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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
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The Measure of
Greatness
Philosophers on Magnanimity
Edited by
S O P H IA VA S A L OU
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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.
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20 Introduction
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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.
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Honour as exhibitor, and Kirkaldy received a medal as draughtsman.
The drawings of these four ships were placed in the Louvre Museum
after being presented to the Emperor Napoleon.
The Scotia, the second and last of the Cunard iron paddle-
steamers, followed in 1862. She was 379 feet in length, of slightly
greater beam and depth than the Persia, and of 3671 tons, and her
engines of 4900 indicated horse-power gave her a speed of nearly
14¹⁄₂ knots. The Persia was sold in 1868, and was converted into a
sailing ship. The Scotia was kept in the service as long as possible,
as she was a favourite with the public, but her very limited cargo
space and her immense consumption of coal made it impossible to
run her except at considerable loss. She was consequently
withdrawn in 1875, and sold to the Telegraph Construction and
Maintenance company, which had her re-engined and turned into a
twin-screw boat. She remained in the service of this company for
many years, and was used for cable-laying purposes. These were
not, however, the Cunard Company’s first iron steamers, as they had
already had for some time two smaller vessels of iron in their
Liverpool and Continental service.
By this time the Cunard directors were convinced, by the success
of the Inman steamers, and by the advice of the engineers whom
they consulted, that the paddle-steamer had reached its utmost point
of development. Henceforth they built screw steamers, the first being
the China, launched in 1862, and followed by the Java in 1865, and
the Russia in 1867.
The “China” (Cunard, 1862).
The “Russia” (Cunard, 1867).

The Russia, and the Inman steamer City of Paris, the finest
commercial vessels afloat, left New York on the same day in
February 1869, within about an hour of each other and arrived at
Liverpool with only thirty-five minutes difference between them. They
made the run across the Atlantic, with the twenty minutes’ stop at
Queenstown, in about eight days, eighteen hours. The City of Paris
started first, and got in at 3.45 a.m., and the Russia at 4.20. The
vessels were in company for four days. Once the Russia passed the
City of Paris, but the Inman liner took the lead again, and at another
part of the voyage the Cunarder recovered her lost ground. As
racing, however, was strictly forbidden by the rules of the two
companies, and the ships’ logs showed that no extra pressure of
steam was used, it is supposed that in this, as in many other cases
of supposed ocean racing, the race existed mainly in the imagination
of the passengers, who for lack of anything else to do worked
themselves up into a frenzy of excitement about it. The captains, of
course, merely concerned themselves with putting in all the
seamanship they knew. Pictures published at the time show that
both vessels were under full sail, and even carried stunsails.
The China, after some years’ service, was sold and converted into
the sailing ship Theodor, and proved as fast after the change as
when a steamer. She foundered at sea in 1908.
In 1866 another competitor appeared on the North Atlantic. The
fate of the Collins and Galway Lines did not deter Mr. S. B. Guion
from inaugurating a rival service to that maintained by the Cunard
and Inman Lines, and for a time it seemed as if he would be
successful in wresting from the splendid vessels of these companies
the premier position on the Atlantic. The steamships which he placed
on the service between Liverpool and New York were at that period
superior in size, speed, and luxury to any of their competitors. He
started the service with the Manhattan, and thus inaugurated in 1866
what may be called the great race of the greyhounds of the Atlantic.
