This paper offers a provocative re-reading of the passage about the sizes of the sun, moon, and stars late in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (5.564-613). Attention to not only details of argumentation but also shades of meaning and contorted syntax shows a more complex, ambiguous presentation than generally acknowledged. This paper suggests that Lucretius' narrator—rather than merely parroting wrong, ridiculed doctrines—pulls student-readers into the process of inquiry. It becomes the didactic audience’s task to receive data from sense-perception and use lessons learned earlier in the poem in making correct judgments based upon that data. In Epicurean and Lucretian accounts of reality, the senses themselves are infallible; so the Lucretius-ego’s assertion that the sun as big as perceived by our senses must also be infallible. But our interpretation of what that assertion entails about the sun’s actual size is a matter of judgment, and thus fallible and uncertain indeed.

This chapter argues that Plato wrote the Phaedo so that we would see Socrates as a philosophical hero, a replacement for traditional heroes such as Theseus or Heracles. The dialogue tells a new sort of story of how a hero faces death, providing an alternative to tragedy, as Plato thought that tragedy was actually practiced. I discuss the topic here because the opening of the dialogue plays an important role in setting up the Phaedo as an alternative to tragedy. But my case’s strength comes from cumulative evidence drawn from across the dialogue, and so this chapter provides an overall reading of the dialogue as an alternative to tragedy. After arguing for this, I turn to two other ways in which storytelling arises in the opening of the dialogue: in Socrates’ Aesop fable and in his dream that tells him to compose poetry.

This argument (typically called the “affinity argument”) is central to the structure of the Phaedo, setting up much of the remainder of the dialogue. Moreover, it develops the dialogue’s most detailed account of the forms and of ordinary objects, and it argues for an innovative account of the nature of the soul, which is relied upon in Socrates’ ethical account in the next section. Despite this, the argument has received very little scholarly attention, supposedly because scholars widely view it as an especially bad argument. This chapter shows that the argument is much more precise and stronger than has been appreciated. In doing so, it argues that Socrates describes here a new, fundamental feature of the forms: they are simple in a way that makes them partless – in strong contrast to ordinary objects, whose complex structure allows them to have opposing features at the same time.

This chapter introduces the book’s approach and its main theses, ending with an overview of the Phaedo. I argue that the dialogue has an unfolding structure, in which claims made early are often explained only at later stages. I briefly lay out the distinct stages of Socrates’ accounts of the forms, of the soul, and of ethics. These are not three independent topics; instead, his ethical account is grounded in his account of the soul, which is in turn grounded in his account of the forms. Another important thread running through the dialogue is how Socrates responds to Simmias’ and Cebes’ fears by trying to help them acquire the right sort of rational confidence in their views. I also discuss how Socrates appropriates and transforms ideas from his religious, scientific, and literary context in articulating and defending his philosophical theories.

Cebes’ cloakmaker objection presents an alternative model of the soul according to which it is ultimately destroyed in the process of providing life to the body. Socrates’ final argument rejects this model by arguing that the soul’s bringing life to the body, far from destroying the soul, is precisely what ensures that it must be immortal and imperishable. In doing so, the argument identifies a way in which the soul has a characteristic of the divine – immortality – thereby specifying one way in which it is akin to the divine, as Socrates claimed in the kinship argument. Thus, the final argument responds to Cebes’ cloak maker objection in a way that further fills in the kinship argument’s account of the soul. The final argument also includes an important discussion of forms and ordinary objects. I argue that Socrates here identifies the most basic reason why forms cannot be ordinary, perceptible things: ordinary objects are receptive of opposites, whereas forms cannot be.

Socrates here draws on the cyclical and kinship arguments to further explain nearly every claim made earlier in the defense speech (Chapter 3). He provides an interconnected account of virtue, happiness, moral psychology, reincarnation, and soul–body interaction. He first describes how coming to know the divine will ultimately allow the philosopher’s soul to spend the afterlife with the gods, eternally happy. By contrast, non-philosophers reincarnate because their desire for the body-like pulls them into a new body after death. Understanding this mechanism requires clarifying how Socrates thinks of the impurities in non-philosophers’ souls. After examining this, the chapter turns to how the body deceives the soul into desiring things that are not good for it. Socrates develops the account of true courage and temperance from the exchange passage (69a–e) to explain how the philosopher avoids and resists the body’s insidious effects so that the soul can pursue wisdom and so be eternally happy.

