audacious:


Nequiquam deus abscidit
Prudens oceano dissociabili Terras.


In vain a wise god sever'd lands
By the dissociating sea.


Daedalus violated the air, as Hercules invaded hell. The discovery
of fire put us in possession of a forbidden secret. Is this
unnatural conquest of nature safe or wise? Nil mortalibus ardui est:

Man finds no feat too hard or high;
Heaven is not safe from man's desire.
Our rash designs move Jove to ire,
He dares not lay his thunder by.


The thought of this ode [Footnote: i. 3.] roughly expresses what
would have been the instinctive sense of thoughtful Greeks if the
idea of Progress had been presented to them. It would have struck
them as audacious, the theory of men unduly elated and perilously at
ease in the presence of unknown incalculable powers.

This feeling or attitude was connected with the idea of Moira. If we
were to name any single idea as generally controlling or pervading
Greek thought from Homer to the Stoics, [Footnote: The Stoics