16 HUMILITY AMONG THE ANCIENT GREEKS

Sophie Grace Chappell

Perhaps the most notorious passage in Aristotle’s Ethics is [NE 1123a33-1125a17] where he describes the megalopsychos, or great-souled, or magnanimous man—some­times [as by Ross] translated as ‘the proud man’.

(John Casey, Pagan Virtue 199-200)

The New Testament not only praises virtues of which Aristotle knows nothing—faith, hope, and love—and says nothing about virtues such as phronesis which are crucial for Aristotle, but it praises at least one quality as a virtue which Aristotle seems to count as one of the vices relative to [megalopsychia], namely humility.

(Alasdair MacIntyre,AfterVirtue 182, 184)

16.1

In the West we are the inheritors of two main virtue-ethical traditions, the Christian tradition and the pagan¹ Greek tradition. Both traditions are flourishingly alive today, both in our indi­vidual psyches and in our lives together. It is often said (as suggested by my two epigraphs) that one major difference between them is that the Christian tradition recognises, and the pagan tradition does not, a virtue of humility. One of the concerns that motivate this essay is the his­torical question whether and in what sense this commonplace might be true, in particular of the Greek tradition from Homer to Aristotle. Another (though I won't have space to say much about it here) is the philosophical question whether we should recognise a virtue of humility, and if so, what that virtue should look like here and now.

I say “whether we should recognise” it, and I say “here and now”, because in investigating any virtue, humility included, we must always keep in mind that real virtues are not timeless essences but sociological and psychological realities.Virtues are nodes and concentrations² of disposition, belief, attitude, response, vision, and expectation, actually present in real agents (individual or joint), in real and particular social settings.

This point narrows the gap that I may seem to have just opened up, between my historical and my philosophical question.All the way back to Socrates, philosophers have tended to hunt for ahistorical and abstract accounts of the virtues, allegedly captured in counterexample-proof iff-definitions, and relativised to nothing except an equally timeless abstraction called “human nature”.

Now certainly, there is such a thing as human nature. But real human nature is neither timeless nor abstract, as we know from science; obviously from evolutionary science, but from anthropological, ethological, sociological, historical, and psychological science too.As we actu­ally see it, human nature is always and essentially socialised, and that means socialised in some historically specific way. We might even say, with an echo of Pico della Mirandola (and indeed of Sartre), that homo sapiens is the animal whose nature is to have no nature that is not also a culture.³

Equally certainly, our understanding of the virtues should have some sort of dependence on our account of human nature. So given the historical variety of socialisations of human nature, there must be a corresponding variety of understandings of the virtues. (To say so is not to espouse the dubious thesis of relativism; it is to recognise the obvious fact of relativisation.) Our understanding of the virtues here and now needs to be grounded in the history of that variety, and seen as a continuation of that history. Understanding a virtue by way of an iff-definition can be useful, where such a definition is available. But quite often it is at least equally useful to see why no such definition is available, or why, even if it is, that formula in itself radically under­determines what counts as a realisation of it in any particular society or psychology. Either way we need to engage with the messiness of history.

In the case of humility, it is particularly obvious that this sort of historical inquiry will be more useful than the standard iff-definitional approach. For even if we are historically minded, we are enough the heirs of Socrates to want to start our inquiry into humility by saying, at least at an intuitive level, what humility is. But this is not easy, because intuitively, and philosophically too, we say and think such a dizzying variety of things about humility that it is most unlikely that any unitary definition could make good sense of them all.

Sometimes we also view humility with puzzlement, as a kind of amiably bumbling, absent­minded blindness to one's own merits, as arguably exhibited (relative particularly to his own intellectual virtues) by Socrates in dialogues like the Symposium. So viewed, humility seems to involve a kind of self-forgetfulness; but “humility” can also name a disposition that is all about focusing on myself, constant self-monitoring to make sure I don't get too uppity. On that sort of view, humility can seem as puzzling a virtue as faith.Those who take faith to be “Believing whole-heartedly what you know isn't true” may well likewise take humility to be a “virtue of ignorance” (as Driver argues modesty is, JP 1989) or even self-deception, and/or deliberately fostering a false low opinion of yourself. (So Sidgwick 1907: 334: “humility prescribes a low opinion of our merits: but if our merits are comparably high, it seems strange to direct us to have a low opinion of them”.) People may also see humility simply as low self-esteem, and so as a symptom of poor mental health; perhaps even, as Hume proposes, as a vice.⁵ Or again, more darkly, humility can be seen as a pious humbug of the Uriah Heep variety, a smarmy pretence of self-effacement that—none too successfully—masks the inner rancour, ressentiment, and relent­less will-to-power of a small and ugly soul.

Given all this diversity, it is not easy to follow Socrates' advice, and start from a definition of humility.Very probably, the attempt to find one will itself drive us back to the historical question where all that diversity came from; to which I now turn.

