ABSTRACT
What we call pride was, in antiquity, a spectrum of attitudes, from megalopsychia (positive) to hyperephania (negative) to hybris (extremely dangerous). It was the achievement of late antique and Byzantine authors to discover, define and treat pride as a separable state. When Byzantine authors discussed hyperephania, they were equipped with the powerful analytical tools of an already ancient literature. They located the discussion of pride in theological texts of a moral variety: edifying tales or treatments of virtue and vice, which were the descendants of manuals of philosophical pedagogy meant to train a person away from vices arising from passions and substitute the virtues necessary to achieve certain goals. For philosophers and rhetors, those goals could be certain achievements of mind in a well-functioning society; for their heirs, the sophisticated monastic authors of the fourth and later centuries, the goals of the virtues supported Christian social and spiritual ends. Like all the pathe, pride was not as much an emotion as an affliction. Pride was described in different ways in different genres; in epic or history, an episode of hybris could be followed by a sudden fall, and therefore function as a monitory tale. But in the second and third centuries, with the development of Stoic virtue ethics and Christian ascetic philosophy, the monitory narrative of pride gave birth to a description of the disease of pride, and its precise location in the soul or mind. The result was an ever-finer set of distinctions about the causes, duration and treatment of pride.
