Introduction

Like Nietzsche a century before, whose persistent influence on Williams may be as difficult to describe as it is to dismiss, and about which this chapter will have more to say, Williams began his university training as a classicist, evidence of which can be found in the mastery of ancient Greek poets, dramatists, historians and, of course, philosophers that pervades his work from beginning to end. For Williams, the ideas of the ancient world fill a reservoir from which moderns and postmoderns may slake their philosophical thirst; not just in the sense that ancient thought holds inherent intellectual interest, which of course it does, but more importantly in the sense that, as Williams puts it in Shame and Necessity, almost certainly his finest book, “our view of [the ancient Greeks] is intimately connected with our view of ourselves” (Williams 1993b: 3). In short, contemporary self-understanding depends upon understanding the Greeks.

Williams displays his own understanding of the Greeks in remarkably varied forms. On the one hand, there are a number of fairly narrow, relatively self-contained analyses of more or less focused topics drawn from classical philosophical texts by Plato and Aristotle, topics such as Plato's treatment of names in the Cratylus or Aristotle's conception of justice in the Nicomachean Ethics (see Williams 1982b and 1980 respectively). On the other hand, there are instances of memorably ambitious breadth. Who but Williams, one is tempted to ask, would take on Plato for a series on “The Great Philosophers” (Williams 1997), producing a stunningly satisfying account in all of forty-five pages?