This chapter argues that the cosmological doctors arose as the result of a much wider realignment in Classical Greek medicine. As some doctors grew increasingly concerned about the many variables that can change from one case to the next, they rejected older forms of diagnostic handbooks in favor of new methods for organizing medical knowledge. We see this anxiety over individual differences not only in the works of the cosmological doctors but also in texts such as On Regimen in Acute Diseases, Prognostic, Airs Waters Places, and the seven books of Epidemics. In all of these texts, medical inquiry is defined, quite generally, as a search for commonalities. Doctors in this period were gathering together multiple accounts, noting the similarities and differences between those accounts, and isolating high-level generalizations that can unite and govern them all. Although the cosmological doctors took their search for commonalities farther than some of their contemporaries might have been willing to follow, they nevertheless responded to the same pressures that transformed nearly all the medical literature that survives from this period.

This chapter examines friendship terms (e.g. phile, beltiste, daimonie) in Plato in the light of Brown and Levinson’s face-threat theory of politeness. It argues that every friendship term in Plato is polite redress for a specific face-threatening act, and aims to explain not only their general significance but also why they occur exactly when they do. The chapter examines Phaedrus in detail in order to show how friendship terms are associated with particular face-threatening acts, and supports the argument with a selection of passages from other dialogues. About 240 out of the 457 friendship terms in the corpus are either discussed in detail or explicitly linked to a specific face-threatening act, and the remaining examples should be readily intelligible in the light of this. Friendship terms are formally polite, in keeping with Socrates’ persona as represented in the dialogues, but also serve to emphasize face-threatening acts such as criticism and refutation. It is notable that there are no friendship terms in dialogues, or sections of dialogues, where overt face threat is avoided (e.g. the conversation with Gorgias in Gorgias).

One very important kind of love in Plato is love of wisdom, or philosophy (philosophia). Philo-sophia is, literally, ‘friendship for wisdom’, not erōs, which is love in the sense of passionate desire, often with a sexual component. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophia in Plato often has close connections with erōs. For example, philosophia is portrayed as the object of erōs, or as a passionate desire to attain wisdom, or as the search for wisdom together with another person who is the object of erōs. Moreover, throughout the dialogues, Socrates the philosopher is characterized by his close association with both philosophia and erōs. Socrates says that he has erōs for two objects, Alcibiades and philosophia (Gorgias), and he is himself the object of erōs (Symposium, Alcibiades I). He claims to know nothing except erotic matters, and he resembles the daimōn Eros in desiring the wisdom he recognizes that he lacks (Symposium). He invents an ideal state in which the rulers are philosophers, those who have erōs for learning (Republic). In the Phaedrus, Socrates prays to Eros not to take away the erotic art that Eros has given him. Just before drinking the hemlock (Phaedo), Socrates, who has chosen to philosophize all his life, says that he does not regret that this practice has led to his execution, because after death philosophers hope to attain the wisdom that was the object of their erōs in life.

Platonic love has often been attacked – notably by Vlastos – as fundamentally selfish. The basis of this argument rests on the claim that love for Plato is little more than a form of utility in which the beloved is exploited to enable the philosopher’s ascent and is simply the object of love to the extent to which he exhibits desirable qualities and not as an individual. This reading ignores the elements of erotic reciprocity found in both the Symposium and Phaedrus, in which the beloved is not merely a passive object, but rather an active participant with the lover in a mutually beneficial project defined by shared values, with both parties attempting to become as godlike as possible. The erastes is shown to care genuinely for the eromenos in the course of the philosophical pedagogy which Plato advocates. In the Phaedrus, the tripartition of the soul seems to be a further move towards non-individuality and the significance of the beloved’s individuality is regularly downplayed. Yet the abstraction inherent in Platonic love is revealed to be both beneficial as a mechanism for avoiding the negative aspects of interpersonal love, as well as a natural feature of the human condition: the striving after Beauty.

Love and rhetoric are two major topics in Plato’s Phaedrus, unified by the dialogue’s theme of psychagōgia, or soul-leading. In Socrates’ great speech, the Palinode, Socrates explains how properly directed eros can assist souls in becoming the types of souls who will be capable of ascending closer to the forms and who will know themselves better. The Palinode is also itself an example of Socratic soul-leading with Phaedrus. Socrates acts akin a true lover to Phaedrus, in leading him towards philosophy and a philosophically informed view of rhetoric.