The Manhattan was built by the Palmer Company of Newcastle-on-
Tyne, and was the first of seven steamers comprising the line. Her
length was 343 feet, her beam 42 feet 6 inches, and her depth 28
feet, and her register was 2866 tons. She had accommodation for 72
passengers in the first class, and 800 in the second class, and
besides taking 1000 tons of coal could carry 1500 tons of cargo. A
feature of this vessel was the attention paid to the comfort of the
second-class passengers, the cabins for this class being on the main
deck and thoroughly ventilated, wherein they showed a marked
improvement on the many other vessels carrying emigrants. She
was fitted with low-pressure inverted direct-acting surface
condensing engines, designed by Messrs. J. Jordan and Co. These
had cylinders of 60 inches in diameter, with a piston stroke of 42
inches. The Chicago and the Merrimac, sister ships, followed from
the same builders. The Chicago was wrecked in a fog on the rocks
near the entrance to Cork Harbour, and, a contrast to some of the
disasters to Atlantic liners, not a life was lost, the whole of the
passengers and crew, numbering 130, being landed by the ship’s
boats within an hour of the accident. The earlier Guion liners were
brig-rigged steamers, and some of them carried the new American
double topsails on both masts. Other boats which formed a part of
the earlier fleet of the Guion Line were the Nebraska, Minnesota,
Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. In 1870 these were augmented by the
Wyoming and Wisconsin, also built and engined by Messrs. Palmer.
These were each 366 feet long, 43 feet broad, 34 feet deep, and of
3238 tons register. Among other distinctive features they had the first
compound engines on the transatlantic route. These had one vertical
high-pressure cylinder of 60 inches in diameter, and one double-
trunk horizontal low-pressure cylinder of 120 inches in diameter, both
working on the same crank, and having a stroke of 42 inches. Great
expectations as to speed were entertained when the Montana and
Dakota, from the Palmer yards, were brought into the service in
1872. They exhibited a new design in hull and machinery as they
had an abnormal slope of side, flush steel plating, and water-tube
boilers. These vessels each had a length of a little over 400 feet,
with a breadth of 43³⁄₄ feet and a depth of 40³⁄₄ feet. Like the
Wyoming and Wisconsin, they had compound engines, one high-
pressure cylinder of 60 inches diameter, working inverted on a
forward crank, and two low-pressure cylinders working horizontally
on the after crank. The Montana’s boilers were constructed of a
series of cross-tubes 15 inches in diameter and were intended to
carry a head of 100 lb. of steam, but in consequence of an explosion
when at 70 lb. pressure, they were replaced by ordinary tubular
boilers with a pressure of 80 lb. of steam. The Dakota was wrecked
on the Welsh coast in May 1877, and a similar fate befell the
Montana three years later. Seven years passed and then the Arizona
was brought into the Guion service. She was of iron and was built
and engined by Messrs. John Elder and Co. of Glasgow. Her
dimensions were: 450 feet long, 45¹⁄₈ feet broad, 35³⁄₄ feet deep,
with a register of 5147 tons. She differed from the earlier boats of the
line by being four-masted, carrying square sails on the fore and main
masts, having two funnels, and having her saloon accommodation
amidships; in all these particulars, as well as in the straight cutwater,
she bore a strong resemblance to her rivals of the White Star Line.
Model of the “City of Paris,” 1866.
Although there was no deviation in her hull from the existing type,
her machinery displayed some novel features. Her engines were
compound with three crank shafts, each having one cylinder. The
high-pressure cylinder was 62 inches in diameter, and was placed in
the centre, between the low-pressure cylinders each of 90 inches,
and all had a piston stroke of 66 inches. Steam was generated in
seven boilers capable of withstanding 90 lb. pressure, and furnished
with thirty-nine furnaces, which had an average coal consumption of
125 tons per day, or in round figures 25 per cent. in excess of her
fastest rivals, which were then in the White Star Line. On her
homeward voyage from New York in July 1879, the Arizona
succeeded in breaking the record, and repeated the feat on her
outward passage in May 1880, when she made the passage from
Queenstown to New York in 7 days, 10 hours, 47 minutes, thus
proving herself for two years in succession the fastest boat on the
Atlantic. While on her homeward passage in November 1879, the
Arizona collided at full speed with an iceberg. Although she gave the
berg a direct blow she is one of the few vessels that have managed
to survive after such an experience. It was stated at the time that
there was a projecting spur of ice from the berg under water, and on
this the ship slid. Her weight caused the berg to rock, and it was to
this circumstance alone that she owed her safety, for the rocking of
the huge mass of ice enabled her to slip off the spur into deep water
again. A tremendous quantity of ice, dislodged by the shock, crashed
down upon her deck, doing a considerable amount of damage, and
she had only drifted a few hundred yards from the berg, after the
impact, when an immense portion of it fell at the spot where only a
few moments previously the ship had rested. This is one of the
narrowest escapes recorded in the annals of the sea. Fortunately,
her collision bulkhead withstood the enormous strain, and the vessel
received a magnificent, though entirely undesired, testimonial to the
soundness and stability of her construction. She put into St. John’s,
Newfoundland, and was found to be so badly damaged that she had
to have entirely new bows. The success of the Arizona led to the
building of the Alaska, which proved another triumph for Messrs.
