that widespread dislike for greatness of spirit springs from the fact that it is a virtue for cultures unlike our own, and, as a result, people who try to understand it draw the wrong models from their lived experience and misunderstand what Aristotle is talking about. Terence Irwin, “Disunity in the Aristotelian Virtues,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume, ed. Julia Annas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 61–78, sets standing critiques aside and instead argues that Aristotle contradicts himself by claiming, first, that the only way to have one virtue of character is to have all of them and, second, that it is possible for a person to have a virtue concerned with small-scale honors without being great-spirited. Irwin uses greatness of spirit to raise fundamental questions about NE’s account of happiness, virtue, and external goods. There has been a lively if somewhat diffuse body of newer work (discussed below) as scholars have responded point for point to Irwin and to older scholarship but less often to each other.

4. Mark Newman, “1947: A Time for Change,” MLB.com, April 13, 2007, archived 2009, http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070412&content_id=1895445&vkey=perspectives&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb.

5. Eunshil Bae, “‘An Ornament of the Virtues’,” Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003): 337–349.

6. The Greek literally means “freedom,” which in Aristotle’s context refers to people who are not enslaved. Given that Aristotle thinks that slaves are generally incapable of virtue and happiness, this does not really set generosity apart from other virtues. As the Latin equivalent, liberalitas, also means freedom, some translators render eleutheria as “liberality.” This translation, however, has political connotations that are at best confusing for this discussion.

7. Irwin, “Disunity in the Aristotelian Virtues,” 62–64.

8. Michael Pakaluk, “On an Alleged Contradiction in Aristotle’s Nico‑ machean Ethics,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Summer 2002, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Summer 2002), 201–219.

9. This foreshadows NE 5.3, where Aristotle presents “justice in distribution,” which assigns resources to individuals based on individuals’ relative worth.

10. On this point, I part ways with Pakaluk, “Alleged Contradiction,” who argues that not all acts of big spending need aim at the public good.

11. It is in this sense that Hesiod uses kosmos to speak of “adorning Pandora.” See the introduction to part 3 for discussion.

12. Bae, “‘Ornament of the Virtues’,” argues that greatness of spirit may manifest itself through greatness in any virtue. James Stover and Ronald Polansky, “Moral Virtue and Megalopsychia,” Ancient Philosophy 23 (2003): 351–359, argue in an accompanying article that greatness of spirit is possible only with greatness in every virtue. Roger Crisp, “Aristotle on Greatness of Soul,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 158–178, sides with Bae, arguing that greatness of spirit helps one engage in deeds of any particular virtue and thus develop that virtue further (167).

13. Recall Plato’s Republic 347e-352d, where Socrates ridicules nonmusicians who think they can outdo musicians in tuning instruments, since an instrument is either in tune or not.

14. Daniel Russell, “Aristotle’s Virtues of Greatness,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Supplementary Volume, ed. Rachana Kamtekar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 115–147, critiques this line of thought, arguing instead that greatness here involves high social rank. This limits the possibility for developing greatness of spirit to the few, just as Irwin’s requirement of great wealth limits big spending. Rather than disarm Irwin’s critique as Pakaluk does, Russell argues that certain forms of elitism are necessary and therefore unproblematic, given that we live in a world of social distinctions. Insofar as Aristotle thinks that one cannot have any virtue without having all of them, Russell concludes that this works one way for people with common virtues and another way for people in positions of social prominence, which seems problematic at best. Shane Drefcinski, “A Different Solution to an Alleged Contradiction in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 30, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 201–210, offers a possible way out. On his reading, both healthy pride and greatness of spirit are species of a more general, unnamed virtue concerned with honor. Generosity and big spending, likewise, are species of an unnamed virtue dealing with spending. This would allow Aristotle to claim that to have any virtue one must have every general virtue but not every specific form of it. For a related discussion of different forms of elitism and equality, see McGrew, “Carving Out Space.”

15. Irwin, “Disunity in the Aristotelian Virtues,” 64–66, stresses the centrality of success to Aristotle’s account of the mean and contrasts this to the Stoics, who require merely the right effort (77). Drawing on NE 1.10, however, Irwin admits that one may be virtuous and unsuccessful in situations when external factors interfere.

