Racine 27 



Not that his devotion to Artemis is blameworthy in itself ; but 

 Aphrodite has her claims also. And it was the Greek notion, not 

 that a man might acquire merit and plead exemption for the 

 others by satisfying this or that claim, but that he should satisfy 

 all claims in their due and proper proportion. In yEschylean and 

 Sophoclean tragedy this conception is axiomatic. The tragedy 

 arises from the protagonist's inability or unwillingness to satisfy 

 all just claims — in the great tragedies from his inability to do so, 

 as in Electro, Antigone, and CEdipus. Naturally, the more 

 august the claims and the more conflicting and irreconcilable, the 

 more stupendous the tragedy. While the lesser tragedies, if I 

 may speak of degrees of tragedy, turn, not so much on the fatal 

 contrarieties in the nature of things, like traps to break the soul, 

 as on those inconsistencies of character in which the protagonist 

 seems less unable than unwilling to pay all his debts, like Ajax 

 by reason of hybris or like Hippolytus himself by reason of 

 ctKoXacTia or intemperance. And if nowadays we fail to recog- 

 nize Hippolytus' fault, it is because the obligation of sophrosyne 

 or moderation has lost its authority either wholly or in part, just 

 as is so often the case with one or another of the conflicting 

 claims of Greek tragedy — the law of talion, for instance, which 

 disputes with filial piety the Electra and the Coephoroe. 



Nor is even the idea of sophrosyne an easy one for the mod-- 

 ern ; even Plato devotes an entire dialogue to the discussion of it 

 — inconclusively, according to the critics. In this respect, how- 

 ever, I can not agree with them, since the positions which Plato 

 pre-empts in the Charmides are those which he finally occupies 

 in the Republic. The only reason for their temporary relinquish- 

 ment in the former dialogue is the circumstance that the discus- 

 sion has involved certain assumptions — principally that of the 

 equivalence of happiness and meeting your obligations — ^which 

 he will not at the time consent to have taken for granted, though 

 he justifies them later. Hence it is that I can not look upon 

 Plato's attempt at a definition as a failure. At least I can give 

 no better account of the matter ; and what that account implies 

 is, in sum, that sophrosyne consists in taking one's own measure 

 as a man and conforming to it — the virtue to know the measure 



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