The Measure of Greatness Philosophers On Magnanimity Sophia Vasalou Full Chapter

The Measure of Greatness:
Philosophers on Magnanimity Sophia

Vasalou
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-measure-of-greatness-philosophers-on-magnani
mity-sophia-vasalou/
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 04/10/19, SPi
The Measure of Greatness

M I N D A S S O C IAT IO N O C C A SIO NA L SE R I E S
This series consists of carefully selected volumes of significant original papers on
predefined themes, normally growing out of a conference supported by a Mind
Association Major Conference Grant. The Association nominates an editor or editors
for each collection, and may cooperate with other bodies in promoting conferences or
other scholarly activities in connection with the preparation of particular volumes.
Director, Mind Association: Julian Dodd

Publications Officer: Sarah Sawyer
Recently published in the series

In the Light of Experience
Edited by Johan Gersel, Rasmus Thybo Jensen,
Morten S. Thaning, and Søren Overgaard
Perceptual Ephemera
Edited by Thomas Crowther and Clare Mac Cumhaill
Evaluative Perception
Edited by Anna Bergqvist and Robert Cowan
Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment
Edited by C. B. Bow
The Actual and the Possible
Edited by Mark Sinclair
Art and Belief
Edited by Ema Sullivan-Bissett, Helen Bradley, and Paul Noordhof
Thinking about the Emotions
Edited by Alix Cohen and Robert Stern
Art, Mind, and Narrative
Edited by Julian Dodd
The Epistemic Life of Groups
Edited by Michael S. Brady and Miranda Fricker
Reality Making
Edited by Mark Jago
The Metaphysics of Relations
Edited by Anna Marmodoro and David Yates
The Measure of
Greatness
Philosophers on Magnanimity
Edited by
S O P H IA VA S A L OU
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© the several contributors 2019
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941477
ISBN 978–0–19–884068–8
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840688.003.0001
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Contents
Acknowledgementsvii
Notes on the Contributorsix
Introduction1
Sophia Vasalou
1. Magnanimity as Generosity 21
Terence Irwin
2. Stoic Magnanimity 49
Christopher Gill
3. Strengthening Hope for the Greatest Things:
Aquinas’s Redemption of Magnanimity 72
Jennifer A. Herdt
4. Magnanimity, Christian Ethics, and Paganism in
the Latin Middle Ages 88
John Marenbon
5. Greatness of Spirit in the Arabic Tradition 117
Sophia Vasalou
6. Cartesian Générosité and Its Antecedents 147
Michael Moriarty
7. Magnanimity and Modernity: Greatness of Soul and
Greatness of Mind in the Enlightenment 176
Ryan Patrick Hanley
8. The Kantian Sublime and Greatness of Mind 197
Emily Brady
9. Nietzsche on Magnanimity, Greatness, and Greatness of Soul 215
Andrew Huddleston
10. A Composite Portrait of a True American Philosophy
on Magnanimity235
Andrew J. Corsa and Eric Schliesser
vi Contents
11. Twenty-First-Century Magnanimity: The Relevance of

Aristotle’s Ideal of Megalopsychia for Current Debates in
Moral Psychology, Moral Education, and Moral Philosophy 266
Kristján Kristjánsson
12. Greatness of Soul Across the Ages 292
Robert C. Roberts
Index 319
Acknowledgements
This volume would not have crystallized, or crystallized in quite its present form,
were it not for the generous financial support that made it possible to organize a
two-day conference on the topic at the University of Birmingham in January 2017
and bring the contributors together for a live conversation. The conference was
organized through grants awarded by the British Academy, the Mind Association,
and the British Society for the History of Philosophy, so this book stands in their
debt. I would like to extend a special thanks to a number of people who acted as
commentators on papers presented at the event, namely David Carr, John Sellars,
and Jussi Suikkanen. The contributors and I are also grateful to the two readers
for the Press whose constructive comments helped make this a better book.
Finally, I am grateful to Peter Momtchiloff for his guidance as this book took
shape and for seeing it through to publication.
Notes on the Contributors
Emily Brady is Professor of Philosophy and Susanne M. and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair
and Director of the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University.
Previously, she was Professor of Environment and Philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh. She has published six books, including Between Nature and Culture: The
Aesthetics of Modified Environments (2018, as co-author); The Sublime in Modern
Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature (2013); and Aesthetics of the Natural Environment
(2003). Her current book project explores the aesthetics of nature in eighteenth-century
philosophy.
Andrew J. Corsa is an Assistant Professor at Lynn University in its Dialogues of Learning

programme. His essays on magnanimity, focusing on Hobbes, Hume, Smith, and Thoreau,
have been published in the journals Hobbes Studies, Ergo, and Environmental Philosophy.
He is currently working on a book reflecting on the role that the virtue of magnanimity
should play in the contemporary world.
Christopher Gill is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. He

works on Greek and Roman philosophy, especially ethics and psychology, with a special
focus on ideas of character, personality, and self. His books include Personality in Greek
Epic, Tragedy, and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (1996); The Structured Self in Hellenistic
and Roman Thought (2006); Naturalistic Psychology in Galen and Stoicism (2010); and
Marcus Aurelius Meditations Books 1–6, translated with introduction and commentary
(2013), all published by Oxford University Press. He is currently writing a book on Stoic
ethics and its potential contribution to modern thought.
Ryan Patrick Hanley is Professor of Political Science at Boston College. A specialist in the
history of moral and political philosophy in the Enlightenment period, he is the author of
Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Love’s
Enlightenment: Rethinking Charity in Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Our
Great Purpose: Adam Smith on Living a Better Life (Princeton University Press, 2019); and,
most recently, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon (Oxford University Press, 2020), with its
companion volume of translations, Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings (Oxford
University Press, 2020).
Jennifer A. Herdt is Gilbert L. Stark Professor of Christian Ethics and Senior Associate
Dean for Academic Affairs at the Yale University Divinity School. She is the author of
Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008), and Religion and Faction in
Hume’s Moral Philosophy (1997), and has served as guest editor for special issues of the
Journal of Religious Ethics and the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. In 2013
she delivered the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary on Christian eudai-
monism and divine command morality. An ongoing project on ethical formation, Bildung,
x Notes on the Contributors
and the Bildungsroman, is supported by a research fellowship from the Alexander von
Humboldt Foundation.
Andrew Huddleston is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to

moving to Birkbeck, he was Michael Cohen Career Development Fellow at Exeter College,
Oxford. His work focuses on nineteenth-century European philosophy (especially
Nietzsche), aesthetics, ethics, and social philosophy. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence
and Flourishing of Culture (2019) explores issues of ethics and social philosophy in
Nietzsche’s thought. Huddleston’s work has also appeared in a number of journals and
edited volumes.
Terence Irwin read Literae Humaniores at Magdalen College, Oxford, and received a PhD
from Princeton. From 1975 to 2006 he taught at Cornell University. He is now Professor of
Ancient Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College. His main
research interests are in ancient philosophy, moral philosophy and its history, and the phil-
osophy of Kant. He is the author of: Plato’s Gorgias (translation and notes, 1979); Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (translation and notes, 2nd edn 1999); Aristotle’s First Principles (1988);
Classical Thought (1989); Plato’s Ethics (1995); and The Development of Ethics, 3 vols (2007–
9). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the
British Academy.
Kristján Kristjánsson received his doctorate in moral philosophy from the University of
St. Andrews, Scotland, and his research focuses on issues at the intersection between moral
philosophy, moral psychology, and moral education. He is currently Professor of Character
Education and Virtue Ethics, and Deputy Director of the Jubilee Centre for Character and
Virtues, at the University of Birmingham, UK. Kristjánsson has published extensively in
international journals on his research topics, and his latest books are The Self and Its
Emotions (Cambridge, 2010); Virtues and Vices in Positive Psychology (Cambridge, 2013);
Aristotelian Character Education (Routledge, 2015); and Virtuous Emotions (Oxford, 2018).
John Marenbon is a Senior Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he has
been a Fellow since 1978. He is now also Honorary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the
University of Cambridge and was Guest Professor at Peking University in 2015–16. His
recent books include The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy (as editor, 2012); Pagans
and Philosophers: The Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, 2015);
and Medieval Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2016).
Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a

Fellow of Peterhouse. He was previously Centenary Professor of French Literature and
Thought at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include Taste and Ideology
in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge, 1988); Roland Barthes (Cambridge, 1991); Early
Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford, 2003); Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves:
Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford, 2006); and Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in
Early Modern French Thought (Oxford, 2011). He has translated Descartes’s Meditations on
First Philosophy and The Passions of the Soul and Other Late Philosophical Writings for the
Oxford World’s Classics series. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Chevalier dans
l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
Notes on the Contributors xi
Robert C. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics, Emeritus at Baylor University,

and was formerly Chair of Ethics and Emotion Theory at the Jubilee Centre for Character
and Virtues, University of Birmingham. He works on the philosophical moral psychology
of emotions and character traits and its intersection with empirical psychology. He is the
author of Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (2003); Spiritual Emotions (2007);
Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (2007, with W. Jay Wood); and
Emotions in the Moral Life (2013), as well as numerous papers in journals and collections.
Most recently, Roberts is the editor (with Daniel Telech) of The Moral Psychology of
Gratitude (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), and he is currently working on Kierkegaard’s
Psychology of Character (Eerdmans).
Eric Schliesser is Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting
Scholar at the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman
University. He has published widely on early modern philosophy and science as well as
contemporary philosophy of economics, including a monograph on Adam Smith (Oxford
University Press, 2017). He has authored an essay on magnanimity in David Hume and
Adam Smith for Hume Studies.
Sophia Vasalou received her doctorate from the University of Cambridge, and is currently
a Senior Lecturer and Birmingham Fellow in Philosophical Theology in the Department of
Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. Her work focuses on Islamic
ethics, virtue ethics, and a number of other philosophical subjects. Her books include
Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Muʿtazilite Ethics (Princeton, 2008);
Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime
(Cambridge, 2013); Wonder: A Grammar (SUNY, 2015); and Ibn Taymiyya’s Theological
Ethics (Oxford, 2016).
Introduction
Sophia Vasalou
‘We all love great men . . . nay can we honestly bow down to anything else?’ So
wrote Thomas Carlyle in a well-known set of lectures running under the title
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.1 It is as good a place as any
to open a conversation about that singular virtue—a virtue of greatness and great
men—to which this volume is dedicated. Carlyle himself may not have had the
virtue of greatness of soul or magnanimity specifically in mind when he launched
his investigation of the hero. But it is a virtue that has often been understood to
bear an especially close relation to the heroic, a relation to which it owes some of
its strongest tensions but also the deepest roots of its power to fascinate.
For philosophers, the history of this virtue begins with Aristotle, who provided
the first extensive philosophical account of it in his Nicomachean Ethics. The
great-souled or magnanimous person (megalopsychos), as he pithily put it there, is
the one who ‘thinks himself, and is, worthy of great things’ (1123b1–2); or in
another translation, ‘who claims much and deserves much’.2 The basis of this person’s
sense of worth is his excellence of character. And insofar as the greatest external
good is honour, the great-souled person is one who is knowingly worthy of the
highest honours. Greatness of soul is thus primarily a virtue that regulates one’s
relationship to great honours.
Aristotle’s account, articulated in the distinctive moral and civic environment
of the Athenian democracy, has often been seen under its aspect as an heir to
a different kind of moral world to which fourth-century Athens maintained a
strong but uneasy relationship—the world represented in the Homeric epics.
Aristotle’s specific virtue term, as Terence Irwin points out in this volume, has
scarcely a discernible footprint in fifth-century Greek, making its earliest literary
appearances in the work of the Attic Orators. Yet not-too-distant cognate words—
such as megalētor, often translated as ‘great-hearted’—are rife in Homer as desig-
nations of his heroes. And when Aristotle’s specific term comes into common use,
1 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, ed. David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 31.
2 The first quote is from the translation of the Nicomachean Ethics by Christopher Rowe with com-
mentary by Sarah Broadie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), which I draw on throughout the
text with occasional modification. The second translation is by F. H. Peters.
Sophia Vasalou, Introduction In: The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity. Edited by: Sophia Vasalou,
Oxford University Press (2019). © the several contributors.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840688.003.0013
2 Introduction
its association with the raw splendour of the Homeric world and its gallery of
larger-than-life heroes is unmistakably clear. Great-souled or great-hearted men
(and it is unmistakably a male virtue) are men like Achilles, whose love of honour,
famously the source of the destructive wrath of which the Iliad sings, also leads
him to disdain death in the ardour to avenge the death of his friend Patroclus, or
men like Ajax, who prefers suicide to dishonour.
What do such men have in common? A love of honour, it is clear, even to the
death. Aristotle himself is certainly thinking of such men when, in a well-thumbed
passage of the Posterior Analytics (II.13.97b15–25), he brings up the term mega-
lopsychia and names ‘intolerance of insults’ as a key component of its meaning.
Yet that passage also attests that the transition from the Homeric battlefield to
the Athenian polis has not left the moral universe, and the meaning of words,
untouched. Since Achilles’ death-defying heroism—a heroism whose tendency to
benefit the community mingled uneasily with its destructiveness—there had been
other precedents, setting different examples of what a well-lived and indeed heroic
life might look like. There had been Socrates, whose pregnant words in the Apology
would resonate subtly with Aristotle’s chosen vocabulary in the Nicomachean Ethics,
when he would ask his judges what ‘such a man’ as he deserves, and volunteer the
answer: ‘Some good thing, men of Athens, if I must propose something truly in
accordance with my deserts’ (36d).3 For far from hurting the community, he had
been its ‘benefactor’. In Socrates, the death-defying pursuit of the noble had taken
a giant step farther, leaving even the love of honour behind to become an all-
encompassing indifference to external goods. ‘Indifference to fortune’, in fact, was
a second semantic strand of the virtue term that Aristotle would go on to identify
in the Posterior Analytics.
Language had caught up with the changing views of heroism. Yet this seemed
to leave moral language in a curious state of tension. When one described the
warrior as magnanimous and the philosopher as magnanimous, how much was
there in common between the two uses? Was one talking about one and the same
characteristic? Aristotle’s considered exposition of the virtue in the Nicomachean
Ethics has often been read as an attempt to provide a response to this question,
and thus to work through the stress fractures between the moral world of the
Homeric epics and the democratic polis. On one reading, Aristotle’s compromise
was to maintain the connection with honour but to moderate Achilles’ attachment,
and to maintain the link with a reserved attitude to externals, but to moderate
Socrates’ detachment.4
It would be hard to understate how deeply this account has divided modern
readers. This profound division was captured starkly by the French scholar René
3 Translation by Harold N. Fowler in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 1914).
4 See the discussion in Neil Cooper, ‘Aristotle’s Crowning Virtue’, Apeiron 22 (1989), 191–205.
Sophia Vasalou 3
Antoine Gauthier in a panoramic work published in 1951, Magnanimité: l’idéal de

