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ROOTS OF HONOUR: BABIES AND RECOGNITION DYNAMICS IN GREEK LITERATURE AND THOUGHT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2025

Bianca Mazzinghi Gori*
Affiliation:
Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura, Turin
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Abstract

This article investigates honour and recognition dynamics involving babies. By drawing on modern theories and experimental studies of infants’ psychology, selected case studies from Classical Greek literature and philosophical accounts will be interpreted in terms of basic intersubjective mechanisms. Case studies from Herodotus and Menander show that babies were intuitively perceived as agents capable of putting forth implicit demands to recognition and respect. Passages from Plato reveal that babies were regarded as possessing embryonic forms of a sense of dignity and entitlement. The article thus demonstrates that babies were involved in basic dynamics of honour and recognition. Overall, these mechanisms can be seen as the psychological and social foundation of the fully fledged version of timê, the Greek notion that captures the range of bidirectional dynamics of honour, recognition and respect which stand at the basis of human interaction and sociality.

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Type
Research Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association

INTRODUCTION

The interest in children in Antiquity has grown exponentially in the last years.Footnote 1 This article aims to expand the discussion by raising attention to neglected topics such as the psychology of infants and the involvement of babies in dynamics of reciprocal recognition. Scenes of interaction with babies and passages concerning infants’ psychology will illustrate the working of honour dynamics involving babies. As we shall see, notions drawn from modern developmental psychology and philosophy provide vital insight into the implications of these passages. By examining honour and recognition dynamics involving babies, the article also contributes to an innovative understanding of the Greek notion of timê as a bidirectional mechanism that encompasses honour, respect and recognition more generally.Footnote 2 This interpretation challenges the idea of honour as a scarce good pursued by adult men in a zero-sum game, whereby one acquires honour by dishonouring others. On the contrary, as revealed by studies of timê and related notions such as aidôs, honour should be understood as a pro-social mechanism, based on bidirectional recognition. As we shall see, embryonic forms of this mechanism were attributed to babies too, forming the foundation for the fully fledged capacities for proper bidirectional recognition that were regarded as one of the main aims of education and personal development.

LITERARY SCENES OF INTERACTION WITH BABIES

In Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories, the story is told of how the baby Cypselus, who would become the tyrant of Corinth, survived the Bacchiadae’s first attempt to murder him.Footnote 3 Two prophecies revealed to the Bacchiadae that Eetion’s son would overthrow their rule. A group of men is sent to kill the baby; one of them takes the baby in his arms with the intention of killing him. At that point, something happens that makes all of them, one after the other, unable to carry out the murder (92γ3):

τὸν λαβόντα τῶν ἀνδρῶν θϵίῃ τύχῃ προσϵγέλασϵ τὸ παιδίον, καὶ τὸν φρασθέντα τοῦτο οἶκτός τις ἴσχϵι ἀποκτϵῖναι, κατοικτίρας δὲ παραδιδοῖ τῷ δϵυτέρῳ, ὁ δὲ τῷ τρίτῳ, οὕτω τϵ διϵξῆλθϵ διὰ πάντων τῶν δέκα παραδιδόμϵνον, οὐδϵνὸς βουλομένου διϵργάσασθαι.

The baby providentially happened to smile at the man, and this sight filled the would-be assassin with pity and stopped him killing the child. Feeling sorry for the baby, the first man passed him on to the third, and so on, until he had been passed around all ten, none of whom could bring himself to the deed.Footnote 4

According to Herodotus, Cypselus owes his life to the fact that he providentially happened to smile just at the right time: it is his smile that somehow prevents the men who had the task of killing him from doing so. Herodotus explains this effect in terms of pity, oiktos. As Aristotle says, pity arises in cases of undeserved (anaxios) suffering; the close connection between axia and timê suggests that this passage might be relevant to the theme of babies’ honour.Footnote 5 Konstan interprets Aristotle’s association of pity and axia strictly in terms of moral desert—if this was the case, we could pity someone only when they are suffering for something despite their innocence.Footnote 6 However, moral desert is too narrow a lens for a case like this: the men already knew that the baby was not guilty of anything, and the smile would not change their perception of this. The question is what Cypselus’ smile changed in the men’s perception of the situation, and how and why it did so. The notion of pity as moral desert does not suffice to answer these questions; more satisfactory answers are offered instead by philosophical and experimental accounts of intersubjectivity.

In the twentieth century, but building on nineteenth-century foundations, first philosophy and subsequently the social sciences were revolutionized by the intersubjectivist turn.Footnote 7 The notion of intersubjectivity rejects merely objectivist and subjectivist approaches to reality, stressing the co-created nature of reality and of our understanding of it.Footnote 8 In philosophy, intersubjectivity was already at the core of the thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Of particular interest for our purposes is his notion of Aufforderung, an invitation or summons to recognition that an agent addresses to another.Footnote 9 More recently, Axel Honneth has expanded the account of intersubjectivity, linking it to recognition theory; in his view, interpersonal and social conflict should be seen as a form of our constant struggle for recognition, driven by our fundamentally intersubjective nature.Footnote 10 This understanding of recognition as a bidirectional dynamic is the one best suited to explain the multi-faceted and complex dynamics encompassed by the Greek notion of timê.

