David Conan Wolfsdorf has done a great service in putting together the thirty chapters (only a handful by women) that make up the new collection Early Greek Ethics.Footnote ¹ As he notes, ethical thinking prior to Socrates has generally been neglected or, in some cases, simply denied. Wolfsdorf's classification of ‘early’ as the ‘formative period’ (late sixth to early fourth centuries bce) prior to Plato's and Aristotle's major ethical works allows him to bring together a rich and diverse group of individuals and topics. He himself acknowledges that different people will feel different kinds of lack within the collection, but he is explicit that its aim is to be ‘quite’, rather than entirely, comprehensive. He is also clear that his aim is to focus on Greek ‘philosophical ethics’ (as he understands it) rather than the sort of significant ethical thinking we might think can be found in Greek tragedy, for example.

The collection is divided into three parts. The first consists of twenty chapters on specific individuals or texts, beginning with a survey of the evidence for the Pythagorean acusmata and working through various early Greek Philosophers, Sophists, and Socratics (including Socrates and early Plato) in chronological order. There is real value in seeing Socrates and his circle considered in this ethical context, as opposed to the more common approach of working back from Plato. The second section presents seven chapters on specific topics or themes, including the place of ethics in Greek medicine and early Greek ethnography, and the themes of friendship, the afterlife, and justice. A ‘Coda’ contains three chapters on post-fourth-century thinkers such as Diogenes of Sinope and Aristoxenus. Many of the chapters provide useful introductions and thus fill a notable gap in the literature – I have already gratefully employed John Palmer's chapter on Empedocles and Monte Ransome Johnson's on Democritus in my own undergraduate teaching. One notable and welcome feature of the volume is the variety of approaches to early Greek ethics that it offers, from close study of individual texts to broad summary. It is to be hoped that this book serves to stimulate more interest in this area and, indeed, more awareness of its existence.

Another wonderfully diverse and interesting recent collection is Plato's Academy, which brings together a fascinating group of papers on various aspects of the history and function of Plato's school.Footnote ² Paul Kalligas’ introduction presents a useful brief history of scholarship on the Academy and makes clear the volume's aims: to show possible directions for future study, and to demonstrate the ways in which different types of approach may illuminate and support one another. It is notable just how many of the chapters seem to reach relatively agnostic conclusions about activities within the Academy (especially those of Plato himself). The more concrete conclusions tend to come from those which survey the archaeological evidence. Daniela Marchiandi presents an intriguing account of the history of the area before Plato founded his school (‘In the Shadow of Athena Polias: The Divinities of the Academy, the Training of the Politiai and the Death in Service to Athens’). In doing so, she provides a useful survey of the cultural background within which the Academy came into being, suggesting that the area had connections to the education of the Athenian elite and to a particularly political Eros that may have held a specific appeal for Plato. With ‘The Gymnasium of the Academy and the School of Plato’, Eutychia Lygouri-Tolia demonstrates how the archaeological evidence can provide insights into the topography and, thus, the functioning of the school itself, with the suggestion that the Academy's gymnasium is likely to have been the site of the school's library. Matthias Haake offers an assessment of the place of the Academy within Athenian society and politics more generally (‘The Academy in Athenian Politics and Society – Between Disintegration and Integration: The First Eighty Years (387/6–306/5)’), arguing that it seems to fit neatly into the broader history of philosophy in Athens as the object of suspicion, owing to its apparent connections to oligarchy.

Other chapters demonstrate the different perspectives that come from and about similar evidence. John Glucker (‘Plato in the Academy: Some Cautious Reflections’), for example, surveys the rival reconstructions of Plato's own teaching activities within the Academy in order to conclude that we have little evidence of any formal teaching having occurred. Vassilis Karasmanis (‘Plato and the Mathematics of the Academy’), in contrast, uses the evidence of the dialogues to argue that we have good reason to regard Plato as a mathematician and director of further mathematical research. The place of mathematics in the Academy is a topic also treated by Michalis Sialaros (‘Euclid of Alexandria: A Child of the Academy’), although here the focus is on Euclid's relation to the school.