16.2

The commonplace of recent ethics that the pagan Greeks had no virtue of humility is evidenced at least to this extent: it's certainly true that, if you look at classical Greek philosophers' tables or lists of virtues, a virtue called humility does not appear in them. In Plato and Aristotle, it is not even clear what the word for “humility” would be. Moreover, one of Aristotle's virtues is, famously or notoriously, megalopsychia, a quality of character that some modern commentators (Sir David Ross, for example) think Anglophones should call pride. (Another of Aristotle's vir­tues is megaloprepeia, which perhaps stands to megalopsychia as I have suggested modesty stands to humility, the one being external, about how one presents oneself, and the other internal, about how one sees oneself. More about megalopsychia, and about pride, in due course.)⁶

However, the fact that Plato and Aristotle say little or nothing directly about any such virtue does not mean that humility is not an important value in their society. The opposite is true, and obviously true as soon as we look more widely in classical antiquity than just at the best-known and best-preserved philosophers—something which quite a few self-described “Aristotelian ethicists” perhaps do not do quite as much as they should.

For every classical Greek thinker from Homer to Socrates, it is an essential requirement for humans that they should know their place in the cosmos, and avoid hybris, overstepping the mark, seeking to rival the gods and thereby, perhaps, attracting their fatal attention. Socrates himself is a case—as we shall see, a special case—of this careful avoidance of hybris: that is pre­cisely the point of his famous claim to know nothing, and likewise of his taking to heart of the Delphic injunction “Know thyself”.

A century before Socrates, Heracleitus applies the same principle of keeping within our bounds not only to men, but to the cosmic order as well, all the way up to the sun (“the sun will not over­step its marks, metra, or dike will find it out”, DK22 B94). For Heracleitus, indeed, everything in the universe is governed by the notion of metron, measure or limit.And for Heracleitus as for every other ancient Greek, hybris is “outrage”, i.e. going beyond (French outre) the limits set by nature.

It is also in the spirit of avoiding rivalry with the gods that the Chorus of sea-nymphs in the Aeschylean Prometheus Vinctus deplore Io's mesalliance with Zeus, precisely on the grounds that such divine dalliances are certain to lead to disaster—in Io's case, the rather farcical disaster of being turned into a cow by the jealous Hera.

A wise man he, a wise man he indeed,

who first weighed in his mind and spoke this truth:

that love of like to like most answers need,

that a poor man's love of a rich bride breeds—reproof,

that the slave should never seek the hand of her master,

that a god's seed mixed with a mortal's brings disaster.

Never then, O never, Fates, bestow

on me the trembling glory of Zeus' concubine.

No bridegroom high for me who am below, for my slight self no Olympian lord divine.

For look at Io, barren, lost, unmanned, unwombed, unhoused by Hera's hard command.

([Aeschylus], Prometheus Vinctus 889—903)¹

No one, the nymphs tell their audience, should reach too far above their station in the world. And often that thought is naturally manifested in a superstitious fear of attracting nemesis by crowing too much over one's successes. The same fear lingers to this day in the southern Mediterranean, in the superstition of the “evil eye” and indeed in the very word “envy” (Latin invidia, from in-videre, “to look on with hostility”). This is partly why, in Herodotus, Solon advises Croesus to “call no man happy until his life is completed” (Histories 1.56; cp. Euripides, Troiades 510, Ovid Metaphorphoses 3.131—152).

The same formula comes at a key moment in Aeschylus' Oresteia, the moment that spells Agamemnon's ruin.This is the point where Clytaemestra succeeds in cajoling him, despite his pious reluctance, to tread the gorgeously dyed tapestry that, not like Penelope, she in his absence has woven. “No, do not make me walk this envious way”, pleads Agamemnon,

and draw the waiting wrath down from Above.

These things are honours for the gods, not men.

The man who walks and soils such silken gear—

a fool does this; a twice-fool, with no fear.

I am no god. Give me a human's due.

This sheening scarlet broidure-web I call

no footpath for my trampling to tear through.

God's greatest wisdom-gift is we not fall into false wisdom we mistake for true.

Living by this thought only quells our fears:

“Call no man happy till he end with happy years”.

(Aeschylus, Agamemnon 921—930)

Despite these words he quickly yields to her, and Clytaemestra sees his hybris, and in the quiet and deadly ironies of her extraordinary estin thalassa speech, celebrates his coming death as a thing now inevitable (Agamemnon 958—971).

Or take Sophocles' Antigone, where the central question is whether Antigone by seeking the same decent burial for both her dead brothers, or Creon by seeking to prevent her from equally honouring the “loyal” Eteocles and the “traitor” Polyneices, is overstepping the bounds set by their place in the world. The Antigone is not, pace some distinguished readers including Hegel and Nussbaum, a drama which pits “the value of the political” against “the value of the personal”. The statement that Antigone wishes to make is both personal and political, and the catastrophic loss that Creon endures during the play is both personal and political too. For both Antigone and Creon, the question is how to respond to demands that are at once personal and political; and for both of them, the question is how to do this in a way that does not overstep humanity's ethical bounds.⁸

Antigone is also, in some crucial respects, an instance of that key class of afflicted ones in the ancient world, the suppliant. Suppliants are everywhere in classical Greek literature, from Homer on: the Iliad begins and ends with a suppliant.⁹ And from Homer on we see that among the most familiar appeals that a suppliant can make is to rouse their vanquisher's fear of overstepping the human limits. Such an appeal can certainly be overridden, and in the bleak and brutal war­world of the Iliad, it usually is. But even when it is overridden, it addresses to the vanquisher a demand that he must respond to somehow. In the most famous supplication scene in the whole poem, Iliad 21.64—137, Lycaon's main plea to Achilles is that because this is the second time that Achilles has captured him in battle, there must be some special tie of Fate between them, which Achilles will avoid hybris only by respecting.“Feel aidos towards me” (shame), Lycaon implores, “and have pity” (συ δε μ' α'fδεο καi μ' ελεησον, Iliad 21.74).

