The questions involved in this passage continue to be matter of debate. At this point in the dialogue the Forms are not yet regarded as causes, or as ‘in’ particulars; they are here introduced as in each case the perfect type, which particulars so named imperfectly resemble. Thus, equal things are described as being ‘like’ αὐτὸ τὸ ἴσον How far can this statement be reconciled with the case of the other Forms, which are presently instanced as on a par with ‘the Equal’ (75 c–d, οὐ γὰρ περὶ τοῦ ἴσου νῦν ὁ λόγος ἡμῖν μᾶλλόν τι ἤ καὶ περὶ αὐτοῦ τοῦ καλοῦ καὶ αὐτοῦ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ καὶ δικαίου καὶ ὁσίου). Further, what is the point and significance of the plural phrase αὐτὰ τὰ ἴσα?

(I) αὐτὸ τὸ ἴσον Plato does not at any point in his argument indicate that he finds any difference in status between αὐτὸ τὸ ἴσον and the other perfect types. He refers to it in terms which become familiar in relation to the Forms of being. Thus, 74c, ἐκ τούτων . . .τῶν ἴσων, ἑτέρων ὄντων ἐκείνου τοῦ ἴσου 74d, ὅταν τίς τι ἰδὼν ἐννοήσῃ ὅτι βούλεται μὲν τοῦτο . . . εἶναι οἶον ἄλλο τι τῶν ὄντων, ἐνδεῖ δέ, κτλ 75a, ἰδόντες τὰ ἴσα ἐνενοήσαμεν, ὅτι ὀρέγεται μὲν πάντα ταῦτα εἶναι οἶον τὸ ἴσον, ἔχει δέ ἐνδεεστέρως . . . ἐκείνου τε ὀρέγεται τοῦ ἔστιν ἴσον, καὶ αὐτοῦ ἐνδεέστερά έστιν 75b, εἰληφότας ἐπιστήμην αὐτοῦ ἴσου ὅτι ἔστιν It is after this passage of exercise, so to speak, in the concept of αὐτὸ τὸ ἴσον that he explicitly (75c–d, already quoted) places this Form on a level with αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν and the rest.

Bei dem seit 25 Jahren wogenden Streit um die Entwicklung der aristotelischen Gotteslehre, in den auch mit wohl abwägendem Urteil Sir David Ross (Aristotle's Physics, 94 ff.) eingegriffen hat, ist eine Stelle aus Sextus Empiricus hyp. 3, 218 nicht verwertet worden. Um aus dem Schwanken der Theologie in die skeptische ἐποχή zu führen, gibt Sextus einen kurzen Katalog der Gottesauffassungen, wobei er wie ‘Aetios’ Doxogr. 297a13 ff. anlässlich eines ausführlichen Kataloges mit den Atheisten beginnt und folgende Lehrmeinungen aufzählt: ᾿Αριστοτέλης μὲν ἀσώματον εἶπενεἶναι τὸν θεὸν καὶ πέρας τοῦ οὐρανοῦ Στωικοὶ δὲ πνεῦμα διῆκον καὶ διὰ τῶν εἰδεχθῶν, ᾿Επίκουρος δὲ ἀνθρωπόμορφον, Ξενοφάνης δὲ σφαῖραν ἀπαθῆ Deutlich ist, wie sich zwei Paare gegenüberstehen. Der aristokratische Gott des Aristoteles, unkörperlich und uns entrückt, und der gemeine, körperliche und auch durch das Hässliche hindurchgehende des Stoikers, weiter der menschenförmige und der in idealer Kugelgestalt gedachte Gott. Die stoische Meinung ist gut wiedergegeben, höchstens dass in διὰ τῶν εἰδεχθῶν ein leiser polemischer Ton mitschwingt; ein frühes Zeugnis bietet Megasthenes, der in seinem Indienbuch für einen Zug der brahmanischen Philosophie die stoische Formulierung übernimmt (bei Strabo 713) ὁ διοικῶν τὸν κόσμον . . . θεὸς δι ᾿ ὅλου διαπεφοίτηκεν αὐτοῦ Der menschengestaltige epikurische Gott ist vielfach bezeugt, z.B. fr. 355 Usener.

