Tera Kirk
Classics 341.
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Honor in the Ancient World


Every culture has a sense of what it considers honorable. This sense is based on what values are important to a particular society, and thus no culture’s system of honor is exactly like any other. Though it is a common belief that the ancient Greeks and Romans were identical in their beliefs and practices, this is far from being the case. Both groups were similar in some ways, and different in others. For the Greeks, the kind of honor they believed in was what they as a culture tried to emulate; for the Romans, the honor system they practiced was different from the one they held as an ideal.
The Greek concept of honor is, of course, only one part of a greater picture. It is something born from the society in which the people of ancient Greece lived, and in order to discuss it, we must discuss this society first. The ancient Greeks lived in what is called a “face-to-face” society; in such a society, much weight is placed on how a person is viewed by others in his or her community, and popular opinion of one is more important than how one views oneself. According to David Cohen in his book Law, Sexuality and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens, people in “face to face” societies felt shame on account of their behavior as opposed to guilt. He writes, “The moral perspective of shame involves evaluating oneself in significant measure according to the way in which one is seen by others. Guilt, however, arises more from internal recognition, before oneself, of wrongdoing, and is expressed through remorse, repentance, and a desire to restore a damaged relationship” (Cohen 58). Shame, then, involves losing face in the eyes of others. The opposite of shame--gaining respect from other people--is honor. Du Boulay describes the Greek concept of honor succinctly when he discusses the modern Greek village of Ambeli: “ ‘...the villager’s honor is, broadly speaking, something which is granted him by public opinion and which may not be possessed in defiance of it’ “ (Cohen 59).
By comparing the culture of ancient Greece with modern Mediterranean societies, Cohen illustrates the importance of popular opinion in a “face-to-face” society. He says that, in Vergadi, although women are not supposed to work outside the home, a family’s honor is not diminished if a woman works in the fields and “ ‘public opinion recognizes the necessity for it’” (Cohen 58).
The importance of having respect in the eyes of others led the Greeks to become a highly competitive, or agonistic (from the Greek agon, meaning “contest” or “struggle”) culture. They believed that everyone had a maximum potential, a “personal best” which they called arete, and they spent their lives striving to reach this point and be called aristos (“best”). They felt that all people had the same amount of arete, but in different areas of expertise. For instance, the Greeks believed that someone who was meant to be a farmer had just as much arete as someone who was meant to be a legendary hero. This constant striving to be declared “best” undoubtedly led to a love for competition in Greek society. The poet Hesiod describes Greek competitiveness in his poem Works and Days: “for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his horse in good order...This Strife is wholesome for men” (Hesiod ll 20-24).
The astuteness of Hesiod’s observation can be seen in the daily lives of those smallholders who worked their own land without being under anyone else’s supervision. These workers were by no means wealthy, and the members of the elite class considered them victims of servility, because they had to work for a living. The actual landowners, however, felt free because, to them, slavery meant working for someone else. As Ellen Meiksins-Woods writes in her book Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundation of Athenian Democracy, “For one type of citizen, eleutheria [freedom] meant the freedom of labor; for the other, it meant the freedom from labor” (Meiksins-Woods 134). Victor Davis Hanson also discusses Greek farmers’ view of work in his book The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization. He writes, “Possessing a work ethic that is hauntingly similar to the modern ‘immigrant’ philosophy of self-help, the Greek farmer saw little reason to extend social or political privilege to those who could not aid themselves” (Hanson 129).
Hanson uses Homer’s works to illustrate the self-sufficient attitude of Greek farmers. It is not a far-fetched idea that the ideals of Greek society can be found in Homeric epics--the “Homeric code” of how heroes behaved became the ideal for all Greek men. In the Odyssey, Achilles’s ghost says that he would rather “ ‘follow the plough as thrall to another man, one with no land allotted him and not much to live on, than be a king over all the perished dead’” (Homer 129).
The reward for struggle and competition was honor, which the Greeks called time. In many ways, time was almost tangible. It could be gained and lost, and there was an honor hierarchy that the Greeks abided by. A person could only gain honor at the expense of someone with equal or greater honor; displaying too much power over people with less or no honor was frowned upon. For instance, if a group of elites decided to attack a poor man, they would lose face. Because of this strict scale of honor, child abuse and excessive abuse of women were almost unheard of in ancient Greece, since neither groups had honor that could be taken. (Men did hit their wives in Greece; however, this was because they felt that women needed to be trained, like dogs--we may hit a dog on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper to teach it correct behavior, but if we were to take out our anger on the dog and attack it, that would be considered abusive. So it was with Greek husbands and wives).
