ABSTRACT

This book presents an introduction to the Characters, a collection of thirty amusing descriptions of character types who lived in Athens in the fourth century BCE. The author of the work, Theophrastus, was Aristotle's colleague, his immediate successor and head of his philosophical school for thirty-five years. Pertsinidis' lively, original and scholarly monograph introduces Theophrastus as a Greek philosopher. It also outlines the remarkable influence of the Characters as a literary work and provides a detailed discussion of the work's purpose and its connection with comedy, ethics and rhetoric.

chapter |9 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|20 pages

Theophrastus

His life, works and character

chapter 3|24 pages

The Characters as a comedy of manners

chapter 4|19 pages

Behaving badly

Ethics and the Characters

chapter 6|3 pages

Epilogue

Conclusions and implications