When, towards the close of 1897, I, a freshman of St. John's College, Oxford, first met David Ross of Balliol in the room of a common friend, I little dreamed how long and how closely we should be associated in the life and work of another Oxford college and how immeasurably I should be enriched by his example, his help and his friendship. So I welcome wholeheartedly this opportunity of acknowledging, since I cannot repay, my debt by making a contribution, however slight, to the tribute of admiration, affection and good wishes embodied in this volume. Much of his time and ability has been devoted to the study and elucidation of the works of the Greek philosophers, and I offer him, γλαῦκ᾽ εἰς Ἀθήνας, some notes, which lay no claim to completeness, on the light thrown on that study by Greek inscriptions.

We regard the rise and development of philosophy as one of the supreme achievements of the Greeks, which has permanently and profoundly affected Western civilisation. Did the later Greeks share this view? Inscriptions offer some evidence which merits consideration. The author of the Parian Chronicle, who is for us, owing to the mutilation of the stone, anonymous, compiled a chronological table of the outstanding personalities and events in Greek history down to 264–3 B.C. The extant record is fairly complete from 1581–80 to 355–4 B.C. and again from 336–5 to 299–8, and if we examine the period after 1000 B.C. we are struck by the predominance of Greek tyrants and foreign potentates in the sphere of political and military history and of poets (prose authors are ignored) in the realm of culture; Terpander of Lesbos (A34) is the sole representative of music and Callippus, the astronomer (B6), of natural science, while sculptors, painters and architects are passed over in silence. Philosophy appears only in the persons of Socrates, Anaxagoras and Aristotle; a brief reference to two of these, is tacked on as an afterthought to the record (A60) of Euripides' first victory in 442–1 B.C., and the death of ‘Socrates the philosopher’ at the age of 70 is reported (A66) under the date 400–399, while in a paragraph (B11) relating to events in Asia Minor and Egypt in 321–20 B.C. occurs the phrase A fragment of another chronological table, drawn up in A.D. 15–16, survives in Rome and gives rather more recognition to philosophy; S[olon], Anacharsis, the Seven Sages and Aesop are mentioned in B2, 4 and 5, B7 tells of Pythagoras's capture by Cambyses in Egypt in 524–3, and B10 runs: where the year is unfortunately lost.

It is the purpose of this paper to draw the attention of classical scholars to an Arabic theory of prophecy and divination which, though known for a long time in the original text and in modern translation, has quite escaped the notice of those interested in the history of late Greek philosophy and its continuation in mediæval Islam. I mean here by prophecy and divination, like the Arabic author I am going to deal with, all kinds of apparently supernatural knowledge, concerned with the realm of the transcendent as well as with particular events in the future and special happenings at the present time. The possessors of this knowledge are characterised as individuals of a peculiar excitability and a range of imagination which exceeds the normal. Attempts at explaining phenomena of this kind in rational terms were not uncommon in Greek philosophy from Plato's days down to late Neoplatonism. I propose to show that the Arabic theory continues these Greek discussions and to suggest that it represents, at the same time, a facet of Greek thought which has not survived in its original context.

Al-Fārābῑ (c. A.D. 870–950), a well-known Muslim Neoplatonist and Aristotelian of outstanding importance in the history of Islamic philosophy, deals at some length with prophecy in his work The Views of the People of the Best State. Since, in accordance with the Greek tradition, he connects divination and prophecy with an innate faculty of the soul itself, and does not describe it as a state of possession by supernatural powers, his explanation of these phenomena is linked up with his analysis of man and his Neoplatonic-Aristotelian metaphysics. Prophecy is auxiliary to the rational faculty and as such an indispensable ingredient in man's perfection; divine inspiration (wahy) can be understood as the union of the highest philosophical knowledge with the highest form of prophecy; but the primacy of reason and philosophy is maintained, prophecy being confined to the faculty of imagination, which is given a less humble position than in Aristotle's De anima, but still ranked as inferior to philosophy.