John Elder and Co., for the speed she developed won her the title of
the Atlantic Greyhound, her homeward passage in June 1882 being
less than seven days. This remarkable run was, however, eclipsed
by the Oregon, the last vessel added by the Guion Company prior to
its dissolution; she sailed from Liverpool to New York on October 6,
1883, and accomplished the passage from Queensland to Sandy
Hook in 6 days 10 hours 9 minutes. The Oregon was an iron vessel
built and engined by Messrs. John Elder and Co., on similar lines to,
but of greater dimensions than, the Arizona and the Alaska. She was
no less than 500 feet in length, 54 feet wide, 40 feet deep, and
registered 7375 tons. Her engines were compound and consisted of
one 70-inch high-pressure cylinder placed in the centre, and two low-
pressure 104-inch cylinders, with a 6-foot stroke; her boilers had a
steam-pressure of 110 lb., and her average daily consumption of
coal was 310 tons.
The “Oregon” (Cunard and Guion Lines, 1883).
From about this time the passenger service across the Atlantic
began to assume proportions and a degree of importance to which it
had never before attained. Hitherto the steamers engaged on the
transatlantic route had depended considerably on their cargo
capacity as a means of meeting expenses, but with the demand for
larger and faster vessels—and faster vessels could only be made
larger—there was developed an express passenger boat which
depended almost wholly on its passenger accommodation and
carried a much smaller amount of cargo than some of the older and
smaller vessels then engaged in the trade. The Guion Line did not
wholly meet these requirements, and on the death of Mr. S. B.
Guion, the line gradually dropped out of existence, the remaining
vessels of the famous fleet of steamers being dispersed in various
directions. Some years before this happened, however, the White
Star Line began to build steamers for the Atlantic.
The White Star Line has always been the line of big ships. In its
sailing-ship days it owned some of the finest wooden clippers afloat,
famous alike for their size and speed. When Mr. T. H. Ismay in 1867
took over the management of the line and formed with some friends
the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company, there were already in
existence the Cunard, Inman, Guion, and National Lines, which had
secured such control of the Atlantic trade that it seemed almost
rashness for the new line to venture to compete with them. “Nothing
venture, nothing win”; the line now holds a position second to none
in the world for the magnificence and size of its steamers. All its
vessels have been built by Messrs. Harland and Wolff at Belfast. The
first of the fleet was the Oceanic, launched on August 27, 1870,
which started on her maiden voyage and the inaugural voyage of the
fleet on March 2, 1871. Several vessels of the same type followed in
rapid succession, all having the straight stem, four masts, and single
funnel which were the distinguishing marks of the White Star
steamers in those days. The Oceanic was 420 feet long, 41 feet
beam, 31 feet deep, and had a registered tonnage of 3707. These
steamers were somewhat differently designed from the other boats
on the North Atlantic. The high bulwarks and narrow wooden deck-
houses were dispensed with, and instead another iron deck was
added with open iron railings round it, there being thus nothing to
hold any water that might come on board. The saloons were
amidships and extended the entire width of the vessel, and the
staterooms were placed before and after the saloon and were better
lighted and ventilated than those of any other steamers. The engines
also were of a novel type; they were compound, four-cylindered, and
arranged tandem, with two high-pressure cylinders each 41 inches
diameter and two low-pressure each 78 inches in diameter, working
on two cranks and having a stroke of five feet. The engines were
arranged fore and aft, and each formed a complete engine in itself,
so that either could be worked in case of accident to the other. The
Oceanic inaugurated the era of the modern type of express ocean
liner. After a few voyages some alterations were made in her, which
added to her efficiency, her masts being shortened, and a whaleback
being built over her stern. In 1875 she was transferred, together with
her sisters the Belgic and Gaelic, to the Pacific to inaugurate the
White Star steam service between Hong-Kong, Yokohama, and San
Francisco.
