Ancient Forgiveness

Classical, Judaic, and Christian

In this book, eminent scholars of classical antiquity and ancient and

medieval Judaism and Christianity explore the nature and place of
forgiveness in the premodern Western world. They discuss whether
the concept of forgiveness, as it is often understood today, was absent
or, at all events, more restricted in scope than has been commonly
supposed, and what related ideas (such as clemency or reconcili-
ation) may have taken the place of forgiveness. An introductory
chapter reviews the conceptual territory of forgiveness and illumi-
nates the potential breadth of the idea, enumerating the important
questions a theory of the subject should explore. The following
chapters examine forgiveness in the contexts of classical Greece and
Rome; the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and Moses Maimonides; and
the New Testament, the church fathers, and Thomas Aquinas.

Charles L. Griswold is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of

Philosophy at Boston University. Among his books are Forgiveness:
A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge, 2007); Adam Smith and the
Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1999); Self-Knowledge in Plato’s
Phaedrus (1986); and an edited volume, Platonic Writings, Platonic
Readings (1988). He also serves on the editorial advisory boards of
Ancient Philosophy, Theoria , and the International Journal of the Classical
Tradition .

David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University and

Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at Brown
University. His most recent books include Before Forgiveness: The
Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge, 2010) and “A Life Worthy of the
Gods”: The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus (2008). He was president
of the American Philological Association in 1999 and serves on the
editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals.
 Ancient Forgiveness
Classical, Judaic, and Christian

Edited by
CHARLES L. GRISWOLD
Boston University

DAVID KONSTAN
New York University
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Ancient forgiveness : classical, Judaic, and Christian / [edited by]
Charles L. Griswold, David Konstan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-11948-1 (hardback)
1. Forgiveness. 2. Forgiveness – Religious aspects – Christianity. 3. Forgiveness –
Religious aspects – Judaism. I. Griswold, Charles L., 1951– II. Konstan, David.
bj1476.a45 2011
179′.9–dc22 2011012714

isbn 978-0-521-11948-1 Hardback

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 Contents

Contributors page vii

Preface by Charles L. Griswold xi

I. The Territory Philosophically Considered

1 What Is Forgiveness? 3
Adam Morton

II. Forgiveness among the Greeks

2 Assuaging Rage: Remorse, Repentance, and Forgiveness in
the Classical World 17
David Konstan
3 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone: Forgiveness in Homer
and Beyond 31
Page duBois
4 All in the Family: Forgiveness and Reconciliation in New
Comedy 48
Kathryn Gutzwiller

III. Forgiveness among the Romans

5 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 79
Susanna Morton Braund
6 Gender and Forgiveness in the Early Roman Empire 97
Kristina Milnor
7 “To Forgive Is Divine”: Gods as Models of Forgiveness in Late
Republican and Early Imperial Rome 115
Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

v
vi Contents

IV. Judaic and Christian Forgiveness

8 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness in Ancient Judaism 137
Michael L. Morgan
9 A Man Had Two Sons: The Question of Forgiveness
in Luke 15 158
Peter S. Hawkins
10 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 176
Jennifer Wright Knust
11 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy: The Importance of
Repentance and the Centrality of Grace 195
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli
12 Forgiveness and Perfection: Maimonides, Aquinas, and
Medieval Departures from Aristotle 216
Jonathan Jacobs

Bibliography of Works Cited 237

Index 253
 Contributors

Susanna Morton Braund moved to the University of British Columbia in

2007 to take up a Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry and its Reception
after teaching previously at Stanford, Yale, and the Universities of London,
Bristol, and Exeter. She has published extensively on Roman satire, Latin
epic poetry, and Roman perspectives on the emotions. She has translated
Lucan for the Oxford World’s Classics series (1992) and Persius and Juvenal
for the Loeb Classical Library (2004).
Page duBois is Distinguished Professor of Classics and Comparative
Literature in the Literature Department at the University of California,
San Diego. Her most recent books are Out of Athens: New Ancient Greeks
(Harvard University Press, 2010); Slavery: Antiquity and Its Legacy (I. B.
Tauris and Oxford University Press, 2010); and Slaves and Other Objects
(University of Chicago Press, 2003). Earlier publications include History,
Rhetorical Description and the Epic (Boydell and Brewer, 1982); Centaurs and
Amazons (University of Michigan Press, 1982); Sowing the Body (University
of Chicago Press, 1988), translated into Italian as Il corpo come metafora
(Laterza, 1990); Torture and Truth (Routledge, 1991); Sappho Is Burning
(University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Trojan Horses: Saving the Classics
from Conservatives (New York University Press, 2001).
Charles L. Griswold is Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy at
Boston University. His most recent book is Forgiveness: A Philosophical
Exploration (Cambridge University Press, 2007). His publications include
Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press,
1999) and Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (Yale University Press, 1986),
which was awarded the American Philosophical Association’s F. J. Matchette
Prize. He is also editor of Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings (Routledge,
Chapman, and Hall, 1988).

vii
viii Contributors

Kathryn Gutzwiller is Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati.

Her most recent books are Poetic Garlands: Hellenistic Epigrams in Context
(University of California Press, 1998), for which she was awarded the
American Philological Association’s 2001 Charles J. Goodwin Award of
Merit; The New Posidippus: A Hellenistic Poetry Book (edited volume; Oxford
University Press, 2005); and A Guide to Hellenistic Literature (Blackwell,
2007). She has recently received grants from the Institute for Advanced
Studies, American Council of Learned Societies, and Loeb Classical
Library Foundation to work on a critical edition and commentary for the
epigrams of Meleager. She is also publishing a study of new mosaics from
Antioch depicting scenes from Menander.
Peter S. Hawkins is Professor of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity
School. He has published widely on Dante, including his books Dante’s
Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination (Stanford, 1999), Dante: A Brief
History (Blackwell, 2006), and Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World
to Come (Seabury, 2009). His work on the history of biblical reception
includes three coedited volumes, Medieval Readings of Romans (T&T Clark,
2007), Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs (Fordham, 2006), and
From the Margins 1: Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives (Shefield
Phoenix, 2009).
Jonathan Jacobs is Director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics, editor
of the journal Criminal Justice Ethics, and Professor of Philosophy at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. Much of his
work focuses on moral psychology and metaethics. He is also interested in
topics in the philosophy of law. He is the author of nine books and many
articles. His most recent book is Law, Reason , and Morality in Medieval Jewish
Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2010).
Jennifer Wright Knust is Associate Professor of New Testament and Christian
Origins at Boston University. She is the author of Abandoned to Lust: Sexual
Slander and Ancient Christianity (Columbia University Press, 2005) and is
currently completing a book on the transmission and reception of the story
of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). She is also editor, with
Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, of Ancient Mediterranean Sacriice (Oxford University
Press, 2011).
David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University and John Rowe
Workman Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative
Literature at Brown University. He has published Sexual Symmetry: Love
in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (Princeton University Press, 1994),
Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Pity
Transformed (Routledge, 2001), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks (University
of Toronto Press, 2007), and Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea
 Contributors ix

(Cambridge University Press, 2010). He has served as president of the

American Philological Association (1999) and is a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kristina Milnor is Associate Professor of Classics at Barnard College. She
is the author of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private
Life (Oxford University Press, 2005). She is currently inishing a book
on ancient Roman grafiti entitled Grafiti and the Literary Landscape in
Roman Pompeii .
Michael L. Morgan is Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and
Jewish Studies at Indiana University (Bloomington). His most recent
books include Discovering Levinas (Cambridge University Press, 2007); The
Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (edited with P. E. Gordon,
Cambridge University Press, 2007); and On Shame (Routledge, 2008). His
book The Cambridge Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas appeared in 2011.
He is currently working on Modern Jewish Philosophy, with Paul Franks, for
Cambridge University Press, and a book on contemporary Jewish phil-
osophy, tentatively entitled Jewish Philosophy and the Grounds of Normativity:
Judaism in an Age of Naturalism .
Adam Morton holds a Canada Research Chair in Epistemology and
Decision Theory at the University of Alberta. His recent books are On
Evil (Routledge, 2004) and The Importance of Being Understood (Routledge,
2002). He is working on a book on good reactions to one’s limited ration-
ality and is planning a book on imagination and the emotions.
Ilaria L. E. Ramelli has been Young Researcher in Late Antiquity and
Assistant in Roman History and in Ancient Philosophy at the Catholic
University of Milan, and Professor of History of the Roman Near East at
D’Annunzio University. She received two Gemelli Awards (1996, 1997),
the Gigante Classics International Award (2006), and two Mentions for
Distinguished Scholarly Service (2010, 2011). She is the director of an inter-
national research project on Bardaisan, involving scholars from Europe
and the United States. Ramelli is the author of many books, articles, and
reviews in prestigious scholarly journals and series, on the topics of patris-
tic philosophy, ancient philosophy, the New Testament, the reception of
Scripture, and the relation between Christianity and classical culture. Her
books include Allegoria: L’età classica (Vita & Pensiero, 2004); Il Basileus
come nomos empsukhos (Bibliopolis, 2006); Gregorio di Nissa Sull’Anima e la
Resurrezione (RCS Bompiani–Catholic University, 2007); Hierocles the Stoic
(Brill-SBL, 2009), translated by David Konstan; and Bardaisan of Edessa
(Gorgias, 2009). A history of apokatastasis is forthcoming.
Zsuzsanna Várhelyi is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Boston
University. She has published articles on Greco-Roman history and
x Contributors

religion and is author of The Religion of Senators in the Roman Empire: Power
and the Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2010). She is currently work-
ing on a book on the varied contexts in which selfhood was created and
experienced in the Roman Empire. She is editor, with Jennifer Wright
Knust, of Ancient Mediterranean Sacriice (Oxford University Press, 2011).
 Preface

Charles L. Griswold

Talk about forgiveness has reached astonishing proportions in the contem-

porary world. Forgiveness is said to do it all: it is the cure for wrongs both
personal and political, the road to eternal salvation, and the secret to men-
tal and physical health. Related notions such as apology, pardon, excuse,
mercy, pity, sympathy, empathy, and reconciliation have also gained wide
currency. One can hardly open the newspaper without reading about an
apology being offered by, or demanded from, some organization, state, or
prominent individual. We want apology and remorse from convicted crimi-
nals so as to decide how harshly to punish them; we praise South Africa’s
famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the path to forgiveness
and civic unity; countless self-help and religious tracts urge us to forgive our
enemies unilaterally and instruct us how to do so, promising that we shall
thereby rid ourselves of toxic resentment. Forgiveness and related notions
are now so thoroughly woven into the fabric of culture that it is hard to
imagine a moral world without them.
The meanings of these terms – starting with forgiveness – are hard to
pin down despite the ease with which the words are used. The shifting
usages can be not only quite different from but even inconsistent with each
other. At times, for example, “forgiveness” sounds very much like amnesty
(however vengeful and angry the victim may continue to be) or else, on the
contrary, like the giving up of revenge in an interpersonal rather than a pol-
itical context. At other times, it is taken to consist in the unilateral forswear-
ing of moral anger or else, on the contrary, in the forswearing of moral
anger that is contingent on the offender taking certain steps. As this abbre-
viated list indicates, forgiveness and its related notions are often melded or

I would like to thank Caroline Griswold, Stephen Griswold, David Konstan, and Annice Kra
for their comments on this Preface. David Konstan and I would jointly like to thank David
Jennings and Robyn Walsh for their careful reading and copyediting of the entire manuscript,
and production editor Brian MacDonald for his excellent work.

xi
xii Charles L. Griswold

confused with one another. Redemption, spiritual rebirth, the demands of

honor and self-esteem, and the moral imperative of peacemaking have also
come to form part of this extended web of ideas, and they complicate the
picture still further. One reason for this hodgepodge of both conlicting
and overlapping meanings, which is characteristic of this cluster of notions,
is historical: we are the inheritors of a variety of different traditions and
ways of thinking about such notions, some religious and some secular, some
modern and some ancient.
Investigation into the historical background of a notion such as forgive-
ness holds great interest because it may help to shed light not only on the
different senses of the given term but also on the conceptual, moral, social,
and political backdrop against which it acquires its distinctive meaning.
Such an investigation illuminates the cluster of ideas in which this or that
sense of forgiveness inds its home. What is more, the provenance of our
current conceptions of forgiveness is debatable, and a historical investiga-
tion helps to make us aware of our assumptions. Indeed, we may be mistaken
in believing that our assumptions derive from a certain historical context,
a discovery that may challenge our current view. For example, Hannah
Arendt claimed, without much argument, that “the discoverer of the role of
forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.”1 Likewise,
others hold that our contemporary notion of forgiveness as unilateral (or,
as it is sometimes also called, unconditional) not only is absent from the
pre-Christian world but is a distinctive contribution of Christian thought.
Is either claim accurate? If so, what notions exactly did Christian thought
import that permitted these striking developments? Indeed, might forgive-
ness have a relevant history within the Christian tradition, such that the
ideal of unilateral forgiveness is a relatively recent development? Is forgive-
ness also present in the Judaic tradition and, if so, how is it conceptualized?
If the Roman era – to take another period discussed in this volume – knew
little of what we now call forgiveness, what role (if any) did such things as
forswearing resentment, compassion, apology, and reconciliation have in
its moral outlook? Surprisingly little work has been done so far concerning
the historical meanings and genealogy of this important notion, and it is a
principal purpose of this volume to further this investigation.2
I irst began to think about the historical context of forgiveness when
writing a book on forgiveness, and I offered there a few relatively brief

1
Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 238.
2
See the relevant work by various authors mentioned in the Bibliography to this volume,
for example, Dover, “Fathers, Sons and Forgiveness,” Illinois Classical Studies 16 (1991):
173–82; Krašovec, Reward, Punishment, and Forgiveness: The Thinking and Beliefs of Ancient Israel
in the Light of Greek and Modern Views (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Metzler, Der griechische Begriff des
Verzeihens: Untersucht am Wortstamm συγγνώμη von den ersten Belegen bis zum vierten Jahrhundert
n. Chr. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1991); and Romilly, Tragédies grecques au il des
ans (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995). See also the works referred to in the next footnote.
 Preface xiii

comments on the status of forgiveness as a concept and virtue in the con-

text of the “perfectionist” views of ancient philosophers.3 I argued that,
because perfect sages were assumed to be invulnerable to the sort of injury
that would degrade their virtue – the only kind of harm that was consid-
ered truly damaging – and because such sages would certainly never com-
mit an offense against another, they had occasion neither to forgive nor
to be forgiven. Accordingly, forgiveness played a small role in the classical
philosophical tradition (at least in that part of it oriented by such notions
of perfection). This is just one example of the historical context of forgive-
ness. I did not dwell on it, or on investigating other such contexts, since
my aim was to set out the conceptual backdrop against which forgiveness
might be counted as a distinct virtue. The focus of the book was analytical
rather than historical. Conversations about these topics with David Konstan
during the 2004–5 academic year at Stanford University (where he was a
Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and I
was a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center) led us both to realize that
the historical dimension holds enormous interdisciplinary interest and that
it would be well worth exploring that dimension in much greater detail. We
therefore organized a colloquium on forgiveness and its history, with the
support of the Liberty Fund, Inc., that took place in June 2007. Most of
the contributors to the present volume attended, and the multidisciplinary
readings ranged not only over Greco-Roman literature but also over Judaic
and Christian sources. Ancient Forgiveness is an outgrowth of the conversa-
tions that unfolded at that wonderful conference.
The present volume makes no claim to comprehensiveness. Were a com-
prehensive discussion of the character and development of forgiveness in
ancient Greece, Rome, and Judaic and Christian contexts possible, it would
certainly consume many volumes. The task would be even more daunting
were it – unlike the present volume – to move beyond the boundaries of
what is commonly referred to as “the West.” We have sought to make a start
by examining a broad selection of texts and authors from these traditions
that would certainly form an essential basis for any comprehensive view of
the matter, and we very much hope to spur others to carry the investiga-
tion forward. While no essay devoted to the Greek or Roman philosophers

3
Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), chap. 1 [i]. For my replies to ive critics of the book’s argument, see “Forgiveness,
Secular and Religious: A Reply to My Critics,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical
Association 82 (2008): 303–13 (available at http://secure.pdcnet.org/pdc/BVDB.nsf/
journal?openform&journal=pdc_acpaproc; see under “free content”), and “Debating
Forgiveness: A Reply to My Critics,” Philosophia 38.3 (2010): 457–73 (available at http://
www.springerlink.com/content/b5405026451n8675). The critiques to which I am respond-
ing are reproduced in those volumes as well. Discussion of the topic may also be found in
my “Plato and Forgiveness,” Ancient Philosophy 27 (2007): 269–87; and in Konstan, Before
Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
xiv Charles L. Griswold

(other than Seneca) is offered here, substantial discussion of their thought

is present in a number of our essays. Certainly, a future volume might go
through the writings of the philosophers more exhaustively. A thorough
exploration of courtroom speeches, legal codes, and inscriptions would
also be illuminating. Necessarily limited in scope though this book may be,
David Konstan and I are nonetheless conident that it makes distinctive and
original contributions to what we hope is an emerging area of interdisci-
plinary research: the historical, social, and political provenance of impor-
tant moral ideas.
Contributors to this book represent the disciplines of philosophy,
classical studies, comparative literature, and religious and theological
studies. In assembling these essays, David Konstan and I made an import-
ant methodological decision. Instead of starting with a set deinition of
“forgiveness” and then asking the contributors to hunt for evidence of it
through their respective literatures – a top-down approach – we chose an
approach that, with an important qualiication, may be characterized as
moving from the ground up, that is, from context to deinition. The quali-
ication is this: we begin with an essay by a philosopher, Adam Morton, that
sets out a number of distinctions and questions relevant to a deinition of
forgiveness, thereby offering an overview of what one might call the con-
ceptual topography. All of the contributors had Morton’s essay in hand
when writing their own. Morton emphasizes the complexities – both seman-
tic and conceptual – involved in drawing hard and fast distinctions. The
“forgiveness territory,” as he calls it, is deceptively hard to map precisely,
and yet there are basic contours. For example, he points out that deining
“emotion” is challenging and that some of the features it may involve (such
as an affective dimension) may or may not be present when forgiveness
takes place. Nonetheless, we rightly think of forgiveness as somehow tied
to an emotion (say, as requiring the forswearing of resentment), and that
would seem to remain central to any discussion of the matter.
Another complex aspect of the territory involves the extent to which
forgiveness is bilateral; in some contexts it seems to be private, something
one can do on one’s own, and in other contexts not. Further, forgive-
ness and legal pardon share overlapping features, even though they are
also distinct. The same may be said about forgiveness and divine mercy.
Forgiveness seems to have something to do with empathy or compassion;
but leshing out that linkage, as Morton again points out, requires recogni-
tion of the inherent complexity and variability of the core notions involved,
even as those notions are identiied as core. As he notes at the end of his
piece, “Forgiveness has many varieties, all of which can come about in many
ways.” But this is not to say that just anything will count as forgiveness. At a
minimum, the scene must include two people, one of whom has intention-
ally harmed the other and who is thus responsible and blamable for the
wrong (putting aside the problematic case of self-forgiveness for wrongs
 Preface xv

one has done to oneself). In sum, Morton presents us with an interplay

between conceptual linkages and boundaries, on the one hand, and vari-
ability of context and meaning, on the other, while also articulating key
questions relevant to an account of the topic.
All of the contributions to this volume are informed by this common
framework of questions and distinctions. At the same time, contributors
were free to investigate whether and how terms that might be understood
as “forgiveness” are explicitly or implicitly at work in the texts they elected
to examine. Working in this way “from the ground up,” each contributor
took into account the particularity and nuances of the historical and liter-
ary context in which forgiveness, or whatever notion was closest to forgive-
ness, took shape. Moreover, the approach we have adopted accommodates
the obvious semantic challenges: our contributors are working with texts
in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, among other languages – while seeking to
articulate the results in English. And because forgiveness forms part of a
complex web of ideas (pardon, apology, sympathy, empathy, and so forth),
the approach we have adopted is especially suited to discerning the ever-
shifting connections between these ideas from context to context. Thus,
many of the essays in this volume end up engaging in a species of dialogue
with their texts. Rather than stipulate a meaning against which the ancient
writers are to be measured, they ask what characteristics the several candi-
dates for “forgiveness” possess, and thereby interrogate what – if anything –
would seem to count as forgiveness and why, all the while working from a
common set of distinctions, linkages, and questions.
This interplay between conceptual and historical inquiry pervades this
volume, often implicitly. A large question about the relation between con-
ceptual and historical analysis no doubt looms behind relections of this
nature. It may be understood as a question about the independence of
philosophical analysis of a concept from its historical context or, conversely,
about the independence of analysis of historical context from a timeless con-
ceptual structure.4 Is there such a thing in principle as getting “forgiveness”
right once and for all? Is it possible to set out the necessary and suficient
conditions that deine what it is? Or must we rely on a historically posi-
tioned hermeneutic process that is revisable but not arbitrary? Although it
is not our aim here to work out an answer systematically, we hope that the
essays in this volume offer an illuminating approach to the long-standing
philosophical question about the relation between conceptual and histor-
ical inquiry.

