Hubris (ὕβρις, hybris) — Overweening insolence: the conduct of someone who oversteps the limit proper to him, outraging another’s honour or defying the order that conditions human life. In Greek culture hybris is the opposite of moderation (sōphrosynē) and is typically followed by retribution (nemesis). In Athens, violent outrage was even a matter for prosecution (graphē hybreōs). In the Rhetoric (II.2, 1378b), Aristotle treats it within his account of anger, as one of the forms of slighting (oligōria): it is inflicting harm or shame on someone not to gain an advantage but for the pleasure of asserting one’s own superiority. Nick Fisher’s influential study Hybris (1992) stresses hybris as a violation of honour; later work, such as the essays collected in Hubris: Ancient and Modern (Cairns and others), also highlights the dispositional element of thinking too highly of oneself. In tragedy hybris appears as the sin of the powerful: in Aeschylus’ Persians (472 BCE), Xerxes’ defeat is presented as the consequence of excess, and Sophocles explores the arrogance of power in Oedipus the King. In moral and political terms hybris was held to be the root of injustice and of the decline of cities. The notion runs through Greek thought as a warning against the lack of limit (metron), and it connects with justice, arete and the order of the kosmos; see also pathos and Aristotle.
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