Thanks in particular to Trevarthen, intersubjectivity is now also at the core of modern developmental psychology. Generally speaking, interaction with other human beings is seen as the dimension where babies (and adults alike) co-create their reality and their understanding of the world. In particular, the most recent theories identify three main stages of babies’ psychological development, corresponding to three different forms of intersubjectivity, starting with primary intersubjectivity.Footnote 11 The current investigation is primarily concerned with the first phase, that of primary intersubjectivity. Also referred to as the phase of emotion sharing, primary intersubjectivity expresses children’s capacity to interact dyadically with adults in their first nine months, in the form of embodied emotional alignment.Footnote 12 The experiments on primary intersubjectivity have tremendous implications for the question of infants’ honour. As several studies have shown, infants are attuned to the adult’s facial expressions and movements from birth.Footnote 13 Various experiments demonstrate that, when adults do not respond adequately to infants’ emotion sharing, babies become upset, manifesting this by interrupting the interaction through visual cut-off.Footnote 14 Already at this stage, therefore, babies have expectations about how interactions with adults should go—namely, they should respect emotional alignment. This is the first form of the sense of fairness and of the expectations of mutuality that represent important and often unacknowledged characteristics of infants’ and babies’ psychology.Footnote 15 Moreover, this shows that babies’ behaviour and reactions are dictated by a need for recognition, or a ‘struggle’ for recognition, in Honneth’s terms. In fact, as Gallagher stresses, ‘Honneth’s account of recognition starts too late in the developmental story’, in so much as it ignores embodied primary intersubjectivity and the fact that infants too are involved in recognition dynamics, expecting and offering emotional alignment in their interactions with adults.Footnote 16

Another fundamental aspect is the ‘like me’ model developed by Meltzoff.Footnote 17 This notion, which can also be described as ‘self-other equivalence’, further undermines the traditional views of children’s solipsistic and egotistical nature. As Meltzoff’s research shows, infants can map their own experiences onto the behaviour of others, and vice versa. At first, this applies to bodily movements, but it then expands, gradually encompassing cognitive aspects, thus providing the foundation for social cognition. With regard to honour, this notion can also be seen as the foundation for the mutuality of recognition and for the bidirectional aspects of honour dynamics. Finally, the points about infants’ sense of self and their intersubjectivity are also supported by findings on emotional development. With regard to anger and shame, the emotions most closely connected to honour, recent studies show that children start to experience them early on. Studies on anger confirm the points about infants’ sense of fairness and of their own claims to respect, while the findings on shame show that soon after their first birthday infants worry about the impression they make on others.Footnote 18 Overall, this overview of modern accounts of infants’ psychology and development shows that essential aspects of honour and recognition dynamics play a crucial role for infants too. The science of early human development tells us that we are predisposed from the beginning of our journeys in the world to engage in bidirectional recognition with other human beings.

Let us now examine a different passage. In Menander’s Samia, Moschion’s ex-nurse notices that his baby is lying on a couch, screaming and crying. She picks him up, comforting him and holding him until he stops crying (225–6, 238–44):

ἐπὶ κλίνης μὲν ἔρριπτ᾿ ἐκποδὼν 225
τὸ παιδίον κϵκραγός …
ἰδοῦσα δὲ 238
τὸ παιδίον κϵκραγὸς ἠμϵλημένον …
προσέρχϵται 241
καὶ ταῦτα δὴ τὰ κοινὰ “φίλτατον τέκνον”
ϵἰποῦσα καὶ “μϵγ᾿ ἀγαθόν· ἡ μάμμη δὲ ποῦ;”
ἐφίλησϵ, πϵριήνϵγκϵν. ὡς δ’ ἐπαύσατο
κλᾶον, πρὸς αὑτήν φησ[ι]ν “ὦ τάλαιν’ ἐγώ, 245
πρώην τοιοῦτον ὄντα Μοσχίων’ ἐγὼ̣
αὐτὸν ἐτιθηνούμην ἀγαπῶσα, νῦν δ’ [ἐπϵὶ
παιδίον ἐκϵίνου γέγον[ϵ]ν̣ [ἤ]δ̣η καὶ τόδ̣[ϵ
The baby’d been dumped screaming on 225
a couch out of the way. (…)
She saw the child 238
ignored and screaming (…)
she went right up to him and said 241
the usual things, ‘My darling baby’ and
‘Great treasure—where’s your mummy?’ Then she kissed
and danced him round. When he stopped crying, she
said to herself ‘Dear me, it’s not so long 245
ago that I nursed Moschion himself,
and loved him just like you, and now that his
own baby’s born, already it as well …’Footnote 19