la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne, which
remains a landmark in the limited scholarship on the topic. It is astonishing today
to read some of the strongly worded expressions of admiration that Gauthier
documented among some of Aristotle’s readers in the nineteenth and early parts
of the twentieth century. One writer speaks of the portrait of magnanimity as a
‘true gem’ in the Aristotelian corpus. Another breathlessly describes the mag
nanimous man as ‘sparkling with spiritual beauty, he consumes my entire ability
to admire’. Aesthetic terms abound: a noble ‘painting’, a work of art.5
Modern readers may find it difficult to relate to these gushing reactions. This
reflects the degree to which the more recent reception of this virtue has been
dominated by the very opposite response, what Gauthier himself referred to as a
sense of ‘scandal’. There has been no end to the forms this sense of scandal has
taken. Several of these are hard to adumbrate without dwelling on the particulars
of Aristotle’s account. The easiest to pick out is the deep moral discomfort pro-
voked by the sense of entitlement—an entitlement to ‘great things’—exhibited by
the great-souled person and by the self-satisfaction that marks his appraisal of his
own moral credentials. Smug, priggish, disdainful of others; to these faults have
been added myriad others which find their purchase in different elements entering
Aristotle’s picture. The great-souled person likes to ‘bestow benefits, but is
ashamed at receiving them’ (1124b9–10) and dislikes hearing about his debts; he
tends ‘not to ask anyone for anything’ while being eager to give; he is ‘slow to act,
holding back except where there is great honour to be had or a great deed to be
done’ (1124b24–6); he is not given to wonder, thinking that ‘nothing is great’
(1125a3). Mining such and other passages, different kinds of readers have excori-
ated the ideal of magnanimity for failing to make room for gratitude, for codifying
a near-delusive desire for god-like self-sufficiency, and for legitimating an unjus-
tifiable self-exemption from the smaller yet nonetheless significant acts that make
the warp and woof of the moral life. The great-souled man’s imperviousness to
wonder in turn betrays a suffocating self-absorption and the constriction to an
all-too-human sphere of virtue lacking transcendent object.6
This last point represents a criticism which Gauthier puts to the mouth of one
of Aristotle’s Christian readers in the first half of the twentieth century, the Jesuit
writer André Bremond. This is the thin edge of a wedge into the larger observation
that many of the moral values antagonized by the ideal of magnanimity—notably
5 See René Antoine Gauthier, Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et
dans la théologie chrétienne (Paris: J. Vrin, 1951), 5–7.
6 The last point reprises the discussion in Gauthier, Magnanimité, 9. The other points draw on
remarks voiced by a number of different commentators. Some of the recurring criticisms of Aristotle’s
account can be found clustered in Howard J. Curzer, ‘Aristotle’s Much-Maligned Megalopsychos’,
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 69 (1991), 131–51, and Roger Crisp, ‘Greatness of Soul’, in The
Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
158–78.
4 Introduction
humility and gratitude, taken as a virtue of acknowledged dependence—in fact

occupy a special place within Christian morality more narrowly. It may thus
appear unsurprising that magnanimity has often been viewed as epitomizing the
clash between pagan and Christian ethics. Yet to the extent that these kinds of
values remain deeply embedded in modern moral culture, the clash inescapably
has wider reach, and magnanimity seems calculated to find itself in tension with
this broader culture.
This tension, it has been suggested, partly reflects Aristotle’s failure to shake
off the heroic origins of the virtue he was commending and leave the Homeric
world fully behind. Taken as a virtue of deserving great honours through great
acts that require similarly great means and opportunities, this virtue remains the
province of the privileged few, and as such, one of the ‘holdovers from an age of
Homeric heroism that lay too much emphasis on the lottery of natural and social
endowments’. Insofar as this emphasis was encrusted within the structures of
Aristotle’s own society no less than his moral philosophy, magnanimity represents
a remainder of cultural contingency that Aristotle failed to think away.7 We often
view Aristotle as the great universalist voice in ethics; yet here, his mask slips. If
we see it slip, this reveals the extent to which our own culture is informed not
only by Christian values but also by liberal political values in which egalitarianism
occupies pride of place. In this regard, taken as a virtue that enshrines the ‘self-
ishness of honour-loving gentlemen and glory-seeking warriors’, magnanimity
would seem to be the ‘vestige of a bygone aristocratic and militaristic age’ and by
the same token to have no conceivable place in the modern world.8
This fusillade of hostile readings has not gone unchallenged. Over the last few
decades, the number of Aristotle’s detractors has been almost evenly matched by
that of his defenders, who have met such criticisms point-by-point with increas-
ingly nuanced responses. Central to the debate about how we should evaluate
Aristotle’s account of this virtue, inescapably, have been heated debates about how
we should interpret it—how we should understand the nature of this virtue and
its place in Aristotle’s ethics. Is the great-souled man’s fundamental commitment,
for example, to honour, or rather, as many of its defenders have argued, to virtue?
How does Aristotle’s claim that honour is the greatest good square with his iden-
tification of that good with friendship elsewhere? Did Aristotle really intend to
present greatness of soul as the peak of excellence, or was it rather as a limited
peak, one towering over the sphere of the moral but not the intellectual virtues?
His wonderlessness, it has been argued, marks him out as the ‘political man par
excellence’ as against the philosopher capable of self-transcending contemplation
7 The quoted remark is from Nancy Sherman, ‘Common Sense and Uncommon Virtue’, Midwest
Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988), 103. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre’s remarks in After Virtue, 3rd ed. (London:
Duckworth, 2007), 182, and A Short History of Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 75–7.
8 The quote is from Ryan P. Hanley, ‘Aristotle on the Greatness of Greatness of Soul’, History of
Political Thought 23 (2002), 1, though it is Hanley’s aim to question that assessment.
Sophia Vasalou 5
whose way of living Aristotle commends in the last book of the Ethics.9 In this
regard, Aristotle’s great-souled man is closer to Achilles than to Socrates, or indeed
to the conception of greatness of soul marked out (if not fully expounded) in the
work of his teacher, Plato, who had highlighted its philosophical character in the
Republic. Some have taken the deficiencies and internal incoherencies of this
figure to be so blatant that the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that it was
intended by Aristotle less as an admirable and emulable ideal than a report—
‘half-ironical’ or indeed ‘humorous’—of popular moral views of his time.10
Such interpretive analyses have sometimes been paired with a closer question-
ing of the evaluative commitments that underlie criticisms of the Aristotelian
account of this virtue. If the great-souled man’s concern with honour, or self-
conscious sense of worth, antagonizes us, perhaps the right response is not to
reject this ideal but to interrogate our moral premises, and to consider whether
there may be a degree of preoccupation with honour, and well-founded sense of
self-esteem, that is not only legitimate but salutary.11 Such self-interrogation may
require us to challenge deep-seated moral feelings that represent the legacy of a
long religious past.
The pendulum of such debates has swung back and forth several times over the
last few decades, and although the sense of ‘scandal’ has gradually given way to
more balanced assessments, the ambivalence provoked by Aristotle’s presentation
of this ideal still lingers. This explains why this has been one of the few elements
of Aristotle’s ethics that, outside the sporadic salvos of such debates, has not bene
fitted from the burgeoning interest taken in his ethical legacy by contemporary
moral philosophers. Distrustful of the dazzle of this grandstanding virtue, philo
sophers have generally consigned it to the shadows.
So why bring it out of them—dedicating an entire volume of essays to its inves-
tigation? There are different ways of answering this question. The simplest is to
point out, with Carlyle, that certain types of ideals carry their own intrinsic claims.
‘We all love great men’—we all ‘reverence’ heroes. And while we might disagree
whether to call Aristotle’s great-souled man a ‘hero’, or whether Aristotle’s own
stance towards him was one of tacit reservation as against whole-hearted embrace,
9 Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas Aquinas on
the Nicomachean Ethics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952), 130. The ‘limited peak’ view is
also argued by James T. Fetter in ‘Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man: The Limited Perfection of the Ethical
Virtues’, History of Political Thought 36 (2015), 1–28. Gauthier is the most notable dissenter from this
view, having identified the Aristotelian megalopsychos with the philosopher. See the discussion in
Magnanimité, part 1, chapter 3.
10 The words are John Burnet’s: The Ethics of Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1900), 179. Cf. Fetter’s
discussion in ‘Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man’.
11 The legitimacy of a certain kind of concern with honour is a theme, for example, in Carson
Holloway’s discussion in ‘Christianity, Magnanimity, and Statesmanship’, Review of Politics 61 (1999),
581–604; the legitimation of a certain kind of pride (or pridefulness) is a central theme in Kristján
Kristjánsson’s engagement with the virtue in Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy (London and
New York: Routledge, 2002), chapters 3 and 4.
6 Introduction
the claim of this ideal on constituting a vision of greatness will be clear. If this
larger-than-life image of virtue engages us, it is precisely in its capacity as a vision of
human greatness; and it is in the same capacity that it antagonizes us and demands
a critical response. We all love great men—yet is this a vision of greatness we can
‘honestly bow down to’?
This is a vision, moreover, in which stakes with crucial importance for the moral
life are played out, however differently these stakes might be ordered and negoti-
ated by different interpretations. Seen from one perspective, this is a virtue that
governs the correct attitude to honour and to proper self-worth. Taken also as a
virtue concerned with benefaction on a large scale, as some have emphasized, it is
a virtue with crucial significance for the political sphere and the well-being of
the community.12 Seen from another perspective, it is a virtue that governs the
correct attitude to external goods and vicissitudes of fortune more broadly, and as
such, in Gauthier’s wording, is concerned with ‘the problem which is the crucial
problem of Greek ethics in its entirety: that of the relationship between human
beings and the world’.13 From this perspective, it is a virtue enmeshed with far-
reaching questions about the role of luck in the good life, and the nature and
extent of human dependency, that carved deep tracks through much of ancient
ethical thought.
These were questions that attracted different kinds of responses among ancient
philosophers, with significant repercussions for how the broader moral landscape
was configured and how the conception of human greatness was in turn drafted
within it. Already Aristotle’s account reveals a concept in transit, whose boundaries
have undergone critical shifts. Yet in doing so—and this is to move towards a second
answer to the above question—it invites a question about how its boundaries might
shift yet again. If the meaning of this virtue, and the evaluative commitments
keyed into it, underwent important changes in the transition from the heroic world
to the democratic polis, what can we say about those later stages of intellectual
history in which this world, as indeed the Athenian polis with its constitutive
social hierarchies and divisions, was left even farther behind? What story of con-
tinuity and change might there be to tell?
This collection of essays is an attempt to answer this question by shining a
more inclusive and sustained spotlight on the longer life led by this virtue—this
vision of greatness—in the unfolding of philosophical history. In doing so, it
seeks, on the one hand, to broaden a discussion that has often focused all too nar-
rowly on Aristotle’s account, placing the latter in conversation with a longer
sequence of philosophical and indeed theological approaches. Taking this longi-
tudinal view is important if we wish to achieve a fuller and more nuanced
12 The political character of the virtue is accentuated by a number of writers cited above, including
Holloway and Jaffa.
13 Gauthier, Magnanimité, 303.
Sophia Vasalou 7
understanding of this virtue, to the extent indeed of raising questions (and I will
return to this in a moment) about how we understand this virtue’s unifying iden-
tity across these historical transitions. It is also important for confronting more
judiciously evaluative questions about its significance, and for considering what
place, if any, this virtue can still occupy among our ideals.
This type of question seems particularly relevant set against the record of
recent contestations of its significance, framed relative to its Aristotelian expres-
sion. Yet in this regard, there could be no more illuminating theme than that of
‘conflict’ or ‘contestation’ to raise as a looking glass to this virtue’s longer history.
And it is illuminating precisely because of the ways in which this history frustrates
and surprises it, revealing an ideal that, if it did not meet the welcome of heroes
throughout its entire passage, was warmly received precisely where it seemed
most liable to be rejected, and as such challenging any preconceived notions
about the conflict it must inevitably pose to key evaluative perspectives—to an
ethic shaped by Christian values, by egalitarian commitments.
It is thus commonplace, as already noted, to wonder whether an ideal still so
redolent of the world of honour-loving warriors and aristocrats could have a place
in the modern world, with its distinctively egalitarian values. Yet this is to overlook
a ferocious preoccupation with this type of ideal—an ideal of greatness and
great men—that swept through European and American intellectual culture
over an extended period spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This preoccupation can be seen at work among a broad array of intellectuals,
and assumes a variety of different forms. In many of these forms, it emerges
precisely out of a concern with the problematic consequences of the culture of
modernity, with its liberal egalitarian values, democratic structures, and com-
mercial ethos. We hear the acute observer of American political life, Alexis de
Tocqueville, for example, mourning the effect of democratic society in making
men small-minded, so that their thoughts become confined to the satisfaction
of bodily needs and the multiplication of physical comforts and they forget
about the ‘more precious goods’ of the soul which constitute ‘the glory and the
greatness of the human species’. Democratic men, in this sense, think too
meanly of themselves—humility, in them, is a vice. Countering this tendency
means cultivating anew a ‘taste for the infinite, a sentiment of greatness, and a
love of immaterial pleasures’.14 This is a pedagogical task with a crucially political
dimension, requiring visionary statesmanship, one of whose cardinal virtues
must be an independence of mind that enables one to resist another endemic
peril of democracy, the coercive power of public opinion.
14 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and
Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 509, 519. The religious dimension
of Tocqueville’s concerns distinguishes his perspective sharply from some of the other thinkers
mentioned next.
8 Introduction
We find the same lament about the erosion of greatness among many other
intellectuals of de Tocqueville’s time. It is in the same vein that John Stuart Mill
ruefully comments on the disappearance of individual greatness and of ‘energetic
characters on any large scale’.15 Perhaps the best-known philosophical develop-
ment of this concern is by Nietzsche (the subject of Chapter 9 of the present vol-
ume), whose preoccupation with the levelling effects of modern society (read
against a more distinctive cultural genealogy), with the creep of mediocrity, and
the imperative of clearing the space for human greatness is paired with a more
explicit problematization of humility as a value.
Among a number of other philosophers, this preoccupation takes shape
directly as a renewed concern with the importance of magnanimity as a virtue.
The Scottish philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith (the subject of
Chapter 7) form a case in point. For Smith, as Ryan Hanley has persuasively
argued, magnanimity is a virtue that modern conditions not only fail to render
otiose but on the contrary mandate all the more urgently—the very antidote for
its unique ills. These ills include the type of small-mindedness de Tocqueville
would later bemoan, but also that evil which so memorably exercised Rousseau:
the tendency to live in other men’s opinions, more concerned with how we appear
than how we really are. Magnanimity is the virtue that supplies the corrective to
these evils, orienting us to the noble and enabling us to live in our own conscious-
ness of our merit. Insofar as it displaces our concern from the self to the common
good, magnanimity has a special role to play in the political sphere.16
We find echoes of this approach in numerous later thinkers. They are distinctly
present, for example, in the ideal of self-reliance articulated by the great American
intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson (the subject of Chapter 10), which embodies the
stout imperative of looking inward rather than outward to convention and opinion.
‘Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist’.17 In these new revivals, sig-
nificantly, magnanimity is conceived as a virtue oriented to the honourable rather
than to actual honour—which it rather enables one to resist—and to a proper
sense of self-worth that can remain independent of the latter.
Thus, a more nuanced consideration of some of the episodes of this concept’s
history suggests that there may be a more complex story to tell about its apparent
conflict with the modern world and its distinctive ethos. Modernity may have left
the Homeric battlefield and the ancient polis far behind. But if we think the modern
world has no room left for heroes and great men—and surely we can now add: for
great women—and their virtues, we may need to think again.
15 ‘On Liberty’, in On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 77–8.
16 See the discussion in Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), chapter 5.
17 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 134.
Sophia Vasalou 9
If this conflict invites re-reading, the other source of conflict mentioned

