ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we looked at the portrayal of virtue and knowledge in Greek literature; in this chapter we turn to philosophy. Ethics becomes philosophical in ancient Greece in the fifth century BC. The people primarily responsible for this development are a diverse group of thinkers, called collectively the Sophists, and that remarkable individual, Socrates. Before the Sophists and Socrates, the Greek philosophers had concerned themselves primarily with questions about the nature of the cosmos and reality. Socrates and the Sophists made ethics one of the main areas of philosophical reflection, a status it has retained ever after.