This passage might appear banal in its content: the baby cries, somebody pampers him, he stops crying. However, this passage contains extraordinarily precious evidence for our investigation of infants’ timê. The keyword here is ἠμϵλημένον, ‘ignored’, ‘neglected’ (239). Nobody was taking care of the baby, and the lexical choice implies that this was a shortcoming on the part of the adults involved, namely the female servants who were busy with the preparations for Moschion’s wedding. The only person who pays attention to the baby and understands his needs is, unsurprisingly, Moschion’s ex-nurse. She immediately notices that the baby needs some attention and fondles him until he stops crying (ἐπαύσατο κλᾶον, 244–5): thus, she comforts the baby by simply rocking and addressing him with tender words. The baby was not crying because of hunger or other merely physical needs, but out of a need for recognition, as Honneth would put it: the infant’s cries express a claim to emotional attention, which both the nurse and Menander acknowledge and validate.Footnote 20 Employing Fichte’s terminology, we can say that the infant’s cries represent an Aufforderung, an invitation or summons that only an agent can be thought to make. The fact that the nurse recognizes and responds to this summoning demonstrates her recognition of the baby qua agent.Footnote 21

We can now reconsider the episode of baby Cypselus. As we saw, a crucial question is why the man changes his mind on seeing the baby smiling; the answer lies in primary intersubjectivity and in dynamics of emotional alignment. Cypselus’ smile paralyzes the would-be assassin precisely because of intersubjective dynamics. Thanks to primary intersubjectivity, infants are predisposed to respond to adults’ facial expressions. This dynamic goes both ways, however, as adults engage in imitation of infants too.Footnote 22 Not only do adults respond to infants’ facial expressions, but they also feel that they have some responsibility to respond adequately. And this is why timê is relevant here. Generally, the right way to respond to a smile is to reciprocate it. By looking at the baby and seeing him smile, the man has found himself, willingly or unwillingly, in a situation of interaction and proximity with the baby.Footnote 23 Because of primary intersubjectivity, the baby’s smile creates expectations of mutuality and recognition. The importance of proximity and contact is illustrated well by the functioning of supplication.Footnote 24 Contact, either physical or visual, makes the suppliants’ demands more difficult to dismiss. The man is in the same position of the person whose knees somebody is clutching: ignoring the other person’s pleas is now a serious infringement of the expectations that proximity and physical contact tend to create. The parallel with supplication is highlighted by the outcome of the man pitying Cypselus and not being able to kill him.

The man is thus caught in a contradiction between his intention to kill the baby on the one hand and the intersubjective drive to respond to the infant’s claim to recognition on the other. In philosophical terms, on seeing Cypselus smiling at him, the man intuitively interprets the baby’s smile as a Fichtean Aufforderung, an invitation to recognize the baby as agent and respond appropriately in the interaction.Footnote 25 The man’s change of attitude demonstrates that he now sees the baby as an agent: the man’s pity is based on a recognition of the baby’s status qua agent and of his claims to recognition and respect. Recognizing the strength of the principle of mutuality, the man feels unable to kill the baby, who appears axios, worthy, of being perceived as an agent and having his Aufforderung or claims acknowledged and respected.Footnote 26 In this interpretation, this episode shows that the notion of axia that underpins pity is much wider than moral desert. It is not an appraisal of the baby’s moral desert that saves him, but the acknowledgement of the claims that others make of us, and the feeling that, in any given interaction with someone that we recognize as an agent, we are enmeshed in mutual obligations and expectations. Overall, this episode is thus a powerful illustration of the importance of intersubjectivity in the case of infants, and an acknowledgment of their status as agents capable of putting forth legitimate claims to recognition and respect.

Another perspective on similar problems is offered by a passage from another play by Menander, Epitrepontes. In the scene that gives the play its title, the slaves Syriscus and Davus are involved in a private arbitrage judged by the old citizen Smicrines. The slaves are arguing over the jewels found with an exposed baby (238–358): Davus was the one to find and take up the exposed baby, with the idea of rearing him; soon after that, however, he changed his mind and had second thoughts about raising the baby. Thus, when Syriscus begged him to give him the child, Davus agreed and gave the baby to him. We can read some of the lines with which Syriscus is claiming for the baby the objects that Davus had found with him (301–7, 316–18):

ἐ]πὶ τοῦτον, πάτϵρ,
αὐτὸς πάρϵστιν οὑτοσί. τ̣[ὸ] π̣α[ιδί]ον
δός μοι, γύναι. τὰ δέραια καὶ γνωρίσματα
οὗτός σ᾿ ἀπαιτϵῖ, Δᾶ᾿· ἑαυτῷ φησι γὰρ
ταῦτ᾿ ἐπιτϵθῆναι κόσμον, οὐ σοὶ διατροφήν. 305
κἀγὼ συναπαιτῶ κύριος γϵγϵνημένος
τούτου· σὺ δ᾿ ἐπόησάς μϵ δούς …
ἥκω δὲ καὶ νῦν, οὐκ ἐμαυτοῦ σ᾿ οὐδὲ ἓν 316
ἴδιον ἀπαιτῶν. κοινὸς Ἑρμῆς; μηδὲ ἓν
ϵὕ]ρισχ᾿, ὅπου πρόσϵστι σῶμ᾿ ἀδικούμϵνον·
οὐχ⌟ ϵὕρϵσις τοῦτ᾿ ἐστὶν ἀλλ᾿ ἀφαίρϵσις.
Sir, he’s here
himself to claim them. Wife, give me the baby.
This child it is who claims the necklace and
the tokens, Davus. He says that they were
put there for his adornment, not your keep! 305
I join him in his claim, since I’ve become
his legal guardian—your gift has made me that. (…)
But here I am, and now I plead for him— 316
for me, I’m claiming nothing. ‘Finding’s sharing,’
you said! Don’t talk of ‘finding’ something, where
wrong to the person is involved. That’s not
discovery, it’s robbery!Footnote 27

