Early Greek Ethics is concerned with what its editor David Conan Wolfsdorf calls the ‘formative period’ of Greek philosophical ethics (xxiii). This period comprises roughly the century and a half from the last years of the Archaic period through to the early Classical period. Philosophy of this period has been severely neglected, and its philosophical ethics has suffered from an even greater neglect. This volume begins the process of rectifying that state of affairs and establishing a basis for further research into the period. The introduction suggests that the two following features characterize philosophical ethics, as distinguished from non-philosophical ethics, namely ‘a dominant concern with universal or at least very general principles pertaining to the domain in question and a dominant concern with explicit argumentation for these principles’ (xxvii).

This is a large volume with 30 contributions. Every chapter is devoted to one of the following: a philosophical text, the ethical thought of a particular philosopher of the period, a particular topic relevant to ethical philosophy or a whole subject or an ethically relevant discipline such as music or medicine. As to structure, the volume is divided into three parts: Part I, ‘Individuals and Texts’, Part II, ‘Topics and Fields’, and finally a coda at the end of the volume which includes treatments of three thinkers who are all post-formative.

Part I is the largest of the volume with 20 contributions. A useful summary of the kaleidoscope of papers is not possible here so I will take the liberty of highlighting a few contributions so as to give the reader a flavour of the volume as a whole. We have papers on both the so-called pre-Socratics and the Sophists. Among these especially of interest are Shaul Tor’s contribution (Chapter 2) which argues that Xenophanes anticipates some of Plato’s concerns about the ethical disvalue of epistemic arrogance, and John Palmer’s (Chapter 4), which makes fascinating suggestions about the basis of the Empedoclean prohibition against killing other living creatures as well as drawing connections between Empedocles’ natural philosophy and his ethical thought. Some of the best contributions are on texts that have received negligible attention, and about which this reviewer was thoroughly ignorant. These include sophisticated treatments of the many understudied ethical fragments of Democritus of Abdera (Monte Ransome Johnson, Chapter 11) and of the Dissoi logoi (Wolfsdorf, Chapter 14). Wolfsdorf carries out an acute analysis of the text of the Dissoi logoi and offers considerations in favour of its unity as a whole, and the unity of its proper parts. There is also an excellent treatment of the On Law and Justice, usually attributed to Archytas of Tarentum, by Monte Johnson and Phillip Horky (Chapter 20). After consideration they come to the view that the fragments which comprise the text are based on a work by early Peripatetic biographer Aristoxenus of Tarentum, and so can still be used to arrive at some tentative conclusions about Archytas’ thought. These include suggestions that he offered a rare positive argument for democratic rule along with innovative distinctions in respect to distributive justice and the rule of law.

In Part II, we get seven treatments of the wider currents of ethical thought in the formative period. Joseph Skinner (Chapter 21) argues that ethnographic writing contributed to the very emergence of popular ethics in the period. Dimitri El Murr (Chapter 24) argues that there was a rich and fruitful philosophy of friendship prior to Aristotle in which harmony, self-sufficiency and usefulness played significant roles. And Christopher Rowe (Chapter 27) ends the section with an incisive treatment of divergent views on the teachability of arētē among early Greek ethicists, and the various sorts of intellectualism to which each is committed.

Finally, the coda contains chapters on Diogenes of Sinope, Anaxarchus and Aristoxenus’ Pythagorean Precepts. They are all ‘post-formative’ but are included because their subjects are both understudied and relevant to understanding the philosophical movements of the post-formative period.

I wish to note two features of the collection. The first concerns the methodological scope of the book. This is truly impressive and inclusive of historical, philological, literary, analytic and continental influenced approaches to these works. But one wonders who the target audience of the volume is. If one is interested in a certain topic, it may well be a matter of luck to see whether the relevant treatment is one to which you are methodologically amenable. However, I think this reaction would misunderstand the state of early Greek philosophical ethics. The purpose of this volume is to promote interest in the formative period, rather than this or that figure within it. In this respect its liberal attitude to approaches and topics will serve it well.

Secondly, given that the editor introduces the volume by emphasizing the role of argument in distinguishing philosophical ethics, I wonder if explicit reflection on the difficulty of attributing arguments in early Greek philosophy would have been useful. Many of the texts and evidence are of course in a complicated and fragmentary state where sequence is hard to discern. Textual sequence is certainly not the only guide that we can use for reconstructing a philosophical argument, but nonetheless some reflection as to what sort of arguments we can plausibly reconstruct without it would be of great value for the study of early Greek ethics. This is not to say that individual papers do not cogitate in depth on these matters and offer many prudent warnings. But explicitly reflecting on how we set about reconstructing the logical connections which make up an argument in a defensible way without the benefit of textual sequence would be useful for research into the period.

My hope is that this volume’s range and eclecticism will prompt greater study of what is a profoundly rich philosophical period, which has a great deal more to offer. I would recommend it to those working on ancient ethical thought in general and those who have an interest in early Greek ethics in particular.