This chapter develops in detail a conception of temperance, based on a critical engagement with the dialogue’s resources, which I dub temperance as self-realisation. I explore how this conception is modelled in the dialogue, with particular reference to Socrates’ own procedure as depicted therein. The model enables us to address questions of Socrates’ own relation to temperance, and of how temperance can be regarded as of benefit on this conception. Emphasis is placed on the exercise of temperance as a continuous process and to that extent on self-realisation as something that is necessarily imperfectible. However, it is argued that this makes sense both of the status of temperance as a branch of practical knowledge and of its ability to characterise a whole life.

Interpreters have long recognized that there is a problem about determining what kind of activity Aristotle thinks happiness is. Some of his remarks appear to favor a single best kind of activity, intellectual contemplation. Other evidence suggests that it is an overarching activity that has various virtuous activities, ethical and intellectual, as parts. Interpreters typically view these as incompatible theses and try to show that one or the other apparent thesis is merely apparent. The problem of determining which of two incompatible theses Aristotle believes is the Dilemmatic Problem of Happiness. But the arguments that rival interpretations amass exert pressure to think that Aristotle really is committed to both of the allegedly incompatible claims. The problem of showing how he can coherently endorse both is the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness. Any dialectically satisfactory interpretation of Aristotles theory of happiness must solve it. None has done so. It cannot be solved while laboring under the weight of three common assumptions. Chapters 2–4 argue for the falsity of those assumptions and provide materials for constructing a solution to the Conjunctive Problem.

Scholarship on De Officiis tends to place the emphasis on those aspects of the treatise that outline the building blocks of a functioning commonwealth. What tends to receive rather less attention is Cicero’s theorizing of what to do in situations of communal breakdown. But in De Officiis he is as interested in injustice as he is in justice, in the ability of humans to inflict massive damage on each other, in the insufficiency of legislation to ensure harmonious co-existence, in fraud and abuse of power. To address the problem of harm and injustice Cicero calls for vigilance and intervention on the part of all members of the community and endorses ‘protective violence’ up to and including the license, indeed the duty, to kill tyrannical figures that threaten the fabric of communal life. This chapter argues that Cicero’s ethical extremism animates the entire treatise. To render this claim plausible it explores the historical circumstances that gave rise to it and traces its ubiquitous presence within De Officiis, with a particular focus on the conceptual strategies used to justify murder.

In De Officiis, Cicero undertakes sustained engagement with Roman exemplary ethics. He uses dozens of different exempla to serve a variety of functions including as inspirational paradigms as means of illustrating abstract concepts and to communicate the important principle of situational variation. In addition he reflects upon some of the challenges of exemplary ethics when viewed within the Stoic context and also develops new techniques for utilising exempla and exemplary modes within a Stoic framework. He achieves this partly by incorporating into his philosophical discussion some key features of Roman exemplary ethics including a sense of particularity and historical specificity emotional charge and injunction and indeterminacy. De Officiis anticipates to some extent ideas later developed more explicitly by Seneca; identifying these enables us to better appreciate the unfolding dialogue between Stoicism and exemplary ethics.

Aristotle has the resources to solve the Conjunctive Problem of Happiness and thus to vouchsafe the necessity of ethically virtuous activity while clarifying the kind of priority that contemplation has. Among these resources is his theory of predication as articulated in the Organon, his toolkit for all sorts of philosophical inquiry. This theory allows us to understand the coherence of what have appeared to many to be fundamentally discrepant answers to the question about what kind of activity happiness is.