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    Shame and Necessity, Second Edition
    Shame and Necessity, Second Edition
    Shame and Necessity, Second Edition
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    Shame and Necessity, Second Edition

    By Bernard Williams

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    We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery.

    The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.

    Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. In a new foreword A.A. Long explores the impact of this volume in the context of Williams's stunning career.

    This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2008.
    We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of California Press
    Release dateApr 28, 2023
    ISBN9780520934931
    Shame and Necessity, Second Edition
    Author

    Bernard Williams

    Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was one of the most distinguished British philosophers of the twentieth century, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

    Read more from Bernard Williams

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      This is the best book I've read in some time. My only complaints are that 1) I wish it were longer, since I didn't want it to end; and 2) it diminishes some of the impetus I have for getting my Ph.D., since this is basically the book I've been wanting to write for a long time, except better than I could have done.Williams' central claim is that our understanding of ancient Greek tragedy, moral philosophy and indeed their "world view" at large is distorted by certain modern misconceptions concerning the nature of morality, human action, and the will. Once we see at least the contingency of modern views about the relation between free will and action, between abstract, characterless universal reason and ethics--and indeed, Williams argues that the former in each of the previous dyad is not only the result of a contingent cultural formation but basically just a mistake--we will be both more inclined to see the Greeks as closer to us, as less exotic, and we will be better able to understand them at all. If you are a diehard Kantian, or are loathe to consider that our ideas about free will might be just a bit confused, you will probably find this book disappointing, and feel like it just glosses over a lot of philosophical issues. It does. But its purpose is not strictly speaking philosophical in this sense. I think it is fair to say it is an application of more properly "philosophical" arguments Williams has made elsewhere concerning the will, morality, etc. to Greek tragedy and philosophy (see, for example, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy). If you read it as such, and approach it with at least some skepticism about Williams' critical targets, I think you will find it an immensely enjoyable and intellectually stimulating read.

    Book preview

    Shame and Necessity, Second Edition - Bernard Williams

    SATHER CLASSICAL LECTURES

    Volume Fifty-Seven

    Shame and Necessity

    A CENTENNIAL BOOK

    One hundred books

    published between 1990 and 1995

    bear this special imprint of

    the University of California Press.

    We have chosen each Centennial Book

    as an example of the Press’s finest

    publishing and bookmaking traditions

    as we celebrate the beginning of

    our second century.

    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

    Founded in 1893

    Shame and Necessity

    Bernard Williams

    With a New Foreword by A. A. Long

    University of California Press Berkeley · Los Angeles · London

    University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

    University of California Press

    Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

    University of California Press, Ltd.

    London, England

    © 1993, 2008 by The Regents of the University of California

    First paperback printing 1994

    ISBN: 978-0-520-25643-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    The Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier version of this book as follows:

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Williams, Bernard Arthur Owen.

    Shame and necessity / Bernard Williams.

    p. cm.—(Sather classical lectures; v. 57)

    Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

    ISBN: 978-0-520-08830-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

    i. Greek poetry—History and criticism. 2. Necessity (Philosophy)

    in literature. 3. Philosophy, Ancient, in literature. 4. Ethics in literature.

    5. Shame in literature. I. Title. II. Series.

    PA3095.W5 1993

    88I’.OIO9384—dc2o 92.2212

    17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08

    10 987654321

    To Patricia

    έπαμέροί’ τί δέ τις; τί δ’ οϋ τις; σκιάς όναρ άνθρωπος, άλλ’ όταν αίγλα διόσδοτος eko λαμπρόν φέγγος έπεστιν άνδρών καί μείλιχος αiών.

