Chapter 3 takes up the Elenctic section of the dialogue, in which Socrates begins to chisel away at Alcibiades’ hubris in an effort to expose his double ignorance, that is, his ignorance of his ignorance. The young man hastens to the Athenian bema, eager to give a speech about justice, but estranged from justice beyond the level of ethical virtue. Without self-knowledge, he desires nothing other than the accolades of the many and asks not even the simplest question about justice, to say nothing of ascending to contemplate it as intelligible reality. Socrates refutes him in order to remove his arrogant pretension, not only that he knows justice, but that he knows himself. Generally, the Elenctic section removes the obstacles that stand in the way of Alcibiades’ conversion, and the Neoplatonic student learns that he must undergo a similar cleansing to that of Socrates’ interlocutor – Alcibiades’ purification is that of any philosophical initiate.

The purpose of the Protreptic section – the subject of this chapter – is to ensure that Alcibiades will not abandon his newly manifest sense of self and its correlative longing sparked in the previous section; it is to continue his transformation so that he might actively seek the desiderata to which he has been awakened. Revealed to himself imbued with a yearning for desiderata he is unable to comprehend much less pursue, the young man remains hesitant. Socrates challenges Alcibiades with the story about the King of Persia and the kings of Sparta in order to argue it is peculiar to Athenians to pursue wisdom. The Neoplatonic student’s interpretation for the entirety of this middle section of the dialogue is framed accordingly: attempting to intensify the young man’s newly awakened eros, Socrates replaces honour with wisdom as the ultimate goal for which philosophical initiates must strive.

Chapter 2 reads the late medieval romance of the spendthrift knight as an exemplum of economic faith. A character borrowed from folklore, the spendthrift knight falls into debt through excessive largesse, and consequently into exile from the aristocratic community. The plot of the spendthrift romance is organized around the protagonist’s debt recovery and eventual social triumph when newfound wealth allows him to reclaim the status he lost through penury. I argue that what makes these romances amenable to and generative of commercial values is their valorization of credit, typically expressed in the narratives as honour, trouthe, and faithfulness. Such faithfulness is manifest primarily in a willingness to take economic risks, variously extending and accepting credit, in cycles of exchange that end up generating profit for the knight and for his community. Belief as such in relations of social and material exchange, belief that defies strict rationality and that makes risk and sacrifice both possible and profitable, motivates gifts and market transactions alike, and binds individuals in creditor–debtor relationships that are both reciprocal and hierarchical.

For being the reputed “father of capitalism,” Adam Smith had many criticisms of commercial society. Smith’s concerns were so numerous, in fact, that some commentators argue that Smith is properly considered as on the political left rather than on the political right. Given the seemingly unending stories of business malfeasance and corruption, many today wonder whether there can even be such a thing as what we might call “virtuous business.” Despite his concerns about business, perhaps there might nevertheless be something relevant to contemporary concerns in Adam Smith. Smith recommends political-economic institutions that can provide a framework enabling us to address what a just and humane society is, as well as the role virtuous business might play in it. This chapter investigates how the Smithian system might plausibly provide such a framework and suggests that it can offer guidance today for what we might call “virtuous business.”

Honour is an emotion unfamiliar to many these days. In post-war West Germany, honour was rarely mentioned, let alone felt, though it bravely hung on when children (and sometimes adults) promised their ‘word of honour’. Around 1900, however, the term honour had ‘a very strong sentimental value’, German men still ‘possessed’ honour and felt it ‘in their bodies’. Not incidentally, the motto emblazoned on the belt buckles of SS uniforms since 1932 read ‘my honour is loyalty’. This chapter explains how female honour differs from this, what – allegedly – puts it in danger, and how, in turn, women are endangered by it, not least through the phenomenon of so-called ‘honour killings’. The chapter shows the increasing tendency to replace honour with dignity, which has the advantage of being fundamentally inclusive because it was granted without discrimination to all. This made it a more suitable concept than honour for modern societies that considered themselves egalitarian.

German army traditionally stressed the personal factor and therefore the importance of the second command task, selecting the right men. Operated the ‘seniority tempered by merit’ principle for appointing and promoting officers, based on a carefully structured though flawed confidential reporting system. Continuous but not always successful efforts during the war to select good and weed out unsuitable commanders and general staff officers. Limits on ability to post officers freely, especially because of the constraints on and conservatism of the Military Cabinet running the system. Suggestions that function automatically overrode rank at best oversimplified. Always the possibility of friction in such cases, illustrating the effect of personal factors such as reputation, honour, ambition, pay and strain. Personal relationships, sometimes developing into networks and cliques, interacted with objective professional considerations and influenced the conduct of operations as well as the subsequent historiography. Two case studies illustrate these factors.

The De re publica contains a sophisticated strain of reflection on the place of the honor motive in a good life, and in particular in the good life of public service. Cicero finds a way for a conscientious public servant to be interested in receiving honor while still directing his actions at the public good and that only. Further, he finds a use for merited honor and merited shame in the moral education of citizens and political leaders. The chapter argues that Cicero’s account of how honor motivates a person, both ordinarily and in the normative case, is fundamentally more similar to the views on honor put forward by the Hellenistic Stoics than it is to the tripartite model of psyche used by Plato in his Republic. As so often in De re publica, what we have is Platonism filtered through and modified by subsequent Stoic thought. But Cicero’s own experience in politics has also given stimulus to his reflections; and conversely, the philosophical position on honor that he develops in his writing becomes part of his self-representation as a public figure.