As the scene depicts a private arbitration, the perspective in the passage is mainly legal. The passage is therefore notable in so much as it shows that infants could be thought of as having rights in a legal sense. In his speech, Syriscus puts emphasis on the baby’s legal rights: the baby is not a thing, but a sôma, a person, and he is being wronged (σῶμ᾿ ἀδικούμϵνον, 318): the objects belong to him, and Davus is acting like a thief (τὸν λϵλωποδυτηκότ᾿, 312). sôma must here be interpreted as ‘person’, ‘human being’, and is thus the vaguest possible designation from a legal or social point of view.Footnote 28 Syriscus’ point is therefore independent of the child’s legal status; according to him, the grounds for the respect owed to the baby consists in the fact that he is a human being, a person. Some lines later, Syriscus also makes the point that the tokens represent the only available clue to discover something about the legal status of the baby, who might be of free birth. The appalling eventuality that a baby of free birth, adopted by a couple of slaves, might lose the only possible evidence of his real status is a strong argument in Syriscus’ plea. However, the fact that the point about the baby’s legal status is only brought up in the second argument enhances the wider scope of the first point. Just on account of his being a person, the baby has the right to be respected and not to be deprived of what belongs rightfully to him.

In addition to these legal aspects, this passage is also significant because of the aspects connected to interaction and proximity. To stress his points, Syriscus takes the baby in his arms and declares that he is speaking on behalf of the baby himself. By addressing Davus as if it were the baby who was accusing him of theft, Syriscus powerfully stresses the baby’s status as an agent, capable of putting forth claims to respect. Additionally, holding the baby up so that Smicrines can see him better is a way to create a situation of proximity between the two, so that it will be easier for Smicrines to recognize the baby as an agent endowed with rights and claims, and to feel obligations towards him. With this twofold move, Syriscus is thus fostering Smicrines’ sense of involvement and responsibility towards the child. The interactive context that Syriscus creates resembles in crucial ways the scene of Cypselus’ attempted murder: physical proximity strengthens the obligations to respect and mutuality that a subject feels towards the other person. In other words, Syriscus is harnessing specific intersubjective means to reinforce Smicrines’ recognition of the baby’s claims to respect.Footnote 29

PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS OF INFANTS’ PSYCHOLOGY

Let us now consider Plato and, more marginally, Aristotle. Both Plato and Aristotle are often taken to have narrow views of children, seeing them as passive, empty receptacles of any influence they are exposed to. Although these views are undeniably present in both authors, they actually draw a more complex picture.Footnote 30 One first crucial hint as to this lies in the role played by thymos in their views of infants’ psychology. The meaning and function of thymos is highly debated, but what is certain is that it is strictly linked to timê.Footnote 31 Often translated as ‘spirit’, ‘spirited element’ or ‘anger’, we can describe it as the metaphoric locus of a desire for recognition and a sensitivity to one’s self-image and social image (which must not be seen as separate entities, but are actually intimately connected); one second related meaning, which underpins its meaning of anger, is the tendency to react when these images are threatened in some ways. Interestingly for us, both philosophers attribute it to newborns as well. In the fourth book of the Republic (441ab), Plato states that even new-borns are full of thymos:

καὶ γὰρ ἐν τοῖς παιδίοις τοῦτό γ’ ἄν τις ἴδοι, ὅτι θυμοῦ μὲν ϵὐθὺς γϵνόμϵνα μϵστά ἐστι, λογισμοῦ δ’ ἔνιοι μὲν ἔμοιγϵ δοκοῦσιν οὐδέποτϵ μϵταλαμβάνϵιν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ ὀψέ ποτϵ.

You can be sure to find this in children because at birth they are immediately full of thymos, but some seem to me never to acquire any share of reason, although most of them do sometime eventually.Footnote 32

This statement is echoed by Aristotle in a passage from the seventh book of the Politics (1334b23–5), in which he also affirms that all the three basic forms of desire, including thymos, are present in children from birth:

θυμὸς γὰρ καὶ βούλησις, ἔτι δὲ ἐπιθυμία, καὶ γϵνομένοις ϵὐθὺς ὑπάρχϵι τοῖς παιδίοις, ὁ δὲ λογισμὸς καὶ ὁ νοῦς προϊοῦσιν ἐγγίγνϵσθαι πέφυκϵν.