4
This question is explored in Philosophy in History, ed. Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially in the essays in part I.
 part i

THE TERRITORY PHILOSOPHICALLY

CONSIDERED
 1

What Is Forgiveness?

Adam Morton

Concepts versus Territories

What counts as forgiveness? Suppose that a person says that she forgives
you but she clearly feels great hostility to you. Is she misusing the word?
Suppose that a word in some text from another civilization is translated
as “forgiveness” although the text describes the execution of “forgiven”
people. Is this a mistranslation? One way to approach such questions would
be to make a theory of forgiveness, laying out the conditions that have to
be met for one person to forgive another. Then, if a person or a text uses
a word in a way that violates these conditions, we would take it that forgive-
ness is not really the topic.
That is the procedure suggested by standard analytical philosophy. It
is well suited for debunking, and there is always a lot of bunk around.
But, for all its attractiveness, I think it is not the best approach here, for
two reasons.
The irst reason is a doubt about philosophical analysis that is common
among analytic philosophers. To put it in terms of an extreme case, sup-
pose that the text is by a philosopher. He has observed practices of people
in his city, many of which we would classify as forgiveness, even if we do
not know why. And he has worked out a complex, exotic, perhaps bizarre
theory of what lies behind these practices. It may be that the theory is right
and ours is wrong, however much of a jolt it would be to accept it. Or it
may be that the philosopher is overambitious, misguided, or confused, as
we philosophers usually are. In either case, his theory is about forgiveness,
even if it denies what seem to us basic characteristics of the process. The
same would hold true of a contemporary thinker making strange assertions
about who has forgiven whom. So we should hesitate before saying, “Don’t
translate that word as ‘forgiveness,’” just because the claims that would
result are bizarre.

3
4 Adam Morton

The point is that reference and sense have some degree of independ-
ence.1 One can talk about something while being very wrong about it. This
can clearly happen when the object is a familiar physical object: in the fog,
you can think that a tree is a moose. And it can happen when the object is
something more abstract. A philosopher can be dealing with justice, truth,
or rationality – trying to explain what seems evident about it, trying to make
sense of related practices – while mischaracterizing it completely. It is con-
troversial what she has to do for it to be really justice, truth, or rationality
that she is talking about, rather than some other concept of her own inven-
tion, but trying to explain the facts and adducing the cases that for us are
the everyday home of the concept must play an important role. So too it
must be with nonphilosophical discourse on abstract matters. Politicians
are still talking about freedom and democracy when they invoke them in
absurd ways. Lexicographers are no safer. (An Australian philosopher once
told me that when students try to ix a fact with “the dictionary says,” he
tells them to look up “summer.”) So, to complement the conclusion of the
previous paragraph, any analysis we produce to gather all the things we say
about forgiveness and our diverse practices of forgiving is making a hypo-
thesis rather than describing what is evident. It might be as wrong as the
crazed exotic theory. A better irst step is to focus on the sayings and the
practices themselves.
The second reason might make us worry less about the irst. Consistency
with a theory is a yes/no business. But we are often interested in conceptual
closeness rather than conceptual identity. It might be important to know
whether something could responsibly or helpfully be called forgiveness-
like, without having to settle whether it is exactly “our” concept of forgive-
ness. Concepts are usually vague, and their penumbras can vary. “City” as
used by many young North Americans includes what older British speakers
of English would place under “town”; “rock” for some includes what others
count as mere stones. But if two cultures or two dialects have ways of sub-
dividing village/town/city/metropolis and pebble/stone/rock/boulder,
then it is signiicant that they both focus on the same continuous range,
even if they divide it differently, and it is interesting to try to see where
the differences in the divisions lie, and what their origins might be. Of
course, it is more interesting when the territory is more important, as it
is with forgiveness/reconciliation/pardon/clemency/reinstatement. The
obvious primary topic is not the concept of forgiveness but the forgiveness
territory: the bundle of mutually sustaining practices, ideas, and theories
that center on people doing something roughly like forgiving one another

1
A theme of 1970s philosophy of language, particularly in the work of Kripke and Putnam,
as in, for example, Kripke, “Naming and Necessity,” in Semantics of Natural Language, ed.
Davidson and Harman (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), pp. 253–355, and Putnam, Mind, Language
and Reality, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
 What Is Forgiveness? 5

for wrongs. We want to know the resemblances between the forgiveness

territory in one culture at one time, or perhaps part of one culture at one
time, and that territory in another at another. Before that, we may need to
ask whether we can isolate anything that seems to constitute a forgiveness
territory at all.
This is a collection on ancient forgiveness. So we are dealing with a range
of times and places and of social complexes at those times and places, with
varying ideas and customs. Classicists standardly compare such things as
kingship, manhood, sexuality, honor, and citizenship across these various
cultures and measure them against our versions. It hardly needs saying that
the label in English one uses to describe any such project is treacherous,
luring us into assuming that the people we are discussing thought or acted
as we do, when that is one of the main questions we should be trying to
settle. A dramatic example is homosexuality: when ancient writers discuss
sex between people of the same gender, are they using anything like our
twenty-irst-century concept? Forgiveness is not in principle different. We
want to make as few assumptions as possible, in order to see similarities and
differences between various ancient forgiveness territories and ours. In the
remainder of this chapter, I describe the general shape that the forgiveness
territory has at our time among most people whom authors and readers of
this collection will engage with.

Emotions and Linkages

What is an emotion? Central examples are fear, anger, sadness, and joy.
These combine several elements. We have (a) a standard way of reacting
to a standard situation or, at any rate, to a situation thought of as being of
a standard type. Ronald de Sousa calls these “paradigm scenarios.”2 For
example, in fear one tries to get away from something dangerous: in the
primal case, one runs away from a physical threat. In less central cases, the
threat and the evasion may be more abstract, and one may simply think of
the situation as a threat rather than believing, let alone knowing, that it is
dangerous. These standard reactions are probably hardwired into mam-
malian brains, most likely in the limbic system. (So one of the bases of the
standard emotions is biological: just one of them.) We also have (b) feel-
ings characteristic of particular emotions, affects. An angry person feels
angry. As a lot of psychology shows, these feelings are not as speciic as
we tend to think, and a person’s conidence that it is, for example, anger
rather than excitement that she is feeling is based as much on her know-
ledge of her situation as on introspection. At the heart of many such affects
are the bodily responses appropriate to the paradigm scenarios. Still, we
might hesitate to call something an emotion if it was never associated

2
De Sousa, The Rationality of the Emotions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 181.
6 Adam Morton

with people feeling some characteristic way. And third we have (c) effects
on belief and motivation characteristic of particular emotions. A fearful
person wants to get away, imagines escapes, and has beliefs about which
escapes will and will not succeed. There is a characteristic pressure on
imagination and thought. Very often we also have a fourth feature,
(d) objects or situations that are speciic targets of the emotion. One is
afraid of a spider or afraid that a spider will appear. When (d) is absent, as
in objectless generalized fear, what we have is a less central case of emotion.
Depression is very different from sadness.3
The category of emotion may be very speciic to our culture. At other
times, people have spoken of passions and sentiments in ways that distin-
guish them from what we would call emotions.4 Other cultures may be
right to neglect the category in this respect: deciding whether a state – for
example, regret – is an emotion may not be an important question. The
answer may not tell us much about what is happening when someone is in
the state.
Is forgiveness an emotion? Often when one person forgives another, she
has strong feelings, and indeed there is a cathartic sense of escape from the
burden of hatred that marks dramatic cases of forgiveness. Moreover, for-
giveness usually has an object: one forgives a particular person for a particu-
lar act or history. And, to add to the similarity, there are standard effects on
the thinking of the forgiver. She will begin to think of the forgiven person
as more in the category of ally than of enemy, and she will be more recep-
tive to considerations of the admirable qualities (“redeeming features”) of
the forgiven.
There are differences, though. Forgiveness has emotion-like features in
terms of (b), (c), and (d). However, (a) is more subtle. The situations that
evoke forgiveness are essentially many-person situations, in which there are
roles for both forgiver and forgiven. I don’t want to be too deinite about
what is essential to the paradigm scenarios for forgiveness. Those are just
the details that we should take slowly here. But forgiveness involves a for-
giver, a forgiven, an issue between them, and emotions that both must feel.
It helps to compare forgiveness not to emotions but to another category of
things, for which we do not have a common label, but which I propose to
call “linkages.” Other linkages are courtship, seduction, punishment, abase-
ment, and the tango. It takes at least two, and you need the right feelings.
Courtship, for example, is not an emotion. One person courts another, and
typically knows that that is what they are doing, and each person usually has
3
For a survey of contemporary work on the philosophy and psychology of the emotions, see
Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
I ind de Sousa’s Rationality of the Emotions still a rich source of ideas, particularly in trying to
connect the biological and the cognitive sides of emotion.
4
See, for example, Rorty, “From Passions to Emotions and Sentiments,” Philosophy 57 (1982):
159–72.
 What Is Forgiveness? 7

feelings that it the situation. (A milder version of courtship is befriending,

a linkage that involves friendly emotions.) Punishment, like courtship, is
something that one person does to another and, as the term is sometimes
used, may require appropriate feelings from the participants. It is not really
punishment if it is not for some misdeed, if the punisher does not have
some retributive feeling, and if the punished does not feel bad. What distin-
guishes linkages from emotions is primarily that a linkage is something that
actually happens between the participants. It cannot just consist in events
in their minds. The linkage involves a disposition of the participants to feel
emotions that it the situation and to think in corresponding ways.
Many words are ambiguous between linkages and emotions ( just as
many words are ambiguous between emotions, traits of character, and
virtues). Consider “love.” We have the linkage between people when one
loves another. When it is reciprocal, the two are lovers, but even when it is
one-sided, one can be a suitor or a devotee. Different from this is the emo-
tion that can exist just in the mind of one person, creating no difference in
their objective relationship.
Forgiveness has this ambiguity. Sometimes it is just something that hap-
pens between people, and any emotions are incidental. One person per-
forms an act of forgiving another for something. Think of the pardons that
U.S. presidents are empowered to bestow: the pardon may be given out of
pure political calculation, with none of the cathartic feeling that may hap-
pen when one reconciles with an enemy.5 Sometimes also forgiveness is
an emotion that is private to the forgiver. I have long resented something
that you have done, though I have taken no action against you, and now I
ind myself getting beyond the resentment and accepting you as a decent
person. All this may create no ripples in the way we interact.
In the typical case there is an emotional background, involving resent-
ment, blame, or some similar emotion directed by one person at another
in connection with some action of the other. Then there is an emotion of
overcoming that background. But in the typical case there is also a relation-
ship between the two people that changes at the moment of forgiveness.
This is something that does not consist in the emotions of either person.
The relationship changes so that, while the offender was unforgiven, now
an act of forgiveness has occurred. We sometimes use the forgiveness label
when either the linkage or the emotions are involved, and we are most com-
fortable doing so when both are.
The territory of forgiveness, if this is right, involves a family of emotions,
resentment-like emotions of the forgiver, abasement-like or repentance-like
emotions of the forgiven, and a process of transition joining them, in the

5
Is this a central case of forgiveness? It certainly would not be on the account in Griswold,
Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). That
is not the question at this point.
8 Adam Morton

course of which reconciliation-like emotions can occur on both sides. That

is not to say that any of these are required or, in the other direction, that
even if we have all of these, any combination will result in forgiveness. But
it is in combinations of these emotions and this linkage that the territory of
forgiveness is found. Which combinations?

Central and Peripheral

Consider three contrasting paradigmatic cases. One of two friends, Alicia, is
on a committee that is considering the other, Bruno, for a job (e.g., a high-
paying but high-pressure job that involves a lot of traveling). Alicia prefers
her cousin Cristin for the job and does not tell the committee that Bruno is
her friend or that Cristin is her cousin. In the meeting she argues strongly
against Bruno, exaggerating his weak points, so that Cristin is appointed.
Bruno inds out and is outraged. The two are not on speaking terms for
years. When Alicia attends the funeral of Bruno’s wife and tells him how
much she had always admired her, she reveals that she was against his can-
didacy for the job in part because she thought it would be bad for their
marriage. Bruno reveals that he is in fact glad he didn’t get the job. They
embrace and cautiously resume their friendship.
In the second case, a revolutionary leader demands the cooperation of a
lawyer in forging some documents. The lawyer refuses and leaves the coun-
try to avoid reprisals. Years later when the leader has become president,
the lawyer has retired and wants to live his last years in his native town. He
writes to the president apologizing for his past failure and afirming his
support for the revolution. The president replies that since the lawyer did
nothing actually to harm the cause and since he is a member of a promin-
ent family that is unusual in its sympathy for the revolution, he may return
without fear.
In the third case, an addict kills a teenaged clerk in a store in the course
of a botched robbery. The addict is caught and convicted. In that jurisdic-
tion the death penalty can be imposed at the discretion of the judge, who
hears testimony for and against. The mother of the murdered clerk is asked
to testify for death and refuses, testifying instead for clemency. She argues
that no one is beyond redemption and that the addict was as much a victim
of circumstances as her daughter. Years later when the murderer is released
from jail, the mother offers her help in inding a job and a place to live,
partly in the hope of making some sense out of her daughter’s short life.
These cases have in common that there was tension between two people
and the tension was overcome deliberately by one of them. They are dif-
ferent in important ways, though. The irst case is personal. It is not clear
that Alice has done anything wrong or that Bruno thinks she has. Their
reconciliation centers on Bruno deciding not to hold her past actions against
her. He is suspending blame, but the blame may never have been moral.
 What Is Forgiveness? 9

The second case involves authority, at the beginning that of a political leader
and at the end that of a head of state. The authority gives the power to pun-
ish, which is restrained in an act of clemency that may be motivated in part by
political calculation. The third case involves an indisputably immoral act,
and a person who has every right to condemn it – as she does, intellectually,
but without some of the animus that often accompanies condemnation. We
might think of the particular element of this case as redemption.
I take it that these are good examples of forgiveness, as we use the word
now. There can be cases of reconciliation, clemency, or redemption that
are not forgiveness. Reconciliation without forgiveness could occur when
there is no speciic act that someone is forgiven for, as when friends who
have ceased to feel warmly get over a vague raft of differences. Clemency
without forgiveness can come when there is no change in judgment, no
wiping out of thoughts of betrayal, disloyalty, or disobedience, but punish-
ment is suspended for some reason. Redemption without forgiveness can
occur when there is no condemnation, as when members of historically
antagonistic groups reach out to one another.
The factor that makes our three cases count as forgiveness, while similar
cases do not, seems to be the presence of blame, responsibility, or excuse.
Forgiveness overlaps with excusing, though the connections between them
are not obvious, and to accept someone’s excuse is in some cases to say
that there is nothing to forgive. These are themselves vague and tricky con-
cepts that are often waved around in a loose rhetorical way. At a minimum,
responsibility requires that someone perform an intentional act that causes
or allows an event to occur.6 If this resulting event is then the object of anger,
moral disapproval, or another similar emotion, the person who is angry or
disapproving can suspend or overcome her emotion to return to something
like the attitude she had before. If this is to be a linkage and not only an
emotion, the relationship between the two must change at this point. One
way that it can change is for the offender to petition the potential forgiver,
as in the second case, and for the petition to be successful. Another way is
for the forgiver to acknowledge some change in attitude of the offender,
something like coming over to the offender’s side. Yet another way is for the
forgiver to act in some dramatic way that marks an attitude different from
past or expected behavior.
We can vary the central cases in many ways to get controversial or
problem cases. There are cases in which the forgiven act is right or even
admirable, cases in which the forgiver has not been injured or offended,
and cases in which the forgiven person does not accept the change of state.
Some of these might be unproblematic cases on some common concept at
some other time or place. From the perspective of some such time, some

6
Eshleman, “Moral Responsibility,” in Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Zalta
(2001 [rev. 2009]), available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-responsibility.
10 Adam Morton

cases that are unproblematic for us might seem deviant, perhaps because
what is going on in them cannot be easily labeled or because the motiv-
ations of the people involved would be hard to understand.

Judges
The way we think of forgiveness is complicated by its connections with two
rather different ideas. First there is the idea of judicial or legal punishment
and pardon. If a person is found guilty of a crime and a penalty is imposed,
then that penalty can be lifted if the person is pardoned. Pardon is a linkage
that shares basic features with forgiveness, but there are differences between
pardon and what we would take to be paradigmatic forgiveness. The judge or
other authority does not always have to give a reason for his pardon, and his
attitude to the offender does not have to change. (Often, in fact, a change
in attitude, frequently induced by a change in the offender, is either a cause
or a justiication of the pardon. But this is not usually formally required.)
There can be a pardon for a penalty imposed as a result of an act that neither
offender nor pardoner thought was wrong; there can be a pardon where the
pardoner continues to think of the pardoned as an awful criminal.
The second complicating connection is with divine mercy. In monotheis-
tic religion, God gives us instructions, which we often break, and he is then
entitled to punish us. He can, however, suspend punishment. Suspension
usually occurs as a result of our repentance, which consists in our want-
ing to submit to God’s will and our realization that what we have done is
wrong. An essential emotion, remorse, combines condemnation of oneself
with resolve to change. Presumably, moral individualists, who submit to div-
ine authority to escape hellire but reserve the right to their own opinions
about whether the commands are just, do not qualify for mercy. Both emo-
tion and moral judgment are essential here.7
Although legal pardon and divine mercy differ in essential respects, they
also have something in common. They both involve authority, breach of
rules, and the suspension of a legitimate power to punish. Each can be seen
as a metaphor for the other. Divine judgment can be seen as if God were an
earthly judge administering a set of laws, with a list of standard minimum
sentences. And legal punishment can be seen as if the judge is substituting
an earthly punishment for things that God will eventually deal with. Both
are combined in a medieval picture of divine authority percolating down
through layers of earthly rulers, ending with the authority of husbands and
fathers over their families.

7
In Forgiveness and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp.
159–73 (chap. 9: “Varieties of Forgiveness”) and pp. 174–86 (chap. 10: “Afterthoughts”),
Bash wrestles with the issue of reconciling the judging and forgiving sides of the Christian
God and with that of our limited human capacities to forgive.
 What Is Forgiveness? 11

It is controversial among philosophers whether morality consists in fol-

lowing rules (let alone what would make any rules correct), and it is con-
troversial whether the way decent people are committed to act morally has
much in common with the authority that a ruler or a legal system exerts.
It is natural to think, though also natural to contest, that the idea of mor-
ality as a set of divine rules came from thinking of right action in terms of
obedience to the commands of a social power and then imagining an ultim-
ate authority. However the idea of moral obligation began, it is now not
at all clear that acting morally consists in following rules, that we can clas-
sify actions as simply permissible or not, or that wrongdoing and guilt are
closely linked. Things seem more complicated and subtle. Many of these
subtleties suggest cases where a traditional concept of forgiveness does not
easily apply. Suppose, for example, that someone is facing a moral dilemma
in which there are serious considerations against all of the courses of action
open to her. Suppose she makes a choice, after due relection, and it is one
that hurts you. Suppose that it is not what you would have taken to be the
best way out of the dilemma, but you can see that a reasonable person might
have chosen it. So you think she did the wrong thing but do not condemn
her. Is that forgiveness? Probably not. Suppose that you are furious with her
but later come to see that she acted reasonably in a tough situation. Is that
forgiveness or just cooling down?
Remorse is not what a person usually feels in such a situation. Regret is
more natural. Consider what you might feel if you took what seemed to you
the lesser of two unappealing options, which turned out disastrously for
someone else. You would wish that you had not done it, or that it could have
had a different result: your regret would be not at all trivial, but it would
lack the sense of having been the wrong kind of person that accompan-
ies classic remorse. So if your victim is to forgive you, you cannot honestly
offer her remorse. You have to express the full depth of your regret. We
would take this to be real forgiveness, I think. But we might not do so in
the somewhat similar situation where you injure someone out of ignorance.
Recognizing that you had no harmful intentions and that you really regret
having injured them, the victim might withdraw her initial anger. However,
that is not forgiveness but a kind of reconciliation.
Judges and kings in traditional societies resolved disputes about personal
harm but also about property and contracts. We have now divided law into
criminal and civil, and it is criminal law that deals with guilt and innocence.
Civil law deals with responsibility, too, but its disputes are between indi-
viduals rather than between an individual and the state. Its subject matter
also yields metaphors for forgiveness. They may be more than metaphors
in that they may rely on very similar ways of thinking. We use the very word
“forgiven” of debts that do not have to be repaid. And when someone has
been punished enough, we speak of his having paid his debt. We speak of
“owing” someone the consideration that he has a right to. And when one
12 Adam Morton

person has not treated another as that person thinks she should, there can
then be a negotiation between them, rather like the negotiation over repay-
ment of a debt or fulillment of a contract. The negotiation can resolve the
issue if the “debtor” can satisfy the “creditor” that outstanding obligations
have been met, directly or in substituted form. Substitution is possible,
because the damaged party may be satisied with the other’s feeling con-
trite. Substitution is inevitable if the damage is irreparable, but contrition is
usually not a matter just of feelings of remorse but also of a realignment of
intentions and values that will often serve the interests of the creditor.8
We also speak of forgiveness metaphorically in connection with bank-
ruptcy. When a person or business is declared bankrupt, some proportion
of his debts is forgiven, which proportion depending on the outcome of a
legal procedure. We speak metaphorically of moral bankruptcy. Folding
one metaphor within another, we can ask what moral debts can be forgiven
when we decide that someone is morally bankrupt. I suppose that we no
longer hold someone responsible for things whose wrongness we decide
she had not the moral insight to understand.
Imposed settlements in civil law, and the negotiations that avoid them, do
not usually divide neatly into creditor and debtor. Each side is often suing
the other, or there is a contract requiring something of each. And many
nonlegal proceedings between people are analogous to this, when recon-
ciliation requires reciprocal undertakings and complementary emotions of
both sides. But we do not think of two-sided reconciliation as forgiveness.