Pity, mercy on the suppliant, is close here conceptually to its etymological near-neighbour, piety: to see that I have reason to spare my victim is to see both him and myself in the light of our shared vulnerability to the gods. Thus the shame that Lycaon means to arouse is not (as a Nietzschean might suppose) an embarrassment felt by Achilles at Lycaon's helplessness, but a willingness in Achilles to recognise the constraints that should inhibit even the most exalted mortal, given that he is, permanently and unavoidably, as helpless before the gods as his suppli­ant is before him. Achilles' unbending reply is that since Patroclus' death he no longer wants to spare any Trojans, and that aidos no longer gives him any reason to be inhibited by his own vulnerability; for the gods have doomed him already.Yet Lycaon's pleas do demand some answer; Achilles cannot just kill him and say nothing. He has to justify his action in killing a suppliant, however stark his justification may be.This is a kind of limiting case of the recognition that even heroes stand under the ethical demand that they keep within the bounds that are set for mortals; only so can they avoid hybris.

What then, in the conceptual scheme of early classical Greek ethics, is the virtue that restrains a person from hybris, overstepping, not knowing your place, in the multifarious forms that, as we have now seen, it can take? In Homeric and archaic Greek thought, such restraint falls within the remit of a virtue that is usually called sophrosune, “self-control” (literally “healthiness of judgement”): that, apparently, is what Agamemnon lacked, in being too easily persuaded—and moreover by a woman—to trample over the triumphal tapestry. But alternatively, and equally possibly in the right contexts, such restraint can be seen as the work of the virtue called dikaio- sune, “justice” (literally “doing what is indicated”: deiknumi, cognate with German zeigen and Latin in-dic-are and English “digit”): it is justice that Antigone and Creon are disputing about, and their conflict, as I have argued, is both ethical and political—and theological too.¹⁰ Or again, the virtue that avoids hybris may be called hosiotes, piety (literally “holiness”). It is this virtue that Lycaon vainly begs Achilles to display, and it is piety that Io lacks in allowing herself to be seduced by Zeus—not that she had any choice, but fate can be pitiless. Agamemnon also lacks piety, despite a few fine words: “I am no god. Give me a human's due”, he piously says—then tramples over the silk.

Whatever the manifestations or particular forms of hybris-avoiding virtue, there is always something close to our humility in it, and when we seek to translate the Greek terms for this sort of virtue into our own English vocabulary, the language of humility can easily be—some­times should be—the one that we reach for.

Something rather like our humility is, then, an important part of the ethics of early classical Greece.¹¹ But along with that first-order conclusion comes the methodological point that there can be very different ways of listing the virtues or dividing up their domains—and that nonethe­less very similar particular verdicts about how to feel, how to respond, and how to act can derive from these diverse lists.¹² Thus what we typically think of as one unitary virtue of humility, the archaic Greeks regarded as a requirement to keep within human bounds that they distributed across and found within a whole range of different virtues.¹³

16.3

It is a familiar point in classical history of ideas that the archaic Greek outlook, the one repre­sented, in their different ways, by both Homer and Aeschylus, both Sophocles and Heracleitus, had broken down by the time of Plato and Socrates.The story of how and why it broke down is, centrally, the story is one of what we would call secularisation.

Between Hesiod's time and Socrates', traditional theological conceptions lost at least some of their cultural and psychological grip.This matters to the historian of humility, insofar as the cen­tral motivating thoughts of archaic Greek humility were “Remember you are mortal” and “Do not provoke the jealousy of the gods”. It is no accident that the main critics of the traditional theology in sixth- and fifth-century-âñ Greece were also critics of the traditional “quiet”¹⁴ vir­tues of restraint, discretion, moderation, fairness, pity, and indeed humility that are dictated by that theology. When a person begins to think that, if there is a God at all, then that God can be nothing like the Zeus of Homer, then he naturally begins also to question the traditional notion that we should fear the envy or spite (or justice) of a Homeric Zeus. What people will say is permitted to them, in the absence of theological sanctions, is familiar from the “sophists”—pro­fessional savants whose ethical teaching seems usually to have had very little theological content, and was often strikingly revisionist. For Thrasymachus, Callicles, or Polus, the message does not even seem to have been the Dostoyevskian “If God does not exist, then anything is permitted”. Their message, rather, is simply “Anything is permitted”—provided only you are strong enough and shameless enough to get away with it.¹⁵

To those who were princes from the start, or to those who were men enough by nature to achieve some kind of rule or kingship or dynastic power on their own—to people like that, what could be more contemptible, more pernicious, than temperance and justice? If it is open to you to enjoy the good things of life without anyone to hinder you, why should you impose upon yourself the control of herd morality, herd reasoning, herd disapproval?... Justice and happiness means luxury, intemperance, and libertinism, backed up by brute force.All the rest—those man-made conventions that run contrary to nature—is nothing but a fine pretence; it is worthless drivel.

