Euboulia in the _Iliad_

Classical Quarterly 36 (1):6-31 (1986)
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Abstract

The wordeuboulia, which meansexcellence in counselorsound judgement, occurs in only three places in the authentic writings of Plato. The sophist Protagoras makeseubouliathe focus of his whole enterprise(Prot.318e–319a):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 ofeuboulia. Invited by Socrates to call injusticekakoetheia(vicious disposition — he has just identified justice as ‘an altogether noble good nature (euetheia)’, i.e. as simple-mindedness), he declines the sophistry and says (Rep. 348d): ‘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 mentionseubouliais 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 haseuboulia(Rep.428b) — 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’ (428c–d). 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 (02):436-.
‘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.
Timē_ and _aretē in Homer.Margalit Finkelberg - 1998 - Classical Quarterly 48 (1):14-28.

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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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