Shame in Ancient Greece

Abstract

inhame has had a bad press for the past century or so. As Thomas Sc eff remarks (1997: 205): Over the last 200 years in the history of modern societies, shame virtually disappear d. The denial of sha e has been institutionalized in Western societies.1 Shame's t tus as a moral emotion has bee impug ed by critics, ong them theologians and anthropologists, who consider i a pri itive pr cursor to guilt: shame, the argument goes, responds to the judgments f other and is indifferent to ethical rinciples in themselve , whereas guilt is an inner sensibility and corres onds o the morally autonomous self of modern man.2 The shift from a shame culture to a guilt culture, in the formula made popular by Ruth Benedict (1946), is ak n as a sign of mor l pr gress. Thus the warrior society represented in the Homeric epics a shame culture, according to E. R. Dod s (1951) slowly gave way to a guilt c lture, which began to emerge in fifth-century democratic Athens but did not achieve a fully developed expression in the lassical world until he advent of Christianity.3 Psychol gists either ignored shame or tre ted it as c aracteristic of an early stag in the socializati n of the child,4 at least until Helen Block

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