The Shame of the Romans^[[*]]

Robert A. Kaster

The University of Chicago

Not long ago a dermatologist in Greenwich, Connecticut, set about landscaping his substantial property. His plans included removal of ninety-five trees--an expensive proposition, but not obviously problematic beyond that. The trees were all located on his own lot; and though he knew that some neighbors disapproved, because they wished to keep the town green, there surely was no law against cutting the trees down. So that is what he did. After all, this was Greenwich, Connnecticut, a Republican stronghold, dedicated to the values of private property and the proposition that a man's home is his castle: trouble was not even a blip on life's radar screen. Or so he thought. In the event, according to The New York Times, "he was shunned. He may have had a legal right to cut down the trees, but his community considered his yardwork an affront. . . . His medical practice dried up; his house was vandalized. He was . . . driven out of town."^[[1]]

Now there is another story to set beside this, from the Rome of Augustus, concerning one Timagenes, a sharp-tongued historian who came to Rome a captive slave from Alexandria.^[[2]] According to the elder Seneca, "from a slave [Timagenes] had become a cook, from a cook a chair-carrier; from being a chair-carrier he had struggled into the friendship of the emperor." But having won the emperor's amicitia, Timagenes could not hold his tongue: he not only made certain smart remarks against Augustus, Livia, and the entire household, but he saw to it that the remarks circulated widely, to feed his reputation as a wit. When Augustus asked him to "use his tongue more moderately," as the younger Seneca puts it, he ignored the request; when he persisted, Augustus formally barred him from his home. A sorry tale, then, of social failure and downward mobility after a great rise--or so we might think. Yet after his apparent disgrace Timagenes was the toast of the town: Caesar's house was closed to him, but no other threshold was barred, and he became an intimate of the consular and literary man Asinius Pollio.

These two stories, each paradoxical in its own way, are linked across two millenia by the workings of similar ethical and social emotions: what we would call a "sense of shame," and the contrary quality that we think of as "shamelessness." The Yankee dermatologist failed to grasp that it is not always right to do what we have a right to do: with misplaced confidence in formal law and disregard for his community's values he took a stance his neighbors regarded as shameless; and so they shunned him, the purest sanction placed on shamelessness. In the Roman case, the temperament that produces a smart mouth, combined with a desire to be admired for it, caused Timagenes to behave shamelessly toward his friend and benefactor: this failing was especially shocking in Roman terms because the weight of respect owed one friend by another was vastly and asymmetrically increased by the lowliness of Timagenes and the eminence of Augustus. And so Augustus repaid the shamelessness of Timagenes with a form of shunning, in effect saying "Go and never darken my door again." In this case, however, the shunning was without effect, as one kind of shamelessness was compounded by another: for the houses that received Timagenes, to enjoy his wit, were themselves demonstrating their own lack of respect for the man's great former friend.^[[3]]

Now I do not seek to persuade you this afternoon that the mechanisms of shame are more vigorously at work at the close of our century than they were in Augustan Rome. These mechanisms can still operate among us in certain circumstances; but a society in which a Dennis Rodman, Dick Morris, and Camille Paglia flourish does not risk being mistaken for a vibrant "shame-culture." Nor do I ask you simply to observe that people's behavior is often at odds with the dominant ethical ideology, something I take to be true everywhere and at all times--not least within the walls of the academy. There is, for example, the recent, notorious case of the biologist David Baltimore: when he was indirectly involved in allegations of scientific fraud, his colleagues quite shamelessly drove him from the presidency of Rockefeller University, before the allegations received a proper hearing (as you know, they have since been found baseless), and despite his colleagues' duty as scholars and citizens to attempt to find the facts before forming a judgment.^[[4]]

Rather, I want to spend some time considering the following question: why was the shame of the Romans not a stronger force? The Romans' notion of shame stayed remarkably uniform through the classical period, and it ostensibly played a much larger role in their ethics than the corresponding notion does in ours; yet this ethical idea had few supports to give it power--why should this have been so? We can turn to this question after we survey the core elements of the Roman notion of shame and some of its implications. To start, let us consider the main vehicles of the ideology, the term pudor and its cognates, which are the counterparts--though certainly not the exact counterparts--of such terms as AI)DW/S in Greek and "shame" in English.

Most fundamentally, pudor is, very much like English "shame," the displeasure someone feels when caught in an unbecoming moment: this is the emotion known in virtually all cultures, for example, if a person is observed defecating. In common experience, the displeasure is most often caused by an error that reveals what one truly and lamentably is in moral terms: a cheat, a coward, a bully, a liar, and so on. The fact or risk of standing revealed before an audience is certainly central to the Roman conception of pudor: sensitivity to the emotion is therefore often spoken of, metaphorically, as a garment, a cloak that conceals the ethically naked self and provides an acceptable social identity.^[[5]]

But a survey of some two thousand places in classical Latin where pudor and its cognates occur suggests the need for a broader and more nuanced definition, which I here suggest: pudor primarily denotes a displeasure with oneself caused by vulnerability to just criticism of a socially diminishing sort. This is the emotion that most closely corresponds to what we mean in English when we say "I feel shame" or "I feel ashamed at having done X." There is also an important extension of this definition: for pudor can also denote an admirable sensitivity to such displeasure, and a desire to avoid behavior that causes it--a disposition, in other words, comparable to what we call "a sense of shame."^[[6]] I want first to consider the four core elements of the primary definition just offered--displeasure with oneself, vulnerability, just criticism, and social loss. All four of these elements are present and interact in the vast majority of instances in which Romans speak of pudor, though their relative importance can of course vary from one instance to the next. We can begin with what is perhaps the most interesting of them, "displeasure with oneself."

