If a Christian account of mythopoiesis owns that not only do all things depend upon God for their being, but that ‘all things exist in Christ’, then following Ward, we can assert that mythopoiesis, as a cultural artefact, is shot through with God’s presence: it is a means by which God is revealing God’s self to us. To the degree a myth speaks truly of God it can be understood as participating in God’s self-disclosure to creation; to the degree it is enmeshed in and occluded by sin, myth speaks less truly. Following Henri de Lubac, I argue that the nature–grace distinction can be overstated and that a paradoxical affirmation of the operation of grace within nature without violating the proper autonomy of creation is necessary in order to meaningfully express how human action (mythopoiesis) apart from Christian formation can be said to speak of God (theology). The interplay of the cultural mediation of God’s grace and God’s already-there-ness in nature offers a way of speaking about mythopoiesis’ theological possibilities without necessarily resorting to a doctrine of ‘anonymous Christianity’.

This chapter concerns Lucian’s presentation of the contemporary display of literate knowledge and the practice of criticism and scholarship. That presentation is often obviously satirical, but Lucian’s tone and purpose also often remain elusive; Lucian’s voice is never easy to capture. Examples include Lucian’s account of the art of reading in On the Ignorant Book-Collector, and the posturing philosophers and ignorant grammarians of the Symposium; this latter case illustrates how Lucian’s concern with ‘the culture of criticism’ is always part of the ever-present negotiation with classical models which is a hallmark of his work, as of any major figure of the Second Sophistic. The same is true of the satire on Atticism in Lexiphanes. The final part of the chapter considers Lucian’s presentation of artistic technai, whether that be that art of writing history or the treatise on pantomime, On the Dance.

Abolitionists adopted higher law to oppose the settled law which explicitly recognized chattel slavery in America. Emerson sometimes spoke on higher law but it was not his most comfortable position. Emerson was a Neoplatonist, and it is the gradualism of Neoplatonism that he embraced against the immediatism implied in higher law. But even before Emerson’s 1856 conversion to abolition, starting in 1854 Emerson began moving his self-reliance into Northern-reliance. He was working his way philosophically toward a political activism that he would, finally, enthusiastically embrace. Emerson borrowed from the Neoplatonist Plotinus the word and idea of living “amphibiously,” and that is what he learned to do.

Ever since antiquity, scholars of Plato have been evenly divided between those who identify Plato’s supreme god with a form (usually, the form of the good) and those who identify Plato’s supreme god with a soul (usually, the soul of the cosmos). But Plato never aims to give us a science of god; he aims to show us how to become like god. I distinguish three Platonic ascents to the divine: a metaphysical ascent to the form of the good; a cosmological ascent to the cosmic soul; and a religious ascent to the proper civic cult. These three ascents form a nested hierarchy, such that the cosmological ascent presupposes the metaphysical ascent, while the religious ascent presupposes the cosmological ascent. The metaphysical and cosmological ascents culminate in the religious ascent because becoming like god for Plato is a civic project. A philosopher can save herself only by saving her city.

I stake out a contemporary context in which democracy seems to be under attack from the populist right, and neglected by parts of the progressive left caught up with a politics of the personal. In a polarised world, persuading others to change their sense of who they are has become more difficult. I draw on Jonathan Haidt to show how most decisions are made on the basis of emotion rather than reason. Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe argue for the importance of public argument and the theatricality of political life, prioritising social roles over personal authenticity. From a liberal perspective, Judith Shklar speaks to the inevitability of hypocrisy in democratic politics. Matthew Flinders, Alan Finlayson and David Runciman are contemporary theorists who identify the need for political science to take on the problem of rhetoric. From truth and hypocrisy, I turn to the question of representation. A democratic politician represents those who vote for her or him much as an actor in a play represents a character. Theatre offers a lens through which to contemplate problems of selfhood and identity, and the paradox of the sincere liar.

