Early Greek Ethics

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
International Team ◽  
Philosophical Ethics ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Law And Justice ◽  
Dissoi Logoi

Early Greek Ethics is devoted to Greek philosophical ethics in its “formative” period. The formative period is the century and a half that extends from the last decades of the sixth century BCE to about the first third of the fourth century BCE. It begins with the inception of Greek philosophical ethics and ends immediately before the composition of Plato’s and Aristotle’s mature ethical works: Republic and Nicomachean Ethics. The ancient contributors include Presocratics such as Heraclitus, Democritus, and figures of the early Pythagorean tradition such as Empedocles and Archytas of Tarentum (who have previously been studied principally for their metaphysical, cosmological, and natural philosophical ideas); Socrates and his lesser known associates such as Antisthenes of Athens and Aristippus of Cyrene; sophists such as Gorgias of Leontini, Antiphon of Athens, and Prodicus of Ceos; and anonymous texts such as the Pythagorean acusmata, Dissoi Logoi, Anonymus Iamblichi, and On Law and Justice. In addition to chapters on these individuals and texts, the volume includes chapters on select fields and topics especially influential to ethical philosophical thought in the formative period and later, such as early Greek medicine, music, friendship, justice and the afterlife, and early Greek ethnography. Consisting of thirty chapters composed by an international team of twenty-eight philosophers and classicists, Early Greek Ethics is the first volume in any language devoted to philosophical ethics in the formative period.

Hesiod and Comedy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Cultural Currency ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

Comic dramas, attested as early as the later sixth century bce in Sicily and from ca. 486 bce in Attica, reflect familiarity with Hesiodic poetry from the time our actual documentation begins in the 470s for Sicily and 430s for Attica and into the mid-fourth century bce. Comic poets engaged with Hesiodic poetry at the level of specific allusion or echo and (more frequently) with Hesiodic stories, thought, themes, ideas, and style, now common cultural currency. They also engaged with the poet and his poetic persona, whether bracketed with Homer as a great cultural authority, distinguished as the anti-Homer in subjects or style, or showcased as an emblematic persona of poet and (didactic) sage. Aristophanes, for one, adopted elements of the Hesiodic persona in fashioning his own.

What Philosophos Could Have Meant: A Lexical Account

2019 ◽  
pp. 66-106
Author(s):  
Christopher Moore
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Diodorus Siculus ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

This chapter shows what the term philosophos could have meant at the time for which it is attested, and thus what meaning Pythagoras or his followers would have sought to spin in accepting the term for themselves, had they done so. It pays close attention to the peculiar archaic use of phil-prefixed names, their normative valence, their application, or the contribution of their second element to the overall meaning. The chapter also considers the meaning of that particular second element, soph-, at the end of the sixth century BCE. This chapter thus begins by turning again to Cicero's version of the Pythagoras story. It looks in more detail to a non-Heraclidean but probably still fourth-century BCE version, found in Diodorus Siculus, which in effect dramatizes the thesis of this book: that the word philosophos was formed in reference to sophoi considered as “sages.”

Non-Academic Philosophia

2019 ◽  
pp. 194-218
Author(s):  
Christopher Moore
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Research Outcomes ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Dissoi Logoi ◽  
Practical Teaching

This chapter addresses non-academic uses of philosophia in the fourth century BCE, which provides the background against which one can understand Heraclides' use of the term. It shows how philosophia became a discipline in Plato's Academy only by understanding how the term philosophia was being used elsewhere. The key context comes from the educators Alcidamas, Isocrates, and the author of the Dissoi Logoi. The chapter shows that there is less reason to say that these educators competed over “ownership” of the term philosophos (even if at times they may have) or its true and universal meaning than that they gave varying retrospective reconstructions of the term's usage, differing, for example, in the relative emphases they give to practical teaching over the defensibility of research outcomes. To the extent that the academic view of philosophia “won,” this is not because that view was truer or more convincing, but because the Academy instigated a continued discipline that called itself philosophia more than Alcidamas or Isocrates did, neither of whom appear to have had success or interest in developing the sort of well-populated discipline crucial for maintaining a name.

