This position had the advantage of agreeing with Augustine and Peter Lombard, two of the pillars that supported early thirteenth-century scholasticism. But it had disadvantages too. For one thing, it seems frankly implausible. Are we really to believe that Socrates was not showing real courage when he unflinchingly drank the hemlock, that not a single decision reached by pagan judges had ever been truly just? For another thing, there was Aristotle. As we also saw in Chapter 26, it took a while for his Nicomachean Ethics to become available in a complete Latin version. Once it did, the
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