Two famous sister ships the White Star Line had were the
Germanic and Britannic, built in 1875 and 1874 respectively; they
were each 455 feet long, 45 feet broad, 33 feet 9 inches deep, and
of 5004 tons register. The hulls were built at Belfast, but the engines
were by Maudslay, Sons and Field and similar to those of the
Oceanic. With a speed rather above 16 knots, they were the first to
reduce the passage to below seven days. Numerous experiments
were made with a lifting propeller in the Britannic, but they were not
a success and the principle was never tried in any more of the
company’s boats. The company sought also to improve the lighting
of their steamers. The old system of lighting a ship by candles was
seldom more than enough to make the darkness visible, and oil
lamps were not always much better; so an attempt was made to
install a gas-lighting apparatus. It worked very well while the vessel
was in port, the experiment being made on the Adriatic in 1872, and
the Celtic in 1873; but there was a certain amount of leakage
through the working of the ship in a sea-way and the experiment was
abandoned. Oil lamps were then installed in these steamers and
remained in use until superseded by electric light. Another White
Star experiment was with the oscillating saloon, intended to keep
berths and staterooms level while the ship was rolling, but this was
no more a success on the broad Atlantic than it was on the English
Channel when tried in the steamer Bessemer.
Other lines which have played a conspicuous part in the North
Atlantic trade are the State, the Beaver, and the National Lines, all of
which owned some very fine steamers. The last named was founded
to run a line between Liverpool and the ports of the Confederate
States when the war should terminate, but it proved a financial
failure and the promoters then decided to enter the Liverpool and
New York trade. Its three vessels, Louisiana, Virginia, and
Pennsylvania, were the largest cargo-carriers on the ocean, being of
nearly 3500 tons gross. Three larger steamers, The Queen, Erin,
and Helvetia, were added in 1864, and three more in the next two
years. The Italy, of 4300 tons, was regarded as a wonderful ship on
account of her size, and is stated to have been the first of her type in
which compound engines were fitted. Other and larger steamers
were added to the fleet to meet its extensive requirements, until it
sustained not only a weekly service each way between Liverpool and
New York, but also had regular sailings from London to New York,
calling at Havre. Its steamers were not beautiful or fast, but were
very steady, made cargo-carrying a feature, and conveyed a great
number of emigrants. Then the National Line surprised every one by
bringing out in 1884 one of the most beautiful and graceful steamers
ever seen on the Atlantic, and certainly the fastest of her day—the
America, which, as she was built of steel, belongs properly to a later
period of ship construction. She was 5528 tons gross, built and
engined by Messrs. J. and G. Thomson, and was sold in a few
months to the Italian Government. Some years later the line began
to decline and it is now a part of the “Combine,” only two or three
vessels being under its flag.
The “America” (National Line, 1884).
The first mail steam-ship line between Liverpool and Canada was
started by McKean, McLarty, and Lamont of Liverpool in 1852 under
contract with the Government, but the effort was a failure, and in the
next year H. and A. Allan undertook the work. Their first steamer was
the Canadian in 1853, followed by the Indian, North American, and
Anglo-Saxon, and as the Grand Trunk Railway was completed next
year to Portland, this town became the winter terminus of the line
and Montreal the summer terminus. Upon the completion of the
intercolonial railway in 1876, connecting Quebec with Halifax, the
Nova Scotian port became the winter terminus of the Allan Line. By
1882 the service had increased to such an extent that the sailings
were made weekly instead of fortnightly. In 1862 the Allans
established a line between Glasgow and Montreal; a few years
afterwards sailings were made between London and Canada, and
more recently still Continental calls were added.
