Arete of Cyrene was daughter and disciple of the founder of the Cyrenaic school and mother and teacher of the figure who codified its principles. Our sources emphasize her as a link in the intellectual chain connecting the school it its Socratic roots, to the detriment of preserving her own philosophical ideas. In this chapter, I make a case for her philosophical contribution to the Cyrenaics, as revealed in a careful reading of the few sources we have. I follow this with methodological reflections on how we might access a figure like Arete. I argue that this task requires and licenses the adoption of severed methodological strategies related to an added open-mindedness to source material. I reflect on how these methodological points contribute to a wider project of recovering the thought of marginalized figures.

Aristotle’s notion of aretē provides a way of reading Shakespeare’s plays that unifies the characters’ actions in a manner parallel to how ethics unifies humanity. For Aristotle, moral virtue is determined by how completely an individual embodies human nature. As a result there is a sense in which Aristotelian virtue is a selfish endeavor; I strive to fulfill my nature, and in doing so I achieve happiness (eudaimonia). Yet for Aristotle, moral virtue is a political exercise, it is action that ties a person to others. An individual’s role in the state is necessary for the full cultivation of virtue, and hence a requirement for achieving their own selfish end. Shakespeare frequently plays with this tension in Aristotelian virtue: The way characters relate their own good to the good of the state is, by this reading, a way of interpreting the virtue of the characters. Virtuous judgment is not set over universal principles. It is thinking through objects and experience in all their vicissitudes, as characters in a drama have to do. This chapter uses King Lear to demonstrate how Aristotelian moral virtue, and its relation of the individual and the state, can serve as a structuring principle for understanding action.