Socrates' approach in questioning his opponents in the Gorgias is quite different than in the Protagoras. Here, we find a Socrates who is far more aggressive, critical, and angry with those whom he questions. Socrates upsets his opponents and even compares Callicles to a kinaidos (passive homosexual), an image that even the bold Callicles finds to be out of bounds (494e). While the conversation begins respectfully, by the dialogue's end we see what seems to be a verbal agôn between Socrates and Callicles. I suggest that Socrates' questions in the Gorgias have an agonistic character because Socrates is engaged in a real battle over the nature of the good life. Socrates' aggressive questions here underscore the tension between his and his opponents' understandings of a virtuous life.

In general, the assumption has been that Plato's aim in the Gorgias is to draw a sharp line of demarcation between the activities of philosophy and rhetoric, favoring philosophy over its obviously inferior opponent. Commentators on the Gorgias have suggested numerous distinctions between philosophy and rhetoric: (1) philosophy requires the consistency of one's beliefs, while rhetoric consists of merely verbal refutation; (2) philosophy requires a commitment to reason that the sophists lack; (3) the philosopher is committed to a different understanding of power – for example, the power to make others virtuous rather than domination over others; (4) philosophers possess a refined self-knowledge that the rhetoricians lack; (5) philosophy values technical knowledge while rhetoric does not; or (6) philosophy is linked to a specific set of moral claims.

Aristoxenus set out to convince his hearers and readers that students of harmonics should adopt the methods of research, the systematic approach, the standards of accuracy and the coherent argumentative strategies that are proper to a science in the Aristotelian mould. If he is to be believed, no previous theorist in the empirical tradition had come close to fulfilling these requirements, and he may very well be right, since the picture of their work which I tried to paint in Chapters 2–3 suggests that they had no such aim in mind. Aristoxenus, by contrast, set himself to the task of transforming harmonics into something it had never been before, a science whose credentials were as recognisable and legitimate as those of any other and which could now take its proper place among the sciences of nature. His repeated insistence on this objective in the Elementa harmonica suggests that he saw it as the most important aspect of his project; and in that case the audience he was addressing must have been composed of people to whom such issues mattered. Aristoxenus, we may conclude, was trying, above all, to persuade his fellow philosophers and scientists in the Lyceum that in his hands the previously trivial discipline of empirical harmonics had developed into one which deserved their intellectual respect.

These conclusions are uncontroversial, unoriginal and unsurprising, and nothing that I say in this chapter is intended to cast doubt on them.

In literature since Plato, the city-state has served as an influential analogue and metaphor for the soul and the self. Here is a version of the metaphor from contemporary scholarship that illuminates two different understandings of the self: on one view, the self is like a carefully planned and centrally organised city at the centre of which are the judicial, executive and administrative branches of government, all acting from a single set of rules. Radiating from the centre are broad boulevards. Power emanates from the centre to the city, and all the way to its outskirts. The analogy shows the self as essentially rational, unified, self-transparent, and governed by one single thing, the rational centre. This view is often attributed to Descartes and it colours many interpretations of Plato as well as Plotinus.

The medieval city is very different. Like Paris in ad 1250, it consists of guilds, grand families, religious orders, and old village centres. Such cities were loose confederations of semi-autonomous neighbourhoods, each defined by a distinctive internal organisation and distinctive procedures for foreign relations. There may have been a loose central organisation as well as attempts towards city-planning, but these functions were much harder to delineate and describe than the ones in a centrally governed and planned town. Analogously, the other understanding of the self is a complex layered configuration of many parts, dimensions and possibilities.

The arrangement of this book is only partly chronological, as I have said. Still, one would like to begin at the beginning. But it is hard to know what would count as a solid historical starting point. New intellectual enterprises do not spring into being in a single bound, fully armed and fully recognisable; typically they trickle together as a confluence of tributaries which are themselves side-shoots of other, pre-existing traditions of thought, none of which ‘is’ this new thing, but whose developing combination can be seen, in retrospect, gradually to have become it. In any case, such information as we have about the earliest explorations of territory eventually claimed by this science is vague, unreliable and hopelessly entangled with legends and misconceptions that grew up in later times. Pythagoras, of course, is often identified as the fountain-head, and if that were true it would take us back to the late sixth century. There are also reports that his younger contemporary, the poet and composer Lasus of Hermione, wrote the first ‘treatise’ (logos) about music, and allusions in two other writers seem to suggest that Lasus' work had some connection with issues in harmonics. But one of these latter references is too enigmatic to be interpreted safely; in the second, which hints at connections with Pythagorean speculations in acoustics, there is a serious gap in the surviving text, and we do not know precisely what the author was asserting.

