Euboulia in the Iliad

Classical Quarterly 36 (01):6- (1986)
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Abstract

The word euboulia, which means excellence in counsel or sound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makes euboulia the focus of his whole enterprise : What I teach a person is good judgement about his own affairs — how best he may manage his own household; and about the affairs of the city — how he may be most able to handle the business of the city both in action and in speech. Thrasymachus, too, thinks well of euboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injustice kakoetheia ’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says : ‘No, I call it good judgement’. But Plato finds little occasion to introduce the concept in developing his own ethical and political philosophy. The one place where he mentions euboulia is in his defence of the thesis that his ideal city possesses the four cardinal virtues. He begins with wisdom, and justifies the ascription of wisdom to the city on the ground that it has euboulia — which he goes on to identify with the knowledge required by the guardians: ‘with this a person does not deliberate on behalf of any of the elements in the city, but for the whole city itself — how it may best have dealings with itself and with the other cities’ . It is normally rather dangerous to draw an inference from the absence or rarity of a word to the absence or rarity of the idea expressed by the word

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Malcolm Schofield
Cambridge University

Citations of this work

‘Short on Heroics’: Jason in the Argonautica.R. L. Hunter - 1988 - Classical Quarterly 38 (2):436-453.
Philosophical Rule from the Republic to the Laws 1 : Commentary on Schofield.Rachana Kamtekar - 1997 - Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 13 (1):242-254.
Time and arete in Homer.Margalit Finkelberg - 1998 - Classical Quarterly 48 (1):14-28.

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References found in this work

The Greeks and the Irrational.E. R. Dodds - 1951 - Philosophy 28 (105):176-177.
Plato on Punishment.Mary Margaret Mackenzie - 1981 - Philosophy 57 (221):416-418.
Magic, Reason and Experience.G. E. R. Lloyd - 1981 - Philosophy 56 (217):433-435.
Morals and values in Homer.Anthony A. Long - 1970 - Journal of Hellenic Studies 90:121-139.
The philosophy of the "Odyssey".Richard B. Rutherford - 1986 - Journal of Hellenic Studies 106:145-162.

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