359 the Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics Is Curiously Titled. A

Book Reviews 359

Christopher Bobonich, ed., (2017) The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xi + 395 pp. $29.99. ISBN: 9781107053915 (pbk).

The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Ethics is curiously titled. A naive reader might be surprised, upon perusing its contents, to discover that ‘ancient’ here means ‘ancient Greek (and, to a considerably lesser extent, Roman)’ and that ‘ethics’ means ‘philosophical theories of ethics’. This reader might have sup- posed that ‘ancient’ would have a wider geographic extension and that ‘ethics’ might have encompassed a greater variety of ethical thought. This naiveté would consist largely in unfamiliarity with contemporary Anglo-American disciplinary trends and with the discipline that this book represents. For in contemporary analytic philosophy, ‘ancient’ means ‘Greek (and, to a considerably lesser extent, Roman)’ and ‘ethics’ means ‘philosophical theories of ethics’.1 The authors of this volume’s chapters work primarily in the analytic tradition of the history of philosophy, and the editorial introduction aims the book squarely at analytic philosophers and their students. Those of us who identify with this tradition will likely find nothing amiss here, as the chapters put its virtues on full display. But readers who take their bearings from more Continental philosophical or interpretive traditions or from other dis- ciplines altogether – including many readers of Polis – will likely turn away disappointed.2 They are forewarned. The volume’s 18 chapters collectively aim to provide an accessible, up-to- date overview of ancient Greek philosophical ethics from the Pre-Socratics to the Neo-Platonists. In its overall structure, the collection highlights several pervasive features of ancient ethics that have often been thought distinctive of it and that have attracted critics of modern moral philosophy: the centrality of eudaimonia, the crucial role of virtue and theories of virtue, the intimate connection between ethics and psychology, and the attention devoted to friendship. After a brief, largely historical Part I surveying ethical themes in the Pre-Socratic philosophers and the problems surrounding the quest for the historical Socrates, the next three parts of the volume examine these pervasive features in Plato (Part II), Aristotle (Part III), and ‘The Hellenistics and Beyond’

1 The American Philosophical Association has long discouraged this use of ‘ancient’ for ‘ancient Greek’ in its ‘Statement on the Global Character of Philosophy’, but it continues to be common usage. 2 In this respect, the volume differs starkly from D. Morrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Socrates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010), which deliberately collects con- tributions from scholars working in a variety of (sometimes inconsistent) philosophical, interpretive, and disciplinary traditions.

(Part IV). Plato and Aristotle get three chapters apiece, one focusing on the relationship between happiness and virtue, one on ethical psychology, and one on love and friendship. For the post-Aristotelian period, the distribution is less generous and less egalitarian: the Stoics get two chapters, one on virtue and happiness and another on psychology, while the Epicureans, Skeptics, and Neo-Platonists get only one chapter each. The final section, ‘Themes’ (Part V), collects five chapters dealing with topics of frequent and general interest: the distinctive character of eudaimonism and its relation to modern concepts of ‘morality’, the role (if any) of impartiality in ancient ethics, the apparently severe elitism of Plato and Aristotle, the recurrent aspiration to godlikeness in Plato and Aristotle, and the practical application of philosophy as a guide to life. For the most part, these chapters succeed admirably in balancing potentially conflicting aims: they present state-of-the-art scholarship in a form accessible to non-specialists and students, yet they avoid merely summarizing existing scholarship or, conversely, setting out novel views that cannot be adequately defended within the limitations of the companion. A few chapters do not quite succeed in this last respect, but on the whole the volume is well worth reading for students and non-specialists alike, and even specialist scholars will likely profit from several chapters. Part I, ‘Origins’, begins with André Laks’ ‘What is Pre-Socratic Ethics?’ Laks eschews the common strategy of surveying popular and Sophistic ethical thinking as a preparation for Socrates, focusing instead on the Pre-Socratic nat- ural philosophers and asking how what the later tradition calls ‘ethics’ relates to what it calls ‘physics’. In a crisp overview of Parmenides, Anaximander, Xenophanes, Philolaus, Democritus, and Empedocles, he distinguishes three different relationships: correspondence, where human life and action are seen as governed by normative principles also found in the cosmos at large; separa- tion, where knowledge of nature is thought to offer us no practical knowledge; and tension, where knowledge of nature is seen not as irrelevant to ethics, but as posing special problems for it. As Laks notes, these categories are not exhaustive and are meant to capture only ‘directions and tendencies’. (p. 14) He takes theoretical inspiration from sociology, particularly Weber and Bourdieu (p. 26), and in that respect his chapter stands out in the volume for its interdis- ciplinarity. Readers for whom these Pre-Socratic figures are not already familiar may find the chapter rough going, however, as Laks aims more to advance our thinking about Pre-Socratic ethics than to accommodate the uninitiated. The same cannot be said for David Wolfsdorf’s ‘The Historical Socrates’. Indeed, this chapter is now the first place that I would advise anyone inter- ested in the topic to look for guidance. Wolfsdorf helpfully surveys the main sources of evidence and the problems they raise, and his own treatment of

Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek AND ROMAN Political Thought 36 (2019) 347-417