ABSTRACT
The virtue that comes with perfected reason, and constitutes happiness, can be analysed into four constituent 'parts', wisdom, self-control, courage and justice. Platonists had inherited their founder's famously revisionary definition, according to which justice was in the first instance a question of the internal structure and balance of the soul. Sceptical critics doubted that the egotism of a primary appropriation of each creature to itself, and the altruism of a social appropriation to humanity at large, could be as easily and harmoniously combined as the Stoics seemed to think. The general impression is that Platonists endorse sociability and benevolence as natural dispositions for human beings, but have no very large place to give such matters in the construction and display of their versions of Platonic theory. Epicureans and Cynicizers thus break the link between gamos and sociability, just as they do that between eros and sociability.