(Callicles, at Gorgias 492b2-c8)

Amoralist sophists like Callicles were hybristic god-defiers. On the empirical ground that typi­cally the wickedness of the wicked is not punished by Zeus but rewarded by circumstances, these sophists advocated a life quite free from fear of the gods.Their leading idea—which Nietzsche endorses—is that the natural life, for anyone who is strong enough to achieve it, is a life of lux­ury won by ruthlessness and unimpeded by the scruples, the humility, and the shame (aidos) that god-fearingness gives rise to. Their ethics was perceived as an outrage upon traditional Greek values, and that is what they meant it to be.

Nietzsche, then, had things back to front when he argued, in Twilight and Genealogy (and elsewhere), that Socrates was the great opponent of the Greeks' traditional values—a rationalist decadent whose “knife-thrust of the syllogism” was the assault of the resentful mob upon the noble and anti-moralistic aristocrats, whose true values men like Callicles represented. On the contrary, in Socrates' time—as the Meno, Gorgias, and other dialogues all demonstrate—sophisti­cal amoralism was a historically recent innovation, and the sophists who went around advocat­ing it were decidedly looked down upon by real aristocrats. Moreover, to charge traditionalist aristocrats with holding sophistical values was a scandalous charge; for sophistical amoralism was, and was meant to be, a shocking and iconoclastic heresy.

This much is clear from the reactions to it of so many characters in Plato's dialogues:Anytus in the Meno, for example, or Glaucon and Adeimantus in the Republic. Glaucon's famous chal­lenge to Socrates¹⁶, at the beginning of Republic II, is to answer the question “Why be just?” without reference to the traditional rewards and punishments—divine or human. The whole point of the question is that Glaucon is looking for an answer to sophistical amoralism that will vindicate traditional Greek values. Given the waning of the older religious orthodoxy, it will not help for this answer to appeal to the vengeance of Zeus. But fundamentally—pace Nietzsche— what Glaucon is asking Socrates to do is not to replace traditional values, but to rescue them by providing them with a new and a philosophical justification.

Whether those values can be rescued in this way, whether they are still the same values at all if they are re-presented on the completely new basis that Plato wants to give them, is a stand­ing question for every reader of Plato. One familiar aspect of this question is salient for present purposes insofar as what we call humility falls, as I have described, within the scope of what the Greeks called justice, dikaiosyne.This is the celebrated question whether there is a fallacy of equivocation about justice in Plato's Republic (Sachs 1963)—that is, whether what the Republic calls dikaiosyne is anything like the same thing as what Plato's contemporaries had traditionally meant by the word. But then, if there is this question about dikaiosyne in the Republic, there is clearly a parallel question about the Republic’s other three principal¹⁷ virtues—courage, wisdom, and again sophrosyne.

Something that gets less attention, but which is at least as relevant when we are thinking about pagan Greek humility, is the discussion of sophrosyne, temperance, that is staged in the Charmides. As in the other “Socratic” dialogues, Plato's characters do not succeed in defining the target quality of sophrosyne (which, significantly or not, is never quite called a virtue in the Charmides: Levine 2016). But they do along the way review five interesting candidate defini­tions: (1) That sophrosyne is quietness, the almost Thucydidean hesychiotes (159b). (2) That it is “shame” or modesty, aidos (160e). (3) That it is “doing your own business” (161b). (4) That it is self-knowledge (164d), a formula perhaps offered because, inter alia, of Socrates' endorsement of the Delphi gnothi seauton.And (5) that it is knowledge of the kinds of knowledge and of itself— which means that sophrosyne is also knowledge of knowledge and of ignorance (166e); a formula perhaps proffered in allusion to Socrates' reputation, whether or not earned, for saying “All I know is that I know nothing”.¹⁸

The dialogue's official line is that none of these formulae can possibly be correct. For temper­ance to be a good to us, it needs to be knowledge of the good, but Socrates professes that he can­not see what kind of good sophrosyne would be the knowledge of (175a). But as so often in the Socratic dialogues, we should look beyond the official line.The Charmides itself is a rich source of possible answers to that question, some of them in the last paragraph.With an eye on 160e, sophrosyne might be defined—and, modulo the deficiencies of any simple formula, really rather plausibly defined—as the knowledge when it is right or fitting to be ashamed, and when not. Or picking up on 161b, we might say—again, pretty plausibly—that sophrosyne means understand­ing what is your own business, and what isn't. Such a view of sophrosyne would be very close to the definition of it that Plato's Socrates explicitly advocates at Republic 432a-b—that sophrosyne is an agreement between the parts of the city, or soul, about which of them should make it its business to rule; and even closer to the Republic’s definition of dikaiosyne—as, precisely, “doing your own business”, to ta hautou prattein.

One last intriguing feature of the Charmides, taken as a text on the pagan-Greek concep­tions that are closest to our notion of humility, is that it contains at least two anticipations of the modern idea that there is something paradoxical about humility; that if it is a virtue, it needs to be what some (following Roy Sorensen) have called a blindspot virtue, or what others (following Driver 1989) have called a virtue of ignorance.