16. See the introduction to part 3 for discussion.

17. Our passage ends by connecting greatness of spirit with “beautiful goodness” (kalokagathia). This term, which also appears at NE 1.8 in connection with crowning Olympic victors, is not much discussed in NE. Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, however, treats it as an architectonic virtue. Heather Reid, “Athletic Virtue and Aesthetic Values in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 47, no. 1 (2020): 63–74, places the term in historical context, which was split between older ideas of inherited goodness and newer ideas of athletic, earned goodness.

18. Bae, “‘Ornament of the Virtues’,” 344–345; Crisp, “Greatness of Soul,” 167; Hellen Cullyer, “The Social Virtues (NE iv),” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky, 135–150, esp. 143–144; Michael Pakaluk, “The Meaning of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 26, ed. David Sedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 241–275, esp. 247 and 270–272.

19. Neil Cooper, “Aristotle’s Crowning Virtue,” Apeiron 22 (1989): 191–205, attempts to rescue Aristotle by seeing greatness of spirit as concerned with friendship rather than honor, though it is unclear to me what this accomplishes. Howard Curzer, “Megalopsychia and Appropriate Ambition (NE IV.3–4),” in Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 121–142, concludes that greatness of spirit is not a virtue at all but a propensity to stay at the high end of the mean and perform great and heroic acts.

20. Pakaluk, “Alleged Contradiction,” 215–218, distinguishes between proper pride and greatness of spirit in terms of occasions: proper pride is for everyday affairs, e.g., performance reviews, while greatness of spirit is for eulogies and awards banquets. My reading, while similar, looks not to the frequency of such thinking but how it figures in one’s continual structuring of goals.

21. My reading differs slightly from that of Bae, Crisp, Cullyer, and Pakaluk (cited earlier). I agree with them that greatness of spirit is ultimately inward looking, yet they see it as a matter of self-worth, while I see it as a matter of striving after goals that a good person, whether oneself or others, should appreciate.

22. Pakaluk, “Meaning of Aristotelian Magnanimity,” presents Aristotle’s great-spirited person in terms of a Socratic protreptic to philosophy. This is a compelling picture of a way to structure one’s life around a high-level goal. On my reading, though, it need not be the only one.

23. I side with Stover and Polansky, who see greatness of spirit as an ornament of all character virtues, rather than with Bae, who sees it as an ornament of any character virtue. My reason for drawing this conclusion, however, differs from theirs.

24. Cullyer, “Social Virtues,” 148.

14. Sportsmanship and Thinking on One’s Feet

1. Richard Kraut, Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 118, calls general justice “the exercise of the other ethical virtues in accordance with the law for the good of the state.” Hallvard Fossheim, “Justice in the Nicomachean Ethics Book V,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: A Critical Guide, ed. Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 254–275, argues that general justice is not a virtue of character at all but a strong tendency to obey laws. Kraut, “Justice in the Nicomachean Ethics,” in Political Philosophy, 98–177, discusses the difference between general and particular justice. Michael Pakaluk, “Justice as a Character-Related Virtue,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 181–205, lays out the relationship between Plato and Aristotle on justice, arguing that Aristotle’s distinction between general and particular justice seeks to correct a basic mistake in Republic’s account of justice.

2. Some readers take Aristotle to present three types of particular justice. Here I follow Ronald Polansky, “Giving Justice Its Due,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 151–179, in seeing only one virtue, particular justice, which is put to work in different contexts.

3. While the example sounds a bit silly, Aristotle suggests at the start of NE 5.5 that some people understand justice in such literal terms. Lindsay Judson, “Aristotle on Fair Exchange,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 15, ed. C. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 147–206, esp. 150–151, stresses that Aristotle intends an “equal return,” i.e., giving things of equal value, rather than an “identical return,” i.e., giving the exact thing that was taken beyond one’s fair share.

4. Older translations have rendered chreia as “demand,” which is ultimately an individual’s subjective sense of what he desires, as opposed to need, which is an objective fact based on the individual’s biology and circumstances (compare moral relativism versus the mean relative to the individual). This older translation has led various readers to see an early version of the market economy at play in NE 5.5. Scott Meikle, Aristotle’s Economic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), provides a critical survey of economic interpretations of NE 5.5 stretching back to Adam Smith and Karl Marx. According to Meikle, economic and ethical ideas were more intimately connected in Aristotle’s time, and pinning down how exactly is critical to interpreting NE 5.5’s argument. Judson, “Fair Exchange,” by contrast, argues that NE 5.5 is a discussion carried on via exclusively ethical terms, and the plethora of interpretations offered by economists results from the fact that they are looking for economic thinking where there is none.