above—tied more particularly not to modernity with its democratic egalitarian
ethos, but to an ethical culture influenced by Christian values—might seem more
stubborn and harder to think away. It is noteworthy that many of the intellectuals
just named who preoccupied themselves with the concept of human greatness
and who sought to reclaim the virtue of magnanimity as an important ideal saw
their concerns as expressly pitted against this ethical culture. Nietzsche is the
clearest example, with his vitriolic critique of central Christian values including
humility and compassion for their debilitating effects, glorifying human weak-
ness rather than greatness and strength. Yet so is Hume, well known for his dis-
missive view of the ‘monkish virtue of humility’. The virtue of greatness of mind,
by contrast, was shaped by a ‘steady and well-establish’d pride and self-esteem’. In
foregrounding the latter, Hume thus saw himself as advocating an ideal with a
distinct anti-religious edge, which ‘many religious declaimers’ decry as ‘purely
pagan and natural’.18
Hume’s point may seem intuitive in rehearsing a familiar understanding of the
conflict between magnanimity and Christian values. The opposition between the
Christian ideal of humility and the sense of pride embedded within Aristotelian
magnanimity offers one of the most obvious ways of parsing this conflict. Yet there
is an interesting question as to how comfortably this picture squares with the actual
history of Christian thinkers’ interaction with this particular virtue. Even Augustine,
that formidable architect of enduring features of the ethical outlook of Latin
Christianity and its relationship to the pagan world, had not entirely refused his
admiration to the dazzling examples of Roman heroism in the City of God, and had
not singled out magnanimity for special rebuke.19 Looking to the later stages of
Christian intellectual history, in fact, we see the virtue living and breathing in the
works of major theologians in the Middle Ages, from Abelard, to Albert the Great,
Thomas Aquinas, and beyond (as explored in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book).
Yet here, to be sure, a closer plotting of this virtue’s historical reception—
surprisingly welcomed where rejection might have been expected—locks paths with
the task of a finer-grained reading of its constitution, and historical evolution, as a
concept. Because even the briefest inquiry reveals that the concept that lives and
breathes in Aristotle is not quite the same as the one that animates these theological
articulations. Aquinas’ reworking, for example, has been characterized in a number
of ways, all of which serve to highlight its distance from the Aristotelian account.
If Aristotle’s virtue is concerned with the management of honour, Aquinas’ has by
contrast been described as a virtue of ‘hope management’, most immediately
18 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1978), 3.3.2, 599–600.
19 Some of his most concentrated references to the virtue appear in Concerning the City of God
Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 2003), Book I, §22, and do not betray a
critical attitude to the virtue as such.
10 Introduction
concerned with the passion of hope.20 If Aristotle’s virtue is that of consummate

self-aware greatness, Aquinas’, on one reading, is a virtue in which greatness
figures in the content of aspiration. One might even go so far as to call it a virtue
of self-realization.21
Similar shifts or divergences can be plotted across several other stages of the
virtue’s history, beginning from the ancient world itself. Some of the medieval
reworkings can in fact be seen as renegotiating precisely those elements often
taken to constitute the Aristotelian virtue’s troublesome ethical commitments. Yet
these moves, as John Marenbon shows in his contribution to this volume, in turn
partly reflect the influence of the rather different conception of magnanimity
stemming from the Stoic tradition (explored in Chapter 2 of this book) and medi-
ated to medieval thinkers notably through the works of Cicero. In this conception,
Aristotle’s emphasis on the virtue’s role in managing attitudes to honour is replaced
by a stronger emphasis on attitudes to external goods or circumstances more
broadly, and magnanimity is configured more specifically as the ability to rise
above these and treat them with indifference or disdain. The interweaving of
Stoic and Aristotelian elements continues down to post-medieval times, and new
emphases emerge that introduce delicate yet not insignificant shifts into the virtue’s
content. Thus, Descartes’ seemingly Aristotelian construal of magnanimity or
generosité as the ‘passion of legitimate self-esteem’ (as Michael Moriarty puts it in
his chapter) is tied, in a not-quite-Aristotelian way, to the subject’s awareness of
her freedom of will and resolution to use this freedom well, and to a capacity to
regulate desires directed to what lies outside one’s control. Magnanimity, thus, is
fundamentally a kind of wonder at one’s own power.
Where the concept of magnanimity opens out to the broader concept of human
greatness, as with Nietzsche, or to allied states that share some of the historical
content of this virtue but not its conceptualization as a virtue—such as Kant’s sub-
lime (the subject of Chapter 8 of this volume), which is shaped by a perception of
human greatness not unlike Descartes’ and his Stoic predecessors’—the divergences
may loom larger still. Nietzsche’s understanding of human greatness, for example,
not only stocks that concept with very different evaluative features compared with
most ancient thinkers, but is also remarkable for its willingness to countenance
the possibility that the concept of greatness and that of goodness may come
entirely apart. Widening the conversation to include approaches taken outside
the European world, such as the virtue of greatness of spirit articulated in the
20 David Horner, ‘What It Takes to Be Great: Aristotle and Aquinas on Magnanimity’, Faith and
Philosophy 15 (1998), 431.
21 This suggestion can be read out of both Horner’s and Gauthier’s approach to the virtue. Gauthier
characterizes it as a virtue that presides over the efflorescence of the human personality in all its
aspects—moral, intellectual, physical—which as such ‘defines . . . a personalist style of life’
(Magnanimité, 368–69). Horner similarly underlines its involvement in the recognition, and thus con-
fident fulfilment, of one’s personal capacities and distinctive calling. See especially ‘What It Takes to
Be Great’, 431–3.
Sophia Vasalou 11
Arabic tradition (the subject of Chapter 5) which was structured by an emphasis

on great aspiration and aspiration to virtue, may seem to drive the wedge a notch
deeper insofar as it involves severing the textual link with the ancient tradition
that holds all of the other accounts together.
Looking at these and other divergences—ably plotted by Robert Roberts in his
contribution—it may be tempting to conclude that the concept that forms the
subject of this book possesses such internal plasticity and such permeable seams
that to talk about magnanimity is to talk about everything and nothing, a perfect
chameleon. In what sense, it may be asked, are we talking about the same con-
cept? In what sense is the story of this book a story about a single subject? This, of
course, is a question as old as Aristotle. Has the passage of time made it any easier
to answer?
Now some of the differences can be exaggerated, and just how deep they appear
will depend on important interpretive decisions. The interpretation of Aristotle’s
account advanced by Terence Irwin in his contribution, for example—which
draws the Eudemian and the Nicomachean Ethics more closely together to accen-
tuate the status of magnanimity as a virtue involving the correct appreciation and
relative ordering of goods—may roll up part of the distance between Aristotle’s
approach and several others, including Descartes’ and the one found in the Arabic
tradition. Other differences run deeper, reflecting the fact that this virtue, like any
other ethical concept, takes its meaning from the broader ethical and indeed
metaphysical landscape in which it is anchored. As Roberts suggests here and
elsewhere, our view both about which character traits constitute virtues, and
about how particular virtues are to be understood, will inevitably be responsive to
larger views about human nature and the nature of the world we live in.22
Yet even so, certain patterns can be discerned—certain clusters of physiognomic
features which permit us, if not to draw hard-and-fast boundaries around this
virtue, at the very least to trace out a set of family resemblances that bring the
different accounts documented in this book together. One such feature is the con-
cern with attitudes to fortune or external goods. Another feature is the concern
with attitudes to honour, and the related connection to self-worth and elevated
self-esteem. There is then room for competing approaches as regards the precise
calibration of attitudes to honour (for example, concerning the degree of attachment,
whether this should be Aristotelian moderation or Socratic/Stoic indifference)
and to external goods more broadly. There is also room for competing views
about the precise features of the self that form the basis of proper esteem and
self-esteem, for example one’s acquired excellence of character as a particular
individual (Aristotle) as against one’s moral capacities as a member of the human
species (Descartes, Kant, several of the philosophers and theologians in the
22 See his discussion in ‘How Virtue Contributes to Flourishing’, in Current Controversies in Virtue
Theory, ed. Mark Alfano (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 36–49.
12 Introduction
Arabic tradition). There are also different ways of parsing the notion of worth, for
example whether it is backward-looking (worthiness to receive some good, as on
an obvious reading of Aristotle) or forward-looking (worthiness to perform some
action or actively achieve some good, as in Aquinas or the approaches attested
in the Arabic tradition). Linked to the latter parsing is another recurring feature,
the constitutive concern with the pursuit of virtue and of great and virtuous
actions, which can in turn figure as the object of (thus forging a further link with)
elevated hope and aspiration. There is then room for different specifications of the
virtuous pursuit at stake, including whether the emphasis is on moral virtue
(notably virtue involving large-scale benefaction, as among numerous thinkers)
or on intellectual virtue and thus on the philosophical life more broadly (as among
some of the American Transcendentalists). The global connection with virtue and
the pursuit of central aspects of the good life as a whole lends the concept a
higher-order aspect.
This inventory of conceptual filaments, to repeat, is not so much a way of
marking out the determinate boundaries of the concept as of plotting those
physiognomic resemblances that make it natural to regard many of the accounts
surveyed in this book as instances of a single concept or members of the same
family. At the same time, even this more generous understanding of what is
involved in identifying our theme concept might seem to come under strain faced
with some of the approaches showcased in this volume. This holds especially true
of those approaches whose distinction lies in the fact that they cannot be straight-
forwardly seen as developing a focal concept parsed, categorially, as a virtue. This
applies, most obviously, to the exploration of Nietzsche’s approach to human
greatness (Chapter 9), and of Kant’s conception of the aesthetic experience of the
sublime (Chapter 8).
Here, certainly, the boundaries of the topic breathe with greater freedom. Yet
to let them breathe is to give acknowledgement to the complex web of relations in
which this concept is embedded, and the broader evaluative landscape into which
it sends its nerves. It is to acknowledge, for example, that this is a virtue that has
often represented not just one virtue among others but a more overarching and
superordinate vision of what it is to be great. Nietzsche in particular, as already
noted, stands at a special juncture in the revived concern with this vision and the
renegotiation of key values, such as humility and pride, that make up the field of
relevance of magnanimity as a virtue. To let these boundaries breathe is also to
acknowledge the manifold and evolving contexts in which the concerns of this
virtue can be manifested—indeed, the plural and evolving contexts in which the
moral life more broadly extends its nerves. Kant’s moralized view of the sublime
is the best example of that, making the aesthetic encounter with nature (and to a
lesser extent art) the scene of a numinous confrontation with our own moral
nature and the higher dignity with which it invests us. The terrible wonder pro-
voked by nature can thus become a wonder at our own greatness, understood in
Sophia Vasalou 13
ways informed by a long tradition of ethical reflection in which the specific virtue
of magnanimity also had a solid place.23 This, too, belongs to the history of
engagement with this virtue and the moral world in which it lived and breathed.
To point to these breathing boundaries and to the larger universe in which this
concept sends its pulse is also, by the same token, to call attention to the fact that
this book itself is in an important sense incomplete, because inevitably selective.
A showcasing of crests rather than a comprehensive topography, its task will
nevertheless be complete if it succeeds in opening new windows into the history
of a virtue that still both enchants and divides, and if it helps us think more con
structively through our conflicted responses.
Having conjured the broad stage in which the project of this book unfolds, let me
offer a brief preview of its contents. The chief aim of this book, as I have said, is to
offer a more sustained insight into the historical development of the virtue of
magnanimity or greatness of soul set against the larger aim of refocusing discus-
sion about its contemporary significance. This aim is reflected in the structure of
the book. Its backbone consists of ten chapters which explore the approaches
taken to the virtue among a number of key thinkers, schools, and contexts. Two
chapters focusing on the ancient context (Aristotle and the Stoics respectively)
are followed by two chapters exploring the virtue’s articulation in the world of
medieval Latin Christianity, and by another chapter that addresses the approaches
taken in the Islamic world. The next chapters focus, in turn, on Descartes and his
predecessors, outstanding thinkers of the Scottish enlightenment (Hume, Smith, and
John Witherspoon), Kant, and Nietzsche. A final chapter addresses the American
context with a focus on Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau.
With this historical backbone in place, the concluding two chapters take a more
reflective view, with Robert Roberts critically surveying the concept against its
manifold historical articulations, and Kristján Kristjánsson closing the circle by
offering a broad-brush appraisal of the Aristotelian account of the virtue and
what, despite everything, it may still have to teach us.
Taking each chapter in sequence, Terence Irwin (Chapter 1) offers a rereading
of Aristotle’s account of magnanimity which takes its point of departure from a
commonly overlooked element: the magnanimous person’s disposition to forget
past evils. Far from a faithful reproduction of conventional views, this move
appears surprising set against earlier conceptions of the virtue, as notably exem-
plified by the Homeric heroes, in whom magnanimity was tied to an intolerance of
dishonour requiring a lively memory of wrongs suffered. Similarly, while the notion
of ‘not recalling evils’—of taking a generous attitude towards past offences—had a
23 I have unpacked this idea a little more fully in Wonder: A Grammar (Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press, 2015), chapter 4, esp. 160–2, and Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint:
Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 5,
esp. 189–90.
14 Introduction
prominent place in Greek political life, it was not specifically connected to

magnanimity. A closer scrutiny of the structure of Aristotle’s argument enables us
to unpack this non-intuitive move and place it in its proper context. It becomes
intelligible once situated against an understanding of magnanimity that emerges
most distinctly in the Eudemian Ethics, such that central to the virtue is a capacity
to know which goods are great and which goods small. From this perspective, the
goods gained by vice are never great enough to be worth pursuing; by the same
token, external goods—or their restoration after injury—may need to be forgone
for the sake of what is fine, including the good of the community. On this reading,
the gap between the modern usage of the term ‘magnanimity’ and Aristotle’s may
be slimmer than is sometimes supposed. And while Irwin’s aim is not to defend
or vindicate the virtue against its critics, his rereading of Aristotle’s argument
quietly dismantles many of their charges along the way.
In Chapter 2, Christopher Gill takes up the Stoic approach to magnanimity,
an approach that interestingly appears to have developed independently from
Aristotle’s. In mainstream Stoic sources, magnanimity is presented as a virtue sub-
ordinate to the cardinal virtue of courage which involves an ability to rise above
external circumstances, particularly misfortune. Having set this understanding
against the Stoic conception of virtue, Gill unfolds a broader canvas by situating
this virtue against the Stoic philosophers’ theory of value (in which virtue is the
only good), their psychology (shaped by an ideal of freedom from the passions),
and their worldview (with the world viewed as a providentially ordered natural
whole of which human beings form part). The Stoic approach receives a fresh
articulation in Cicero’s On Duties—historically significant given the influence it
exercised on medieval and early modern Europe—where it is presented as one
of four central or cardinal virtues. In this reworking, the virtue comprises two
aspects: an ability to rise above fortune and misfortune, but also a readiness to
undertake great and socially beneficial action. Cicero’s discussion raises challen
ging questions about the Stoic attitude to honour; having addressed these questions,
the chapter concludes by adumbrating some of the most important similarities
and differences between the Aristotelian and Stoic approaches.
Jennifer Herdt (Chapter 3) presents a reading of Aquinas’ engagement with
magnanimity that is set against the backdrop of longstanding questions about the
apparent tension between the Aristotelian virtue and Christian ethics. Aquinas’
negotiation of this virtue has to be seen, on the one hand, in the context of the
broader Christian understanding of the moral life, in which God represents the
final end, Christ the Way to that end, and the virtues the qualities that equip
human persons for their part in creation’s reditus to God. But it also has to be seen
in the narrower context of Aquinas’ preoccupation with Jesus Christ as the per-
fect moral exemplar of all virtues, magnanimity included. In approaching the
virtue, Aquinas draws on different strands of both the ancient and the earlier
medieval tradition and delicately interweaves the teachings of Aristotle, Cicero,
Sophia Vasalou 15
and his theological predecessors to reconfigure magnanimity as a virtue of hope