One of the two passages I have in mind here is 158c-d, where Socrates asks the beautiful young Charmides whether he, Charmides,“already has a sufficient share of sophrosyne, or is lack­ing in it”.To answer this, Charmides needs to know not only how much temperance he has, but also (as it were) how much temperance he hasn’t—at what points and in what ways Charmides' disposition falls short of temperance.This paradox we will come back to below.The problem that is more immediately obvious to Charmides himself is—he tells Socrates, and blushes with shame as he says it (158c5)—more like a social dilemma facing any young gentleman of good manners:

“For,” he said, “if I say I am not temperate, that is both an absurd accusation to make against myself, and also me giving the lie to Critias and many others, who by his account think I am temperate. But if on the other hand I say I am temperate, and sing my own praises, then that seems repellent behaviour. So I don't know what I should reply to you.”

(158c9-d7)

If sophrosyne is a virtue of self-restraint, then if I claim to have it, that might just seem to show that I don't; no genuinely self-restrained person needs to say that she is self-restrained. A wide variety of arguably virtuous dispositions show something similar—we may call it a blindspot feature: no one can talk (or not much) about her own ability to keep silent, no one can plan to be spontaneous, no one can spend their lives focusing on making themselves focused on others. How exactly its blindspot shows up for any blindspot disposition depends on the particular dis­position in question. But, most relevantly here, it seems obvious that it is self-defeating to boast about your own modesty or humility; it may even be contrary to humility just to believe that you are humble. In which case, it is a necessary condition of being humble that you not believe that you are humble; which makes humility, in Driver's terminology, a “virtue of ignorance”.

The other passage is 167b-169c, in which Socrates argues—in a refutation of Critias that makes Critias too blush with shame, 169c8—that temperance cannot be knowledge of knowl­edge and of ignorance, because, he says, “There cannot be knowledge of ignorance”. To see Socrates' point, read it as the claim that “You cannot know the answer to the question: ‘What true propositions are there that I do not know?'”; or as the claim that “You cannot know the answer to the question: ‘What false propositions are there that I believe?'”; or indeed as both claims.Those two claims are plainly true; and they seem to threaten the whole idea of know­ing what you don't know or understanding what you don't understand, an idea that, as Plato points out, is often taken to be at least part of what humility involves.As Wittgenstein says in the Preface to the Tractatus: “In order to set a limit to thought, we would have to find both sides of the limit thinkable”.

16.4

There is much in Plato's mindset—and, one speculates, in the historical Socrates' before him— that equipped him to question a central feature of the ethical tradition that he inherited that is of the first importance in thinking about pagan Greek humility: namely the honour-code, the aris­tocrats' preoccupation with the winning of glory (kudos) and the protection of honour (time).— On one reading of the Iliad—a reading which to me seems unquestionably right, and which is canonically expressed in our era by Simone Weil in her famous essay “L’lliade ou le poeme de la force”—the destructive power of this preoccupation is a key moral lesson of Homer.

But Homer is a great poet, and great poets may show moral lessons, but they never tell them; they are always ambiguous; the greater they are, the more ambiguous they are (Tolstoy, for example, comes close to ruining War & Peace by a lack of ambiguity).The Iliad can also be read, and often has been, as a celebration of the aristocratic honour-code. If it were such a celebra­tion, it would not follow that it was also an implicit dismissal of any kind of positive evaluation of humility; honour and humility coexist as ideals in plenty of other places, for instance in the mediaeval Christian-courtly aristocratic romance-cycle that we know as Thomas Malory's Morte d’Arthur. Nonetheless, that Plato read Homer as implicitly celebrating, not questioning, the honour-code, and as thereby rejecting values like justice, restraint, and humility as Plato understood them, is obviously one of the reasons for his emphatic rejection of Homer.We may surmise that Plato's rejection of Homer was driven, too, by the way contemporary sophists such as Ion were using Homer to reinforce their own exaltations of force and violence. Socrates of Alopece, the humble maker of clay statues, was a teacher and friend of the very aristocrats who most upheld the Athenian honour-code—people from noble families like Plato's.Yet he stood out as someone who questioned and opposed and often plain ridiculed that code, and thereby made space for a more extended notion of sophrosγne as including many elements of what we call humility. And in this Plato followed Socrates.

Like Socrates and unlike Plato, Aristotle appraised the ethos of the aristocracy of classical Athens as an outsider; but a different kind of outsider. During the years he lived at Athens (367-347 bc, and intermittently thereafter till his death in Euboea in 322 bc) he had the half­citizen status of a resident alien, a metoikos or “metic”, someone whose home (oikos) was with (meta) the Athenians and who had the protection of their laws, but no right to vote or stand for office. Aristotle seems to have been an admirer both of Plato and of the Athenian society that Plato so fiercely criticised; his central methodological dictum was always the broadly con­servative and deeply anti-Platonic tithenai ta phainomena (NE 1145b2-7), “preserve as much as possible of our already-established understanding of the world”; and he was famously tutor to the one man above all in whom the Calliclean or Thrasymachean vision of a proud life of kudos and time won by extreme violence actually came true—Alexander the Great. It is then perhaps unsurprising that Aristotle offers a quite different response from Plato's to the tradition of the honour-code—and, especially in the Eudemian Ethics,¹⁹ seems in fact to be something like a defender of that code.

