Hubris (in so many ways) is still with us: commentators and pundits still return repeatedly to this ancient Greek concept as a way of diagnosing the shortcomings of leadership and foresight that underpin contemporary political and business failures. These appeals to the notion of hubris rest on aspects of the ancient phenomenon that would have been familiar to an ancient theorist such as Aristotle. But beyond these popular understandings, hubris has become a term of art in contemporary academic approaches to leadership and management and is widely considered to have congeners and analogues in contemporary psychology. Yet these disciplines are rarely brought into dialogue with the intellectual history of classical Greece. This Introduction remedies that deficiency by outlining the approaches of contemporary classics, business and management studies and psychology and discussing the potential for each of these disciplines to draw and learn from the insights of the others.

Aristotle defines hybris as a way of mistreating (dishonouring) others. But he also emphasises its psychology, in ways that chime very well with the understanding of the concept in earlier literary sources. As well as indicating a failure to show other people the respect they deserve, hybris is a way of thinking too much of oneself. This affects one’s estimation of the role that luck plays in all human endeavour: the classic Aristotelian case is that of the rich, ‘lucky fools’ who think that their material good fortune is a sign that they excel in all respects; but ancient hybristai in general tend to develop the belief that they are invulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. In this way, hybris regularly entails a failure to deal adequately with risk. At the same time, it bears a relation to the myth of meritocracy, by which the fortunate convince themselves that their success is deserved.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Classics on topics related to distributed cognition and to consider how the various chapters in this volume represent, reflect and advance work in this area. This volume brings together eleven chapters by international specialists in the historical period from archaic Greece to late antiquity, with the majority of essays focusing on the period from the fifth century BCE to the third century CE. It includes essays on the ways in which cognition is explicitly or implicitly conceived of as distributed across brain, body and world in Greek and Roman technology, culture, science, medicine, philosophy, art, literature and drama. Together the chapters make evident the ways in which the particular range of sociocultural and technological contexts that existed in antiquity fostered and reflected particular notions of distributed cognition. In what follows I attempt to put these contributions in their wider research context, in terms of (a) mainstream classical scholarship, (b) earlier work in Classics which draws on the theories and findings of the cognitive sciences in general, and (c) existing applications of specific aspects of distributed cognition theory to classical material. In each of these sections I freely intersperse references to the chapters in this volume, where they can be seen as taking forward the issues in question or where they provide further information on topics canvassed here, before turning, in the concluding section, to the chapters themselves.

Distributed Cognition and Traditional Classical Scholarship

To a considerable extent, traditional ways of doing Classics, ancient history and classical archaeology either lend themselves to recasting in terms of distributed cognition or in fact already employ, usually without realising it, approaches and assumptions that can be expressed in those terms. For example, as contributors to this volume such as Christopher Gill and George Kazantzidis make clear, ancient philosophical theories of the nature of the psychē, its capacities, affections and afflictions, as well as its relation to the body, regularly rest on models that assume the interaction of body and soul in most if not all aspects of cognition and affectivity. The primacy of the body, as Kazantzidis demonstrates, is a given of Hippocratic medical theory. Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the relation between body and psychē implicates the body in all or virtually all aspects of mental functioning.