In this chapter, I offer some of the reasons to think that Plato has a substantial contribution to make to contemporary thinking about moral education. To allow a sense of how wide the range of reasons is, I start by listing ten miscellaneous reasons that one can compellingly offer, some of which scholars have offered. Then I present my preferred reason, which involves a way of approaching Plato that is new and unorthodox. When you approach Plato this way, you don’t try to interpret him correctly. Instead, you use his writings simply as a tool for theorizing, and what you theorize about is how best to carry out the Socratic project of leading other people to self-examination.

Noting the debates around whether ‘wisdom’ constitutes a genre, Suzanna R. Millar instead studies the multiple smaller genres of which wisdom literature consists. Texts use (and sometimes intentionally misuse) genres to communicate with readers, providing them with conventions for interpretation and expectations about content. Surveying Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Ben Sira, and Wisdom of Solomon, Millar discerns four clusters of genres, grouped according to their communicative purpose. Some genres intend to instruct their users (sayings, instructions, diatribe, protreptic, and didactic narratives); others engage in reasoning (reflections and wisdom dialogues). These genres are not unexpected in wisdom literature, but the next are more familiar from other biblical corpora: some genres offer praise (either to wisdom, people of God), and others enunciate complaints (laments and legal complaints). These multiple genres combine and interact in complex ways within the wisdom book

Cicero’s epistolary corpus is still partly unexplored from a philosophical angle. Modern scholars have left aside discrete and fragmentary allusions to philosophy, though the letters are a laboratory in which the origins and the development of Cicero’s thought appear more clearly than in his later works. The study of Greek words loaded with philosophical connotations, especially when these words are not translated, is particularly enlightening from this point of view. In this chapter, I successively study three different uses of philosophical Greek in Cicero’s letters: (1) Greek language betraying the influence of a philosophical model on the letters (the influence of protreptic) long before the Hortensius was written in 45 bce; (2) Greek language coming from implicit quotes, whether they serve a purely philosophical purpose or interweave philosophy and literature; (3) Greek language revealing the progressive elaboration of a philosophical work, De finibus, and its analysis of the Stoic theory of οἰκείωσις in book 3.

The introduction presents the nature and scope of De mundo and explains the objectives of the present volume. De mundo is a protreptic work aiming to present philosophy as a study of the universe and its relation to God. For that reason, it sets out to explain the world in terms of what makes it an orderly arrangement, a kosmos. The work’s central thesis is that the orderly arrangement of the universe is due to God and that it is hence crucial to have a proper conception of God and his causal relation to the universe in order to fully appreciate the universe, its structure and the phenomena that occur in it. Unlike most scholarly work done on this text, the present volume does not focus on the question of authenticity and dating, but on its content and philosophy. However, the introduction does explain at some length why De mundo should not be ascribed to Aristotle, although the author clearly aimed to present a picture of the world and God that is essentially Aristotelian. The introduction is accompanied by an overview of the argument presented in De mundo.

Clement’s title, Stromateis, is his most explicit genre marker; it is a miscellanistic cliché, by which he positions his work squarely within the culture of Classical miscellany- making. Classical miscellanists often invented clever titles and drew attention to them; on the surface, Clement’s Stromateis appears to be, by contrast, dull and prosaic. On closer inspection, we find that he uses his sequence of titles creatively to guide his readers into a deepening relation to God. Protrepticus and Paedagogus become scripturally authorised ways of figuring the Lord as the one who is addressing the reader, while Clement as author oscillates between accompanying his readers and sharing the Lord’s voice. In the Stromateis,Clement emphasises that the title is a miscellanistic cliché and does not endeavour to discover it in Scripture, but that in itself turns out to have significance. His point is that what is strewn (διεστρωμένα) is strewn in the world more widely than in Scripture, and the work has its telos in something that lies beyond the words on the page.

The first chapter of De mundo sets the tone and object of the treatise and aims to capture the reader’s attention with highly polished rhetoric, admittedly worthy of an address to Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander. It advances the claim that philosophy is a divine matter because it deals with eternal, divine truths. Unlike specialised sciences, which study one or more parts of the universe in isolation, philosophy seeks to appreciate the universe as a harmonious, well-ordered whole. However, without understanding God and the way he is related to the world, the essential features of the world – its order, unity, eternity, beauty and goodness – cannot be appreciated. For this reason, the author of De mundo urges his addressee – Alexander, ‘the best of leaders’ – to pursue philosophy, which amounts to studying the universe as an effect of God and, in this sense, to theologise. This is a conception of philosophy that the author of De mundo seeks to ascribe to Aristotle.

The complexity of its themes and concerns suggests that Augustine anticipated multiple audiences for the “Confessions,” including his critics within the Catholic and Donatist churches of North Africa and his former compatriots among the Manichaean community. For the former, it served as an apology, demonstrating the authenticity of his spiritual development away from his Manichaean past. For the latter, it served both as a polemic, cleverly criticizing Manichaeism in the guise of self-condemnation, and as a protreptic, offering himself as an exemplar of a path to conversion commensurable with those spiritual values he could appreciate in the Manichaeans, despite their heresy.