After several chapters on the development of the Academy after Plato, Mauro Bonazzi (‘The End of the Academy’) considers what we can say about how and when it came to an end. Arguing that we should acknowledge that the physical destruction of the Academy may not neatly correlate with the end of the activities of the Academy, Bonazzi notes the difficulties presented by the evidence but concludes that Philo's death does indeed mark a plausible end for Academic activities. He raises interesting questions about the degree to which proximity to the Academy or identification as an ‘Academic’ relates to adherence to Plato himself, thus prompting reflection on the connection between school and founder. Myrto Hatzimichali ends the volume with a useful discussion of Philodemus’ History of the Philosophers in ‘The Academy Through Epicurean Eyes: Some Lives of Academic Philosophers in Philodemus’ Syntaxis’, demonstrating the value of understanding the ancient perception of the Academy from without and, once again, noting the difficulties caused by a lack of firm evidence. The book concludes with an annotated text and the first complete English translation (by Paul Kalligas and Voula Tsuna, with notes by Myrto Hatzimichali) of Philodemus’ History of the Academy, a resource that will prove to be of enormous value to those justifiably motivated to pursue the lines of research established by this volume.

The difficulties posed by approaching unreliable evidence are also addressed in Dorota Dutsch's new monograph, Pythagorean Women Philosophers.Footnote ³ Rather than seeking to establish the authenticity or otherwise of the texts attributed to or about Pythagorean women, Dutsch aims to consider these texts on their own merits, and to establish what they indicate about the gendering of philosophical knowledge in antiquity and the possible construction or acknowledgement of female intellectual possibilities. In doing so, she endorses ‘an ethical obligation to engage in a reading of the ancient texts about and by women philosophers that is both critical and trusting’ (4).

The volume is divided into three parts. In the first (‘Portraits’), Dutsch offers a series of what she calls ‘snapshots’ to illuminate the tradition of Pythagorean thought as incorporating female experience and acknowledging female knowledge in a variety of ways. She suggests that the ‘snapshots’ of Pythagoreanism available in the first century bce indicate several aspects of the construction of female philosophical activity. The Pythagorean acousmata, for example, necessarily involve reference to women as a result of their particular interest in community and familial relations. Dutsch suggests that Plato's dialogues offer several implicit snapshots of Pythagorean women from different perspectives, from the priestesses of the Meno and the female guardians of the Republic as practitioners of wisdom, to the gendered theory of the soul in the Timaeus. Other images are to be found in the Hellenistic biographers and historians. There we see Theano presented as female disciple of Pythagoras, and the daughter of Pythagoras as a significant figure in the construction of his biography and memorialization. On the basis of these different kinds of evidence, Dutsch builds two possible interpretations. It may be that the Platonist-Pythagorean woman was constructed primarily to show her impossibility. Being a woman and being a philosopher are shown not to be consistent. Or, as Dutsch emphasizes, it may be that we find here evidence for the existence of women readers of philosophy, reflected in part in the texts they read. Dutsch goes on to consider the nature of the female Pythagorean sage, examining the sayings attributed to figures such as Theano. Here we see again that the female philosopher is constructed as having explicitly ‘female concerns’, with a repeated and particular concern for familial and sexual ethics. Nevertheless, we do find evidence here of the possibility of the female sage, whose wisdom may be more than simply women's talk.

In Part II (‘Impersonations’) Dutsch turns to the complex text-network that consists of the pseudepigrapha attributed to Pythagorean Women. Again, her concern is to establish the possibilities imagined by these texts, rather than to decide their authenticity. She plausibly treats them as a group of texts within which we can recognize recurrent ideas as significant, which in turn indicate something about the potential communities of writers and readers within which they were produced and circulated, and which are likely to have contained women. Dutsch turns first to five Doric treatises which address questions of female morality, with the intention of asking whether the three texts attributed to ‘male’ authors differ in their representation of female knowledge from those attributed to ‘women’. She concludes that, while all these texts seem to promote a female ethics of submission and the need to benefit others over oneself, the fact of female authorship itself suggests the possibility of something more: ‘Once asserted as a figure of authority, she takes a life of her own’ (171). These may be ‘women’ who argue against female ethical autonomy, but they are also women who do so by ostensibly thinking for themselves. In turning to the letters of Pythagorean women, Dutsch finds a collection of texts that once again construct women as authorities, but primarily on how to live a conservatively good female life. Pointing to the importance of the experience on which this advice is presented as resting, she notes that female wisdom is once again constructed as indispensable for the survival of the community, even if it does not stray beyond fairly standard ethical obligations of submission and self-sacrifice.