For thymos, wish and also appetite are present in children right from birth, whereas reasoning and understanding naturally develop as they grow older.Footnote 33

According to both Plato and Aristotle, then, children are equipped with thymos from the moment they are born. The question arises, then, of what the implications of this are, and whether we can take Plato’s and Aristotle’s statements about the thymos of infants as an acknowledgement of their desire for recognition. One might object that thymos simply refers here to the tantrums that babies throw to express their physical needs and has no implications beyond that. However, the passages that we have examined before authorize us to imagine that thymos has to do with timê in the case of infants too. Moreover, both Plato and Aristotle employ other elements to talk about merely physical needs; Plato’s passage is located in the section of the Republic devoted to the distinction between to epithymêtikon, thymos and to logistikon. Given that to epithymêtikon is specifically oriented towards physical needs, the point about infants possessing thymos must imply something about their struggle for recognition. Furthermore, one prominent meaning in both these two passages is thymos as anger. Together with aidôs and aischynê, anger is the emotion most closely connected to timê, as a response to some form of disrespect towards a legitimate claim. As supported by modern studies of babies’ psychology, behind this anger we are also allowed to see a sense of entitlement to recognition.

Plato seems to be quite concerned with children having an excessive sense of entitlement. In the seventh book of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger describes children as the most insolent among beasts, ὑβριστότατον θηρίων (808d):

ὁ δὲ παῖς πάντων θηρίων ἐστὶ δυσμϵταχϵιριστότατον· ὅσῳ γὰρ μάλιστα ἔχϵι πηγὴν τοῦ φρονϵῖν μήπω κατηρτυμένην, ἐπίβουλον καὶ δριμὺ καὶ ὑβριστότατον θηρίων γίγνϵται.

And, of all wild creatures, the child is the most intractable; for in so far as it, above all others, possesses a fount of reason that is as yet uncurbed, it is a treacherous, sly and most insolent creature.Footnote 34

Not surprisingly, then, he is strongly concerned with the upbringing of children. As he underlines in a different passage, the earliest stages of one’s upbringing have tremendous effects on one’s character, and it is of the utmost importance that babies be brought up in the right way to ensure they develop the proper character, êthos, thanks to good habit, ethos (792e).Footnote 35 The negative outcomes of a bad education can have two possible extremes, as detailed in 791d:

ΑΘ. τίνα οὖν ἂν τρόπον ϵὐθὺς ἐμφύοιθ᾿ ἡμῖν ὁπότϵρον βουληθϵῖμϵν τῷ νϵογϵνϵῖ; φράζϵιν δὴ πϵιρατέον ὅπως τις καὶ καθ᾿ ὅσον ϵὐπορϵῖ τούτων.

ΚΛ. πῶς γὰρ οὔ;

ΑΘ. λέγω δὴ τό γϵ παρ᾿ ἡμῖν δόγμα, ὡς ἡ μὲν τρυφὴ δύσκολα καὶ ἀκράχολα καὶ σφόδρα ἀπὸ σμικρῶν κινούμϵνα τὰ τῶν νέων ἤθη ἀπϵργάζϵται, τὸ δὲ τούτων ἐναντίον, ἥ τϵ σφοδρὰ καὶ ἀγρία δούλωσις, ταπϵινοὺς καὶ ἀνϵλϵυθέρους καὶ μισανθρώπους ποιοῦσα ἀνϵπιτηδϵίους ξυνοίκους ἀποτϵλϵῖ.

Ath. In what way, then, can we implant whichever of these two qualities we choose, right at birth, in the new baby? We must try and say how, and to what extent, anyone is going to make a success of that.

Clin. Of course.

Ath. I hold the prevailing view, which is that overindulgence produces, in the young, characters which are bad-tempered, irritable, and too easily upset by things of no importance, while its opposite, harsh and undue repression, makes people servile, obsequious, unsociable and unfit for human society.Footnote 36

tryphê, excessive indulgence, could lead to characters that are dyskoloi and akracholoi, ill-tempered and irascible, while its opposite, described as a form of doulôsis, literally enslavement, would make them tapeinoi and aneleutheroi, submissive and slavish (791d), as well as misanthrôpoi and thus unfit to live with others.Footnote 37 Both these dispositions clearly have to do with timê, with an inflated sense of entitlement on the one hand and a deficient one on the other. As misanthrôpoi reveals, moreover, both deference and demeanour, in Goffman’s terms, are at stake here—that is both one’s attitude towards oneself and that towards others.Footnote 38

This sentence refers to the characters of neoi, young men in their twenties, but the Athenian Stranger firmly believes that the roots of these dispositions lie in the early upbringing. In 791d–3e, he gives specific instructions for the upbringing of babies up to three years old and for children between three and six years old. For the former group, he recommends that they be exposed to a balanced mix of pleasures and pains. For the latter, he recommends punishing them so that they do not become spoilt, but they must not be punished in a degrading way, atimôs (793e), since, like slaves, children would become angry if they were punished with hybris. In the case of children between three and six, therefore, the relevance of timê and of intersubjective dynamics is made explicit. While for babies up to three years old the focus is on pleasures and pains, the other passages examined so far, and in particular Plato’s reference to infants’ thymos, support an interpretation that sees in this advice too a concern with babies’ sense of entitlement. If a baby is always pampered and never gets used to pain and lack of satisfaction, he will grow up with the assumption that he is entitled to be always satisfied in all his desires. As the Athenian Stranger says, it is in the earliest phase that the whole character is implanted in us; from the sentence on the possible outcomes in neoi’s characters, it is clear that our sense of entitlement, of our claims to dignity and respect, our deference and demeanour, our attitude towards ourselves and others—in a word our timê—are a huge part of our character, if not the most important.

