Kakos, the primary Greek term of denigration opposed to agathos, occupies a structurally indispensable position in the depth-psychological and classical-ethical literature of the Seba corpus. Its treatment is dominated by Arthur Adkins, whose sustained analysis in Merit and Responsibility traces the word across Homeric, lyric, tragic, and philosophical contexts, demonstrating that kakos originally indexed failure, military defeat, low birth, and material helplessness rather than moral vice in any quiet, internalist sense. The term’s emotive power derived from its place within a competitive value-system in which the inability to defend oneself or one’s household was the defining disgrace. The corpus documents a long, contested, and never fully resolved transition: from kakos as designator of external disadvantage to kakos as a term of moral condemnation applicable to injustice and cowardice of character. Euripides marks a pivotal moment, using kakos in new ‘quiet’ moral senses while the traditional usage persists in force. Socrates and Plato press the extension further, insisting that injustice constitutes the most profound kakos for the soul. The term thus stands at the center of debates about shame-culture versus guilt-culture, the psychology of responsibility, the scope of moral language, and the relationship between competitive and cooperative excellences in archaic and classical Greek thought.
The noun kakotés, with the adjective kakos, its synonyms deilos and ponéros, the comparative form kakiôn, and the superlative kakistos, are the corresponding words of denigration.
Adkins establishes kakos as the primary term of denigration in Greek, systematically opposed to agathos and its synonyms, anchoring the word within the competitive value-system that governs Homeric and later Greek moral language.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
to do kaka, to do harm, is not to be kakos; to be kakos is to be the sort of person to whom kaka may be done with impunity, since he cannot defend himself: and it is this condition which is aischron.
Adkins articulates the foundational Homeric logic of kakos: the term denotes not the active perpetrator of harm but the powerless victim unable to defend himself, making vulnerability itself the social disgrace.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
Kakos, as the earlier portion of the poem showed, is used in this poem to decry the man who has lost certain external advantages, or has failed in war or the games, while apalamnos, apparently parallel, presumably has its original sense of ‘helpless’, ‘useless’.
Adkins demonstrates through Simonides that kakos operates in lyric poetry to stigmatize loss of external advantages and failure in competitive arenas, not moral defect of character.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
men are termed kakoi, or said to possess kakia or poneria, for different reasons, in the usage of Chapter IX. In these circumstances, there are only two logical attitudes to adopt: like Socrates, one may insist that these new instances of kakia can be characterized in the same manner as the old.
Adkins maps the philosophical crisis created when kakos is extended to moral failures: either Socrates’ route of insisting the new and old instances share the same criteria, or the immoralist’s denial that the new uses designate genuine kakia at all.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
Society must now decide which of these men are agathoi and which kakoi. The question is important, in view of the great claims which the agathos has against his fellows.
Adkins shows that the social redistribution of wealth in archaic Greece forced a public renegotiation of who counted as kakos, turning an apparently fixed term into a contested social classification with major political consequences.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
kakos is used in a quiet sense, and we have an interesting coupling of traditional and new values.
Adkins traces Euripides’ use of kakos in a new ‘quiet’ moral sense as evidence of the transitional period in which traditional and emergent moral valuations coexist uneasily within a single text.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
new use of kakos in, 176, 190 (6); and of agathos and arete, 176 ff, 191 (13); and aischron, 183 f.; opposes aischron to dikaion, 185 f.
The index entry for Euripides catalogues the textual locations where kakos undergoes semantic innovation, confirming the playwright as the pivotal figure in expanding the term’s moral range.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
it is not possible. Ou kalon, then, in Homer, since it is not used to decry failure, is not an equivalent of aischron either in usage or in emotive power… she has shown herself to be kakê by her actions.
Adkins distinguishes the emotive registers of ou kalon and aischron while noting that kakos can be applied to women whose actions constitute genuine moral failure, illustrating gender-differential applications of the term.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
This is quite unlike the unpremeditated use of kakos in Sophocles; accordingly, though the thought may have influenced the linguistic usage of its (sophistic) authors, there is no reason to suppose a priori that it will influence the general linguistic usage.
Adkins contrasts the deliberate, ideologically loaded new uses of kakos in Euripides with its unreflective traditional deployment in Sophocles, marking the degree of intentional semantic innovation required for moral reform.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
the contrast between actions which are aischra nomêi, shameful by convention, and those which are aischra phusei, shameful by nature, is the contrast between the new ‘quiet moral’ aischra and the traditional aischra of failure.
Adkins situates kakos within the broader sophistic opposition of convention and nature, showing how the traditional valuations associated with failure always threatened to undercut attempts to moralize terms like kakos and aischron.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
deilos, deilaios, I 5, I 10, I lOn
Nietzsche’s index references deilos — a near-synonym of kakos — in the Genealogy of Morals’ genealogical analysis of noble versus slave moral valuations, situating the Greek denigration vocabulary within the broader master-morality thesis.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887aside