Part III usefully collects the passages discussed by Dutsch, along with her own English translations. Throughout, she demonstrates the significance of the construction of female philosophical authorities, their historicity or otherwise notwithstanding. She treads a careful line that will not satisfy all, especially those who crave a female voice within the ancient philosophical canon. But her careful analysis of the evidence and her willingness to balance caution with optimism have produced a fascinating account of these challenging texts.

Two new collections focus on the small matter of the soul. In World Soul – Anima Mundi,Footnote ⁴ Christoph Helmig brings together fourteen chapters (almost exclusively by men) on the notion of the World Soul in antiquity. Only one chapter is assigned to the ‘Prehistory of the Concept’. In this (‘Is the Logos a Kind of World Soul? On the Relationship between Cosmology and Psychology in Heraclitus’), Christian Vassallo argues that we can usefully consider Heraclitus’ logos as a kind of anima mundi. He does so by working from Heraclitus’ account of the soul towards that of the logos, reversing a fairly standard approach of trying to locate the soul within the logos.

Four chapters are dedicated to Plato's Timaeus and the Pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo. Filip Karfík (‘Disorderly Motion and the World Soul in the Timaeus’) considers the relation between motion and the World Soul in the Timaeus, arguing against the common idea that disorderly motion presupposes the motion of the World Soul. In fact, he argues, the disorderly motion is a prerequisite for the constitution of the World Soul, whether or not we take the account of creation as literal or metaphorical. In his chapter on the De mundo (‘The Power of God in Pseudo-Aristotle's De mundo’), Johan C. Thom considers the relation between god and the cosmos as an alternative to the organizing principle of the World Soul. Thom suggests that the De mundo responds to Stoic notions of causation and immanence to establish god's transcendence alongside the presence of a divine power which ‘transmits or mediates god's will to the lower regions’ (149).

Jean-Baptiste Gourinat, in one of four chapters on Hellenistic and Platonist figures (‘Apospasma: The World Soul and its Individual Parts in Stoicism’), considers the relation between the World Soul and individual souls in Stoicism. He notes the apparent difficulty that the individual soul is sometimes treated as analogous to the World Soul, and sometimes as a part of it. Via an account of physical and medical influences on Stoic thought, Gourinat plausibly argues that individual souls should be understood as ‘detached portions’ of the World Soul, ‘just as children are detached portions of their parents’ (186). Carl O'Brien presents an account of the World Soul in the metaphysics of Calcidius (‘Calcidius on Fate and the World Soul’), with a focus on his adherence to middle Platonist interpretations and interest in providence and fate.

Four chapters treat the representation of the World Soul in the Neoplatonists, including Dirk Baltzly's discussion (‘The World Soul in Proclus’ Timaeus Commentary’) of Proclus’ insistence on one World Soul best understood in terms of its function as a mediator between matter and nous. Balztly offers a provocative conclusion on the significance of asking and answering such questions. In the final chapter of the volume (‘Nachleben’), Johannes Zachhuber traces the influence of Plato's and Aristotle's notions of the World Soul in natural philosophy from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth (‘World Soul and Celestial Heat: Platonic and Aristotelian Ideas in the History of Natural Philosophy’).

Brad Inwood and James Warren present a collection focusing on Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy.Footnote ⁵ These eight chapters, based on papers given at the Symposium Hellenisticum in 2016, consider the fundamental questions of the relation between body and soul, and the nature of the soul as itself material or not. A useful introduction sets out the scope of approaches found in antiquity to the question of body–soul relations and notes the influence of medical developments on philosophical thinking, particularly in the subtle accounts of the soul offered in the Hellenistic period.

