The Four Temperaments Explained: From Greek Medicine to Modern Personality Talk
If you have ever called someone "sanguine" about a risky plan or "phlegmatic" in a crisis, you have used a 2,400-year-old personality system without knowing it. The four temperaments are the grandparents of almost every color quiz, including ours. They are also a good case study in how an idea can be scientifically wrong and still culturally useful. Here is where they came from, what they meant, and how to think about them now.
Four fluids, four seasons
The story starts with Greek medicine, not psychology. The Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man, written in the late fifth century BCE, describes the human body as made of four humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Scholars generally attribute that treatise to Polybus, Hippocrates' student and son-in-law, rather than to Hippocrates himself [1]. Health, the author argued, was a proper balance and mixture of the four. Disease came from one humour separating out or dominating.
The theory was elegant because it connected everything. Each humour had two qualities. Blood was hot and wet, yellow bile hot and dry, black bile cold and dry, phlegm cold and wet. Each was said to dominate in a season: blood in spring, yellow bile in summer, black bile in autumn and phlegm in winter [1]. A doctor could therefore advise adjusting diet and habits through the year to keep the body in balance.
Notice what is missing: personality. The early Hippocratic writers were interested in illness. The jump from fluids to character came later.
Galen turns humours into temperaments
Galen of Pergamon, a Greek physician who worked in Rome in the second century CE, is the figure who made the system enduring. Born in 129 CE, he wrote an enormous body of work on anatomy, physiology and therapeutics that dominated European and Islamic medicine for well over a thousand years [2]. Galen combined the Hippocratic humours with the four elements and the four qualities and argued that a person's natural mixture (in Greek, krasis; in Latin, temperamentum) shaped both body and disposition [3].
Interestingly, Galen's own book on mixtures is organized mainly around the qualities hot, cold, wet and dry rather than a tidy set of four humour-based personalities; the neat four-type scheme was elaborated by later writers [1]. But by the Middle Ages the familiar four had settled in [4]:
| Temperament | Dominant humour | Traditional character |
|---|---|---|
| Sanguine (from Latin sanguis, blood) | Blood | Cheerful, sociable, hopeful, sometimes careless |
| Choleric (from Greek cholē, bile) | Yellow bile | Ambitious, energetic, quick to anger |
| Melancholic (Greek for "black bile") | Black bile | Thoughtful, serious, prone to gloom |
| Phlegmatic | Phlegm | Calm, patient, slow to rouse |
The ideal person, Encyclopaedia Britannica notes, was thought to have an ideally proportioned mixture of all four; a predominance of one produced a sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic person [4].
Why the temperaments survived
The humoral theory of disease collapsed with modern physiology. Nobody now thinks depression is caused by black bile. So why do we still use the words?
They describe real, noticeable differences. People really do differ in energy, sociability and emotional reactivity. The four temperaments are a crude but recognizable map of two of those differences: how quickly and strongly someone reacts, and whether their mood tends toward the bright or the dark side.
They are easy to remember. Four types, each with a vivid name, are far easier to talk about than a set of continuous scales.
They moved into art and literature. From medieval calendars to Renaissance prints, the temperaments were drawn, painted and written about for centuries. Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, published in English in the 1790s, still illustrated the four temperaments as faces [5]. Goethe and Schiller even painted a "rose of temperaments" in 1798–99 that assigned colors and occupations to them [6], an early bridge between temperament and color.
Temperaments in modern psychology
In the twentieth century, psychologists returned to the old idea with new tools. Several influential researchers noted that the four temperaments could be mapped onto two dimensions: one for sociability and outward energy (often called extraversion) and one for emotional stability. Under that reading, a sanguine person is outgoing and stable, a choleric person outgoing and reactive, a melancholic person reserved and reactive, and a phlegmatic person reserved and stable [7]. These two dimensions survive in today's leading trait model, the Big Five, as extraversion and neuroticism [8].