We are accustomed to think of shame as outer-directed or other- directed: it is what a person feels when caught, disreputably, in the gaze of someone else. Yet the interiority of pudor, and its crucial link to one's self-conception, are equally striking. Consider, for example, that the single most common way for a Roman to speak of pudor as a motive for behavior is to contrast it with fear, that is, metus or timor.^[[7]] In drawing this contrast, a speaker typically has in mind two overlapping oppositions: what is internal as against what is external, and what is spontaneous as against what is compelled. Fear is generated by our circumstances, by some person or thing with coercive power: an enemy in battle, or the law, or an angry parent, or poverty. A close kin of force, fear seeks to shape behavior willy-nilly, though its power to shape may last only so long as it is directly applied. pudor, for its part, is generated from within: in that respect it truly reflects a person's character, the universe of habits and sentiments formed by countless choices made over time. People feel pudor not only because they are seen, or fear being seen, by someone else, but also because they see themselves and know that their present behavior falls short of their past or ideal selves: as one of Terence's repentant youths exclaims, "Oh, how utterly displeased with myself I am, what pudor I feel!"^[[8]]

These are very much the terms in which the contrast between fear and pudor is famously drawn by Micio in the Adelphoe of Terence, when he justifies his way of raising his son Aeschines (57-59, 69-75). "I believe that it's better," Micio says,

to keep children in line through pudor and
an open hand (liberalitas) than through fear (metus). . .
This is the way I figure it: A person
who does his duty only when coerced
is afraid only so so long as he thinks he'll be found out;
the minute he thinks no one's looking, bang, he's back to his basic nature.
But the person joined to you by favor acts sincerely,
He's eager to make fair return and is the same before your eyes and behind your back.
This is a father's job, to accustom a son to behave rightly
Of his own accord, not out of fear of another.

The internalized spontaneity of pudor has further consequences, implied in the phrase "vulnerability to just criticism."^[[10]] To arouse pudor, criticism must be criticism--not mere correction of error, say, but reprehension, a finding of fault; and the criticism must be seen as just, for otherwise it will arouse anger or indifference, not displeasure with oneself. The criterion of "just criticism" thus links pudor to the notion of personal responsibility: I will feel pudor if I am defeated in battle because I failed to fight bravely, but not if I am ambushed by vastly greater forces--unless I or someone else could justly blame the ambush on my own negligence or stupidity, not just bad luck.^[[11]]

Furthermore, if I can be the source of that criticism, then its expression by another need only be a potential, not an actual, event. This brings us to the idea of vulnerability: for a person with a well-tuned ethical sense did not actually have to experience criticism as something "out there"--"what other people say"--to suffer the pangs of pudor. So, for example, Valerius Maximus tells us how Terentius Varro, who had rashly engaged battle in the disaster at Cannae, was later spontaneously moved by pudor to refuse the office of dictator offered him by the whole senate and people.^[[12]] In such a case we find the interiority of pudor most obviously at work: seeing the distance between his circumstances and what he expects of himself, the person open to pudor does not need to wait for others whose opinion he values to criticize the gap.^[[13]]

The person who felt pudor most typically acknowledged the fact in a way that embodied the emotion's spontaneity, with the involuntary act of blushing: as Pliny reminds Trajan in his panegyric, "The more blood in the countenance, the more pudor in the soul."^[[14]] Like the distinction between pudor and fear, the alignment of pudor and blushing is everywhere in the literature, part of a clearly delineated physical representation of the emotion: someone in the grip of pudor is marked by a blush, silence, and downcast eyes. This distinctive body-language made a person simultaneously absent and present. Silence and the averted glance signified a momentary withdrawal from social contact, a kind of mini-exile; the blush acted as a beacon drawing the gaze of others, both marking the lapse and attesting a proper response to it. It was disconcerting to find these signals obscured. Domitian's naturally ruddy complexion was resented precisely because he seemed to exploit it as a defense against pudor: people could not tell when he was blushing.^[[15]]

Finally, the displeasure of pudor is associated with failure that brings or threatens some social damage. An academic, for example, could suffer pudor by failing publicly to answer a question in his area of expertise--indeed, a philosopher named Diodorus is said literally to have died of pudor from just that cause;^[[16]] but someone would not suffer pudor by failing to achieve some wholly secret ambition. The displeasure that constitutes pudor arises from within; but the act or state that stirs the displeasure must have consequences in the wider world, and for a person's standing in the eyes of one or more valued observers. To serve as an effective sign, a blush requires an audience.

This audience in the first instance consists of the persons most relevant to the circumstance that causes pudor: a father for a wayward son, say, or the senate for an impoverished senator.^[[17]] But the notional audience can quickly expand and become entirely abstract, to include the imagined consensus of all relevant observers: when Quintilian says that he would feel pudor if he dissented from the literary authority of Cicero, the audience for his potential discomfort is surely an imaginary one, comprising all right-thinking admirers of Cicero's authority--including not only Quintilian himself but also, perhaps, an imagined Cicero.^[[18]]

In the dynamics of pudor, the relative importance of internal and external, of self and others, might shift from one circumstance to the next or from one individual temperament to another; but the two poles together give the emotion its essential boundaries. Without the feeling that wells up from within, there is simple coercion and constrained conformity; without reference to the norms of a significant audience, there is mere sincerity and self-regard, solipsism and fragmentation. The simultaneous working of internal and external also gives the emotion its reciprocal character: someone capable of feeling pudor is ipso facto a decent person, deserving from me a certain consideration and respect; and I should feel pudor if I fail to pay that respect.^[[19]]

So much, then, for the constitutive elements of pudor: what are the implications of this emotion? First, pudor is solely human. Though the Romans were as ready as we to endow other creatures with human traits like courage or cunning or malice, only two Latin authors associate pudor with non-human forms of life: the elder Pliny, who speaks of the pudor of elephants (NH 8. 12), responding to the strong social sense that these animals display; and Seneca, whose Theseus alleges that even wild animals abstain from incest because of a pudor inscius, an ignorant or unconcscious pudor (Phaed. 914). The phrase itself is an oxymoron and as such suggests why the Romans did regard pudor as the exclusive preserve of humankind: it arises from consciousness turned upon the self within a social system.

