The virtue of agency : sôphrosunê and self-constitution in classical Greece /
"Among the cardinal virtues of classical Greece - wisdom, courage, justice, piety, and sôphrosunê - sôphrosunê is the least understood or valued. But, as this book shows - studying the vigorous and wide-ranging debates about the virtue, across fifth- and fourth-century poetry, prose, and philos...
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| Format: | eBook |
| Language: | English |
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New York, NY :
Oxford University Press,
[2023]
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| Online Access: | Connect to the full text of this electronic book |
| Summary: | "Among the cardinal virtues of classical Greece - wisdom, courage, justice, piety, and sôphrosunê - sôphrosunê is the least understood or valued. But, as this book shows - studying the vigorous and wide-ranging debates about the virtue, across fifth- and fourth-century poetry, prose, and philosophy - many Greeks in fact judged it the preeminent virtue. They understood it to be the capacity to choose between one's conflicting desires and to act only on those aiming at what one judges one's authoritative or properly life-defining ends. This is the capacity to be a mature human: facing down one's bodily and social promptings with discipline, identifying with one's long-term goals or acknowledged norms over one's evanescent impulses. This is what makes one count as an "agent": someone who acts on her own principles, rather than simply reacts to external or internal proddings. Thus sôphrosunê is the virtue of agency. The clearest evidence for the nature of and significance granted to sôphrosunê is the disagreement found across ancient Greek literature over the term's application and scope. This book starts by appraising remarks about sôphrosunê from the archaic and early-Classical period in Homer, Theognis, Pindar, Aeschlyus, Heraclitus, and funerary inscriptions. Then it turns to later fifth-century exchanges in Euripides especially but also Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Critias, Antiphon, and Democritus. Socrates is a crucial figure for the study, as we see in the works of his associates Antisthenes, Xenophon, and particularly Plato. After several chapters on Plato, we turn to the radical innovations of Aristotle and the less familiar Pythagorean assessments"-- |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiv, 394 pages) |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. |
| ISBN: | 9780197663523 0197663524 0197663516 9780197663530 0197663532 9780197663516 |