There was a time when αἰδώς occupied that whole domain of meaning afterwards divided between it and αἰσχύνη. It had then the same duplicity of meaning which is latent in the Latin ‘pudor,’ in our own ‘shame;’ and indeed retained a certain duplicity of meaning till the last (Euripides, Hippol. 387–389). Thus Homer, who does not know αἰσχύνη, sometimes, as at Il. v. 787, uses αἰδώς, where αἰσχύνη would, in later Greek, have certainly been employed; but elsewhere in that sense which, at a later period, it vindicated as exclusively its own (Il. xiii. 122; cf. Hesiod, Op. 202). And even Thucydides, in a difficult and doubtful passage where both words occur (i. 84), is by many considered to have employed them as equipollent and convertible (Donaldson, Cratylus, 3rd ed. p. 545). So too in a passage of Sophocles, where they occur close together, αἰδώς joined with φόβος, and αἰσχύνη with δέος (Ajax, 1049, 1052), it is very difficult, if not impossible, to draw any distinction between them. Generally, however, in the Attic period of the language, they were not accounted synonymous. Ammonius formally distinguishes them in a philological, as the Stoics (see Plutarch, De Vit. Pud. 2) in an ethical, interest; and almost every passage in which either occurs attests a real difference existing between them.
This distinction has not always been seized with a perfect success. Thus it has been sometimes said that αἰδώς is the shame, or sense of honour, which hinders one from doing an unworthy act; αἰσχύνη is the disgrace, outward or inward, which follows on having done it (
This much of truth the distinction drawn above possesses, that αἰδώς (== ‘verecundia,’ which is defined by Cicero, Rep. vi. 4: ‘quidam vituperationis non injustae timor’2) is the nobler word, and implies the nobler motive: in it is involved an innate moral repugnance to the doing of the dishonorable act, which moral repugnance scarcely or not at all exists in the αἰσχύνη. Let the man who is restrained by it alone be insured against the outward disgrace which he fears his act will entail, and he will refrain from it no longer. It is only, as Aristotle teaches, περὶ ἀδοξίας φαντασία: or as South, ‘The grief a man conceives from his own imperfections considered with relation to the world taking notice of them; and in one word may be defined, grief upon the sense of disesteem;’ thus at
Ἐντροπή, occurring only twice in the N. T. (
1 There is the same onesidedness, though exactly on the other side, in Cicero’s definition of ‘pudor,’ which he makes merely prospective: ‘Pudor, metus rerum turpium, et ingenua qaaedam timiditas, dedecus fugiens, laudemque consectans;’ but Ovid writes,
‘Irruit, et nostrum vulgat clamore pudorem.’
2 In the Latin of the silver age, ‘verecundia’ had acquired a sense of false shame; thus Quintilian, xii. 5, 2: ‘Verecundia est timor quidam reducens animum ab eis quae facienda sunt.’ It is the δυσωπία, on the mischiefs of which Plutarch has written such a graceful little essay.
[The following Strong's numbers apply to this section:G127,G152,G1791.]
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