Plutarch, Plato and Plato's Adjectives

The ancients needed some time to wrap their mind around the idea of an adjective. Aristotle uses this very example to illustrate his idea of an accidental feature that subsists in a substance. It seems that the adjective, sometimes called a quality or epithet, was made a distinct grammatical category by toricians. The distinction of soul, body and externals comes from platonist discussions of the virtues.