Sebas and Aidos — the overlap and the divergence

The Cairns monograph supplies the most careful map in the modern philological literature of where sebas and aidos coincide and where they part. The overlap is large enough that the two terms can substitute for one another in many archaic contexts; the divergence is precise enough that the substitution is never total.

Both affects respond to the same class of objects — those invested with timē. Cairns lists altars and sacred precincts, the bonds of xenia and philia, the suppliant, the king, the parent, the corpse: “Aidos and sebas also naturally overlap in those other spheres of human relationships, notably xenia and philia, to which aidos was central in Homer; here, too, both respond to the special status of the other as a party to a given relationship” (Cairns 1993). The shared object-class is what makes the two terms substitutable in many tragic passages.

The divergence is in the vector of the affect. Aidos is centripetal: it turns the self back from its own potential disgrace, restraining the impulse that would lower the agent in others’ or his own estimation. Sebas is centrifugal: it registers the arrival of a power the self did not make, and the recognition flows from the object toward the subject. Cairns notes that sebas-verbs “do not occur with a general ‘other people’ as their object” in the way aidos-verbs do — sebas is reserved for objects that themselves carry sacred or quasi-sacred weight (Cairns 1993).

The diachronic finding is that the two terms do not stay in equilibrium. By Aeschylus, “sebas is, in certain areas, by far the commoner term, and has taken over many of the functions of aidos” (Cairns 1993). The shift tracks the increasing religious specialization of the sebas-cluster: the cognate adjectives eusebes and asebes harden into their classical religious sense, while aidos retains the broader social-affective register. By the fifth century the inversion is complete, and what Homer would have called aidos in many passages, the tragedians call sebas.

Sources

• douglas-l-cairns: aidos and sebas overlap in their object-class but diverge in the vector of the affect; sebas takes over many functions of aidos by Aeschylus
• homer: Iliad 18.178–180 — Iris’ exhortation to Achilles uses sebas where aidos would also serve
• cody-peterson: the philological pair grounds the modern Lineage’s recovery of an affect Western modernity has lost the grammar for