ABSTRACT
Democritus’ ethical theory, although it has attracted some notable scholarly attention,1 has not been as central to discussions of ancient ethics as one might expect, especially given the centrality to history of philosophy of his metaphysics and epistemology. This is in spite of the fact that the overwhelming majority of the extant fragments are ethical in content, and despite the fact that Democritus, being contemporary with Socrates, is among the first ancient thinkers from whom we have ethical material.
