Ethical Values and the Literary Imagination in the Later Ancient World

Ethics has once again become a central interest of philosophy. One of the focal points of the renewed interest is the ethical philosophies of antiquity: I need only mention the names of Julia Annas, Brad Inwood, Martha Nussbaum, and Bernard Williams as reminders of the field's contemporary vitality. Much of the attention has been devoted to Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic thought roughly down to Plotinus, who died in A.D. 270. Less notice has been taken of the major bridging figures to medieval thought, Augustine and Boethius. Yet there has been a considerable revival of interest in them as well, as witness important studies by John Rist and John Magee.1 Students in the field agree that something new takes place at the end of the later ancient period, but they are not sure what it is or how they should talk about it. Part of the problem arises from the fact that there appears to be a change in the principal genre in which ethical discussion takes place. There is a decline in purely philosophical inquiry and a rise in interest in ethics as a branch of literature, understanding literature to include both the secular and the religious. It is a change that has both positive and negative consequences. The big loser is the secular philoso phy of ethics, which virtually disappears until it is revived by Peter Abelard in the twelfth century. The gain is a deepening of relations between ethics and literary experience. Beginning with Cicero and Seneca, this aspect of ethics breaks genuinely new ground in figures like Origen, Jerome, and Augustine. Of course, there is nothing new about situating ethical problems in a literary landscape: the idea is as old as Greek tragedy, the book of Job, or the Christian parables. In ancient education the connection between the ethical and the literary is a normal feature of the teaching of both grammar and rhetoric. For Cicero, the best sort of person is an ethically informed orator. Quintilian, building on this notion, devotes a chapter of his Institutio Oratoria to lectio (1.8), where he speaks of ethical instruction through poetry. This idea is echoed in the Middle Ages, when the curriculum authors were simply known as "ethici." Nonethe less, despite such continuities in the teaching of literature from an