My thesis so far has been that the pagan-Greek ethical concept closest to our concept of humility is the concept of avoiding hybris, overreaching or overstepping one's bounds, which (I have argued) is an important part of the content of at least three of their virtues—hosiotes, sophrosyne, and dikaiosyne. But we come now to an obvious objection to describing the avoid­ance of hybris as humility in anything like our sense. This is that whether a person counts as humble by not overreaching his bounds depends, after all, on what his bounds are. But Aristotle's “man of virtue” is the megalopsychos, the great-souled man. And the whole point about the megalopsychos is that, for him, the bounds of what he can do without hybris are far more exten­sive than for other people: “he claims great things, and is entitled to them” (NE 1123b1-4). Perhaps surprisingly to us, for Aristotle truthfulness turns out to be a matter of self-assessment, and a mean between “boastfulness” (alazoneia) and “self-deprecation” (eironeia) (NE IV7); thus the megalopsychos has a high opinion of himself, and is right to (Curzer 1990, Curzer 2012).The bounds that the megalopsychos must not overstep are different from those that apply to other mortals.

Perhaps, indeed, there is at least one place where there are no bounds at all on the mega- lopsychos, namely when he is engaging in theδria. It is not clear that, in this context, anything he could do would count as hybris or overstepping. Instead, at least as Aristotle advises, he should simply disregard the usual advice to “remember that he is a mortal”, and should rather, eph’ hoson endekhetai, athanatizein (“seek to be, as far as possible, divine”, NE 1177b36). It matters here that in Aristotle's schema the “intellectual virtues” do not, unlike the “virtues of character”, lie in a mean.

On Aristotle's character-sketch of the megalopsychos, John Casey comments (PaganVirtue 200):

The magnanimous (or “proud”) man has not proved to be the most durably popular ofAristotle's ethical portraits... The kindest thing that now seems to be said about the megalopsychos is that he is a crystallization of an aristocratic ethic prevalent in Aristotle's time, which Aristotle is not able to transcend.

But if people do say that, they are surely missing something.Why would Aristotle not be “able to transcend” the prevalent aristocratic ethic? The idea that he couldn't suggests that that ethic had never then been questioned, so that it could not have crossed his mind to go beyond it. But this suggestion is obviously false: Aristotle had spent twenty years studying with the main philosopher who did put in question the aristocratic ethic, and along with it the ideas of Greek racial supremacy, of male superiority, and of anything like a natural division between slaves and free men, namely Plato. Behind Plato stood the even more radically questioning and (as Nietzsche pointed out) decidedly proletarian figure of Socrates. Alongside both Plato and Socrates, throughout Aristotle's time and before it, the aristocratic ethic had been subjected to open questioning and disruption by the Athenian dramatists for over 100 years. Before them all, there is—as Simone Weil and others have shown—a marked strain in Homer himself of spiritual, but not political, egalitarianism: of the idea that there are deep commonalities to all human lives, that being a king like Odysseus rather a swineherd like Eumaeus, or a Greek rather than a Trojan, or a man rather than a woman, or even a free man rather than a slave, is a relatively shallow divi­sion of natures compared with what those natures have in common. In the Attic dramatists as in (for instance) Shakespeare, the artistic imagination could and did make good sense—and great art—of all these ways of being human. IfAristotle refused the vision of Andromache’s humanity, or Ion’s, or Atossa’s, or Hecuba’s, or Alcestis', that was indeed a refusal on his part; it was not that he was never offered the vision in the first place.

So pace Casey, it was hardly that, by some accident of history,Aristotle was “not able to tran­scend” the aristocratic ethic. He chose not to transcend it. Like Plato in the Republic before him, Aristotle sought new foundations for a revisionary version of social elitism. His notion of the megalopsychos is part of this project, and what it shows is that Aristotle was much more willing than the Plato of the Republic to accommodate Calliclean and Thrasymachean thoughts about the naturally superior man. Plato’s deep scepticism about ordinary opinions, and his inherit­ance of Socrates’ at-least-in-practice egalitarianism, made him prepared to advance a theory of human nature and the ordering of society that was radically at odds with how things actually were in contemporary Athens. Aristotle, by contrast, works as we have seen on the basis that there is always something in the views of “the many and the wise”; moreover, for at least part of his career he was tutor to a prince who turned into a world-dictator. Perhaps it is not altogether surprising that Aristotle turns out to be the proponent of a revisionary defence of the aristo­cratic ethic that is also, by way of a compromise, very happy to follow sophists like Callicles and Thrasymachus at least some of the way, in setting up “the great man” as an ideal to which there is reason to aspire for all those who can (not that there are so many of them). So understood, Aristotle’s idealisation of the megalopsγchos stands in parallel with his effort to find arguments for racial and gender supremacy. In the context of his background culture, his project is an eccentric and, in the strict sense of the word, a reactionary project (Chappell 2010).