    Pindar Pythian 8. 95"97

    Contents 1

    Contents 1

    Preface

    Foreword to the 2008 Edition

    CHAPTER ONE The Liberation of Antiquity

    CHAPTER TWO Centres of Agency

    CHAPTER THREE Recognising Responsibility

    CHAPTER FOUR Shame and Autonomy

    CHAPTER FIVE Necessary Identities

    CHAPTER SIX Possibility, Freedom, and Power

    Notes

    ENDNOTE ONE Mechanisms of Shame and Guilt

    ENDNOTE TWO Phaedra’s Distinction: Euripides Hippolytus 380-87

    Bibliography

    General Index

    Index Locorum

    Preface

    T

    his book is based on Sather Lectures that I gave at the University of California at Berkeley in spring 1989. The practice is that lectures in this series are given by extremely distinguished classical scholars, and I owe it to the reader, and also to the Sather Committee who did me the honour of inviting me, an honour that I particularly appreciate, to make it clear that I am not primarily a classical scholar. I am someone who received what used to be called a classical education, became a philosopher, and has kept in touch with Greek studies primarily through work in ancient philosophy.

    I must mention this, all the more, because this study does not stay within the limits that this experience might advise. I do discuss some ancient philosophy (most extensively, in chapter 5, some views of Aristotle’s), but for much of the book the writers I discuss are not philosophers but poets, and I try to discuss them as poets, not as providing rhythmic examples for philosophy. I say something about my reasons for this in the first chapter. It is true that I am particularly concerned with Greek ideas from periods in which there were no philosophical writers, or from which few and fragmentary philosophical writings survive; but that is not my main reason for turning to poetry.

    Philosophers who are guilty of bad scholarship should rightly be reproached for it. It must be said at the same time that there are some literary scholars who seem closed to the idea that their reflections might involve some bad philosophy. They should perhaps at least be conscious of the risk. That is not to say that they do wrong to run the risk—while there are standards of scholarly orthodoxy, philosophy (in the words of an old joke) is anybody’s doxy. But it does mean that scholarship, at least when it tries to say anything interesting,¹ cannot travel entirely on its own credentials. The truth is that we all have to do more things than we can rightly do, if we are to do anything at all. As T. S. Eliot put it, of course one can ‘go too far’ and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.²

    Eliot’s admirable remark, however, carries not just an encouragement, but, to someone in my situation, a warning as well. If those who are unused to working with literary texts may sometimes be too rash to satisfy the demands of scholarship, they also run the risk of not going far enough, of seeming feeble or superficial, by the standards of imaginative criticism. An insight that is robustly unaffected by contemporary writing about literature may turn out merely to represent some unforgotten prejudice. One can only accept that there is no reliable way of converting the disadvantages of amateurism into the rewards of heroism.

    In admitting that the instrument for much of my recital is the violon d’Ingres, I am cheered by the fact that at least I was introduced to it by some excellent teachers. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford I had the good fortune to be taught by two of the most remarkable classical scholars of this century, Eduard Fraenkel and Eric Dodds. They set quite different, but equally demanding, standards for understanding the ancient world. Neither, incidentally, was unqualifiedly admired in Oxford. Fraenkel was represented by the malice of the common rooms as a monster of Teutonic arrogance. He could certainly be alarming when presented with rash or pretentious error, but the quality he conveyed in his teaching and taught one to respect was humility in the face of dense and complex philological fact; and while he possessed classical learning on a scale that I suppose is not matched by anyone now living, he saw himself as poorly informed when compared, for instance, with the master whom he called the great Leo.

    If Fraenkel was sometimes derided by amateurs, Dodds was undervalued by pedants (the pedants and the amateurs were in some cases, needless to say, the same people). Extremely liberal in his political sentiments, interested in the social sciences, a poet and a friend of poets, he was also a deeply imaginative scholar. The Sather Lectures that he gave in 1949-50 yielded one of the most helpful and enduring books in the series,³ and it is one of the closest in subject matter to the concerns of this study. Since he was also extremely kind to me when I was a student, I should like to feel that my undertaking, even though it is imperfectly related to the kind of scholarship he practised, might count as a homage to him.

