The Cardinal Virtues
Four pillars of good character — wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice — that became the West's basic moral vocabulary.
The cardinal virtues are the foundational quartet of practical wisdom (phronēsis), courage (andreia), temperance or self-control (sōphrosynē), and justice (dikaiosynē). Plato gave them their classic structure in the Republic (4th century BCE), mapping each onto a part of the soul and of the well-ordered city. The Stoics and Cicero carried them into Roman thought, and they were later absorbed into Christian ethics — named 'cardinal' from the Latin cardo, 'hinge,' because the moral life turns on them.
How it traveled
- RepublicAthens · -375explains
- LawsAthens · -348explains
- RhetoricChalcis · -335explains
- Nicomachean EthicsChalcis · -322explains
- Eudemian EthicsChalcis · -322explains
- de Finibus Bonorum et MalorumFormiae · -43explains
- Institutio OratoriaRome · 95explains
- Ad Se IpsumVindobona (Vienna) · 170explains
- Avot DeRabbi NatanYavneh · 220
- Vitae philosophorum— · 240explains
- SanhedrinSura (Babylonia) · 500
- Midrash TanchumaTiberias · 600
- Tanna DeBei Eliyahu RabbahBabylonia (region) · 900
- Mivchar HaPeninimGranada · 950
- Midrash TehillimEretz Yisrael (travels) · 1050
- Duties of the HeartZaragoza (Saragossa) · 1080
- Yalkut Shimoni on NachTiberias · 1250
- Yalkut Shimoni on TorahTiberias · 1250
- Sha'arei OrahGuadalajara · 1260
- ZoharGuadalajara · 1280
- Sefer HaIkkarimSoria · 1425
- Akeidat YitzchakTarragona · 1490
- Abarbanel on TorahNaples · 1505
- Avodat HaKodesh (Ibn Gabbai)Cairo · 1523
- Ketem Paz on ZoharTzfat · 1561
- Sha'arei KedushaDamascus · 1572
- Reshit ChokhmahTzfat · 1575
- Ohr HaChammah on ZoharTzfat · 1620
- Mesillat YesharimAmsterdam · 1738
- Maor VaShemeshKrakow (Cracow) · 1817
- Likutei HalakhotBreslov (Ukraine) · 1840
- Malbim on ProverbsBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on GenesisBucharest · 1860
- Malbim on IsaiahBucharest · 1860
- Torah Temimah on TorahPinsk · 1904
- Fragmenta MoraliaAthensexplains
- Legum Allegoriarum Libri I-III—explains
- De Specialibus Legibus (lib. i‑iv)—explains
- Historia RomanaRomeexplains
- De Virtutibus—explains
Key passages(20)
On the Duties of the Clergy · Ambrose of Milan
Manes, the founder of Manicheism, living about a.d. 250. He taught that there were two original principles absolutely opposed one to the other. On the one side God, from Whom nothing but good can go f
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He was a man truly to be numbered with the heroic spirits, distinguished for his illustrious deeds and his inborn majesty. For since there are, in the opinion of the philosophers, four principal virtu
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Divisiones Aristoteleae · Pseudo-Aristotle
The components of virtue are justice, courage, self-control, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, practical and speculative wisdom.
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Liber de philosophorum sectis (epitome ap. Stobaeum) · Arius Didymus
Διαίρεσις τῶν ἐπιδεικτικῶν · Menander Rhetor
And the lawgiver shows this, when he says, "And a river went out of Eden to water the Paradise; and from thence it is divided into four heads," is For there are four generic virtues: prudence, courage
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Legum Allegoriarum Libri I-III · Philo Judaeus
And a river goes forth out of Eden to water the Paradise. From thence it is separated into four heads: the name of the one is Pheison. That is the one which encircles the whole land of Evilat. There i
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Clin. Then, Stranger, was not the view we stated long ago the right one? We said that all our laws must always aim at one single object, which, as we agreed, is quite rightly named virtue. Ath. Yes. C
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Ath. And, as our argument asserts, the cause of this does not lie in luck, but in the evil life which is usually lived by the sons of excessively rich monarchs; for such an upbringing can never produc
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Soc. but you are both good yourself and have the gift of making others good. And you are so confident of yourself that, while others make a secret of this art, you have had yourself publicly proclaime
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Moreover, Zeno admits (as Plato does) several virtues with various distinctions—to wit, prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice—as being indeed inseparable, but yet divers and different from one a
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Zeno of Citium: Fragments & Testimonia · Zeno of Citium
Doxographic testimonia: Zeno of Citium is credited with originating gr-virtue, gr-cardinal-virtues, gr-cosmopolitanism.
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