Crush two pounds of cheese in a mixing bowl; when that is thoroughly mashed, add a pound of wheat flour or, if you want the cake to be lighter, just half a pound of fine flour and mix thoroughly with the cheese. Add one egg and mix together well. Make it into a loaf, place it on leaves and bake slowly on a warm hearth under a crock.

Cato the Elder's recipe for sacrificial cakes

"What is the subject of our present enquiry?
'Pleasure.'
Submit it to the standard, put it on the scales. For something to be good, must it be something that we can properly place confidence in and trust in?
'Indeed it must.'
Can we properly place confidence, then, in something that is unstable?
'No.'
Is pleasure stable?
'No, it isn't.'
Away with it, then; take it out of the scales, and drive it away from the realm of good things. But if your sight is none too keen and one set of scales isn't enough for you, bring another. Is the good something that can properly inspire us with pride?
'It is indeed.'
Is the pleasure of the moment, then, something that can properly inspire us with pride? Take care not to say that it is, or I'll no longer regard you as being worthy of even using the scales!"

Epictetus, Discourses 2.11

When you consider the nature of every body, what, besides the soul, do you think sustains and supports it, so that it lives and moves about?
'There isn't anything.'
What about when you consider the nature of everything else? Don't you agree with Anaxagoras that it is ordered and sustained by mind or soul?
'I do.'

Plato, Cratylus 400a

For all things are known by something similar to them: the sensible by sense perception, the scientific object by science, the intelligible by the intellect, the One by what is like the One. So then, when thinking, the soul knows both itself and what it thinks through ‘touch’, as we said, but when it is transcending thinking, it knows neither itself nor that towards which it directed its own ‘one’.

Proclus, On Providence 31

The chief fruit of piety is to honour God according to the laws of our country, not deeming that God has need of anything, but that He calls us to honour Him by His truly reverend and blessed majesty. We are not harmed by reverencing God's altars, nor benefited by neglecting them. But whoever honours God under the impression that He is in need of him, unconsciously deems himself greater than God. 'Tis not the anger of the gods that injures us, but our own ignorance of their nature. Anger is foreign to the gods, for anger is involuntary, and there is nothing involuntary in God. Do not then dishonour the divine nature by false human opinions, since thou wilt not injure the eternally blessed One, whose immortal nature is incapable of injury, but thou wilt blind thyself to the conception of what is greatest and chiefest.

Porphyry, Letter to Marcella 18

But he who neither perceives by himself nor takes in a lesson from another, he on the other hand is a worthless man.

Hesiod, Works and Days

Those who weep and lament, besides not being able to recover what they have lost, or recall to life those that are dead, impel the soul to greater perturbations, in consequence of its being filled with much depravity. It is requisite therefore, that, being washed and purified, we should by all possible contrivances wipe away our inveterate stains by the reasonings of philosophy. But we shall accomplish this by adhering to prudence and temperance, being satisfied with our present circumstances, and not aspiring after many things.

Hipparchus, On Tranquility

Just as the bleary, uncleansed eye cannot behold exceeding brightness, so the soul that has not secured virtue is incapable of reflecting the beauty of truth. For it is not lawful for the impure to lay hold of the pure.

Hierocles, Commentary on the Golden Verses Proem

Death, I think, is actually nothing but the separation of two things from each other, the soul and the body.

Plato, Gorgias 524b

If you aren't practicing, you're just an unpaid academic!

One of the most damaging mischaracterizations of Platonic metaphysics is the idea that the material world is a "copy" of the divine immaterial world. While it is not totally wrong to speak in terms of copy, it can be misleading. Far from being a mere copy, our world is forever participating in the divine - to be sure, its participation is temporal and imperfect, but the key point is that it is an ongoing expression of divinity. The language of "copy" tends to degrade the universe whereas the correct understanding of participation actually elevates it.

Our motto, as everyone knows, is to live in conformity with nature: it is quite contrary to nature to torture one’s body… Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one.

Seneca, Letter 5

The soul is divided into reasoning power, anger and desire. Reasoning power rules knowledge, anger deals with impulse, and desire bravely rules the soul’s affections. When these three parts unite into one action, exhibiting a composite energy, then in the soul results concord and virtue. When sedition divides them, then appear discord and vice. Virtue therefore contains three elements; reason, power, and deliberate choice. The soul’s reasoning power’s virtue is prudence, which is a habit of contemplating and judging. The irascible part’s virtue is fortitude; which is a habit of enduring dreadful things, and resisting them. The appetitive part’s virtue is temperance; which is a moderation and detention of the pleasures which arise from the body. The whole soul’s virtue is justice; for men indeed become bad either through vice, or through incontinence, or through a natural ferocity. They injure each other either through gain, pleasure or ambition. More appropriately therefore does vice
belong to the soul’s reasoning part. While prudence is similar to good art, vice resembles bad art, inventing contrivances to act unjustly. Incontinence pertains to the soul’s appetitive part, as continence consists in subduing, and incontinence in failure to subdue pleasures. Ferocity belongs to the soul’s irascible part, for when someone activated by evil desires is gratified not as a man should be, but as a beast would be, then this is called ferocity.

The effects of these dispositions also result from the things for the sake of which they are performed. Vice, hailing from the soul’s reasoning part results in avarice; the irascible part’s fault is ambition, which results in ferocity; and as the appetitive part ends in pleasure, this generates incontinence. As unjust actions are the results of so many causes, so also are just deeds; for virtue is a naturally beneficent and profitable as vice is maleficent and harmful.