5. Kraut, “Justice in the Nicomachean Ethics,” 145–156.

6. The structure of NE 5’s argument is a matter of dispute. I follow Polansky, “Giving Justice Its Due,” in seeing NE 5.6–11 as defending the account of particular justice set out in NE 5.3–5.

7. Kraut, “Justice in the Nicomachean Ethics,” 107. In the same work (132–136), Kraut contrasts Aristotle, who sees justice in terms of active civic engagement, and Plato, who presents it in Republic as each person minding his own business.

8.NE 6’s list of virtues of thought can come across as answers in need of a question or distinctions in need of a purpose. J. O. Urmson, Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 79, argues that the task of NE 6 is to provide practical guidance to fill out NE 2–5’s very schematic account of virtues of character, though he concludes that NE 6 fails to deliver. Pakaluk, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 209–216, responds that Urmson has misrepresented the task Aristotle sets for NE 6. My reading sides with Pakaluk. Carlo Natali, “The Book of Wisdom,” in Polansky, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 180–202, takes the same basic position as Pakaluk on the task pursued in NE while giving a more extensive literature review on various controversies along the way. He and Pakaluk, however, take opposite views on whether NE 6 advances an expansive (Natali, 192) or narrow (Pakaluk, 214–216, 226–228) conception of happiness.

9. Archery is perhaps the most obvious image at play here. Alternatively, the ancient javelin was thrown using a leather strap (ankylē) that was wrapped around the javelin’s shaft to act as a kind of slingshot and to help give spin. Wrapping was a delicate process, as throwers found the middle point between too tight to give a good release and too loose to hold together leading up to the throw. Stephen Miller, Ancient Greek Athletics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 68–74. The goal, however, was not accuracy (hitting a target) but distance. Archery, therefore, seems the most plausible candidate for Aristotle’s image.

10. Pakaluk, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 207. Jessica Moss, “Aristotle’s Ethical Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics, ed. Christopher Bobonich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 124–142, situates NE 6’s account of virtues of thought against Aristotle’s broader theory of human nature as set out in NE 1, Eudemian Ethics, and other psychological works.

11. Moss, “Aristotle’s Ethical Psychology,” 138–140, argues that the activity of practical wisdom itself constitutes part of the end.

12. Daniel Russell, “Phronesis and the Virtues,” in Polansky, Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 203–220.

13.NE 4.3 presents greatness of spirit as a kosmos of the other virtues. Here perhaps we find a hint of the strategic sense of kosmos, as greatness of spirit attends to the high-level goal around which mid- and low-level goals are to be “arrayed.”

14. The image of a medieval crown sitting on a monarch’s head seems to be the default in the scholarship. Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 412–419, for instance, suggests that study crowns the active life, but she then adjusts the metaphor to say that it is more like a coping stone, which holds things together, than a cupola, which merely sits on top. The original Greek sense of stephanos, which means “wreath” as much as anything, implies encircling. This presents the image Brodie is looking for without the need for adjustment. Likewise, in “Practical Truth in Aristotle,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90, no. 2 (2006): 281–298, Broadie claims, “Perhaps sophia [wisdom] is a virtue only for the gods, and for us just an occasional beautiful contingent ornament, not a flowering of fundamental human nature” (269). Here she spells out the cosmetic sense of kosmos but contrasts it to something else, which I suggest is a rather nice statement of the athletic sense of kosmos. I call attention to these passages not to challenge Broadie’s interpretation but to suggest that existing interpretations such as hers may find additional textual support by reading kosmos against an athletic context.

15. Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), 65.

16. David Brooks, Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2016), xi, and Brooks, “Moral Bucket List,” New York Times, April 11, 2015.

15. Enjoying Discipline

1. Aristotle explicitly lists one’s relationships to victory, honor, wealth (1174b30), children, and parents (1148a31).

2. My presentation follows the reconstruction of Paula Gottlieb, “The Practical Syllogism,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006), 218–233.

3. Gottlieb, “Practical Syllogism,” argues that particular roles are often central to how Aristotle deploys practical syllogisms. General premises often spell out who should commit or refrain from an action not insofar as someone is human but insofar as he is a doctor, temperate person, parent, soldier, etc.

