This article analyzes the concept of contempt in ancient Greek (and especially Athenian) society and law through the lens of dishonor (Greek atimia). This approach rests upon the findings of recent scholarship on the nature of honor, which have demonstrated that, contrary to what was previously believed,
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honor is not the scarce, non-material object of aggressive, male-dominated forms of zero-sum competition, but rather a measure of the value of any quality or set of qualities that a community deems important,
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and so a factor that can often play a central role in the administration of justice.
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What this essay aims to illustrate is that the notion of dishonor, and especially its incorporation from the socio-ethical into the legal sphere (i.e., the codification of the socio-ethical notion of dishonor as a penalty in the Greek legal system), can help bring out some important aspects of contempt as a response to certain kinds of behavior. Specifically, I will show below that Greek attitudes toward dishonor in the legal sphere—and especially its employment as the appropriate legal penalty against those individuals whom the community regarded as contemptible—prove the point, made by Bell (2013) in her recent book on the subject, that contempt is not necessarily a negative emotion to be avoided at all costs: rightly employed, it can also “offer ways of confronting immorality” (p. 2). Thus, the Athenian example provides us with one of the earliest case studies of a community that made use of preexisting, collectively approved social norms and formalized “apt” contempt in its law code through the creation of a penalty that essentially represented the legal actualization of that very kind of contempt.
“Apt” and “Inapt” Contempt
The connection between contempt and dishonor is highlighted by Bell (2013) herself, who describes contempt as “a dismissive emotion that fails to respect the dignity of persons” (p. 96), and as “a demoting emotion that presents its target as having a comparatively low status” (p. 128, emphasis in original). However, as Bell notes, this line of argument is not entirely new: the relationship between the two concepts—contempt and dishonor—had already been explored, in the fourth century BCE, by the philosopher Aristotle.
In Book 2 of his Rhetoric (essentially a handbook for arguing in court), Aristotle focuses particularly on emotions as persuasive tools and mentions contempt in his definition of anger and discussion of its causes (1378b, esp. 10–35). He begins by subdividing “belittling” (oligōria) into three further subcategories: contempt (kataphronēsis), spite (epēreasmos), and hybris. Despite its untranslated use in modern English, the precise meaning of the Greek term hybris has generated some debate among classical scholars:
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for my present purpose, suffice it to say that it is “a way of going wrong about the honour and self and others” (Cairns 1996, p. 32), which springs from a particular disposition of over-confidence in one's own power derived from “a misguided and inflated conception of oneself and one's place in the world” (p. 8). According to Aristotle, then, belittling (oligōria) is the primary cause of anger; within this framework, he describes “dishonor” (atimia) as a feature of hybris (which, as we have seen above, is a subcategory of oligōria), and states that anyone who “dishonors” (atimazōn)
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another is belittling him or her (oligōrei).
Here it is important to note two things. First, that, despite this clear link between “belittling”—with its subcategories of “contemning.” “spiting,” and “committing hybris”—and “dishonoring,” contempt and dishonor are not the same thing. Contempt is an emotion and, as such, does not necessarily need to be made known—it can remain private, even hidden, and never be acted upon. On the other hand, dishonoring someone cannot be a private endeavor—it needs an audience or at least a victim, and represents precisely one of the ways through which contempt is shown, by acting or speaking in a manner that seeks to devalue its target. Thus, dishonor is something that can be prompted by contempt and refers either to a process—an attempt to lower a person's status through insulting behavior (that may, however, fail)—or to a state that comes about when the process of dishonoring is successful, in that it translates into an actual diminution of the target's status that is recognized and validated by an audience or a community. This is the reason why Aristotle discusses “belittling” in his chapter on anger: part of the function of the victim's anger is to represent the treatment she is being subjected to as unwarranted and therefore unjust.