Several papers focus on the particular issue of the influence of medicine on philosophical accounts of the soul. Thus, Sylvia Berryman looks at the theories of Strato of Lampsacus (‘Hellenistic Medicine, Strato of Lampsacus, and Aristotle's Theory of Soul’) and argues that he can be read as developing and revising what remains fundamentally Aristotelian psychology on the basis of new evidence from Hellenistic medicine. In particular, the novel theory of neura as responsible for perception and motor functions influences Strato's views on the location of the governing organ in the mid-brow, the material basis of the soul, and his two-seed theory of animal reproduction. Berryman suggests, for example, that Strato's location of the governing organ may have been motivated by the recent discovery of the optic nerves, which would seem to address many of the Peripatetic criticisms of brain-centred psychologies. Strato may also have been influenced by the discovery of the ovaries, assumed to be analogous to the testicles, in his claim that the female produces seed as well as the male. Berryman notes that, taken alongside the assumption that one or other seed will predominate within the embryo, this two-seed theory may be compatible with form–matter analysis. A similar question is pursued by David Leith in his chapter on the doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus (‘Herophilus and Erasistratus on the Hēgemonikon’), albeit in a different direction. Leith argues that the doxographical accounts of their theories on the location of the governing organ were corrupted by a particular concern with the philosophical response of Chrysippus, thus producing a narrative of rivalry that is not justified by the evidence. Philip van der Eijk continues the discussion of the interaction of medical and philosophical thought in his chapter on ‘Galen on Soul, Mixture and Pneuma’. He notes the apparent tension between the perceived ‘teleological instrumentalism’ and the ‘material determinism’ found at different points in Galen's work. He argues that these ideas should be understood in context as bringing together the idea of a demiurgic Nature and the notion that we are to a significant degree responsible for our health and disease.

Other chapters consider the relation of the soul to the cosmos. Francesco Ademollo offers a chapter (‘Cosmic and Individual Soul in Early Stoicism’) that could usefully be read against Gourinat's chapter discussed above. Like Gourinat, Ademollo considers the evidence for the Stoic doctrine that the individual soul is both analogous to and part of the cosmic soul. Via an appeal to the ‘father–offspring’ analogy, he argues that we can make sense of the apparent difficulties of unifying these two kinds of relation. Jan Opsomer (‘The Platonic Soul, from the Early Academy to the First Century ce’) focuses on the exegetical tradition for the discussion of the composition of the World Soul at Timaeus 35a. Looking at the tradition prior to Plutarch, Opsomer suggests that we find an established focus on the significance of motion and cognition as the primary functions of soul and a recurrent interest in the composition of the soul from the Academy to the Hellenistic period. These detailed and original essays provide a valuable collection of relevance to any scholar of ancient psychology or intellectual history.

In 2006, Malcolm Schofield published a monumental volume on Plato's political philosophy in OUP's ‘Founders of Modern and Political Social Thought’ series. He now publishes a work on Cicero in the same series.Footnote ⁶ As with his Plato, Cicero is detailed, challenging, and fascinating, offering a thorough account of Cicero's political thought that is both situated within his particular and disruptive historical context and in constant dialogue with modern political theory. Schofield begins with a valuable introduction setting out the history of the reception of Cicero's political and philosophical writings, noting his rehabilitation as a political philosopher under the influence of Quentin Skinner and renewed interest in the Republican tradition. Schofield presents a brief biography, situating Cicero's writings within (or without) his life and political activity and noting his philosophical influences. In truth, the biography may not suffice for those who come to the volume without much background knowledge of the end of the Roman Republic, but it will at least provide a useful framework against which to map the detailed analyses that follow. This is important because, throughout, Schofield is justifiably committed to assessing Ciceronian ideology as informed by his political activities and experience, thereby following Cicero's own lead. He notes what he sees as a ‘deliberately existential dimension in Cicero's project of writing philosophy’ (19). This is not ivory tower theorizing on Cicero's part; it is a fight to defend a particular ideology in the face of a genuine threat to the res publica.

