for the man who is tempted down the path of wrongdoing and crime (hybris), but promises blessings for the one who perseveres along the more difficult, uphill road of Justice (dike). In Homer we have the fierce heroic aspiration to excel; Hesiod provides the counterpart warning against arrogance and excess. These two themes constitute the major topics of moral comment in the work of the early lyric poets and the Attic tragedians. The Greek moral tradition thus bears within itself two potentially conflicting conceptions of arete, or human excellence: on the one hand the heroic ideal of unlimited self-assertion; on the other hand the Delphic principle of meden agan, "nothing to excess," the proverbial wisdom formulated in the aphorisms of the Seven Sages (Bias, Chilon, Cleobulus, Periander, Pittacus, Solon, Thales). Of them, Thales (fl. 580 B.C.E.) was allegedly the first natural philosopher. Another, Solon (c. 640-c. 560 B.C.E.), was the founding father of the Athenian moral tradition. The poems of Solon, composed in the early sixth century just when philosophy and science were beginning to take shape in Miletus, aim at a careful balance between the two standards of success: "May the gods give me prosperity and good fame in the eyes of all men…. I want to have wealth, but not to acquire it unjustly; for punishment [dike] always comes later" (Solon 1, 3-8).

For the earliest philosophers, the Milesians, at least one ethical concept is attested. The sense of inevitable punishment for excess and crime, illustrated above in the quotation from Solon, also serves Anaximander (fl. c. 550 B.C.E.) as his figure for the immutable order of nature: "They [the constituents of the world, probably the elemental opposites] pay the penalty [dike] and make retribution to one another for their injustice, according to the ordering of time" (DK 12. B 1). A moral conception of natural order is also implicit in the very designation of the world as a kosmos, a well-ordered structure. The word kosmos has both aesthetic and political overtones. The natural philosophers reinterpreted the justice of Zeus as the rational governance of the world of nature. Some tension inevitably results with the older conception of the gods. As Heraclitus put it, the one wise principle, who is steersman of the universe "is both unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus" (DK 22.B 32; cf. B 41 and 64). The natural order is conceived as a moral order as well: "The sun will not overstep his measures. If he does, the Furies handmaids of Justice [Dike] will find him out" (Heraclitus B 94).

Xenophanes spelled out the ethical implications of the new cosmic theology. "Homer and Hesiod have assigned to the gods everything that is a reproach and blame among men: stealing, adultery, and cheating one another" (DK 21. B 11). Xenophanes rejected Hesiod's tales of battle between gods and giants and between different generations of gods; hostility and conflict, he claimed, have no place in the realm of the divine (B 1, 20-24),

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