Arthur W.H. Adkins

Arthur W.H. Adkins (1929–1996) was a British classicist whose Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (1960) is a canonical study of the shift from Homeric “competitive” values (what one is by birth and prowess) to classical “cooperative” values (what one does in justice and piety). Adkins’s thesis remains debated — Bernard Williams and others later pushed back — but his documentation of the classical vocabulary of justice and piety, and of the way eusebeia becomes the counter-term to adikia, remains philologically load-bearing.

For Seba, Adkins stands alongside bruno-snell as one of the mid-twentieth-century classicists who made the Homeric-to-classical transition visible as a shift in the moral vocabulary of the Greek soul. Where Snell traces the birth of the unified subject, Adkins traces the birth of the cooperative virtues — of which eusebeia is the religious-ethical instance. The two studies are parallel operations on the same arc: the formation of the classical Greek self out of the Homeric affective substrate.

His contribution to the eusebeia recon is the tragic catalogue — the explicit pairings of eusebes with dikaios and its contrast with adikos, ekdikos, and kakistē across Sophocles and Euripides. The catalogue shows the concept taking on its classical ethical charge while retaining its religious root.

Key concepts

Major works

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