18 P. HH. Frye 
Nor was this interpretation due to a confusion of nomenclature, 
as has often been assumed. Sophocles was no dupe of a vocab- 
ulary. Rather, if there were such a confusion of vocabulary at 
all, it was a concomitant result, with this interpretation, of the 
spirit of those who used the language. The conviction of the cor- 
relation of misery with wickedness, of prosperity with righteous- 
ness, together with what we should call the indifference to motives, 
which inspired the solution of Greek tragedy, was not confined to 
Sophocles and his fellow playwrights. . It suffused the conscious- 
ness of the Greeks. The happy man was the good man—we have 
Plato’s word for it in contradiction of the Sophists, who in their 
efforts to disintegrate traditional morality were beginning to ques- 
tion it—or as we say, for the idea is not without modern echoes, 
he was the man who had done well. In fact, so thoroughly was 
the identification ingrained in the popular mind that there was a 
general prejudice against misfortune as in itself an impairment of 
character. But while the Greek temper was consistently moral, 
it was consistently intellectual too. Not only were the unhappy 
obviously in the wrong; but since no one acted ill knowingly, all 
wrong doing was finally a form of ignorance or misjudgment— 
that is, an error of some sort. Ignorance too was criminal. And 
while this conception of conduct was not pushed relentlessly to 
its logical conclusion—for Aristotle seems to discriminate in de- 
barring from tragedy what can be only the man of evil impulses— 
yet it did tend to turn the Greeks’ attention from the motive- 
grubbing with which we are familiar and fix it upon the act and 
its consequences, which as a matter of fact furnish the only 
practical means of estimating the moral significance of character. 
Ill 
With these general considerations in mind it is possible to dis- 
pose more or less systematically and intelligibly of several details 
which are usually handled in a rather empirical and disconnected 
fashion as notations of fact rather than as consequences of a 
principle. 
In the first place it ought to be clear from this point of view 
why Greek tragedy should manifest itself so frequently under a 
316 