This chapter is concerned with divine mediation and resolution of interpersonal disputes in Roman Hieradoumia. Secular disputes could be submitted to divine jurisdiction by the performance of one or other of two rituals, the setting up of a sceptre and/or the deposition of a pittakion in the sanctuary. Several different categories of low-level dispute are discussed: disagreements over the ownership of livestock; theft of other people’s money or belongings; the non-repayment of loans of money or goods; and disputes between family members, which could be extraordinarily acrimonious. Familial disputes fall into various predictable patterns, reflecting the underlying fault lines within the Hieradoumian kinship system which arise from the ambiguous status of older women within the Hieradoumian village household.

This chapter introduces the two inscribed monument types which were characteristic of Roman Hieradoumia: the familial epitaph and the propitiation-stēlē. Both categories of monument tend to be dated by year, month, and day, which allows us to map the development of the epigraphic habit in the region with unusual precision. Hieradoumian tombstones generally take the form of pedimental marble stēlai, often bearing a depiction of a wreath, either incised or in relief. The associated funerary inscriptions have a highly stereotyped structure, in which the deceased is ‘honoured’ by a smaller or larger group of family members, whose relation to the deceased is very precisely defined. These funerary monuments have several formal similarities to the propitiation-stēlai erected in many Hieradoumian rural sanctuaries, which narrate individual transgressions, divine punishments, and acts of propitiation. Taken together, these two categories of ‘commemorative’ monument provide a vivid picture of the moral universe of rural Hieradoumia in the first three centuries AD.

The focus of this chapter is the gambling of the elites and primarily gambling for large financial stakes, so-called playing deep. It seeks to provide a picture of how far gambling of different kinds was firmly integrated in the lives of many among the elites, and how the landscape of elite gambling changed across the eighteenth century. However, it also emphasizes the tensions and even contradictions which existed in elite attitudes towards ‘gaming’ and the influence of different milieu on the propensity to gamble and nature of gambling. At its core are a series of case studies of individual gamblers and specific gambling coteries, including a detailed examination of a case of a junior member of a leading Scottish titled family, Lord William Murray of the Murrays of Atholl, for whom gaming was very destructive personally. Gambling, it is often emphasized, was frequently an enactment of the code of honour of the gentleman; but at stake were different, competing versions of honour and masculinity. Gambling divided as much as it united the elites, in terms of habits, conduct, and attitudes.

Chapter Two focuses on the concept of dignity. It characterizes the two main competing conceptions subsequently analysed in the book, sovereign and human dignity. It begins by exploring the intellectual origins of the concept of dignity – with its religious and philosophical strands. Within human dignity, particular emphasis is laid on the Christian and Kantian (secularised) conceptions of human dignity due to their distinctive historical influence on the shaping of international law. On this basis, the first component of the analytical framework is built, namely the conceptual categories of dignity that will, subsequently, be used to explore how dignity has found expression in international law.

Attitudes towards what we term ‘domestic violence’ are hard to locate in the ancient Greek sources, but they do emerge in a variety of literary and artistic genres which span several centuries. This chapter explores some of the key evidence and, utilising anthropological theory, asks what kind of violent treatment women received at the hands of male relations, and why. Issues of honour and shame surface as key causes, and the chapter explores the fragility of male and familial codes of conduct and the consequences of their infringement. It becomes clear that the sources on violence towards women are not so infrequently encountered as to suggest that violence did not occur often, but show that violence towards women was so matter of fact that it barely deserved mention.

Sexually-violent practices and ideologies have varied dramatically over time and geographical region. There have also been important shifts in the weighting given to its two components: “sexual” and “violence”. Sexual violence is deeply rooted in specific political, economic, social, and cultural contexts. In exploring these issues on a global-scale the first question to ask is: who is entitled to label something as “sexually violent”? Despite the incredible personal suffering inflicted on victims of sexual assault, under-reporting is pervasive: victims routinely struggle to find words for their pain. Cognitive distortions about gender, sexuality, and violence have left legacies of abuse that are difficult to counter. Perpetrators of violence are often presented as victims and, in the context of mass rapes during wartime, international law has been sluggish in responding. The chapter concludes by evaluation the attempts by victims of sexual violence, feminists, politicians, lawmakers, police, and community activists to resist and eradicate sexual violence not only in their own societies but also globally. Rape thrives in situations of structural inequality. Although women act in sexually aggressive ways (and there is some evidence that the proportion of female aggressors is increasing), in the final analysis, political attempts to reduce and finally eliminate sexual aggression must start with the main perpetrators. Eradicating rape requires a radically different conception of agency and masculinity.

Honour was an important and enduring element in the moral economy and mattered as much to peasants as to the nobility. ‘Honour’ retained something of the Old English notion of weorđ , entitlement. Association with a lord or estate owner could bestow weorđ but so too could ownership of a full ploughteam. Local saints were often people who were valued for what their piety could achieve for the community. Age could command respect: ‘village elders’ and ealdormann , both have ‘elder’ as their root. Peasant elites also became consolidated as a result of the countryside becoming formally organised from the mid-tenth century for the purposes of dealing with local matters, mainly crime and its policing. Townships were the political worlds of the peasantry and the sphere in which peasant elites operated. A strong emphasis was put on inheritance, a value shared across society.