Still, not all humans experienced this feeling, nor did all experience it in the same way.^[[20]] Slaves had no sense of pudor at all, perhaps because they were not usually conceived as having an interior ethical life, and certainly because they could not suffer social diminution: in this respect the common phrase pudor ingenuus--the pudor characteristic of the freeborn--is a tautology.^[[21]] Among the freeborn, moreover, the poor had only so much pudor as they could afford: as Tiberius is made to say in Tacitus' Annals, where we (he means the senatorial aristocracy) might be motivated by pudor, the poor are constrained by necessity.^[[22]]

Women certainly possessed a capacity for pudor, but it was largely limited to a single frame of reference--the sexual: the pudor of women is, in effect, congruent with their pudicitia, or sexual respectability.^[[23]] Notice the narrowing of meaning that occurs as one moves from the one to the other of these closely related terms, from pudor to pudicitia, a narrowing that is paralleled in another pair words, amor and amicitia, related to each other in exactly the same way: that is, pudor yields the adjective pudicus, from which the abstract noun pudicitia derives, precisely as amor yields amicus, from which the abstract noun amicitia derives. The two nouns pudicitia and amicitia uniquely share this pattern of derivation, a philological curiosity that reflects an interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon. In each case the morphological progression narrows and focuses a wide-ranging emotion, concentrating it in a specific form of socially important behavior: as against the great emotional range that amor can denote there is the more limited, institutionalized cluster of feelings, favors, and obligations represented by amicitia. pudicitia, similarly, reduces pudor to the appropriate gender roles of both sexes, emphasizing especially the control of reproduction within the patriarchal social structure.

In each case the product of this transformation is far from simple in itself: no one would suggest that either "friendship" or "sexual respectability" is a simple concept. Nonetheless both represent a considerable simplification compared with the concepts from which they are derived. A person knew the do's and don't's of pudicitia according to who he or she was in broad categorical terms, terms easily generalized according to gender and, for women, marital status: you could not be pudicus, a sexually respectable male, if you did A, B, or C; you could not be pudica, a sexually respectable female, if you did X, Y, or Z. The rules of pudor were by contrast far more numerous, more varied, more situational; and from most of the relevant situations women were regularly excluded.

It follows that the richest sense of pudor belonged to the adult elite male, who had available the widest range of social situations involving the widest range of relations. Bestowing favors and paying debts, conducting friendships and engaging in enmities, giving entertainments and being entertained, speaking in court, arranging a marriage for a daughter or introducing a son to public life: in fact all the conventionally desirable occasions of Roman life were at the same time occasions that could cause pudor. The more various your social relations, the more various the desirable occasions you had; the more numerous these occasions, the more circumstances you faced that might precipitate the thought me pudet, "I am ashamed"; the more exposed you were to pudor, the more embedded in the community you were, the more complete and multi-faceted was your social identity. The risk of pudor was in that respect desirable, even enviable. Yet at the same time the more exposed you were, the greater was the chance that you would falter, for any one of countless reasons. In this respect, we might say that Roman social life was structured precisely as a twofold challenge: on the one hand, to show always that you were a decent sort, capable of feeling pudor--and on the other hand, to behave always in such a way that you did not need to feel it. Thus the pudor of the elite entailed something of a high-wire act: the higher the wire--the more exposed to pudor--the more enviable your position and the more admirable your performance.

This high-wire act was closely observed. Since the ideology of pudor is overwhelmingly communitarian in its impulse, tending away from eccentric acts of individual will and toward social harmony, and since the signs of this harmonizing emotion are visible in the blush and posture, a large part of social harmony must rely literally on face-to-face relations. The ideology encourages us constantly to read one another and be attentive to the signs; and so I scan you as you scan me as we both are scanned by others, in what Maud Gleason has called the "forest of eyes" that hemmed in Roman life.^[[24]] To a person with an active sense of pudor, all those who constitute his social world are constantly visible, as he is visible to them. Conversely, to be without a sense of pudor is to treat others as if they were simply not there; the most direct response to such shamelessness, shunning, treats the shameless one as if he were invisible in return.

At the same time, the communitarian ideology gets its centripetal force from the energy of the individual conscience: it assumes that much responsibility for social harmony can usefully be located in the individual psyche, especially the tendency for people to be displeased with themselves. According to this ideology, therefore, I have a lot invested in your subjectivity and its healthy working. "non te pudet?" a Roman is apt to exclaim, with much the same point as when someone says, in English, "Aren't you ashamed of yourself?"^[[25]] In both cases the question amounts to a check of the other person's emotions, usually meant to jump-start his or her sluggish ethical reflexes: in Latin as in English, asking "Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" amounts to saying "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." But in Latin, unlike English, it is a person's subjective state that has the last word: Latin almost never uses expressions involving pudor or its cognates that correspond to English expressions such as "I shamed him" or "I put him to shame."^[[26]] pudor, evidently, cannot simply be imposed from the outside: in order to exist it must be felt.

As we have seen, the feeling is thought to be spontaneous and involuntary, a reflex produced by ethical conditioning.^[[27]] It is unsurprising, then, to find that in action pudor is far more often and more vividly spoken of as reactive than as anticipatory, and so more often as retrospective than prospective: considerations of the type "me pudet ne id faciam"--"I feel pudor lest I do that", that is, at the prospect of doing that--or "si faciam, pudebit"--"I will feel pudor if I do that"--are vanishingly rare.^[[28]] pudor is vastly more often a source of remorse or reproof than of counsel and prevention: accordingly, as pudor more commonly gives grounds for praise or blame than for planning, it is invoked more for rhetorical than for prudential purposes. This seems a weakness in pudor, if we agree that crying over spilt milk is not a very effective means of social control. This weakness brings us to the final aspect of the subject I want to consider.

Maintaining sensitivity to pudor in the members of the community entailed some fairly high ideological stakes. Such sensitivity was an important ingredient in the mix of a harmonious society. Insofar as it acted as a brake upon mere self-regard and self-assertion, it would tend to regulate the vigorous competition for prestige and honor among the elite, whose exposure to pudor was the most varied and consequential. More generally, maintenance of pudor would tend to lead almost automatically to the maintenance of the status quo, in which the elite had much invested.

Yet our sources suggest that pudor was a lot like the weather: everyone talked about it, but as for doing something about it . . . well, that was a different matter. There was certainly no lack of shameless behavior--behavior meriting the label impudentia--but there were no generally effective mechanisms to reinforce the appropriate reflexes. Such informal mechanisms as there were seem to have been seldom used: I mean practices like shunning the shameless person by shutting your home to him and thus renouncing your friendship.^[[29]] There were formal, public mechanisms as well: a range of delicts falling under the heading "shameful behavior" could lead to the mark of disgrace, the censorial nota, being placed next to a person's name in the citizen rolls; cowardice by a military commander, if it caused defeat (or even, in some circumstances, if it did not), could lead to a charge of maiestas; calumny--knowingly bringing a false charge against another--could result in the letter K (for kalumnia) being tattooed on a man's forehead. But in all these cases the operative word is "could": such mechanisms appear to have been used no more frequently than the informal types of shaming; and in any case, they all had a very high threshold, involving kinds of shameless behavior more gross and public than everyday impudentia.

