αἴδεσις
(Αntiatt. α 72)

D. General commentary

The lemma of the Antiatticist (A.1) is concerned with the abstract nounAbstract nouns αἴδεσις, presented as a synonym of αἰδώς ‘respect’. To illustrate this meaning, the Antiatticist refers the reader to D. 21.43 (C.1), where αἴδεσις is used together with φιλανθρωπία ‘sympathy’ (for the interpretation of the passage, see below). In Attic, in fact, αἴδεσις usually means ‘pardon, reconciliation’, as testified in Demosthenes (C.1) and in Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution (C.4: on the background of this passage, see MacDowell 1963 82–4, Rhodes 1993, 645). Under the Athenian law on homicide, involuntary murder may be pardoned by the victim’s family, probably upon payment: αἴδεσις and its base-verb αἰδέομαι were the specialist terms for this type of pardon (a full discussion of this aspect of Attic law is available in Heitsch 1984; see also MacDowell 1963, 73–81, Harrison 1971, 78).

The more detailed entry of the Synagoge (B.1), which – together with a further expansion now missing in Σ^b – is the source of Photius, is also concerned with the verb αἰδέομαι, the technical meaning of which is illustrated through two quotations from Demosthenes (C.2, C.3). The Synagoge does not directly equate αἴδεσις with αἰδώς. Instead, it begins with a direct quotation from Demosthenes’ Against Midias (C.1), the same locus classicus that lies behind the Antiatticist’s entry. Based on this quotation, the Synagoge goes on to paraphrase the verb αἰδέσηται of D. 37.59 (C.2), the oration Against Pantaenetus, with αἰδοῦς καὶ τιμῆς ἀξιώσας οἰκτείρει ‘he pities [the involuntary murderer], deeming [him] worthy of respect and honour’. This paraphrase is not directly based on the passage of Against Pantaenetus but instead appears to take the nouns αἰδοῦς and τιμῆς from a loose rendering of αἰδέσεως καὶ φιλανθρωπίας ἠξίωσαν from Against Midias (C.1), as is revealed by its use of the same verb, ἀξιόω. Therefore, in spite of the superficial difference in the discussion, the Synagoge in fact draws the same inference as the Antiatticist – namely, that αἴδεσις is a synonym of αἰδώς in Demosthenes. It is possible that the longer entry of the Synagoge depends on an ampler version of the Antiatticist that is now lost to us.

The same interpretation of αἴδεσις in Demosthenes’ αἰδέσεως καὶ φιλανθρωπίας πολλῆς ἠξίωσαν is given in the modern translation of Vince (1935), who renders αἰδέσεως καὶ φιλανθρωπίας πολλῆς with ‘much consideration and charity’. He thus takes πολλῆς to modify both nouns and the whole expression as an explanation of the sentiments behind the attitude of Attic laws towards involuntary homicide. This, however, was not the original meaning. In this passage, Demosthenes uses αἴδεσις as technical term, and the whole sentence means ‘they deem accidental homicide worthy of pardon and much charity’, i.e. with only φιλανθρωπίας πολλῆς to describe the ethical attitude behind the law.

There is no other trace of this (incorrect) equation of αἴδεσις with αἰδώς in ancient scholarship. The scholia to Demosthenes (B.2) and the Lexicon Patmense (B.3) correctly define αἴδεσις in its Attic meaning of ‘pardon’. They likely drew upon sources which focused on Attic customs and technical language. The use of sources dealing more closely with rare -σις nouns should not be ruled out either. The lists of -σις nouns in Poll. 6.177–81Poll. 6.177–81 and Su. α 3614Su. α 3614 suggest that there may have been a special interest in abstract nouns that had little circulation outside Attic literature (Lobeck 1820, 351–2). αἴδεσις is part of the increase in abstract nouns that characterises Attic political and legal language (see Holt 1940, 152–64, Willi 2003, 76–7). This phenomenon sometimes led to the creation of technical by-forms of primary nouns (in this case αἰδώς). The base-verb of αἴδεσις, the denominative αἰδέομαι, is itself a by-form of the primary αἴδομαι (for a discussion of the origin of αἰδέομαι, see Meissner 2006, 151–2 and 176–8, who interprets it as a back-formation from ἀναιδής ‘shameless’).