Two Functions for Forgiveness

Forgiveness is above all the transcendence of blame. But blame is a very
troubling concept. It applies in a straightforward way to only some of the
situations in which we acknowledge that wrong has been done. Looking for
blame often blinds us to important reasons why bad things happen. And
it biases us toward a perpetrator-victim model of unhappy events. Blame
can be distributed in many subtle ways, so that none of these consequences
is inevitable. But looking for someone to blame is very often not a good
way to react to events. And, in the wider issues beyond blame, questions
of personal responsibility are deeply contested in philosophy and in the
culture generally.
Can we have forgiveness without blame? We certainly need not blame
after forgiving, when blame has been put aside. But when one person has
forgiven another for something, he usually still thinks of it as that person’s
fault, for which she has been forgiven. If forgiveness requires remorse on the
part of the forgiven person, then it requires her to take upon herself some-
thing like blame. (We might distinguish between two kinds of forgiveness.

8
As described in the evocative Atwood, Payback (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2008).
 What Is Forgiveness? 13

On the less common and more extreme one, the forgiver says, “It was not
really your fault, at any rate not more than mine; I withdraw that thought.”
On the more common one, the forgiver just says, “There is no longer the
barrier between us that you culpably made happen.”)
There is a way, though, in which the act of forgiving tends to erase the
shadow of blame. There are two purposes to forgiveness, each of which
is sometimes served without the other. The irst is to return to a previous
cooperative relationship that is of beneit to both parties (or to establish
one if none existed). When this exists by itself, we usually call it reconcili-
ation or rehabilitation.9 The second is to allow each to imagine the situ-
ation of the other. When we explain the actions of others, according to
one of the irm conclusions of social psychology in the past thirty years, we
often attribute greater inluence to their characters than to the situations
in which they ind themselves.10 When thinking of our own past actions,
though, we typically overemphasize the situation. It is natural to think of
vivid accurate imagination as a potential corrective to this. When you con-
sider what it was like for another person to be in the situation in which she
acted, simulating her irst-person perspective on it, you apply some of the
same ways of thinking that you would in your own case. And, as you would
in your own case, you see how the situation is as important as mood, char-
acter, and personality. In a similar way, though no doubt harder, when you
simulate in detail the way someone else thinks about you, you duplicate the
emphasis she puts on your character rather than your situation. So your
situation-focused excuses become less plausible. And if you are imagining
the thoughts of someone who is blaming you, you have to make vivid in
your mind the way she has suffered and the hostile thoughts she has toward
you.11 If both happen, then many of the main features of forgiveness will
have been achieved. In fact, the situation will approximate to what Charles
Griswold has called “forgiveness at its best,”12 where in a single process the
forgiven recognizes his error and the forgiver suspends her hostility.
In fact, if forgiveness happens through the use of empathetic imagin-
ation, the result is likely to include the irst function I mentioned, the
resumption of cooperation. For each person is likely to have something

9
Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36
(2008): 33–68.
10
Nisbett and Ross, The Person and the Situation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991).
11
As described in Currie, Image and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995); Morton, On Evil (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 104–35 (chap. 4: “Facing Evil:
Reconciliation”); Morton, “Imagination and Mis-imagination,” in The Architecture of the
Imagination, ed. Nichols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 57–72; Goldie,
“Emotion, Personality and Simulation,” in Understanding Emotions: Mind and Morals, ed.
Goldie (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 97–109; Deonna, “The Structure of Empathy,” Journal
of Moral Philosophy 4 (2007): 99–116; and Goldie and Coplan, eds., Empathy: Philosophical and
Psychological Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
12
Griswold, Forgiveness, chap. 2.
14 Adam Morton

like the grasp of the other person’s preferences and inclinations that makes
shared activity possible. So empathy-based forgiveness is not just good for
the soul – it makes human life go on as it should.13
I wrote “likely” twice in the last paragraph. For, in fact, being able to
imagine someone does not always make one more prone to cooperate. It
can lead to the kind of despair that writes off the other as a hopeless case.
This response ought to be rare among typical capable humans. And in the
previous paragraph I wrote that it is “natural” to think of imagination as
having the effects I described. As far as I know, there is little experimental
work on the effect of rich imagination on character attribution. This is a
topic just waiting to be explored.
Forgiveness has many varieties, all of which can come about in many
ways. It does not have to proceed in the imagination-based way I have been
describing. But a link to imagination and empathy allows one to see it as
part of a natural conceptual space. Moreover, if it comes about in the ways
I have highlighted, then it is easy to see why forgiveness is something that
we often need.

13
David Konstan points out to me that the Greek sungnōmē has the roots “with-knowing.” Is
empathy tied to the origins of the concept of forgiveness? That pleads for more thought.
 part ii

FORGIVENESS AMONG THE GREEKS

 2

Assuaging Rage
Remorse, Repentance, and Forgiveness
in the Classical World

David Konstan

Forgiveness is a variable human process and a practice with culturally dis-

tinctive versions.1

Did the ancient Greeks and Romans forgive? In this chapter, I argue that
they did not – at least not in the sense that the term commonly bears
today, according to which we forgive someone who has wronged us and
who expresses sincere remorse for her or his behavior. This is not to fault
the ancients: they had, as we shall see, other strategies of reconciliation.
But forgiveness in the full moral (and modern) sense of the word was not
among them; for where we are inclined to seek confession and apology,
they looked rather to excuse or exculpation.
In the second book of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which provides the most exten-
sive analysis of the emotions that has survived from ancient Greece, the irst

1
Walker, Moral Repair: Reconstructing Moral Relations after Wrongdoing (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), p. 152.
This chapter is a version of the talk I delivered as invited foreign speaker at the annual confer-
ence of the Canadian Classical Association/Société Canadienne des Études Classiques, held
in Montréal on May 12–14, 2008; the talk was subsequently published in Phoenix, the journal
of the Association (Konstan, “Assuaging Rage: Remorse, Repentance and Forgiveness in the
Classical World,” Phoenix 62 [2008]: 243–54), with the understanding that a revised version
would appear in this volume. A shorter version was presented, in Spanish, at the meeting of
the Sociedad Española de Estudios Clásicos, held in Valencia on October 22–26, 2007, pub-
lished as “Apaciguando la cólera: Remordimiento, arrepentimiento, y perdón en el mundo
clásico,” in Periles de Grecia y Roma (Actas del XII Congreso Español de Estudios Clásicos), ed.
González Castro and de la Villa Polo, vol. 2 (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Estudios Clásicos,
2010), pp. 515–23. I wish to thank Charles Griswold and the participants in the Liberty Fund
colloquium on forgiveness, held in San Francisco on June 14–17, 2007, for many helpful
insights into the subject of forgiveness. The discussion of Menander’s Samia is drawn in
part from the keynote address that I was invited to give at the graduate student colloquium
on anger, held on March 16–17, 2007, under the sponsorship of the Classics Department
at the University of Western Ontario; I thank the participants in that conference for many
useful comments.

17
18 David Konstan

emotion to be examined in detail is anger (orgē); following this, Aristotle

devotes a section to praotēs or praünsis, “calmness” or “calming down,” which
he treats as the emotion opposite to anger. As many critics have observed,
calmness does not sound much like an emotion; however, if we think of the
pathē as responses to the behavior of others that have the effect of altering
our judgments, which is the way Aristotle himself deines them (adding that
they must be accompanied by pleasure and pain), then we can more easily
see why the elimination of anger might also igure in Aristotle’s inventory
of the passions.
In this section, Aristotle discusses various ways of appeasing another
person’s anger. First of all, given that anger (or orgē), as Aristotle deines it,
is a response to a slight or belittlement, and since, as he points out, “a slight
is a voluntary thing,” it follows that people are peaceably disposed “toward
those who do not belittle them, or who do so involuntarily, or who at least
seem like that” (2.3, 1380a10–12). Thus, you should try to show that you
meant just the opposite or that, however you behaved toward the other
person, you also behave toward yourself, since, as Aristotle says, people do
not normally belittle themselves. He then adds that our anger is lessened
toward those who admit that they were wrong and show that they regret it
(1380a14: kai tois homologousi kai metamelomenois). For, Aristotle explains, it
is as though they have paid the penalty for the pain that they caused you.2
Now, Aristotle would seem to be recommending that, to assuage anger,
one should apologize and express remorse and, by implication, ask for-
giveness of the person who has been offended. But, in fact, the situation
is not so clear. For he goes on to offer as evidence of the effectiveness of
such an approach the treatment of slaves who have aroused the ire of their
masters: “We rather punish those who talk back and deny what they have
done, but we leave off being angry at those who confess that they are being
justly punished” (1380a17–19). Aristotle explains that, by denying what is
obvious, the slave seems to be acting shamelessly, and shamelessness in turn
resembles contempt – which Aristotle identiies as one of the major stimuli
to anger, because contempt is nothing other than a kind of belittlement.
So too, Aristotle says, we give over anger toward those who adopt a humble
attitude (tapeinoumenoi), since this is a sign that they are beneath us and so
fear us, and “no one belittles a person he fears” (1380a24). In the same
way, we tend to relax our anger against those who beg and plead, since in
doing so they humble themselves. Clearly, Aristotle is not so much inter-
ested in the sincere expression of regret or remorse, which might elicit
forgiveness, as he is in the demonstration that any hint of insult was unin-
tentional, because, by abasing yourself, you openly exhibit your recognition
of the other person’s superiority – and this is just the opposite of a slight.

2
For a fuller discussion of this chapter in Aristotle, see Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient
Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006),
pp. 77–90. All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
 Assuaging Rage 19

Furthermore, Aristotle notes that it is not just humility that allays anger: a
show of strength can do so as well. “It is impossible,” as Aristotle puts it, “to
be afraid and be angry at the same time” (1380a 33–34). That is the way to
treat anger on the part of a slave, for example, should a slave ever presume
to feel or show such a proud sentiment.
Aristotle’s analysis of the appeasement of anger is, as we see, focused
entirely on relations of status and power, which is in accord with his concep-
tion of anger as a consequence exclusively of a slight or diminishment. His
analysis thus has little to do with forgiving an admitted wrong, and indeed
he makes no mention here of pardon or sungnōmē. This is not surprising,
given that, in the Rhetoric (1.6, 1358b32–33), Aristotle asserts that a litigant
in court “would never concede that he has done wrong, for if he did, there
would be no need for a trial” – nor for forgiveness. In the Nicomachean
Ethics, Aristotle notes that sungnōmē is appropriate when people act either
under external compulsion, which includes conditions beyond the strength
of any human being to resist (1110a24–26), or in excusable ignorance of
the facts or circumstances (1109b18–1111a2). Both these cases fall under
the category of involuntary acts (1109b30–32) and so do not involve guilt
or exoneration. In a similar way, Aristotle later observes that we are more
inclined to pardon people who surrender to desires that are natural and
common to all (1149b4–6), since they are presumably irresistible.3
Later rhetoricians too held that sungnōmē was owed to those who had
acted involuntarily, whether through ignorance or compulsion (the lat-
ter could include the inluence of powerful emotions or even drunken-
ness). As Malcolm Heath observes, in his translation with commentary of
Hermogenes’ treatise On Issues, sungnōmē comes under the category in
which “an acknowledged prima facie wrong is excused as due to factors out-
side the defendant’s control, and not capable of being brought to account
(or, according to some, due to internal factors outside the defendant’s con-
trol, such as emotion).”4 When pleading for sungnōmē, the object was not
to diminish or extenuate responsibility for a crime but to seek complete
exoneration by virtue of something equivalent to what jurists call “force
majeure” or, in Latin, vis maior.5 It is true that the deed is conceded, as is the
deinition of the act as a wrong; but responsibility is wholly denied.6

3
Cf. Roochnik, “Aristotle’s Account of the Vicious: A Forgivable Inconsistency,” History of
Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2007): 207–20.
4
Heath, Hermogenes On Issues: Strategies of Argument in Later Greek Rhetoricians (Oxford:
Clarendon Press,1995), p. 256, in the glossary.
5
On this concept in Roman law, see Molnár, “Die Ausgestaltung des Begriffes der vis maior im
römischen Recht,” Iura: Rivista Internazionale di Diritto Romano e Antico 32 (1981): 73–105,
and Pirovano, Le Interpretationes vergilianae di Tiberio Claudio Donato: Problemi di retorica
(Rome: Herder, 2006), pp. 129–41.
6
The exception is the special case of Latin deprecatio, where one has no recourse but to admit
guilt; see Cicero, On Invention 1.15, 1.46, 2.94. But Cicero afirms (2.104) that the use of
deprecatio “can scarcely be approved in trials, since if the crime is conceded it is hard to ask
20 David Konstan

Today, the idea of forgiveness is understood to entail the voluntary sur-

render of anger and the desire for retribution precisely when anger is
deserved: we do not forgive but rather excuse involuntary acts. Thus, the
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary gives as the deinition of the verb “forgive”:
“to give up resentment of or claim to requital,” and “to cease to feel resent-
ment against (an offender)” (I leave aside the special sense of remission of
debts).7 As Vladimir Jankélévitch writes in his book entitled Forgiveness, “the
scandal of forgiveness and the folly of love have it in common that their
object is someone that does not ‘merit’ it.”8 In an article entitled “Plato and
Forgiveness,” Charles Griswold observes: “To forgive someone . . . assumes
their responsibility for the wrongdoing. Indeed, part of what makes for-
giveness so interesting is that it represents a change in the moral relation
between wrongdoer and wronged that accepts the fact that wrong was
indeed done, and done (in some sense) voluntarily.”9 Griswold goes on to
state, “To forgive is to forswear not only revenge, but also anger (either by
giving up anger or by putting oneself on the road to giving up warranted
anger).”10 For Aristotle, however, anger is by deinition the desire to avenge
an insult (Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a31–33), and it is not assuaged until the dam-
age to one’s status or reputation (doxa) is repaired: for this is just what
revenge (timōria) aims to accomplish. The slave who admits that he did
wrong, in Aristotle’s example, is not altering the moral relation between
himself and his master: he is simply demonstrating a proper respect for the
master’s superior status.
There were, of course, other philosophical schools in classical antiquity,
but none seems to have taken much of an interest in forgiveness. Griswold,
in the previously cited article, remarks that “Plato never sees it as a virtue or
commendable quality – certainly not one of any signiicance.”11 The reason
for Plato’s neglect, according to Griswold, is that a good person is invul-
nerable to harm and so has nothing to forgive; and because he will himself
not hurt others voluntarily, neither will he be in need of forgiveness. The
Stoics, in turn, regarded anger, like other passions, as unbecoming to a sage
(Chrysippus deined orgē as “the desire to take vengeance against one who
is believed to have committed a wrong contrary to one’s deserts”; SVF 3.395
= Stobaeus 2.91.10). A wise man will disdain a slight on the part of a fool, as

the person who is supposed to be the punisher of crimes to grant pardon [ut ignoscat]”; thus
even here, one does everything possible to avoid accepting responsibility for one’s offense.
7
The dictionary is available at http://www.merriam-webster.com. Of course, the word “for-
giveness” has a broad penumbra of meanings (see Adam Morton’s chapter in this volume);
but my concern in this chapter is to argue that one sense of the term, often taken as central
in modern discussions, did not play a role in classical Greek and Roman moral thought.
8
Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Kelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 94.
9
Griswold, “Plato and Forgiveness,” Ancient Philosophy 27 (2007), p. 275; see also Griswold,
Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
10
Griswold, “Plato and Forgiveness,” p. 276.
11
Ibid., p. 279.
 Assuaging Rage 21

the Stoics called those who fell short of virtue. But this does not mean that
he will be inclined to forgiveness, for that would be to ignore the claims of
justice – in effect, to condone the crime. Seneca, in his treatise on clem-
ency, asks: “Why will a wise person not forgive [ignoscet]?” And he explains,
“Pardon [venia] is the remission of a deserved penalty.” But the wise man
acts according to what is due, and so he will not remit the penalty for an
intentional wrong (De Clementia 2.7.1). Seneca does allow that a sage will
spare (parcet) an offender and try to improve him (corriget); thus, “he will
act as though he forgave, but he will not forgive, since he who forgives con-
fesses that he has failed to do something that should be done” (2.7.2).
Musonius Rufus, a Stoicizing philosopher who was a contemporary of
Seneca’s, sees as proper to a philosopher a mild and humane temper, and
a disposition to pardon any offenses against himself (hōste sungnōmēs axious
ei tis plēmmelēseien eis auton, 10) rather than go to trial. For although by doing
so he may seem to be defending himself, in truth he betrays his own incon-
sistency, since the philosopher claims that “a good man cannot be wronged
by a bad man, and yet he brings charges as if he believed that he, though
a good man, were being wronged by people who are wicked” (ibid.). The
Socratic premise of the argument obviates the need for forgiveness.
What happens when one forgives an acknowledged wrong? Are the Stoics
right that forgiveness is incompatible with justice? To escape the paradox,
modern accounts of forgiveness generally seek to specify the conditions
under which it is reasonable or appropriate to absolve an offender. Thus,
Alice MacLachlan, in her doctoral dissertation entitled “The Nature and
Limits of Forgiveness,” afirms: “We forgive for reasons, and these reasons
are subject to moral evaluation; there are better and worse reasons to for-
give”; but this does not mean that “what was done is no longer wrongful.”12
Charles Griswold too states that “forgiveness responds to reasons. . . . It
is, as we say, earned, or due; and those reasons have to do with (among
other things) steps taken by the offender, and the nature of the injury
done. Forgiving cannot be forgetting, or ‘getting over’ anger by any means
whatever.”13 Very well, but what are the conditions that warrant forgiveness,
and how does forgiveness respond to them? Most generally, the process of
forgiveness – for it is best conceived as a process – involves the following
stages. First, there must be honest remorse on the part of the wrongdoer or
offender; this may be expressed, for example, as an apology. Second, there
must evidence of repentance, that is, not just regret but the intention to
change or reform; in recognizing that what he did was wrong, the offender
achieves a new moral insight and character. As Anthony Bash, in his recent
book, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics, observes: “Some say that there should

12
MacLachlan, “The Nature and Limits of Forgiveness” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2008),
pp. 16, 18.
13
Griswold, “Plato and Forgiveness,” p. 276.
22 David Konstan

be no forgiveness until the wrongdoer acknowledges and regrets the

wrong. . . . Others go so far as to say that forgiveness without repentance is
morally irresponsible because it leaves the wrongdoer free not to accept
that the action was wrong and so free to repeat the wrongdoing.”14 Third,
there is required a corresponding change of heart in the forgiver – as Alice
MacLachlan notes, “The idea of forgiveness as a change of heart is the
image most commonly alluded to by contemporary philosophers writing on
the subject.”15 The result is that the forgiver does not excuse or forget the
injury but sees it as something pertaining to a past that no longer holds sway
over the present. Thus, following an idea developed by Hannah Arendt (in
The Human Condition), MacLachlan concludes that “forgiveness ‘undoes’ or
transforms the wrong.”16
Consistent with their lack of interest in forgiveness as a virtue, the classical
philosophers – and, indeed, classical writers generally – seem to have had
little interest in the themes of remorse or repentance. In his recent book on
the Roman emotions, Robert Kaster explains that one of the characteristics
of remorse is “a seeking of forgiveness, as a prelude to reintegration in a
community,” and he concludes, after a thorough study of Latin paenitentia
and related words, that Tertullian was right to deny that true remorse – that
is, “a change of heart that leads one to seek purgation and forgiveness” –
was known to pre-Christian Romans.17 David Winston likewise afirms that
“Greek philosophy generally had little interest in the feelings of regret or
remorse that may at times lead an individual to a fundamental reassess-
ment of his former life path,”18 in contrast to the Jewish tradition, in which
repentance played a fundamental role. Philo of Alexandria, for example,
devoted a section of his treatise On Virtues (175–86) precisely to the sen-
timent of metanoia (a “change of mind,” or “regret”). And yet, as I have
argued elsewhere,19 even Philo, cognizant as he was of the classical Greek
philosophical tradition, assigns a secondary status to metanoia as a virtue,
precisely because it depends on a prior error; just as health is the greatest
good for the body, and recovery next best, so too repentance “is not ranked
in the irst and highest class of goods, but as winning second prize in the
next class” (On Virtues, 176). Contrast the fully developed conception of
repentance as moral transformation in the treatise “On Repentance” by
Moses Maimonides: “What is repentance? It is that the sinner shall desert