Theages, On the Virtues

'Plato knew as well as the Scholastic philosophers that the artist as such has no moral responsibilities, and can sin as an artist only if he fails to consider the sole good of the work to be done, whatever it may be.*1

But like Cicero, Plato also knows that “though he is an artist, he is nevertheless a man”*2 and, if a free man, responsible as such for whatever it may be that he undertakes to make; a man who, if he represents what ought not to be represented and brings into being things unworthy of free men, should be punished, or at the least restrained or exiled like any other criminal or madman.

It is precisely those poets or other artists who imitate anything and everything, and are not ashamed to represent or even “idealize” things essentially base, that Plato, without respect for their abilities, however great, would banish from the society of rational men, “lest from the imitation of shameful things men should imbibe their actuality,”*3.' - Ananda Coomaraswamy

*1 Laws 670E; Sum Theol. 1.91.3, I-II.57 ad 2.
*2 Cicero, Pro quinctio xxv.78.
*3 Republic 395c; cf 395-401, esp. 401BC, 605-607, and Laws 656c.

So we should do the other things, including pleasant things, for the sake of good things, and not good things for the sake of pleasant things.

Plato, Gorgias 500a

So this is how I set down the matter, and I say that this is true. And if it is true, then a person who wants to be happy must evidently pursue and practice self-control. Each of us must flee away from lack of discipline as quickly as his feet will carry, and must above all make sure that he has no need of being disciplined, but if he does have that need, either he himself or anyone in his house, either a private citizen or a whole city, he must pay his due and must be disciplined, if he's to be happy. This is the target which I think one should look to in living, and in his actions he should direct all of his own affairs and those of his city to the end that justice and self-control will be present in one who is to be blessed. He should not allow his appetites to be undisciplined or undertake to fill them up - that's interminably bad - and live the life of a marauder. Such a man could not be dear to another man or to a god, for he cannot be a partner, and where there's no partnership there's no friendship. Yes, Callicles, wise men claim that partnership and friendship, orderliness, self-control, and justice hold together heaven and earth, and gods and men, and that is why they call this universe a world order, my friend, and not an undisciplined world-disorder.

Plato, Gorgias 507c-508a

'It is fitting' for each of us to do these things 'according to the customs of one's country'. For God is always simultaneously present everywhere, with all of his divine powers. But we are limited to one form among those many forms produced by God, the human form, and within the human form are limited to one form of life for now and one choice of life, and are divided up into a little portion of the universe and of the earth itself. So different people partake in a different instance of divine goodness, and they do so in a different way at different times and places. You can at least see that when it is day with us, it is night for others, and when it is winter in one place, it is summer in another, and that these sorts of flora and fauna prevail here, and elsewhere other sorts: the earth and the things on it partake of divine goodness in a divided way.

Simplicius, On Epictetus' Handbook 94.8-21

There is a strand of thought in some circles which seeks to delegitimize our Greco-Roman heritage.

This effort is itself subversive.

The impact and influence that the Greek and Roman civilizations had on the identity, nature, and development of Europe is so enormous and profound that it cannot be calculated.

The philosophy, the theology, the poetry, the art, the science and mathematics, the political systems, even to some extent the military and athletic cultures… we owe so much of all of this, so much of who we are, to Greece and Rome.

None of this is to diminish the beauty and importance of other European civilizations, all of which I love.

But the idea that we should deconstruct our Greco-Roman inheritance and view it with an eye of suspicion because of some occasional outside influences or syncretism, some of which are conjectural, is ludicrous and modernist hogwash. I can hardly think of anything more subversive and destructive than that.

But if we are persuaded by me, we’ll believe that the soul is immortal and able to endure every evil and every good, and we’ll always hold to the upward path, practicing justice with reason in every way.

Plato, Republic 621c

The place beyond heaven - none of our earthly poets has ever sung or ever will sing its praises enough! Still, this is the way it is - risky as it may be, you see, I must attempt to speak the truth, especially since the truth is my subject. What is in this place is without color and without shape and without solidity, a being that really is what it is, the subject of all true knowledge, visible only to intelligence, the soul's steersman. Now a god's mind is nourished by intelligence and pure knowledge, as is the mind of any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it, and so it is delighted at last to be seeing what is real and watching what is true, feeding on all this and feeling wonderful, until the circular motion brings it around to where it started. On the way around it has a view of Justice as it is; it has a view of Self-control; it has a view of Knowledge - not the knowledge that is close to change, that becomes different as it knows the different things which we consider real down here. No, it is the knowledge of what really is what it is. And when the soul has seen all the things that are as they are and feasted on them, it sinks back inside heaven and goes home.

Plato, Phaedrus 247c-e

That's because what everyone loves is really nothing other than the good. Do you disagree? Now, then. Can we simply say that people love the good? But shouldn't we add that, in loving it, they want the good to be theirs? And not only that. They want the good to be theirs forever, don't they? In a word, then, love is wanting to possess the good forever. ... All of us are pregnant, Socrates, in body and in soul, and, as soon as we come to a certain age, we naturally desire to give birth. Now no one can possibly give birth in anything ugly; only in something beautiful. That's because when a man and woman come together in order to give birth, this is a godly affair. Pregnancy, reproduction - this is an immortal thing for a mortal animal to do, and it cannot occur in anything that is out of harmony, but ugliness is out of harmony with all that is godly. Beauty, however, is in harmony with the divine.

Plato, Symposium 206a-d