when we struggle to improve ourselves, in some way, we often frame it as a battle with our faulty inner selves. We talk of our failures as our ‘demons’, who are part of us, and who we must fight. By my fault, by my fault, by my very great fault . . . None of which is to say that the Greeks had no interest in moral goodness, of course, or that there were no medieval Christians who wanted to better their economic circumstances (indeed, the monasteries were pioneers of an embryonic form of capitalism). But it was a shift in emphasis – and a major one. It changed who we thought we were, who we
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