Antigone is the only character in Sophocles who explicitly purports to value philia above hatred. She does so in the course of a short dialogue, central to the play, which turns on the nature of philia and enmity.

Women were interwoven into the politics of Alexander’s itinerant court. Alexander’s mother Olympias and his full sister Cleopatra played the most important and enduring roles at court, even though they remained in the Greek peninsula and never saw Alexander again. His half-sisters Cynnane and Thessalonice and his niece Adea-Eurydice (also all resident in the Greek peninsula during Alexander’s reign) only grew to some level of importance after his death. His first wife, the Bactrian Roxane, mother of Alexander IV, played more of a role, though a still limited one, than his two Achaemenid wives. Though he never married the half-Persian Barsine, he fathered a son by her. Men and women worked together, not infrequently for violent ends. Women’s access to information, their participation in information networks covering great distances, their attempts to influence events and decisions, and their ability to exercise patronage to their own ends is striking. The violent deaths of all the female Argeads (by birth or marriage) resemble those of male Argeads and many of the Successors. All these women were, in the end, killed because they somehow constituted a problem, a threat to others, just as the men did.

This chapter asks whether Augustine criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that there was something fundamentally flawed about the eudaimonist approach to ethics, or whether he criticised Stoicism and Platonism because he thought that these philosophies had insufficiently understood eudaimonism itself. It finds that the latter explanation is correct: in reaching this conclusion, this chapter establishes that Augustine defined virtue and vice, or sin, from within the eudaimonist tradition, making use of the ideas of love as eros and philia, and of the highest good, or summum bonum.

This chapter is focused on aspects ot the superordinate Idea of the Good. Why is the first principle of all a normative principle (Section 2.1)? How does the Idea of the Good differ from an “ordinary” Form of the Good (Section 2.2)? Why is the unhypothetical first principle of all also the goal of everything, that which all desire (Section 2.3)? How does the Idea of the Good differ from the Demiurge? Why is the Demiurge good but not the Good (Section 2.4)? How is the admonition in Theaetetus to “assimilate to god” related to the Good as goal (Section 2.5)? In Symposium, the relation between eros and the Good is explored (Section 2.6). In Lysis, the idea of a “prōton philon” is comapred to the Idea of the Good as goal (Section 2.7). The evidence frrom Aristotle and from the indirect tradition that Plato identified the Good with “the One” is assembled. Why is oneness an index of goodness? The idea of integrated unity according to kind is introduced (Section 2.8).

The longing for love and the possibility of its loss are consistent concerns in Ishiguro’s production. Through references to ancient and modern conceptualizations, the chapter addresses the varieties of love that dominate Ishiguro’s works. It moves from the guilt-ridden love of a mother for her suicided daughter in A Pale View of Hills, through Stevens’s barely acknowledged love for Miss Kenton in Remains of the Day, to the unresolved tension between the devotion to our nearest and dearest and the pursuit of a higher ideal in The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans. After minor excursions into songwriting and short stories, the chapter focuses on the most recent three novels, considering the deceptive possibility of romantic love’s redemptive power in Never Let Me Go, the long-standing but apparently doomed conjugal love of Axl and Beatrice in The Buried Giant, and Klara’s touching devotion to the sick Josie in Klara and the Sun.

Platonic love has often been attacked – notably by Vlastos – as fundamentally selfish. The basis of this argument rests on the claim that love for Plato is little more than a form of utility in which the beloved is exploited to enable the philosopher’s ascent and is simply the object of love to the extent to which he exhibits desirable qualities and not as an individual. This reading ignores the elements of erotic reciprocity found in both the Symposium and Phaedrus, in which the beloved is not merely a passive object, but rather an active participant with the lover in a mutually beneficial project defined by shared values, with both parties attempting to become as godlike as possible. The erastes is shown to care genuinely for the eromenos in the course of the philosophical pedagogy which Plato advocates. In the Phaedrus, the tripartition of the soul seems to be a further move towards non-individuality and the significance of the beloved’s individuality is regularly downplayed. Yet the abstraction inherent in Platonic love is revealed to be both beneficial as a mechanism for avoiding the negative aspects of interpersonal love, as well as a natural feature of the human condition: the striving after Beauty.

Chapter 2 concluded that liberal democracy must be supported by a sense of unity that is oriented toward the preservation of liberal democracy and that does not suppress difference and disagreement. Chapter 3 explores what this unity ought to look like by engaging with Aristotle’s notion of political friendship. For Aristotle, citizens who belong to different factions are political friends when they share a commitment to preserve the regime, provided that the regime is “correct” or not excessively “deviant.” The chapter determines that the unity we seek should assume the form of a culture of trust where citizens believe that their fellow citizens probably value the continuation of their civic relationship, where citizens share a commitment to liberal democracy, and where they can nonetheless debate the meaning of equality and justice. Such trust, however, faces an initiation problem by virtue of presupposing a broad commitment to liberal democracy. This chapter concludes that citizens must either first develop a preliminary sense of trust on top of something other than a commitment to liberal democracy or be able to contribute to liberal democratic trust without realizing it.

This chapter challenges the notion that love and envy are incompatible and argues that love and envy are compatible in at least two senses: first, they thrive in the same psychological conditions and thus are likely to occur together; second, love can benefit from emulative envy, and, when love is wise, it can tolerate some amount of inert, aggressive, and spiteful envy. The descriptive version of the incompatibility thesis (namely that love and envy never co-exist) is shown to be too strong and dismissed. The normative version of the incompatibility thesis (namely that love and envy ought not to co-exist) is refuted via an indirect argument, according to which we ought not to endorse an ideal of love free from envy, because that ideal is psychologically implausible. Finally, two cases studies from literature and TV are discussed in order to show that envying the beloved might be in some conditions a good thing.

This chapter argues that notwithstanding the Symposium’s debt to its more famous Platonic predecessor, Xenophon exploits the symposiastic setting to serve his own purposes and interests, as Socrates, assisted by Antisthenes, seeks to educate Callias, a super-rich Athenian, concerning proper elite values and behavior in the democracy. Callias’ naive assumptions concerning his wealth and its capacities are challenged and laid bare, and ultimately Socrates instructs him on how he can live up to the high expectations of a man of wealth and high birth by seeking political knowledge, pursuing leadership positions within the city, and fostering the same ambitions in the boy Autolycus, whom he loves, within the context of a mutually supportive friendship (philia). As such, the Symposium constitutes a case study in the education of a conspicuous member of the Athenian elite concerning the political role to which he should aspire within the city. Although Xenophon portrays Callias as a challenging student to educate, he shows his Socrates doing his best to recruit a prominent elite Athenian to serve the democratic city.