This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Sophrosyne is often rendered temperance in English, but the Stoic sense is broader than moderation in food, drink or sensual pleasure alone. Diogenes Laertius's summary lists its species as good discipline, seemliness, modesty and self-control, covering the whole of a person's bearing and self-governance rather than one narrow appetite; Stobaeus's anthology similarly treats it as the virtue concerned with what is to be chosen and avoided in the sphere of the person's own impulses generally, not a rule about diet or drink specifically.
The Stoic account of the two passions sophrosyne corrects, epithymia and hedone, rests on the same theory of judgment that grounds every other pathos. Desire is the irrational reaching after something merely believed to be a future good, and pleasure is the irrational elation at something merely believed to be a present good; in both cases the passion is not the appetite or the good feeling itself but the mistaken assent to a false judgment about what is genuinely good. A Stoic sage, on this account, is not without desire or pleasure altogether, since a rightly reasoned impulse toward what is truly good, virtue and right action, generates its own settled joy, chara, which the school did not classify as a passion at all. Sophrosyne is the discipline of withholding assent from the false judgment, not the suppression of feeling as such.
This distinction between correcting a mistaken judgment and simply suppressing a feeling is why Stoic sophrosyne differs from the more common modern sense of temperance as willpower exercised against temptation. On Stoic terms a person still fighting a felt urge toward something they know, in the abstract, to be bad has not yet achieved the virtue; the fully self-controlled person no longer experiences the pull as a struggle, because their judgment about what is worth wanting has itself changed. This is one of several points where Stoic virtue, as the ancient sources describe it, is closer to a settled state of clear-sightedness than to a contest of will.