Temperance

Spenser wrote in his ‘Letter to Raleigh’ that Arthur was ‘the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as Aristotle hath devised, the which is the purpose of these first twelve bookes’. This statement has caused difficulties: the virtues described by Aristotle in the Ethics are not twelve in number, and few of those he does describe bear the same names as Spenser's. Temperance is one of those few, but it does not follow that Spenser's treatment corresponds in all respects with Aristotle's. On the contrary, there are fundamental differences of emphasis between the pagan philosopher and the Protestant poet.

Central to Aristotle's discussion of the moral virtues is his concept of the ‘mean’. Each virtue is described as occupying a mid-position between an excess of passion or appetite, and a deficiency (Ethics pp. 34–6). Temperance is the intermediate, or mean, state between self-indulgence and a deficiency (perhaps indifference?) for which Aristotle cannot find a name because he considers it so unusual (pp. 66–7).