In the previous chapters, three general tendencies in Plotinus – or in my interpretation of his philosophy – have become evident. First, the metaphysical hierarchy is explanatory both of the sensible realm in general and more specifically of anthropology as well as human selfhood, psychology and cognition. Plotinus' otherworldliness should therefore not be overstated. Second, Plotinus gives due attention to the nature of temporal and bodily human beings, and considers the sensible realm a necessary starting point for any advancement in both epistemological and therapeutic issues. Third, his radical and (from today's perspective) unappealing emphasis lies, rather, in what he considers as normatively ideal: pure reason, separated from the body and from external influences, directed to itself and its internal objects, the eternal forms. Despite my efforts to show the rationale and motivation behind these views, the third emphasis raises pressing questions about the relation – both real and ideal – a Plotinian philosopher has to the world he lives in as well as the significance of other people in his primarily inward-directed existence. The topic of this chapter is the self in the sphere of action and morality. Its purpose is to explicate what significance action holds in Plotinus' system, what consequences the therapeutic separation from the body and the inward turn have for moral action, and whether, from our point of view, the self-directed and self-absorbed self-improvement endangers other-regard and morality.

Few books have more splendidly informative titles than Theon of Smyrna's Mathematics useful for reading Plato. A title modelled on his, perhaps Harmonic theory useful for reading classical Greek philosophy and other things would have given a fair impression of my agenda here. But that's a little cumbersome; and for accuracy's sake, I would have had to tack the phrase ‘and indications of the converse’ onto the Theonian title, since I shall be trying to show not only how harmonics can be ‘useful’ to students of other fields, but also how the preoccupations of Greek writers who tilled those fields can shed light on the development of harmonics itself, and can help us to understand its methods and priorities. More importantly, this hypothetical title would have been dangerously hubristic; it has the air of presupposing a positive answer to one of the book's most serious questions. Leaving one or two exceptional passages aside (the construction of the World-Soul in Plato's Timaeus, for example), does a knowledge of the specialised science of harmonics, and of its historical development, really give much help in the interpretation of texts more central to the scientific and philosophical tradition, or in understanding the colourful environment inhabited by real Greek musicians and their audiences, or indeed in connection with anything else at all? Can such knowledge be ‘useful’, and if so, in which contexts, and how? I intend to argue that it can, though not always in the places where one would most naturally expect it.

The picture of selfhood emerging from our material is, if not thoroughly, nonetheless emphatically intellectual. The rational soul – and especially its paradigmatic part, the intellect – is identified as the true self, as that which gives us stability and identity. For this reason alone, philosophy of the self must include a description of the nature of intellect and rational capacities. Furthermore, elevating pure reason as a normative ideal has important consequences: it acts as a regulative paradigm and principle for embodied and temporal selfhood. An understanding of the rational powers of the soul will thus also reveal indications of what kind of selfhood is held to be valuable and what kind of functioning and processes are believed to cultivate it.

As such, there is nothing striking in Plotinus' intellectualism. Most ancient philosophers held that the universe has an intelligible structure, and that this structure is divinely beautiful. Striving to become aware of the essential and intelligible order of the universe is a natural inclination and capacity of the human psuchē, and this process brings the soul itself closer to order and beauty, shaping the states of the human soul according to the perfection and order of the universe. Acquisition of knowledge is thus not merely instrumental for rationally organising one's life towards happiness and well-being, but is something that quite literally brings human beings closer to a divine state, to god-likeness.

For Plotinus, self-integration and normatively ideal self-constitution both depend upon rational self-realisation.