14
Bash, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 63.
15
MacLachlan, “The Nature and Limits of Forgiveness,” p. 57.
16
Ibid., p. 40.
17
Kaster, Emotion, Restraint and Community in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), pp. 80, 81.
18
Winston, “Judaism and Hellenism: Hidden Tensions in Philo’s Thought,” Studia Philonica
Annual 2 (1990), p. 4.
19
Konstan, “Philo’s De virtutibus in the Perspective of Classical Greek Philosophy,” Studia
Philonica Annual 18 (2006): 59–72.
 Assuaging Rage 23

his wrong doing, remove it from his thoughts and determine in his heart
not to do it again.”20 Maimonides insists that “the penitent should cry con-
tinually before the Lord with tears and supplications and isolate himself
completely from the sin he has committed”; and he goes so far as to suggest
that “he may change his name as if to say ‘I am another person, not the
man who did those things. . . .’ He may leave his home because exile atones
for evil as it leads to humility and a lowly spirit.”21 Maimonides is clearly
imagining a thoroughgoing transformation in the character of the wrong-
doer, to the point of a change of identity. To be sure, he recommends a
posture of humility and self-abasement; but the purpose is not to enhance
the status of the injured party but to enable the penitent to achieve a new
self. Correspondingly there must be a transformation or conversion in the
heart of the forgiver: “A man is forbidden to be cruel and must be concili-
atory; he should be easily appeased, and hard to make angry and, when a
wrongdoer begs his forgiveness, he ought to forgive with a whole heart and
willing spirit.”22
Much of the language here is reminiscent of Christian attitudes toward
penitence and forgiveness, and one may recognize in the background the
biblical conception of sinful humanity and a merciful God who forgives
us despite our weaknesses and errors, provided that we turn to Him –
“convert” in the literal sense of the term – with our entire mind and heart.
This conception has even been enshrined in modern law, at least until quite
recently. I quote from the Código Penal of Spain (Decreto 14 septiembre
1973): “Extenuation due to repentance, which has a religious and moral
dimension, subjectively requires the manifestation of an ethical-psychologi-
cal state of soul in the offender that changes his perverse criminal will for a
‘sound’ one, as a result of an act of inner personal contrition deriving from
a felt grief and regret and from his self-condemnation.” The article speci-
ies further that “repentance . . . demands grief or regret of a moral nature,
similar to the contrition of Christian theologians, along with self-condem-
nation.” The attenuation of guilt that such repentance enables seems to
unite pardon in the judicial sense with a personal kind of forgiveness that
looks to an inner change of character in the offender.
The new “Ley orgánica 10/1995, de 23 de noviembre, del código penal”
represents a reaction against the religious conception of repentance, and the
attendant notion of forgiveness, in the older code. Thus, we read concern-
ing confession: “One must be truthful in the sense that one must recount
sincerely all that has happened in so far as he is aware, without conceal-
ing anything of importance and without adding false information so as to

20
Cited according to Russell and Weinberg, trans., The Book of Knowledge: From the Mishneh
Torah of Maimonides (New York: Ktav, 1983), sec. 2.2, p. 111.
21
Ibid., sec. 4, p. 112.
22
Ibid., sec. 10, p. 113.
24 David Konstan

exculpate oneself or others.” The new code further explains: “Extenuation

on the basis of spontaneous repentance has, beginning with the 1995
reform of the Penal Code, a markedly objective character, inasmuch as it
attends exclusively to the fact of whether – within the conditions of the law –
the relevant behavior favoring the administration of justice is realized . . .
thereby replacing the moral grounds represented by the demand for an
urge to spontaneous repentance with a more objective criterion.”23
Outside of Spain, this anxiety over the implications of confession, as
enshrined in medieval law, found expression still earlier. Annalise Acorn
cites the Baron de Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1752):
It is one abuse of this tribunal [Courts of Human Justice] that, of two persons
accused of the same crime, he who denies is condemned to die; and he who con-
fesses avoids the punishment. This has its source in monastic ideas, where he who
denies seems in a state of impenitence and damnation; and he who confesses,
in a state of repentance and salvation. But a distinction of this kind can have no
relation to human tribunals. Human justice, which sees only the actions, has but
one compact with men, namely, that of innocence; divine justice, which sees the
thoughts, has two, that of innocence and repentance.24

But is it true that the Greeks and Romans of the pre-Christian era had no
comparable concept of forgiveness and moral transformation, and sup-
posed that the appeasement of anger and the relinquishing of revenge were
solely a matter of restoring the dignity of the injured party, if one assumes
that a wise man could indeed be harmed? Did remorse and repentance play
no signiicant role in the process of reconciliation between enemies? And,
if not, did the Greeks and Romans have some moral equivalent to forgive-
ness in their vocabulary and ethical system?
To approach an answer to these questions, let us turn to some texts – not
philosophical, now, but literary – where we can perhaps see forgiveness at
work. The Iliad provides a classic case of the renunciation of anger, when
Achilles gives over his wrath against Agamemnon and rejoins the battle to
avenge the death of his friend Patroclus. Does he forgive Agamemnon?
Many modern critics have thought that he does not. The time for forgive-
ness, had Achilles been so disposed, was when Agamemnon offered him
countless gifts, via the embassy of Odysseus, Ajax, and Phoenix. But at that
time Achilles rejected the offer of reconciliation, still angry at the way that
Agamemnon had insulted him before the rest of the Achaeans. Some have

23
I am grateful to Luis Francisco Nieto Guzmán de Lázaro for having called my attention to
these texts.
24
Book 26, “Of Laws in Relation to the Order of Things Which They Determine,” chap. 12,
“That Human Courts of Justice Should Not Be Regulated by the Maxims of Those Tribunals
Which Relate to the Other Life, Continued,” available at http://www.constitution.org/
cm/sol.htm. Cf. Acorn, “‘Sumimasen, I’m Sorry’: Apology in Dispute Resolution in North
America and Japan,” Aichigakuin Law Review 48 (2007): 131–61.
 Assuaging Rage 25

supposed that Agamemnon’s offer was something like a buyout, an effort to

purchase Achilles’ favor without a proper apology or recognition of his own
guilt, with appropriate gestures of remorse and repentance. They ind sup-
port for this interpretation irst in Agamemnon’s insistence that Achilles
defer to his superior status (9.160–61): “Let him yield to me to the degree
that I am more kingly [basileuteros] and claim to be greater in lineage,”
words that Odysseus discreetly suppresses when he repeats Agamemnon’s
message. Second, scholars cite Achilles’ curt remark that “he is as hate-
ful to me as the gates of Hades who hides one thing in his mind but says
another” (9.312–13), as though Achilles intuited the real attitude of
Agamemnon (compare his sarcastic suggestion that some other Achaean
wed Agamemnon’s daughter – one who is “kinglier” than he; 9.391–92),
although these words may simply be Achilles’ way of preparing his friends
for his own forthright rejection of their plea. Achilles, on this reading,
refuses to forgive the wrong done to him, because the proper conditions
for granting forgiveness have not been met. When he inally does become
reconciled with Agamemnon, it will be because a more powerful emotion –
his grief at the loss of Patroclus – has driven out his resentment at the insult
he suffered, and the question of forgiveness has become moot.25 But we
may also read Achilles’ response as simply revealing the depth of his morti-
ication for the way he was humiliated by Agamemnon, which will take him
more time to overcome. While it is true that he rejoins the Achaean army to
avenge Patroclus, he is also ready now to be reconciled with Agamemnon.
In any case, it seems forced to interpret Achilles’ reaction in terms of
values, such as remorse and forgiveness, which are not foregrounded in the
poem itself.26
The Odyssey is hardly the place to look for the forswearing of revenge, but
there is one episode that might suggest that forgiveness has occurred: I am
thinking of the domestic tranquillity that appears to reign in the palace of
Menelaus, who seems to have given over whatever rancor he may have enter-
tained over Helen’s elopement with Paris. It is impossible to know whether
their reconciliation is based on sincere repentance on her part or a change
of heart on his. In the Iliad, Menelaus and the other Greeks seem to regard
Helen as a possession to be recovered rather than as an errant wife deserv-
ing punishment; back in Sparta, her promptness to serve her husband and
his guests a draft of nepenthe to dull their sorrows (4.219–32) suggests that

25
Compare the interpretation of the scholiast [bT] ad Il. 18.112–13: “Of the two emotions
besetting Achilles’ soul, anger [orgē] and grief [lupē], one wins out. . . . For the emotion
involving Patroclus is strongest of all, and so it is necessary to abandon his wrath [mēnis] and
avenge himself on his enemies.”
26
For a fuller discussion of this passage and others relating to the appeasement of anger, see
Konstan, Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), pp. 59–66.
26 David Konstan

the couple have agreed to forget the past. As Griswold observes, however,
“forgiving cannot be forgetting.”27
Nor is there much forgiving in evidence in tragedy. This is not the place
to do a survey of uses of the term sungnōmē, which in any case would not be
terribly revealing, since it embraces a wide range of meanings, including
sympathy, mutual understanding, and judicial pardon, among which it is
not easy to distinguish the sense of forgiveness.28 In those plays in which
the reconciliation of antagonistic parties is represented, such as Aeschylus’s
Eumenides or Sophocles’ Philoctetes, forgiveness does not seem to be at
issue: no one admits to guilt or offers an apology; there are no gestures of
remorse, no sign of a change of heart toward the offender. Odysseus’s sense
of pity toward the mad Ajax in Sophocles’ drama induces him to overlook
Ajax’s attempt to kill him and the other Achaean leaders and to challenge
vigorously the determination of Agamemnon and Menelaus to deny him
a proper burial. Of course, since Ajax is dead, there is no question of an
apology for what he planned, nor was there any sign of remorse on his part
while he was still alive. Odysseus bases his argument on the laws of the gods
and the duty to respect a noble warrior in death (1343–45), thereby side-
stepping the matter of Ajax’s wrongful act, or attempted act.
The genre in which forgiveness, or something like forgiveness, plays
the greatest role is New Comedy. Although it offers many examples, I
consider here Menander’s Samia, which is particularly rich in scenes of
reconciliation.29 To remind the reader of the plot: two Athenian men,
Demeas and Niceratus, have been traveling abroad. In their absence,
Demeas’s adopted son, Moschion, has raped the daughter of Niceratus, as
a result of which she became pregnant and gave birth to a child. In fear of
their parents’ reaction, they conspire with Chrysis, Demeas’s concubine, to
pretend that the baby is hers and that Demeas is its father. This too poses a
problem: she is not only a concubine but a foreigner – from Samos, as the
title indicates – and Demeas has no reason to wish to raise a child of hers.
Nevertheless, Chrysis rightly predicts that he will get over it, since he is in
love with her, and “this quickly leads even the most anger-prone person to
reconciliation” (touto d’eis diallagas agei takhista kai orgilōtaton, 82–83). When
he inds out what has happened, Demeas is indeed furious: “It seems that,
unbenownst to me, I have a lawfully wedded hetaira [gametēn hetairan]”

27
Griswold, “Plato and Forgiveness,” p. 276.
28
For a detailed survey of the uses of sungnōmē, see Metzler, Der griechische Begriff des Verzeihens:
Untersucht am Wortstamm συγγνώμη von den ersten Belegen bis zum vierten Jahrhundert n. Chr.
(Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1991). More compact and illuminating in the pre-
sent context is the chapter by Kathryn Gutzwiller in this volume; see also Konstan, Before
Forgiveness.
29
See Gutzwiller in this volume for further discussion; Gutzwiller is more inclined than I to see
forgiveness at work in Menander’s comedies. For an analysis of other Menandrean come-
dies, see also Konstan, Before Forgiveness.
 Assuaging Rage 27

(130–31). He declares that he is not one to raise a bastard son (nothos,

136) for someone else and is prepared to cast Chrysis out of the house.
Moschion, however, objects, questioning “which of us is a bastard, by the
gods, and which legitimate, given that we are born human” (137–38). The
following bit is mutilated, and so we cannot tell what further arguments
the boy may have offered, but Demeas is ultimately persuaded to relent.
What explains his calming down?
Chrysis’s offense, in Demeas’s view, consists in having nursed the infant
rather than exposing it. In so doing, she behaved as if she and Demeas were
social equals – husband and wife instead of Athenian citizen and foreign
concubine – and as if she had the right to decide the baby’s fate. This is in
effect to demean Demeas – hence, his rage. Two factors, in turn, work to
mollify him. First, there is his love for Chrysis, which, as Chrysis predicts,
softens him. As Aristotle remarks in the Rhetoric, “We do not render judg-
ments in the same way when we are in pain or rejoicing, or when we love or
hate” (1356a15–16). Second, there is Moschion’s argument that the child
is as good as legitimate; hence, Chrysis’s behavior – and, by implication,
her own status – are less inappropriate than they seemed. This is a radical
claim, because it undermines one of the fundamental social distinctions
in classical Athens, that between citizen and noncitizen, and Demeas is
understandably amazed at it. Still, he gives in. Has he forgiven Chrysis? It
is hard to say. If he accepts Moschion’s argument, then he has changed his
mind about the nature of the offense, and no wrong was done. More likely,
he is conciliating his beloved stepson and his mistress and simply swallows
his irritation.
However, a greater shock is in store for Demeas. For when he acciden-
tally overhears his old nurse say that the real father of the child is Moschion,
he concludes that Moschion had an affair with Chrysis during his absence.
At irst, he explores the possibility that he may be leaping to a mistaken con-
clusion – a good Aristotelian strategy for allaying anger. Addressing himself
to members of the audience as if they were judges, he declares: “I am not
yet upset. For I know the boy, by the gods, and he has always been well
behaved until now and as respectful as possible toward me” (271–74). Yet
the evidence of what he has heard seems indisputable, and he ends up
beside himself with rage (exestēch’ holōs, 279). Nevertheless, he still seeks
ways of exonerating his son: “Why are you shouting, you fool? Control your-
self, bear up. Moschion has not wronged you” (327–28). He reasons that
Moschion did not act deliberately, since in that case he would have opposed
the idea of marrying Niceratus’s daughter; but, in fact, he consented at once,
when Demeas proposed the idea to him. Moschion, he adds, was doubtless
drunk and not in control of himself (ouk ont’ en heautou, 340) when Chrysis
seduced him; besides, he is still young – another mitigating factor in regard
to anger. Demeas repeats that it is not at all plausible (pithanon, 343) that a
youth who was always well behaved and modest should treat his own father
28 David Konstan

badly, “even if he was ten-times-over adopted, and not my own son by birth:
for I look not to this, but to his character [tropos]” (346–47). Demeas is
here applying something like the logic that Moschion employed to per-
suade him to condone Chrysis’s decision to keep the child. Unfortunately,
it works to opposite effect. Having convinced himself of Moschion’s inno-
cence, Demeas turns violently against Chrysis: it is she who is “responsible
for what happened” (338). “You must be a man,” he admonishes himself:
“forget your desire [pothos], stop being in love” (349–50). He resolves to
expel Chrysis from his house, while keeping the real cause concealed for
his son’s sake, pretending that the reason is her presumptuousness in rais-
ing the child (374–75).
In pacifying his anger toward his son, Demeas convinces himself of the
boy’s innocence: a young man is easy prey for an experienced courtesan,
and to resist her charms would be, as Aristotle puts it, beyond the powers of
a human being (NE 1110a25). Demeas, then, does not so much forgive as
exonerate Moschion in this episode, precisely as Aristotle and the rhetori-
cians such as Hermogenes, Cicero, and Quintilian advised.
But Demeas’s problems are not over. When Moschion, unaware of
Demeas’s suspicions, pleads vigorously in behalf of Chrysis, Demeas con-
cludes that he is joining Chrysis in wronging him (sunadikei, 456). Hence, he
must have been a willing partner in the affair. Moschion, aware of Demeas’s
growing agitation, declares that “it is not right to give everything over to
anger,” to which Niceratus adds: “He’s right” (462–63). Bursting with rage
(475), Demeas inally blurts out that he knows the child is Moschion’s.
But Moschion, supposing that Demeas knows the whole truth, declares
that what he did is nothing terrible – tens of thousands have done likewise
(485–87). Finally, he catches on to his father’s error (522) and reveals that
the mother is Niceratus’s daughter. With this, Demeas’s anger against his
son and Chrysis evanesces, since he realizes that both are innocent of any
offense against him.
Now it is Niceratus’s turn to be furious. When Demeas tries to protect
the infant, the two old men almost come to blows, as Niceratus concludes
that Demeas has wronged him and was in on the scheme from the begin-
ning (582–84). This is untrue, of course, but there is no way of denying
that Moschion was at fault. The only way to appease Niceratus’s rage is for
Moschion to marry the girl (586, 599), and this indeed sets matters right.30
Forgiveness is beside the point.
We come now to the inal act – and a further surprise. Moschion is
furious, now that he has relected on the matter (cf. logismos, 620), that his
father suspected him of sleeping with Chrysis (620–21). Only his passion

30
Cf. the approving comment of Diogenianus in Plutarch’s Quaestiones convivales 712C: “In all
his [i.e., Menander’s] plays there is no passionate love for a male youth, and the violation of
virgins ends up decently in marriage.”
 Assuaging Rage 29

(erōs) for Niceratus’s daughter, he says, prevents him from leaving Athens
for good and entering military service in remotest Bactria: once again, love
serves to inhibit anger and revenge. Nevertheless, he desires some ven-
geance, if only in words, and so he pretends that he is off to the wars: this
way he can give his father a fright (phobēsai, 635), so that he will hesitate to
treat him unfairly (agnōmonein, 637) in the future. When Demeas appears,
he neither begs Moschion to stay nor dismisses him angrily (as Moschion
had feared, 682–84). Rather, he acknowledges that Moschion has reason to
be angry and hurt at having been wrongly accused (694–96), but he goes
on to call Moschion’s attention to the circumstances of the case (all’ ekein’
homōs theōrei, 697). Here, then, is something new: Demeas frankly admits
that he was in the wrong. Is he appealing for forgiveness? Let us take a
closer look at his arguments.
Demeas irst reminds Moschion that he is his father and that he reared
him from childhood: since Demeas gave him all that was pleasant in his
life, Moschion should also put up with something painful. This is a plea for
fairness, not a denial of guilt, and Demeas again latly confesses: “I accused
you unjustly: I was deluded, wrong, out of my mind” (702–3). Demeas next
points out that, even when he believed the worst of Moschion, he kept it
to himself, whereas Moschion is making his father’s mistake public; thus,
Moschion’s response is immoderate. Demeas does not challenge his rea-
son for being angry, only his readiness to advertise a family quarrel to their
enemies. Finally, Demeas urges Moschion not to dwell on the memory of a
single day and forget all the rest. With this, he ends his apology, concluding
that a son should obey his father willingly, not reluctantly.
Demeas clearly confesses his error. However, he alleges extenuating
circumstances and points out that his reaction was moderate – unlike
Moschion’s now. Finally, he makes a claim to ilial respect, which is the
more compelling in that Demeas had always treated his adopted son gen-
erously. Doubtless, Demeas regrets his behavior; but does he repent of it?
And does Moschion in turn experience a change of heart? It is impossible
to evaluate the effect of his arguments on Moschion, because at this point
Niceratus appears, furious that Moschion is about to make off and abandon
the girl he got with child. Harry Sandbach explains the action as follows:
Demeas’ speech puts Moschion in a dificult position. There is no answer to the
accusations that he has allowed one incident to outweigh many years’ good treat-
ment, and that he has been ready to injure his father’s reputation, while his father
had done all he could to preserve that of his son. Reason requires that he should
abandon his dramatic pose and apologize. But this is a thing that Moschion, like
many young men, would ind very hard. He is saved by the sudden appearance of
Nikeratos, which relieves him from the necessity of an immediate reply.31

31
Gomme and Sandbach, eds., Menander: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973), p. 628 ad vv. 713ff.
30 David Konstan

As Sandbach reads the scene, Demeas has in effect turned the tables
on Moschion and put him in the position of the wrongdoer; thus, it is
Moschion, rather than Demeas, who should be apologizing and asking his
father to forgive him. If this is right, then Demeas has pulled a neat trick,
defending himself by exposing a greater fault on the part of his son. In
any case, Demeas inally convinces Niceratus that Moschion is indeed pre-
pared to marry his daughter and asks him to bring out the bride. With
this, Moschion says, rather impertinently: “If you’d done this right away,
you wouldn’t have had the bother of playing the philosopher just now”
(724–25). We are reminded of his earlier claim that his real motive for not
leaving home is his passion for Niceratus’s daughter, not consideration for
his own father.
Does Moschion realize that he was wrong to be so angry with his father?
Sandbach’s view that it is he who ought to apologize is not entirely satisfac-
tory, since Demeas has admitted that he was at fault: his earlier accusation
can be seen as a slight against Moschion’s character, which Moschion had
reason to resent. If Moschion does come to take a different view of his
father’s behavior, and so give up his anger, I imagine it is because Demeas,
in confessing that he was at fault, has humbled himself, and this, as Aristotle
points out, is an effective means of reducing ire. Though he insists on ilial
piety, he nevertheless treats his son as an equal, recognizing that he has as
much right to be angry when insulted as he, Demeas, has. By demanding
this show of respect, moreover, Moschion demonstrates that he is now a
man, ready to assume the responsibilities of a married head of household –
it is this, indeed, that makes sense of the addition of the inal act, which
otherwise has the appearance of an arbitrary coda to the principal action
of the play. The Samia concludes with a satisfying reconciliation between
father and son, but the appeasement of anger continues to rest upon a
proper regard for status and authority. As a moral basis for the giving over
of anger, it works. But it is different, I believe, from the modern paradigm
of remorse, repentance, and forgiveness.32

32
For a somewhat different interpretation of this scene, see Gutzwiller in this volume.
 3

Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone

Forgiveness in Homer and Beyond

Page duBois

In the streets of Athens today, in the crowds climbing the hill of the
Akropolis to the Parthenon or riding the bus or subway, the polite remark
to be made, equivalent to the American “excuse me,” or the English
“sorry,” is sungnōmē, translatable as “pardon [me],” or, more formally,
“forgive me.” The banal, automatic utterance, ever more necessary as the
city draws more and more Greeks from their villages into the city, has
undergone centuries of mutation and transmission from the language of
antiquity. Does it really mean “forgive me,” today, in the sense in which
Charles Griswold uses the term in his important work on the topic?1 And
can we ind his virtue of forgiveness in the works attributed to Homer, in
the earliest Greek poetry?
I am concerned in this chapter with the intertwined issues of empathy
and forgiveness. As a heuristic device, I want to argue that forgiveness does
not occur in Homer’s Iliad, not even in the encounter between Achilles
and Priam in book 24; my most challenging assertion is that the archaic
Greek world did not know empathy or forgiveness. I take into account the
important work on pity by David Konstan, as well as Griswold’s recent book
on forgiveness.2
Questions to be considered include: Does Priam forgive Achilles for the
killing of Hektor? Does Achilles forgive Priam for fathering a son, Hektor,
who killed his beloved Patroklos? Does the offer to consume a meal together
provide a de facto model of mutual forgiveness? Or do we need to distin-
guish more rigorously between a scene of tolerance or reconciliation and
one of true forgiveness, which is evident in later texts but not in this early,
painful, hauntingly beautiful scene of a potentially murderous encounter
that leads to generosity and a funeral?