    I have many people and institutions to thank. I am grateful to la Maison des Sciences de I’Homme in Paris, and its administrator, Clemens Heller, for a productive period of time spent there in 1981. In the same year, I presented an early version of some of the material in this book in the Eliot Lectures that I gave at the University of Kent; I appreciated this invitation, and I am sorry that by turning into their present and very different form the lectures I gave disqualified themselves from appearing among the books that bear the name of that series. An invitation from the Classics Faculty at Cambridge to give the J. H. Gray Lectures in 1986 moved some of my ideas nearer to their present form. More recently, I have had the opportunity to present versions of some of the chapters in lectures or papers given at Yale, UCLA, Haverford College, the University of Michigan, Warwick University, and New York University. I have benefited from discussions and comments on all these occasions.

    Between the time when I was invited to give the Sather Lectures and my giving them, I had become a member of the Berkeley faculty. The members of the classics department, undiscouraged by this unprecedented and strictly irregular situation, extended the same hospitable and warm welcome to a visitor from the philosophy department as they customarily do to Sather lecturers from other institutions. Tony Long, in particular, not only did everything that could be asked of a chairman, but also showed himself a good friend and a generous colleague in giving me the benefit of his own work on subjects related to the lectures, especially to chapter 2. Other members of the classics department to whom I have special reasons for gratitude are Giovanni Ferrari, Mark Griffith, Don Mastronarde, and Tom Rosenmeyer. I thank David Engel and Chris Siciliani for their work as research assistants. Two helpful seminars on the lectures were held in the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, for which I am specially grateful to Paul Alpers, Samuel Scheffler, and Hans Sluga.

    Other friends and colleagues have been generous with their comments and scholarly help; some have read all or some of the book at various stages of its preparation. I should like to thank Julia Annas, Glen Bowersock, Myles Bumyeat, Ronald Dworkin, Helene Foley, Christopher Gill, Stephen Greenblatt, Stuart Hampshire, Stephen Knapp, Jonathan Lear, Geoffrey Lloyd, Anne Michelini, Amy Mullin, Thomas Nagel, Ruth Padel, Robert Post, Andrew Stewart, Oliver Taplin, and David Wiggins for their various kindnesses. The mistakes are undeniably my own.

    Foreword to the 2008 Edition

    B

    ernard Williams (1929-2003) was one of the greatest Englishspeaking philosophers of modern times. His work displays a remarkable combination of conceptual subtlety, arresting argument, imagination, sensitivity to literature, and humane insight. It is also more accessible to the wider public than most academic philosophy because of Williams’s trenchant interest, especially in his later career, in making sense of humanity, to borrow from the title of one of his collections of essays.1 The titles of two of Williams’s earlier books—Problems of the Self and Moral Luck— reflect this special contribution eloquently, and it is registered with particular force in Truth and Truthfulness, the last book that he completed before his untimely death.2 This is not to say that Williams shied away from the technical issues that professional philosophers argue back and forth in the academic journals. He published numerous articles on such topics as personal identity, scientific realism, and the freedom of the will. But, as his illustrious career developed, he came to focus increasingly on ethics and on what philosophy, in his view, can do, and more especially on what it cannot do, to help us live morally admirable and meaningful lives.

    Williams’s understanding of what to include under the ethical was much broader than that of most contemporary philosophers in their typical practice as members of the academic community. His writings cover numerous political issues, and they show a profound concern with history, including both the history of philosophy and the history of classical antiquity. This complex array of interests is brilliantly on view in Shame and Necessity. Ostensibly the book is a selective analysis of how its title’s two themes, together with the themes of responsibility and agency, are deployed in Greek literature and philosophy. Williams’s treatment of these topics is highly perceptive and philologically exact—a major contribution to classical studies as such—but it is also informed throughout by his philosophical and cultural insights and by a deeply personal engagement with the material. As he remarks of the Greeks, in his inimitable style, at the end of chapter 1, They can tell us not just who we are, but who we are not: they can denounce the falsity or the partiality or the limitations of our images of ourselves (10).