that is ultimately concerned with public benefaction and incorporates a perfect
reliance on (and redirection of honour to) God.
With the attention still trained on the medieval context, John Marenbon
(Chapter 4) widens the focus to provide a more longitudinal perspective on the
reception of the virtue in the Latin Christian world. Any expectations that the
virtue might prove unpalatable to Christian thinkers are unseated by the historical
discovery that this virtue found a ready place in Christian ethics—a result, in
part, of vagaries of textual transmission, which saw Christian thinkers first con-
front the virtue in its Stoic rather than its Aristotelian form. Even so, the story of
the virtue’s reception has much to tell us about the relations between Christianity
and paganism. This is borne out by the four case studies that structure the chapter,
beginning with Abelard’s incorporation of magnanimity into a scheme of virtues
drawn up from a religiously neutral perspective. This scheme was influential on
later theologians seeking to integrate the virtue into Church teaching, notably
Aquinas, whose theological appropriation of the virtue—transforming it from a
self-regarding to an other-regarding virtue in the process and reconciling it with
humility—in turn provided a central reference point for Arts Masters in the
thirteenth century. The fourteenth century brings a change of wind, as evidenced
by two prominent commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics, by the Franciscan
theologian Giraut Ott and the Arts Master John Buridan. Unlike Aquinas, whose
engagement with the virtue is shadowed by the dominant Stoic conception of his
time, these two thinkers confront Aristotle’s account more directly and accept
more unreservedly the virtue’s orientation to honour, which brings them up
against the task of articulating it in terms compatible with their Christian beliefs.
If the tension between magnanimity and Christian values remains muted among
these writers, it is in Dante that we see it come closer to open acknowledgement,
as a careful reading of his Commedia reveals.
Chapter 5 turns away from the Christian context to consider a different cul-
tural and religious setting that has often been excluded from the conversation, the
Arabic tradition. The effort to piece together the life this virtue led within the
Islamic world opens up interesting questions about how we identify the relevant
concept and demarcate its boundaries. One of the surprises of the story that
emerges is that there were no fewer than two Arabic concepts that can be identified
as heirs to or counterparts of the ancient virtue of megalopsychia, concepts whose
genealogies and trajectories converged but also diverged in crucial respects. The
focus of one of these concepts (kibar al-nafs or greatness of soul) was on the right
attitude to the self and its merits, and bore a strong affinity to Aristotle’s config-
uration of the virtue. As articulated, this virtue would seem to stand in profound
tension with certain elements of Islamic morality. By contrast, the focus of the
second concept of virtue (ʿiẓam al-himma or greatness of spirit) was on right desire
or aspiration, and some of its main exponents—including the Christian philosopher
16 Introduction
Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī and the Muslim theologian al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī—parsed it more
specifically as a foundational virtue of aspiration to virtue. Unlike the first concept,
which failed to establish itself in Arabic-Islamic ethical culture, the second spread
like wildfire through a number of genres of ethical writing, including literature
(adab) and mirrors for princes. This pervasive cultural presence reflects the deep
roots this virtue strikes, even more directly than in the Greek tradition, in the
values of pre-Islamic Arab society and its heroic ethic, an ethic which it preserves
but also transforms.
In Chapter 6, Michael Moriarty returns us to the European context to thematize
the concept of generosité in Descartes’ philosophy. Descartes’ approach can be
illuminated by locating it against the negotiations of the virtue among some of his
predecessors, notably the Jesuit Tarquinio Galluzzi (Tarquinius Gallutius) and
Scipion Dupleix. It can also be illuminated by relating it to the popular usage of
his focal term—where it is associated with nobility in the twofold sense of social
rank and moral character—and to the literary works of Descartes’ time in which
the concept comes alive. Particularly instructive here are the works of the play-
wright Pierre Corneille but also Jean-Pierre Camus, where the virtue is linked to a
transcendence of limit and self-sacrifice with heroic connotations. In Descartes,
the interdigitation of Aristotelian and Stoic elements visible in earlier phases of the
virtue’s trajectory achieves a new expression. Aristotle’s emphasis on self-evaluation
is echoed by Descartes’ explication of generosité as a passion of legitimate self-
esteem, though one grounded, in a more universalist manner reminiscent of the
Stoics, to an awareness of one’s freedom and one’s resolution to use this freedom
well. It is also the Stoic conception that is reflected more overtly in Descartes’
association of generosité with the regulation of desires directed to what lies outside
our control. His additional association of generosité with universal benevolence,
and virtuous humility, betokens an intellectual heritage whose constitutive layers
include both philosophical and Christian elements.
With Ryan Hanley’s Chapter 7, we move two centuries forward in time to map
the directions taken in the eighteenth century by three key Enlightenment theor
ists, David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Witherspoon. United in their interest
in reclaiming magnanimity as a virtue with enduring relevance for modern times,
these thinkers differed in how they approached two central questions: the stand-
ard by which magnanimity is measured, and the need to ensure that goodness
and greatness coincide. Hume’s relative understanding of greatness of mind—
moral worth is measured against the spectator’s level of excellence and therefore
in a real sense lies in the eye of the beholder—created problems which Smith
sought to redress by introducing the concept of ‘absolute perfection’ as the touch-
stone for judgements about magnanimity and indeed moral judgements more
broadly. With the virtue linked, as in Hume, to a conscious sense of self-worth as
well as to self-control or self-command, this move frees the former element from
its dependence on spectators’ judgements while also making room for humility.
Sophia Vasalou 17
Against this background, and against the apparent tension between magnanimity
and Christian values underscored by thinkers like Hume, John Witherspoon
sets out to recover the virtue on specifically Christian terms. Central to his
account is a move that takes Smith’s solution one step further by identifying the
standard of absolute perfection with God, with merit conceived as conformity
with God’s will and the desire for worldly honour displaced by a desire for
worthiness of God’s esteem.
In Chapter 8, Emily Brady focuses on Kant’s place in this historical development.
While Kant has little to say about magnanimity as a specific virtue, there are
interesting connections to be drawn between this evaluative concept and Kant’s
account of an aesthetic experience with critical importance for his thinking, the
experience of sublime. Like many theorists before him, Kant makes an element of
self-appreciation central to his analysis of the sublime. In the sublime, the great-
ness of some external natural object enables the mind or soul to become aware of
its own greatness, with the latter in turn anchored in one’s moral capacities as a
human subject, specifically one’s freedom or autonomy. While this exaltation of
the human seems to lend itself to a form of human exceptionalism, it is counter-
balanced by an element of humility. Having located the sublime against these dif-
ferent dimensions—exaltation and humiliation—Brady concludes by locating it
against a third comparative dimension which highlights the role of the body in
sublime experience.
In Chapter 9, Andrew Huddleston takes our perspective forward by consider-
ing another major thinker, Nietzsche, whose relationship to the conversation, like
Kant’s, is given less by the concept of magnanimity (Großmuth) than by the more
global and richly textured concept of greatness in which Nietzsche took an
all-consuming interest. Mining Nietzsche’s remarks about greatness and great
individuals across his works, we can fill out the content of this ideal and gain a
more concrete picture of the specific characteristics it may involve. These include,
among other qualities, independence and a capacity for solitude, self-discipline,
the single-minded pursuit of goals, magnanimity in the narrower sense, and self-
reverence. There are compelling comparisons to be made between this specifica-
tion of greatness and the one embedded in Aristotle’s account of magnanimity.
Recent scholars have been too quick to dismiss the comparison as the result of a
misguided emphasis on Nietzsche’s irrationalism. A crucial difference between the
two perspectives lies in Nietzsche’s readiness to decouple greatness from goodness.
Yet with a more balanced understanding of the issues, we may be able to recognize
Nietzsche’s ideal of greatness as a bid to recover aspects of the classical tradition
that he saw the Judeo-Christian worldview as in danger of obscuring.
With Chapter 10 we move from the European to the American context to confront
the negotiation of magnanimity among some of the linchpin figures of American
Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David
Thoreau. Working towards what they designate a ‘composite portrait’ of these
18 Introduction
three thinkers, Andrew Corsa and Eric Schliesser identify a number of distinct
characteristics that shape their conception of the virtue, forging different kinds of
relationship with its prior history. One, thematized especially sharply by Emerson,
is the virtue’s intellectual character, its connection with the achievement of philo-
sophical and religious understanding. This achievement rests on a network of
dependencies, on God (or the over-soul in Emerson’s later parlance) but also on
other human beings. Another characteristic, directly related to this, is the con-
nection with friendship, as brought out especially strongly in the interaction
between Emerson and Fuller. Yet a third, which assumes its clearest form in
Thoreau, is the emphasis on a confrontation with the natural world in its wildness.
Although far from an ideal of self-sufficiency, magnanimity involves an ability to
resist public opinion and social convention (as highlighted by Emerson) and to
shake off the bondage of worldly possessions through simple living or voluntary
poverty (as highlighted by Thoreau). Recast in the terms of these thinkers, mag-
nanimity is a virtue that is open to all, yet while reflecting the egalitarian commit-
ments of the modern age, it can serve as a remedy for many of its evils, particularly
the regnant concern with wealth and public recognition.
Chapter 11 brings us back to our starting point to raise the prospect of new
beginnings, opening the question of how we might mine the ethical resources of
this history via a broad-brush meditation on Aristotle’s account of the virtue.
Approaching Aristotle with an explicitly revisionary concern—a concern with
how Aristotelian ideas can be reconstructed so as to help us lead better lives
today—Kristján Kristjánsson suggests that his account of magnanimity, even if
not salvageable as a general ideal, incorporates a number of significant insights
that merit a serious hearing. These insights span a variety of domains, including
moral psychology, moral education, and moral philosophy more broadly. In
moral psychology, the concept of moral selfhood embedded in Aristotelian mag-
nanimity offers a model of ‘soft self-realism’ which helps mediate between hard
self-realists and anti-self-realists in current debates about the self. In moral edu-
cation, it foregrounds, among other things, an important point concerning the
necessary individualization of Aristotelian character education that is often side-
lined in contemporary discussions. This is linked to the fact that magnanimity, in
Kristjánsson’s view, is a virtue decidedly not available to all, resting on a bed of
unique circumstances and preconditions, both socio-economic and psy cho
logical. For the same reasons, and to the extent that these circumstances cast the
magnanimous in a special social role that exacts from them extraordinary acts of
virtue and public benefaction—acts that carry significant costs for their personal
happiness and flourishing—this account contains instructive lessons about role
morality and the practice of virtue more broadly.
In the concluding chapter, Robert Roberts takes a step back to provide a more
global perspective on magnanimity or greatness of soul across its diverse historical
expressions. Moving seamlessly between intellectual articulations and paradigmatic
Sophia Vasalou 19
exemplars of the virtue, he takes into his sweep the variety of philosophical and
theological approaches showcased in previous chapters, drawing out some of
the contrasts and relations between them and critically highlighting some of the
questions they raise and tensions they harbour, while also broadening the scope
to weave in a number of additional perspectives. A survey of the different historical
conceptions and living embodiments of magnanimity reveals important patterns
and continuities. Yet it also reveals discontinuities which have a lot to say about
the fundamental plasticity of the virtue and of the larger notion of human great-
ness to which it is tied. These competing visions of human greatness reflect different
views about human nature, and different evaluative outlooks that yield shifting
standards for measuring what makes a soul great. Roberts’ discussion is bookended
by two exemplars of very different mettle: the Odysseus of the Homeric epics,
with his adventurousness, preoccupation with honour and recognition, and bel-
ligerence, and Abraham Lincoln, with his generosity of spirit, sense of duty, com-
passion, and fine balancing of both the intellectual and the moral virtues. In
Lincoln’s character, the competing strands of the conceptions of greatness sur-
veyed are renegotiated and integrated in illuminating ways.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher Rowe with commentary by

Sarah Broadie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Augustine. Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by Henry
Bettenson. London: Penguin, 2003.
Burnet, John. The Ethics of Aristotle. London: Methuen, 1900.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Edited by
David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Cooper, Neil. ‘Aristotle’s Crowning Virtue’. Apeiron 22 (1989), 191–205.
Crisp, Roger. ‘Greatness of Soul’. In Richard Kraut, ed., The Blackwell Guide to
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 158–78. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Curzer, Howard J. ‘Aristotle’s Much-Maligned Megalopsychos’. Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 69 (1991), 131–51.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by
Brooks Atkinson. New York: Modern Library, 2000.
Fetter, James T. ‘Aristotle’s Great-Souled Man: The Limited Perfection of the Ethical
Virtues’. History of Political Thought 36 (2015), 1–28.
Gauthier, René Antoine. Magnanimité: l’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie
païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne. Paris: J. Vrin, 1951.
Hanley, Ryan Patrick. ‘Aristotle on the Greatness of Greatness of Soul’. History of
Political Thought 23 (2002), 1–20.
20 Introduction
Hanley, Ryan Patrick. Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009.
Holloway, Carson. ‘Christianity, Magnanimity, and Statesmanship’. Review of Politics
61 (1999), 581–604.
Horner, David. ‘What It Takes to Be Great: Aristotle and Aquinas on Magnanimity’.
Faith and Philosophy 15 (1998), 415–44.
Hume, David. Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev.
P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Jaffa, Harry V. Thomism and Aristotelianism: A Study of the Commentary by Thomas
Aquinas on the Nicomachean Ethics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952.
Kristjánsson, Kristján. Justifying Emotions: Pride and Jealousy. London and New York:
Routledge, 2002.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. A Short History of Ethics. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 3rd ed. London: Duckworth, 2007.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Plato. Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Translated by Harold N. Fowler.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
Roberts, Robert C. ‘How Virtue Contributes to Flourishing’. In Mark Alfano, ed., Current
Controversies in Virtue Theory, 36–49. New York and London: Routledge, 2015.
Sherman, Nancy. ‘Common Sense and Uncommon Virtue’. Midwest Studies in
Philosophy 13 (1988), 97–114.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated and edited by Harvey
C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Vasalou, Sophia. Wonder: A Grammar. Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2015.
Vasalou, Sophia. Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice
of the Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
1
Magnanimity as Generosity
Terence Irwin
1. English and Greek
In modern English ‘magnanimity’ normally refers to generosity, especially in

forgiving offences.1 Perhaps the most widely read instance of this use in the
mid-twentieth century appears in Winston Churchill’s Second World War, in the
‘Moral of the Work’:
In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace:

