This article shows how two basic meanings of psukhē – namely ‘breath’ and ‘life’– may have helped Platonising or for that matter Stoicising doxographers to lend to various pre-Platonic philosophers the view that the world is ‘ensouled’. I do not try to systematically reconstruct how these cosmo-philosophers conceived the relationship between the world and what was to become ‘the soul’. I do suggest, however, that framing the problem in terms of ‘breath’ and ‘life’ helps us in getting a more adequate understanding both of the authentic evidence and of the history of its reception. Indeed, to the extent that it is possible, I try to reconstruct the interpretive steps that led, with various degrees of legitimacy, from the original wording to its Platonising or Stoicising deformations, which remain all too often the framework of analysis in modern interpretations. Five case studies are considered: Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, some Pythagoreans and Alcmeon.

In Laws 7.817a–d we find the following passage:

A singular work

The Laws can be considered the first work of genuine political philosophy in the Western tradition. Admittedly it was conceived within an already complex tradition of philosophical legislation and speculative constructions, in which the Republic holds an important place. But so far as we can judge, the Laws’ combination of an investigation into the foundations of legislation with the concrete elaboration of detailed laws is without precedent. From this point of view, the Republic is at best a sketch, whereas the Laws breaks ground for future political thought.

Part of the work’s importance lies in its having created a new genre, or rather two, by combining two approaches which posterity would come to distinguish. The Laws is at once an exposition of political principles (comparable to Rousseau’s Social Contract or Hegel’s Principles of the Philosophy of Right), and a treatise of applied legislation (comparable to the Project for the Constitution of Corsica or the proposal for a German Constitution). Moreover, several concepts elaborated in the Laws have proved of lasting value to political philosophy. The so-called principle of Lord Acton, that absolute power corrupts absolutely, is already formulated in the Laws. More positive philosophical ideas first articulated in the Laws include the ‘mixed constitution’, the ‘rule of law’, and last but not least the ‘legislative preamble’. Plato himself presents this last item as his greatest legislative innovation (722e1–4).

Soul, sensation, and thought: a separate chapter could be devoted to each of these items. But, beyond considerations of space, there is a rationale for broaching them together, for these three notions are in some sense correlated. It is on certain aspects of this correlation that I shall focus. The first part of this chapter concentrates on the soul, and its relationship to the two other terms. The second part specifically will be devoted to the relationship between thought and the senses. Since an important aspect of the latter question bears on epistemology, some overlap with J. Lesher's contribution to this volume (Chapter 11) is unavoidable. However, I have tried to draw attention to “physiological” rather than epistemological problems. As it turns out, this emphasis may not be too artificial because, as we shall see, there is a question as to whether the early Greek philosophers' interests in the relationship between thought and the senses was not primarily physiological rather than epistemological, in a sense of the term “physiological” that remains to be spelled out.

‘Live unknown’, said the Epicureans, enjoining abstinence from politics. The Stoics, by contrast, believed that the wise man should go into public life if the circumstances were right, but held notoriously utopian and in the end depoliticized conceptions of the good community. Neither school debated the merits of oligarchy and democracy or tried to work out detailed prescriptions for the best constitution. These intellectual postures have sometimes been seen as appropriate and indeed inevitable responses to the decline of the polis in the age of the Hellenistic kingdoms: no polis, no political philosophy.

There is of course a grain of truth in this conventional picture of political thought — or its absence — in the Hellenistic period. But the present volume tells a more nuanced and complex story. One reason is that it reflects theorizing undertaken from a Roman perspective. Rome was the greatest of the Mediterranean cities of the time, and Rome was not a monarchy but an independent republic governed according to a distinctive constitutional structure which invited analysis along broadly Aristotelian lines. The principal surviving analyses, albeit fragmentarily preserved, come from the pens of Polybius, writing in the mid-second century BC, and Cicero, a hundred years later. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the way in which these two authors draw on a wide range of Greek intellectual models to devise accounts of constitutional development (ch. 1) and of the moral and intellectual requirements the statesman — conceived as the magistrate of a republic — must satisfy (ch. 2), which are then applied to the case of Rome.

The sixth Symposium Hellenisticum returned to England for the first time since the initial meeting in Oxford in 1978. It took place in Cambridge between 17 and 23 August 1992. Accommodation and meals were provided in St John's College, and discussion sessions were held in the Faculty of Classics. The papers contained in this volume are revised versions of the drafts submitted to the conference: footnotes testify to the vigour and range of the criticisms they provoked during and after the proceedings. Hence as has been usual on these occasions the revisions are sometimes thoroughgoing.

The following scholars participated in the Symposium: Antonina Alberti, Keimpe Algra, Julia Annas, Margaret Atkins, Chris Bobonich, Jacques Brunschwig, Myles Burnyeat, Victor Caston, Andrew Erskine, Jean-Louis Ferrary, David Hahm, Brad Inwood, Anna Maria Ioppolo, André Laks, Tony Long, Jaap Mansfeld, Mario Mignucci, Phil Mitsis, John Moles, Carlo Natali, Martha Nussbaum, John Procopé, Malcolm Schofield, David Sedley, Richard Sorabji, Gisela Striker. Melissa Lane acted as graduate assistant.

Many participants received financial assistance from their home institutions, for which we offer thanks. We are particularly indebted to St John's College and the Faculty of Classics: each made substantial subventions towards costs. Without this generous help the Symposium could not have gone ahead.