*Socrates* was less a moral philosopher than a preacher of virtue. Self-ordained as a censor and reformer, he directed his invective and irony principally against the Sophists, whose chief characteristic as to philosophy seems to have been the denial of objective truth, and thus, of absolute and determinate right. Socrates, in contrast with them, seeks to elicit duty from the occasions for its exercise, making his collocutors define right and obligation from the nature of things as presented to their own consciousness and reflection. Plato represents him, whenever a moral question is under discussion, as probing the very heart of the case, and drawing thence the response as from a divine oracle. *Plato* held essentially the same ground, as may be seen in his identifying the True, the Beautiful, and the Good; but it is impossible to trace in his writings the outlines of a definite ethical system, whether his own, or one derived from his great master. The three *principal schools of ethical philosophy in Greece* were the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic. The *Peripatetics* derived their philosophy from Aristotle, and their name from his habit of walking up and down under the plane-trees of the Lyceum. According to him, virtue is conduct so conformed to human nature as to preserve all its appetites, proclivities, desires, and passions, in mutual check and limitation. It consists in shunning extremes. Thus courage stands midway between cowardice and rashness; temperance, between excess and self-denial; generosity, between prodigality and parsimony; meekness, between irascibility and pusillanimity. Happiness is regarded as the supreme good; but while this is not to be attained without virtue, virtue alone will not secure it. Happiness requires, in addition, certain outward advantages, such as health, riches, friends, which therefore a good man will seek by all lawful means. Aristotle laid an intense stress on the cultivation of the domestic virtues, justly representing the household as the type, no less than the nursery, of the state, and the political well-being of the state as contingent on the style of character cherished and manifested in the home-life of its members.