The Donaldson Line, established in 1855, has for many years
maintained a service between Glasgow and Montreal, its vessels
ranging from sailers to some of the finest steamers entering the St.
Lawrence River. Its present service is performed with the twin-screw
steamers Athenia and Cassandra, and nine single-screw boats; and
another twin-screw boat, the Saturnia, is shortly to be delivered, and
will be of about 8000 tons, the largest in the company’s fleet. The
salient feature of the Donaldson Line passenger steamers is the
carriage of one class of cabin passengers only, called second cabin.
This enables travellers to enjoy the best the ships afford, the
accommodation being equal to that on many long-distance
steamers, such as those that go to Australia. Its first steamer to
Montreal was the Astarte in 1874, upon the withdrawal of the line
from the South American trade in which it had been engaged up to
then; and its Canadian service, fortnightly at first, became weekly in
1880. A line to Baltimore, Maryland, was established in the winter of
1886-7, and the winter service to Canada began with the Baltimore
boats calling at Halifax on their west-bound voyages.
No further attempt was made by the Americans to establish a line
of steamers across the Atlantic until 1871, but in that year Messrs.
Cramp of Philadelphia received orders for four large steamers of
over 3000 tons each, and these with some English vessels
maintained the service of the American Line. In 1884 the Red Star
Line took over the line and ran the boats as cargo steamers. They
were again transferred in 1893 to another American Line which three
years later sold them. In the meantime, the later American Line
ordered a number of vessels and, besides buying up the Inman Line,
absorbed the Inman and International, which owned the steamers
City of Paris and City of New York. The new owners dropped the
words “City of,” and also had two steamers built in America to
comply with the Act of Congress under which the line was formed.
The screw propeller was naturally not long in commending itself to
the builders of ships for the long voyages to India and Australia.
Mr. John Dudgeon, in an article published in 1856 on steam
expansion and the suitability of expansion engines for long voyages,
was almost prophetic in his remarks on the relative value of the
screw propeller and the paddle-wheel. In the article he said:
“The application of this property in steam to Australian screw
steam navigation, would, if adopted, effect a radical change in the
whole question. When we find that vessels of the magnitude of the
Great Britain have to run thousands of miles out of their course to
get a fresh supply of coal, it becomes a question whether that state
of matters may not be amended. I therefore propose that vessels of,
say, 2000 tons be built and fitted with engines working up to 1100
horses actual power, which would ... consume 1609·5 lb. of coal per
hour, and with this power the vessel would steam at least 10 knots
an hour ... equal to 19 tons 4 cwt. per day and a speed of 240 knots;
500 tons of coal would therefore be enough for a run of twenty-five
days, and 6000 nautical miles. Should it be deemed prudent to carry
a reserve stock, coal for an additional 1500 miles would still not
seriously interfere with the carrying properties of a large vessel,
while it would obviate the necessity of having any stoppage but the
Cape between Great Britain and Port Phillip. A vessel of 2000 tons
builders’ measurement will carry at least 2000 tons dead weight,
over and above her own weight of ship and machinery. Presuming
that she takes coal for 9000 miles, or 750 tons, we still have a
balance of 1250 tons for cargo and, in a well-arranged vessel, room
for 350 passengers. Now I apprehend that as regularity and
multiplied means of communication are the prime wants in all
commercial matters, we should do better to sail such ships as these,
with frequent departures, than if we were to build vessels of double
the size, and have double the time to wait for a full freight and a full
complement of passengers. No doubt that in a vessel double the
size we may manage to carry coal for the whole distance to Port
Phillip, but I apprehend that the delay of waiting for freight and
passengers would more than balance the delay of coaling at the
Cape. It must also be cheaper to send out coals in vessels adapted
for the trade of carrying coal, than to occupy the valuable room in
even a large vessel which ought to be appropriated to the carriage of
that class of goods which will pay for rapid steam communication.