16.5

Clearly Aristotle is no great friend of any substantive virtue of humility. He does, like all other ancient Greek thinkers—and indeed the idea is close to truism—hold that each of should avoid overreaching or overstepping the bounds that are proper to us. But that is not saying much when he also believes that the proper bounds can vary radically for different people.

Here too we see the close connection between the ethical concept of humility, as we have it, and the ethical concept of equality. (As noted, again, by John Casey: “It goes without saying that he is directly opposed to Christian humility. But modern dislike of him extends far beyond the ranks of believing Christians. He offends that spirit of equality—partly rooted, of course, in Christianity—which few of us can escape even if we try”: Pagan Virtue p.200.)

To think that each of us is right to have the modest self-assessment that is a key part of substantive humility is already to think that each of us alike occupies a rather small place in the world. On any sober and realistic account of humans’ place in the cosmos, that thought is surely both true and salutary. But there is at least a tendency in the pagan Greek honour-code, as indeed in any honour-code, to ignore, sideline, or simply reject that true thought: to think instead, for instance, that nothing matters more than winning political glory here and now. On any sober and realistic assessment, such a thought is straightforwardly insane. Though maybe, as Douglas Adams suggests, a true sense of our cosmic smallness might also be a challenge to our sanity:

Trin Tragula... was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot. And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordi­nate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.“Have some sense of proportion!” she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex just to show her.And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.To Trin Tragulas horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

(Douglas Adams,The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, ch.11; accessed online at https:// hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Trin_Tragula)

Much of our ordinary, self-interested life is—as Adams' satire brings out—precisely about failing to see ourselves in true relation to the hugeness of things; and the thoughts that the honour­code encourages, about glory and success and honour here and now among others similarly pre­occupied, are thoughts that take us in absolutely the opposite direction from facing such realities. To his credit Aristotle does not always go along with such thoughts: see the visible deities remark in (NE 1141b1), and Aristotle's rejection of honour as an aim for life in (NE 1095b27-30). But sometimes he does, and the reasons why are not hard to see: because he gets caught up in a cult of the great man that, for the tutor of Alexander, was perhaps only too tempting.

We move one step closer to our own substantive conception of humility when we get to the age of the Stoics, whose “cosmopolitan” ideal is a vision of a universe in which all humans are both small and also equal, and where each individual is called upon to work together with others for the common good.That is a step in the direction of our notion of humility, even if, in practice, the Stoic vision was often put on hold, and the actual living of actual Stoics, like that of Epicureans such as the Roman poet Horace (see e.g. Odes 2.10), was not so much a life of humble and equal coopera­tive striving for the good, but rather a kind of ironic distancing from all society's corrupt concerns.

We get closer again to the modern notion of humility when, at the coming of Christianity, we add to this cosmopolitanism both the markedly and sometimes studiedly demotic social tone of the actual Christian communities—at least one early opponent of Christianity, Celsus, pointed to the disproportionately lowly demographics of Christianity as a reason to reject it (Origen, Against Celsus 3.44, 59, 64)—and also the idea that there is something in each of us that biases us away from a true self-assessment and a true humility, from seeing ourselves truly as small in the world, and that needs to be broken into pieces before we can see and choose straight, and without that bias.We might call this bias, for want of a better word, what Iris Murdoch called it, the “fat relentless ego”; or again what the Bible calls it, sin.

It is not wrong to see this addition to our ethical understanding as a distinctively Judaeo- Christian achievement, and to link it directly to the Psalms' and the New Testament's praise of self-abasement (tapeinosis, Philippians 2.3, 2.8) and abasement of mind (tapeinophrosyne, 1 Peter 5.5—6, James 4.6).²⁰ Yet, if the basic Christian idea is that spiritual homecoming and true and humble self-knowledge is only possible for us after long, painful, and degrading expiation through battles and wanderings, neither is it wrong to think that Homer himself would agree.²¹

Notes

1 “Pagan” here is neither an ameliorative nor a pejorative. It does not mean “superstitious backwoods rustic” (as paganus often did). Nor do I mean the contemporary sense of“paganism”, as, roughly, Celtic druidism plus Californian pantheism (and minus human sacrifice).“Pagan” here is neutrally descriptive; it just means “follower of traditional pre-Christian Greek religion in its various forms”.

Corollary: possession of a virtue is a matter of degree; there are vague and borderline cases of “X hasV”.

See della Mirandola, Oratio de Hominis Dignitate (1487), paragraphs 18-23, where God tells Adam that he has made him with no definite nature except to be the creator of his own nature:“Nec te celestem nec te terrenum, neque mortalem neque immortalem fecimus, ut tui ipsius quasi arbitrarius honorari- usque plastes et factor, in quam malueris tu te formam effingeris” (22). Also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue p.161:“Man without culture is a myth. Our biological nature certainly places constraints on all cultural possibility; but man who has nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing”. (Thanks to Ben Colburn for the Pico reference. Sarah Broadie reminds me that there is something similar in Protagoras' myth.)

“Humble?” said Charlotte. “‘Humble' has two meanings. It means ‘not proud,' and it means ‘near the ground.'That's Wilbur all over. He's not proud and he's near the ground”. I am grateful to Mary Keys, “Humility and Greatness of Soul”, Perspectives on Political Science, 37:4, 217—222, for reminding me of this passage from one of my favourite children's books, Charlotte’s Web (White 1980, 140).

