Nothing in Excess

Mēden agan, 'nothing in excess' (or 'nothing too much'), was the second of the great maxims carved on Apollo's temple, and stands beside 'know thyself' as the twin pillar of Greek practical wisdom. It counsels measure and restraint in everything — in pleasure, in grief, in ambition, in speech — and warns against the excess (hubris) that the Greeks believed drew down the anger of Nemesis and the gods upon the proud.

The maxim gave popular voice to one of the deepest Greek convictions: that the good and the beautiful lie in proportion and the right measure, and that virtue is a kind of balance. Plato makes temperance — self-mastery and due measure — a cardinal virtue, and grounds the good life in limit and proportion; Aristotle systematizes the same insight as the doctrine of the mean, where each virtue lies between a too-much and a too-little.

So a proverb fit for the temple wall became a principle of ethics and even of cosmology, for the cosmos itself was held to be an order of measure and proportion. To live by 'nothing too much' was to bring one's own soul into harmony with the measured order of the world.