Goodwill.
When Churchill speaks of magnanimity in victory, he rejects the attitude that

seeks to settle old scores, to take revenge, and to humiliate one’s opponent. I will
refer to the attitude that Churchill advocates as ‘Churchillian magnanimity’.
To see what Churchill means by ‘magnanimity in victory’, we need only refer
to his remarks on the vindictive attitudes that were expressed, in Britain and else-
where, after the First World War.
The economic clauses of the Treaty were malignant and silly to an extent that
made them obviously futile. Germany was condemned to pay reparations on a
fabulous scale. These dictates gave expression to the anger of the victors, and to the
belief of their peoples that any defeated nation or community can ever pay tribute
on a scale which would meet the cost of modem war. The multitudes remained
plunged in ignorance of the simplest economic facts, and their leaders, seeking
their votes, did not dare to undeceive them. The triumphant Allies continued to
assert that they would squeeze Germany ‘until the pips squeaked’. All this had a
potent bearing on the prosperity of the world and the mood of the German race.
In fact, however, these clauses were never enforced. On the contrary, whereas
about one thousand million pounds of German assets were appropriated by
the victorious Powers, more than one thousand five hundred millions were lent a
few years later to Germany, principally by the United States and Great Britain, thus
1 I am grateful to participants at the conference in Birmingham on magnanimity for their questions,

and to a referee for helpful suggestions about revision.
Terence Irwin, Magnanimity as Generosity In: The Measure of Greatness: Philosophers on Magnanimity. Edited by:
Sophia Vasalou, Oxford University Press (2019). © the several contributors.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840688.003.0001
22 Magnanimity as Generosity
enabling the ruin of the war to be rapidly repaired in Germany. As this apparently
magnanimous process was still accompanied by the machine-made howlings of
the unhappy and embittered populations in the victorious countries, and the
assurances of their statesmen that Germany should be made to pay ‘to the utter-
most farthing’, no gratitude or good will was to be expected or reaped.2
The magnanimous attitude is contrasted with the desire to squeeze the defeated
enemy until the pips squeaked. Even actions that might have been evidence of
magnanimity did not express it, and were not taken to express it, because they
were accompanied by the vindictive attitude that turned out to be self-defeating.
To describe the opposite of the outlook that Churchill advocates, we would
probably not use ‘pusillanimity’. We normally use this term to refer to cowardice.
We would display pusillanimity not exactly in running away from an imminent
danger, but by displaying lack of resolution in the face of less immediate threats
or difficulties. It is probably the opposite of the ‘resolution’ and ‘defiance’ that
Churchill takes to be the appropriate attitudes to war and to defeat. The use of
‘magnanimity’ to describe the opposite of pusillanimity is common in earlier
English, but the OED says it is now obsolete.
There is no reason to expect that English usage should correspond exactly to
the Latin and Greek terms from which it has developed. Many people might point
to the Churchillian example to explain why ‘magnanimity’ is a bad translation of
‘megalopsychia’. Similarly, according to some people, ‘virtue’ is a bad translation
of ‘aretê’. In both cases (allegedly) the modern English term that appears to be
historically closest to the Greek term carries so many misleading associations that
it ought to be avoided. We are in danger (allegedly) of anachronism if we interpret
the Aristotelian terms by importing the sense of the modern terms that might
immediately occur to us.
I do not want to discuss this general question about the rendering of
Aristotelian moral (another anachronism?) vocabulary. But I raise this question
in order to point out one non-trivial respect in which Aristotelian megalopsychia
agrees with Churchillian magnanimity. The modern uses of ‘magnanimous’ and
‘pusillanimous’ identify central features of the Aristotelian virtue. These features
are central because they allow us to see what is essential to its being the virtue it
is. If we attend to these features, we will avoid being misled by features, or sup-
posed features, of megalopsychia that have exposed it to criticism.
It is certainly not a sensible constraint on an interpretation of an Aristotelian
virtue that it should make Aristotle agree with our moral outlook. For many
readers, megalopsychia is one of the clearest examples of the difference between
Aristotle and us. In this case, however, I believe that the difference can easily be
exaggerated. We can prevent exaggeration if we attend to the central features of
2 Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1948), vol. 1, 8–9.
Terence Irwin 23
the virtue.3 From now on, I will often use ‘magnanimity’ to render the Greek
term, without assuming that it is a good translation.
To see whether Aristotle recognizes Churchillian magnanimity, we may turn to
a brief remark towards the end of his list of characteristics that are commonly
attributed to the magnanimous person. He tells us that the magnanimous person
does not recall evils.
Nor is he prone to marvel—for nothing is great to him—nor prone to recall

evils—for it does not belong to a magnanimous person to dwell on memories,
especially not of evils, but rather to overlook them. (1125a2–5)
Aristotle offers an explanation of the behaviour that he attributes to the magnani-

mous person by referring to a more general characteristic. In this case he suggests
that it is uncharacteristic of a magnanimous person to dwell on his memories,
especially of bad things. This is a small part of Aristotle’s long discussion of mega-
lopsychia, and we might suppose it is also a minor and unimportant observation.
If it needs explanation, we might suppose that he is referring to a familiar feature
of the megalopsychos that everyone will recognize.
These suppositions, however, are false. I will argue against them by arguing for
two other claims: (1) Aristotle’s audience do not take it for granted that the mag-
nanimous person does not remember evils. Such a claim about the magnanimous
person is surprising. (2) Aristotle relies on the central theoretical elements of his
account of magnanimity. Not remembering evils is a consequence of Aristotle’s
argument about the essential features of the virtue. To defend these claims, I need
to make a few historical remarks about magnanimity and about recalling evils. We
should then be able to see where Aristotle’s account would surprise his audience.
2. Megalopsychia: Honour and Revenge
There are no certain examples of ‘megalopsychia’ and cognates in fifth-century

Greek.4 Plato does not use it.5 The earliest clear examples are in the Attic Orators.
3 Aristotelian magnanimity has been quite widely discussed by recent critics. A useful essay is
Roger Crisp, ‘Aristotle on Greatness of Soul’, in Richard Kraut, ed., Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 158–78.
4 Perhaps the ostensibly earliest occurrence of the term is in Democritus B 46: ‘It is magnanimity to
bear untowardness (plêmmeleian) calmly.’ However, (1) Democritus may have lived into the mid-
fourth century; (2) since this is one of the ethical fragments attributed to ‘Democrates’ by Stobaeus, it
may not belong to the fifth or the fourth century.
5 There are two examples in the pseudo-Platonic Second Alcibiades. (See Hutchinson’s comment in
John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997].) At 140c9, 150c7–9, it is
one of the euphemistic terms for foolishness, aphrosunê. This ironic use of ‘megalopsychia’ may be
explained by the connexion, marked in [Aristotle], Virtues and Vices, between being magnanimous
and being straightforward. See below n. 25.
But, even if the word is new, the attitude it describes is as old as the Homeric
poems. It is a recognizable element in the outlook of Achilles, Ajax, and all the
others who care about their own power, achievements, and reputation.
Isocrates praises large ambitions, and takes them to be characteristic of the
magnanimous person: we should ‘think immortal thoughts by being magnani-
mous, but mortal thoughts by measured enjoyment of what you have’ (1.32). The
dead king Evagoras will be pleased with the magnificent honours paid to him at
his tomb, but even more pleased with Isocrates’ account of his achievements and
the dangers he faced. His pleasure is a mark of his magnanimity.
For we will find that honour-loving and magnanimous men not only want to be
praised for such things, but calmly6 choose death in preference to life, and take
their reputation more seriously than their life, sparing no effort to leave behind
an immortal memory of them. (Isocrates 9.2–3)
For the king well knew that many men, both Greeks and barbarians, starting
from low and insignificant beginnings, had overthrown great dynasties, and he
was aware too of the magnanimity of Evagoras and that the growth of both his
prestige and of his political activities was not taking place by slow degrees; also
that Evagoras had unsurpassed natural ability and that fortune was fighting with
him as an ally. (9.59)
He had a high opinion of himself (mega phronein) because of his own achieve-
ments, not because of his fortune; he made friends of some people by his benefits
to them, and subjected others to him by his magnanimity, being feared by them
not because of his harshness but because of his superior nature. (9.45)
Since one gains honour by doing things on a large and impressive scale, magna-
nimity leads one to large ambitions. Hence the Persian king regarded Evagoras as
a dangerous opponent because of his magnanimity.
Similarly, Demosthenes takes Philip’s ambition to conquer all of Greece to be a
mark of his magnanimity, despite the humble origins that make his ambition
surprising.
Surely no one will dare to call it becoming that in a man brought up at Pella,
then a small place without reputation, such great magnanimity should arise that
he coveted the dominion of all Greece . . . while you, natives of Athens . . . should
sink to such cowardice as by a spontaneous, voluntary act to surrender your
liberty to a Philip. No one will make that assertion. The only remaining, and the
necessary, policy was to resist with justice all his unjust designs.
(Demosthenes 18.68–9)
6 Reading eukolôs, rather than (with some mss) eukleôs.

Terence Irwin 25
In contrast to Philip, the Athenians might be expected to display magnanimity,

given their illustrious past, but instead they display cowardly subservience.7 He is
dangerous because, like Evagoras, he has enough magnanimity to conceive large
ambitions and to put them into effect.
According to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, magnanimity includes large ambitions,
resulting from the desire for great honour, and it results in large achievements that
secure this honour. Hence it is a virtue that produces large benefits (1366b17–18).8
Emulation (zêlos) is characteristic of young and magnanimous people, because
it involves thinking oneself worthy of goods that one lacks (1388a37–b3).
Magnanimity predominates in young people, because of their hopeful outlook:
They are magnanimous; for they have not yet been humbled by life, but are
inexperienced in necessities, and thinking oneself worthy of great things is
magnanimity; and all this is characteristic of a hopeful person. (1389a29–32)
This attitude to oneself sometimes results in a distant attitude to inferiors. Hence
Paris’s retreat to Mount Ida is mentioned as behaviour that might be cited as
evidence of magnanimity. (1401b20–3)
These fourth-century writers use ‘megalopsychia’ to describe the outlook of

Homeric heroes, and especially Achilles and Ajax. Among the leading characters
in the Iliad and the Odysssey these two stand out, because they display high ambi-
tion, and demand the highest honours. Since they aim at superior honours and
status, they resent any slight or dishonour, and go to every length to avenge it. If
they fail to gain compensation for dishonour, the humiliation is intolerable.
Rather than tolerate it, Achilles withdraws from the battle until compensation is
offered to him. When Ajax is humiliated and fails to gain compensation through
revenge, he prefers suicide to living with dishonour.
Demosthenes appeals directly to these Homeric precedents. When he addresses
the Athenian tribe of the Aeantids, who claim Ajax as their eponymous ancestor, he
tells them that Ajax’s suicide presents them with an example they ought to follow:
The Aeantids know very well that when Ajax had been robbed of the prize
of highest merit (aristeia), he thought his life was not worth living (abiôton) for
himself. When, therefore, the god was giving the prize of highest merit to
another, at once they thought they must die trying to repel their foes so as to
suffer no disgrace to themselves. (Dem. 60.31)
7 Magnanimity is closely connected with magnificence, doing things on a grand scale: Dem.
19.140, 235.
8 Christof Rapp (Aristoteles: Rhetorik [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002], vol. 2, 409n7) argues that
the conception of magnanimity in this passage is quite different from the one in EN iv 3. But he
believes that the conception in the EN is assumed in ii 12, in the description of young people.
The attitude that Demosthenes praises is magnanimity. Similarly, when Aeschines

accuses Demosthenes of lacking any sense of honour and self-respect, he contrasts
the shameless attitude of Demosthenes with the magnanimity of Ajax.
Certainly none of you will have any fear that Demosthenes—this magnanimous
man outstanding in war—if he fails to win the prize of highest merit (aristeia)
will go home and make off with himself—a man who has so little respect for any
sense of honour (philotimia) towards you that he . . . inflicted thousands of wounds
on his head and made money by bringing a suit for premeditated assault.
(Aeschines, Ctes. 211–12)
Demosthenes so completely lacks Ajax’s magnanimity that there is no danger of

his displaying it as Ajax did by suicide.
Achilles showed similar magnanimity in his eagerness to avenge the death of
Patroclus. Aeschines mentions his refusal to wash or eat before he placed the head
of Hector on the tomb of Patroclus. His desire to avoid dishonour was so strong
that he was indifferent to everything else.
And indeed not only here do we see his deep distress, but he mourned so sorely
for him, that although his mother Thetis cautioned him and told him that if he
would refrain from following up his enemies and leave the death of Patroclus
unavenged, he should return to his home and die an old man in his own land,
whereas if he should take vengeance, he should soon end his life, he chose fidelity
to the dead rather than safety. And with such magnanimity did he hasten to take
vengeance on the man who slew his friend, that when all tried to comfort him
and urged him to bathe and take food, he swore that he would do none of these
things until he had brought the head of Hector to the grave of Patroclus.
(Aeschin. Tim. 145)
Achilles certainly remembered the evil that Agamemnon had done to him by
humiliating him, and the evil that Hector had done to him by killing Patroclus.
He retained his memory and his anger until Agamemnon had admitted his error,
and until he had avenged the death of Patroclus.
According to these Homeric examples, we ought not to tolerate dishonour, but
ought to do all we can to make sure that offenders pay for any slight or insult or
humiliation they have inflicted on us. Refusal to recall evils is regarded as the mark
of cowardly and self-effacing people who do not demand recognition of their
worth. Not recalling evils is the attitude of pusillanimous people. Magnanimous
people do not treat their own honour so lightly. To affirm their own worth, they
are ready to squeeze their enemies till the pips squeak, as Achilles did when he
humiliated even the dead body of Hector. Vivid memory of grievances is part of
Terence Irwin 27
what makes someone magnanimous. Aristotle is not saying something obvious

