The notion of the ‘self, together with related ideas such as ‘personality’, ‘character’, can be used primarily in connection with human psychology, or ethical and social relationships, or a combination of these. In this chapter, I focus on the self as a psychological notion, taking up in Chapters III and IV related questions about ethical character and about the individual and society. On this topic, as on ethics and values, much recent debate has centred on the question whether we can trace a clear line of development within Greek culture, and on the related question of the relationship between Greek and modern conceptions of the self and the mind.

In recent work on Greek ethics, several developments parallel, and are linked with, those discussed in Chapter II in connection with psychological models. In this area too, for a variety of reasons, some recent scholarship has laid less stress than before on the idea of development within Greek ethics and on the differences between Greek and modern approaches to ethics. It has emphasized, rather, recurrent patterns in Greek ethical thought of different periods, and also the idea that Greek thought constitutes an intelligible type of ethical thought for modern thinkers. As well as outlining these developments, I suggest ways in which they can be taken further in some ways and qualified in others.

Although there has been a good deal of important new work on Greek political philosophy, there has not, until recently, been the same intensity or volume of scholarly debate as in the case of Greek ethical philosophy; and it would not be so easy to define prevalent trends. I offer, instead, a personal treatment of one important strand in Greek political theory, which both draws on some recent scholarly thinking and complements the themes of other chapters in this book.

In this chapter, I take up a question which follows from the issues discussed in the previous ones. I have considered ways in which Greek thought, both as expressed in poetry and philosophy, assumes that there are objective norms, in psychology, ethics, and politics. This gives rise to the question: what is the ultimate basis for these norms? I focus on one kind of answer to this question, and on the debate from which this answer arises. This answer is that the normative basis for psychological, ethical, and political life exists in ‘nature’, in some sense. Versions of this answer can be found in, for instance, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans; and their answers build on fifth-century controversy about the relationship between ethics and nature, as well as developing an important feature of Presocratic thinking.