    Shame and Necessity began its life as the series of six lectures that Williams delivered in 1989 as Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Each year the Department of Classics at Berkeley invites a scholar to spend a semester at the university as a visiting colleague whose duties are to deliver a series of lectures on a topic of his or her choice and to teach a graduate seminar. Appointment to the Sather professorship is regarded in the community of classical scholars as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. It was my great good fortune to be chair of the classics department during Williams’s tenure as Sather professor. Thus I had the privilege not only of hearing his six lectures but of introducing him on each occasion, and I also had numerous discussions with him in advance of the lectures’ publication in this book form.

    If Williams the professional philosopher had received his higher education in the United States, his qualifications as a classical scholar of the necessary eminence might have prompted puzzlement. In fact, as a British high-school and Oxford University student, he received the linguistic and historical training that would have equipped him, if he had wished, to make a career as a professor of classics or a scholar specializing in ancient philosophy. While he chose instead to make his mark as a highly creative philosopher, in the ways I have indicated, his classical education and his interests in Greek literature and philosophy shone throughout his career, especially in his later years. The great delight he took not only in speaking about Homeric poetry or Sophoclean tragic verse but also in quoting such texts in the original Greek to his audience was evident to everyone who attended his Sather Lectures. We Berkeley classicists could not have chosen a Sather professor whose infectious enthusiasm for the classical literature was more palpable.

    Shame and Necessity was an instant classic from the moment when it was first published by the University of California Press, in 1993. The book is entirely approachable as its stands, but unlike many modern scholars, Williams preferred to let his readers think and react for themselves, rather than summarising everything himself in a lengthy introduction or telling them exactly where he was coming from. Actually the book’s argumentative force, evident as it is to any careful reader, acquires even greater interest and significance when set in the context of Williams’s earlier interests. Because he chose not to spell these out in Shame and Necessity, I offer a brief account of them here.³

    In 1981 Williams published an outstanding survey of Greek philosophy.4 Referring to Plato’s Republic and the egoistic … rationality Plato attributes to Thrasymachus, Williams observes that the Thrasymachean position derived some of its historical grounding and appeal from the aristocratic or feudal morality evidenced in the competitive success highly valued by Homeric heroes (2.43). For such a morality, he observes, shame is a predominant notion, and a leading motive the fear of disgrace, ridicule, and the loss of prestige. However, we should not suppose that shame is occasioned only by failures in competitive and self-assertive exploits; it may also be prompted by a failure to act in some expected self-sacrificing or co-operative manner:

    The confusion of these two things (i.e., the value set on competitive success and the occasion for shame] is encouraged by measuring Greek attitudes by the standard of a Christian … outlook. That outlook associates morality simultaneously with benevolence, self-denial, and inner directedness or guilt (shame before God or oneself). It sees the development of moral thought to this point as progress, and it tends to run together a number of different ideas which have been discarded—or at least rendered less reputable—by that progress. (2.44)

    This dense passage, when read retrospectively, can be seen as setting much of the agenda for Shame and Necessity, especially the later book’s close attention to Homer, the recognition that shame can motivate cooperative as well as competitive action, the negative assessment of a Christian moral outlook, and criticism of the progressivist moral attitude for being confused and irrelevant to much human experience.

    In this survey article Williams finds certain aspects of Greek ethics problematic: for instance, the Socratic ideal that a clearheaded person always has stronger reasons to do acts of justice … rather than acts of mean temporal self-interest, and Aristotle’s rational integration of character (249-50). Summing up, however, Williams concludes that in many respects the ethical thought of the Greeks was not only different from most modern thought, particularly modern thought influenced by Christianity, but was also in much better shape (251):

    It has, and needs, no God. … It takes as central and primary questions of character, and of how moral considerations are grounded in human nature: it asks what life it is rational for the individual to live. It makes no use of a blank categorical imperative. In fact—though we have used the word moral quite often for the sake of convenience—this system of ideas basically lacks the concept of morality altogether, in the sense of a class of reasons or demands which are vitally different from other kinds of reason or demand.