when he affirms that the magnanimous person will not recall evils.
3. Why We Ought Not to Recall Evils
Nonetheless, Aristotle’s remark about not recalling evils recalls something familiar
to his audience, who know that a generous attitude to past offences is often taken
to be the mark of a virtuous person. The Homeric attitudes we have just described
are only one side of Homer. The Homeric character who tries to resolve disputes
by refusing to bear grudges is Odysseus. In the Iliad he is the diplomat who tries
to reconcile Agamemnon and Achilles. This side of him is developed most fully in
Sophocles’ Ajax, where Odysseus argues for generous treatment of Ajax’s body
and his dependents after Ajax has tried to kill the Greeks who awarded the
armour of Achilles to Odysseus. The last book of the Iliad shows how Achilles
learns to show some generosity towards his enemies.
Both Homeric attitudes are visible in the Greek historians. The attitudes of
Achilles and Ajax often result in vindictive behaviour in which one city takes the
opportunity to settle some old score with another city, or one faction within a city
try to eliminate their opponents. But we also find frequent appeals to the gener-
osity that does not recall past offences. Thucydides, for instance, describes a
Spartan appeal to Athenian generosity. After the Athenian success at Pylos, the
Spartan ambassadors ask for a generous settlement from the Athenians, who are
now in the stronger position.
Indeed if great enmities are ever to be really settled, we think it will be, not by
the system of revenge and military success, and by forcing an opponent to
swear to a treaty to his disadvantage, but when the more fortunate combatant
waives these his privileges, to be guided by generosity, and conquers his rival by
virtue, and accords peace on more moderate conditions than he expected.
From that moment, instead of the debt of revenge which violence must entail,
his adversary owes a debt of virtue to be paid in kind, and is inclined by honour
to stand to his agreement. And men oftener act in this manner towards their
greatest enemies than where the quarrel is of less importance; they are also by
nature as glad to give way to those who first yield to them, as they are apt to be
provoked by arrogance to risks condemned by their own judgment.
(Thucydides iv 19.2–4)9
9 Douglas M. MacDowell draws attention to this passage in ‘Aretê and Generosity’, Mnemosyne
16 (1963), 127–34.
The Spartans suggest that the beneficiaries will want to ‘return virtue’ (antapodou-
nai aretên), in recognition of the virtue (aretê) and generosity (to epieikes) that
has been shown to them. Virtue is shown especially in benefiting others who have
no prior claim to the benefit.10 They will recognize that their benefactors have not
exacted the sort of settlement that they could have exacted if they had been keep-
ing their eye on their own interest; benefactors show generosity in so far as they
act for the interest of the beneficiaries, and thereby forgo their own interest. This
creates a sense of obligation to be generous and forbearing in return. That is
exactly what the Allies failed to do after 1918, according to Churchill. Their vin-
dictive attitude to the defeated Germans meant that they received no gratitude
even for their more generous actions.
The Spartans hope for the attitude that Churchill calls magnanimity in victory,
though they do not speak of megalopsychia. In this case their arguments are tenuous,
and their proposals vague, as Thucydides presents them. Their appeal to generosity
perhaps betrays the weakness of their position.11 And so this passage might lead us
to suspect that appeals to generosity are not after all to be taken very seriously.
Such a suspicion would be unwarranted. The Athenians, however, were also
familiar, from their internal politics and conflicts, with calls for generosity in the
pursuit of past quarrels. They were proud of their willingness not to recall evils,
and especially on their display of such willingness in the amnesty offered after the
fall of the Thirty (Aeschines 3.208, Andocides 1.140). Indeed, the verb ‘not recall-
ing evils’ (ou mnêsikakein) is used as a technical term for a formal amnesty.12 The
Athenian Assembly passed a law that prohibited recalling evils from the past.13
There should be a general amnesty concerning past events towards all persons
except the Thirty, the Ten, the Eleven, and the magistrates in Piraeus; and these
too should be included if they should submit their accounts in the usual way.
Such accounts should be given by the magistrates in Piraeus before a court of
citizens in Piraeus, and by the magistrates in the city before a court of those
rated. On these terms those who wished to do so might secede.
([Aristotle], Ath. Pol. 39.6)
10 For this aspect of aretê see Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991–2008), on Thucydides iii 58.1.
11 Hornblower, ad loc. ‘The wrapping-paper needed to be fancy because there was not much inside.’
Arnold W. Gomme, A Historical Commentary on Thucydides (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945–81)
ad loc. comments that the Spartans’ offer ‘demanded not only a generosity of feeling and a far-
sightedness on the part of Athens which they had no reason and no right to expect . . . but an even
greater generosity, megalopsychia, on their own, to accept the Athenian gesture and forget their own
disgrace . . .’. Gomme aptly uses ‘megalopsychia’ in an Aristotelian sense that is not found in Thucydides.
12 See Thuc. iv 74.2; viii 73.6. Peter J. Rhodes (A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia
[Oxford: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981], 468) mentions other amnesties that include mȇ
mnȇsikakein. He cites Alfred P. Dorjahn, Political Forgiveness in Old Athens (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1946).
13 Mnêsikakein is used in Andocides 1.90; Isoc. 18.3; X Hell. ii 4.43; Lysias 18.19; 25.9.
Terence Irwin 29
The Athenians took this amnesty seriously. It was secured by an oath, but probably
was not embodied in a decree that would give it the force of law.
And having sworn oaths that indeed they would not recall evils (mnêsikakein),
even now they engage in common political life (homou te politeuontai) and the
people abides by the oaths. (Xenophon, Hellenica ii 4.43)
The amnesty was generally observed, and, together with the rest of the provisions
for reconciling the opposed factions, achieved its purpose.14
Since the Thirty had ruled for only a short time in 404 and 403, the amnesty
was less elaborate than the ‘Act of Indemnity and Oblivion’ that followed the res-
toration of Charles II in 1660, or the process of ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ that
followed the end of apartheid in South Africa. But it was apparently sometimes
challenged by accusers who wanted to exact vengeance. In one instance Archinus,
a leading defender of the amnesty, denounced someone to the Council for violat-
ing the amnesty, and had him summarily executed.
And yet a third such action was when one of the returned exiles began to violate
the amnesty, whereupon Archinus haled him to the Council and persuaded
them to execute him without trial, telling them that now they would have to
show whether they wished to preserve the democracy and abide by the oaths they
had taken; for if they let this man escape they would encourage others to imitate
him, while if they executed him they would make an example for all to learn by.
And this was exactly what happened; for after this man had been put to death no
one ever again broke the amnesty. On the contrary, the Athenians seem, both in
public and in private, to have behaved in the most unprecedentedly admirable
and public-spirited way with reference to the preceding troubles.
(Ath. Pol. 40.2)
The author contrasts the holding of grudges with the morally admirable (kalon)
attitude that the Athenians displayed for the good of the city.
These examples make it clear that ‘ou mnêsikakein’ does not refer to failure to
remember evils, in the sense of no longer being aware that they happened. In order
to execute the appropriate sort of ‘oblivion’ of some wrong, we have to remember
that it happened. ‘Not recalling’ evils implies that we do not attend to them as
grounds for retaliation. This connexion between not remembering, forgiveness,
14 Athenian observance of the amnesty: Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion

Politeia, 471–3. Thomas C. Loening has a full discussion in The Reconciliation Agreement of 403/402
B.C. in Athens, Hermes Einzelschrift 53 (1987), with a summary at 145–9. The Athenians went on
mentioning people’s past career, including their behaviour during the regime of the Thirty, in speeches
at trials; but he concludes that they probably never actually convicted anyone in violation of the
amnesty. See Lysias 26.2, 10; 16.3–8.
and reconciliation is familiar in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Psalmist prays ‘O

remember not the sins and offences of my youth: but according to thy mercy
think thou upon me, O Lord, for thy goodness’ (Psalm 25: 6). He is not asking
God to become ignorant of something; he is asking God not to hold his sins
against him, but to show mercy.
None of these passages says anything about megalopsychia, and we should not
be surprised about this, given the conception of megalopsychia that we have previ-
ously surveyed. So far we have found that megalopsychia is displayed by those who
refuse to accept humiliation, and seek revenge on those who have humiliated them.
This is the attitude that has to be overcome in those who try not to recall evils.
4. A Puzzle About Magnanimity
On the basis of this evidence, we can be confident that Aristotle’s audience and
readers believed that megalopsychia is an important virtue and that generosity
towards an opponent or an offender is an important virtue. But we have found no
evidence to show that his contemporaries identified these two virtues, or regarded
one as an aspect of the other. On the contrary, they treated them as opposed vir-
tues that require quite different behaviour. We have found no evidence to suggest
that megalopsychia requires us not to recall evils.
Aristotle, therefore, disagrees with many of his contemporaries when he claims
that maganimity requires generosity towards past evils.15 Though the claim is stated
briefly in EN, it is not a casual claim. Since, as far as we know, it is not a familiar
feature of magnanimity, we may reasonably ask why Aristotle asserts it. What is it
about magnanimous people that makes them generous in not recalling evils? Since
Aristotle makes no similar claim about any of the other virtues of character, why
does he think such generosity manifests magnanimity in particular?
Before we examine the discussion in EN, we ought to notice an aspect of mega-
lopsychia that we find in philosophical sources, but not in the historians and
orators we have discussed so far. When Aristotle wants an example of two appar-
ently different senses of a term, he picks two examples of magnanimity, which he
finds in Ajax and in Socrates.
For instance, if Alcibiades is magnanimous, or Achilles and Ajax, what is the one
thing they all have? Refusal to endure insult; for the first went to war, the second
was angry, and the third killed himself. Again <what is there in common> in
other cases, e.g. Lysander or Socrates? If <this common feature> is being indif-
ferent (adiaphoron) in both good and bad fortune, then I take these two common
features and ask what there is in common between being unaffected (apatheia)
15 He may also disagree with himself; for this claim is absent from his treatment of magnanimity in
both the Eudemian Ethics and the Magna Moralia.
Terence Irwin 31
about fortune and not enduring dishonour. If there is nothing in common, there
will be two species of magnanimity. (Posterior Analytics 97b17–25)
Aristotle does not suggest that this incidental example gives us a correct account
of magnanimity. Nor does he present this contrast between two types of magna-
nimity in any of the three ethical works. But he must nonetheless suppose that his
audience find it an intelligible account; otherwise it would not clarify the point
that he seeks to clarify.
Our previous examples make it obvious why Alcibiades, Ajax, and Achilles
might be thought to be magnanimous. We have found no examples similar to
those of Lysander and Socrates, but Aristotle must take them to be recognizable
examples of magnanimity. He expects us to be puzzled about how Ajax and
Socrates could manifest the same virtue. He suggests, but does not affirm, that
they do not manifest the same virtue at all, because magnanimity has these two
irreducibly different forms.
The ‘Socratic’ view that magnanimity requires indifference to fortune has no
support in the dialogues of Plato; none of them uses ‘magnanimity’ in this sense.
But we find some relevant evidence in two sources that may be roughly contem-
porary with Aristotle. The right attitude to fortune is mentioned in the Academic
collection of definitions:
Magnanimity: a civilized treatment (asteia chrêsis) of the things that happen.16

Magnificence of soul with reason. ([Plato], Definitiones. 412e3–4)
A similar view is expressed in Virtues and Vices. Though this essay is in the
Aristotelian Corpus, it is not by Aristotle; but it may belong to the Lyceum in the
time of Aristotle.
Magnanimity is a virtue of the soul in accordance with which one is able to

bear both good fortune and bad, and both honour and dishonour. ([Aristotle],
De Virtutibus et Vitiis 1250a14–15)17
Neither of these passages mentions indifference to fortune, but they at least refer
to some sort of resilience in the face of ill fortune.
These references to bearing ill fortune suggest a sharp contrast with the mag-
nanimity of Ajax, who refused to bear ill fortune and committed suicide rather
than stay alive after his humiliation. Socratic magnanimity seems not only to be
16 Ernst A. Schmidt ([Aristoteles]: Über die Tugend [Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1965], 139) says that
the first definition is evidently post-Aristotelian. This claim is questionable in the light of Aristotle’s
remark on the magnanimity of Socrates.
17 The Greek text of VV is printed in Friedrich Susemihl, ed., Eudemii Rhodii Ethica (Leipzig:
Teubner, 1884). Schmidt provides a translation and commentary in Über die Tugend. On further
remarks in VV see section 1.9 below.
different from the magnanimity of Ajax, but opposed to it. These two apparently
opposite types of magnanimity will eventually help us to understand part of
Aristotle’s argument in the EN.
5. The Structure of Aristotle’s Argument

in the Nicomachean Ethics
To see how Aristotle responds to the different aspects of megalopsychia that we

have described, we should begin from a short description of the structure of the
discussion in EN iv 3. This will reveal both the theoretical centre of the argument
and the relation of the different parts to this centre.
(1) 1123b1–15. It is generally accepted (dokei, 1123b1) that the magnanimous

