ABSTRACT
Theophrastus (371–287 BCE) was an Ancient Greek Peripatetic philosopher and colleague of Aristotle, who published some of the earliest works in psychology, biology, metaphysics and ethics. In his book named Characters (Ἠθικοὶ χαρακτῆρες), Theophrastus depicted 30 (im)moral characters from Athenian life, reporting in the preface:
I shall never cease to marvel, why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character . . . having observed human nature a long time. . . have thought it incumbent upon me to write in a book the manners of each several kind of men both good and bad.
(Theophrastus, 1714, pp. 21–38)