    … Relatedly, there is not a rift between a world of public moral rules and of private personal ideals: the questions of how one’s relations to others are to be regulated, both in the context of society and more privately, are not detached from questions about the kind of life it is worth living, and of what it is worth caring for.

    Williams acknowledges that the Greek philosophers’ application of this outlook is neither fully recoverable nor fully admirable: we cannot inhabit a Greek city-state, and we certainly should not endorse Greek attitudes to slavery and women. In addition, he finds that Greek ethical thought, like most ethical outlooks subsequently, rested upon an objective teleology of human nature which we are perhaps more conscious now of having to do without than anyone has been since some fifth-century Sophists first doubted it (252). Even so, he approves Greek philo sophical ethics for representing one of the very few sets of ideas which can help now to put moral thought into honest touch with reality.

    Toward the end of his 1981 survey Williams turns from Greek philosophy to tragedy; and here, as in his brief remarks on Homeric values, he adumbrates ideas he was to develop strongly in Shame and Necessity. Whereas Greek philosophy, in its sustained pursuit of rational self-sufficiency, seeks to insulate the good life from chance, Greek literature, above all tragedy, offers us a sense that what is great is fragile and what is necessary may be destructive (153). This passage is strongly marked by Williams’s qualified endorsement of Nietzsche:

    Granted the range, the power, the imagination and inventiveness of the Greek foundation of Western philosophy, it is yet more striking that we can take seriously, as we should, Nietzsche’s remark: Among the greatest characteristics of the Hellenes is their inability to turn the best into reflection.

    The Sather Lectures that generated Shame and Necessity gave Williams an opportunity to expatiate on Nietzsche’s dictum, an opportunity he clearly relished, for the most notable feature of the book is Williams’s sympathetic engagement with the implicit ethics and psychology of Homer and the Greek tragedians. Equally notable in Shame and Necessity, and in surprisingly sharp contrast to his survey chapter in The Legacy of Greece, is the strongly critical posture he adopts toward the moral psychology of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato. To understand this shift, we need to take account of Williams’s sceptical challenges to what he calls morality or the moral system, as articulated in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book that he wrote after his survey article on Greek philosophy and before Shame and Necessity.5

    Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, building on many of Williams’s earlier studies, is a vigorous challenge to the coherence, psychological plausibility, and practicality of contemporary moral philosophy. Although he discusses numerous styles of ethical theory, the principal target of his critique is the special notion of moral obligation, inherited from Kant, which he characterises as the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook, of almost all of us (174). The many problems Williams has with the concept of moral obligation include its categorical claims to trump all other kinds of motivation; its focus on a supposedly autonomous will undetermined by particular persons’ dispositions, interests, and social roles; and, in sum, its insulation from their lived experience as members of a community with an outlook that is both partly shared but also meaningfully individual. This book presents a wholesale challenge to the idea that philosophical reflection, just by itself, can generate ethical norms and shape people’s outlook in abstraction from their social context and psychological particularities.

    Williams approaches his criticism of the moral system, as so characterised, by contrasting it in the above respects with Greek philosophical ethics. Yet right from the outset of his book he raises doubts about whether any moral philosophy, now including that of the Greeks, can reasonably hope to answer the question of how one should live (1). Nonetheless, he identifies that Socratic question as the best place for moral philosophy to start (4), inasmuch as the question, in its generality, is noncommittal about any specifically moral considerations or assumptions about duty or goodness. In Williams’s terms the Socratic question pertains to ethics rather than morality, which he uses as his name for the narrow kind of ethics that emphasises the notion of obligation.