Although the word ‘autonomy’ comes from Greek autonomos, literally meaning ‘living by one's own laws’, and was used in Greece both for states and persons, treatises on moral autonomy are hard to find in ancient literature. This does not, of course, mean that ancient philosophers did not have opinions on what it means to be an agent, when an action is free, or what makes an agent responsible for his actions. In fact, the connected notions of self-determination and self-sufficiency are commonly agreed upon ideals that recur in philosophical literature. Central ancient terms used in contexts relevant to what we think is covered by the issue of autonomy undoubtedly include at least enkrateia (self-control), autexousios (in one's free power, or self-determined), autarkeia (self-sufficiency), prohairesis (deliberate choice), hekousios/akousios (voluntary/involuntary) and akrasia (weakness of will). As the terminology of self-control and lack of it already shows, the ancients were inclined to worry about coercion that happens within the agent, namely the power of non-rational motivation to lead us into involuntary, or perhaps, rather, non-deliberate action. In addition to this, Platonic discussions on human freedom are closely intertwined with discussions on metaphysical necessity, and scholars have sometimes chosen to talk for instance of Plotinus' philosophy of freedom, rather than of any specifically human autonomy.

In this chapter I intend to follow two different ways of tracking Plotinus' views on what it is to be an autonomous agent and a self, both belonging to the approach where self is understood as a free or self-determining agent.

Before the foundation of the great philosophical ‘schools’ in the fourth and third centuries, there were no institutions dedicated to scientific or other intellectual pursuits. Some thinkers recorded their ideas in writing, and these writings could travel widely, reaching other individuals at a long distance from their starting point. But no formally constituted community of scholars existed to provide a ready-made audience for the products of ‘academic’ endeavour. Who, then, were these pioneering harmonic scientists, and to whom did they address their work? Did they and their audiences fall into any clearly identifiable group or category, and if so, how were they related to other kinds of technical or intellectual specialist? Are they to be regarded as ‘intellectuals’ at all, comparable, for instance, to mathematicians, philosophers and astronomers? In what settings and for what purposes did they present their ideas? In this chapter I shall suggest two kinds of answer to these questions. They are different but perfectly compatible with one another; some at least of these theorists may very well have marched under both banners at once.

HARMONIC THEORISTS IN THE WORLD OF THE SOPHISTS

There is a small pointer towards my first suggestion in a passage of Aristoxenus which we glanced at in Chapter 2, where he speculates that those harmonikoi who set out their results in a notation did so in order to impress ‘lay persons’, people who were in no sense specialists in the musical sciences, and to give them something on which they could pass judgement (El. harm. 40.29–41.6).

Aristotle tells us rather little about empirical harmonics. His most significant reflections on the subject are concerned with the relation in which it stands to the mathematical form of the discipline, which he finds a good deal more rewarding, and we shall examine his views on this relation in Chapter 13. But before we move on to the next major phase in the history of the empirical approach, we need to review briefly some aspects of his Posterior Analytics. This pocket-sized treatise condenses into a mere seventy pages of text a meticulous study of the structure of scientific knowledge. We can only scratch the surface here, and in any case not all of it is relevant for present purposes; some other parts of it will be discussed when we come to consider Aristotle's comments on harmonics in their own right. But a sketch of some central theses is essential at this point, along with a rather closer account of certain details, because of the influence it exerted, a generation later, on Aristoxenus' conception of his project in the Elementa harmonica. I shall refer back to it repeatedly in Chapters 6–8. One of Aristoxenus' main aims was to improve radically on the manner in which his predecessors approached their research and set out its results, which he regarded as methodologically haphazard and inadequate, and to transform the discipline into a properly constituted science.

The ontology of the last chapter divided human nature and selfhood into branching layers with a variety of sources. We are composites of soul and body, of forms and a material aspect organised by forms. The relation between individual rational subjectivity and the composite person with both a body and living functions is problematic. Furthermore, embodied selves are temporal creatures whose existence extends in time. Their identity is threatened, in that they never exist ‘all at once’, but with past and future horizons, or even parts. The self seems to be split into two radically different kinds of beings: unchanging and unified immortal souls or intellects and divided as well as multifaceted temporal and material composites. Yet every self and subject is also one: human beings are individuals, in that they exist as determinate beings in one body both at a time and through time. According to the simplest explanation, it is the soul and its formal power that gives human individuals their unity. As a non-spatial principle of organisation, it is by definition a principle of unity, too. So far, however, the organisation and unity endowed by such a principle to the composite has been mostly material: it is the structure of the extended thing as well as the future constitution of living things. But human beings are not just well-organised material bodies or even beautiful plant-like things with organised growth and lifespan. They move in co-ordinated ways and they experience themselves as unified centres of experience.