4. A. W. Price, “Acrasia and Self-Control,” in Kraut, Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 243–254, refers to this as “hard” as opposed to “soft” weakness of will.

5. Price, “Acrasia and Self-Control,” 237.

6. Rachel Barney, “Becoming Bad: Aristotle on Vice and Moral Habituation,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 57, ed. Victor Caston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 273–307.

7. Above, I claimed that children are undisciplined insofar as they do not know what amounts to the mean in a sphere of activity. On this reading, undiscipline is merely the absence of discipline. Barney, by contrast, sees undiscipline as the presence of discipline’s opposite, a vicious state brought about through repeated immoderate actions. If she is right, then typical people do not move through all four stages of Aristotle’s scheme. Rather than starting at undiscipline, children may occupy another category, e.g., the natural virtue discussed in NE 6.

8. Miles Burnyeat champions this reading in his influential article “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 69–92.

9. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 1, coins the term to refer to the euphoric feeling of floating or effortlessness elite performers experience when everything about a performance falls into place.

10. Burnyeat, “Learning to Be Good,” 78.

11. Howard Curzer, “Aristotle’s Painful Path to Virtue,” and “Shame and Moral Development,” in Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 318–366.

12. Curzer, “Painful Path,” 327; italics in the original.

13. Curzer, “Painful Path,” 327.

14. Curzer, “Painful Path,” 323.

15. Curzer, “Painful Path,” 330.

16. Burnyeat, “Learning to Be Good,” 73.

17. This is the main argument of Curzer, “Practical Wisdom and Reciprocity of Virtue,” in Aristotle and the Virtues, 293–317.

18. Curzer, “Practical Wisdom and Reciprocity of Virtue,” 299–300, 312, 314. Curzer ends his reconstruction of Aristotle’s theory of moral development (Aristotle and the Virtues, 363–366) by criticizing its emphasis on internalized shame and other negative emotions. Given that these features, by Curzer’s own admission, do not present the most obvious reading in the text, I have trouble seeing how his rather dark reading of Aristotle on moral development is “charitable.”

19. William Damon, The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life (New York: Free Press, 2008). For an overview of Damon’s work, see Angela Duckworth, “Interest,” in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), 95–116.

20. K. Anders Ericsson, R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review 100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363, discussed by Duckworth, “Practice,” in Grit, 117–142.

16. Gym Buddies

1. What I present here is perhaps the most obvious reading of the text, as laid out by Terence Irwin, trans., Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 277. Against this, John Cooper, “Aristotle on Forms of Friendship,” in Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 312–335, argues that in a friendship based on pleasure or usefulness, one person may still value the other for himself and wish him well. This well-wishing (eunoia), however, is contingent on that person getting pleasure or use out of the relationship. Alexander Nehemas, “Aristotle’s Philia, Modern Friendship,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 32, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 213–247, esp. 222–225, agrees with Cooper but stipulates that a friend in each sort of relationship will wish for the other what he himself gets out of that relationship. Thus, friends of pleasure will wish pleasure for each other, and friends of usefulness will wish usefulness for each other. Corrine Gartner, “Aristotle on Love and Friendship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics, ed. Christopher Bobonich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 143–163, approaches Nehemas’s reading from the slightly different angle that a person within any given class of friendship will wish for his friends whatever appears to him to be good.

2. Michael Pakaluk, “Friendship,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 271–276.

3. Aristotle’s understanding of human nature, which focuses here on reproductive roles, leads him to see the family as involving a man, woman, and children. Plato’s understanding of human nature, which focuses on rationality, leads him in Republic to deny any difference between the sexes, at least as regards ruling the state, and to dissolve the nuclear family in the interests of the state. Plato’s Symposium, meanwhile, presents heterosexual relationships as decidedly second-rate. In modern terms, Aristotle embraces the heteronormative, while Plato rejects it.

4. Nehemas, “Aristotle’s Philia, Modern Friendship.”

5. Zena Hitz, “Aristotle on Self-Knowledge and Friendship,” Philosophers’ Imprint 11, no. 12 (2011): 1–28, defends this general thesis against rival views. The current passage lays the groundwork for this dispute, which I will turn to shortly.

6. In terms of the egoism debate we explored in conjunction with NE 8, Nehemas, “Aristotle’s Philia, Modern Friendship,” 229 and 236, takes this passage to show that self-sacrifice is not possible in a friendship based on virtue, insofar as the person sacrificing external goods comes away with a greater good for himself.

