Greek and Roman Philosophy and Ideas
This domain tests philosophical argument: what a thinker claimed, what reasons were offered, what objections follow, and how ideas were transmitted and adapted at Rome.
Socrates and Plato
Socrates wrote nothing; the elenchus proceeds by question and refutation, exposing inconsistency. His trial in 399 BC and death are reported by Plato and Xenophon. Plato's theory of Forms separates changing particulars from changeless intelligible realities; the allegory of the cave (Republic VII) maps education from images to the Form of the Good; the philosopher-rulers and the critique of poetry are political as well as epistemological claims.
Aristotle
Aristotle systematised logic, biology, ethics and poetics. The four causes (material, efficient, formal, final) explain change. Virtue ethics: virtues as stable dispositions, the golden mean between extremes, eudaimonia as activity of reason. The Poetics analyses tragedy through plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle and song, with catharsis and hamartia.
Hellenistic schools and Rome
Epicurus: pleasure as absence of pain, ataraxia, the Garden; Lucretius' De Rerum Natura sets this in Latin verse. Stoicism: virtue as the only good, living according to nature, logos; Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius adapt it to Roman public life. Cynics and Sceptics challenge convention and certainty.
Worked example
'Plato thought the sensible world is unreal.' Reasoning: too strong. Plato treats particulars as imperfect and dependent, grasped by opinion rather than knowledge; the cave image distinguishes levels of cognition. The correction earns marks because it shows the theory's structure rather than a slogan.
Traps
Attributing Plato's doctrines to the historical Socrates; collapsing Stoic and Epicurean ethics; ignoring the purpose of an argument.