The sole question at issue is: Can a vessel of from 2000 to 3000
tons be worked with an economy equal to a vessel of from 4000 to
6000 tons? I contend that not only is such the case, but that the
balance of returns, and convenience to the public, must be in favour
of the moderate-sized vessel. With such Leviathan vessels there is,
first, the double outlay upon one ship and corresponding interest of
capital; secondly, there is a double risk in case of losing the ship; a
correspondingly higher premium of insurance; additional risk of not
having full cargo; additional time required for procuring freight,
stowing, and loading vessel, and the almost impossible feat to be
performed of finding a sufficiently large body of passengers ready to
go at the same time; the impossibility of entering the ordinary docks
in the kingdom necessitating the use of a port of embarkation at a
distance from the main channel of business. The whole of these
weighty objections then have to be balanced by the economy
theoretically presumed to be attainable by the increased capacity of
vessels for carrying coal, cargo, and passengers. It appears obvious
that coal-carrying can be done cheaper by auxiliary vessels, where
the station is in a direct line, than by the vessel carrying them
herself. It is only when the power of carrying coal is so small or the
consumption is so large, that the vessel is forced to make a great
number of stoppages, and make considerable detours to arrive at
coaling stations, that stopping to coal becomes so serious an evil.”
The writer goes on to contend that the propeller should be placed
outside the rudder, so that a coarse pitch may work with proper
effect, “as it is clearly proved that working the propeller in the
deadwood destroys a large portion of its useful effect, so much so
that an increase in the pitch of a propeller to the extent of one-third
does not show more slip (when used behind the rudder) than the
two-thirds when used before it.” He further contended that the
proportion of stroke to diameter should be greater in an engine that
is to drive a screw propeller direct than what is required for applying
the same power to a paddle-wheel, and it would soon be found that
as an instrument of propulsion, even for great speed, the screw
would not be inferior to the most approved patent paddle-wheel.
One has only to read a declaration of this character, by one of the
leading shipbuilders of his day, and then compare the situation, the
difficulties of which appeared to him wellnigh insuperable, but every
one of which has passed away, with the frequent sailings of the
enormous vessels which journey the whole of the way between
England and Australia under steam alone without stopping, and
carry passengers by the hundred, to realise the phenomenal
developments which have marked the progress of the last fifty years.
Races between steamers fitted with the rival modes of propulsion
were not uncommon, but did not always take place with official
sanction, though the results were carefully noted. One most exciting
race was held by arrangement in the Channel to test the relative
capacities of twin-screw and paddle boats in March 1865, the
competitors being the twin-screw steamer Mary Augusta and the
London, Chatham, and Dover Railway Company’s new steamer La
France, said to be the fastest boat in the Channel service. The screw
boat left Greenhithe early in the morning and steamed down to
Dover to wait the departure of the mail steamer. The latter, when
time was taken, was about three cables’ length ahead of and on the
weather bow of the Mary Augusta. The screw drew level, but a hot
bearing developed in her starboard engine, necessitating that engine
making fewer revolutions and causing her to steer badly. She
continued to gain however, her rival, according to a contemporary
record, “emitting such immense volumes of steam and smoke from
her two funnels as satisfactorily proved that the engines were having
more steam than they could make use of, and that La France could
never at any time or under any circumstances during her yet short
career have been driven with more purpose to win than at the
present.” After the heated bearing was cooled the Mary Augusta
resumed her full speed and the race was her own from that moment,
and she reached Calais Pier three and a half miles ahead. The Mary
Augusta returned to England at full speed without entering Calais
Harbour. The time occupied by her in the double run from Dover to
Calais and back was 2 hours 45 minutes 10 seconds, a rate of
speed never equalled by any screw steamer before. She went to the
Thames at full speed in a violent north-east gale and was back at
Gravesend at a quarter-past nine the same evening.
We will now continue the history of the steam-ship services to the
East, Africa, and South America. The P. & O. steamer Himalaya has
already been mentioned. She was built of iron, was launched at
Mare’s shipyard at Blackwall in May 1853, and was originally
intended to carry paddle-wheels driven by engines of 1200 horse-
power, but at an early stage in her construction it was decided that
she should be a screw boat. Her engines, by John Penn and Son,
were of 700 horse-power. This steamer was 340 feet between
perpendiculars and 46 feet 2 inches beam, and of 3550 tons.
