The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Fairbanks - The Ethical Teaching of Sophokles
Sophokles emphasizes three allied causes of sin, viz. selfishness, self-assertion, and pride. F. cites Polyneikes as an example of selfishness; of self-assertion, Œdipus, whose impetuous temperament made him carry to excess the Greek ideal of a large and vigorous manhood; of insolent pride (ὕβρις), Kreon, who makes laws contrary to sacred custom and divine law, and demands absolute obedience to them. F. finds Sophokles' ideal man truthful and sincere. As an instance he cites Neoptolemos. The wily plans of Odysseus, on the contrary, fail; the stealth of Aias is punished by madness, and Herakles' treachery in slaying an enemy results in his death. Further, author finds devotion to the state, as a virtue, exemplified in Œdipus; he deduces also from the same character that reverence for the gods was an essential feature in the Greek ideal. He (F.) believes these ethical ideas to be the product of the age in which Sophokles lived, though he was in advance of the actual ideals of the time. The Sophoklean conception of virtue and duty are characteristic of Greece in general from the fact that they are aesthetic rather than ethical. The beautiful and the proportionate in conduct awaken enthusiasm; a grand fault is better than a weak virtue, and conscience is, with Sophokles, a sense of conformity to an aesthetic ideal. This aesthetic ideal, F. goes on to say, is embodied for the Greek in the eternal relation of things, in natural law in the moral world.