Greek:
hybris
Related Topics:
personality
hamartia
will

hubris, in ancient Athens, the intentional use of violence to humiliate or degrade. The word’s connotation changed over time, and hubris came to be defined as overweening presumption that leads a person to disregard the divinely fixed limits on human action in an ordered cosmos.

The most-famous example of hubris in ancient Greece was the case of Meidias, who in 348 bce struck the orator Demosthenes in the face when the latter was dressed in ceremonial robes and performing an official function. This sense of hubris could also characterize rape. Hubris was a crime at least from the time of Solon (6th century bce), and any citizen could bring charges against another party, as was the case also for treason or impiety. (In contrast, only a member of the victim’s family could bring charges for murder.)

The most-important discussion of hubris in antiquity is by Aristotle in his Rhetoric:

Hubris consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim…simply for the pleasure of it. Retaliation is not hubris, but revenge.…Young men and the rich are hubristic because they think they are better than other people.

Hubris fit into the shame culture of archaic and Classical Greece, in which people’s actions were guided by avoiding shame and seeking honour. It did not fit into the culture of internalized guilt, which became important in later antiquity and characterizes the modern West.

Because Greek has a word for error (hamartia) but not for sin, some poets—especially Hesiod (7th century bce) and Aeschylus (5th century bce)—used hubris to describe wrongful action against the divine order. This usage led to the modern sense of the term and its assertion of impiety. Literary critics today often seek to find in hubris the “tragic flaw” (hamartia) of the heroes of Greek tragedy. There are figures in Greek myth and history for whom this usage may be appropriate, such as the Persian king Xerxes in Herodotus’s history of the Persian Wars of the 5th century bce, who tried to punish the sea for destroying his bridge over the Hellespont; Ajax in Sophoclesplay Ajax, who told Athena to help other warriors because he did not need divine help; or Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, who by unwittingly killing his true father and marrying his own mother fulfills the Delphic oracle’s prophecy of him.

This article was most recently revised and updated by J.E. Luebering.
Also called:
tragic flaw
Related Topics:
tragedy
hubris

hamartia, (hamartia from Greek hamartanein, “to err”), inherent defect or shortcoming in the hero of a tragedy, who is in other respects a superior being favoured by fortune.

Aristotle introduced the term casually in the Poetics in describing the tragic hero as a man of noble rank and nature whose misfortune is not brought about by villainy but by some “error of judgment” (hamartia). This imperfection later came to be interpreted as a moral flaw, such as Othello’s jealousy or Hamlet’s irresolution, although most great tragedies defy such a simple interpretation. Most importantly, the hero’s suffering and its far-reaching reverberations are far out of proportion to his flaw. An element of cosmic collusion among the hero’s flaw, chance, necessity, and other external forces is essential to bring about the tragic catastrophe.

In Greek tragedy the nature of the hero’s flaw is even more elusive. Often the tragic deeds are committed unwittingly, as when Oedipus unknowingly kills his father and marries his own mother. If the deeds are committed knowingly, they are not committed by choice: Orestes is under obligation to Apollo to avenge his father’s murder by killing his mother. Also, an apparent weakness is often only an excess of virtue, such as an extreme probity or zeal for perfection. It has been suggested in such cases, since the tragic hero is never passive but struggles to resolve his tragic difficulty with an obsessive dedication, that he is guilty of hubrisi.e., presumption of being godlike and attempting to overstep his human limitations.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.