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Aristotle is always surprising us not merely by the immense volume of clear thinking and co-ordinated knowledge of which he was master, but by the steady Sôphrosynê of his temper.
Sophrosynê in religion was the message of the classical age. But the ages before and after had no belief in such a lesson. The old Medicine-Man was perhaps himself the first Theos. But the effort was too great for the average world; and in a later age nearly all the kings and rulers all people in fact who can command an adequate number of flatterers become divine beings again.
Unlike many religious systems, it generally permitted progress; it encouraged not only the obedient virtues but the daring virtues as well. It had in it the spirit that saves from disaster, that knows itself fallible and thinks twice before it hates and curses and persecutes. It wrapped religion in Sophrosynê. Again, it worked for concord and fellow-feeling throughout the Greek communities.
Her character is built up of "Sophrosyne," of self-restraint and the love of goodness qualities which often seem second-rate or even tiresome until they have a sufficiently great field in which to act. Very characteristic is her resolution to make the best, and not the worst, of her life in Pyrrhus' house, with all its horror of suffering and apparent degradation.
Consequently the commoner have the pull. Even the great democratic statesmen of the past, he now sees, have been ministers to mob desires; they have 'filled the city with harbours and docks and walls and revenues and such-like trash, without Sophrosynê and righteousness'. The sage or saint has no place in practical politics. He would be like a man in a den of wild beasts.
Dionysius had three children by Doris, and by Aristomache four, two of which were daughters, Sophrosyne and Arete. Sophrosyne was married to his son Dionysius; Arete, to his brother Thearides, after whose death, Dion received his niece Arete to wife.
I hesitate what to call this literature, seeing that it was obviously written to the glory of God and His Virgin Mother. If the people were saved, it was due to that substratum of sanity, of Greek sophrosyne, which resisted the one and derided the other.
The insane ages have often done service for the sane, the harsh and suffering ages for the gentle and well-to-do. Sophrosynê, however we try to translate it, temperance, gentleness, the spirit that in any trouble thinks and is patient, that saves and not destroys, is the right spirit.
Only in one great school does the true Hellenic Sôphrosynê continue flourishing, a school whose modesty of pretension and quietness of language form a curious contrast with the rapt ecstasies of Stoic and Cynic and even, as we have seen, of Epicurean, just as its immense richness of scientific achievement contrasts with their comparative sterility.
And it is to be feared that none of these fourth-century leaders, neither the fierce bishops with their homilies on Charity, nor Julian and Sallustius with their worship of Hellenism, came very near to that classic ideal. To bring back that note of Sophrosynê I will venture, before proceeding to the fourth-century Pagan creed, to give some sentences from an earlier Pagan prayer.
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