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Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values
Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values
Adkins’s 1960 study is a canonical treatment of the Greek moral vocabulary, tracing the shift from competitive (Homeric) to cooperative (classical) values across the poetic and philosophical corpus. The book is philologically rigorous; its interest for Seba is its documentation of how eusebes, eusebeia, and their cognates enter the classical vocabulary as ethical terms in explicit contrast with adikos (unjust) and ekdikos (lawless).
The retrieved passage catalogues the contrast across fifth-century tragedy: “S. Phil. 1050, where dikaios is linked with eusebes; E. Ion 1092, where eusebeia is contrasted with being adikos; Helen 900 ff., where eusebeia is contrasted with being ekdikos, lawless; Helen 1632, where kakistē is contrasted with eusebestatē; and Phoen. 525, where adikein, to be adikos, is contrasted with eusebein” (Adkins 1960). The finding is load-bearing: by the tragedians’ hand, piety and justice are braided. To be pious is to act rightly; to act unjustly is to be impious. The concept has migrated from affect (sebas) into ethics (eusebeia) without losing its religious charge.
Adkins’s broader argument — that Greek values shift from what a man is (noble, well-born) to what a man does (just, pious, measured) — gives the knowledge graph a secondary anchor for the classical elaboration of the Homeric affective vocabulary into moral vocabulary. The line from σέβας (archaic affect) to εὐσέβεια (classical virtue) is part of this larger migration.