1. In particular, see MacDowell, D. ‘Hybris in Athens’, G&R (1976), 14–31Google Scholar; Gagarin, M., ‘The Athenian Law Against Hybris’, Arktouros: Hellenic Studies Presented to Bernard M. W. Knox (Berlin, 1979), pp. 229–36Google Scholar; and Fisher, N., ‘Hybris and Dishonour I’, G&R (1976), 177–93Google Scholar, ‘Hybris and Dishonour I’, G&R (1979), 32–47. Ruschenbusch's, ‘Hubreos Graphe’, ZSS (1965), 302–9Google Scholar, has been superseded by these later treatments.

2. E.g., Gagarin, , supra n. 1, p. 230Google Scholar; MacDowell, supra n. 1, 25.

3. Ibid.

4. Rhetoric 1378b20ff. defines hubris as inflicting a harm which causes disgrace for the pleasure of doing so, not for one's advantage. See also N.E. 1149b23 on the connection of pleasure and hubris, and Rhetoric 1374^a13, where a blow only constitutes hubris if struck for the pleasure of doing so or to dishonour the victim. The motivation is affirmation of one's superiority. The Virtues and Vices (1251b23) adopts a similar definition: hubris is the disposition to procure pleasures for oneself while disgracing others.

5. See also Rhetoric 1391^a19, where Aristotle claims that hubris and akrasia together produce wrongdoing that is not malicious (all wrongdoing involves either hubris or malice). The link of the two categories of conduct that I maintained are central to hubris is here affirmed by Aristotle: such nonmalicious wrongdoers commit adultery and assaults.

6. See also Demosthenes 17.4 for hubris perpetrated by the tyrant upon women and children.

7. See also Demosthenes 21.80, 144, where the issue is whether drunkenness negates the frame of mind required for an assault to be hubristic.

8. This should indicate, pace Halperin and others, that for Aristotle such sexual relations did not necessarily turn on an axis of domination and submission, activity and passivity.

9. Cf. Politics 1311b2 and 1315a24. The same point arises in other contexts, and helps to explain what it is about passion that eliminates the hubristic quality of the conduct, namely the absence of the intent to assert oneself through the infliction of harm, humiliation, or disgrace. This intentional quality is nicely illustrated in Anabasis 5.5.16.2, where the men are said to take provisions not from hubris but from necessity. The same constellation appears in Thucydides 4.98.5.2 where soldiers say they drank holy water not from hubris, but because of necessity.

10. Most of the examples refer to behaviour involving sexual honour: one involves the sister of Harmodius, another an insult to the homosexual favourite of the tyrant Periander (the favourite is asked if he is pregnant), others have to do with adultery and other homoerotic relationships. See also N.E. 1115a22.

11. See also Demosthenes 17.4.1., and Aristotle N.E. 1115a2.

12. At 188a7 the unchaste kind of love is explicitly referred to as hubristic: ho meta tes hubreos Eros.

13. In the language of a fourth-century marriage contract from Elephantine (Mitteis, L., Chrestomatie, No.283, p. 317Google Scholar) the sexual transgressions of the wife bring shame (aischune) to her husband, and his infidelities constitute hubris against her.

14. Lysias 1.4, 17, 25. There are also numerous similar references in tragedy: Euripides, , Electra 947Google Scholar, Hippolytus 1073; Aeschylus, , Suppliants 29–30, 426, 487, 817–18Google Scholar.

15. See also Isaeus 8.44 on the dangers of adultery. Such mistreatment was, of course, extra-judicial, constituting an extravagant and expressive form of self-help designed symbolically to subordinate the adulterer, thus reversing the relation of dishonour that the adulterous act had established. It must indeed be emphasized that this is not a form of punishment, but of private violence. Further, we have no way of knowing how frequently such acts occurred.

16. In Cyr.7.5.62.4–5 castration is appropriate for hubristic horses.

17. Isocrates (Lochites 5.5), for example, claims that the reason for prosecuting someone for an act of hubris is not the injury itself, but the dishonour (atimia) which it brings. Although we know of relatively few actual prosecutions for hubris Isocrates' statement may reflect social reality. Aristotle (N.E. 1267b39), for example, reports that Hippodamus' theory of law embraced only three categories, death, damage, and hubris, because these are the three things men litigate about. Further, the fact that we possess no orations from cases of theft hardly indicates that this was an insignificant category of litigation.

18. Providing another illustration of the general point made by Aristotle and Isocrates about the way in which acts of hubris, particularly those directed at the sexual honour of women and children, can lead to civic violence.

19. Thus, Lysias (3.6, 23) makes clear that strangers who forcibly intrude into the presence of respectable women in their homes are insulting them by violating their sexual honour, and, hence, the honour of the men of the family.

20. There is no need here to set out the way the values of honour and shame operate in the sexual sphere. See Cohen, , ‘Separation, Seclusion, and the Status of Women in Classical Athens’ (G&R, 1989)Google Scholar, ‘Law, Society, and Homosexuality in Classical Athens’ (Past and Present, 1987), and Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (C.U.P., forthcoming 1991)Google Scholar for discussions of these values and the social practices and legal regulations associated with them.

21. Whether such accusations are true is, of course, irrelevant. The point concerns rather the normative expectations by which the author expects such exploits to be judged.

22. The passage is interesting in a number of ways, for it raises the question of to what extent concubines were thought to possess sexual honour which could be besmirched by an act of hubris.

23. And see also 1148b29.

24. Not only is hiring a free man as a prostitute hubris, but Demosthenes (22.21.2) also refers to accusing a man falsely of prostitution as committing hubris against him.

25. See also Thucydides (8.45.2.7), who claims that the Athenians keep the pay of the navy low so that the sailors will not weaken their bodies by engaging in hubris.

26. Further indication that this is hubris is his comparison with Demosthenes who he says caused Theban women and children to be distributed among the barbarians' tents. In 19.6 he explicitly refers to this as hubris committed against ‘free bodies’ (ta eleuthera sornata).

27. I have suggested elsewhere that there was no graphe for moicheia, and that the graphe which Aristotle refers to is the only one which contemporary Athenian sources actually attest: the graphe which could be brought to procure the release of a moichos being heid by the family of the adulteress, as attested in the pseudo-Demosthenic Against Neaera. See Cohen, , ‘The Athenian Law of Adultery’, RIDA (1984)Google Scholar.

28. Dover, K., Greek Homosexuality (1978)Google Scholar.

29. See, in addition to 163.9, 55.2 and 87.8. Cf.108.1 and 29.8. Apart from passages cited above, see also Plato, , Phaedrus 254e2, 250e5Google Scholar for characterizations of hubristic intercourse.

30. See Halperin, generally D., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (London, 1990)Google Scholar and Winkler, J., The Constraints of Desire (London, 1990)Google Scholar, who are far less critical than Dover in the way they develop this interpretation.

31. I refer here to the Athenian view of such relations which typically portrays the active partner alone as deriving sexual satisfaction from the transaction.

32. As Campbell's study of the Sarakatsani indicates, this was probably less true in rural settings (Campbell, J., Honour, Family, and Patronage [Oxford, 1964], pp. 200ff., 268ffGoogle Scholar). Hence, Biblical and Assyrian law distinguish between rape in the town and rape in the fields, where the woman's outcry cannot be heard. Menander, of course, indicates the exceptional possibilities which religious festivals represented. For fuller references see Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society, chapter 5.

33. Campbell, , Honour, pp. 268–9Google Scholar.