The justification for including this article in a volume dedicated to Sir David Ross must be that the tragic poets reflect the psychological terminology of educated Athenian society during a period which corresponds almost exactly with the life-time of Socrates and includes the first twenty years or so of Plato's life. Of course the tragic poets wrote in a poetic language strongly influenced by Homer and less strongly by lyric poetry, but they were also influenced by contemporary thinkers, doctors, sophists, and philosophers. The present study is confined to the words psyche, thymos, kardia (and its synonyms), phren/phrenes, nous.

It may be useful first to note the range of usage of these words and secondly to point out very briefly the historical development. The range of usages of these words is difficult to define; in fact such definition cannot produce boxes into which instances can be sorted but may usefully mark points on the scale of meaning between which any given instance falls. Of the five words, kardia and phrenes are names for parts of the body, ‘heart’ and ‘diaphragm’. It is perhaps rash to identify psyche and thymos with the cold/moist and hot/dry components of breath, but certainly in many passages of Homer they have some such physical meaning. Nous, however, is a verbal abstract and verbal abstracts in Greek mean not only a process but also the agent or the result of the process; as a process, it means ‘appreciating the situation’ in the military sense in which appreciate involves also making a plan; as an agent, it means ‘the appreciating mind’; as a result, it means ‘the plan or thought’ which results from the appreciation. By analogy, I suspect, with nous the other words also can be used for mental processes and results as well as for agents; thymos can already mean ‘thought’ in Homer, kardia ‘courage’ in Archilochos, and phrenes ‘intention’ in Solon. The full possible range of meaning is: (a) part of the body, (b) psychological agent, (c) psychological process, (d) result of psychological process. But these meanings fade into one another and any particular instance may be difficult to classify precisely.

Zu den erregendsten Zeiten der Geistesgeschichte gehören sicher die zwei Jahrzehnte, in denen Aristoteles zunächst in der Schule Piatons seine philosophische Anregung empfing, um sich dann von seinem Lehrer und von der platonischen Akademie zu lösen und sein eigenes System dem seines Lehrers gegenüberzustellen.

Die folgenden Jahrhunderte richteten ihren Blick ausschlieβlich auf die ausgebildeten Systeme dieser beiden groβen Denker. Entweder stellte man ihre Ansichten als gegensätzlich einander gegenüber oder man trachtete sie irgendwie miteinander zu vereinigen. Das hatte zur Folge, daβ gerade die Jahre, da beide als Lehrer und Schüler sich begegneten, für uns in Dunkel gehüllt sind.

Wir besitzen zwar das literarische Werk Piatons, aber wir wissen wenig von seinem mündlichen Unterricht und von dem Lehrbetrieb seiner Schule. Und gerade die Reihenfolge seiner Spätschriften, die eben in die zwei Jahrzehnte fallen, da Aristoteles in der Akademie war, können wir immer noch nicht mit Sicherheit bestimmen. Aristoteles kannte natürlich die Schriften seines Lehrers, aber er war nicht auf sie angewiesen, um zu wissen, welche Ansichten Piaton vertrat. Wir wissen auch, daβ er selbst die Lehre der Akademie in Schriften vertreten hat, die teilweise im Altertum weit verbreitet und berühmt waren. Wir wissen freilich auch, daβ er in anderen seiner Schriften die Lehren Piatons bekämpfte und seine gegenteilige Ansicht begründete. Wir haben aber von diesen Schriften nur geringe und unzusammenhängende Bruchstücke. So stehen wir bei der Erforschung dieses Zeitraums, dessen Kenntnis uns doch helfen könnte, sowohl Piaton wie Aristoteles besser zu verstehen, vor groβen Schwierigkeiten.