person is the one who correctly thinks himself worthy of great things,
since the name of the virtue itself suggests some connexion with greatness
(1123a35–b8).
(2) 1123b15–26. What are these great things? Being worthy is being worthy to
receive external goods, and the greatest of these is honour, so that the
great things that the magnanimous person demands will be honours.
(3) 1123b26–1124a4. The magnanimous person has all the virtues, since he is
worthy of great honours.
(4) 1124a4–12. The magnanimous person believes that he deserves honour
because he believes in the supreme value of virtue.
(5) 1124a12–20. Magnanimity requires the true beliefs and the right attitudes
about external goods, and about ‘every sort of good and ill fortune’ (1124a14).
(6) 1124a20–6. External goods are worth pursuing, and increase magnanim-
ity. But they are not sufficient for magnanimity, even if their possessor
thinks as much of himself as the genuinely magnanimous person does. It
is hard to bear good fortune appropriately without virtue (1124a29–b4).
(7) 1124b6–1125a16. If we understand magnanimity as the right attitude to
external goods, we can see why magnanimous people behave as they do.
In some cases these patterns of behaviour are familiar from popular views
about magnanimity. In other cases they are unfamiliar, but we can see why
they are signs of magnanimity.
The first two parts connect Aristotle’s account with common views about mag-
nanimity, and especially about its connexion with greatness and with honour. Part 3
is the theoretical centre. It draws a consequence from the first two parts, and
provides the starting point for the next four parts. Part 4 discusses honour, the most
familiar object of magnanimity. Parts 5 and 6 extend the discussion from honour
to other external goods. Part 7 sketches some of the behavioural consequences.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Rock?”
“Yes, a sort of narrow ledge across the face; a fault, as they call it.
It runs downward at your left almost to the bottom, I’d say. Listen,
Nod. Suppose I got a long pole and lowered one end to you and held
the other. Would that be easier for you to hold on to?”
Laurie considered a moment. “I reckon so,” he answered. “My right
arm’s just about dislocated. Try it, will you, Bob?”
Bob arose and disappeared into the woods.
“Wish I could stand on my heels for a while,” said Laurie. “My toes
are trying to dance. Where’s Ned gone for the rope?”
“To the quarry, he said,” Polly replied. “If Bob and I made a sort of
rope of our clothes, Laurie, wouldn’t it be better than a pole?”
“Don’t believe so. I wouldn’t feel awfully easy in my mind if I
trusted to that sort of rope. Anyway, I don’t intend to have you make
rags of your new dress!”
“Oh, Laurie, as if a new dress mattered!” exclaimed Polly. “I do
wish it wasn’t so thin, though. Here comes Bob.”
Bob brought the dead trunk of a young black birch about five
inches thick at the butt where, by hacking with his knife and twisting,
he had managed to sever it. Now he slashed the larger branches
away. “Good thing it’s dried out,” he said to Polly. “If it wasn’t it would
be too heavy to hold. Hope it’s long enough!”
“Oh, Bob, I don’t believe it is,” said Polly anxiously.
“If it isn’t I can find one that is.”
But it was. When Bob had lowered the smaller end down the cliff
at Laurie’s right and Laurie had very carefully and rather fearfully
unclasped his numb fingers from their rocky hold and clutched them
about the tree there remained a few inches of the butt end above the
level of the ground. Taking a firm hold with both hands at arm’s
length as he lay facedown, Bob smiled his satisfaction.
“She’ll hold you, Nod, even if the shelf you’re standing on gives
way! Polly can sit on my legs if she has to, and after that I’m good for
all day.”
“Gee, that’s a lot better,” said Laurie. “Wow, that arm was almost
out at the socket! Can you see this fault, as you call it from where
you are?”
“Yes.”
“Look it over, will you? Does it go right to the bottom?”
“N-no, not quite, I guess. I can’t just see the end of it. There’s a
three-cornered hunk of ledge sticking out down there. I guess it
stops about a dozen feet from the bottom, Nod.”
“All right. Tell you what I’m figuring on. You check me up, you two.
Suppose I have that rope that Ned’s gone for. It wouldn’t be any
good for me to try and climb it, for I’m aching all over and I just
wouldn’t have the strength. If I tied it around me you three couldn’t
pull me up over that edge. Of course if the rope’s long enough you
fellows can lower me down, or I could put a turn of the rope around
me and get down myself, I reckon. How about that?”
“You’d get awfully scraped up, I’m afraid,” said Bob. “I’m pretty
sure the three of us can pull you up, Nod.”
“I don’t believe you could. It would be risky, anyway. Maybe,
though, I can climb up somehow.”
“Perhaps,” offered Polly, “Ned will bring some one back with him to
help.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Laurie. “If he doesn’t, the next best thing is a
rope long enough to reach to the bottom. My idea was this, Bob.” He
paused long enough to shift one foot gingerly and relieve his jumping
nerves. “I thought I could tie the end of the rope under my shoulders
and work along this ledge that I’m standing on until I got where I
could jump or drop or something.”
“We could lower you the rest of the way if the rope lasted.”
“Yes, of course. Question is—” Laurie’s words were coming slower
now, with pauses between—“question is, can you folks follow along
the edge and hold your end of the rope?”
Bob turned his head and studied. After a minute he said: “Yes, I’m
sure we can. The trees are close to the edge in places, but we could
manage to pass the rope around them. We’ll see to that. Trouble is,
Nod, there’s a place about ten or twelve yards from where you are
where the blamed shelf sort of peters out for a ways, nearly five feet,
I’d say.”
“That so?” Laurie deliberated. “Well, if you fellows took a turn
around a tree with your end of the rope I reckon I could make it, eh?”
“Yes, I think you could,” Bob agreed. “Sure, you could!”
“All right. Guess that’s ... the best plan,” said Laurie tiredly. “How
long’s Ned ... been gone?”
“Oh, he must be back in a minute!” cried Polly. “He’s been gone a
long, long time.”
“Seen him down there ... yet?”
“He probably went to the office-building near the dock,” answered
Bob. “You can’t see that from here. Keep the old dander up, Nod.”
“I know,” agreed Laurie, “only ... I ain’t so well in my dander! Ought
to see ... a doctor—”
“He’s coming!” cried Polly. “I hear him!”
Even as she spoke joyfully, Ned came into sight, panting,
perspiring, flushed, a coil of rope over a shoulder. He fairly staggered
up the last of the ascent and across the small clearing, his eyes
questioning Polly’s anxiously.
“He’s all right,” cried Polly. Ned exhaled a deep breath of relief and
struggled to disencumber himself of the rope. The girl sprang to his
aid.
“I broke a window in the shed down there,” panted Ned. “This was
all I could find, but it’s good and strong.” He began with trembling
fingers to fashion a noose.
“Oh, Ned,” faltered Polly, “it’s so short!”
“How long?” called Bob.
“Forty feet,” replied Ned. “Maybe more. It’s more than long
enough!”
Polly explained hurriedly, and Ned’s face fell as he stared
despairingly at the cliff’s edge. Then his shoulders went back. “We’ll
get him up,” he said grimly. “We’ll get him up or I’ll go down with
him!” He went on bunglingly with the noose. Bob and Laurie were
talking beyond the edge.
“Rope’s too short for your scheme,” Bob said as cheerfully as he
could. “Only about forty or fifty feet, Nod.”
“Wouldn’t do, eh?” Laurie asked after a moment’s silence.
“No, too short by thirty feet, I guess. Twenty, anyway. We’ll have to
pull you up, old chap. We’ll manage it.”
Ned was peering down now. “I’ve made a slip-noose, Laurie. We’ll
lower it down, and you can get one arm through and then the other.”
“Wait a bit,” said Bob. “You’d better take hold of that ledge again
with your right hand first, Nod. These branches will be in the way.
Can you reach it? Higher yet. There you are! All right.” Bob pulled up
the birch-tree, edged his body back, rolled over, and took several
deep breaths. Then he rubbed his neck vigorously and got to his
knees. “Polly,” he directed, “you take hold of the end of the rope and,
for the love of Mike, don’t let go of it! Lower away now, Nid. Coming
down, old chap. Left arm first. Straighten it up. All right. Get your
hold again. Now the other. Hold the rope closer in, Nid. Right-o! Fine!
Tighten up easy, Nid. How’s that, down there?”
“All right, thanks. Ned, don’t start anything until you’ve rested a bit.
I can hear you puffing down here. I’m fine now and can spend the
day here.”
Ned sank down and relaxed, breathing heavily and mopping his
face. “Best way to do,” said Bob to him, “will be to take a turn of rope
around a tree and let Polly take up the slack as we haul. It’ll be a
hard tug, with the rope binding over the edge, but I guess we can do
it.” Ned nodded, took a deep breath, and stood up.
“Let’s go,” he said shortly.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PEQUOT QUEEN
T he first pull on the rope resulted only in sawing through the turf
and earth at the edge of the cliff until the rock was reached. The
next tug brought a few inches more at the cost of terrific effort, for
the rope must pass at almost right angles over the raw edge of the
rock. Laurie, his hands clasping the rope above his head to lessen
the strain across his chest, was showered with earth. Another heave,
and Ned and Bob went back a scant foot, Polly, her weight on the
rope, tightening the slack around the tree. Once more the two boys
dug their heels into the ground and strained. This time there was no
result. They tried again. It was as though they were pulling at the cliff
itself. The rope tautened under their efforts but yielded not an inch.
“Must be ... caught!” gasped Bob.
Ned, weak from that hurried climb up the hill, nodded, and closed
his eyes dizzily. The moment’s silence was broken by a hail from
Laurie.
“No good, you fellows! The rope’s worked into a crevice of the rock
and is jammed there. I’ll have to climb it myself. Make your end fast
around something and stand by to give me a hand—if I make it!”
Bob silently questioned Ned, and the latter nodded again. “Let him
try,” he said huskily. “If he can’t—”
“Oh, wait, wait!” cried Polly. “We’re—we’re perfect idiots! He
doesn’t have to do that, Ned! He can walk along that ledge, and we
can hold the rope—”
“But it isn’t long enough,” Bob expostulated.
“Not down,” said Polly impatiently; “up!”
“Up? By Jove, that’s so! See what she means, Ned? Here, let’s get
this tied to the tree!” A moment later Bob was at the edge, his eager
gaze following the narrow ledge as it ascended at Laurie’s right.
Scarcely twenty feet beyond, it ended at a perpendicular fissure
hardly four feet below the top. Gleefully he made known the
discovery to Laurie, and the latter, stretched like a trussed fowl
against the rock, his toes still just touching the shelf, grunted.
“Never thought of that,” he said disgustedly. He stretched his head
back until he could see the shelf. Then, “It’s a cinch,” he affirmed.
“You’ll have to get the rope free first, though, and ease up on it until I
can get my feet back on the ledge. Can you do it?”
“Have to,” answered the other cheerfully. Cautiously he and Ned
untied the rope from about the tree, gave it some three inches of
slack, retied it, and set to work at the edge of the cliff. Or, rather, Bob
worked, for Ned’s hands trembled so that he couldn’t. The rope was
fast in a jagged-edged notch of the rock, and Bob’s only implement,
his pocket-knife, was somewhat inadequate. But he made it do.
Using the handle like a tiny hammer, he chipped and chipped until
finally the rope began to slip downward and Laurie’s weight rested
again on the ledge. The end about the tree was unfastened; the rope
was lifted from the channel it had dug through the overlying soil and
carried a yard to the left. Then, with Ned and Bob and Polly holding
it, their heels dug firmly into the sod, Laurie began his journey.
It was slow work at first, for his nerves and muscles responded ill
to the demands of his brain, and delays came when those above
cautiously moved their position, taking new holds on the slowly
shortening rope. Had Laurie been fresh for the task he would have
swarmed up there in no time at all. As it was, it took a good ten
minutes to reach the end of his journey; and, even so, he did not
proceed to the limit of his narrow foot-path but, once his hands could
reach the edge, squirmed his way over, Bob and Ned pulling and
tugging.
Once there, he flopped over on his back in the tangle of brush and
stretched legs and arms relievedly. In the little silence that ensued
Bob removed the rope from Laurie and coiled it with unnecessary
exactitude. Then Laurie took a long, deep breath, sat up, and said
“Thanks!”
That relaxed the general tension. Bob laughed queerly, Ned
grinned in a twisted way, and Polly dabbed at her eyes with a
diminutive handkerchief.
“Welcome,” said Bob dryly. Then all four began to laugh and talk at
the same time. After a moment of that Bob laid a hand on Laurie’s
collar. “Let’s get out of this,” he said. Laurie got to his feet somewhat
shakily, and they fought their way back to the little clearing. “Now,”
said Bob, “we’ll just sit down and look at that view we came up here
to see and get rested for a quarter of an hour. I don’t know how
Laurie feels, but I’m all in!”
“I’ll bet you are,” responded Laurie. “Guess I had the easiest part
of it.”
“You look it,” answered Bob sarcastically. Laurie’s face was brown
with dirt, his knuckles were bleeding, there was a cut on his chin,
and his clothes were torn until they looked fit only for the ragman.
Ned, who had been scowling blackly for the last minute or two, broke
into sudden speech.
“Of all the crazy lunatics, Laurie,” he began fiercely.
“Oh, please, Ned!” cried Polly. “He didn’t mean to do it!”
“Let him say it,” said Laurie humbly. “I deserve it, and it’ll do him
good.”
But Ned’s eloquence had fled him. He said “Humph!” and turned
his head away and stared hard at the wide expanse of scenery
spread before him. The others pretended not to know that there were
tears in his eyes, and Bob said hastily: “Well, all’s swell that ends
swell! How did it happen, anyway, Nod?”
“Oh, I was—was thinking about something and didn’t realize I was
so close to the edge, I guess. Then Ned called to me and I turned
around quick and one foot began to go. I tried to catch hold of that
tree there and missed it. Next thing I knew I was sliding down the
rock. I guess that trying to catch hold of the tree saved me, because
it threw me forward and, instead of falling outward, I went sliding
down with my face scraping against the rock. Somehow, just by luck,
I got hold of a root for a second. It broke off, but it helped, I guess,
for I stopped with my feet on that ledge and my right hand holding on
to something above me. I suppose I made sort of a fuss about it
down there,” he concluded apologetically, “but you don’t know how
quivery your nerves get, Bob. Seemed like my legs wanted to dance
all the time!”
“Son, you certainly had a narrow squeak of it,” said Bob solemnly.
“Gee, when I saw you go over—”
“Oh, it was perfectly horrible,” shuddered Polly. “And then
afterward, while Ned was gone—”
“There’s a busted window down there that some one’s got to settle
for,” growled Ned.
“Believe me, old scout,” replied Laurie feelingly, “I’m willing to
settle for a hundred busted windows! Of course, I don’t mean that it
wouldn’t have been a heap more considerate of you to have slipped
the catch with your knife and saved me the expense.”
Ned faced them again then, glaring at his brother. “You poor fish!”
he said contemptuously.
“That’s me,” agreed Laurie smilingly. “Pulled up with a line!”
Polly and Bob laughed, the former a trifle hysterically. Then Ned’s
mouth twitched itself into a grin. “Laurie, you’re an awful fool,” he
said affectionately.
“Guess you’re right, Neddie.” He climbed to his feet, stamped
them experimentally, seemed to approve of the result, and added,
“Well, unless some one else is going to fall over, say we go home.”
“I’m ready,” agreed Bob. “How about the rope? Oughtn’t we—”
“In payment for my share in the recent—er—episode,” said Laurie,
“I’ll look after it. Where’d you get it, Ned?”
“Why don’t we all go?” asked Polly. “It isn’t much farther that way.”
“Right-o,” agreed Bob. “Besides, who knows what Laurie would do
next if we let him go alone?”
So they set off down the hill again, every one by now extremely
merry and light-hearted in the reaction. They dropped the rope
through the window in the shed adjoining the office of the quarry
company and retraced their steps to the village and up Walnut Street
and so, finally, just as dusk began to settle down, reached the little
shop. There it was Polly who voiced the thought that had been in the
minds of the rest for some time.
“Perhaps,” said Polly, “it would be better if we didn’t say anything
about what happened.”
“Polly,” declared Laurie relievedly—and slangily, “you spoke a
mouthful!”
“Yes,” agreed Ned. “No use worrying folks about a thing when it’s
all over.”
“Of course not,” chimed in Bob. “Guess it won’t happen again,
anyway.”
“Not with me in the rôle of happenee,” said Laurie with conviction.
“If it ever does,” said Ned, “you’ll hang over the cliff until you dry
up and blow away for all of me, you poor simp!”
But when they had said good night to Bob Ned’s tune was
different. “Old-timer,” he said after a silence, “you sure had me
scared.”
“I know,” said Laurie soberly. “Sorry, Ned.”
“Uh-huh. ’S all right.” Ned slipped his arm in Laurie’s. “Wish you’d
cut out that sort of thing, though. Always gives me heart-failure. It’s
risky business, anyway.”
“Right,” agreed Laurie. After a minute, as they passed through the
gate, he added, “No more I’ll risk my neck on dizzy height.”
“Well said, for if you do you’ve me to fight!”
That evening the twins were content to lounge in easy-chairs in
the recreation-room and read, refusing challenges to ping-pong,
chess, and various other engagements requiring exertion of mind or
body. They went early to bed and, although Laurie roused once to
hear Ned in the throes of nightmare and had to quiet him before
returning to his own dreamless slumber, awoke in the morning their
normal selves again.
After breakfast that morning Laurie announced to Ned that he was
going to walk down and explain the broken window, and settle for it if
settlement was demanded. Ned said, “All right, come along.” But
Laurie persuaded the other that his presence during the conference
with the quarry company officials was not only unnecessary but
inadvisable. “You see,” he elaborated, “it’s going to require tact, old
son, and Tact, as you know, is my middle name. Now, if I took you
along you’d be sure to say something to queer the whole show and
I’d have to fork over a dollar, maybe. No, better leave this to me,
Ned.”
“Must say you fancy yourself a bit this morning,” scoffed Ned. “All
right, though. Come over to Bob’s when you get back. I told him I’d
go around there and look at the court.”
Laurie saved his dollar by narrating a moving tale of his fall from
the cliff to the occupants of the small office down by the river. One
weazened little man who held a pen in his mouth and talked through
it or around it—Laurie couldn’t decide which—reminded the visitor
that if he had not trespassed on quarry company property he
wouldn’t have got in trouble. But it was plain that this view was not
popular with the other members of the force present, and Laurie was
permitted to depart with his last week’s allowance intact.
From the office he made his way across toward the stone-walled
dock where lay the Pequot Queen. Once he paused, turned, and
sent his gaze to the great mass of rock that arose precipitately from
beyond the littered floor of the quarry. He couldn’t see the tiny ledge
that had saved his life yesterday, but there, looking very small from
down here, was the leaning tree, and he measured the distance to
the rock-strewn ground beneath and shuddered. He was still gazing
when there was a dull concussion and a cloud of gray dust, and a
great pile of rock slid down the face. The little locomotive tooted and
came rocking toward the railway, dragging a flat-car loaded with two
great squares of rock. On the farther side of the small dock a lighter
was being loaded, a big boom swinging from cars to deck to the
music of a puffing engine and the shrill piping of a whistle. Laurie
continued his way to the Pequot Queen.
A few years before the boat had been used in the ferry service
between Orstead and Hamlin, across the river. Then the business
failed to show a profit, the company was dissolved, and the Pequot
Queen was pushed into the quarry company’s dock—without
permission, if rumor was to be credited—and left to rot. She was
about fifty feet long and very broad of beam. The stern was occupied
by a cabin with many windows, a few of which were still unbroken.
Amidships, if one may apply the term to a launch, was a small
engine-room in which a rusted upright engine still stood amid a litter
of coal-dust. A door led to a smaller compartment, the wheel-house.
Between that and the bow was a space for luggage and freight. The
Pequot Queen had not carried vehicles.
At one time the boat had doubtless shone resplendent in white
paint and gold-leaf. Now there were few traces of either remaining.
The name was still legible on each side of the bow, however, in
faded black. Through the roof a rusty smoke-stack pushed its way to
lean perilously to starboard. Atop the cabin, reached by a narrow
companion, benches inside a pipe-railing had afforded
accommodation for passengers in fine weather. The boat was
secured fore and aft with frayed hawsers, and her rail lay close to the
wall. Laurie viewed her speculatively from stem to stern and then
stepped aboard. Had there been any one about to observe him they
might have thought that here was a possible purchaser, for he went
over the boat completely and exhaustively, giving, however, most of
his time to the cabin. In the end he went ashore and once more
viewed the derelict in frowning speculation. There was no doubt that
the Pequot Queen had outlived her use as a water-craft. She still
floated and would probably continue to float for many years yet, but
old age had claimed her, as rotting timbers and yawning seams
showed. Yet Laurie, whether or not he was a prospective purchaser,
turned away at last with an expression of thoughtful satisfaction on
his countenance.
Back by the railroad, he stopped and viewed his surroundings
intently. On one side lay the bridge, with the Basin beyond and to the
left, and the big quarry to his right. On the other side was the
company office and shed, the dock and pier, the latter piled high with
roughly-squared blocks of stone. Toward town the river’s margin was
unoccupied for a space, and then came the coal-wharves and the
lumber company’s frontage. It was a noisy and dust-laden spot in
which the Pequot Queen had been left to pass her declining years,
and Laurie shook his head slowly as though the realization of the
fact displeased him. Finally he crossed the bridge again, hurrying a
little in order not to compete for passage with a slow-moving freight
from the north, and continued along the river-front until he had
passed the station and the warehouses across the track and was
again allowed a view of the stream unimpeded by buildings. Here
there was no wall along the river, but now and then the remains of an
ancient wooden bulkhead still stood between the dusty road and the
lapping water. Here and there, too, a rotted hulk lay careened or
showed naked ribs above the surface further out. Across the road
hardly more than a lane now, a few dejected but respectable
dwellings stood behind their tiny front yards. Behind them the hill
sloped upward less abruptly than farther back and was thickly
clustered with unpretentious houses wherein the industrious foreign-
born citizens of Orstead lived. Compared to the vicinity of the quarry,
however, this section of town was clean and quiet. There were trees
here, and later on there would be grass along the unfrequented road
and flowers in the little gardens. Westward lay the sunlit river and the
wooded shore beyond. Laurie nodded approvingly more than once
as he dawdled along, paying, as it appeared, special attention to the
margin of the stream. Finally, more than an hour after he had left
school, he retraced his steps as far as Ash Street and turned uphill.
Ash Street was two blocks north of Walnut and, having an easier
grade to climb, was less devious in its journey. It brought Laurie at
length to Summit Street a short block from the little white house from
which Miss Comfort had lately removed. As he passed it Laurie
observed that so far no vandal hand had been laid on it. The brown
shutters were closed at the down-stairs windows, and the buds on
the lilac-bushes were swelling fast. Somehow these two facts,
apparently unrelated, combined to bring a little pang of sadness to
the observer. He went on, with only a glance down Pine Street to the
blue shop, and entered the side gate of the Coventry place.
CHAPTER XIV
A PERFECTLY GORGEOUS IDEA
N ed and Bob were watching Thomas, the man-of-all-work, rolling