That mapping is the main reason the temperaments remain interesting to scientists: the ancient Greeks, without any measurement at all, seem to have noticed two of the most robust dimensions of personality. What they got wrong was the cause (fluids), the tidiness (four boxes), and the idea that the boxes were fixed.
Separately, a popular branch of type psychology revived the four temperaments by name. David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates's Please Understand Me (1978) presented four temperaments derived from Myers-Briggs type theory [9], and in the same year Don Lowry built True Colors on Keirsey's work, renaming the temperaments Gold, Blue, Green and Orange [10]. Keirsey's four temperaments are not the same as the Greek four, but the family resemblance is deliberate.
How the temperaments echo in color systems
Here is a rough guide to how the old four show up in today's color frameworks. Treat it as a loose analogy, not an equivalence; each system was built differently (our theory page explains each one).
- Choleric energy appears as Red in Hartman's Color Code (motivated by power) and in color versions of DISC (Dominance). In our quiz it is closest to Crimson and Cobalt.
- Sanguine energy appears as Yellow in the Color Code (fun) and DISC color versions (Influence), and as Orange in True Colors. In our quiz: Amber and Coral.
- Phlegmatic calm appears as White in the Color Code (peace) and Green in DISC color versions (Steadiness). In our quiz: Gold and Sage.
- Melancholic depth appears as Blue in DISC color versions (Conscientiousness) and Green in True Colors. In our quiz: Emerald and Violet.
What to take from the temperaments today
Use them as vocabulary, not verdicts. "I'm feeling a bit phlegmatic about this" is a charming way to say you are not worried. "He's a melancholic, he'll never lead" is a misuse that no modern psychologist would endorse.
Remember most people are mixtures. Even Galen considered the well-balanced mixture the ideal. In modern trait terms, most people score near the middle on most dimensions, which is exactly where four-box systems are least accurate.
Notice that context matters. The same person can be choleric at work and phlegmatic at home. Situations shape behavior, which is why our quiz reports where you landed on each axis rather than only a single label.
Enjoy the history. Few ideas have lasted as long. When you take a color quiz, you are participating in a conversation about human differences that began in ancient Greece, passed through Galen's Rome, medieval monasteries, Goethe's Weimar and 1970s workshops, and is still going.
Curious where you land? Take the free quiz or read the full history of personality colors.
A quick, playful self-check
Just for fun, ask yourself two questions the old temperament theory implied. First: when something exciting happens, do you tend to respond quickly and outwardly, or slowly and inwardly? Second: when something goes wrong, does your mood tend to bounce back fast, or linger? Quick and bouncy suggests sanguine; quick and lingering, choleric; slow and lingering, melancholic; slow and bouncy, phlegmatic. Most people will recognize themselves in more than one, which is the most modern lesson of all.
- [1] J. Jouanna, "The Legacy of the Hippocratic Treatise The Nature of Man: The Theory of the Four Humours," in Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen, Brill, 2012. brill.com (PDF)
- [2] Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Galen." britannica.com/biography/Galen
- [3] Encyclopaedia Iranica, "Humoralism." iranicaonline.org/articles/humoralism-1
- [4] Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Humour (ancient physiology)." britannica.com/science/humor-ancient-physiology
- [5] Wellcome Collection via Wikimedia Commons, "Temperaments, from Lavater, Essays on physiognomy, 1793." commons.wikimedia.org
- [6] Klassik Stiftung Weimar, "Die Temperamentenrose." klassik-stiftung.de
- [7] Wikipedia, "Four temperaments" (modern interpretations). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments
- [8] R. R. McCrae & O. P. John, "An Introduction to the Five-Factor Model and Its Applications," Journal of Personality 60(2), 1992. doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x
- [9] Internet Archive, Please Understand Me by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates, 1978. archive.org/details/pleaseunderstan00keir
- [10] True Colors Workshops, "About True Colours." truecolorsworkshop.com