Chapter 6 centres on Galen’s longest moral work, the Affections and Errors of the Soul, and explores the features of Galenic practical philosophy from a number of angles. The first section provides an analysis of the work’s programmatic preface and shows that Galen exploits the dynamics of polemic, self-promotion and self-effacement to cast himself as a prominent contributor in this intellectual area. The next section discusses Galen’s emphasis on self-knowledge, which is often blocked by self-love. It claims that in order to generate feelings of revulsion with regard to the latter, Galen works on ‘class fraction’ as a tactic with moralising intent. Another strand of special importance in the essay is the figure of the moral adviser, which Galen elaborates on so as to highlight the need for welcoming and indeed enduring moral criticism. Even though the moral adviser features in other authors of the Second Sophistic, in Galen it points to the applicability of ethics to a broad range of social contexts, thus credentialing his situational ethics. A separate section of Chapter 6 focuses on the concept of free speech (parrhēsia). While Galen debates the challenges of social and political interaction, he advises frankness at all costs. A genuine friend should never be reluctant to express the truth of someone’s moral situation and this makes him strikingly different from the flatterer, a disgusting stock figure in Imperial works on moralia, particularly in Plutarch, whom Galen seems to follow here. Another shrewd device that Galen uses to good effect to achieve the moral rectification of readers is the description of the pathology of anger (its origins and results), particularly in the episode featuring Galen’s Cretan friend, which is framed, I suggest, as an ‘ethical case history’, sharing characteristics with Galen’s medical case histories.

Sex differences in obligatory parental investment and reproductive potential cause human females to desire high-quality men as partners. For men, this means that to achieve reproductive success, they must 1) combat other men to gain access to or retain mates, and to guard the resources women need for reproduction and child care, and/or 2) attract women by displaying (sexual) ornamentations or direct provision of resources. These pressures have shaped men’s physiology, as well as mating-related and other behaviors, and result in intense male–male intrasexual competition. In this chapter, I provide an overview of men’s intrasexual competitiveness, first detailing several important concepts, before focusing on the major domains of these competitions. The research reviewed shows that physical formidability and social status are central to human male–male competition – although qualitatively different, these dimensions are intertwined, such that formidable men are more likely to excel in physical combat and competition, and as a result attain higher social status and, ultimately, increased reproductive success. Men use an array of tactics to compete with same-sex rivals, ranging from direct aggression and physical contests (e.g., in sports or fights) to (verbal) competitor derogation, and the conspicuous flaunting of possessions, leisure activities, and helping behaviors. Finally, yet importantly, research on the context-dependent fluctuations in men’s testosterone levels sheds light on the underlying processes of male intrasexual competition. Specifically, increases in testosterone are observed both in preparation for and as a result of male–male competitions, and a sharp decline in testosterone after entering in a long-term romantic relationship or during fatherhood suggest a down-regulation of these competitive tendencies.

Chapter 7 turns to closing the gendered qualification gap. I develop and experimentally test three strategies to close the gendered qualification gap. I show that simply providing voters with more information about female candidate qualifications is not enough to close the gendered information gap, and thereby the gendered qualification gap. Putting qualification information in context that tells voters that female candidates have more or better qualifications than male candidates effectively closes the gendered qualification gap. Self-promotion does not close the gendered qualification gap. This chapter points to the need for more research on how to disrupt the implicit biases voters bring with them to the ballot.

The chapter analyses Cato the Elder as the ‘inventor’ of a novel ethos of principled thrift and pride in peasant parsimony in response to the massive and unprecedented influx of war spoils and other riches into Rome in the first half of the second century BCE. It explores how Cato turned aspects of prudent and parsimonious husbandry as allegedly practiced by earlier generations of Roman peasants into a normative benchmark for all Romans, and in particular members of the senatorial elite and endowed his vision with authoritative and exemplary force by projecting it back into the past. The argument then shifts to resistance to this reconfiguration of material moderation as an ancestral ideal and concludes with a look at the self-promotion of Scipio Aemilianus, who aligns himself in some respects with the Catonian persona but distances himself from it in others, not least in his explicit if partial embrace of Greek culture – or rather those aspects of Greek culture that could be presented as compatible with Roman tradition.