the cinder surface of the new tennis-court. Theirs was a
pleasant occupation for such a morning, and Laurie joined them
where they sat on a pile of posts and boards that had once been a
grape-arbor and that had been removed to make way for the court.
“What happened to you?” asked Ned. “Thought maybe they’d had
you arrested. Bob and I were just talking of pooling our resources
and bailing you out.”
“I found I had nearly ninety cents,” said Bob proudly.
“No, they were all right about it,” replied Laurie musingly. Then he
lapsed into silence, staring thoughtfully at Thomas as he paced to
and fro behind the stone roller.
“What do you think of it?” asked Bob, nodding at the court.
“Corking. Pretty nearly done, isn’t it?”
“Pretty nearly. It’ll take about two days to put the gravel on.
They’re going to bring the first load this afternoon. It has to have clay
mixed with it, you know, and that makes it slower. And then it’s got to
be rolled well—”
“Seems to me,” said Laurie, “a turf court would have been easier.”
“Yes, but they don’t last. You know that. And it’s the very dickens
to get a grass surface level.”
Laurie nodded. It was evident to Ned, who had been watching him
closely, that Laurie’s mind was not on the tennis-court. “What’s
eating you, partner?” he asked finally. Laurie started.
“Me? Nothing. That is, I’ve been thinking.”
“Don’t,” begged Ned. “You know what it did to you yesterday.”
“I want you and Bob to be at Polly’s this afternoon when she gets
home from school. I’ve got something to tell you.”
“Tell us now,” suggested Bob. Laurie shook his head.
“No use saying it twice.”
“What’s it about?” asked Ned.
“About—about Miss Comfort.”
“Gee,” said Bob, “I thought that was done with. What about her,
Nod?” But Laurie shook his head, and their pleas for enlightenment
were vain.
“You’ll know all about it this afternoon,” he said. “So shut up.” A
minute after he asked, “Say, Bob, does your father know the folks
who run that quarry?”
“Yes, I guess so. He buys stone from them. Why?”
“I want to meet the head guy, president or general manager or
whatever he calls himself. That’s all.”
“Want to meet him! What for? Going to get after him for not having
a railing around the top of the bluff?”
“Not exactly. Know any one here who has a launch?”
“Lunch? Say, what are you talking about?”
“I didn’t say lunch, you goop; I said launch, l-a-u—”
“Oh, launch! Why, no, I don’t believe so. I know a fellow who owns
a canoe—”
“Sure,” agreed Laurie with deep sarcasm, “and I know a fellow
who owns a bean-shooter, but it doesn’t interest me. There must be
some one who has a launch around here. There are half a dozen on
the river.”
“Why, there’s a man down there who rents boats, you idiot. I think
he has some sort of a launch. I thought you meant—”
“What’s his name? Where’s he live?”
“Name’s Wilkins or Watkins or something, and he lives—I don’t
know where he lives, but he keeps his boats up by the old chain-
works.”
“Thanks. You fellows going to spend the day here? Let’s do
something.”
“Want some tennis?” asked Bob eagerly. “I’ll take on you and Nid.”
Laurie looked inquiringly at his brother. “Would you?” he asked.
“Seems sort of too bad to take advantage of his ignorance.”
“It’ll teach him a lesson,” answered Ned, rising, stretching, and
looking commiseratingly down at the challenger. “Pride goeth before
a fall and a haughty spirit—”
“Before the Turners,” completed Laurie. “Come on to the slaughter,
Bob, before my heart softens and I let you off.”
Shortly after three that afternoon, Laurie, perched on a counter in
the Widow Deane’s shop, had the floor. That sounds peculiar, I
acknowledge, but you know what I mean. They were in the shop
because Mrs. Deane and Miss Comfort were occupying the back—
pardon me, the garden. “It’s like this,” Laurie was telling Polly, Mae,
Ned, and Bob. “We couldn’t find a place on land for Miss Comfort,
and so it occurred to me that a place on the water might do.” He
paused to enjoy the effect of this strange announcement.
“On the water!” echoed Polly. “Why, whatever do you mean?”
“Yes,” cried Mae, “whatever—”
“Don’t you get it?” asked Ned. “He wants Miss Comfort to join the
navy!”
Laurie grinned. “Shut up, you idiot! You know the Pequot Queen?”
They all agreed silently that they did. “Well, I’ve been all over the
boat this morning. It would take about two or three days—and a few
dollars, of course—to make her into just as nice a house as any one
would want. Take that cabin—”
“But, look here, you three-ply goop,” interrupted Ned, “Miss
Comfort wouldn’t want to live on a tumble-down old ferry-boat!”
“How do you know?” asked Laurie. “Have you asked her?”
“But—but she’d be afraid, Laurie,” protested Polly. “I’m sure I
should! Suppose it floated away or—or sank—”
“Suppose it spread its wings and flew on top of the court-house,”
answered Laurie sarcastically. “It couldn’t float away because it
would be moored to the bank, and it couldn’t sink because there
wouldn’t be enough water under it. Now, just listen a minute until I
get through. Of course I know that the scheme sounds funny to you
folks because you haven’t any imagination. As for saying that Miss
Comfort wouldn’t live in the Pequot Queen, you don’t know anything
of the sort. I’m blamed certain that if I was—were Miss Comfort I’d a
lot rather live in a nice clean boat tied to the bank than go to the
poor-farm!”
“Well,” said Polly dubiously, “you’re a man.”
“A man!” jeered Ned.
“Well, you know perfectly well what I mean,” said Polly. It was
evident that Polly wanted very much to be convinced of the
practicability of the plan, and her objection had been almost
apologetic. Mae, taking her cue from her friend, awaited further
enlightenment in pretty perplexity.
“Miss Comfort has enough to furnish it with,” continued Laurie. “At
least, Polly said she had taken a lot of stuff with her.” Polly nodded
vigorously. “All we’d have to do would be to board up about four
windows on each side of the cabin, put some shades or curtains at
the others, put a new lock on the door, run a stove-pipe through the
roof—”
“Perfectly simple and easy,” said Ned. “Go on, son.”
“That’s about all. That cabin’s big enough for her to live in
comfortably, big enough for a stove and bed and table and chairs—
and—and everything. Then, there’s the roof, too. Why, she could
have a roof-garden up there, and a place to dry her clothes—”
“After she’s fallen overboard?” asked Bob.
“That’s all right,” answered Laurie a trifle warmly. “Have your fun,
but the scheme’s all right, and if you’d quit spoofing and stop to think
seriously a minute—”
“Why, I think it’s a perfectly splendid idea!” asserted Polly with a
bewildering change of front.
“Gorgeous!” chimed in Mae.
“If only Miss Comfort can be persuaded to try a life on the ocean
wave,” added Ned dryly. “Seems to me the first thing to do is to ask
her what she thinks of it.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Laurie. “The first thing is for you to go down there
with me right now and see for yourselves. If you don’t agree with me
we’ll just let it drop.”
“Of course,” said Polly. “Come on, every one! Oh, I do hope that
Miss Comfort will like it!”
“How about the owners?” asked Bob as, a minute later, they were
all on the way to the river. “Well, not the owners, for I suppose there
aren’t any. But what about the quarry people, Nod? Think they’ll let
us have it?”
They all accompanied Laurie to the Pequot Queen

“Don’t see why not. It’s no good to them, and it’s in their way.
That’s where your father comes in, Bob. I want him to introduce us to
the head guy and say a good word. Think he’d mind?”
“No, but even if Miss Comfort lived in the boat, Nod, it would be
just as much in the way, wouldn’t it?” Bob looked puzzled.
“No, because it wouldn’t be there any longer. We’d have it hauled
out of their dock and taken to a place I found the other side of town,
up-river. Know where Ash Street comes out down there? Well, about
two blocks beyond that. We’d draw the boat up close to the bank,
make her fast, and build a sort of bridge to the deck. Some of that
stuff in your yard will come in very handy.”
“Why, that would be perfect!” declared Polly. “I didn’t want to
mention it, Laurie, but I was dreadfully afraid that Miss Comfort
wouldn’t want to live down there by the quarry, with the dynamite
shooting off and all those rough-looking men about!”
“Sounds as if the young fellow’s scheme might have something in
it after all,” allowed Ned. “Just the same, I’ll bet the quarry folks won’t
give up the boat unless some one pays them for storage or whatever
it’s called.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Bob. “Dad’s company is a pretty good
customer just now, and if dad will talk with the head of the firm—”
“He might tell them that he wouldn’t buy any more of their old
stone,” said Mae. “I guess that would—would bring them around!”
“Not a doubt of it,” laughed Ned. “Well, let’s have a good look at
the old ship first. Maybe she’s fallen to pieces since morning!”
But she hadn’t. They spent a full twenty minutes aboard her, while
Laurie explained and Polly’s enthusiasm grew by leaps and bounds.
Bob, too, came over to Laurie’s side, and even Ned, although he still
pretended to doubt, was secretly favorable. As for Mae—well, as
Polly went so went Mae! After they had viewed and discussed the
Pequot Queen to their satisfaction, Laurie led them back along the
river and showed the place he had selected for the Pequot Queen’s
future moorings. It was a quiet spot, disturbed by scant traffic along
the lane, now that the chain-works was no longer in operation.
Passing steamers and tugs might infrequently break the silence with
their whistles, and when, further down, a coal-barge tied up at the
wharf, the whir of the unloading machinery would come softened by
distance. Between the well-nigh unused road and the water lay a
strip of grass and weeds, a ribbon of rushes, a narrow pebbled
beach. Some sixty feet out a sunken canal-boat exposed her deck-
house above the surface. Six yards or so from the tiny beach the
remains of a wooden bulkhead stretched. In places the piles alone
remained, but opposite where Laurie had halted his companions
there was a twelve-foot stretch of planking still spiked to the piles.
“We could bring her up to that bulkhead and make her fast to the
piles at bow and stern. I figure that there’s just about enough water
there to float her. Then we’d built a sort of bridge or gangway from
the bulkhead to the shore. She couldn’t get away, and she couldn’t
sink. That old hulk out beyond would act as a sort of breakwater if
there was a storm, too.”
“I think it’s a perfectly gorgeous idea,” said Polly ecstatically. “And
just see, Mae, how very, very quiet and respectable it is here!”
Ned, though, seemed bent on enacting the rôle of Mr. Spoilsport.
“That’s all right,” he said, “but how are you going to get permission to
tie her up here? This property belongs to some one, doesn’t it?”
Laurie looked taken aback. “Why, I don’t believe so, Ned. Here’s
the road and here’s the river. There’s only a few feet—”
“Just the same,” Ned persisted, “some one’s bound to own as far
as high tide.”
“Maybe the folks in the house across the road,” suggested Mae.
“Mean to tell me,” demanded Laurie, “that the fellow who left that
canal-boat out there had to ask permission?”
“That’s in deep water,” answered Ned.
“So would the Pequot Queen be in deep water!”
“Maybe, but your bridge or gangplank wouldn’t be.”

The Measure of Greatness Philosophers On Magnanimity Sophia Vasalou Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Measure of Greatness Philosophers On Magnanimity Sophia Vasalou Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Measure of Greatness:

Philosophers on Magnanimity Sophia

The Measure of Greatness

Director, Mind Association: Julian Dodd

Recently published in the series

11. Twenty-First-Century Magnanimity: The Relevance of

Notes on the Contributors

Andrew J. Corsa is an Assistant Professor at Lynn University in its Dialogues of Learning

Christopher Gill is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Thought at the University of Exeter. He

x Notes on the Contributors

Andrew Huddleston is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. Prior to

Michael Moriarty is Drapers Professor of French at the University of Cambridge, and a

Notes on the Contributors xi

Robert C. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics, Emeritus at Baylor University,

3 Translation by Harold N. Fowler in Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus (Cambridge,

Antoine Gauthier in a panoramic work published in 1951, Magnanimité: l’idéal de

humility and gratitude, taken as a virtue of acknowledged dependence—in fact

If this conflict invites re-reading, the other source of conflict mentioned

concerned with the passion of hope.20 If Aristotle’s virtue is that of consummate

Arabic tradition (the subject of Chapter 5) which was structured by an emphasis

prominent place in Greek political life, it was not specifically connected to

and his theological predecessors to reconfigure magnanimity as a virtue of hope

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher Rowe with commentary by

1. English and Greek

In modern English ‘magnanimity’ normally refers to generosity, especially in

In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace:

When Churchill speaks of magnanimity in victory, he rejects the attitude that

1 I am grateful to participants at the conference in Birmingham on magnanimity for their questions,

Nor is he prone to marvel—for nothing is great to him—nor prone to recall

Aristotle offers an explanation of the behaviour that he attributes to the magnani-

2. Megalopsychia: Honour and Revenge

There are no certain examples of ‘megalopsychia’ and cognates in fifth-century

6 Reading eukolôs, rather than (with some mss) eukleôs.

In contrast to Philip, the Athenians might be expected to display magnanimity,

These fourth-century writers use ‘megalopsychia’ to describe the outlook of

The attitude that Demosthenes praises is magnanimity. Similarly, when Aeschines

Demosthenes so completely lacks Ajax’s magnanimity that there is no danger of

what makes someone magnanimous. Aristotle is not saying something obvious

3. Why We Ought Not to Recall Evils

14 Athenian observance of the amnesty: Rhodes, A Commentary on the Aristotelian Athenaion

and reconciliation is familiar in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Psalmist prays ‘O

4. A Puzzle About Magnanimity

Magnanimity: a civilized treatment (asteia chrêsis) of the things that happen.16

Magnanimity is a virtue of the soul in accordance with which one is able to

5. The Structure of Aristotle’s Argument

To see how Aristotle responds to the different aspects of megalopsychia that we

(1) 1123b1–15. It is generally accepted (dokei, 1123b1) that the magnanimous

N ed and Bob were watching Thomas, the man-of-all-work, rolling

They all accompanied Laurie to the Pequot Queen

You might also like