1
Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
2
Konstan, Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth, 2001).

31
32 Page duBois

I also consider a moment in Sophocles’ Antigone and a speech that con-

tains the word sungignōskō (982–83), often translated as “forgive.” Hegel’s
discussion of Sophocles’ tragedy is the basis for Judith Butler’s important
work on the igure of Antigone, but she too it seems is drawn to interpreting
Antigone’s unbending stance as implicating “forgiveness.”3 I would argue
that here, as well as in Homer’s Iliad, the inding of forgiveness and the
translation of the Greek as “forgiveness,” are mistaken and lead the reader
astray, to anachronism and the imposition of a false emotional landscape
on archaic and classical texts.
For Griswold, forgiveness is not an emotion, a “pathos” in the ancient
Greek sense used by Aristotle to describe such experiences as anger and
pity. A central theme in his work is “forgiveness understood as a moral rela-
tion between two individuals, one of whom has wronged the other, and
who (at least in the ideal) are capable of communicating with each other.”
His concept of forgiveness is not a private, subjective one but rather one of
“reciprocity between injurer and injured.”4 He maps out a complex land-
scape of interaction between the forgiver and the forgiven, in which “the
two parties establish a moral relationship and . . . intertwine their narratives.
Both commit to change – the one to reform her ways, the other to for-
swear resentment.”5 And he argues that such a notion, sometimes called a
“virtue,” is dificult to locate in the ancient philosophers, Plato, the Stoics,
and Epicureans in particular, who have a “perfectionist” view; that is, they
value the “perfected” person, who needs neither to receive forgiveness
from others nor to offer it to others, standing as that person does “outside
the circle of sympathy.”6 Believing that forgiveness takes place in radically
different human circumstances, Griswold assumes a background of exist-
ence as “temporal and mortal, embodied, emotive, and interdependent or
social,” recognizing “the pervasiveness of suffering.”7
Although Griswold acknowledges the possibility of the historicity – the
historical quality – of emotions, or even virtues, his interest lies less in tracing
the historical development of the concept of forgiveness than in describing
its ideal form. He mentions in a note that Hannah Arendt claimed that “the
discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus
of Nazareth.”8 This is a claim that is disputed in other essays in this volume.
But Griswold is less concerned with this alleged discovery: “While it is true
that in the Western tradition forgiveness came to prominence in Judaic and

3
See Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2000).
4
Griswold, Forgiveness, p. xvi.
5
Ibid., p. 110.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., p. xv, n. 4. The Arendt citation is from The Human Condition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1958), p. 238.
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 33

Christian thought, I see no reason why we should be bound by its historical

genealogy.”9 As a classicist, I am most interested in this historical genealogy,
and in the possibility that forgiveness was invented rather than discovered,
that it is not a natural, hardwired aspect of human behavior or conscious-
ness but a learned behavior, whether learned in the context of Hellenistic
Athens, among post-Platonic philosophers or the early Jewish followers of
Jesus, or in the European Enlightenment. Does the Homeric text exhibit
signs of the sort of forgiveness beautifully delineated by Griswold?
Some scholars ind it dificult, from the perspective of postmodernity,
not to project our own emotional landscape onto others or to assume a
universality of human feeling. I fear a colonizing of the past and of other
cultures that not only erases their difference from our own but also sug-
gests that there will be no change for the better in human beings. Did not
the Enlightenment argue for the abolition of slavery, for example, on the
basis of a newly developed sense of shared humanity and sympathy for the
oppressed, itself something new in human history?
Does the reciprocity model of forgiveness require a feeling of empathy,
or sympathy, or compassion, that is, the capacity to feel with an other, in
order to ask for forgiveness, in order to grant forgiveness? In his Histories,
Herodotus describes the defeat of the Egyptians by the Persian Cambyses
in the ifth century b.c.e.:
Cambyses, wishing to see what stuff the Egyptian king Psammenitus was made of . . .
forced him . . . to witness from a seat in the city suburbs a spectacle deliberately
devised to humiliate him. First, he had his daughter dressed like a slave and sent
out with a pitcher to fetch water, accompanied by other young girls. . . . The girls
cried bitterly as they passed the place where their fathers sat watching them, and
the fathers, in their turn – all but Psammenitus himself – wept and lamented no less
bitterly at the sight of such an insult to their children. Psammenitus, however, after
a single glance of recognition, bent to the ground in silence. (3.14)10

Cambyses bridles the king’s son, ties a rope around his neck, and marches
him past with two thousand other youths to their execution. Again,
“Psammenitus watched them pass, and knew that his son was going to his
death; but, though the other Egyptians who were sitting near him contin-
ued to weep and to show every sign of distress, he did just what he had
done before at the sight of his daughter.” Finally, an old man who had
been the king’s friend but was now a beggar walked past, begging from the
soldiers. “At the sight of him Psammenitus burst into tears, and called him
by name, and beat his head in distress.” Cambyses sent a messenger to ask
the Egyptian king why he “honored with those signs of grief a beggar not
even related” to him. The king replies, “my own suffering was too great

9
Griswold, Forgiveness, p. xv.
10
Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Selincourt, rev. Burn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
34 Page duBois

for tears, but I could not but weep for the trouble of a friend, who has lost
great wealth and been reduced to beggary on the threshold of old age.”
His answer, recognized as just, wins residence at the court for the king, for
whom “even Cambyses felt a touch of pity.”
Herodotus cites this story with approval and, as is often the case, seems
to be offering a portrait of nobility in his representation of the other, in this
case the Egyptian. This anecdote is told in his third book, in which there
are other stories about fathers and their children, among them the story
of Amasis, who refuses to send his own daughter to the emperor Cyrus,
sending his deposed and murdered predecessor’s daughter instead. In
the same narrative low, the Carian and Greek mercenaries ighting with
the Egyptians take the sons of Phanes, who led the Persians into Egypt,
and cut their throats in the no-man’s land between the two armies, then
mix wine and water with the boys’ blood and drink it. The humiliation of
Psammenitus’s daughter, dressed as a slave, and that of his son, marched to
execution, echo these episodes of Herodotus’s history and complicate the
paternal and ilial relationships of the anecdote. These events, too, belong
to the greater themes of Herodotus’s narratives concerning the rise and
fall of cities. In the prelude to his book, he announces that he will talk
about cities, “many of which were great once but are small today; and those
which were great in my own time used to be small. Knowing, therefore, that
human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention
to both alike” (1.5). The tragic events of Psammenitus’s fall echo this larger
theme; the question of pity arises not with his own destruction, of which his
children are a part, but rather with the sight of an old friend “who has lost
great wealth and been reduced to beggary at the threshold of old age.” In
this intriguing story, is he weeping for his father, recently dead, for himself,
fallen from great heights, or for the loyal retainer, who is dragged down
with him? This is the theme of “the fall”: of cities; of Croesus, another igure
destroyed in his own lifetime; of great men, such as Oedipus, in tragedy;
and of the tyrant city Athens, in the great instability and constant mutability
of history. Can his emotion be interpreted as empathy? In fact, it seems, the
fall of Psammenitus is objectiied, rendered a spectacle for the ruler as he
views this old friend; and the theatrical dimension of the spectacle, the dis-
tancing that allows for the experience of emotion, seems part of the story.
The embeddedness of this tale, its center of gravity that supports the great
thematics of Herodotean history, points not, I would argue, to empathy,
perhaps not even to pity, but rather to a pained recognition of the impossi-
bility of happiness in a world of constant change.
The emotion we might associate with the events described in this story
is empathy. I am especially curious about the politics of empathy and the
ways in which empathy serves to excite action in viewers of the sufferings
of others. And such inquiry brings up the question of the historicity of the
emotions, the passions, the pathē. I am inclined to think that the Greeks did
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 35

not know empathy and that translations effacing the difference between our
language and theirs transfer our emotional landscape backward in time.
Konstan’s Pity Transformed very usefully discusses the wide range of schol-
arship, in many ields, on the question of emotion, nature, and culture, and
he raises a number of points: there is debate concerning the role of cog-
nition in emotion, some scholars arguing, for example, that certain facial
expressions are universally associated with the same emotions and that
emotions therefore have a biological basis; other scholars claim that these
researchers simply “absolutize the English folk-taxonomy of emotions,” and
still others argue for purely conceptual and learned functions for emotion,
emotion as process, a stimulus and response. Although Konstan focuses on
pity, he also discusses “instinctive sympathy or empathy”11 but cites Hume,
Adam Smith, Rousseau, and Schopenhauer – all later thinkers than the
Greeks, his principal object of study – and argues that “the weakness in
relating pity so closely to sympathy (in Hume’s sense of the term) is that
pity does not in fact require that we experience an emotion identical to
that of the pitied.”12 There is a huge bibliography on sympathy that I will
bracket for now; Konstan cites the studies showing that children cry at the
sound of other children crying, for example; is this empathy, feeling for
the other, or sympathy, a contagious reaction to a stimulus? Other scholars,
such as Planalp, produce a developmental scale, with sympathy as its inal
stage: “Whereas empathy is feeling with another person . . . , sympathy [the
higher stage] is feeling about another person’s situation.”13 Some of this
research targets pathological individuals, seen sometimes as criminally dei-
cient in empathy.14
I begin with etymologies, not because I believe they contain some essen-
tial truth about language, a kernel of the irrefutable, but because words
are historical entities, layered, bearing the vestiges of the marks of their
beginnings, covered with traces of their usage in different places and times.
To discover the archaeology of a word is to look for those traces, not to
seek a true deinition but to register its travails. Words can point to the net-
work of concerns of a particular society and can offer insight into practices
and beliefs. They can also conceal and deceive us. In their occurrence in
11
Konstan, Pity Transformed, p. 12.
12
Ibid., p. 13.
13
Planalp, Communicating Emotion: Social, Moral, and Cultural Processes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 66; cited from Konstan, Pity Transformed, p. 15 (emphasis original
to both); “absolutize the English folk-taxonomy of emotions” from Wierzbicka, Emotions
across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), p. 171 (cited by Konstan on his p. 7).
14
Konstan, Pity Transformed. Konstan discusses pity in the Iliad; see pp. 61–62, 78–79, 125–26:
“In the heroic world of Homer’s Iliad, pity is sometimes begged of a conquering warrior,
though it is never granted” (p. 78). Pity comes into play in episodes involving the elderly,
women, and children, rather than fellow warriors (see p. 79). Achilles may soften his anger,
and show pity toward Priam, but this is neither empathy nor forgiveness.
36 Page duBois

different places and times, they can suggest that a shared deinition unites
two distant places and times, that we and another mean the same thing
when we use a word, that something (maybe even human nature) is being
invoked when a powerful word is used.
I began with the etymology of the English word empathy but found that
the word “empathy” is not listed in my copy of 1971 edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary!15 It should fall between “empasm” (perfumed powder to
be sprinkled on the body to restrain sweating or to destroy its smell) and
“em-patron” (patronize), words one would imagine to be relatively more
rare in occurrence. Perhaps empathy is not an emotion or passion found in
British nature. It does occur in the Webster’s New World Dictionary, “from the
Greek empatheia, affection, passion”; it was used early in the twentieth cen-
tury to translate the German coinage Einfühlung [ein in + Fühlung feeling],
and is deined as “1. The projection of one’s own personality into the per-
sonality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in
another’s emotions or feelings 2. The projection of one’s own personality
into an object, with the attribution to the object of one’s own emotions,
responses, etc.”
Linked to empathy are the English words sympathy and compassion.
Compassion: from Late Latin “to suffer together with, feel pity” [from
com together + pati suffer]. Sympathy: from the Late Latin sympathia, itself
derived from the Greek sympatheia, is deined as:
1. a real or supposed afinity between certain things by virtue of which they
are similarly or correspondingly affected by the same inluence, affect or inlu-
ence one another (esp. in an occult way) or attract or tend toward each other
b. Physiol. and Path. A relation between two bodily organs or parts (or between
two persons) such that disorder, or any condition, of the one induces a corre-
sponding condition in the other c. in Comm., “in sympathy with” used in market
reports in reference to a rise or fall in the price of a commodity followed by a
rise of fall in that of another 2. Agreement, accord, harmony, consonance, con-
cord, etc. 3. Conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes
persons agreeable to each other; community of feeling, harmony of disposition
b. The quality or state of being affected by the condition of another with a feel-
ing similar or corresponding to that of the other; the fact or capacity of entering
into or sharing the feelings of another or others; fellow-feeling; also, a feeling or
frame of mind evoked by and responsive to some external inluence c. The qual-
ity or state of being affected by the suffering or sorrow of another; a feeling of
compassion or commiseration.16

All three of these terms, empathy, compassion, and sympathy denote

feelings, emotions. And all three are formed of classical roots, from Greek
and Latin.

15
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
16
Ibid., s.v. “sympathy.”
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 37

But their formation actually conceals a historical difference that I want

to place at the center of my essay. For the classical Greeks – who used words
that look a lot like the English sympathy, compassion, and empathy – did
not, in my view, mean what we mean when we use these words.
Empatheia in Greek is deined in Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon
as “affection” (Galen, second century c.e.); “passion,” with late citations,
such as Ptolemaeus the mathematician, second century c.e., and Hierocles
Platonicus, philosopher, ifth century c.e.; or “partiality,” also late. Empathēs
means “in a state of emotion” (e.g., Aristotle, De Insomniis 460b7). Other
citations come from Plutarch (irst–second century c.e.), who seems to have
liked the word. We are a long way – seven hundred years – from the classical
age of the Greeks, the ifth century b.c.e., the beginnings of tragedy, dem-
ocracy, and philosophy, and even further from the world of Homeric epic.
Sympatheia, “fellow feeling, sympathy,” is used by Aristotle, but not in
reference to persons. The term is used elsewhere concerning the olive in
respect to the grape vine (Geoponica 9.14.1). It can denote corresponding
“affection,” afinity (Epicurus), the afinity, concord of heavenly bodies.
I think we should retain the strangeness of these words, of their sometimes
opaque use in Greek texts, and not project modern meanings and ideas of
human nature onto them, not assume a continuity, similarity, identity with
ancient people. My argument is that there is difference and alterity, that the
Greeks are not identical to us, and that the very historicity of our notions of
empathy and forgiveness makes them fragile things. These notions are not
a part of human nature but accomplishments, rather, of a certain enlight-
enment, which has negative as well as positive aspects.
The Greeks mapped a psychic landscape different from our own, and
what we sometimes value as empathy was in fact articulated by them to be
pity and fear, in a distinction that clariies issues of power, hierarchy, and
self-interest sometimes obscured by the valuation of empathy. Aristotle dis-
cusses the emotions of pity and fear in relation to tragedy in the Poetics:
“Tragedy . . . represents men in action and does not use narrative, and
through pity and fear [di’eleou kai phobou] it effects relief to these and simi-
lar emotions [tēn tōn toioutōn pathēmatōn katharsin]” (1449b).17 This relief
is a purging, producing an absence of pity and fear, or a cleansing of these
feelings. Later, “one should not show worthy men passing from good for-
tune to bad. That does not arouse fear or pity but shocks our feelings”
(1253a). Shock! Is this not the case of Psammenitus observing his friend?
It is rather a case of pity and fear, perhaps sympathy, being affected by the
same stimulus, but not empathy, not a “feeling with” the sufferer. And the
absence of empathy has to do with distance between persons, which is dif-
ferent from a modern sense of proximity established in a world of discrete

17
Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Fyfe, in Aristotle, The Poetics, Longinus, On the Sublime, Demetrius,
On Style (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
38 Page duBois

individual bodies. The Greeks saw some others as nearer than do we, others
as further away. Early in the history of tragedy, the citizens of Athens for-
bade their tragedians to present current events on stage. They had been
too aroused by the tragedy of the city of Miletus, weeping for the Milesians’
oikēia kaka, the intimate, private wrongs of their relations, the enslavement
of women and children (Herodotus 6.21).
What translators often call a “friend” is the word philos in Greek, a word
that means one’s own, one’s relative, one’s dear one, even, by extension,
one’s friend. (Homer uses philos for the possessive pronoun, one’s own
heart.) These are those so close that seeing them suffer creates an experi-
ence of pain for oneself, because distance between the sufferers does not
exist, and this produces fear, fear for oneself. The experience of pity is
produced when one views a more distant sufferer, not oneself, not those so
near to one’s self, one’s philoi, one’s own.
Other scholars might argue that although the words themselves are not
used by the Greeks, we can locate and identify the feeling of empathy in
various moments in classical civilization when others suffer. Slavery is often
at stake in these moments, as it is in Psammenitus’s gaze at his daughter in
slave dress. One could cite the scene in the Iliad in which Hektor imagines
the enslavement of his wife Andromache (6.464–65); various moments in
Euripidean tragedy, where women, such as Hecuba, have just been enslaved;
Plato’s attitude toward slaves, whom he said one must beat in a dispassion-
ate mood (Diogenes Laertius, Life of Plato 3.38).18 But the Greeks do not
seem to empathize with slaves. They may feel pity for someone remote in
time enslaved, an expression of a fear of being enslaved themselves. But this
is not empathy. As Peter Brown writes of late antiquity,
To beat a slave in a it of rage was condemned. This was not because of any very
acute sense that an act of inhumanity against a fellow human being had been com-
mitted, but because the outburst represented a collapse of the harmonious image of
the self of the wellborn man, and had caused him to behave in a manner as uncon-
trolled as a slave.19

Empathy and its sequel forgiveness develop over centuries of human his-
tory, perhaps in some places and not others. These are historic, historical
emotions and interactions. Others in this volume can better than I account
for the development of empathy and forgiveness in the course of human
enlightenment. The moment of confrontation between slave and free