This latter aspect is especially clear from the example chosen by Aristotle to make his point: the wrath of the hero Achilles in response to the contemptuous treatment he suffered at the hands of Agamemnon, the commander of the 10-year Greek expedition against Troy whose last few weeks are recounted in Homer's Iliad. In the Homeric lines quoted by Aristotle (Hom. Il. 1.356 and 9.648 = 16.59), Achilles states that Agamemnon, who has taken away Achilles’ prize to make up for the loss of his own, has “dishonored” him (ētimēsen, a form of the verb atimaō),
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treating him “like some dishonored (atimēton) vagrant” (see also Hom. Il. 1.170–171). But Achilles is not claiming that Agamemnon, by depriving him of the prize (geras) that symbolizes his honor, has brought about an unequivocally recognized diminution of his status. Achilles is, on the contrary, trying to highlight the fact that Agamemnon has unjustly disrespected him and is treating him as if he had no honor—which is obviously not the case, at the very least from Achilles’ perspective. As a matter of fact, all those who express an opinion on the quarrel—Athena at 1.24, Thersites at 2.239–240, Nestor at 1.275–284 and 9.106–111, Odysseus at 19.181–183, and even Agamemnon himself at 2.378, 9.115–120, and 19.185–197
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—agree that Agamemnon's attempt to dishonor Achilles was ill-judged and illegitimate.
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From this, it is clear that the community plays a crucial role in legitimizing points of view and narratives, and in construing certain kinds of behavior as warranted or unwarranted. Achilles’ anger is a way of decrying Agamemnon's attitude as hybris: with his reaction, Achilles is making it clear that he thinks he does not deserve to be treated in such a disrespectful manner, and that Agamemnon has gone beyond what he can rightfully claim as the commander of the Greek army. Moreover, Agamemnon's conduct is often in the poem explicitly described as hybris, not only by Achilles (at Hom. Il. 1.203 and 9.368), but also by the goddess Athena (at 1.124)—and this, together with Achilles’ anger, serves to characterize Agamemnon's behavior toward Achilles as misguided. We see something similar also in Homer's Odyssey, where the conduct of the suitors who are living in Odysseus’ house and wooing his wife Penelope in his absence is consistently framed as hybris:
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in Greek, the use of hybris terminology makes it clear that the suitors’ behavior is condemned rather than condoned, that it detracts from their good reputation, rather than from the reputation of the people they are disrespecting, even prior to Odysseus’ revenge.
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This last point brings out the second element that needs to be highlighted: as we have seen, Aristotle connects hybris with atimia and identifies the former as a form of oligōria; thus, all hybris is belittling (and has to do with dishonor), but this does not imply that all belittling is hybris—hybris is only one form of oligōria, and not all forms of oligōria are illegitimate or unwarranted. Indeed, of the three types of oligōria, two—spite and hybris—are analytically negative, but one—contempt—can be apt, and indeed the notion of belittling as a superordinate category can be “fitting” or “unfitting”: this is shown especially by Aristotle's discussion of megalopsychoi (“great-souled people”)
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in the Nicomachean Ethics (1124b5–6), a passage discussed also by Bell (2013, pp. 138–147) and Mantzouranis (2023). Megalopsychoi are justified in their contempt for others, because they have the correct attitude toward the honor (timē) of the individuals involved: they recognize that they are genuinely superior to and better than the people they look down upon. Thus their contempt represents an instance of what Bell (2013, pp. 147–151) calls “apt” contempt: a type of contempt that responds to actual and serious faults of character, is morally defensible and reasonable, and stems from the contemnor's genuine concern for the values at stake. As already noted, according to Bell (2013) contempt is not always an inappropriate response, because its moral value depends on the situation and on the identity and status of both contemnor and contemned. If one's contempt stems from an incorrect assessment of one's own worth and that of the target (what in Greek would be labelled as hybris), the contemnor is unjustly disrespecting the target, who may legitimately seek redress; but if one's target is truly contemptible, by contemning him or her the contemnor would be treating the target according to his or her worth. These assessments do not happen in a vacuum—they are based on wider social norms against which the individuals involved (and their audience) evaluate the context, and decide whether the situation warrants contempt or not. In Bell's opinion (2013, p. 8), by adopting an “ethic of contempt”—by collectively construing certain kinds of behavior as contemptible because they are immoral, and, accordingly, presenting the immoral agent as someone of low status who should therefore be avoided—it is possible to protect and shape (or re-shape) the values of a society. A similar idea underlies Appiah's (2010) argument in his book on moral revolutions: if we start framing certain acts and types of conduct as “dishonorable”—that is, morally reprehensible—we can achieve a collective shift in consciousness, a moral revolution.
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Appiah (2010, p. 17), too, emphasizes the relationship between dishonor and contempt by saying that “The appropriate response from others if you breach the [honor] codes is, first, to cease to respect you and, then, actively to treat you with disrespect. The feeling we have for those who have done what is shameful [i.e., dishonorable] is contempt.”
