Homeric Society: A Shame-Culture?

Extract

It is widely known that in the first two chapters of his Greeks and the Irrational E. R. Dodds borrowed the terms ‘shame-culture’ and ‘guilt-culture’ and applied them to early Greek society. According to Dodds, the society depicted by Homer knew nothing of guilt or the sanction of guilt: what acted as a motivating force was aidōs, ‘shame’ or ‘sense of shame’, of which the sanction was nemesis, ‘righteous indignation’. In other words, the warriors of the heroic caste were impelled to certain courses of action, or were restrained from others, by aidōs: they were ashamed of ‘losing face’ among their equals or inferiors, and this fear of public indignation kept before the mind of the heroes where their duty lay. As the Archaic age advanced (Dodds contends), the sense of guilt became manifest, without however displacing entirely the assumptions of the earlier ‘shame-culture’.