The Antoninos

"... at once hesitant to condemn the hero for what had befallen him and humbled by a recognition of how easily they too might one day be ruined if ever they were presented with a situation similar to that with which the hero had been faced.

The tragedy would leave them sorrowful before the difficulties of leading a good life and modest before those who had failed at the undertaking [...]

A tragic hero had to be someone who was neither especially good nor especially bad, an everyday, ordinary kind of human being [...] a person who combined a range of good qualities with certain defects, perhaps excessive pride or anger or impulsiveness.

This character would then make a spectacular mistake, not from any profoundly evil motive, but from what Aristotle termed in Greek a hamartia or lapse of judgement, a temporary blindness, or a factual or emotional slip.

And from this would flow the most terrible peripeteia or reversal of fortune, in the course of which the hero would lose everything he held dear and almost certainly pay with his life [...]

We were to leave the theatre disinclined ever again to adopt an easy, superior tone towards the fallen and the failed".

Status anxiety, Alain de Botton