Time involved public recognition, and usually comprised some kind of physical “mark” of the honored individual’s prowess--the seat of honor at a banquet, gifts, an extra helping of meat at a feast. Thus, Greek heroes are often rewarded for their deeds, which is quite different from many of the heroes we have in our modern Western culture. In the book Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History, we read that, “To modern readers, Homeric warrior-chiefs may appear overly greedy for material things, but their purpose in acquiring and possessing many animals and precious objects was mainly to increase their fame and glory” (61). Our heroes are people who often do good deeds for the sake of justice. They tend to actually avoid being rewarded, either by keeping their true identity secret (Superman always changed into Clark Kent before anyone could reward him with anything, and the line “Who was that masked man?” has been applied to countless heroes) or by refusing an offered reward outright (“No, thanks, Ma’am--just doing my job”).
Our sense of honor is also different from that of the Greeks because we live in an individualistic rather than a collective society. Our heroes are usually alone, not connected to other people, and save people they don’t know. In the movie Shane, the title character rides down from the mountain alone in the opening shot, and spends the movie helping Joe (who has a family of his own, and thus needs someone to help him) defeat the bad guys. In our culture, the best soldiers are those who are not tied down by a family. The Greeks had opposite ideals. Odysseus is never by himself; he is always surrounded by his band of men. Achilles is one soldier among many, and when he is alone, he is sulking because he feels he has been dishonored, and is not being very heroic. Both of these men are also looking out for the welfare of people they do know--Odysseus is trying to make sure his men and himself get home in one piece, and Achilles is fighting for the Greek cause.
Dying nobly was also honorable to the Greeks, as well as the Romans. A Spartan mother is said to have told her son, as he was going off to war: “Either come home with your shield or on it.” (In Sparta, soldiers who were killed in battle were brought home on their shields). This idea is not unlike the philosophy of the Japanese Kamikaze pilots, for whom it is a tremendous honor to be killed for the sake of their country rather than return home after a war. Roman gladiators were taught in gladiatorial school the art of dying nobly--for instance, how to bare one’s throat so a victor could cut it--and audiences were disgusted by gladiators they considered cowardly. In our culture, though we admire those who have given their lives for the country, we would rather our soldiers fight bravely and survive war.
If a person was denied honor where honor was due, the Greeks considered this very disrespectful. In Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, we can see this through Achilles’s anger at having his prize, the captive girl Briseis, taken away from him by Agamemnon. When Agamemnon tries to win his favor with ornate gifts, Achilles says, “ ‘He may offer me ten or twenty times what he has now done...but even so he shall not move me until I have been revenged in full for the bitter wrong he has done me’ “ and “ ‘my blood boils when I think it over, and remember how the son of Atreus [Agamemnon] treated me contumely as though I were some vile tramp, and that too in the presence of the Argives’ ” (Book 9).
The Greeks were so bent on being the best that they became “pre-Renaissance” Renaissance men, of sorts. They felt that a man should work to perfect both his body and his mind, and a Greek male had ample opportunity to display his physical and mental prowess. For example, the Greek hero Odysseus was not only physically powerful and brave, but he was clever as well. His mental facility can be seen in his escape from Polyphemus the Cyclops. When Polyphemus asks him his name, he says, “ ‘My name is Noman; this is what my mother and my father and my friends have always called me.’” Odysseus and his men blind the Cyclops, and escape clinging to the underbellies of some of Polyphemus’s sheep. When Polyphemus’s friends ask him who blinded him, he can only say, “ ‘Noman is killing me by fraud! Noman is killing me by force!’” (Odyssey Book 9). The other Cyclopes feel that, since no one has done anything to Polyphemus, there is nothing they can do. Thus, through Odysseus’s trickery, the Greeks escape unharmed.
The Olympic Games were the hub of arete in ancient Greece, and people with all kinds of talents came to display them at the games. Not only did athletes compete, but poets and sculptors came to be artistically inspired by the competitors, and writers like the historian Herodotus came to read the latest installments of their works for the audience. There were no team events in the Olympics. As it says in Ancient Greece: A Political, Social and Cultural History, “Thus, the games kept alive the ancient ideal of the individual hero: to be declared best by gaining a victory over a worthy opponent” (128). A winner technically got no prize except a crown of laurels, but when he returned home, there would be parades and celebrations in his honor and, if he were a resident of Athens he got free dinners for the rest of his life.
