The Theophrastan Character Sketch as Moral and Political Philosophy

Around 319 BCE, Aristotle’s student Theophrastus wrote the Characters: 30 sketches of Athenian men, each defined by an ordinary vice, from ‘bad timing’ to ‘stinginess’. Recently, this ancient Greek text has been used in arguments about the philosophical value of literature, with Barbara Carnevali and Pascal Engel claiming that the Characters, and the genre of character-writing that it set into motion, provide readers with moral or practical knowledge. These arguments suggest that there is something of a Theophrastan aesthetic, which departs from both the emphasis on the spectators’ imitation of represented actions found in Plato, as well as the Aristotelian notion that works of art act on us through pity and fear. This tempting possibility provokes the question that this thesis sets out to answer: whether in the tradition of writing, reading, and adapting the Characters, its author, translators, and interpreters thought that something like this was the case. Within the arc of this investigation, a subsidiary question emerges: did this aesthetic rise and fall, and if so, when and why? To address these questions the thesis first examines the Characters in its original context (Chapter 1), and then looks at its reception in a long early modern period (1517–1748). It divides this into an enquiry into the sixteenth-century Latin translations (Chapter 2), the first English adaptations (Chapter 3), the wave of English character-writing during and after the Civil War (Chapter 4), the French adaptations (Chapter 5), and what it sees as an end to the moral and political reading of the Theophrastan character sketch in the early work of David Hume, who rejects using character sketches as philosophy in preference for uncovering underlying principles (Chapter 6). In conclusion, the thesis outlines how a Theophrastan aesthetic––which sees character sketches not only as providing knowledge but inspiring action––might speak to the present moment