John Casey, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others famously claim that “pagan” classical Greek ethical thought recognises no virtue of humility.

    The claim is true in the lexical sense that the pagan Greeks’ lists of virtues did not include a single virtue whose name is correctly translatable by the English word “humility”.

    However, their ethical world was richly charged with what we today have no difficulty recognising as humility-thoughts and humility-motivations, even if these were not collected together under a single virtue, but distributed instead among at least three other virtues—sophrosyne, dikaiosyne, and hosiotes.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813511...

    Our two most important sources for pagan Greek ethics are of course Plato and Aristotle.

    But we can and should look beyond them, to Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles for example, to get the full picture of the importance to the pagan Greeks of ethical thoughts about the smallness of humans like us in a big and alien world, and the consequent need for restraint and pity, and for the avoidance of hybris (outrage against the natural order of the world).