All in all, it seems symptomatic that Cicero should invoke pudor and impudentia many scores of times in his orations--yet mention them not at all in De officiis: "shame" and "shamelessness" appear as ready rhetorical ammunition against enemies but are dispensable in the most influential work of practical ethics in the history of the West.^[[30]] There are, to be sure, many instances where Romans are seen responding to pudor's goad.^[[31]] Yet the sources leave one with a pervasive sense that for the Romans pudor did not entail a necessity in quite the same way that AI)DW/S did for the early Greeks. A Greek who violated the demands of AI)DW/S knew that he could expect NE/MESIS in return, a reaction "ranging from shock, contempt, and malice to righteous rage and indignation."^[[32]] It seem non-coincidental that the Romans had no word corresponding to NE/MESIS: the lack suggests that they did not often feel the need to refer to just that cluster of feelings, mobilized for just that purpose.^[[33]]

If pudor was weak in this way, why? Part of the weakness no doubt lay within the individual temperament. We can take it that some people by nature and nurture were (and are) simply shameless: they had what the Romans called on os durum, a "hard face", or even an os ferreum, an "iron face"--they were incapable of blushing.^[[34]] But leaving aside the peculiarities of individual makeup, I want to suggest some possible structural reasons for this weakness, having primarily to do with the competition for prestige, honor, and influence among the elite.

First, we can conjecture that sanctions were rare because of the very nature of the high-wire act of aristocratic life. A general sense of vulnerability within the elite--an unspoken awareness that one's own balance was as precarious as the next man's--might have created a safety net of tacit complicity: to borrow a metaphor from nuclear strategy, men might have been slow to use the weapons of shame from a fear of mutally assured destruction. Such reluctance would be similar to the dynamics that Nathan Rosenstein has suggested to explain, in part, another seeming paradox of Roman social life: the fact that in an explicitly militarist culture, where success in war was lavishly valued, defeated generals rarely suffered disgrace and were seldom even counted as failures. The dynamics originate not so much in the thought "there but for the grace of God go I" as in the self- protective recognition that recriminations, once begun, could leave oneself scarred and, more important, undermine the public perception of excellence that was the premise of the aristocracy's life.^[[35]] In the realm of pudor a kind of gentleman's agreement perhaps tended to produce a certain tolerance for ethical failure, a tolerance not unknown to some more modern aristocracies.

Related to this tolerance, and less speculative, is the place of pudor in the play of amicitia. Even if shame could be used against enemies, it was difficult to use it effectively; whereas shame should not be used, or could not easily be used, against friends. If someone was already your inimicus, his lapses were of course a ready target. But even if you hit the target, it would tend not to cause your enemy much pudor directly, precisely because he already was your enemy and so by definition someone who did not think much of your opinion; at the same time, even your best-aimed missiles could be regarded generally as merely conventional abuse, the stuff expected of inimici.^[[36]] So the younger Pliny snorts and stomps at the lamentable lack of pudor of his b�te noire, the orator Regulus, without, we can presume, much affecting either Regulus himself or his general standing.^[[37]] An amicus, by contrast, was someone whose sense of pudor it was in your interest to shield, not only because he was your amicus, bound to you by sentiment and mutual obligation, but because the revelation that a friend was ethically deficient implied that you had misplaced your friendship--and that would be a cause of pudor to yourself: the Roman adage "Reprove friends in private, praise them in public" entailed a healthy measure of self-interest.^[[38]] This impulse toward self-protection applied a fortiori to dealings with the members of your own household, whose exposure to pudor implicated you in still more intimate ways.

The strength of pudor was also surely limited by ambivalences in the elite's value system: I can mention only a couple of examples now. One example revolves around the notion of audacia, "boldness." The many passages where Cicero, for instance, attacks his opponents' shamelessness, impudentia, readily convey the impression that audacia was impudentia's even nastier twin, and unambiguously evil: over and over and over again audacia is denounced as the raw expression of individual will trampling on the communal sense.^[[39]] It seems the very lifeblood of the shameless--and yet we know that was not true: to be bold, audax, was also a virtue, in fact one of the core components of virtus in its radical sense, the quality of being a real man.^[[40]] The conflict exemplifies the perpetual struggle between self-assertion and submission, dominance and deference, that was at the heart of Roman values. For another example, consider the conflict between pudor and dignitas, personal worth and prestige. To take only a prominent instance: in letter after letter throughout late 50 and early 49 B.C.E. Cicero rails against Caesar's impudentia, his shameless refusal to acknowledge the authority of the senate and demit his province;^[[41]] of course Caesar, for his part, insisted that his actions were prompted, and justified, by the need to defend his own dignitas.^[[42]] From Cicero's point of view, Caesar should have felt pudor because his failure to defer to the senate left him vulnerable to criticism, for audacia among other things. From Caesar's point of view, pudor would have followed if he had deferred: for he would have failed to assert and maintain his own worth and so would have been vulnerable to criticism, for inertia among other things.