The Antiatticist and the Synagoge fail to highlight the semantic specialisation of the Demosthenic αἴδεσις, focusing instead on its apparently less congruous synonymity with αἰδώς. Their misunderstanding can be explained by observing that, in its few post-classical attestations, αἴδεσις only occurs in two meanings: ‘respect, awe’ (e.g. C.5, the same meaning occurs slightly later in Philo’s Hypothetica at 193.7, and C.6) and ‘shame’ (C.7: the same meaning recurs slightly later at Phot. Amphilochia 70.57). The synonymity of αἴδεσις and αἰδώς in Post-classical Greek, which goes unnoticed in the LSJ, where αἴδεσις is only glossed with ‘forgiveness’ (compare the more complete lemma of the DGE), is a crucial explanatory factor in understanding the interpretation of the term in the Antiatticist and in the Synagoge. The misunderstanding of αἴδεσις in the Demosthenic passage is also a consequence of the rarity of its use as a legal term, no doubt posing the problem for later interpreters of Attic literature of how to explain it correctly. We have further traces of this uncertainty in two papyri.

In P.Lond. 1.131 (= TM 20004)P.Lond. 1.131 (= TM 20004), which transmits most of Aristotle’s Athenian constitution, the αἴδεσις of Arist. Ath. 57.3 (C.4) has a ρ written above it. This seems to suggest that the writer did not understand the term and sought to correct it (although the correction is unclear: ἄρεσις ‘favour’ and ἄφεσις ‘quittance’ have been suggested, as discussed by Rhodes 1993, 645–6). In the papyrus lexicon preserved in P.Oxy. 17.2087 (B.4), αἴδεσις is glossed with φιλανθρωπία. This interpretation is also influenced by a superficial understanding of D. 21.43 (C.1). φιλανθρωπία is a typical ‘hendiadys gloss’ (in the definition of Bossi, Tosi 1979–1980, 15). It is not a real synonym of αἴδεσις but a reflection of the pairing of αἰδέσεως and φιλανθρωπίας in the locus classicus. It is harder to ascertain whether the influence of the locus classicus, which leads to the banalising gloss φιλανθρωπία, is also responsible for the less perspicuous first gloss, δόσις (Grenfell and Hunt, commenting on P.Oxy. 17.2087, characterise it as ‘peculiar’). Unless one thinks that δόσις results from the corruption of an original αἰδώς, it may be an elliptical, compressed reference to the fact that pardon by αἴδεσις was sometimes induced by a payment (as explained in the Lexicon Patmense, B.3: αἴδεσις δ’ ἔστι τὸ δυσωπῆσαι ἱκετείᾳ καὶ χρήμασι).

The content of P.Oxy. 17.2087 does not allow us to settle the matter. Most of the lemmas, which begin with α and are partially alphabetised, are taken from prose authors (see Esposito 2005 and Esposito 2006 for analysis). The first ten lines refer to the suit for malversation (ἀδικίου γραφή, the reference being to Arist. Ath. 54.2). The following lemma, ἀειλογία, is also an Attic legal term; meaning ‘continual inquiry’, it is also used by Demosthenes (see LSJ s.v.). As in the case of αἴδεσις, the papyrus interprets it in a literal way (τὸ περὶ τοῦ αὐτοῦ πολλάκις λογίζεσθαι ‘to talk about the same thing many times’). Some of the following entries could also have a broadly legal or judiciary focus (see the gloss at l. 18, δίκ(ην) ἀ(να)γράφοντα, or the definition of ἄληκτα ‘undivided’ at l. 36, which mentions appointment by lot); note also that the explicit sources behind some of the other lemmas are texts such as Plato’s Laws (l. 26), Demosthenes (l. 32–3), and Aristotle’s Περὶ δικαιοσύνης (l. 44: see entry ἀναρριχάoμαι). It may also be useful to mention that the lexicon shows a tendency to ignore the poetic attestations of several of its lemmas (see entry ἀναρριχάoμαι), indicating that it was compiled with a view to prose usage.