Reading a View: Poem and Picture in the Greek Anthology

Ramus ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Squire
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Sister Arts ◽  
The Relationship

‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a speaking picture’ (attr. Simonides)‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a blind picture’ (Leonardo da Vinci)How do words represent images? In what ways do visual signs function like (and unlike) verbal ones? And which medium better captures its represented subjects—pictures that are seen, or poems that are heard, written and read?These questions stretch the length and breadth of western literary criticism. Already in the Homeric description of Achilles' shield (Il.18.478-608), we find the respective resources of pictures and poetry pitched against one other, in a passage that plays with the respective visibility of words and the audibility of images. By the late sixth century BCE, the relationship between poetry and painting seems to have been theorised explicitly. Whatever the origins of the maxim attributed to Simonides—‘frequently repeated’, as Plutarch elsewhere describes it—a related sentiment was evidently widespread by the fourth century BCE. When Plato came to theorise the relationship in hisPhaedrus, he has Socrates define words and paintings in closely related terms: ‘the creatures that painting begets stand in front of us as though they were living entities,’ Socrates concludes; ‘ask them a question, however, and they maintain a majestic silence’ (ϰαὶ γὰϱ τὰ ἐϰείνης ἔϰγονα ἕστηϰε μὲν ὡς ζῶντα, ἐὰν δ' ἀνέϱῃ τι, σεμνῶς πάνυ σιγᾷ, Pl.Phdr.275d).Vt pictura poesis—as is painting, so is poetry’: that was how Horace famously summed up the analogy some four centuries later, giving rise to the so-called ‘sister arts’ tradition of conceptualising painting and poetry.

scholarly journals The So-Called Solonian Property Classes: Citizenship in Archaic Athens

2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (03) ◽  
pp. 409-439
Author(s):  
Alain Duplouy
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
Major Step ◽  
Occupational Groups ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Performance

Abstracts It is commonly accepted that the definition of four property classes by Solon in early sixth century-BCE Athens marked a major step in the political construction of the Athenian state. However, as Claude Mossé argued thirty-five years ago, this reconstruction is mainly the result of a fourth-century-BCE historiography that positioned Solon as the founding father of Athenian democracy—casting doubt on the early existence of the so-called Solonian system. Although such an approach has often been considered as “postmodern” or “pessimistic,” I propose to follow Mossé’s path by considering the Solonian telē as occupational groups involved, along with many others, in the construction of the Athenian polis. This analysis results in the definition of an explicitly Archaic citizenship, conceived as a performance linked to specific behaviors and lifestyles.

Plato’s Hesiods

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Folch
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Manuscript Tradition ◽  
Fourth Century Bce ◽  
The Status

This chapter surveys Hesiodic reception in fourth-century bce prose, with emphasis on Plato and especially the Laws. Passages of the Laws are read in context and used to illuminate the status of Hesiodic poetry in the fourth century. Topics discussed include rhapsodic performance, Hesiod’s relationship to Homer, study of Hesiodic poetry in schools, the fourth-century manuscript tradition, citation of Hesiod’s poems in conversation and Athenian courtrooms, and the politics of Hesiodic quotation. Whether understood as part of the rhapsode’s canon, a gnomic poet, a proto-sophist or proto-philosopher, or an allegorist, Hesiod remained a dynamic site for the production of the philosophical, literary, and political debates that animated fourth-century prose.

Milesian Measures: Time, Space, and Matter

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen A. White
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Greek Philosophy ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Complementary Problems

Any attempt to trace the origin of Greek philosophy faces two complementary problems. One is the fact that evidence for the early philosophers is woefully meager. The other problem raises a question of what is to be counted as philosophy. Yet neither problem is insuperable. This article proposes to reorient the search for origins in two ways, corresponding to these two problems. First, rather than trying to reconstruct vanished work directly, this article focuses on a crucial stage in its ancient reception, in particular, the efforts by Aristotle and his colleagues in the latter half of the fourth century to collect, analyze, and assess the evidence then available for earlier attempts to understand the natural world. The other shift in focus this article makes is from philosophy to science; or rather, it focuses on evidence for the interplay between observation, measurement, and explanation in the work of three sixth-century Milesians.

scholarly journals From Commentary to paribhāṣās: Kātyāyana and Patañjali vis-à-vis Vyāḍi

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-566
Author(s):  
Maria Piera Candotti ◽  
Tiziana Pontillo
Keyword(s):  
Fourth Century ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Integrative Approach ◽  
Fourth Century Bce

Abstract The present paper is targeted on three landmarks in the long story of the paribhāṣās’ development. Two of these landmarks descended from the earliest testimony of Vyākaraṇa meta-rules, i. e. those included in Pāṇini’s grammar (fifth–fourth century BCE), and one which has been handed down as the first independent collection of paribhāṣās and attributed to Vyāḍi. In particular a shift is highlighted between Kātyāyaṇa’s (third century BCE) integrative approach (vacana) and Patañjali’s (second century BCE) recourse to implicit paribhāṣās in the Aṣṭādhyāyī as a powerful hermeneutical tool. A shift that helps in interpreting the need for a validation and collection of implicit pāṇinian paribhāṣās as carried out by authors such as Vyāḍi.

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