Both Socratic Greek philosophy and biblical religion endorse the human aspiration to become as much like a god or God as is humanly possible. This fact testifies to the important role that ideals of perfection play in human life. Against this fundamental similarity, however, important differences arise. First, in Socratic philosophy, deification rests on human not divine initiative. Socratic deification is primarily the product of rational self-discipline. The Bible, however, rejects as prideful this Greek ideal of self-deification. Biblical deification rests on divine not human initiative. Second, the gods of the Socratic philosophers are personifications of reason rather than divine persons. The gods of the philosophers are paradigms to be imitated rather than persons with whom we are in relationship. Third, the gods of the Socratic philosophers are cosmic gods whom we approach through the study of the orderly motion of the celestial bodies. By contrast, the biblical God is a divine person whom we approach through loving union with other persons, divine and human. Greek salvation takes us from here to there, from earth to heaven; biblical salvation takes us from now to then, from the present to the future.

Participatory Athenian democracy has inspired many political thinkers, despite its imperialist atrocities, slavery and the subordination of women. Pericles is an ambivalent figure, and it is dangerous to see him as the embodiment of a golden age. His speech over the war-dead can be seen as a noble democratic manifesto or the calculated work of a demagogue. In a debate about the punishment of Mytilene, as depicted by Thucydides, Cleon uses the language of reason to work on the emotions, and is a paradigm of the populist or ‘demagogue’. We can see the ‘demagogue’ as an aberration from true democracy, or see the word itself as a standard weapon that can be wielded in any democratic contest. The comic dramatist Aristophanes offers us insight into Cleon’s performance techniques that embrace face, arms and voice, and into the minds of those who supported him. In his Gorgias, Plato theorises the problem of rhetoric. Gorgias was a Sicilian who taught the Athenians that rhetoric was an art which they could pay to learn, and for Plato this was a fundamental flaw in his nation’s democratic enterprise.

According to Aristotle, character or ethos in tragedy is ’that which reveals what the moral choice is like’. This kind of ethos is what this book explores in Sophocles, by examining five tragedies in which moral choice is central to the course of the drama. These choices are made within the context of traditional Greek morality, which, amongst other things, expected one to help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. Closely allied to these principles is the conception of justice as retaliation. This nexus of principles provides a pervasive ethical background to most of Greek literature and is of special significance for tragedy.

In this chapter, I discuss the voice of the comic poet in the city and, specifically, Aristophanes. Two interrelated questions provide a focus: how does the comic poet ’speak out’ before the city? What is the role of parodic quotation in Old Comedy, the voice within the voice (’speaking out’)? I begin with some general remarks about the role of poetry in the fifth- and fourth-century Athenian democratic polis, that leads into a discussion of the institution of Old Comedy in the light of modem treatments of carnival and the idea of ’ritual reversal’. The second part of the chapter – focused on the Acharnians and the Frogs – looks first at the comic poet ’speaking out’ to the city through the parabasis in particular, and second at how the poet uses other voices, especially the voice of tragedy, in parodic quotation.

Greek popular thought is pervaded by the assumption that one should help one’s friends and harm one’s enemies. These fundamental principles surface continually from Homer onwards and survive well into the Roman period, and indeed to the present day, especially in international relations. They are firmly based on observation of human nature, which yields the conclusion that most human beings do in fact desire to help their friends and harm their enemies, and derive satisfaction from such behaviour. Thus Xenophon’s Socrates can count benefiting friends and defeating enemies as one of the things which bring the ’greatest pleasures’.

Aristotle’s De anima provides the foundation for a theoretically informed study of perishable life on the crucial assumption that the soul is that which distinguishes what is alive from what is not. It is because Aristotle and Theophrastus take animals and plants to be different kinds of perishable living beings that they are justified in approaching the study of perishable life through separate studies of animals and plants. The chapter offers a survey of the discourse on and around life before Aristotle and Theophrastus with a focus on Plato and the doxographical information on the Presocratic investigation of nature. It also considers the way in which the study of life is narrow down to the study of perishable life, that is animals and plants, as a result of the conceptual work done in Aristotle’s De anima.