    In Shame and Necessity Williams chiefly looks back beyond Plato and Aristotle to Homer and the tragedians, whose work was untouched by philosophy in the sense of a special type of discourse and inquiry that Plato was the first to inaugurate fully. In that material and especially in its treatment of the key themes of shame and necessity he finds evidence for an oulook that not only escapes his earlier strictures against moral philosophy but is also, he suggests, the outlook we shall recognise in ourselves if we can come to understand the ethical concepts of the Greeks (by which he primarily means those authors who preceded Socrates and Plato).6 As he states a page later, in another riveting sentence, If we can liberate the Greeks from patronising misunderstandings of them, then that same process may help to free us of misunderstandings of ourselves. Rather than spoil the reader’s anticipation by saying more about Williams’s remarkable ability to move back and forth between the ancient and the modern, I close with a comment of personal appreciation for this book.

    Shame and Necessity is splendid in its treatment of the Greek material but is perhaps most illuminating and provocative for what it shows us about Williams the creative philosopher and his remarkable ability to cut through the hackneyed distinction between thoughts that are strictly philosophical and ideas that are only literary. Ever since he published the seminal essay Moral Luck, with its subtle discussion of Anna Karenina and an imagined Gauguin, his gift for drawing cogent insights from literature has been evident, and it is superbly present in his account of Rousseau and Diderot in Truth and Truthfulness.7 What I find especially impressive about the present book is Williams’s philosophical engagement with great texts conventionally called literary. Under his guidance, which stands as a model for the practice, the leading characters in Homer and Greek tragedy offer material for ethical and psychological reflection without losing their contextual identity; and that, I take it, is precisely what Williams intended to achieve in his mission to make moral philosophy an enterprise that is true to the complexity of human life as it is actually lived or brilliantly imagined.

    A. A. Long Berkeley August 2007

    1 Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

    2 Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers 1956-1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).

    3 In what follows I draw selectively on an essay I contributed to Bernard Williams, ed. A. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

    4 Philosophy, in The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal, ed. M. I. Finley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 202-55. Williams does not refer to this study in Shame and Necessity. It is included in the collection of his essays entitled The Sense of the Past: Essays in the History of Philosophy, ed. M. Burnyeat (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

    5 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).

    6 Shame and Necessity, p. 10.

    7 Moral Luck, in Moral Luck, chap, z; Truth and Truthfulness, chap. 8.

    CHAPTER ONE

    The Liberation of Antiquity

    W

    e are now used to thinking of the ancient Greeks as an exotic people. Forty years ago, in the preface to The Greeks and the Irrational, Dodds apologised, or rather declined to apologise, for using anthropological material in interpreting an aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece.¹ Since then, we have become familiar with the activity of applying to the societies of ancient Greece methods similar to those of cultural anthropology. Much has been achieved in these ways, and efforts, in particular, to uncover structures of myth and ritual in such terms have yielded some of the most illuminating work of recent times.²

    These methods define certain differences between ourselves and the Greeks. Cultural anthropologists, in their well-known role of observers living in a traditional society, may come very close to the people with whom they are living, but they are committed to thinking of that life as different; the point of their visit is to understand and describe another form of human life. The kind of work I have mentioned helps us to understand the Greeks by first making them seem strange—more strange, that is to say, than they seem when their life is too benignly assimilated to modern conceptions. We cannot live with the ancient Greeks or to any substantial degree imagine ourselves doing so.

    Much of their life is hidden from us, and just because of that, it is important for us to keep a sense of their otherness, a sense which the methods of cultural anthropology help us to sustain.

    This study does not use those methods. Many of the subjects I discuss have been treated in those terms, but I have largely left those discussions to one side.³ 1 want to ask a different sort of question about the ancient world, one that places it in a different—and, in just one sense, a closer—relation to our own. But I do not want to deny the otherness of the Greek world. I shall not be saying that Greeks of the fifth century B.C. were after all more modern than we have recently been encouraged to suppose, and that despite gods, daimons, pollutions, blood-guilt, sacrifices, fertility festivals, and slavery, they were really almost as much like Victorian English gentlemen, say, as some Victorian English gentlemen liked to think.⁴

    I shall stress some unacknowledged similarities between Greek conceptions

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