 Apart from the fragments of his ethical treatises, in which Theophrastus presented with few modifications the Aristotelian account of virtue, we also have his extremely influential book Characters, in which he went beyond his Aristotelian inheritance and focused on vicious human behaviour. More precisely, Theophrastus’ Characters is a collection of thirty brief, often humorous descriptions or sketches, or even caricatures, of unattractive moral behaviour; for instance, loquacity, insensitivity, flattery, shamelessness, obnoxiousness, superstition. Each sketch is preceded by a definition of the personality type, and the entire collection is preceded by a spurious prologue which indicates that the Characters came to be used for moral instruction.