Abstract

The paper argues that ancient dogmatic Platonists, beginning with Antiochus, reconstructed Plato’s ethics in different ways, as a result of their different emphasis on parts of Plato’s work and often argued with each other about what Plato’s ethics actually was. This situation, it is argued, is due to the existence of different strands of ethical views found in Plato’s work itself, such as, for instance, the Protagoras and the Gorgias versus the central books of the Republic and the Philebus on the question of what eudaimonia consists in. The paper argues against the thesis of Julia Annas, outlined in her Platonic Ethics Old and New, that ancient dogmatic Platonists considered the argument of the Republic as being essentially the same with that of all Platonic dialogues and that they unanimously represented Plato’s ethical position as the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness. The testimonies regarding the ethics of Platonists like Antiochus, Plutarch, Numenius, Taurus, or Atticus rather suggest a picture of variance and tension about the reconstruction of Plato’s ethics. Antiochus, Plutarch, and Taurus, for instance, are guided by the theory of the partite soul and maintain that for Plato emotions should be balanced by reason, a view they also find in Aristotle, whereas Eudorus and Atticus appear to favor the elimination of all emotions. Alcinous and, more systematically, Plotinus tend to reconcile and synthesize into a system the different views found in Plato’s dialogues, which brings them to attribute to Plato a complex ethical doctrine. This synthesis corroborates the evidence examined in the paper in support of the view that ancient Platonists recognized diverse strands of ethics in Plato and, far from being unanimous about what Plato’s ethics was, varied significantly in their reconstruction of it