Of course, one type of arete --among many--that could be displayed at the Olympics was physical bodily perfection. The Greeks performed athletics in the nude (a custom the Romans found distasteful), and the bodies of the athletes were rubbed with oil prior to competition. One of the purposes of this was to give the body an anesthetically pleasing glow. This love for the human male form, coupled with the stipulation that no women be allowed at the Games, led to homoeroticism. The Greeks declared their support of favorite athletes with graffiti statements like “So-and-So is beautiful.”
Sex itself had much to do with the concept of honor in ancient Greece. In his essay “Sexuality in Fifth Century Athens,” Brian Arkins writes, “human sexuality in Athens was organized to meet the needs of the adult male citizen, whose body was the locus of all power in the state. All other human beings...existed sexually in relation to the adult male citizen and existed for his sexual gratification” (Atkins 1). For the Greeks, sex was not a mutually pleasurable act--sexual pleasure was reserved for the male (Creel 1). Sex was divided into the roles of dominating and submissive partners, of the penetrator and the penetrated.
This dichotomy is also evident through the practice of pedastry, or the sexual relationship between an adult and a youth. In ancient Greece, single-sex education was the norm, and older males and females often acted as “mentors,” initiating pupils into the erotic world. This relationship between teacher and student, while it would be considered inappropriate today, was thought by the Greeks to be important for a young person’s education and upbringing. They also believed that if teachers were attracted to students, they would work harder to educate them, and that teachers could become inspirational role-models through this kind of relationship. It was, however, inappropriate for the relationship to continue after the boy grew a beard and thus became an adult. Beardless youths were, of course, closer to being children than adults, and thus took the role of the submissive sexual partner. The historian Xenophon illustrates this when he says, in his discussion of Sparta, “ ‘In other Greek states, man and boy live together like married people, elsewhere they become intimate with youths by giving them gifts’” (Ancient Greece 146).
Not all Greek city-states felt the same way regarding sexuality. David Cohen writes that, “some cities prohibited homosexuality, some permitted it, and in others the situation was ambiguous” (Cohen 6). Xenophon says that in Sparta, according to the customs began by the legendary Lycurgus:

“If someone, being himself an honest man, admired a boy’s soul and tried to make him a blameless friend, and to associate with him, he [i.e. Lycurgus] approved, and believed in the excellence of this kind of education. But if it was clear that the attraction lay in the boy’s body, he considered this most shameful” (146).

Thus, it is possible to see evidence of the honor hierarchy in Greek sexual practices. Dominance of one person over another played an important role in sexual relationships.
Since we have spent much time discussing Greek honor as it relates to men, it might seem as though women in Greece had no type of honor at all. David Cohen says that, among the Sarakatsani of modern Greece, honor means different things for men and women. For males, it is andrismos (virility), while for females it is dropi (shame and sexual modesty). This differentiation seems to have been true for the ancient Greeks as well. A woman’s relationship to honor, unlike a man’s, was passive: she could only lose it. Thus, it was something women worked to protect rather than augment. A woman was honorable if she were “virtuous”--if she were a virgin or chaste, and if she accepted her lot in life as bestowed upon her by the man in her life unquestioningly. Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, is an example of a good woman. While her husband is off to war, unsolicited suitors try to woo her; she does not succumb to them. In Book Nineteen of the Odyssey, Penelope says, “ ‘the chiefs from all our islands...are wooing me against my will and are wasting my estate. I can therefore show no attention to strangers, nor suppliants, nor to people who say they are skilled artisans, but am all the time brokenhearted about Odysseus’” (Odyssey Book 19).
Another example of a good woman is Andromache. She is the former wife of the hero Hector, and has been taken to Greece as a slave of Neoptolemus as a result of the Trojan War. She is loyal to her husband, saying,“Beloved Hector! When Aphrodite snared your heart, /I have loved even your other lover for your sake,/ Even nursed your love-child at my breast, sooner than speak one word to grieve you!’” (Euripides 221-4). We can see that, not only is Andromache loyal to her husband, but she also does what the male in her life (who is her master Neoptolemus, at this point) wants her to do. She tells the Spartan princess Hermione, “ ‘I was my master’s concubine/ Because he forced me’” (Euripides ll 391-2). Thus, she has not been able to stay physically chaste like Penelope--this is because none of Penelope’s suitors had power over her. She still, by all rights, belonged to Odysseus.
