Is less than nothing.”
The word in the original, ἀυθαδιά, literally “self-pleasing,” expresses a state of mind which the Greeks, with no shallow ethical discernment, were accustomed to denounce as the great source of all those sins whose consequences are the most fearful to the individual and to society. St. Paul, in his epistle to Titus (i. 7), uses the same word emphatically to express what a Christian bishop should not be (ἀυθὰδη, self-willed). The same word is used by the blind old soothsayer Tiresias in the Antigone, when preaching repentance to the passionate and self-willed tyrant of Thebes, ἀυθαδιά τοι σκαιότητ ὀφλισκάνει, where Donaldson gives the whole passage as follows:—
“Then take these things to heart, my son; for error
Is as the universal lot of man;
But, whensoe’er he errs, that man no longer
Is witless, or unblest, who, having fallen
Into misfortune, seeks to mend his ways,
And is not obstinate: the stiff-necked temper
Must oft plead guilty to the charge of folly.”
Sophocles, Antig. v. 1028.