Hume's polemic is well-known, but also irresistibly quotable (Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, p.73 in Beauchamp's 1998 edition):“[A]s every quality which is useful or agreeable to ourselves or oth­ers, is, in common life, allowed to be a part of personal merit; so no other will ever be received, where men judge of things by their natural, unprejudiced reason, without the delusive glosses of superstition and false religion. Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither to advance a man's fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all those desirable ends; stupefy the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper.We justly, therefore, transfer them to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices; nor has any superstition force sufficient, among men of the world, to pervert entirely these natural sentiments”.

This denunciation of the “monkish virtues” begins from a list that is not in fact a list of virtues, not even on Hume's own almost uselessly capacious definition of “virtue”. But perhaps it is not meant to be: perhaps “and the whole train of monkish virtues” introduces a further item beyond those already listed. The grammar is ambiguous. It is also ambiguous whether Hume can be convicted here of describing celibacy, fasting, etc., as qualities, which would certainly be odd.

Thus Ross's Oxford translation (1935) of NE 1123a30 ff. John Casey comments (Pagan Virtues, n.3 on p.199) that “pride” is “closer to an interpretation than a translation”, and prefers “magnanimity” for megalopsychia.

Unless I say otherwise, all translations are my own.

For more on the Antigone, see Chappell 1999.

As Simone Weil famously pointed out, and as Michael Morris reminds me.

On the role and relation of suppliant see e.g. F.S.Naiden, Ancient Supplication (OUP 2006); John Gould, “Hiketeia”, Journal of Hellenic Studies 1973; on aidos see Douglas Cairns, Aidos (OUP 1992). (My thanks to Gillian Clark and Stephen Clark.)

For the theological significance of dikaiosyne and dike see MacIntyre After Virtue (London: Duckworth 1981), p.134:“‘Dike means basically the moral order of the universe,' wrote Hugh Lloyd-Jones (1971, 161): and the dikaios is the man who respects and does not violate that order. At once the difficulty in translating dikaios by ‘just' is clear; for someone in our culture may use ‘just' without any reference to or belief in a moral order in the universe”. Cp. After Virtue's famous opening “disquieting suggestion”. And Rome too; see e.g. Horace, Odes 2.10, and Ovid, Tristia 3.4.25—26: Crede mihi, bene qui latuit bene vixit, et intra/ Fortunam debet quisque manere suam. (“Believe me: he has lived well who has well concealed himself; everyone ought to keep within the bounds of his fortune”.) The middle phrase of this sentence was, according to some, chosen by Descartes as his epitaph.

On listing the virtues see my papers “Utrum...” and “Lists of the virtues”.

Aquinas' view is an interesting contrast here with what I am characterising as the common classical Greek view.According to Aquinas too (ST 2a2ae.161.4) humility is a subpart of another virtue—but only one other virtue; namely temperance.

For the competitive/ active vs the cooperative/ quiet virtues, see Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, with A.A. Long's critical commentary in JHS 1970.

On Thrasymachus—and on the differences between his thesis and Callicles'—see Chappell 1993.

In this essay, “Socrates” always refers to Plato's character of that name.

17 The principal virtues were later, e.g. in Aquinas's discussion, to be named the cardinal virtues—the virtues on which everything else hinges (Latin cardo, a hinge; it seems to have been St Ambrose who invented the term “virtus cardinalis”).

18 The theme of specifically epistemic humility in ancient Greek thought would be a fascinating discussion in its own right, and would necessarily have much to say about Socrates and the Charmides—if I had room for it.

19 On differences in doctrine between the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics, see Chappell 2010. In sum: the EE is more aristocratic in tone, the NE more egalitarian; and the NE seems to be later, because it expands or develops points that the EE merely states or hints at.

20 Tapeinophrosune, tapeinotes is a Christian notion: see LSJ on these and associated words.The vocabulary hardly ever occurs in the ancient world in other contexts, and when it does (e.g.Aristotle NE 1125a2, hoi tapeinoi kolakes; Arrian's Diatribes of Epictetus 3.24.56, Josephus The Jewish Wars 4.9.2), it is clearly pejorative—it means meanness of mind, not so much self-abasement as baseness.The contrast with the characteristic Christian attitude is obvious in e.g. Lk 16.15:“What is exalted among men is an abomi­nation before the Lord”.

At Romans 12.3 St Paul says something more consistent with a notion of humility not as think­ing lowly of oneself, but as thinking rightly of oneself:“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God has dealt to every man the measure of faith”. It would of course be a mistake to see this as anything like Aristotle's subsumption of humility into simply right opinion of oneself.

In Aquinas ST 2a2ae.161 there is a deep and rich discussion of humility as a virtue, with particular reference to the relation between low opinion of oneself and true opinion of oneself. Given that Aquinas was educated in large part by Cistercians, it is perhaps particularly interesting that he expounds and defends quite a lot of St Bernard of Clairvaux' rules for humility; but as several commentators have pointed out, it is even more interesting what part of those rules he leaves out.

21 For discussion and criticism, I am grateful to Sarah Broadie and to Mark Alfano. Both disagree with the views of this essay, for which neither of them is responsible.

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