CONCLUSION

This overview of both literary and philosophical texts reveals that infants were seen as agents capable of interacting with adults and worthy of recognition and respect. The passages analysed mirror fundamental psychological and social dynamics that the adults involved—either as characters or as authors—understood in an intuitive manner. This intuitive understanding emerges particularly well in the case of literary sources depicting scenes of interaction; in the case of more reflective texts such as those of Plato and Aristotle, the intersubjective predisposition of infants and their embryonic timê are acknowledged in more oblique ways—probably because both philosophers are concerned especially with the results and effects of the proper upbringing in adults. However, especially Plato proves aware of the importance of recognition dynamics involving children, even very small ones, acknowledging that infants’ intersubjective predisposition is the psychological and social foundation of the fully fledged version of timê. In general, this study also confirms the bidirectional nature of honour and recognition and their pervasiveness in all sorts of interactions, including starkly asymmetrical ones.

Footnotes

*

This article is based on my research for the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘Honour in Classical Greece’ (The University of Edinburgh); funding from Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura has allowed me to complete it. I thank Douglas Cairns, Mirko Canevaro, Kleanthis Mantzouranis, Alberto Esu, Linda Rocchi and Matteo Zaccarini for their valuable feedback. Valuable insights were also provided by Richard Rawles, Ruth Scodel and the audience of the final symposium of the HCG project. I want to thank also CQ’s reader and editor for their helpful suggestions.

References

1 See M. Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens (Baltimore, 1990; second edition Baltimore and London, 2015); J. Evans-Grubbs, T.G. Parkin and R. Bell (edd.), The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford, 2013); R. Aasgaard and C. Horn (edd.), Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Routledge, 2018). For iconographical and archaeological accounts, see M.-C. Crelier, Kinder in Athen im gesellschaftlichen Wandel des 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr.: eine archäologische Annäherung (Basel, 2008); L.A. Beaumont, Childhood in Ancient Athens: Iconography and Social History (New York and London, 2013); M. Sommer and D. Sommer, Care, Socialization, and Play in Ancient Attica: A Developmental Childhood Archaeological Approach (Aarhus, 2015); L.A. Beaumont, M. Dillon and N. Harrington, Children in Antiquity. Perspectives and Experiences of Childhood in the Ancient Mediterranean (New York and London, 2021). On children in literature, see W.B. Ingalls, ‘Attitudes towards children in the Iliad’, EMC 42 (1998), 13–34; E.M. Griffiths, Children in Greek Tragedy: Pathos and Potential (Oxford, 2020).

2 An early acknowledgment of this can be found in J.-C. Riedinger, ‘Remarques sur la τιμή chez Homère’, REG 89 (1976), 244–64; J.-C. Riedinger, ‘Les deux αἰδώς chez Homère’, RPh 54 (1980), 62–79. The turning point is represented by D.L. Cairns, Aidōs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford, 1993). For further contributions to this trend see Ø. Rabbås, ‘Virtue, respect, and morality in Aristotle’, The Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (2015), 619–43; M. Canevaro, ‘The public charge for hubris against slaves: the honour of the victim and the honour of the hubristēs’, JHS 138 (2018), 100–26; D.L. Cairns, M. Canevaro and K. Mantzouranis, ‘Aristotle on the causes of civil strife: subjective dispositions, proportional justice and the occasions of stasis’, Maia 62 (2020), 551–70; D.L. Cairns, M. Canevaro and K. Mantzouranis, ‘Recognition and redistribution in Aristotle’s account of stasis’, Polis 39 (2022), 1–34; L. Rocchi, ‘From (apt) contempt to (legal) dishonor: two kinds of contempt and the penalty of atimia’, Emotion Review 15 (2023), 200–6.

3 The story is told by the Corinthian Socles, in the longest speech delivered by anyone in the Histories. For an analysis of the speech that accounts for its wider narrative functions see J.L. Moles, ‘“Saving” Greece from the “ignominy” of tyranny? The “famous” and “wonderful” speech of Socles (5.92)’, in E. Irwin and E. Greenwood (edd.), Reading Herodotus. A Study of the Logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (Cambridge, 2007), 245–68; see 258–61 specifically on the episode of baby Cypselus and the ironical twist that a baby saved by pity is destined to become a pitiless tyrant. The article is reprinted in J. Marincola (ed.), The Collected Papers of J.L. Moles, vol. 2 (Leiden, 2023), 462–89.

4 Transl. R. Waterfield, Herodotus: The Histories (Oxford, 2008), adapted.

5 Arist. Rh. 2.1385b13–14. Aristotle regularly uses axia for what common Greek language refers to as timê in the sense of claims, rights and entitlements; see Rabbås (n. 2) and D.L. Cairns, ‘Aristotle on hybris and injustice’, in C. Veillard, O. Renaut and D. El Murr (edd.), Les philosophes face au vice, de Socrate à Augustin (Leiden, 2020), 147–74.

6 See D. Konstan, Pity Transformed (London, 2004). For criticism, see D.L. Cairns, ‘Pity in the classical world. Review article’, Hermathena 176 (2004), 59–74.