Such conflicts were surely always present at Rome, generated by a hierarchical system of social values in which the shameful and the honorable were conceived in terms of precedence and deference. But such conflicts were surely intensified in the last century of the Republic, which witnessed one long contest of dominance and submission among the elite, played out on an ever larger stage for ever higher stakes. The growth to empire would in itself have tended to weaken pudor as an ethical emotion, not only by plunging it into the kind of value-conflict that engaged Cicero and Caesar, but also by undermining the setting in which it had most force. It seems doubtful that an emotion so powerfully and directly tied to visible relations--to my ability, or inability, to look you in the face--could prosper when Rome had grown far beyond a face-to-face community, and beyond ready consensus; in the great city that had become the center of the world, pudor could even be spoken of as rusticus--something for bumpkins, and not "urbane."< sup>[[43] I am struck that instances of "effective" pudor--cases in which the emotion is held responsible for action--cluster in military contexts, where a close and relatively small community survived, its values clear and unanimous: in such circumstances a commander could use pudor as a rallying cry, and soldiers could rally themselves by the reflex action of shame.^[[44]] A civil society grown more various, splintered, and vastly larger was a less favorable medium for an emotion that required and reinforced close community--the sort of community where, in the words of the anthropologist A. L. Epstein, "there is an opportunity for people to know one another as persons."^[[45]]

Now you may be thinking: that's all well and good--but what's it to me? I confess that I aim at a protreptic purpose, as these addresses by convention are meant to do, though I quickly add that my purpose is not to urge a return to the Roman concept of pudor: however attractive some features of that emotion are--its reciprocity, the way in which it mediates between the self and external consequences--the specifically Roman form of that emotion would surely be too stifling, and too hierarchically pitched, for us to endure. But reflecting upon pudor, upon the ways it helped to constitute the Roman community and the ways it was weakened, can provide a vantage point for us to reflect upon our own various and sometimes splintered community, and the ways in which it is constituted.

That our studies can provide this sort of vantage point is one of their great values, perhaps the greatest: they allow us to approach ourselves through others, by encouraging us to ponder likeness amid differences and difference amid similarities. And so I turn protreptic by way of conclusion and urge all of us to take the time to do two things, one difficult, one easy. First, I urge each of us to set aside some time to reflect on the values that constitute our community--as they are expressed and implied, for example, in our code of professional ethics--and also to consider the structural forces--of competition and faction, say-- that tend to weaken those constitutive values. The brave among us might also ponder how we ourselves, by acts of omission or commission, feed those forces.

My second urging, however, is far less daunting: let us simply take pleasure in the fact that our community is still, for these few days at least, very much a face-to-face community. We are immensely fortunate in this, though we tend to take our good fortune for granted: our meetings are larger than ever, and growing, yet we are still small enough to be able "to know one another as persons," not as mere names or professional masks. So in the reception that follows let us by all means greet old friends--but also congratulate our award-winning teachers and scholars, and simply take the chance to say hello to someone we have never met. That we are able to meet on these terms should be counted an occasion for happiness. To miss an occasion for happiness should surely be counted a shame.



















NOTES

[[*]] The text delivered as the Presidential Address is published here without change; some annotation has been added, mainly to refer the reader to the most important primary sources. In that connection I wish to acknowledge the assistance provided by the Packard Humanities Institute CD-ROM #5.3 (1991) in tracing the uses of pudor and its cognates. I want also to thank Sander M. Goldberg, Laura A. Kaster, C. A. Stray, and Peter White for their criticisms: as always, the reader should not hold such critics responsible for what follows. The reader should also know that what follows--a very preliminary sort of sketch--will be developed in a full study of the values, emotions, and institutions of Roman social inhibition.

[[1]] E. Linden, "The Tree Gods Are a Bit Testy," The New York Times, 22 June 1996, p. A19.

[[2]] For the following see Sen. Ira 3. 23. 4-5 and Sen. Contr. 10. 5. 22.

[[3]] Asinius Pollio reportedly sought Augustus' leave, Sen. Ira 3. 23. 8 "si iubes, Caesar, statim illi domo mea interdicam": not only are the opening three words invidiously chosen to present Augustus as incivilis (a jab one could expect of Pollio); but in a world of robust pudor, the question would not arise at all.

[[4]] See esp. D. J. Kevles, "The Assault on David Baltimore," The New Yorker, 27 May 1996, pp. 94-109, with the subsquent coverage in The New York Times: "Scientist Cleared of Fraud Charge," 22 June 1996, pp. A1, A9; A. Lewis, "Tale of a Bully," 24 June 1996, p. A15; G. Kolota, "Decision in Scientific Misconduct Case Raises New Questions," 25 June 1996, p. B10.

[[5]] pudor (viz., "sense of shame") as garment: Plaut. Poen. 305, Apul. Apol. 3, SHA Heliog. 11. 4; sim., e.g., Tac. Ann. 4. 1 "palam compositus pudor, intus summa apiscendi libido." Cf. D. L. Cairns, "Off With Her AI)DW/S: Herodotus 1. 8. 3-4," CQ 46 (1996) 78-83.

[[6]] In what follows I generally speak of pudor (the emotion as experienced) as distinct from "sense of pudor" or "sensitivity to pudor" (vel sim.), though the Romans did not mark the difference between these "occurrent" and "dispositional" senses; cf. D. L. Cairns, AI)DW/S: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford 1993), 10-11.

[[7]] For the antithetical or disjunctive (aut) relation of pudor and timor / metus see esp.: Ter. Ad. 84, Caes. BG 1. 40. 14, BC 1. 67. 4, 2. 31. 7, Sall. Iug. 100. 5, Cic. Verr. 2. 2. 40, 4. 41, Cat. 1. 22, Prov. cons. 14, Hortens. frag. 97 ("inbecillis autem est pudoris magister timor, qui si quando paululum aberravit, statim spe inpunitatis exultat"), Rep. 5. 6 (pudor aligned with one's opiniones, instituta, disciplinae vs. metus aligned with poena and leges), Fin. 2. 73, TD 2. 46, Fam. 6. 6. 6, Lucr. 3. 81-84, Liv. 2. 58. 7, 2. 65. 4, 27. 12. 15, Publil. Syr. Sent. P. 45, Ov. Fast. 1. 251, Curt. Ruf. Hist. Alex. 8. 14. 22, Sen. Ira 3. 39. 4, Epist. 10. 2, Quint. 9. 2. 76 ("Cum autem obstat nobis personae reuerentia, . . . tanto cautius dicendum est quanto ualidius bonos inhibet pudor quam metus."); Tac. Hist. 1. 78, 3. 12, 3. 41, 4. 72, Ann. 2. 40, 3. 54; Gell. 9. 11. 6; Apul. Flor. 9, Met. 10. 34; cf. Tac. Hist. 4. 11 (pudor vs. neccesitas as a motive for suicide). In most of these cases the contrast between external coercion and internal motivation is explicit or clearly implied.

