This chapter shows that theories of natural catastrophes in Greek and Roman literature in general presuppose the repetition of devastating events rather than their singularity, but that the ancient evaluations of natural catastrophes differ widely. Long shows that Plato and Aristotle tend to be detached and dispassionate in their accounts of such natural catastrophes by treating them simply as inevitable phases in the natural world’s cyclical history. By contrast, the Epicurean Lucretius and the Stoic Seneca clearly acknowledge human fragility in the face of catastrophes. Both philosophers register the dangers of presuming mastery over the natural environment and are sensitive to the human toll that nature can extort from exceeding such limits.

In contemporary discussions, ethics and inquiry into the natural world are often treated as two completely independent fields of study. By contrast, many ancient thinkers took them to be intimately connected. This volume aims to shed light on the various ways in which ancient thinkers drew connections between these two fields. We human beings are in some sense part of the natural world, and live our lives within a larger cosmos, but yet our actions are governed by norms whose relation to the natural world is up for debate. The chapters in this volume discuss how these facts about our relation to the world bear upon both ancient accounts of human goodness and also ancient accounts of the natural world itself. The chapters focus primarily on Plato and Aristotle. But we have also included some discussion of earlier and later thinkers, with a chapter on the Presocratics and a couple of chapters that at least in part point ahead to later Epicurean, Stoic, and Neoplatonist philosophers.

This chapter investigates the apparent conflict in Plato presenting two apparently rather different things – fulfilling human nature and godlikeness – as the human telos. Fan argues that these two accounts are in fact compatible, if we understand the fulfilment of human nature as making the divine part in us flourish. If virtue is understood as a disposition to cope with evils that exist in the human condition but not in the divine life, it is hard to see how becoming virtuous fits with becoming godlike. In the Theaetetus, however, Plato understands becoming virtuous as a flight from the world. This has traditionally been understood as engaging in theory as opposed to praxis. However, such an understanding raises the problem that in the Theaetetus and in the Republic, justice, and thus being concerned with treating other people appropriately, is presented as a central virtue which speaks against understanding the flight idea merely in theoretical terms. Fan argues that instead of identifying the idea of fleeing from the world with withdrawing from practical affairs, we should understand it as a kind of self-transformation, in such a way that we are no longer rooted in the natural world, but in divine, transcendent reality.

This chapter addresses the puzzling question of why, in his Timaeus, Plato combines two very different topics: a cosmogony and account of the universe, on the one hand, and a story about the moral actions of ancient Athens, Atlantis, and Egypt, on the other. Sattler argues that the key to understanding the relation between these two parts is recognition that, in Plato’s view, they confront us with a structurally similar problem: how we are to account for the intelligibility of processes in the phenomenal world. Sattler shows that Plato no longer chooses to solve this problem by tying intelligibility to complete uniformity, as he did in the Republic, but by tying intelligibility to a rule – to norms and laws for actions in the human cultural realm, and to ratios and descriptive rules for the motions of the heavenly bodies in the natural realm. While Plato also accounts for the concerns specific to ethics and physics, the attempt to understand processes raises similar problems for him in both realms. Recurring natural catastrophes, such as floods and fires, appear as one kind of natural regularity in this Platonic account.

Part 5 revisits some earlier themes and takes some of them a bit further. Topics include: the indefinability of ‘good’; the mistake of modelling dialectic on mathematics; the relation of the form of the good to other forms; the sun-like form of the good versus the participand; the correlativity of intelligence and the good; the role of moral and intellectual education; the practicality of the rulers’ dialectic and how this makes it impossible for Socrates to produce examples; how the ‘ordinariness’ of this sort of reasoning is not at odds with Plato’s solemnity about it; how, even when writing the Republic, he could have envisaged dialectic as including investigations of a more theoretical and technical nature than those which (according to this book) characterize his ideal rulers; and, finally, the Republic’s stance of naïve realism about forms.