An “Ethic of Contempt” in Ancient Greece
Our sources suggest that the ancient Greeks were fully aware of the potential of Bell's (2013) “ethic of contempt”—due partly to the close relationship between contempt and dishonor highlighted above and to the centrality of dynamics of honor and dishonor to the administration of justice in ancient Greece, and especially in Athens. As explained by Canevaro and Rocchi (forthcoming), timē (“honor”), in Greek legal discourse, refers both to “status” and to the “rights” and “prerogatives” attached to any given status; therefore, atimia (“dishonor”) as a penalty can target either a person's status overall or one (or more) specific right(s) attached to it. Because, from the Greek perspective, the enjoyment of any status was not a given, but rather depended on the individual's ability to live up to the standard of behavior agreed upon by the community with respect to that status, “apt” contempt could play a part in encouraging honorable conduct and discouraging its opposite. For the Greeks, one of the easiest and most effective ways to safeguard and promote core societal values was openly to present specific types of disruptive and anti-social behavior as dishonorable and to foster a sentiment of “apt” contempt on the part of “honorable” members of the community. What is more, they did not do this simply at an informal level: at least in Athens, during the classical period, engaging in certain types of behavior that were believed to pose a particularly dangerous threat to the well-being of the polis was punished with a kind of atimia that did not consist simply in collectively inflicting shame upon or “shunning” the miscreant, but was a formal legal penalty. Behaving inappropriately (i.e., dishonorably) in those areas by failing to meet the expectations of the community was not just collectively frowned upon—it was illegal. The social dimension of the issue—and its consistent framing as a matter of public interest—is highlighted by the fact that, according to the laws regulating the penalty of dishonor, it was largely the responsibility of the community, of “anyone who wished to do so” (ho boulomenos), to prosecute those who fell into the relevant categories.
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Thus the legal penalty of dishonor (atimia), which entailed the loss of one or more rights attached to one's status (or, in certain cases, the loss of one's status altogether), exemplifies the institutionalization of apt contempt in the Athenian legal system. The precise functioning of the sanction, and all the nuances and degrees that the penalty allowed for, cannot be fully disentangled here (see nn. 6 and 14), but it is important to stress that the penalty resulted both in a diminution (or complete loss) of one's political rights and in a significant curtailment of one's ability to move freely within the polis and interact socially with other individuals. Moreover, this punishment was not available in the case of all potential deviations from Athenian popular morality, but only for serious breaches of socially endorsed standards that threatened core aspects of communal life, such as, for example, deserting from the army or failing to provide for one's parents in old age: legally dishonorable behavior was behavior that was considered a danger to society. This institutionalization did not happen overnight, and certainly did not bring about a complete separation of the legal notion from its socio-ethical background: the legal penalty of atimia, despite being an institutionalized legal response that targeted specific legal rights, always retained a very strong connection to the socio-ethical sphere.
In his Memorabilia (2.2.1–14), for example, Xenophon has Socrates explain to his son Lamprocles that being ungrateful toward one's mother is a form of injustice that is strongly condemned as well as being illegal: according to Socrates, everyone would shun (and here Socrates uses a form of the verb atimazō) those who maltreat their parents, regardless of any official proclamation of atimia in court. Similarly, being a coward was illegal and punished with atimia, but it was also considered contemptible beyond the legal sphere:
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among many examples, we can cite the comic playwright Aristophanes’ standing joke about the Athenian politician Cleonymus throwing away his shield;
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or taunts of cowardice bandied about by litigants in court;
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or Aristotle's observation that throwing away one's shield or fleeing battle due to cowardice is a cause of shame;
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or—again—the treatment that the so-called “tremblers” received in Sparta, which was labelled as atimia by Athenian authors and included both legal and less formal sanctions, such as being avoided in the streets and left out in ball games, and perhaps even having to wear a particularly ridiculous form of dress.
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Both before and after its codification as a fully fledged legal penalty, atimia was also a social sanction: the legal institution did not arise out of nothing, but rather grew from elements that were already a social reality and developed above all from the natural tendency of communities to contemn and marginalize deviant individuals.
