Greek philosophers came to conceive of the general security in broader terms and to think of the end of the legal order as preservation of the social _status quo_. They came to think of maintaining the general security mediately through the security of social institutions. They thought of law as a device to keep each man in his appointed groove in society and thus prevent friction with his fellows. The virtue on which they insisted was _sophrosyne_, knowing the limits which nature fixes for human conduct and keeping within them. The vice which they denounced was _hybris_, wilful bondbreaking--wilful transgression of the socially appointed bounds. This mode of thinking follows the substitution of the city-state political organization of society for the kin-organization. The organized kindreds were still powerful. An aristocracy of the kin-organized and kin-conscious, on the one hand, and a mass of those who had lost or severed their ties of kinship, or had come from without, on the other hand, were in continual struggle for social and political mastery. Also the politically ambitious individual and the masterful aristocrat were continually threatening the none too stable political organization through which the general security got a precarious protection. The chief social want, which no other social institution could satisfy, was the security of social institutions generally. In the form of maintenance of the social _status quo_ this became the Greek and thence the Roman and medieval conception of the end of law.