In conclusion, the evidence of this papyrus, which is contemporary with the first Atticist lexica, shows that the banalising meaning of αἴδεσις (= αἰδώς) found in the Antiatticist is not the result of some later misunderstanding but must have belonged – in this form or another – to the original version of the Antiatticist.

E. Byzantine and Modern Greek commentary

There is no evidence for αἴδεσις in Medieval and Modern Greek, where only αἰδώς survives (see LKN s.v.: in Modern Greek, due to its archaic inflectional pattern, αἰδώς is a rare, very high-register term: its most frequent use is in the standard legal expression προσβολή της δημοσίας αιδούς, 'indecent exposure'. I thank Ioanna Manolessou for this reference). The adjective αἰδέσιμος ‘venerable’, which first appears in imperial prose and survives in Modern Greek, could be based on αἴδεσις and so indicate its familiarity, but equally it may be possible that αἰδέσιμος was synchronically derived from αἰδέομαι through the suffix ‑(σ)ιμος (see DELG s.v. αἴδομαι and, for the suffix, Chantraine 1933, 154–5 and Arbenz 1933; on the semantics of αἰδέσιμος, see Arbenz 1933, 95).

F. Commentary on individual texts and occurrences

(1)    D. 23.72 (C.3)

This is a difficult passage, which lexicographical sources quote with several mistakes. The temporal clause ἕως ἂν †αἰδέσηταί τινα† τῶν ἐν γένει τοῦ πεπονθότος is marked as corrupt by most editors (see Dilts 2005, 284). The same corrupt text is transmitted by Phot. α 550 and printed by Cunningham in Σ^b 626 (see B.1 and its apparatus). The reason the passage is considered corrupt is syntactic. The subject of the whole sentence is the man who is convicted of involuntary homicide (τὸν ἁλόντ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἀκουσίῳ φόνῳ, here in the accusative because it depends on ὁ νόμος κελεύει ‘the law commands’). The verb αἰδέσηται, which is deponent, cannot be rendered as a passive (‘until he is pardoned’), nor does its transitive meaning ‘to pardon’ (cf. C.2) make sense with the object ‘the relatives of the deceased’. A possible correction is αἰδέσηταί τις <αὐτόν> (‘until someone pardons him’), as suggested in the apparatus of Dilts (2005, 284), which would render the idea that the action of pardoning out of pity (αἰδέομαι) is performed by one of the relatives of the deceased. This expression finds a close parallel in C.2.

The only way to defend the text transmitted by the Demosthenic manuscripts, as well as by Photius and the Synagoge, would be to assume that Demosthenes used αἰδέομαι with a factitive force: ‘until [the murderer] makes one of the relatives pity/pardon him’. This interpretation is appealing because it is evoked by the paraphrase that we find in Photius, namely ἐξιλάσεται (which Cunningham corrects to the subjunctive ἐξιλάσηται). It seems that Photius here uses ἐξιλάσκομαι (a transitive deponent, whose normal meaning is ‘to propitiate’, usually a god) to mean ‘to propitiate the relatives of the deceased and [obtain] their forgiveness’. The same verb occurs as a passive earlier in Photius, where the meaning must be ‘he is pardoned’ (the passive forms of ἐξιλάσκομαι are rare but are first attested Pl. Lg. 862c.2 and four times in the Old Testament, e.g. Nu. 35.33). However, since the factitive usage of αἰδέομαι is unparalleled, this alternative interpretation remains doubtful.