Two examples of dishonorable or bad women are Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra and “the face that launched a thousand ships,” Helen of Troy. Neither woman remained loyal to her husband. Clytemnestra took a lover, Aegisthus, while her husband was away at war, and Helen ran off with Paris, although she was Menelaus’s wife. In the Andromache by Euripides, Andromache tells Helen’s daughter Hermione, “Your mother Helen, my girl, was much too fond of men” (Euripides ll 247). In Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, both women get linked together by the chorus after Clytmenestra murders her husband: “He endured so much for the sake of a woman [i.e. Helen],/ now a woman’s hand has struck him dead” (Aeschylus ll 1453-4).
The Romans, as a culture, had two kinds of honor: the kind they idealistically believed in, and the kind they practiced in everyday life. (In Greece there was no split like this. The Greeks as a culture, as we have seen, mostly attempt to emulate the honor their mythical heroes portrayed). In Rome, the two kinds of honor had different names: the idealized type was called duty (pietas) and the type they attempted to achieve in life was called prestige. The primary difference between the two was that duty was others-centered (i.e. a person had duty to his country, his family, and to higher powers), while prestige was self-centered (i.e. someone was prestigious if he had a lot of money, high political rank, and was popular with the masses. In Rome, all of these things were intricately connected). For centuries, Rome was an oligarchy--a few chosen (and wealthy) people ruled over the masses. Upper-class Romans aspired to be great politicians in the same way that we might aspire to be doctors or lawyers or movie stars. (Even Cicero, who was a lawyer, considered politics and important part of his life and had an impressive political career). This need to gain political power led to corruptness and backstabbing, and that corruptness led to the “idealized honor” which we will now discuss.
At the decline of the Republic (which had been the Romans’ form of government for centuries and it frightened them that they could lose it), the Romans realized the corrupt nature of their legal system, and began longing for the idealized Rome of the past. In Livy’s Preface to his History of Rome, he writes, “I...will feel rewarded for my labours by the chance to rest my eyes from the miseries which for years have beset this generation of ours” (Livy 224). The Romans began to espouse morals (in thought, at least) in a desperate attempt to save their society from ruin. Cicero writes, “For if we each of us propose to rob or injure one another for personal gain, then we are clearly going to demolish what is more completely natural than anything else in the world: the link that unites every human being with every other” (Cicero 34). Of course, Cicero feels the need to point out the evils of injuring others for one’s own purposes because, as we will see later, many of his fellow Romans seem not to have realized that there are evils in this.
In Roman literature, the epic hero Aeneas can be seen as a personification of pietas. He is like his Greek predecessors in some ways, and different from them in others. We have already discussed the “Homeric code” of behavior--the deeds of heroes like Achilles and Odysseus, which are alleged to have been written around 800 B.C.E, influenced the behavior of Greek males for centuries. Vergil’s Aeneid was written near the start of the Current Era, and is a product of the Romans’ realization that their society lacked morals. In short, the Greek heroes influenced Greek society--Aeneas was influenced by Roman society. Like Homer’s epic heroes centuries before him, Aeneas travels with a band of men and lives in a world where divine intervention is the norm. However, unlike them, his purpose is not to obtain fame and glory. Instead, his mission is to do what Fate wants him to. In fact, the poet Virgil seems to view glory-seeking as a dishonorable trait. Aeneas’s adversary Turnus, who is the hero’s equal in all other respects, fights to obtain fame while Aeneas fights because it is his duty to Fate to do so. (However, at the very end of the poem, the roles of the two men switch, as we shall see). In Book Ten of the Aeneid, after Pallas hurls his spear at Turnus and misses, Turnus says arrogantly, “ ‘Watch this, and see if my spearhead has not/ More penetrating power’” (ll 310-11).
Vergil’s Aeneas rejects another Greek ideal as well: cleverness. In Book Two, Aeneas tells the Carthaginians, “ ‘Be instructed now/ In Greek deceptive arts: one barefaced deed/ Can tell you of them all’” (ll 91-3). Of course, Aeneas is Trojan, has lived through the Trojan War, and is a victim of Greek trickery. Naturally he, and the Romans for whom he is a mythical ancestor, would abhor this quality. Also unlike Greek heroes, Aeneas is more heroic for his outstanding moral character than for any skills that he has, such as strength. Vergil often calls him “dutiful (pius) Aeneas,” and Aeneas lives up to this title in many ways.