18
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, vol. 1, trans. Hicks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1925). For more on this issue, see duBois, Slaves and Other Objects (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 206–17 (chap. 10: “Irate Greek Masters and Their
Slaves: The Politics of Anger”).
19
Brown, “Late Antiquity,” in A History of Private Life, vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed.
Veyne, trans. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1987), p. 243.
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 39

persons reveals with special intensity the potential for empathy, its vulner-
ability to exploitation, and its historical fragility.
Aristotle himself, in the Rhetoric, tells Herodotus’s story, and I want to
follow through on my claim about the historicity of the passions by looking
at this story. Aristotle retells it, but names Amasis as the Egyptian who expe-
rienced this spectacle staged by Cambyses, Amasis father of Psammenitus.
According to Herodotus, Amasis died before the invasion of Cambyses. This
is an intriguing slip of tongue or pen, perhaps, an interesting displacement,
little break, cut, or tear in the historical record. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the
story is used to illustrate an emotion, the pathos of pity. Earlier in the text,
he discussed the deployment of the emotions in persuasion, casting them in
a negative light. The pathē are “affections which cause men to change their
opinions in regard to their judgments” (1378a); they involve pleasure and
pain, which at this stage of the argument he sees as disturbing, and he uses
suggestive language about their effects on judgment.20 This is an instrumen-
talizing of emotion, its use to create a certain impression in the audience
concerning the speaker, or an emotional reaction in the members of the
audience. Earlier Aristotle had said that “it is wrong to warp the dicast’s
feelings, to arouse him to anger, jealousy, or compassion [eleon which is in
fact, “pity,” a very different thing], which would be like making the rule
[kanoni] crooked [streblon] which one intended to use” (1354a). The word
kanōn denotes a rod or bar, but also a rule or standard; the word streblon
means twisted, bowed, or distorted, and is also used in the verbal form to
mean “wrench, dislocate, stretch on the rack, rack, torture.” It is a word
used in the forensic situation to refer to the torture performed on slaves as
they gave evidence in lawsuits. So here judgments are twisted and distorted,
in a perhaps unwitting recognition that evidence produced under torture is
twisted off the norm, the true kanōn. So for Aristotle the emotions are useful
for changing judgment, for affecting the spectator, juror, or even perhaps,
theatergoer. He cites the story of Amasis, substituting father for son, sug-
gesting that the stoic endurance of pain concerning his children, the judg-
ment of this situation, has been distorted or twisted or at least changed by
the sight of the Egyptian king’s friend, whose sufferings excite pity; the sight
of his children suffering had produced not pity, but shock. They are too
close to be pitiable, under Aristotle’s deinition of pity.
At a recent conference on empathy, I discussed the story told in Herodotus,
recounted earlier, arguing that the Greeks did not experience “empathy” in
the modern sense. This excited mild interest. What I remember from the
conference are the following three things. First, the argument that came
from the audience (composed in good measure of antiempathetic and pol-
itically engaged types) was that empathy is a cheap emotion produced by

20
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1926).
40 Page duBois

advertising and crude sensational news reporting in the present, an emo-

tion that gratiies the spectator most of all and relieves her or him of any
responsibility and need for action. An example would be the witnessing of
the victims of starvation and genocidal violence in Africa, in the past as well
as in the present. According to this line of argument, the facile experience
of empathy lets one off the hook; one feels virtuous, feeling with the remote
victims of intense suffering, and yet the feeling is virtually useless in address-
ing any of the forces and powers that produce the suffering of others. That
was the irst line of critique, which I found provocative and interesting; this
was an antiempathic line.
Then came the intervention of Temple Grandin, an autistic person and
professor at a university in Colorado who has done work on slaughter-
house reform, among other things, working with architects and builders
to reduce the stress on animals as they proceed to abattoirs. She identiies
with animals that are subject to predation and can predict what features of
landscapes and constructions will alarm and panic animals. She was deeply
outraged by my talk and kept referring to it scornfully, coming back to it in
her plenary session speech and using it as a negative example, urging that
academics stop talking about Aristotle and such, and, as she put it, “get
beyond the beltway.” I believe she thought historical study of these issues
was ridiculous and useless.
Last was Frans de Waal, a primatologist who has worked on empathy in
primates. He argues that chimpanzees clearly demonstrate empathy. In his
studies they have performed acts he considers completely altruistic, moving
structures in their habitat, for example, to beneit other animals in distress,
in situations where they themselves would derive no advantage from their
acts. In a panel discussion, I talked about how empathy has emerged as an
object of study historically, and how its discovery, in animals and in neuro-
physiology, cannot be seen without reference to a social and political con-
text in which it has come to be valued.21
All this led me to relect on my assumptions. I still think, as a histori-
cist, that the passions and emotions are historically produced, part of cul-
ture, not innate, and that their discovery, in infants and in animals, has its
ideological aspects. Studies, for example, that ind empathy in infants are
rarely conducted in cross-cultural contexts and, of course, cannot be con-
ducted historically. Thus, the claim of the universal presence of empathy
in newborns and primates must be speculative at best. But, in any case,
if we want to allow for a universal and innate passion – empathy – then
there may be cases or even whole societies, among them those cited
earlier, where empathy is suppressed and where the otherness of others

21
See Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony,
2009).
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 41

allows for a sense of a shared humanness to be overridden by concerns

for one’s own.
The story of Psammenitus, which seems to me to offer rich opportun-
ities for empathy, the “feeling with” victims of suffering, excites very differ-
ent reactions in the work of its various tellers, providing occasions for pity,
for the racking and distortion of judgment, for stoic petrifaction, and for
elegiac regret at our growing subjugation to exhaustively explained infor-
mation. The tale itself is a germinative seed, a kernel of narrative that calls
forth a spectrum of emotion over many centuries.
Griswold’s account of the virtue of forgiveness seems to assume the neces-
sity of sympathy or compassion or empathy, in order that the reciprocity he
sees in the ideal case of forgiveness be realized. Griswold uses the twenty-
fourth book of Homer’s Iliad as a “touchstone.” In his discussion of that
scene in the Iliad between Priam and Achilles, he argues: “The analogies
of situatedness and kinship and the contrast of mortals and gods, implicitly
invite a sympathetic recognition of the enemy as one-like-us. . . . The audi-
ence of this extraordinary scene is also, through sympathy, brought into the
web of the character’s humanity.”22 Without disagreeing with or faulting
Griswold’s interpretation, I too want to read this scene and draw other con-
clusions, stressing that this is not a scene of forgiveness, of reciprocity, but
rather of a tense encounter between men who have every reason to hate one
another and who neither empathize nor forgive.23 Although some modern
readers might sympathize or empathize with these characters, the Homeric
igures are said to experience not empathy or forgiveness but rather grief
and pity, emotions much more visible and powerful in the world of early
Greek antiquity.
The episode involving Priam and Achilles comes near the end of the
Iliad, in a penultimate and climactic moment.24 Hektor has killed Patroklos;
Achilles has returned to battle and, with the help of the goddess Athena, has
killed Hektor in turn. He performs the burial rites for Patroklos but refuses
to allow the funeral ceremonies for Hektor, dragging the Trojan hero’s
corpse, which has been preserved from decay through the intervention of
Aphrodite. The gods are displeased with Achilles’ pitiless actions and send
divine messengers; Hektor’s father Priam, king of Troy, is led by Hermes into
the camp of the Achaians, with promises of safe passage. As he arrives in the
dwelling of Achilles, appearing suddenly, the poem draws a reverse analogy
between the arrival of a murderer in a strange land and the presence of

22
Griswold, Forgiveness, pp. 78–79.
23
On the “visit” scene, see Arend, Die typischen Scenen bei Homer (Berlin: Weidmann, 1933),
pp. 34–53.
24
On book 24, see Homer, Iliad Book XXIV, ed. Macleod (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), and The Iliad: A Commentary, vol. VI: books 21–24, ed. Richardson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993).
42 Page duBois

Priam, who has grasped the knees and kissed the hands “that were danger-
ous and manslaughtering and had killed so many/of his sons”:
As when dense disaster closes on one who has murdered a man
in his own land, and he comes to the country of others,
to a man of substance, and wonder seizes on those who behold him,
so Achilleus wondered as he looked on Priam.
(480–83)25

Priam is not the murderer arriving as a stranger in a strange land but the
bereaved and mourning father who has lost his sons. In a suggestive note,
Arthur Adkins in Merit and Responsibility discussed what is at stake in this
simile:
The murderer comes to the house of a powerful man in another land, and awe,
thambos, falls upon the onlookers. This awe is not the normal Homeric attitude to a
killer, and may mark the beginnings of an attitude which contributed to the belief
in “pollution.”26

Notions of pollution represent a far cry from an interiorized sense of guilt,

sympathy with one’s victims, and the need for forgiveness. Adkins’s still
persuasive analysis argued for the relative insigniicance of ideas of moral
responsibility among these early Greeks and their very different presup-
positions about moral responsibility from our own. Patroklos, when he was
a child, unintentionally, in anger, killed the son of Amphidamas, and like
other killers in Homer, as Adkins points out, “unless the killer takes him-
self, or is taken, out of reach of the offended parties, whether relatives or . . .
some other body of people with whom the dead man is associated, he will
be killed in his turn.”27 Iliad 24 represents the consequences of killing in
war, but the analogy with homicide of another sort has been drawn through
the reverse simile: Achilles has killed Hektor for his killing of Patroklos;
Priam should kill Achilles for his killing of Hektor. What is strange and
compelling about this scene is that Priam is an old man, weak, and unable
to avenge himself appropriately. He is humiliated by having to supplicate
the man who killed his sons and abject himself.28 This is a scene not about
forgiveness but about forbearance. Indeed, Achilles’ sparing of Priam’s life,

25
The Iliad of Homer, trans. Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). Unless
otherwise indicated, I am using this translation throughout.
26
Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960), p. 109, n. 13.
27
Ibid., p. 53.
28
On supplication, see Crotty, The Poetics of Supplication: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. chaps. 1 and 5. Chapter 1, “Eleos and Book 24 of the
Iliad,” pp. 3–23, traces the traditions of interpretation of the last book of the Iliad, analytic
critics seeing a later addition, others a return to humanity by the hero. For the latter, see,
for example, Segal, The Theme of the Mutilation of the Corpse in the Iliad (Leiden: Brill, 1971);
King, Achilles: Paradigms of the War Hero from Homer to the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 43

Priam’s restraint vis-à-vis Achilles, demonstrate the fact that Priam, as an

enfeebled old man, would be an unworthy target of Achilles’ wrath and that
he would be diminished in his aretē, his excellence, nobility, virtue, were he
to descend to destroying an enemy who is no longer a warrior, like the old
men of Troy chirping on the wall in Iliad 3:
Now those who sat with Priam: Panthoos and Thymoites . . .
these were seated by the Skaian gates, elders of the people.
Now through old age these fought no longer, yet were they excellent
speakers still, and clear, as cicadas who through the forest
settle on trees, to issue their delicate voice of singing.
(3.146–52)

Although Achilles refrains from killing Priam, note that he slays twelve
Trojans on the pyre of Patroklos (Iliad 23.176). In addition to exemplifying
Achilles’ desire for the large ransom Priam has brought in exchange for his
son’s body, the scene between Priam and Achilles exempliies pity, an emo-
tion felt by the stronger man toward the weaker. But I would insist that pity
is not forgiveness, and perhaps not even empathy.29
Just before he kills Hektor, Achilles addresses the Trojan hero who has
asked that the two swear an oath not to deile the other’s corpse, if one suc-
ceeds in killing the other: “[A]fter I have stripped your glorious armour,
Achilleus,/I will give your corpse back to the Achaians. Do you do likewise”
(22.258–59). Achilles answers:
Hektor, argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you.
As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions,
nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought to agreement
but forever these hold feelings of hate for each other,
so there can be no love between you and me, nor shall there be
oaths between us, but one or the other must fall before then
to glut with his blood Ares the god who ights under the shield’s guard.
(22.261–67)

The irst line translated here is: Hektor mē moi alaste sunēmosunas agoreue,
literally, “Hektor, speak to me not, wretch, about covenants, agreements.”

of California Press, 1987). Crotty’s chapter 5: “Supplication and the Poetics of the Iliad,”
pp. 89–104, continues the discussion of Iliad book 24, considering in detail the ceremony
of supplication and its place as a model for the poetics of the epic.
29
See Owen, The Story of the Iliad (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), who wrote:
“One immediately recognizes, not his [Achilles’] acceptance of the suppliant merely, but his
beautiful compassion for him as having been involved from the beginning” (p. 243). I would
see magnanimity here rather than compassion. The sight of Priam stirs memories of Achilles’
own father, but this does not mean necessarily “com-passion.” Owen translates gerōn in line
599 as “sir,” when it means “old man” (Lattimore translates “aged sir”). Owen also inds in
book 24 “a universal sorrow and a universal sympathy for the doom of mankind” (p. 246),
and he sees reconciliation “in a noble and universal compassion.” This is a beautiful, uplift-
ing reading of the Iliad, and of book 24, but perhaps somewhat anachronistic in its seeking
44 Page duBois

Lattimore imports a foreign notion when he translates “forgive,” as does

Fagles, when he gives us: “You unforgivable, you . . .”30 The Greek says noth-
ing of the sort, as Achilles naturalizes their enmity: there are no oaths
between men and lions, between wolves and lambs.
The subsequent forbearance Achilles shows toward Priam can be traced
to a variety of causes; there is the gods’ command that he return the body
of Hektor to the slain man’s father, and the fact that Priam appears in his
home, clearly led there and protected by the gods; this is an exchange spon-
sored by the gods. There is an economic issue; if the world of Homer’s
poems is one of exchange and barter – trading of women, for example, for
other valuable goods – then the handsome gifts Priam brings to Achilles, in
exchange for his son’s body, must igure in this equation. Achilles does not
lose face if he accepts the will of the gods, pities and shows mercy to Priam,
and receives a bounty in exchange for the body. If there is a question of
forgiveness in this episode from the Iliad, one might argue rather that the
vector of forgiveness would bind Achilles and Hektor; does Achilles forgive
Hektor? Achilles’ anger may “soften,” as does that of Menelaos in book
23: “his anger/was softened, as with dew the ears of corn are softened/
the standing corn growth of a shuddering ield. For you also/the heart,
o Menelaos, was thus softened within you” (23.597–600). Antilochos, the
target of Menelaos’s rage, has deferred to the older man, given up a prize
mare, and offered further gifts to “soften” his rage.
Achilles remembers his own father, and barely restrains his wrath against
Hektor’s father, as “lion-like” he orders Priam not to anger him. He keeps
the sight of Hektor’s body from Priam, fearing that the old man’s rage might
lare up and ignite Achilles’ own violent fury. He himself lifts the corpse of
Hektor onto the bier, urges Priam to eat, as Niobe did, after her dozen chil-
dren were killed by Apollo and Artemis. The two do eat together, gazing
in wonder at one another, and Achilles agrees to hold off the ighting for
Hektor’s funeral. Then Priam, urged by Hermes, departs in the night with
his son’s corpse. The Iliad ends with the burial of Hektor.
Achilles has asked forbearance of the dead Patroklos for his acceptance
of Priam’s ransom and, in fact, promises to share it:
Be not angry with me, Patroklos, if you discover,
though you be in the house of Hades, that I gave back great Hektor
to his loved father, for the ransom he gave me was not unworthy.
I will give you your share of the spoils, as much as is itting.
(24.592–95)

and inding of universal consolation in the encounter between the old man and the warrior.
See Schein, The Mortal Hero: An Introduction to Homer’s Iliad (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984), for a nuanced reading: “With the greatest tact and consideration he [Achilles]
goes to prepare the body for Priam and keeps it out of sight, in case the old man might be
unable to hold down his anger and he, in turn, might lose control and kill him” (p. 161).
30
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990), p. 550.
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 45

Hektor is dead; given the deinition of reciprocal action in Griswold’s work,

the scene between Priam and Achilles is not a scene of forgiveness. Achilles
has put away his rage, suppressed his desire for vengeance, although it
lurks beneath the surface here, always ready to lare up and consume
Priam. He is led to this by the command of the gods, by Apollo, who says
that Achilles “has destroyed pity” (24.44); by Achilles’ own sense that the
price has been paid; and by pity for the old man, who reminds him of his
father. The irst words Priam utters to Achilles, when the young hero and
his companions gaze with amazement at the old man who has appeared
mysteriously among them, are “Achilleus like the gods, remember your
father, one who/is of years like mine, and on the door-sill of sorrowful old
age” (24.486–87).
The question of pity in the Iliad is discussed by Jinyo Kim in a chapter
entitled “The Meaning of Pity”: “What Achilles does for Priam encom-
passes all the actions that are regularly connected with pitying: avenging,
saving, healing, and the giving for burial.”31 “Achilles’ fury against the
dead Hektor is . . . superseded in the end by his pity for Priam, and, by
extension, for all mortals, including himself.”32 Kim sees in Achilles a uni-
versal pity that no longer distinguishes between Achaian philoi and Trojan
enemies, for “he comes to redeine all mortals as his φíλοι.”33 Kim inter-
prets the Achillean pity for his enemies as the tragic resolution of Achilles’
anger, organic to the poem rather than a later addition that civilizes the
hero, that awkwardly provides an ending, like the deus ex machina of a
Euripidean tragedy. Still, pity is not compassion, not forgiveness. Pietro
Pucci argued in his work on Euripides’ Medea that pity can be a defensive
strategy, protecting the pitier from an acknowledgment of his or her own
vulnerability; rather than feeling fear in the face of pain and death, the
spectator produces pity for the objectiied other and purges him- or her-
self of unwanted feeling.34
Finally, it seems to me that Achilles, in his grief for Patroklos, his concern
for his father, and his pity for Priam, recognizes his own vulnerability as well
as his subjection to the will of the gods and his own mortality. This is a power-
ful, moving, terrible moment in the rhythm of this great poem. But the hero
is closed in his own reality, his own mortality. Achilles seems to me to be
weeping for himself, perhaps for his own father far away, but not for Priam.
As James Redield says: “The end of the Iliad is a ceremonial recognition of

31
Kim, The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity of the Iliad (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littleield, 2000), p. 64; pp. 35–67 (chap. 2: “Meaning of Pity”). Redield, Nature and Culture
in the Iliad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), sees not the resolution of irresolv-
able conlict but a formal presentation in art of the conlicts that renders them legible to an
audience.
32
Kim, The Pity of Achilles, p. 64.
33
Ibid., p. 182.
34
Pucci, The Violence of Pity in Euripides’ Medea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
46 Page duBois

the monstrous singularity of Achilles.”35 We err if we “transfer” onto it our

own emotional landscape of compassion, empathy, and forgiveness.
It may be that a polytheism is less likely to exhibit and prize the prac-
tice of forgiveness. In monotheistic, Abrahamic religions, especially in the
Hebrew Bible, the personality of the divinity often appears prickly, jealous,
punitive, and judgmental. He, emphatically masculine, is seen as overlook-
ing the faults of his chosen people (the Israelites) and their many transgres-
sions, and for a time at least, offering them new chances to win his favor.
A polytheistic system has no single source of redemption, cleansing, or for-
giveness; if one of the gods were to spare the perpetrator of an injury, this is
less a metaphysical event than a private arrangement between that one god
and one of her many worshipers.
The word sungnōmē, mentioned at the beginning of this essay as the com-
mon word used for crowd management in modern Greek (“Excuse me”),
emerges as the word most often translated as “forgiveness” in later classical
Greek texts. Yet even in such contexts, one might argue that there is pro-
jection from a modern, postmodern world, a vocabulary of compassion,
empathy, and therefore forgiveness that betrays earlier Greek meanings.
Butler, for example, in her passionate and illuminating Antigone’s Claim,
misled by an inaccurate translation, refers to forgiveness in this speech,
translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones:
Well, if this is approved among the gods, I should forgive [sungignōskō] them for
what I have suffered, since I have done wrong; but if they are the wrongdoers, may
they not suffer worse evils than those they are unjustly inlicting upon me!36

The word sungignōskō here seems as little to denote “forgiveness,” in a

modern, post-Christian sense, as the word sunēmosunē in the Iliad. Here
Antigone refers not to the mutual, reciprocal recognition of fault and repa-
rations, the abandoning of ressentiment as deined by Griswold, but rather to
agreement, consent to what she has suffered. Grene’s translation is better,
although it imports the Christian idea of “sin”: “If this proceeding is good
in the gods’ eyes/I shall know my sin, once I have suffered” (982–83).37
Butler’s point is that Antigone is “beyond guilt”;38 how much more beyond
guilt, before guilt, or outside a world in which guilt igures, is the Greek text,
in which punishment is inlicted, even consented to, but where forgiveness
is not a possibility for negotiation between mortals and immortals.

35
Redield, Nature and Culture, p. 211. “In the ceremonial context of the ransoming, Achilles is
able, for the irst time, to relect upon himself and his own fate as one instance of a universal
pattern.”
36
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 34. Butler does not give the source of the Lloyd-Jones
translation.
37
Grene, trans., Sophocles I: Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone, 2nd ed., ed. Grene
and Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).
38
Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 35.
 Achilles, Psammenitus, and Antigone 47

If we live in a world in which forgiveness is a virtue for most – always

excepted those Nietzscheans who interpret it as weakness – the world of
Homer did not prize this attribute as some modern civilizations do. Belief
in a universal, inborn forgiveness might be a serious error in a world in
which there are those who still prize warrior skills and an undying commit-
ment to avenging the dead. Some may value forgiveness and wish it were an
innate, universal human quality, but the example of the Homeric Achilles
demonstrates its fragility and its precarious status as a product of centuries
of cultural labor.
 4

All in the Family

Forgiveness and Reconciliation in New Comedy

Kathryn Gutzwiller

From the modern perspective, forgiveness is in its core form an interper-

sonal act in which a person consciously gives up resentment or settled anger
toward another after a sincere expression of contrition.1 The closest Greek
equivalent to forgiveness is sungnōmē, which, however, has a broader range
of meaning including recognition, understanding, forbearance, pardon,
and excuse. The fundamentally cognitive aspect of the Greek concept is
evident in Aristotle’s deinition of sungnōmē as “understanding [gnōmē] that
judges correctly what is fair,” meaning “correct judgment of what is truly
fair” (EN 1143a23–24). The emphasis on intellectual judgment based on
truth in this deinition shows clearly that the Greek concept of sungnōmē
has a different centering point from the modern one of forgiveness, which
emphasizes the interaction of two persons with accompanying emotional
change. The circles representing the behavioral range corresponding to
Greek sungnōmē and modern forgiveness do, however, have a space of inter-
section, which is clearly identiiable in the uses of sungnōmē in the late clas-
sical period. An important way of analyzing this intersection is to look at
the stories told in Greek literature, and my particular interest concerns
the relationship of forgiveness to the identity and formation of dramatic
genres. The word sungnōmē appears but seldom in Attic tragedy,2 and acts
of forgiveness are rare and peripheral because tragedy was about moral
choices made in the face of the irreparable harm that human beings do

1
I follow here the analysis of Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007). All translations in this essay are my own.
2
Metzler, Der griechische Begriff des Verzeihens: Untersucht am Wortstamm συγγνώμη von den ersten
Belegen bis zum vierten Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1991),
pp. 121–27; and Romilly, Tragédies grecques au il des ans (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995),
pp. 61–77. Contrariwise, the role played by revenge in tragedy is well known; see Burnett,
Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and
Bordenave, Recherches sur le vocabulaire de la vengeance et du châtiment dans la tragédie grecque
(Lille: Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses, 2004).