7 According to the Oxford Dictionary of Social Sciences, intersubjectivity ‘concerns the relations between people, rather than within them (subjectivity) or beyond them (objectivity or transcendental reality). More generally, it describes a broad trend in twentieth-century philosophy and social science that privileges communication between people and shared understanding over individual consciousness and concepts of objective knowledge.’

8 The role of phantasia in Aristotle’s account of emotions can be taken as an example of the relevance of intersubjectivity in Greek thought. Clearly Aristotle is neither a subjectivist, nor an objectivist: in the way he frames his account of emotions, it is the way we construe a certain situation that determines our emotions, as well as our attitude and behaviour towards others, who likewise will react on the basis of their own construal of the situation. Thus, in Aristotle’s account people interact in fundamentally intersubjective ways. On phantasia (usually translated as imagination) see V. Caston, ‘Phantasia and thought’, in G. Anagnostopoulos (ed.), A Companion to Aristotle (Chichester, 2009), 322–34; J.D. Moss, Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire (Oxford, 2012); E. Rabinoff, Perception in Aristotle’s Ethics (Evanston, IL, 2018).

9 J.G. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts: nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (Jena and Leipzig, 1796); also S. Gallagher, Action and Interaction (Oxford, 2020), 187–9. Fichte’s intersubjective understanding of reality can also be found, mutatis mutandis, in Hegel; see e.g. the dialectical relationship of master and slave.

10 A. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge, 1995).

11 The following overview of the main developmental stages relies on M. Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2019). On primary intersubjectivity see C. Trevarthen, ‘Communication and cooperation in early infancy: a description of primary intersubjectivity’, in M. Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Human Communication (Cambridge, 1979), 321–47; Gallagher (n. 9), 101–6 provides a short résumé of relevant studies and findings.

12 Around their ninth month, children also develop secondary intersubjectivity, that is a form of person-person-object awareness: nine-month-old babies can recognize an adult’s intentions with regard to an object and interact with the adult according to so-called shared intentionality. Around the baby’s third year, collective intentionality also emerges: children become able to understand objective and normative aspects of their cultural environment.

13 In a study, forty-two-minute-old children are examined: A.N. Meltzoff and M.K. Moore, ‘Newborn infants imitate adult facial gestures’, Child Development 54 (1983), 702–9. See also A.N. Meltzoff, ‘Foundations for developing a concept of self: the role of imitation in relating self to other and the value of social mirroring, social modeling, and self practice in infancy’, in D. Cicchetti and M. Beeghly (edd.), The Self in Transition: Infancy to Childhood (Chicago, 1990), 139–64.

14 See L. Murray and C. Trevarthen, ‘Emotion regulation of interactions between two-month-old infants and their mothers’, in T.M. Field and N.A. Fox (edd.), Social Perception in Infants (Norwood, NJ, 1985), 177–97; Gallagher (n. 9), 104, 198–9, 240.

15 On babies’ sense of justice in interaction, see Gallagher (n. 9), 240.

16 Gallagher (n. 9), 190; Honneth (n. 10), 96–107.

17 See A.N. Meltzoff, ‘“Like me”: a foundation for social cognition’, Developmental Science 10 (2007), 126–34.

18 On infants’ anger, see M. von Salisch and C. Saarni, ‘The development and function of anger in childhood and adolescence’, in F. Pahlavan (ed.), Multiple Facets of Anger: Getting Mad or Restoring Justice? (New York, 2011), 81–101. For studies of cross-cultural differences in infants’ expression of anger, see L.A. Camras, H. Oster, R. Bakeman, Z. Meng, T. Ujiie and J.J. Campos, ‘Do infants show distinct negative facial expressions for fear and anger? Emotional expression in eleven-month-old European American, Chinese, and Japanese infants’, Infancy 11 (2007), 131–55. On shame, see S.V. Botto and P. Rochat, ‘Evaluative Audience Perception (EAP): how children come to care about reputation’, Child Development Perspectives 13 (2019), 180–5: they show that infants as young as fourteen months already assume that one’s own behaviour or appearance could be, or will be, evaluated by others either positively or negatively, and have a general preference towards eliciting positive as opposed to negative evaluations from others. Of particular interest is also C. Colonnesi, S.M. Bögels, W. de Vente and M. Majdandžić, ‘What coy smiles say about positive shyness in early infancy’, Infancy 18 (2013), 202–20: a coy smile in four-month-old babies is an early sign of social competence and sensitivity.

19 Transl. W.G. Arnott, Menander, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2000), adapted.

20 The importance of gender should be acknowledged in these dynamics. In iconography (see n. 1 for references), while it is hard to find scenes of interaction with children, and even harder to infer much from them in terms of infants’ psychology, it is usually nurses who are depicted holding babies and interacting with them; even mothers are rarely portrayed holding their children. The most common depiction is the funerary theme of the mother holding her hands towards her child, held by a nurse, to express the severance of their tie. See S. Waite and E. Gooch, ‘Marginalising maternity: iconography as evidence for social ideologies in Classical Athens’, Childhood in the Past 16 (2023), 84–109. In general, it was a commonplace that women were more predisposed to take care of and cherish babies: e.g. Arist. Eth. Nic. 9.1168a24–7.

