Among these prophets, Thomas More alone never claimed that God spoke to him directly. More insisted that the voice of conscience was the voice of God and that by obeying our conscience, we obey God. But, said More, we have a right to obey our conscience only because we also have a duty to inform our conscience. Today, when we read about prophets hearing the voice of God, we often assume this actually means the voice of conscience. If a prophet is someone who chooses to obey God rather than human leaders, then More chose to obey his conscience rather than his king. Like the biblical Nathan, More confronted his king over the crime of adultery; but whereas King David sought repentance, King Henry sought revenge. Like the Hebrew prophets, More excoriated the priests and monks of his own church for trusting in rites more than in righteousness – until the threat of Lutheranism turned More into a champion of the virtues of his Roman Catholic Church. More’s prophetic vision led him to write the first literary utopia, and indeed, to coin the word. Most prophets are rather grimly earnest but Thomas More, like Socrates, combined prophetic urgency with ironic wit.

Throughout his political works, Plato takes the aim of politics to be the virtue and happiness of the citizens and the unity of the city. This paper examines the roles played by law in promoting individual virtue and civic unity in the Republic, Statesman, and Laws. Section 1 argues that in the Republic, laws regulate important institutions, such as education, property, and family, and thereby creating a way of life that conduces to virtue and unity. Section 2 argues that in the Statesman, the political expert determines the mean between extremes and communicates it to citizens through laws that guide their judgment and conduct, so that they become virtuous themselves and the city is unified; this account of the role of law suggest how even non-expert legislation can contribute to virtue and unity. Section 3 argues that the Laws affirms and develops the idea that citizens should know and accept the laws to become virtuous themselves and to unify the city, and explains how the persuasive preludes and the sanction for violation attached to laws contribute to citizen virtue and civic unity.

This chapter examines the reception of two Platonic texts, the Protagoras and the Statesman, in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Plutarch’s Gryllus. It argues that part of the reason for the success of this reception lies in the way that Plato’s texts are embedded in insolvable problems such as what constitutes nudity and how one distinguishes between animal and human. Embedding a text in a wicked problem is an effective way to ensure it afterlife. In the case of Plato, the difficulty of this problem is exacerbated by his decision to ground his distinction between animal and human in the presence or absence of body-hair. Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch, in different ways, draw attention to the simultaneous complexity, instability, and capaciousness of body-hair as a signifier. They are attracted to explore its potential, but are ultimately forced to reject it and the systems of thought that it supports as unsatisfactory.

Adapting certain features of Empedoclean daimonology, Plato formulated a more rigorous theory of daimonification through virtue. He daimonified the soldiers of his ideal republic for their courage, and daimonified rulers (“guardians”) for their wisdom. In his Cratylus, Plato vouched for the daimonification of all people who were noble and wise. Plato’s Timaeus introduced the ultimate democratic principle of daimonification by identifying one’s guardian daimon with humanity’s higher consciousness (or nous).