This chapter considers the relationship between the historical Gorgias of Leontini and Plato’s portrayal of him and his ideas in the Gorgias. By drawing on fragments and testimonia of the historical figure, it shows that Plato’s understanding of Gorgias and his views informs both his characterization of the orator himself in the Gorgias, as well as that dialogue’s philosophical content and aims. In particular, three of the central themes of the Gorgias – ones that the character himself introduces – are prominent in Gorgias’ own works and in the doxographical reception of him: (1) the conception of speech as a form of power or dunamis; (2) the relation between power and wish or boulēsis and their joint role in human action; and (3) the contrast between – and contrasting relationships speech itself has with – belief on the one hand and knowledge on the other. Whether the historical Gorgias was ever personally committed to the relevant ideas in question or not, the chapter argues that he at least gave voice to them in his works, and that Plato, at least, evidently took them seriously as expressions of Gorgianic theory and practice.

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

This introduction frames the entire project, the purpose of which is to excavate a sense of erotic striving from the Neoplatonic commentaries on the Platonic Alcibiades I and to argue that its arousal is the beginning of the philosophical life. Proclus and Olympiodorus, inheritors of the commentary tradition that begins with Iamblichus and traces its roots even further back to Plotinus, insisted that their students read the Alcibiades I first of all of Plato’s dialogues because of its emphasis on self-knowledge. They themselves, modelling what they witnessed in Plato, awakened their own students to what it is to be human and directed them accordingly. Self-knowledge, which by the end of the dialogue becomes identification of self with soul, is, in the hands of the commentators, the beginning of psychoerotic metamorphosis, a conversion of initiation that, when properly channelled, seeks wisdom as its sole desideratum.

In ‘Early Learning in Plato’s Republic 7’, James Warren provides an analysis of Socrates’ account of the sort of early learning needed to produce philosopher-rulers in Republic 7 (521c–525a), namely a passage describing a very early encounter with questions that provoke thoughts about intelligible objects and stir up concepts in the soul. Warren explains how concepts of number, more specifically the concepts ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘a pair’, and so on, play an essential role in these very early stages of the ascent towards knowledge, and he stresses the continuity between the initial and very basic arithmetical concepts and the concepts involved in more demanding subjects taught in later stages of the educational curriculum. On this account, Socrates is prepared to ascribe to more or less everyone an acquaintance with some, albeit elementary, intelligible objects. This, in turn, can shed some light on broader debates in Platonic epistemology about the extent to which all people – not just those whom Socrates calls philosophers – have some conceptual grasp of intelligibles.

Engaging directly with the question whether Platonic Forms are concepts, David Sedley’s chapter ’Are Platonic Forms Concepts?’ takes its start from the Parmenides 132b–c, where Socrates and Parmenides briefly examine the hypothesis that Forms are ‘thoughts’ (noēmata). Sedley asks what ‘thoughts’ are in that context, and argues that they are not thought contents, but acts of thinking. The chapter offers an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the classical theory of Forms as showcased in the Phaedo, Republic, Parmenides, and Timaeus, in terms that clarify why Plato was bound to reject the hypothesis considered in the Parmenides (132b–c), namely that Forms are thoughts.

Matthew Duncombe’s chapter ‘Relative Concepts’ asks: what are relative concepts according to ancient philosophers? Duncombe argues that Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics have a clear concept of relatives, distinct from incompleteness approaches, which he calls ‘constitutive relativity’. The core idea of constitutive relativity is that a relative is constituted precisely by the relation it bears to an exclusive correlative. Duncombe discusses particular philosophers and schools in detail. The examination of Agathon’s speech in Plato’s Symposium illustrates that Socrates understands relative concepts in general and love in particular, on the constitutive model. Aristotle’s concept of relatives in Categories 7 draws on Plato, but Aristotle addresses a worry that relative concepts might be vacuous. Duncombe argues that a Stoic relative concept is the concept of a relative that relates exclusively to a correlative. He examines Sextus’ sceptical argument, which raises a worry about any conception of relativity where relatives relate exclusively to their correlatives.