My first idea for a book on ethical theory in ancient philosophy came in the 1970s: at that point it was to encompass Plato, Aristotle, and Hellenistic philosophy. My friend Jerry Schneewind, then a colleague at the University of Pittsburgh, proposed a joint project of a three-volume “history of ethics”: ancient ethics by me, post-Renaissance ethics by him, and someone (to be discovered) to deal with the intervening late ancient, medieval and Renaissance periods. Jerry eventually published his remarkable and ground-breaking The Invention of Autonomy (1997)—not exactly the envisaged general history of “modern” ethics, but quite close enough. Later, other friends, notably Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, insisted that the expanding field of ancient philosophy really needed a comprehensive study of ancient moral and ethical theory, and urged me to fill this gap. I agreed with them about the need (this was in the early 1990s, before Julia Annas had published The Morality of Happiness). But what theme could one use to weave a truly comprehensive, philosophically live history of the ancient tradition, which by this time had to include late ancient Platonism? I didn’t have the stomach for a traditional critical report on what current scholarship in the field says about Socrates’ ideas about virtues, Plato’s accounts in the Republic of virtue and happiness, and about pleasure in the Philebus, Aristotle’s ethical theory, the controversies surrounding Stoic and Epicurean ethics, and Plotinus’ spiritualist and Platonist conceptions of the human person and the human good. So, while I continued to write scholarly articles on topics in ancient ethics, moral psychology, political philosophy and related matters that struck me as interesting and needing attention, the book languished inchoate.