"Among the cardinal virtues of classical Greece - wisdom, courage, justice, piety, and sôphrosunê - sôphrosunê is the least understood or valued. But, as this book shows - studying the vigorous and wide-ranging debates about the virtue, across fifth- and fourth-century poetry, prose, and philosophy - many Greeks in fact judged it the preeminent virtue. They understood it to be the capacity to choose between ones conflicting desires and to act only on those aiming at what one judges ones authoritative or properly life-defining ends. This is the capacity to be a mature human: facing down ones bodily and social promptings with discipline, identifying with ones long-term goals or acknowledged norms over ones evanescent impulses. This is what makes one count as an "agent": someone who acts on her own principles, rather than simply reacts to external or internal proddings. Thus sôphrosunê is the virtue of agency. The clearest evidence for the nature of and significance granted to sôphrosunê is the disagreement found across ancient Greek literature over the terms application and scope. This book starts by appraising remarks about sôphrosunê from the archaic and early-Classical period in Homer, Theognis, Pindar, Aeschlyus, Heraclitus, and funerary inscriptions.

Then it turns to later fifth-century exchanges in Euripides especially but also Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Critias, Antiphon, and Democritus. Socrates is a crucial figure for the study, as we see in the works of his associates Antisthenes, Xenophon, and particularly Plato. After several chapters on Plato, we turn to the radical innovations of Aristotle and the less familiar Pythagorean assessments"--.