One notable steamer the company had was the Delta, launched in
1859 by the Thames Iron Works and Shipbuilding Company, and
described as the handsomest of her class yet built on the Thames.
She was a clipper-bowed vessel, carrying stump bowsprit, had two
masts, and was fore and aft schooner-rigged. Her masts and her two
funnels raked aft considerably, and gave her the appearance of
possessing great speed. She was 350 feet in length over all, with a
beam of 35 feet 3 inches. The engines, by Penn of Greenwich, were
previously in the Valetta, from which they were taken to make room
for machinery of less power. The change was of benefit to the
Valetta, as she did equally well with her new engines. At her trial in
Stokes Bay the Delta averaged rather more than 14¹⁄₂ knots an hour,
stated to be a greater speed than had been attained there by any
previous vessel. She was double the tonnage of the Valetta and
carried 300 tons more coal, and had 1200 tons more displacement.
Her engines, of 400 nominal horse-power, gave an indicated horse-
power of over 1600.
The “Delta” leaving Marseilles for the Opening of the Suez
Canal.
The company kept abreast of the times in its steam-ships, and

without displaying any recklessness was not behind in adopting
innovations likely to be advantageous. Its experiences with the
compound engine were not such, however, as to encourage it to take
the lead with new inventions. Its first essay in this direction was in
the Mooltan, built in 1860, and by 1864 several steamers had been
constructed with the new and costly engines.
“But the result was a grave disappointment. The economy was
undoubted; but the machinery, although it had been fitted by one of
the most eminent firms in the country, regardless of cost, was found
to be unreliable. The accidents were numerous, and although
comparatively slight, they occurred so frequently that the efficiency
of the mail service was in danger of being impaired. The result was
that several of the ships thus fitted had these costly engines
replaced by less complex machinery, involving the company in
serious loss. The Mooltan was an example of a vessel fitted with
appliances in advance of the age. Not only were her engines of the
new type, but she was likewise fitted with hydraulic steering gear and
refrigerating machinery; and all these appliances had eventually to
be removed, because they could not be relied on to work
satisfactorily throughout a long voyage. It was not until 1869 that the
company succeeded in building a steamer with high and low
pressure machinery which could be considered thoroughly
successful.”[88]
[88] P. & O. Company’s Handbook.
The African Steamship Company was incorporated in 1852 to

carry out a contract with the British Government for conveying the
mails monthly to the principal ports of the west coast of Africa and to
Madeira and Teneriffe, and also to establish a line of steamers
between Sierra Leone and the West Indies. The contract for the
mails was entered into by Mr. Macgregor Laird in December 1851,
and was for ten years from the ensuing December, commencing with
an annual payment of £23,250 and diminishing by £500 a year
during the continuance of the contract, thus averaging £21,500 per
annum.
Five steamers were built for this service by Laird of Birkenhead;
they were of iron and were screw-propelled vessels. By 1860 the
company was in difficulties and it was proposed to wind it up, but the
directors were persuaded to try a service between Liverpool and the
west coast of Africa, with excellent results to all concerned for a time,
but the control of the company was not too efficient in London and
the concern dwindled until, in 1891, it passed into the possession of
Elder Dempster and Co., and then progressed even more rapidly
than it had previously declined.
The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, who it will be
remembered launched their first steamers in 1841, adopted the
screw propeller in 1849 when they launched the Esk. They were the
first to adopt screw propulsion for the conveyance of mails. The
company assisted the Panama Railroad Company in 1850 by
lending them 125,000 dollars towards the completion of the railroad
across the isthmus, and in January 1851 opened a mail service from
Southampton to Brazil and the River Plate. Several of their steamers
were chartered as transports during the Crimean War. The Dee was
chartered in 1860 to the French Government to convey the “Irish
Brigade,” which had been raised in Ireland to fight for Pope Pius IX.
against Garibaldi, from Havre to Cork on their return from Italy.