48
 All in the Family 49

one another. New Comedy, however, as we know it from Menander, was

created from a reworking, or even a reversal, of tragic form in which the
potential harm that characters might do to one another was blocked or
repaired by a combination of chance and the capacity to forgive.3 In ana-
lyzing Greek drama, particularly Menandrian comedy, I am concerned to
show how cognitive assessment of what is forgivable is affected by bonds of
affection, moral character, and learned social roles.
Forms of sungnōmē and sungignōskō do not appear in extant Greek lit-
erature until the ifth century. Although it would be rash to assume that
individual acts of forgiveness did not take place in archaic Greek culture,
forgiveness was clearly not a valued part of the moral code, which evolved
from the warrior’s posture of aggressive self-aggrandizement. The basic
principle of moral behavior, not seriously challenged until the late ifth
century, was to beneit friends (philoi) and to harm enemies (echthroi).4
A harmful act on the part of a friend changed the relationship to one of
enmity; even so, the damaged relationship could be repaired if the wrong-
doer offered recompense (dikē) and the aggrieved party accepted it (Hes.
Op. 709–13).5 The normal response to a wrong done was revenge, the
opposite of forgiveness. The saying attributed to the sage Pittacus, that
“forgiveness is better [or stronger] than revenge” (συγγνώμη τɩμωρɩ́ας
κρεɩ́σσων, D.L. 1.76), though perhaps formed somewhat later in Greek
culture,6 points to a counterbalancing set of values, which A. D. H. Adkins
has termed “quiet virtues.” Prominent among these cooperative virtues
were prudence, self-control, fairness, and surely, though never named
in archaic poetry, forgiveness. They were more generally acceptable for
women than men, for whom competition for high status was the norm.7
For elite men of the archaic world, to admit wrong and ask for forgiveness
without maintaining status through offered compensation was to assume
a subservient position. Correlatively, to freely offer forgiveness, that is, to
forgo revenge without receiving recompense, was to exhibit weakness and

3
There remains no full-scale discussion of forgiveness in Menander, but see Metzler, Begriff
des Verzeihens, pp. 130–31; Romilly, Tragédies grecques, pp. 70–71; and Konstan in this volume.
Landfester, “Versöhnung folget nach dem Streit: Humanität und Komik bei Menander,”
Gymnasium 96 (1989), esp. pp. 355–56, argues that in Menander’s comic world natural
human faults are overcome to produce familial reconciliation.
4
For a good discussion, see Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study of Sophocles
and Greek Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 26–59.
5
Such offers of recompense were not necessarily accompanied by admissions of wrongdoing;
it was merely a matter of accepting responsibility. The focus was on reestablishment of the
status of the aggrieved party through physically observable means, not on the emotional
relationship of those involved.
6
For discussion of the Pittacus saying, see Metzler, Begriff des Verzeihens, pp. 54–56; she sup-
poses that it was transmitted among the folkloric gnōmai.
7
Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960),
pp. 30–60, esp. pp. 36–37 on women.
50 Kathryn Gutzwiller

vulnerability. The ifth and fourth centuries were periods in which these
attitudes were undergoing change, and Greeks were making their way
toward a valorization of forgiveness as a marker of civilized Hellenism as
opposed to pitiless barbarism. Instances in which a free Greek male will-
ingly asks for (interpersonal) forgiveness or willingly grants it, however, are
rare and exceptional until the plays of Menander.8
The earliest certain instance of a request for forgiveness is addressed
to a god and comes from a woman. In Simonides (543 Page, Poetae Melici
Graecae), Danae, adrift in a chest with her infant son Persius, prays to Zeus
for a change of heart and then asks pardon (σύγγνωθɩ́ μoɩ, 27) if her prayer
was too bold or beyond what is just. To take this or similar requests as a
polite “pardon me” is to overlook the relationships of power and status that
underlie the classical uses of sungnōmē. Gods may forgive humans for slights
to their dignity because their power is absolute and they lack vulnerability.9
Though prayers to deities commonly invoked a sense of anxiety, Danae’s
request for forgiveness for a making a bold request seems conditioned by
her position as a dishonored woman essentially sentenced to death with her
forbidden child. What σύγγνωθɩ́ μoɩ, “forgive me,” implies is a request to
forgo anger and retribution through some mutual understanding, a “shar-
ing of knowledge” as the etymology suggests, and the persistent association
of sungnōmē with the concept of human error reveals what the subject of this
shared knowledge should be.10 The gods, however, have little capacity for
sympathetic understanding of what is common to humanity.11 At the end of
Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Hyllus asks his own attendants for “great forgiveness”
(μεγάλην συγγνωμoσύνην) as he bids them to carry out Heracles’ order to

8
A passage in Theognis (325–28; in West, Iambi et elegi graeci ante Alexandrum cantata [Oxford,
Clarendon Press, 1971]) foreshadows this development of interpersonal forgiveness: “If
someone should be angry at friends on every occasion for their mistakes [μαρτωλσɩ], they
would no longer have friendly attachments; for mistakes follow human beings, . . . and it is
the gods who are not willing to bear them.” Theognis is here advocating a gentle tempera-
ment that does not anger easily at minor slights through recognition of common human
frailty, and while this does not quite it the modern paradigm of forgiveness as a letting go of
anger, it squarely anticipates the classical concept of sungnōmē. Likewise, the advice to turn
enemies into friends appears in some of the sayings attributed to wise men of the archaic
age, whose goal was, in part, to oppose the aggressive code of the elite class: D.L. 1.54
(Pisistratus), 1.91 (Cleobulus), 8.23 (Pythagoras).
9
Dover, Greek Popular Morality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), p. 78; Metzler,
Begriff des Verzeihens, p. 72, who discusses other passages in which gods are asked for forgive-
ness (pp. 70–74).
10
Passages of classical literature in which the connection is made include Eur. Hipp. 615, Thuc.
3.40.1, Xen. Cyr. 3.1.40, 6.1.37; Arist. Rh. 1374b10–11 (τ τoς νθρωπɩ́νoɩς συγγɩνώσκεɩν
πɩεɩκές); Rhet. ad Alex. 1427a37–42. Cf. Men. fr. 389 Kassel-Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci (Berlin:
de Gruyter, 1983–), "νθρωπος #ν $μαρτoν· o% θαυμαστέoν; Ter. Ad. 687, Eun. 879–81.
11
Even so, in Aesch. Suppl. 215–16 (where the text is uncertain) the Danaids and their father
Danaus hope Apollo will display sungnōmē in the sense of “compassionate understanding,”
because he too was once an exile.
 All in the Family 51

end his suffering by placing him on the pyre, even as the gods exhibit “great
indifference” (μεγάλην γνωμoσύνην) to such pain (1264–69).12 Elsewhere
in tragedy, at least in Euripidean tragedy, requests to deities for forgiveness
are accompanied by reminders of the gods’ own familial bonds.13 When
Creusa boldly calls her newly recognized son “a light greater for a mother
than the sun,” she is conident that “the god will forgive” (συγγνώσεταɩ γ&ρ
' θεός, Ion 1440) the slight, apparently because Apollo (here associated with
the sun) is Ion’s father. Escaping the Taurians with her brother, Iphigeneia
prays to Artemis for help with her light and forgiveness for stealing her
image, on the grounds that the goddess’s love for her brother Apollo paral-
lels Iphigeneia’s for Orestes (IT 1398–1402).
Just as humans ask gods for forgiveness, they may humble them-
selves before other humans if the status differential is great enough. In
Aristophanes’ Acharnians Dicaeopolis, in his beggar’s disguise, asks the blus-
tering general Lamachus to forgive him for his bold insults, “if as a beggar
I spoke up and was mouthy” (578–79). Even if Dicaeopolis here plays the
eirōn and laughs up his sleeve at Lamachus, the pretended situation none-
theless illustrates the point that among humans extremely low status makes
possible requests for forgiveness because diminution of status is not at stake.
Correspondingly, very high status may provide suficient protection so that
the granting of forgiveness becomes possible. For instance, when the sage
Pittacus supposedly uttered the saying “forgiveness is better than revenge”
to justify his release of his captured enemy Alcaeus, he was in a secure pos-
ition as a highly honored ruler of Mytilene.14 That fear of vulnerability
remains a block to forgiveness in the high classical period is indicated by
Thucydides’ account of the Athenian debate over how to punish the people
of Mytilene for their disloyalty. In defending his proposal to kill all the
males and enslave the women and children (3.40), Cleon argues against
any tendency to forgive, rejecting the usual grounds that making a mistake
is human (μαρτεɩ̑ν νθρωπɩ́νως). He uses an argument commonplace in
Athenian lawcourts, that the Mytileneans’ actions were deliberate and that
only “involuntary action is forgivable” ( ξύγγνωμoν δ’ στɩ̀ τ κoύσɩoν). He
also warns the Athenians against succumbing to pity or a sense of decency
(epieikeia), arguing that these should be reserved for friends, not enemies
as the people of Mytilene have become. The ultimate argument, however, is
the one from self-interest, namely, that making an example of Mytilene will
protect the Athenians from future revolts. In adapting language relating to

12
The extreme oddity of asking the lowly attendants, who must lift Heracles onto the pyre, for
forgiveness serves to mark Hyllus’s tragic recognition that compassion is a human trait, to be
exercised in the face of all-powerful gods who lack the capacity to pity.
13
Similarly, in the Simonides fragment discussed earlier, Zeus is the father of Danae’s child.
14
Diogenes Laertius (1.76), who attributes this version to Heraclitus, knows a similar story
in which Pittacus said “forgiveness is better than regret” in declining to punish his son’s
murderer.
52 Kathryn Gutzwiller

interpersonal sungnōmē to the political realm, Cleon makes clear the under-
lying anxiety that forgiving produces vulnerability.15
As tragic patterns indicate, women could grant or request forgive-
ness more easily than men because of the lower status attaching to their
gender. While forgiveness plays no role in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Euripides
in his Electra has Clytemnestra attempt to rehabilitate herself by claiming
some capacity to forgive. She explains to Electra that if Agamemnon had
sacriiced Iphigenia to save the city or his other children, she would have
forgiven him (συγγνώστ’ "ν -ν, 1026), and even as it was, with the sacri-
ice made to aid his brother in recovering Helen, she would have refrained
from murder if he had not brought Cassandra back from Troy to share her
bed. While this concern with sex its Clytemnestra’s traditional character,
it also suggests that a loss of status as an honored wife might be creditably
alleged as an excusable reason for killing – rather than forgiving – a hus-
band. Other tragedies as well indicate that a husband’s open transference of
affection to another woman was considered a tipping point, a serious harm
that diminished a wife and might provoke anger suficient for revenge. In
Euripides’ Andromache, after Hermione’s horriic attempt to kill the enslaved
Andromache who has borne her husband Neoptolemus a child, her nurse
assures her that her husband will forgive her “this mistake” (τήνδ’ μαρτɩ́αν,
840).16 In the Medea, as Medea’s anger builds against Jason, she explains to
him that his passion for another’s bed would be forgivable (συγγνώστ’ "ν
-ν σoɩ, 491) if they had no children. She plays here with the model of the
forgiving wife, who is willing to put up with even another bride if her own
happiness alone is at stake, and so saddles Jason with unforgivable behavior.
In turn, her feelings of hurt and anger as a wife betrayed are easily forgiven:
Aegeus tells her so (συγγνωστ& μέν τ"ρ’ -ν σε λυπεɩ̑σθαɩ, 703), and she mis-
leads Jason about her plans to kill their children by asking him to forgive
her earlier threats (αɩ̓τoυ̑μαɩ́ σε . . . συγγνώμoν’ ε0ναɩ, 869–70) on the basis
that it is natural for him to put up with her anger because their many acts of
affection for each (πόλλ’ . . . φɩ́λα, 871) had laid the foundation for this.

15
His opponent Diodotus makes the argument (3.44–48) that the Athenians should impose
a lesser penalty, not through pity or a sense of decency, but through recognition that a
reasoned response lacking angry retribution would make the Athenians more fearful to
their enemies in the future. This result, as Diodotus makes clear, is not forgiveness as such,
because it is based not on sympathetic understanding of the other but on recognition of the
self-interest provided by clemency. It thus anticipates a movement toward political clemency
that takes hold in the fourth century; it also points to an intellectual way to lessen fear of
vulnerability, which probably inluenced new attitudes to interpersonal forgiveness as well.
16
In Sophocles’ Electra, Chrysothemis assumes that her father Agamemnon will forgive her for
not attempting to avenge his death (400), and this view of what is forgivable for a woman
is probably closer to the cultural norm than Electra’s insistence on the necessity to take
revenge (τɩμωρoύμενoɩ, 399). See, however, Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 151–71, on how the ethics of vendetta can under cer-
tain circumstances motivate women to act.
 All in the Family 53

While Aristotle carefully delineates objective standards for what is forgiv-

able and what is not (EN 1136a5–9), tragedy demonstrates that in reality
the emotional bonds of love, particularly within the family, were an import-
ant element offsetting such objective criteria. Sophocles’ Deianira proj-
ects more closely the model of female virtue rejected by Clytemnestra and
Medea. She makes no mention of forgiving Heracles for bringing home
Iole, a beautiful young war captive, to replace her in his bed; to do so would
be out of character for this woman, who knows her place as a mere wife
and would never dream of demeaning Heracles’ heroic stature by presum-
ing to forgive him for exercising his male desires. On the other hand, she
is quite content to follow Lichas’s request that she forgive Iole’s appar-
ent disrespect in remaining silent when asked a question by her new mis-
tress (συγγνώμην 1χεɩ, Trach. 328); she does not want the girl to suffer any
“additional pain from me” (331). In this play in which Zeus refuses to for-
give his son Heracles for his treacherous murder of Iphitus (συνέγνω, 279)
and the gods are otherwise indifferent to human suffering (1266–67), in
which Heracles dies in anger refusing to recognize that Deianira’s fatal mis-
take was caused by love or to consider Hyllus’s anguish if forced to marry
his father’s former mistress, Deianira’s simple act of kindness to her (as yet
unrecognized) rival serves to demonstrate the potential for the reversal of
tragedy inherent in sungnōmē.
For the heroic men of tragedy either the requesting or granting of forgive-
ness was more dificult. In Sophocles’ Ajax, a play about failed revenge and its
aftermath in which Odysseus represents a voice of reason and compassion,
the only reference to forgiveness is addressed by Odysseus to Agamemnon
to delect his anger at Teucer for insisting on burying his brother Ajax:
“I pardon a man [νδρɩ̀ συγγνώμην 1χω] who answers disparaging words
in kind” (1322–23). While the quarrel is partly about whether Teucer as
a bastard son of Telamon has suficient status to question the decision of
the Atridae, Odysseus attempts to smooth it over by treating the dispute as
a cycle of revenge begetting revenge that can be stopped by forgiveness on
the part of equals. Teucer’s lower heroic status as a nothos (Il. 8.284) was a
traditional aspect of his characterization and so, though not expressly men-
tioned, may lie behind his surprisingly unusual behavior in Euripides’ Helen
when he apologizes to an Egyptian lady – the actual Helen – for mistaking
her for that Helen who went to Troy (80–82): “I made a mistake [$μαρτoν].
I gave in to anger [3ργη̑]̜ more than I should have, since all Greece despises
that daughter of Zeus. Forgive me [σύγγνωθɩ 5μɩ̑ν] my words, lady.” Here we
ind a full request for forgiveness with its essential elements – acknowledg-
ment of error, regret for anger, the reason for the anger, and the asking of
forgiveness. Apparently, Teucer’s traditional nobility of character, despite
his lesser heroic status in comparison with his half brother Ajax, and the
slightness of the harm done both account for the framing of the apology by
use of this forgiveness ritual. Euripides’ Orestes contains a rare expression of
54 Kathryn Gutzwiller

forgiveness by a man, even without any request for it (658–61). The offer
to forgive, however, is insincere. Desperately trying to convince Menelaus to
spare his life and that of his sister, Orestes uses the ploy of claiming that he
and Menelaus are in equal positions of power and have equal claims to ven-
geance. He advances the idea that Menelaus owes him for Agamemnon’s
sacriice of Iphigeneia and that he will “forgive” and not demand in turn
the life of his daughter Hermione if Menelaus pardons him and Electra.
The specious claim to forgive is here designed to create for Orestes the
appearance of a secure position from which clemency may be extended.
In Euripides’ Suppliant Women one free Greek male comes close to request-
ing forgiveness from another. Theseus has just refused to help bury the
Argive dead on the basis that Adrastus must suffer the consequences of his
foolish acquiescence to the youthful warriors who wished to attack Thebes.
The suppliant mothers of the dead then attempt to excuse Adrastus’s mis-
take ($μαρτεν, 250) on the grounds that mistakes are natural among the
young and so Adrastus should be forgiven as well. The scene, however, does
not in fact enact interpersonal forgiveness but a political act of compas-
sion. Theseus is not the party harmed, and the women are not the offend-
ers. Theseus’s complaint against Adrastus involves bad leadership, and the
women defend him, not very convincingly, with the excuse that he yielded
to young hot heads, whose actions might be excusable. Their request for
sungnōmē mirrors the request to the Athenian jury on the part of defendants
in legal cases, and the tragedy indicates that civic sungnōmē had become a
feature of late ifth-century life. It is not surprising that when Athenian legal
practice is translated to the tragic world, women are those who request for-
giveness, even when a man of heroic status is present as the recipient.
For the most part, then, forgiveness plays only a marginal role in tragic
action: it might be granted without threatening consequences to women,
but it is offered or requested by high-status men only in unusual circum-
stances or with regard to minor transgressions. In the Hippolytus, the inal
scene of reconciliation between father and son suggests a larger role for
forgiveness in repairing ruptures among philoi, but Euripides maintains the
tragic nature of his play by transferring the choice of revenge or forgive-
ness to the gods, who are shown to lack common human understanding. In
the opening scene the old servant apologizes to Aphrodite for Hippolytus’s
refusal to salute her statue by requesting, “as beits a slave,” that she
“forgive” his master whose youth excuses his foolish words (114–20). As
we saw in the Suppliants, the passions of youth are commonly offered as
an extenuating circumstance to motivate forgiveness. But as the audience
knows from the prologue, Aphrodite will not forgive, and she has already
set in motion her revenge against Hippolytus as well as the collateral death
of Phaedra. In the inal scene, Artemis grants the distraught Theseus
sungnōmē (1326) for causing his son’s destruction, an example of third-
party forgiveness that here suggests Artemis selishly perceives her loss of
 All in the Family 55

Hippolytus’s companionship as the most serious harm done.17 Forgiveness

is in order, she says, because Aphrodite orchestrated these events, while
Theseus’s ignorance (τ μ6 εɩ̓δέναɩ) of Hippolytus’s innocence removes
his error (μαρτɩ́αν) from the category of wickedness (1327–35). With
this act of forgiveness, Artemis is free to plan her revenge (τɩμωρήσoμαɩ,
1422) against Aphrodite, and she vows to destroy with her arrows that god-
dess’s favorite (a reference to Adonis). In Euripides’ tragic world, the gods
use forgiveness and revenge to support their favorites and maintain their
sense of dignity against other gods, with indifference to human suffering.
The inal scene in which Artemis orders the dying Hippolytus to reconcile
with his father reads almost like a parody of emotional forgiveness, and
the word sungnōmē is absent. She bids Theseus to take up his son in his
arms, since “you destroyed him unwillingly, and it is natural for humans
to make mistakes [νθρώπoɩσɩ . . . εɩ̓κς ξαμαρτάνεɩν] when the gods com-
pel it” (1433–34). Her advice to Hippolytus is simply “not to hate” (μ6
στυγεɩ̑ν, 1435) his father, since his destruction was fated. Accordingly, the
release that Hippolytus gives Theseus is not forgiveness but a letting go of
the need for revenge that a dying man might legally grant his murderer
( λύω . . . νεɩ̑κoς πατρɩ́, 1442) – and he does so only because Artemis wishes
it (χρη̜ζoύσης σέθεν, 1442), without any mention of affection for his father.
The failure to acknowledge that Phaedra was also a victim of Aphrodite and
the weak evidence of emotional bonding between Theseus and his son even
during their reconciliation are marks of Euripides’ tragic world, where the
healing power of forgiveness among family members is absent and the self-
ishness of the gods controls.
While discussion of the development of forgiveness in fourth-century
oratory, philosophy, and political theory is beyond the scope of this chapter,
another scene of father-son forgiveness, in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, can
help to show how interpersonal forgiveness, especially within the family,
was related to these other realms. The passage concludes a long section
about the king of Armenia, who had betrayed his alliance with Cyrus
and was granted sungnōmē after truthfully confessing at trial. Later there
occurs this discussion between Cyrus, the king, and the king’s son Tigranes
(3.1.38–40):
Cyrus asked, “Tell me, Tigranes, where is that man who used to hunt with us and
whom you seemed much to admire?” He replied, “Didn’t this father of mine have
him put to death?” “What wrong did he catch him doing?” “He claimed that he
was corrupting me. And yet, Cyrus, he was so noble and good that even when he
was about to die he summoned me and said, ‘Don’t be angry with your father for