7. He uses its noun form, hamilla, once to say, “Where there is competition, there is also victory” (Rhetoric 1371a6–7).

8. Plato, Laws 765a, 829e-384e, and 905e-906e.

9. Lorraine Smith Pangle, “Friendship and Self-Love in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in Action and Contemplation: Studies in the Moral and Political Thought of Aristotle, ed. Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 171–201, esp. 181.

10. Julia Annas, “Self-Love in Aristotle,” and Richard Kraut, “Comments on Julia Annas’ ‘Self-Love in Aristotle’,” in “Aristotle’s Ethics,” Spindel Supplement, Southern Journal of Philosophy 27 (1988): 1–18 and 19–23, respectively. The two pieces are presented as Kraut responding to Annas, though Annas is in fact responding to a draft of Kraut’s book Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), which was not published until the following year, in particular the chapter “Self and Others,” 78–154. Put briefly, Kraut sees a zero-sum competition in Aristotle, in particular a competition for public office that provides opportunities for virtuous activity. Drawing from a discussion in Aristotle’s Politics, Kraut suggests that this competition is tempered through term limits in office. While this solution is clever, it is unclear that it applies to interpersonal relationships outside of public offices. Annas, by contrast, argues that NE presents a non-zero-sum competition. Yet, by her own admission, this merely delays the problem, since it takes the virtuous person’s acts of self-sacrifice to be self-serving in the end. At worst, she argues, this betrays itself as a remnant of a Homeric ethos in which heroes aim to be “superior” (hypeirochos) to others. What Annas sees as the worst-case scenario, I take to be Aristotle’s considered position, and an attractive one at that. For a precursor to Kraut’s and Annas’s discussion, see Marcia Homiak, “Virtue and Self-Love in Aristotle’s Ethics,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11, no. 4 (1981): 633–651.

11. Terence Irwin and Joe Sachs, respectively.

12. The only other use of askēsis in NE comes at 1.9, 1099b9–10. Here, Aristotle poses the question of whether “happiness is acquired by learning (mathēsis) or training (ethiston) or by practice (askēsis) in some other way.” At NE 2.1, 1103a14–18, Aristotle presents learning and training as the means of acquiring theoretical and practical virtues, respectively. NE 1.9 at least suggests that askēsis refers to something other than the acquisition of virtue. The passage proceeds without ever stating what askēsis would look like in this scenario.

13. R. A. Gauthier and J. Y. Jolif, L’Éthique à Nicomaque (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1970), ad loc, claim this passage “pretends to be more profound, but is only more laborious.” Cf. Nehemas, “Aristotle’s Philia, Modern Friendship,” 239.

14. Aryeh Kosman, “Aristotle on the Desirability of Friends,” Ancient Philosophy 24 (2004): 135–154, esp. 148–149.

15. Hitz, “Aristotle on Self-Knowledge,” esp. 18–23.

16. Patrick Lee Miller, “Finding Oneself with Friends,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 319–349, presents a different refinement of the collaborative reading by focusing on study, in which friends strongly identify with their theoretical intellect. Given that theoretical intellect is the same for everyone, friends simply become each other by becoming one and the same intellect. This combines the mirror and collaborative views, albeit in a way that erases human individuality in some kind of mystical union.

17. Angela Duckworth, “Purpose,” in Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), 143–168.

17. Aspiring to Immortality

1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 1.

2. Verity Harte, “The Nicomachean Ethics on Pleasure,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” ed. Ronald Polansky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 288–318, esp. 289.

3. The role of pleasure in the good life was hotly debated within Plato’s Academy. Some of the competing opinions, however, have been preserved only in NE. James Warren, “Aristotle on Speusippus on Eudoxus on Pleasure,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 36, ed. Brad Inwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 249–281, helpfully reconstructs these discussions and situates NE 10.1–5 within them. Aristotle’s response to those who think pleasure is not a good at all is unusually technical. For analysis, see Christopher Shields, “Perfecting Pleasures: The Metaphysics of Pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics X,” in Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics”: A Critical Guide, ed. Jon Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 191–210.

4. G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), 76. Shields, “Perfecting Pleasures,” responds to Anscombe at length.

