Nomos

O child, child now I begin my mourning, the wild newly-learned melody (nomos) from the spirit of revenge. (684-7) Hecuba’s revenge song is a newly-learned ‘melody’ (nomos): it is also a new convention (nomos) and a new way of ordering the world.

Nussbaum reads Euripides’ untranslatable pun on nomos — as melody, convention, and distributive order — to argue that the destruction of convention is simultaneously the destruction of psychic structure and social trust.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Greek nomos is etymologically connected with ideas of distribution, apportionment, and boundary, hence, of interpersonal agreement. In the debate about nomos and its value, Hecuba’s speeches take up an interesting and constructive position.

Nussbaum grounds nomos in its etymological sense of apportionment and boundary, then shows Hecuba arguing that its merely human origin does not diminish its constitutive force in shaping character and psychological stability.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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The notion which is elicited is that of a legal division or sharing out, exclusively enjoined by law, custom, or by agreement, but not by arbitrary decision. The meaning of nomos ‘the law’ goes back to ‘legal apportionment.’

Benveniste establishes the semantic root of nomos in the verb nemō — to divide legally and by agreement — distinguishing it categorically from arbitrary division and grounding law in sanctioned distribution.

Benveniste, Émile, Indo European Language and Society, 1973thesis

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We need to ground our reading of Hecuba’s claims in a more solid grasp of the force of her distinctions within her own time, asking what, exactly, is the relationship of her speeches to the famous contemporary debate about nomos and the status of ethical value.

Nussbaum contextualizes Hecuba’s speeches within the fifth-century nomos–physis debate, arguing that the play enacts philosophically what theorists only argued about — the consequences of nomos losing its normative authority.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986thesis

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Economy (nomos) is concerned with the ways in which we get along in this world home and with the family of society. Nomos in economics means law, but not natural law. It is the recognition that community is necessary and that it requires rules of participation.

Moore treats nomos as the law of communal dwelling embedded in economy, arguing that money materializes nomos and carries the soul of collective life with all its shadow dimensions.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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‘I am not able to look at you with direct pupils (prthais korais). Don’t think that it is bad feeling about you, Polymestor. Besides, nomos is the reason.’ Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, ‘— the nomos that women should not look directly at men’

Nussbaum shows Hecuba deploying nomos cynically — citing gendered convention as pretext for revenge — illustrating how a character stripped of trust now wields nomos as a rhetorical instrument rather than inhabiting it as a lived norm.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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Kirkwood, ‘Hecuba and nomos’ argues that Hecuba’s moral change occurs only later, when Agamemnon refuses her his aid. He needs, however, to distinguish two moral changes: (1) the change from trust in binding conventions to suspicious, solitary revenge-seeking.

Nussbaum engages Kirkwood’s scholarship on Hecuba and nomos to distinguish two sequential moral disintegrations, arguing the more fundamental collapse — from trust in convention to solitary revenge — occurs before Agamemnon’s refusal.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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The word for coinage or currency, nomisma, does not appear before the fifth century. It comes from nomisō

Seaford traces nomisma etymologically to the same root as nomos, demonstrating that coined money is conceptually a form of socially conferred and legally sanctioned valuation — nomos made metallic.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting

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the contrast between actions which are aischra nomēi, 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 nomos within the fifth-century values debate, showing that the nomos–physis contrast was weaponized to dismiss conventionally grounded moral shame as insufficiently real compared to shame rooted in natural failure.

Arthur W.H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting

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The revenger, being without trust, cannot rely on the ‘accustomed usage’ of words. As Thucydides also saw, he or she must recognize that words can undergo a change in their relation to actions and objects.

Nussbaum argues that when nomos collapses, language itself is destabilized — the conventional bonds between words and things dissolve, replacing communicative trust with strategic rhetoric.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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Benveniste 1948: 79 stresses that the phenomenon of lawful and regular distribution that characterizes the verb nemō. However, it may be asked whether more than one root is at the basis of nemō.

Beekes references Benveniste’s account of nemō as lawful distribution while raising the etymological complexity of whether a single root underlies all derivatives, including nomos and nemus.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting

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the impersonal principle of themis is personified as a goddess (Themis), subordinated (more so than are Aisa and Moira) to Zeus. Although Themis ‘breaks up and convenes assemblies (agorai) of men’

Seaford contrasts themis and nomos as competing principles of distributive order, noting how the personification of themis under Zeus parallels the later rationalization of nomos as civic law.

Seaford, Richard, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004aside

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