The advantages of the fearful temperament, if it is not a mere
unmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is
the shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive
temperament, but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold.
Everyone knows the superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity,
that a time of exaltation and excitement and unusual success is held
to be often the prelude to some disaster, just as the sense of
excitement and buoyant health, when it is very consciously
perceived, is thought to herald the approach of illness. "I felt so
happy," people say, "that I was sure that some misfortune was going
to befall me--it is not lucky to feel so secure as that!" This
represented itself to the Greeks as part of the divine government of
the world; they thought that the heedless and self-confident man
was beguiled by success into what they called ubris, the insolence
of prosperity; and that then atae, that is, disaster, followed. They
believed that the over-prosperous man incurred the envy and jealousy
of the gods. We see this in the old legend of Polycrates of Samos,
whose schemes all succeeded, and whose ventures all turned out well.
He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, who advised
him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself; so
Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ring
which he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it.
Soon afterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was
served up at the king's table--there, inside the body of the fish,
was the ring; and when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods
had restored him his gift, and that his destruction was determined
upon; which came true, for he was caught by pirates at sea, and