Socrates argues here that the sole pursuit of philosophers is dying and being dead. In doing so, he introduces most of the key topics in the dialogue, including forms, inquiry, the soul, and the philosophical life. Nonetheless, this section of the dialogue is often overlooked, perhaps because it seems simply to assert many of its claims. I argue that we often must wait until later in the dialogue to find the explanation for these claims, as part of the Phaedo’s unfolding structure. Once we take this section seriously, we can appreciate its tight and careful argumentative structure. Moreover, Socrates’ accounts here, in particular his ethical account, are sophisticated theories in their own right. The section also introduces some unusual and important terminology that Socrates uses later in the dialogue, including “auto kath’ auto” (which I argue should be translated “itself through itself”) and terminology for identifying the forms. The chapter ends with a new account of the famous “exchange passage.”

Cebes’ challenge leads to what is typically called Socrates’ four “immortality arguments,” which structure the core of the dialogue. Despite this common label, Cebes’ challenge does not ask Socrates to show that the soul is immortal, and Socrates’ first three arguments do not claim to show immortality. Instead, Cebes challenges Socrates to address people’s fear that the soul disperses and so is destroyed when someone dies; not being destroyed upon death is, I argue, different from being immortal. After discussing Cebes’ challenge, the chapter turns to the cyclical argument, providing a new account of its basic structure. It is based on an agreement that does not require Socrates to say anything here about the nature of the soul. Nonetheless, the argument is important for aiming to show that a Pythagorean view is correct – reincarnation – by understanding death and rebirth as part of a much larger phenomenon: the coming to be and passing away of opposite things.

Focusing on the revelation of Epicurean thanatology in the third book of On the Nature of Things, this essay argues that the most vehement strains of Lucretius’ diatribe against the fear of death are a polemic against kitsch. It explicates the pervasively frank, anti-kitsch stance of Epicureanism and explores how Lucretius combats kitsch, even as kitsch was enthusiastically circulated in other Roman contexts in the form of Epicurean objects and clichés. In the vignettes of the departed father and the maudlin drinkers in DRN 3, Lucretius draws our attention to the way that kitsch (the image of the stereotypically sweet children, the trite lamentation, the pseudo-philosophy, the falseness) occludes reality. The denunciation of kitsch is fundamental to Epicurean teaching: to deny that our metaphorical city has penetrable walls and to bemoan the eventuality of one’s own death is to refuse the nature of things.

This chapter begins by arguing that to understand Socrates’ (alleged) autobiography, we need to appreciate that he distinguishes between the terms “aitios” (responsible) and “aitia” (cause). Socrates’ account should be understood against the backdrop of the sophisticated treatments of aitios and aitia and of hypotheses in fifth-century medical treatises. At the same time, the autobiography shows how Socrates – as portrayed throughout Plato’s dialogues – would engage with the natural scientific tradition: he shows his hallmark profession of ignorance; he becomes excited by the prospect of acquiring knowledge of the good; since he is unable to learn this from Anaxagoras or others, he proceeds in a way that does not require knowledge; instead, he hypothesizes the existence of the things sought by his typical “what is it?” question. I argue that Socrates might not be interested in teleology here, as opposed to simply being interested in knowledge of the good. Once we situate the method of hypothesis within the overall dialogue, we can see that it is supposed to help one slowly build rational trust in a theory, thereby avoiding the cycle of trust and doubt that leads to misology.

This chapter reexamines the question of Caesar’s putative Epicureanism. While there is no reason to believe that Caesar was a committed Epicurean, there exist tantalizing pieces of evidence that he may have adopted for himself a version of the tenet that “death is nothing to us.” These include his observation, in his speech about the convicted Catilinarians (as reported by Sallust), that death is not a punishment but the endpoint of all experience, and his late-in-life statement (versions of which are found in Cicero’s Pro Marcello and in Suetonius) that he had “lived enough.” The chapter concludes by considering the criteria scholars typically employ for gauging philosophical affiliation in antiquity, arguing for a broadening of definitions and for considering even a some-time Epicurean as Caesar as part of the history of Epicureanism.