He demonstrates his sense of duty to higher powers when he leaves Troy as Fate decrees, although he wants to stay and fight, and then by leaving Carthage and his love Dido to continue with his fated mission to found Rome. In Book Four, he tells Dido, “ ‘I set sail for Italy not of my own free will’” (ll 499). Aeneas is a dutiful son to his father when he saves him from death as Troy is being destroyed, despite his father’s pleas for Aeneas to go on without him. A famous image of pius Aeneas is that of him carrying his father on his shoulders. In Book Two, Aeneas tells his father, “ ‘Arms around my neck:/ I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great weight./ Whatever happens, both will face one danger,/ Find one safety’” (ll 920-24). Aeneas also shows himself to be a dutiful father to Ascanius. One of the reasons which Aeneas tells Dido why he must leave Carthage is: “ ‘Each night thoughts come of young Ascanius,/ My dear boy wronged, defrauded of his kingdom,’” (Book 4 ll 489-90).
Though Aeneas is indeed the model of pietas throughout most of the poem, there are times when he acts quite rashly. One such time is in Book Two. Aeneas sees Helen, whose affair with Paris started the war, and is overcome with a desire to kill her: “ ‘Now fires blazed up in my own spirit--/ A passion to avenge my fallen town/ And punish Helen’s whorishness’” (ll 754-6). Killing Helen has no practical purpose--Troy will be destroyed whether Helen is alive or not--and it also is not very heroic to kill a defenseless woman. The other time Aeneas forgets his sense of duty is at the very end of the poem, when he kills his rival Turnus. As we have said, the difference between Aeneas and Turnus is that the former is motivated by a selfless duty to his family and higher powers, while the latter wants selfishly to augment personal glory. When Aeneas mortally wounds Turnus, however, the two men switch roles. Aeneas says, “ ‘Rearmed now, why so slow?...Summon up all your nerve and skill, choose any/ Footing, among the stars, or hide/ In caverned earth--’” (Book 12 ll 1206-1212). The response of Turnus, who has heretofore played the part of “arrogant prince,” is eerily Aeneas-like: “ ‘I do not fear your taunting fury,/ Arrogant prince. It is the gods I fear,/ And Jove my enemy’” (ll 1215-17).
Thus, Aeneas does not maintain his high moral character to the last. The question that remains is--why would Vergil, after spending over three hundred pages portraying Aeneas as pius in multiple respects, cause his hero to fall so short of this ideal in the end? Perhaps Vergil saw the dichotomy between what the Romans said their honor was (duty) and what they acted like it was (prestige).
Although the Greeks had laws against a person taking advantage of someone with less honor than him, in Rome, there were no such laws. During the Republic, political power equaled prestige, and wealth had a lot to do with political power. According to Ramsay MacMullen, in his book Roman Social Relations: 50 B.C. to A.D. 284, “The connection between money and standing that one expects to find in any society was (along with other, sometimes more valued considerations), acknowledged by the Romans from very early times” (MacMullen 88). Politicians often used their money for political gain--they often bribed people to vote for them. A politician also might lend money to someone, and thereby become that person’s patron. The lendee, a client, would be indebted to him for this favor. One of the client’s duties was to vote for his patron in elections. The patron-client system involved mutual favor-exchanges between people (either monetary or otherwise--Cicero became a patron to many people by pleading their cases in court). Clients had to participate in the morning salvatio (literally, the “saying hi”), in which they would go to the house of their patron(s) and say hello; patrons gave clients small amounts of money (maybe enough for breakfast) at this time. Thus, both patrons and clients had obligations to each other.
An aspiring politician might also sleep with his rival’s wife, in order to find out detrimental information about him. Dominant groups or factions might kill those whose ideas they didn’t like (the murders of Julius Caesar and the Gracchi brothers are examples). Thus, in the Republic, prestige for the Romans had everything to do with one’s position on the political ladder, and a person could use all variety of tactics to get there.
When Rome became an empire, political power became less important (as the Emperor had it all), but the spending of money and the favor of the people fulfilled the old function of political power nicely--for the Emperors, at least. Emperors would put on lavish games to win the people’s admiration. Augustus, in “The Accomplishments of the Divine Augustus,” often mentions those things which he paid for “privata expensa”--with his own money. He says, “From the proceeds of booty I dedicated gifts in the Capitol and in the temples of the divine Julius, of Apollo, of Vesta and of Mars the avenger; this cost me about 100,000,000 sesterces” (Augustus 29).
Therefore, the Greek concept of honor got applied from philosophy to real life; Roman honor, at least in the end of the Republic through the Empire, split into two separate codes for behavior: the ideal and the real. The Greeks and the Romans, then, were two different societies with differing beliefs (though some of them overlapped), and should be treated as such.




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