[[8]] Ter. Heaut. 1043-44 "eheu quam nunc totu' displiceo mihi, / quam pudet!" For pudor entailing a form of self-respect, as the counterpart to reverentia for another, see Varro Men. frag. 449 "non te tui saltem pudet, si nihil mei revereatur?" Note also the association of pudor with conscius / conscientia, e.g., Verg. Aen. 5. 455 "tum pudor incendit viris et conscia virtus" (where the phrase conscia virtus adds a gloss on the preceding noun, more Vergiliano); cf. Ov. Am. 2. 5. 34, Met. 2. 594, Sen. HF 692, Quint. 10. 3. 19, [Quint.] Decl. mai. 4. 5, Calp. Flacc. Decl. 49.

[[9]] Cf. esp. Fin. 2. 73 ("iam si pudor, si modestia, si pudicitia, si uno verbo temperantia poenae aut infamiae metu coercebuntur, non sanctitate sua se tuebuntur, quod adulterium, quod stuprum, quae libido non se proripiet ac proiciet aut occultatione proposita aut inpunitate aut licentia?") and Hortens. frag. 97 (quoted n. 7 above).

[[ [[10]] Note Gell. 19. 6. 3, glossing pudor as "timor iustae reprehensionis," after the definition of AI)SXY/NH attributed to unnamed Greek philosophi (AI)SXY/NH E)STI\N PHO/BOS DIKAI/OY PSO/GOY: "a Stoic definition in Platonic garb," according to L. Holford-Strevens, Aulus Gellius [Chapel Hill 1988] 69; somewhat differently, M.-L. Lakmann, Der Platoniker Taurus in der Darstellung des Aulus Gellius [Leiden 1995] 196-98); the same definition presumably underlies Cic. Rep. 5. 6, glossing verecundia as "quidam vituperationis non iniustae timor" (my thanks to Leofranc Holford- Strevens and James Zetzel for discussing these passages with me). On the relation of pudor and verecundia to AI)DW/S / AI)SXY/NH, cf. n. 30.

[[11]] I am concerned here, as throughout, with personal pudor, instances of which seem universally to acknowledge or attribute at least causal responsibility ("I / you should and could have done X instead of Y," where doing Y causes pudor; contrast, for example, a sentiment such as "I am ashamed to be ugly" in English). I set to one side for now instances of collective pudor, the sentiment one feels as the member of a group, when group identification so overrides personal responsibility that the behavior for which any member is responsible is felt to reflect upon oneself. As one would expect, instances of collective pudor cluster around the family (see, e.g., Suet. Aug. 65. 2, Dig. 47. 10. 1. 5), but in a few cases the Roman polity as a whole seems to be the relevant group. An exceptionally interesting example is the following remark by the younger Pliny, on the ascendancy of the freedman Pallas under Claudius: Epist. 8. 6. 17 "quam iuuat quod in tempora illa non incidi, quorum sic me tamquam illis uixerim pudet!" Pliny claims to feel pudor in reaction to circumstances in the past which he did not experience, much less cause, and for which he could not plausibly have been held responsible (by himself or another) even if he had experienced them: Pliny apparently feels pudor simply as a Roman civis in respect of behavior unworthy of the Roman civitas (note that he assumes his correspondent is likewise disposed: "non dubito similiter adfici te. scio quam sit tibi uiuus et ingenuus animus"). The remark is striking in other respects as well: for example, Pliny's pudor here seems to be generated wholly independently of even an imaginary audience that one could plausibly describe.

[[12]] Val. Max. 4. 5. 2, adding that Varro's display of pudor "culpam maximae cladis redemit effecitque ut acies deorum irae, modestia ipsius moribus imputaretur." Cf. Tac. Ann. 11. 25 (out of pudor certain senators voluntarily withdraw from that body before a censorial investigation can lead to their expulsion), Hist. 2. 22 (out of pudor Aulus Caecina breaks off an ill-considered siege before he can appear foolish).

[[13]] At one point Seneca even implies that it is already too late when someone has been "caught": Ben. 7. 28. 3 "nemo id esse, quod iam videtur, timet; deprenso pudor demitur."

[[14]] Plin. Paneg. 73. 5 "tantum . . . sanguinis in ore quantum in animo pudoris." Cf. Ter. Ad. 643, And. 878; Cic. Fam. 5. 12. 1; Vitruv. 6 pr. 5; Liv. 31. 15. 3; Ov. Am. 1. 3. 14, 1. 8. 35, 2. 5. 34, Met. 2. 450, 10. 241, Trist. 4. 3. 62-64, 70, 5. 11. 5-6; Plin. NH 11. 157, 36. 108; Sen. HF 692, Tro. 1138-39, Phaed. 652, Epist. 11. 5; Stat. Theb. 2. 231; [Quint.] Decl. mai. 18. 15; Plin. Epist. 9. 27. 2, Paneg. 31. 6; Gell. 19. 6. 3; Apul. Apol. 59. Note also Gell. 19. 6. 3, contrasting the blush of pudor with the pallor of timor; sim. Cic. TD 4. 19, Plin. NH 11. 224.

[[15]] Tac. Agr. 45. 2. Similar confusion was caused by Pompey's habit of blushing whenever he appeared in public (Sen. Epist. 11. 4); he was said by enemies to have an os probum but an animus inverecundus (Suet. Gramm. 15. 2).

[[16]] Plin. NH 7. 180. More ordinarily, there were those who committed suicide out of pudor, e.g., Suet. Otho 9. 3, Tac. Hist. 4. 11, Ann. 16. 3. A. J. L. van Hooff, From Autothanasia to Suicide (London and New York 1990), attributes fully one-third of attested Roman suicides to the motive he labels "pudor" (p. 237, with the catalog, "960 Cases of Self-Killing," at pp. 198-232); but that label rarely reflects the language of the sources, and van Hooff's interpretations are very often unreliable.

[[17]] Father: e.g., Ter. Ad. 84, 274, 683, And. 262, Heaut. 260, 1041, Plaut. Bacch. 1007, Most. 1154-55. Senate: Suet. Tib. 47. 1 with Tac. Ann. 2. 37.

[[18]] Inst. 10. 1. 111.