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Contempt and Dishonor from the Archaic
to the Classical Period
Some of the elements described above are visible as early as the Homeric poems: a case in point is the episode, in Book 8 of the Iliad (Hom. Il. 8.139–171), in which the Greek hero Diomedes tries to attack the Trojan commander Hector, but is repelled by Zeus’ thunderbolts. The wise old hero Nestor, interpreting this as a bad omen, convinces Diomedes to flee, but first he needs to reassure him that if, as Diomedes fears, Hector will say that Diomedes is “base and weak,” causing him unspeakable shame, “the Trojans and Dardanians will never believe him.” While Nestor and Diomedes are retreating, Hector shouts after Diomedes that, whereas previously the other Greeks used to honor him, they will now scorn him (again, the term used is a form of the verb atimaō), because he is running away like a coward, behaving like a woman. Nestor is pointing out to Diomedes that retreat can, in the right circumstances, be justified, while Hector, using the verb atimaō, is not only highlighting that, when the criteria for justification are not met, retreat brings dishonor, but also implying that Diomedes’ retreat is unjustifiable, dictated by fear and cowardice, and therefore dishonorable.
As I argue in more detail in my doctoral dissertation and in publications deriving from it (mentioned in nn. 6 and 14), in the Homeric poems atimia-terminology seems to be primarily employed (by victims or critical onlookers) to flag unwarranted forms of disrespect, but its use in this context reflects a different intention on the part of the speaker—to exploit an individual's anxiety that taunts may be taken for truth and the dishonor that they threaten widely endorsed by the target's own community. The fact that this anxiety did exist, and so Hector could exploit it in his taunts, shows that—regardless of whether in this specific instance Diomedes behaved in a cowardly way or not—running away from the battlefield was an action that could potentially be construed as contemptible, and such contempt, if believed to be “apt,” might translate into atimia as an actual shift in status: what both heroes take for granted is that, if Diomedes really were at fault (or, at least, widely believed by the community to be at fault), he would no longer be deemed worthy of sharing in the marks of distinction which he previously enjoyed, such as food, drink, and the seat of honor at banquets—all of which are, according to Sarpedon, a character on the Trojan side (Hom. Il. 12.310–327), honors that depend upon performance (chiefly, although not solely, in battle). Being seen as underperforming means being seen as undeserving and contemptible, which can lead to a tangible loss of prerogatives and privileges, if the other members of the community believe such contempt to be justified.
Thus the Homeric epics clearly present a tension between apt and inapt contempt: there were actions that could be construed as contemptible, and when this contempt was considered by the community to be warranted, it could translate into atimia as actual loss of honor and status within that same community. However, as the example of Achilles and Agamemnon has shown, atimia and cognates in the Homeric poems were more often used to describe inapt contempt, rather than the actual (and, in later periods, legally sanctioned) loss of status entailed by apt contempt. It is the bigger picture—the situation, and one's ability to convince others to subscribe to one's interpretation of the situation—that distinguishes the two kinds of contempt.
This tension, and the need to look at the bigger picture, did not disappear after the codification of atimia as a penalty: the two senses of the notion—(unwarranted) disrespect as an expression of inapt contempt, on the one hand, and loss of honor (as status and rights) as a result of apt contempt, on the other—were still very much in use during the classical period. Demosthenes’ speech Against Meidias (Dem. 21)—a speech through which Demosthenes prosecuted Meidias precisely on a charge of hybris because the latter had punched him in the face while he (Demosthenes) was acting as a chorus producer during a festival—shows this very clearly. In the space of around forty paragraphs, Demosthenes goes from referring to the strict legal meaning of atimia as deprivation of legal rights (Dem. 21.32–33) to conceptualizing atimia as (unwarranted) disrespect, with no legal consequences (Dem. 21.72–74). And this second instance, at §§ 72–74, is particularly telling in terms of strategies used to differentiate warranted and unwarranted atimia. Here, Demosthenes recounts the story of a man, Euaeon, who felt disrespected (a form of the verb atimazō) by a friend, Boeotus, who punched him at a banquet, and responded by killing him, and spells out very clearly that, in his opinion, although Euaeon's reaction might have been disproportionate to the disrespect suffered (and he was in fact tried, convicted, and condemned to death, even if by only one vote: see §§ 74–75), it is understandable that a person who endures atimia as a result of hybris would react with anger. What is more, Demosthenes relates this episode to his own experience with Meidias (whom he is indeed prosecuting for hybris), and uses it to argue that the atimia he was subjected to was completely uncalled for, a sign of his opponent's hybris: as with the descriptions of Agamemnon's behavior in the Iliad and the suitors’ conduct in the Odyssey, the mention of hybris in close proximity to atimia is a way of representing the disrespectful treatment as unwarranted—it is an invitation to others to share in one's construal of what has happened, to persuade them that one's construal is correct (see also, e.g., Dem. 21.23). Demosthenes’ very choice of procedure, a public charge of hybris (graphē hybreōs), is extremely telling in this respect: as Canevaro (2018) has shown, this was a charge that focused on the disposition of the perpetrator (see esp. Cairns 1996), for which the accuser needed to demonstrate that the defendant was trying to arrogate to him- or herself more timē than what s/he was entitled to, thus unwarrantedly disrespecting (i.e., not recognizing the timē of) his or her victims. This clearly shows that, alongside laws that enacted and expressed apt contempt, that is, the laws that punished with atimia those who did not live up to the standards required of them, the Athenians also had a law against inapt contempt (hybris) that aimed to counteract misguided assaults to others’ legitimate timē.