This chapter explores the different treatments the topic of love received in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. The Symposium expressly addresses the question of the character and benefits of eros – and the question of its nature. It is a philosophical enquiry into this phenomenon, conducted by a set of mature men (and the memory of one exceptional woman) who have personal experience in this topic and have thought about it. In the Phaedrus, by contrast, the topic is addressed from the point of view of a would-be lover trying, through a speech addressed to the young and inexperienced man, to persuade him to submit to his overtures and desires. For Plato, eros is crucial to the practice of philosophy, a force which can take us in two separate directions, towards the good and towards the bad.

One of the ways in which Plato has captured the popular imagination is with the claim that the philosopher can feel ers, passionate love, for the objects of knowledge. Why should Plato make this claim? In this chapter, I explore Plato’s treatment of philosophical ers along three dimensions. First, I consider the source of philosophical ers. I argue that it is grounded in our mortality and imperfection, which give rise to a desire for immortality and the immortal. Second, I turn to the object of philosophical ers. I suggest that it is an arresting response to beauty, through which we come to value the ideal properties of the forms. Finally, I address the nature of ers. I claim that it is a focusing desire, that overrides other concerns and causes us to overwhelmingly focus on its object. I conclude the chapter by considering the problem Vlastos famously raises for Plato’s account of ers: can it do justice to disinterested, interpersonal love? In agreement with Vlastos, I claim that one who comes to grasp the forms will cease to feel interpersonal love; however, I also suggest that ers can give rise to philia, beneficent concern with the wellbeing of others.

This chapter investigates the apparent conflict in Plato presenting two apparently rather different things – fulfilling human nature and godlikeness – as the human telos. Fan argues that these two accounts are in fact compatible, if we understand the fulfilment of human nature as making the divine part in us flourish. If virtue is understood as a disposition to cope with evils that exist in the human condition but not in the divine life, it is hard to see how becoming virtuous fits with becoming godlike. In the Theaetetus, however, Plato understands becoming virtuous as a flight from the world. This has traditionally been understood as engaging in theory as opposed to praxis. However, such an understanding raises the problem that in the Theaetetus and in the Republic, justice, and thus being concerned with treating other people appropriately, is presented as a central virtue which speaks against understanding the flight idea merely in theoretical terms. Fan argues that instead of identifying the idea of fleeing from the world with withdrawing from practical affairs, we should understand it as a kind of self-transformation, in such a way that we are no longer rooted in the natural world, but in divine, transcendent reality.

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).

Classical scholars have often singled out the miscellany as a very open-ended genre that requires active participation from the reader, who is called to miscellanise, to select what is beneficial to his or her situation in the moment. Clement, meanwhile, has been cast either as a mere conduit of the divine logos delivering a fixed message, or as a sophist seeking to legitimise his wares in the marketplace of competing philosophies. Implicit in these portrayals of Clement’s authorial voice is a theological question of the relation between author, reader, text and God. By juxtaposition and comparison with imperial miscellanies, we see that Clement reinterpreted this relationship in light of his Christian spirituality and theology. He attributes his vocation to ‘the Saviour himself’ and portrays the reading and writing of notes as a spiritual and ascetic practice, shaped in light of eucharistic devotion and a psalmic prayer. He situates it within the life-generating tradition of the apostles and depicts his own, exemplary journey of discovery culminating in miscellany-making in chaste love, imaged as rest with the bee that anthologises the scriptural meadow in Egypt.

The third chapter forcuses on the influential translation project of the Platonic dialogues by Friedrich Schleiermacher and its relation to his own hermeneutics. Schleiermacher’s work and thinking on Plato is not only representative and innovative of Plato scholarship of the time but harnesses assumptions about individuality, development, and understanding to a Platonic model. This model is in evidence in Schleiermacher’s own thinking about education and scholarship and also importantly influenced such figureheads as August Boeckh, professor of classical philology in Berlin for over fifty years, and directions taken in classical scholarship.