5. David Bostock, Aristotle’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156. Peter Hadreas, “Aristotle’s Simile of Pleasures at NE 1174b33,” Ancient Philosophy 17 (1997): 371–374, cites the frequent uses of akmaios in Aristotle’s zoological works to refer not to the young but to animals who have reached reproductive maturity. He likewise cites Rhetoric 1390b13–15 where Aristotle uses the term to refer to men in their physical and intellectual primes.

6. James Warren, “The Bloom of Youth,” Apeiron 48, no. 3 (2015): 327–345, catalogues talk of blooms in Plato, Xenophon, and NE itself, which speaks of a lover losing interest in his beloved as his bloom (hōra) fades with age (8.4).

7. Shields, “Perfecting Pleasure,” 208–209.

8. There is a standing debate on whether NE 7 and NE 10 give contradictory views of pleasure. I side with G. E. L. Owen, “Aristotelian Pleasures,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 72 (1971/2): 135–152, who sees the two books as addressing different questions but giving complementary answers. Not all readers agree. For a review of the debate, see A. W. Price, “Varieties of Pleasure in Plato and Aristotle,” in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, vol. 52, ed. Victor Caston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 177–208.

9. In the same spirit, Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (New York: Scribner, 2016), 177, presents psychological data on how an individual’s happiness will cause him to do better work.

10. Gallup, “State of the Global Workplace 2022 Report: The Voice of the World’s Employees,” Gallup, Inc. 2022, https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=gallup_access_branded&utm_term=&gclid=CjwKCAjw9suYBhBIEiwA7iMhNFmFkFHSeBKz0diOkjaOaYwb0ye_vCJMtTy0RiT5vF9txUN79x8f-RoCQ3UQAvD_BwE, accessed September 5, 2022.

11. Plato’s Phaedrus, which we have not discussed, makes the connection even more explicit.

12. Anthony Long, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia, Nous, and Divinity,” in Miller, Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics,” 92–113.

13. Richard Kraut, “Two Lives,” in Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 15–77.

14. Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Acting for the Sake of an Object of Love,” in Happy Lives: An Essay on Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 72–92, argues that the life of study provides a “final cause” or model for the lives humans actually live.

15. Terence Irwin, “Conceptions of Happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aristotle, ed. Christopher Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 495–528.

16. Duckworth, Grit, chapter 11.

17. See chapter 11 for discussion of Richard Arum, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Epilogue

1. This reflects what is known in current psychology as an adaptive theory of happiness. For discussion, see James Warren, “Removing Fear,” and Voula Tsouna, “Epicurean Therapeutic Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, ed. James Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 234–248 and 249–265, respectively.

2. Heather Reid makes the most anyone is likely to make of Epicurean thinking about sports in “The Epicurean Spectator,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World (London: Routledge, 2011), 81–89.

3. Terence Irwin, “Virtue, Praise, and Success: Stoic Responses to Aristotle,” The Monist 73, no. 1 (1990): 59–79.

4. Jacob Klein, “Of Archery and Virtue: Ancient and Modern Concepts of Value,” Philosophers’ Imprint 14, no. 19 (2014): 1–16; Heather Reid, “Seneca’s Gladiators,” in Athletics and Philosophy in the Ancient World, 90–98. For application of Stoic thinking to contemporary sports, see Michael Tremblay, “MMA as a Path to Stoic Virtue,” in The Philosophy of Mixed Martial Arts, ed. Jason Holt and Marc Ramsay (London: Routledge, 2021), 122–133. For a focus on ancient images, see Michael Tremblay, “Digestion and Moral Progress in Epictetus,” Journal of Ancient Philosophy 13, no. 1 (2019): 100–119, and “Athletic Imagery as an Educational Tool in Epictetus,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 49, no. 1 (2022): 68–82.

5. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), present two classic discussions.

6. The writings of the original Greek Academic skeptics survive mostly through later works, Cicero’s first and foremost. Given the state of the sources, and the fact that Academic and Stoic philosophy developed in a centuries-long ping-pong match, sorting out the various layers of theory and practice quickly gets complicated. See the introduction to Charles Brittain’s translation, Cicero: On Academic Skepticism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006).

7. The most useful introduction is Tad Brennan, The Stoic Life: Emotions, Duties, and Fate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), explores abuses of Stoicism by the Far Right.

8. Subjects include the possibility of knowledge (On Academic Skepticism), ethics (On Moral Ends), and topics in religion (On Fate, On Divination, On the Nature of the Gods).