However, at § 92 of the same speech, Demosthenes also conflates the legal and extra-legal dimensions of the notion, when he talks about “atimia, that is, loss of legal rights and everything else”: here the language shows that the “loss” entails both opportunities to act in certain ways (rights) in the legal sphere and the recognition of the community within a socio-ethical framework. These two senses existed in a continuum, but this does not mean that the Greeks were unaware of the potential ambivalence of these dynamics of respect and disrespect—on the contrary, as the examples above show, their language fully captures the context-specificity of such dynamics. It is obvious, however, that only “apt” contempt was institutionalized—only apt contempt translated into legal atimia for the target, who was then regarded as lacking or having lost the claims to recognition that characterize members of the community whose good standing affords them full rights of participation. And the full extent of this institutionalization is clear not only from the various legal statutes and procedures that prescribe atimia as a penalty for different crimes (see n. 14), but also from the fact that, as I argue in more detail in forthcoming publications, by the classical period there had been a sharp differentiation in the verbs used to talk about atimia: the actions and types of behavior that warranted apt contempt had been codified by law, and specialized legal terminology emerged as a result.
Whereas, in Homer, the two denominative verbs of the adjective atimos, atimaō/atimoō and atimazō, are used interchangeably (and mostly to talk about the disrespect that expresses inapt contempt: see above and compare, for example, Hom. Il. 1.11, 94; Od. 14.57, 20.166–167), in our sources from the classical period—especially, but not solely, legal sources—atimazō is consistently used to describe unwarranted disrespect (or, more generally, the action of disrespecting or “shunning” an individual, without legal consequences), while atimaō/atimoō is consistently used in discussions of the legal penalty of atimia qua loss of rights (see again, e.g., Dem. 21.72–74 compared with Dem. 21.87–91, 99, 103, 182–183). It thus appears that, at least in classical Athens, the notion of atimia as (informal, interpersonal) “disrespect” was spoken of using the verb atimazō, while atimia as a legal penalty was referred to using atimaō/atimoō, which therefore effectively became a technical term.
The evidence clearly shows that these two dimensions of “dishonor”—that is, “unwarranted disrespect” expressing inapt contempt, on the one hand, and “warranted diminution of one's standing” as a result of apt contempt, on the other—always coexisted, but became differentiated as part of the process of adopting an ethic of contempt as a sanction against anti-social or unethical behavior. This process represented the solidification into law of preexisting social dynamics. As a legal sanction, atimia achieved a high level of formalization, but the link to the socio-ethical sphere remained in that the penalty still operated within areas that were central to the community's values, still entailed an element of blame and reproach in addition to the legal sanction, still relied upon social control (through the involvement of “anyone who wished to prosecute”) for enforcement, and was still meted out as the legal actualization of what the community deemed to be apt contempt. This reaffirmed community values and promoted social cohesion through the collectively enforced marginalization of contemptible individuals.
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In her Conclusion, Bell (2013, p. 272) quotes Edmund Burke, who, in one of his letters, maintained that “contempt is not a thing to be despised” (Burke 1901, p. 436). We can safely assume that the Greeks had not read Burke, but they did understand the importance and utility of apt contempt: far from despising it, they took steps to safeguard themselves against inapt contempt by characterizing it as hybris, and therefore making it actionable as illegal, while at the same time institutionalizing apt contempt into their legal system as the formal sanction of atimia.
