28 Prosser Hall Frye 



and to be moderate. Wherefor my earlier remark that the 

 maxim, /xrjBev dyav^ or Nothing- too much, by which the Greek 

 aphoristically translated the idea, virtually absorbs the other two 

 gnomes in which Greek wisdom is epitomized, yvSidi aavTov and 

 Kar avOpwrrov (jjpovel — Know thyself and Think as a mortal. In 

 short, sophrosyne was much as I have been expressing it, the 

 recognition and satisfaction of all just claims. And this virtue, 

 in which Hippolytus was so sadly to seek, was the polar virtue 

 to the Greek. Mere mortification, asceticism, even the excess 

 or exaggeration of a single duty he would not have understood 

 as righteousness. Saintliness in the sense oi austerity is an ori- 

 ental, not a Greek, ideal. Such a character, if the latter could 

 have comprehended it at all, would have struck him as unnatural, 

 even monstrous. "'Ou yap avdpcoTriKi] icrriv r/ TOLavrr] avataOr]- 

 ata," so says Aristotle.''' And he would have expected to see 

 it draw the lightning, just as Euripides has represented it as 

 doing. For it is this immoderation on the part of Hippolytus in 

 slighting the natural human affinities or inclinations and in un- 

 settling the balance of satisfactions by discharging one set of 

 duties exclusively to the prejudice of all the others — it is this par- 

 tiality which is adjudged a criminal arrogance or hybris. About 

 his very chastity there is designedly something farouche and 

 savage like that of his tutelary divinity, the harrier of Actseon. 

 And it is this partiality which brings him within the scope of 

 Phaedra's baleful influence. In this way is vindicated the inflex- 

 ible justice presiding over the great tragedy of the Greeks — for 

 which reason I have said that however it may be with Euripides 

 in general, Hippolytus at least is in the great tradition. 



All this is so clear that the wonder is how Racine could have 

 missed it. And yet little or nothing of it appears in his Phcdre. 

 The compromise whereby he seeks to excuse his hero's entangle- 

 ment in the coils of a penal process by endowing him with a fancy 

 for Aricie, is too trifling to take seriously. It is Phedre's passion 

 that inflames the play; and any mere affection is bound to show 

 pale and ineffectual in the blaze of such a conflagration. At 



29 Ethica Nicomachea, III, xi, 7. 



200 