Chapter 2 (‘Liberty, Equality, and Popular Sovereignty’) considers the way in which Cicero makes the concepts of equality and liberty central to the argument for popular rule, focusing in particular on his work On the Commonwealth. Schofield notes how Cicero Romanizes an established Greek debate by rendering democratic arguments for equal rights palatable for his Roman contemporaries via a focus on the nature of political justice. Cicero makes an appeal to a particular kind of equality, which applies not to the right of every citizen to hold office, but to the proper exercise of different roles appropriately performed by different constituencies.

Chapter 3 (‘Government’) provides more context for the incomplete On the Commonwealth as a ‘Roman riposte to the Republic’ (62). Schofield notes the originality of Cicero's commitment to the idea of popular sovereignty via his equation of the res publica and res populi but also acknowledges the difficulties of tying down Cicero's ideas via translations of key terms such as ius. Again, we are shown the role of equity in understanding justice as what binds people within a community by both creating and being the creation of consensus. Schofield analyses Cicero's review of the defects of the traditional candidates for systems of government to demonstrate that Cicero sees an answer in the role of consilium and a commitment to effective political leadership. As Schofield notes, Cicero may have failed to adapt his political theory to the particular difficulties and failures of his own time, but he does, in some sense at least, foreshadow the rise of the ‘best citizen’ as a leader in the form of Augustus.

Schofield turns to Cicero's strong interest in cosmopolitanism in Chapter 4 (‘Cosmopolitanism, Imperialism, and the Idea of Law’). Noting the influence of the Stoics, he traces the way in which Cicero presents a particularly Roman cosmopolitanism, albeit of a relatively thin kind. Turning to the conception of law set out in the fragmentary On Laws, Schofield unpacks and defends Cicero's conception of law and emphasis on the rationality of law. Returning to On the Commonwealth (or second-hand reports of its contents), he argues that Cicero had an awareness of the ambiguity of imperialism within his political philosophy, resisting notions of empire as a matter of enslaving and injustice, and embracing a more paternalistic position.

Chapter 5 (‘Republican Virtues’) turns to On Duties and considers the significant differences between Roman virtues and the Greek ethical templates to which they respond. So, for example, Schofield notes that magnitudo animi is treated as quintessentially Roman by Cicero, its Greek background notwithstanding. Here again, he presents an analysis of Cicero's ethical account against the background of his political circumstances and connections, as is justified by Cicero's own methodology and presentation of his ideas. Schofield endorses the account of justice in On Duties as ‘one of Cicero's most interesting contributions to philosophy and political thought’ (161), connecting it once again to his cosmopolitanism and his particularly Roman concerns. For Cicero it is the ‘ultimately reliable and honest republican citizen’ who is ‘the exemplar of virtue’ (175).

Chapter 6 ‘Republican Decision-Making’ focuses on the recurrent interest that Cicero shows in obligation, particularly to the res publica. Schofield suggests that, for all his interest in duties, Cicero is essentially a situationist in ethics. Particularly interesting here is the use Schofield makes of examples and practical reflections taken from Cicero's correspondence, a corpus which is increasingly being recognized as significant for understanding his philosophical thought. Here the relation between Cicero's historical situation and his political thought is particularly well demonstrated by Schofield's analysis of his reflection on decision-making in relation to Caesar's assassination, noting that it fits into a broader ethical model of limiting the obligations of friendship when the survival of the res publica was at stake.

The final chapter (‘Epilogue: Philosophical Debate and Normative Theory’) turns once again to the question of theory and practice, noting Cicero's own interest in the ‘tension between a conception of philosophy and of philosophical ethics as in its very nature a debate, and the idea that the point of doing philosophy is to find and advocate a sound basis for living our lives’ (229–30). This is, of course, a question that remains central to modern ethics and political philosophy. Schofield suggests that Cicero is willing to suspend his Academic commitments for the sake of undertaking ‘a practical project in applied political theory’. In the end, for Cicero, philosophy is of value when it serves to defend the res publica. This is a masterful and lively study, which will be of value to all those with an interest in ancient political philosophy, and, indeed, Republican politics and history.