“Go on, then, if you want, make your classifications and lay out your fancy distinctions of goods into three or four or many kinds! These categorizations have no bearing on the issue and this isn’t the way to bring us over to Plato.” This complaint from the Platonist Atticus reflects a long history of debate about the good. Is there just one kind of good or are the complex classifications we find in later ancient texts closer to the truth? One naturally thinks of Plato’s Form of the good or the Stoic idea that only virtue is good, but also of the Stoic claim from the second century BC that it was Plato’s position that only the *kalon* (which to a Stoic meant virtue) is good. At the same point in the second century BC, the Peripatetic Critolaus seems to have galvanized debate about the way virtue and other goods (of soul, body, and external circumstances) relate to happiness and so sparked the intense debate on this topic which seems to have dominated the first century BC, as we see from Cicero’s *De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum*, among other sources.
In this paper I try to reconstruct the history of the doctrine that there are goods of the body, goods of the soul (virtue, of course), and external goods, along the way pointing to the moral of the story; that such technical classifications can sharpen debate about the good life, but can just as easily undermine it if taken too far and provoke a philosophical ‘backlash’. Platonists, Peripatetics and Stoics were all involved, but the positions taken do not align with school affiliations; the philosophical inclinations of individuals seem to play a greater role. Whether this historical exploration has any relevance to those concerned with value theory today is a question I leave to the audience to decide.