[[19]] One invests oneself and one's own pudor in the pudor of the person with whom one has a relationship: Cic. Verr. 2. 2. 192 "quid facerent omnes Crassi et Antonii? Tantum, opinor, Hortensi: ad causam non accederent neque in alterius impudentia sui pudoris existimationem amitterent"; Hor. Epist. 1. 18. 76-77 "qualem commendes, etiam atque etiam aspice, ne mox / incutiant aliena tibi peccata pudorem"; Sen. Ben. 7. 29. 1 "ingratus non sine nostro pudore protrahitur, quoniam quidem querella amissi beneficii bene dati signum est."

[[20]] Different gentes could have different causes of pudor: see, e.g., Livy 24. 24. 3, on the status of actors and acting apud Graecos.

[[21]] pudor ingenuus Catull. 61. 79; Vitruv. 6 pr. 5-6; Ov. Her. 20. 5; Val. Max. 9. 10 (ext.) 2; Sen. Const. 15. 1; Plin NH pr. 21, 35. 65; Juv. 11. 154; [Quint.] Decl. min. 298.10; cf. Cic. De or. 2. 10, Prop. 2. 24a. 4, Sen. Phaed. 250.

[[22]] Ann. 3. 54 "nos pudor, pauperes necessitas, divites satias in melius mutet." The precarious pudor of the poor is noticed sympathetically at Verg. Aen. 8. 408-13.

[[23]] For the conventional view of the essentially private character of women's pudor, see esp. Livy 34. 2. 8.

[[24]] M. W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton 1995) 55.

[[25]] "Non te pudet?" (vel sim.): Plaut. Amph. 1034, Men. 708, 730, Poen. 1301; Ter. Ad. 754, Hec. 231, Phorm. 525; Varro Men. frag. 66, 449; Cic. Verr. 2. 1. 140, dom. 117, Phil. 2. 61, 68, ND 1. 83; [Cic.] Inv. in Sall. 14; Liv. 3. 52. 7, 9. 11. 12; Prop. 2. 24b. 18; Verg. Aen. 9. 598, 787, 12. 229; Sen. Contr. 7. 2. 1, 3, 10. 4. 16, Suas. 2. 3, 5. 3; Pers. 1. 83; Luc. 5. 310, 6. 154; Sen. Ira 1. 10. 2, Tranq. an. 8. 5, Brev. vit. 3. 5, Epist. 95. 31, 99. 29; Mart. 5. 37. 20; Stat. Theb. 9. 96; [Quint.] Decl. mai. 3. 3, 4. 10, 15. 4, 9.

[[26]] So, most obviously, the implication of the verb pudet, which (like several other verbs of subjective response: libet, piget, taedet) does not admit a personal subject: in its most common construction, the grammatical subject of pudet is the act or state of being that provokes the emotion in oneself ("id facere me pudet" = "doing that causes me pudor"); another person, if mentioned at all, appears only in the gentive, to denote the audience of the reaction ("id facere me tui pudet" = "doing that causes me pudor before you"). To the general rule stated in the text the only certain exception I know is Martial 1. 52. 9 "inpones plagiario pudorem," where a personal subject is involved; but Sen. Epist. 94. 44 "inponit pudorem castigatio" and Ira 3. 39. 4 "pudorem illi . . . incutiet aut metum" (subject = remedium) are very similar.

[[27]] Hence the suggestion, false but understandable, that it is "innate": Publ. Syr. Sent. P. 4 "pudor doceri non potest, nasci potest." Hence too, perhaps, the suggestion that once pudor has been lost it cannot be recaptured: Publ. Syr. Sent. P. 10 "pudor dimissus numquam redit in gratiam," Val. Flacc. 7. 461-62 "non revocabilis umquam / cessit ab ore pudor."

[[28]] In fact I know of no instance of the latter type; for the former see Cic. Fam. 4. 5. 6 "plura me ad te de hac re scribere pudet, ne videar prudentiae tuae diffidere." For "prospective" shame, acting as a goad or deterrent before the fact, see also, e.g., Cic. In Caec. 13 "viri clarissimi nostrae civitatis . . . quos, si mentirer, testis esse impudentiae meae minime vellem," and cf. Plaut. Bacch. 1016 f., Cic. Verr. 2. 2. 191-92, Fam. 7. 23. 1, Plin. Epist. 3. 9. 5. The infrequency with which pudor is spoken of in this way provides another contrast with Greek AI)DW/S, which "is always prospective and inhibitory in the earliest authors" (Cairns, AI)DW/S, p. 13).

[[29]] Beyond the case of Timagenes above (n. 2), see Quint. 6. 3. 79, Suet. Aug. 66. 2, Gramm. 14. 1, and esp. Tac. Ann. 6. 29. 2 "Caesar [viz., Tiberius] . . . disseruit morem fuisse maioribus, quotiens dirimerent amicitias, interdicere domo," where note the implication of perf. fuisse. Loud public abuse of a miscreant--esp. a delinquent debtor-- provided another shaming technique, flagitatio: e.g., Plaut. Pseud. 357-70, Catull. 42 (cf. Petron. Sat. 96. 7), Apul. Apol. 75, with H. Usener, "Italisches Volksjustiz," RhM 56 (1901) 1-28.

[[30]] Cicero does invoke verecundia in De officiis, but not in a way important to his argument (see esp. 1. 98-99). verecundia is in any case distinct from pudor, similar though they are in some respects (cf. n. 10): derived from vereor and fundamentally denoting something like "regard" or "reverence," verecundia in its origin concerns the attitude one adopts toward another rather than another's (or one's own) view of oneself. It seems that the feelings and cognitive acts denoted by pudor and verecundia, taken together, most closely approximate the feelings and cognitive acts denoted by Greek AI)DW/S; but this requires further investigation. In any case, each of these emotions must be thought to entail a distinct way of conceptualizing experience: since emotions are not additive, pudor plus verecundia would not "equal" AI)DW/S.

[[31]] See, e.g., nn. 12, 16, 28 above, 44 below. Outright acknowledgment of shame is not common: see most affectingly Cic. Fam. 14. 3. 2 (to his family) "qua re cum dolore conficiar, tum etiam pudore. pudet enim me uxori optimae, suavissimis liberis virtutem et diligentiam non praestitisse"; cf. Cic. dom. 29, Hor. Epod. 11. 7, Plin. Epist. 8. 6. 17; rather different are the merely polite conversational or epistolary formulas found at, e.g., Cic. Fam. 4. 5. 6, TD 2. 14, Caelius ap. Cic. Fam. 8. 12. 1, Sen. Epist. 13. 14, 48. 5, Plin. Epist. 7. 24. 7.