In the following year the Confederate States commissioners,
Messrs. Slidell and Mason, were taken by force in West Indian
waters by the Federals from the R.M.S.P. Trent. The “Trent affair,” as
the ensuing international crisis was called, ended in January 1862,
when the company’s La Plata arrived at Southampton with the two
commissioners on board.
The Shannon, one of their steamers, arrived at Southampton in
August 1864 from the West Indies with a record consignment of
specie, consisting of gold and silver to the value of £1,511,426 in
2207 packages, which was transferred to the Bank of England in
forty-one waggons. In 1869 the R.M.S.P. transatlantic steamers
extended their voyage from Rio de Janeiro to Buenos Ayres, thus
avoiding transfer to smaller vessels at Rio de Janeiro; the Douro
being the steamer inaugurating this extension.
The steam-ship Victoria, built of iron in 1852 for the Australian
Royal Mail Steam Navigation Company, gained the prize of £500
offered by the colonies for the fastest voyage to Australia. Her time
from Gravesend to Adelaide was sixty days, including two days’ stay
at St. Vincent. She was designed by Messrs. I. K. Brunel and J.
Scott Russell for a speed of ten knots under full steam, and to
provide as much passenger accommodation and space for high-
priced cargo as her coal requirements would permit. She was 261
feet on the water-line and registered 1350 tons. The entrance and
run of the ship were of the wave-like form, while the central 45 feet
were parallel; the bilges were round, the topsides tumbled home,
and there was no external keel, so that she was very heavy in a
seaway. The hull was in twelve water-tight compartments, and
longitudinal bulkheads were carried through from the engine and
boiler rooms so as to separate the coal from the machinery. The
engines were of the oscillating type. The ship had four masts and a
sail area of 1540 square yards. Under steam alone the engines at
full power made 59 revolutions per minute and gave a speed of 11
knots, with a coal consumption of 37 tons per 24 hours. Under sail
alone, with the screw held vertically, the speed was 5¹⁄₂ knots, but
when the screw was allowed to run freely the speed increased to 7¹⁄₂
knots. Her average speed was nearly 11³⁄₄ knots.
The Pacific Steam Navigation Company’s operations were
confined to the west coast of South America until 1865, when, in
pursuance of a supplemental charter, it extended its sphere to the
River Plate. Steamers were specially built for the service, and in
1868, the Pacific, after being about three years on the coast, sailed
for Liverpool from Valparaiso to inaugurate the new mail service. Six
other iron screw vessels were added and the venture proved so
profitable that it was determined to make the sailings fortnightly, and
the steamers Chimborazo, Aconcagua, Garonne, Cuzco, and
Lusitania were built. All these steamers were afterwards in the Orient
Line’s service to Australia, together with the John Elder, which was
one of the earlier batch of boats on the Liverpool-Valparaiso route.
Seven more steamers were added in 1871, and by 1873 the number
of new vessels totalled eighteen. They were all clipper-bowed
barque-rigged steamers and were very handsome craft. After this the
company went in for the straight stem and pole-masted type of
steamer.
The rivalry in the various over-sea trades was very great, and no
sooner did one shipowner secure a vessel which surpassed its
competitors than other owners sought to improve upon it. The sailing
ships were soon obliged to give way to the steam auxiliary vessels,
especially when craft like the Lightning appeared. The Lightning was
built by the Hendersons of Glasgow, and so pleased were her
owners, Messrs. Apcar of Calcutta, and their representative, Captain
Durham, with her, that he ordered the Thunder. The Thunder was
built by Mr. Lungley at his yard on the Thames and engined by
Messrs. Dudgeon, and was an improved edition of her predecessor.
The Thunder was launched in December 1859, and soon
demonstrated that she was the fastest steamer yet provided with a

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The Measure of Greatness:

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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

The “Russia” (Cunard, 1867).

Model of the “City of Paris,” 1866.

The “Oregon” (Cunard and Guion Lines, 1883).

The company kept abreast of the times in its steam-ships, and

The African Steamship Company was incorporated in 1852 to

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