21 Admittedly, the nurse later tells the other servants to wash the baby (252–3), so it might be objected that the child was crying because of a physical discomfort, but the baby stops crying when the nurse cuddles him, meaning that emotional recognition is an essential aspect of the interaction.

22 See Trevarthen (n. 11) for studies on this mirroring effect from adults.

23 On the meanings and effects of gaze, looks and lack thereof, see D.L. Cairns, ‘Bullish looks and sidelong glances: social interaction and the eyes in ancient Greek culture’, in D.L. Cairns (ed.), Body Language in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Swansea, 2005), 123–55.

24 For the importance of honour in supplication, see J. Gould, ‘Hiketeia’, JHS 93 (1973), 74–103, reprinted with an addendum in J. Gould, Myth, Ritual, Memory, and Exchange: Essays in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2001), 22–77.

25 This scene also illustrates very well the embodied and intuitive nature of these dynamics; see Gallagher (n. 9) for the construal of other people’s emotional states and intentions as an embodied dynamic, embedded in interaction and perception.

26 See Cairns (n. 6) for a discussion of Konstan’s ideas on pity and desert.

27 Transl. W.G. Arnott, Menander, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1979), adapted.

28 For comments on the lexical choices in these lines, see W.D. Furley, Menander: Epitrepontes (London, 2009), and A.W. Gomme and F.H. Sandbach, Menander: A Commentary (Oxford, 1973). As Sandbach notes, sôma here signifies human being, person, a standard meaning of the word when it is not qualified. Until the fourth century at least, as reflected also in the Attic orators (cf. e.g. Dem. 20.77 αἰχμάλωτα σώματα; Aeschin. 1.16 οἰκϵτικὰ σώματα), sôma needs to go with specific attributes to identify slaves, whereas in Polybius it can refer to slaves without further qualifications (LSJ s.v. II 2; CGL s.v. 7).

29 In all our case studies, the baby is male. Evidence for respect towards female babies is harder to find; evidence for respect towards female and male small children might be found in Hyperides’ fragmentary speech Against Timandrus, where the speaker construes as deeply disrespectful the fact that Timandrus separated a young girl from her sister and brother, growing her up in his house and taking her to Lemnos when she was seven. The three siblings were all very young, since their eldest brother died at ten. See N. Tchernetska, E. Handley, C. Austin and L. Horváth, ‘New readings in the fragment of Hyperides’ “Against Timandros” from the Archimedes palimpsest’, ZPE 162 (2007), 1–4; K. Backler, ‘Sisterhood, affection and enslavement in Hyperides’ Against Timandrus’, CQ 72 (2022), 469–86.

30 On Plato’s views of children, see M. Grahn-Wilder, ‘Roots of character and flowers of virtues: a philosophy of childhood in Plato’s Republic’, in R. Aasgaard, C. Horn and O.M. Cojocaru (edd.), Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (New York and London, 2018), 19–36; on Aristotle’s, H.J. Fossheim, ‘Aristotle on children and childhood’, in R. Aasgaard, C. Horn and O.M. Cojocaru (edd.), Childhood in History: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (New York and London, 2018), 37–55.

31 For Plato, see A. Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge, 2000); J. Frère, Ardeur et colère: le thumos platonicien (Paris, 2004); D.L. Cairns, ‘ψυχή, θυμός, and metaphor in Homer and Plato’, Études platoniciennes 11 (2014), 1–41; J. Wilburn, The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City (Oxford, 2021). On thymos in Aristotle, see G. Pearson, Aristotle on Desire (Cambridge, 2012); V. Saenz, ‘Shame and honor: Aristotle’s thumos as a basic desire’, Apeiron 51 (2018), 73–95; M. Jimenez, Aristotle on Shame and Learning to Be Good (Oxford, 2020).

32 Transl. C.J. Emlyn-Jones and W. Preddy, Plato: Republic (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2013), adapted.

33 Transl. C.D.C. Reeve, Aristotle: Politics (Indianapolis, 1998), adapted.

34 Transl. R.G. Bury, Plato: Laws (Cambridge, MA, 1926).

35 Pl. Leg. 7.792e κυριώτατον γὰρ οὖν ἐμϕύϵται πᾶσι τότϵ τὸ πᾶν ἦθος διὰ ἔθος ‘For because of the force of habit, it is in infancy that the whole character is most effectually determined’, transl. Bury (n. 34). τότϵ must link back to τὸν ἀρτίως νϵογϵνῆ, ‘the new-born babe’, in the preceding sentence.

36 T. Griffith and M. Schofield, Plato: Laws (Cambridge, 2016), adapted.

37 A similar point was made centuries later by the author of the pseudo-Plutarchian treatise On the Education of Children (12), claiming that excessive praise would make children conceited and excessively proud. On the treatise and its authorship, see E.G. Berry, ‘The De Liberis Educandis of Pseudo-Plutarch’, HSPh 63 (1958), 387–99.

38 E. Goffman, ‘The nature of deference and demeanor’, American Anthropologist 58 (1956), 473–502; deference is the attitude of honour and recognition we bestow on others, whereas demeanour captures our projected social image and our demonstration of dignity and self-respect.