[[32]] B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1993) 80, cf. also Cairns, AI)DW/S, 51-54; both draw on J. M. Redfield's discussion of AI)DW/S and NE/MESIS as a reflexive pair, the "inner and outer aspects of the same thing," such that failures of AI)DW/S provoke the NE/MESIS of others and "the nemesis of others evokes aidos in oneself" (The Tragedy of Hector: Nature and Culture in the "Iliad" [Durham 1994] 113-19; quotations from pp. 116, 117).

[[33]] Latin can of course express all the sentiments that NE/MESIS comprises, but it has no single term that both embraces them all and forms a reflexive pair with pudor: invidia perhaps comes closest in semantic range, but it is of far broader application, and its uses have no particular association with pudor or impudentia.

[[34]] For os durum and the like see, e.g., Ter. Eun. 806, Lucil. frag. 417 M., Cic. Pis. 63, Catull. 42. 17, Ov. Am. 1. 12. 24, A. A. 3. 587, Met. 5. 451, 10. 241, Epist. ex Pont. 1. 1. 80, Sen. Ben. 7. 28. 3, Const. 17. 3, Quint. 6. 4. 11, Mart. 11. 27. 7, Suet. Nero 2. 2. Cf. the rhetorician's lesson for his pupils at [Quint.] Decl. min. 313. 1: "Et quotiens causa plus iuris habet quam pudoris, ad eum transferenda est qui non erubescit."

[[35]] N. S. Rosenstein, Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1990), esp. 154-55.

[[36]] A Roman could of course bring suit for various kinds of insult (contumelia), including the publication of defamatory material (Dig. 47. 10. 5. 9-10, 47. 10. 15. 27; see D. Daube, "'Ne quid infamandi causa fiat': The Roman Law of Defamation," in Atti del congresso internazionale di diritto romano e di storia del diritto 1948, vol. 3 [Milan 1951], 411-50, A. D. Manfredini, La diffamazione verbale nel diritto romano [Milan 1979]); but a more common response seems to have been to treat such behavior as beneath notice. The Romans (like the Greeks) certainly lacked the concept of "reflexive honor,"according to which "B's honor is ipso facto diminished or destroyed [by an insult from A] unless B responds with an appropriate counterattack on A" (J. H. Stewart, Honor [Chicago 1994], 64).

[[37]] E. g., Plin. Epist. 2. 20. 2, 13, 4. 7. 1-5.

[[38]] "Secreto admone amicos, palam lauda": one of the proverbia falsely attributed to Publilius Syrus, p. 107, no. 103 ed. Woelfflin. In fact, Seneca suggests that reproof, even private, would have the effect of "hardening the face" of the other man: Ben. 7. 28. 3 "meliorem illum facies ferendo, utique peiorem exprobrando. Non est, quod frontem eius indures; sine, si quid est pudoris residui, servet." Cf. Publ. Syr. Sent. R. 8 "ruborem amico excutere amicum est perdere."

[[39]] audacia and audax are among Cicero's most commonly used scare-terms, stigmatizing any challenge to the interests he is defending; for their pairing with impudentia / impudens in the orations see, e.g., Rosc. Amer. 96, 118, Verr. 2. 1. 1, 6, 36, 142, 2. 2. 134, 2. 3. 65, 83, 166, 169, 2. 4. 44, 84, 2. 5. 62, 106, Caec. 1, 2, Cluent. 26-27, Flacc. 35, dom. 116, 133, Pis. 66, Phil. 2. 4, 19, 3. 18, 6. 7.

[[40]] For good "audacity" aligned with "fortitude" and "virtue" see, e.g., Caes. BG 2. 26. 2, BC 3. 26. 1, Cic. ND 2. 145, Livy 2. 31. 6, 5. 16. 10, 25. 38. 11, 18 (cf. Serv. ad Verg. Aen. 8. 110 "'audacem' autem dicit ubique Vergilius quotiens vult ostendere virtutem sine fortuna: unde etiam Turnum audacem vocat," sim. ad Aen. 9. 3, DServ. ad Aen. 4. 615). These are mostly military contexts: cf. n. 44 below. Academic-philosophical attempts strictly to distinguish "bad" audacia (vel sim.) from "good" fortitudo are often plainly arbitrary, amounting to little more than saying "audacia denotes the kind of fortitudo of which I disapprove": e.g., Cic. Off. 1. 63 (elaborating a theme from Pl. La. 197B) "animus paratus ad periculum, si sua cupiditate, non utilitate communi impellitur, audaciae potius nomen habeat quam fortitudinis"; cf. Cic. Inv. 2. 165, Part. orat. 81, Sall. Cat. 52. 11, Sen. Ira 1. 20. 2.

[[41]] Cic. Att. 7. 6. 2, 7. 9. 4, 7. 17. 2, Fam. 16. 11. 2.

[[42]] BC 1. 7. 7 "hortatur [sc. milites] ut eius existimationem dignitatemque ab inimicis defendant," cf. 1. 4. 4, 1. 9. 2, 1. 32. 4, 3. 91. 2.

[[43]] See Ov. A. A. 1. 607-8, 672.

[[44]] Effective pudor in military settings: e.g., Caes. BG 1. 39. 3, BC 1. 67. 4, 3. 60. 3, Sall. Iug. 100. 5, Livy 2. 10. 6, 2. 65. 4, 3. 62. 9, 6. 24. 7, 7. 15. 3, 7. 17. 4, 8. 7. 8, 10. 35. 7, 30. 18. 8, 39. 31. 9, 39. 49. 2, Tac. Hist. 3. 17, 3. 24, 3. 41, 5. 15, Frontin. 1. 11. 3 (sim. 4. 5. 11), 2. 8. 12. It is interesting that pudor should most clearly have force in the same contexts in which audacia is most clearly a virtue (n. 40 above).

[[45]] A. L. Epstein, The Experience of Shame in Melanesia: An Essay in the Anthropology of Affect, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland: Occasional Paper No. 40 (London 1984) 47.