1. Aristotle was not of course alone in using the word hamartia. It also appears in the New Testament, where it has usually been translated into English as ‘sin’ – a word which itself may originally have derived from the same root as ‘sinister’, meaning everything that is done in the ‘left’ way, as opposed to the ‘right’ way (compare, for instance, the Russia phrase, na levo, ‘on the left’, applied to anything which is crooked, underhand, ‘not quite right’). In the Lord’s Prayer, hamartia was translated into sixteenth-century English as ‘trespasses’, or ‘stepping over the bounds’, linking it back to the original meaning of hubris. At the roots of language all these ideas – missing the mark, stepping over the bounds, not doing things in the right way, sin, error – are related.