17
For a discussion of third-party forgiveness, for which murder of a loved one is the clas-
sic example, see Griswold, Forgiveness, pp. 117–19. Here, Artemis’s third-party forgiveness
seems more presumptuous than it might otherwise be because Hippolytus, who is not yet
dead, provides his father release from bloodguilt only on the goddess’s command.
56 Kathryn Gutzwiller

putting me to death, Tigranes, since he’s not doing this from any malice [κακoνoɩ́8]
but from ignorance [γνoί8]. Whatever wrongs people do ["νθρωπoɩ ξαμαρτάνoυσɩ]
from ignorance, I think all these are done unwillingly [κoύσɩα].’”
Cyrus’s response to this was “Oh poor man.” But the Armenian king said, “Cyrus,
those who catch other men sleeping with their own wives do not blame them and kill
them for this on the grounds that they are making their wives more subject to folly,
but because they believe that they are alienating their wives’ affections [φɩλɩ́αν], and
for that reason they treat them like enemies [πoλεμɩ́oɩς]. Just so was I jealous of him,
because he seemed to be making my son admire him more than me.”
And Cyrus said, “Yes, in the name of the gods, I think you have done the sort of
wrong humans do [νθρώπɩνα . . . μαρτεɩ̑ν]. So, Tigranes, forgive [συγγɩ́γνωσκε]
your father.” Then after they had discussed in this way and shown affection for
each other [φɩλoφρoνηθέντες] as is natural after a reconciliation [συναλλαγη̑ς], they
entered their carriages and drove away with their wives, happy.
Here are found all the elements of the forgiveness formula – an act result-
ing in serious harm, anger over the act, a narrative on the part of the
wrongdoer explaining why he acted as he did, assessment of the actions
as human error done through ignorance and so unwillingly, the granting
of forgiveness, and genuine reconciliation with a return of affectionate
feelings. This last element, the mark of successful forgiveness, was always
everywhere lacking in tragedy. The problem with Xenophon’s perfect para-
digm is that the scene of interpersonal forgiveness involves not one – but
two – third parties.
First, the person most directly harmed is not Tigranes, but the philoso-
pher (σoφɩστής, 3.1.14) put to death on the accusation of corrupting a
youth. He is clearly a Socrates igure, who expresses, without rancor, his
intellectual understanding of the ignorance that drove the king’s action.
The underlying concept is the Socratic view that no one knowingly does
wrong,18 and its assertion can be used, as here, to establish a posture of
superiority through emotional indifference even when suffering grievous
harm. Griswold explains Plato’s lack of interest in forgiveness in terms of
his “perfectionist ethics,” in which the truly good person cannot be harmed,
feels no anger, and so has no need to forgive, even those putting him to
death.19 I would add that the “shared understanding” implied by sungnōmē is
not suitable for the philosopher because it acknowledges (absent Socrates’
irony) his or her own capacity to fall into the same type of wrongdoing.
The understanding shared between forgiver and forgiven involves not only
their common human propensity to err (from which the philosopher with
true knowledge is exempt) but also often, at least in the literary examples,

18
Pl. Ap. 37a, Prt. 345d–e, Meno 78a–b, Resp. 589c, Ti. 86d–e, Leg. 731c, 860d.
19
Griswold, Forgiveness, pp. 10–13, and “Plato and Forgiveness,” Ancient Philosophy 27 (2007):
269–87, explaining why forgiveness is not considered a virtue in Greek philosophy.
 All in the Family 57

familial bonds of affection.20 Just as the wrongdoer typically errs because of

emotions involving a philos (such as desire or jealousy), so likewise the for-
giver often forgives when his or her anger is soothed because of reciprocal
affection. In Xenophon the philosopher does not ask Tigranes to forgive
his father, only not to be angry with him. In other words, he sets Tigranes
up to act the philosopher, and in fact that is what Tigranes initially does.
When Cyrus puts the Armenian king on trial, Tigranes defends him in a
lengthy dialogue with Cyrus, in which he argues that Cyrus will beneit from
the gratitude the pardoned king will feel and so his clemency will assure
future loyalty (3.1.14–30). His arguments about the advantages of return-
ing beneit for harm, in contradiction to the traditional Greek moral code,
parallel Socrates’ arguments about justice in the Republic. The philosopher
has taught him well.
Our second third-party participant is Cyrus, who represents the good
king, knowledgeable about philosophical ethics but also capable of apply-
ing his knowledge to real-world situations. Cyrus spares the Armenian
king’s life, a political pardon labeled sungnōmē (3.1.9), following the
Socratic principle that harming an enemy only produces a worse human
being (Pl. Resp. 331e–335e). We should note, however, that the principle
applies to those in positions of power over others and not to someone like
the philosopher, who forgives from a position of weakness. In traditional
Greek culture, only those with the power to take revenge may choose
instead to forgive: Socrates’ placid acceptance of death does not equate
with a martyr’s forgiveness. At the end of the story about the Armenian
king, Cyrus turns to healing the rift between Tigranes and his father. It
is not stated that Tigranes bears any anger toward his father, but his tone
in explaining what happened to the philosopher – “This father of mine
had him killed” – may signal an underlying resentment.21 Cyrus’s initial
sympathies are with the dead man, until the king offers an explanation
for his actions. He offers as an analogy a man’s feelings upon discovering
a wife’s inidelity – concern about the alienation of her affections – and
explains that he had the same kind of jealousy toward the philosopher.
For Cyrus, the king’s jealousy over losing his son’s admiration counts as
human error, the type of thing that ordinary human beings might do, and
so bids Tigranes forgive his father.22 Others have noticed the similarity to

20
Aristotle (EN 1162a29–33) briely acknowledges that the just behavior owed by a philos to his
philos, expressly including husband and wife as well as close friends, differs from the justice
owed a stranger, social companion, or school fellow.
21
Cf. Nadon, Xenophon’s Prince: Republic and Empire in the “Cyropaedia” (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001), p. 80, n. 40, who sees in Tigranes Xenophon’s representation of
himself as someone who long resisted Socrates’ teachings.
22
It is not clear what Tigranes is to forgive his father for, killing the philosopher (a third-
party forgiveness that the philosopher likely would not have sanctioned) or the hurt caused
58 Kathryn Gutzwiller

the Hippolytus, with Cyrus in the Artemis role.23 An important difference is

the happy ending, with a return to affectionate feelings ( φɩλoφρoνηθέντες,
3.1.40).24 In Euripides’ play, Theseus and his bastard son Hippolytus had
never established a close father-son relationship, and Theseus’s curse was
intended to do his son harm. In Xenophon the forgiveness works because
the father and son do care about each other, and Tigranes apparently rec-
ognizes, as does Cyrus, that his father’s wrongdoing resulted from a strong
parental attachment.
The Xenophon passage has been discussed at some length because it
illustrates several new attitudes to forgiveness that developed in the fourth
century – the idea that powerful monarchs should grant clemency; a philo-
sophical appreciation of the role of forgiveness in making fair judgments;
and a strong interest in forgiveness among family members, including
male-male forgiveness. It also relects the disappearance of the gods as
arbiters of forgiveness. That role is passed on to absolute monarchs, such
as the Macedonian conquerors, who developed reputations for mildness
(praotēs) and human kindness (philanthrōpia);25 in applying the ethical
advice of Aristotle, Alexander came to consider himself the “reconciler of
everyone” (δɩαλλακτ6ς τω̑ν :λων, Plut. Mor. 329c). A request for sungnōmē
becomes commonplace in fourth-century Athenian oratory, where, though
functioning as a euphemism for acquittal, it yet maintains the charac-
teristics of the Greek concept of sungnōmē. As the treatise known as the
Rhetorica ad Alexandrum instructs, the orator should argue for leniency on
the basis of “the emotions common to human beings through which we
abandon reason” – namely, “desire, anger, drunkenness, excessive ambi-
tion, and the like” (1429a14–19). The same treatise advises the speaker to
argue that the accused’s action was either error (hamartēma) or accident
(atuchēma), two categories that merit sungnōmē, but not injustice (adikia),
which involves deliberate harm and merits timōria (1427a27–42; cf. Arist.
Rh. 1374b2–22, EN 1135b11–1136a9). The jurors who decide for or

Tigranes through loss of his wise companion. Once again, a delection of the one-on-one
relationship of the wrongdoer and the victim signals the dificulties inherent in interper-
sonal forgiveness between Greek males.
23
For example, Dover, “Fathers, Sons and Forgiveness,” Illinois Classical Studies 16 (1991),
pp. 173–74; and Romilly, Tragédies grecques, pp. 73–74, who believes that the Xenophon pas-
sage is a reworking of Euripides.
24
Cf. Il. 9.256 where Achilles is told that friendly feeling is better than heavy-hearted anger
(φɩλoφρoσύνη γ&ρ μεɩ́νων). The resemblance to the Pittacus saying indicates a traditional
connection between philophrosunē and sungnōmē, and likewise between their opposites anger
and revenge.
25
For Xenophon’s Cyrus as a model for the good qualities of Hellenistic kings, including
philanthrōpia and compassion, see Farber, “The Cyropaedia and Hellenistic Kingship,” American
Journal of Philology 100 (1979), esp. pp. 509–10. Ferguson, Moral Values in the Ancient World
(London: Methuen, 1958), pp. 102–17, discusses the development of philanthrōpia as an
important Greek virtue in the postclassical era.
 All in the Family 59

against leniency occupy an interesting position, typical of judicial decision

makers. In aggregate they have the absolute power of gods or monarchs to
punish or excuse, while as individuals they bring to the judgment of fellow
Athenian citizens the shared understanding that underlies sungnōmē. As a
result, court rhetoric and the ethical categories that it manipulates likely
relected, and in turn inluenced, the practice of forgiveness in ordinary
life. Our best illustrations of this practice are in the plays of Menander, in
which the closeness of familial bonds becomes a factor in the decision to
forgive or not to forgive.
In Aristotle’s analysis (Po. 1453a7–12), good tragedy involves a person dis-
tinguished in excellence and justice who falls into misfortune not through
wickedness or depravity but through some kind of mistake (hamartia).26 As
Aristotle also tells us, the suffering that results from such mistakes typic-
ally occurs within family relationships as when “a brother kills or is about
to kill a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, or a son his mother”
(1453b19–22).27 In his version of New Comedy, Menander has converted
the tragic plot concerned with heroic suffering as a result of some hamartia
to a comic plot in which the central ethical issue is whether an ordinary
person who has committed an error will or should ind forgiveness.28 As in
tragedy, the wrongdoer and the person harmed are related by family bonds,
so that murder within the family is replaced by forgiveness among philoi. In
this reversal of tragic plot, the person who commits the central hamartia is
an adult male, a head of household, who receives forgiveness from either
a male of lesser status or a woman.29 Gone is authoritative intercession of
third parties – gods, philosophers, or monarchs – who might make for-
giveness of a high-status male more palatable by commanding it. Acts of
true interpersonal forgiveness take place, though with differing dramatic

26
Among the many discussions of the term, note Bremer, Hamartia: Tragic Error in the “Poetics”
of Aristotle and in Greek Tragedy (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1969), p. 45: “On the whole
the hamart-words seldom indicate an intellectual misconception, a wrong idea as such; they
denote an action which is derived from such a misconception.”
27
Beliore, Murder among Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000), argues that harm or intended harm to one’s philoi is a central char-
acteristic of Greek tragedy, occurring in almost all the extant plays.
28
Menander followed the lead of Euripides; cf. Satyrus, Vita Euripidis, P.Oxy. 1176, fr. 39,
col. vii. 1–22 (Arrighetti, Vita di Euripide: Satiro [Pisa: Liberia Goliardica, 1964]): “[Husband]
against wife, father against son, servant against master, changes of fortunes, violence against
virgins, exposure of children, recognitions through rings and necklaces – all these things are
the substance of New Comedy, which Euripides had perfected.”
29
For hamartia/hamartēma in Menander, see Barigazzi, La formazione spirituale di Menandro
(Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1965), esp. pp. 148–50, and Anderson, “Knemon’s hamar-
tia,” Greece & Rome 17 (1970): 199–217. Cf. Men. fr. 452 Kassel-Austin, “Making mistakes
( ξαμαρτάνεɩν) is innate to all and commonplace, but undoing the mistake (μαρτɩ́αν) is
characteristic not of an ordinary man, but an extraordinary one”; Mon. 390 Jaekel, “Making
no mistake toward friends/family members is a beautiful thing” (καλν τ μηδ<ν εɩ̓ς φɩ́λoυς
μαρτάνεɩν).
60 Kathryn Gutzwiller

construction depending upon whether the forgiver is male or female.

Males have face-to-face conversations in which one admits error, offering
some explanation for it, and the other voluntarily agrees to reestablish a
friendly relationship. Women, however, must challenge their conventional
social roles in order to claim for themselves free agency, and even so their
acts of forgiveness are played out somewhat obliquely, through conversa-
tion with third parties. While the objective Aristotelian categories of what is
forgivable and what is not often play a role in the discussion, the character
who decides for forgiveness, displaying a superior moral quality, makes this
choice in the messy realm of possible human circumstance. There, rules of
right and wrong, the forgivable and the unforgivable, may bend or yield to
feelings of love, to bonds of gratitude or a sense of duty, to sellessness or
unusual decency.30 For women these motivations are supplemented by the
demands of social needs. Menander shows us that the place in society in
which forgiveness must start is the family, through the many threads of con-
nection that make it possible and necessary there, and he shows us the great
beneits that accrue to the oikos from foregoing revenge in favor of volun-
tary reconciliation.
Menander’s focus on the error and forgiveness of a male authority igure
was perhaps innovative even within contemporary social comedy.31 A recur-
ring feature of New Comic plots was a hamartia committed by a young man
against a young woman, typically a rape. As we have seen from tragedy, the
appropriateness of forgiveness for actions compelled by youthful passion
was an idea present already in the ifth century. A fragment of Philippides
evokes a standard scene of forgiveness presupposed by a number of surviv-
ing passages from New Comedy only to reject it (fr. 27 Kassel-Austin, Poetae
Comici Graeci):32
o%κ 1στɩν “ μεθύσθην, πάτερ” λέγoντα
“$μαρτoν,” †=στε πρς σέ με† συγγνώμης τυχεɩ̑ν.
' γ&ρ ε?ς τν σθενη̑ βɩ́α̜ τɩ, Πάμφɩλε,
πoɩBν %βρɩ́ζεɩν, o%χ μαρτάνεɩν δoκεɩ̑.

It is not possible to obtain forgiveness by saying “I was drunk, father, I made a mis-
take.” For the person who acts with force against the weak, Pamphilus, seems to do
violence, not just to commit error.

30
Cf. Men. Sam. 81–83, where Chrysis says of Demeas, ρα̑ɩ . . . κκει̑νoς κακω̑ ς . . . τoυ̑τo δ’ ε?ς
δɩαλλαγ&ς "γεɩ τάχɩστα καɩ̀ τν 3ργɩλώτατoν (“he’s crazy in love. . . . And this very quickly brings
even the angriest man to reconciliation”).
31
See Zagagi, The Comedy of Menander: Convention, Variation and Originality (London: Duckworth,
1994), for Menander’s adaptations of comic convention.
32
Cf. Plaut. Aul. 738–52, where Lyconides confesses to Euclio the sin of raping his daugh-
ter and asks for pardon, and Ter. Haut. 1049–59 (based on Menander’s play of the same
title), where a son asks and receives forgiveness from his father for taking a courtesan as a
mistress.
 All in the Family 61

The speaker here makes a distinction between hubris, which involves a cal-
culated choice to do harm and so is not forgivable, and hamartia, which is
typically motivated by some emotional or psychological impairment, such
as “drunkenness, erotic passion, or misapprehension arising from the deed
happening during darkness or night” (Dem. Or. 21.38). Young men who
rape young women were commonly assumed to be behaving under the
inluence of drink and desire, and so could be forgiven, and many of the
plots of New Comedy, as indicated by fragments of Greek plays and extant
Roman comedies, turn on such actions. In these plays, as suggested in the
Philippides fragment, the person who potentially forgives is not the actual
victim, but a third party, such as the youth’s father or the girl’s kurios (legal
guardian).33 Menander, however, constructs his plots, at least those sufi-
ciently known, so that perpetrators of a much broader range of hamartiai
admit wrongdoing and repent in scenes that lead to interpersonal recon-
ciliation as the conclusion of the play. While repentance resulting in rec-
onciliation between family members is Menander’s central mechanism
for establishing ongoing stability within the oikos, forgiveness is typically
depicted in his plays as more useful for repairing social relationships than
for healing emotional bonds. His foreshadowing of the future thus has a
dark edge that makes his comedies all the more accurate in depicting the
messy reality of family life.
The Dyscolus (The Grouch), Menander’s irst play, offers a kind of prelim-
inary version of this plot type. Sostratus is constructed against the stereo-
type of the passionate young man who seizes an opportunity to have his
way with an unguarded virgin. In the irst scene, he appears to utter his
confession of rape ($μαρτoν, 75) – only to explain instead that he made a
mistake in sending a slave to speak to the girl’s father about marriage when
he should have gone himself. Menander here teases the audience with his
delection of the typical plot line. In the second act, the girl’s half brother
Gorgias brings his assumptions about rich urban youths to his accusation
that Sostratus intends to persuade a free virgin “to do wrong” ( ξαμαρτεɩ̑ν,
290). Sostratus’s intention to marry her is quickly revealed, however, and
Gorgias joins with Sostratus in combating the true obstacle for the romance,
the disagreeable Cnemon, who keeps his daughter from marriage because
of his extreme distrust of other human beings.
It is this Cnemon, an independently minded Athenian farmer, who com-
mits the central moral failing of misanthropy, for which he may or may not
be forgiven. In the prologue, the audience learns of the character faults

33
In Terence’s Eunuchus, based on Menander’s Eunuchus, a youth is forgiven for raping a vir-
gin by the hetaira Thais, who is acting as the girl’s guardian; here the young man’s excuse
is not drink but love (872–81), and when he realizes that the girl who was thought to be a
slave, and so fair game for assault, is in fact a citizen’s daughter, he agrees to marry her; cf.
Ad. 683–95.
62 Kathryn Gutzwiller

that produce Cnemon’s error and inds out that Pan and the Nymphs have
brought Sostratus to this rural place in order to beneit the girl who tends
their shrine assiduously. In the fourth act, when Cnemon has been rescued
by Gorgias from a well into which he had fallen, he makes a speech in
which he admits his mistake ($μαρτoν, 713) and offers as explanation his
earlier faulty philosophy of life. In this misguided view, he believed that it
was possible to live entirely self-suficiently, without the aid of other human
beings. He acquired this belief through his observation that people looked
only to proit and were never “kindly disposed” (εCνoυν, 720) to others.
Now, however, the unselish deed of Gorgias, a “most noble man” (723),
has taught him otherwise. Cnemon’s speech shows that the redemptive
power of Gorgias’s action lies in the fact that it constitutes a reversal of the
traditional Greek moral code. Cnemon had acted toward his stepson with
sustained hostility, not allowing him to approach his door, never helping
him in any way, not even addressing him or conducting a casual conversa-
tion with him. That Cnemon’s abhorrence of human company is directed
not just to strangers but even to close family members goes a long way
toward blocking audience sympathy for him. As Pan tells us in the pro-
logue, his quarrels with his wife were so bitter she inally left him, and the
god’s history of the family suggests that Gorgias was quite young when he
left Cnemon’s home, where he had lived from infancy, in order to farm his
own plot. Despite all that, Gorgias came without hesitation to Cnemon’s
aid. The old man points out that another person, a more ordinary individ-
ual, would have refused to help on the basis that like treatment should be
given for like. This commonplace code of behavior is, in fact, exempliied
by the cook, a low-class character who refuses to participate in the rescue,
citing Cnemon’s fall as the just “revenge” of the Nymphs (τετɩμωρημέναɩ,
643) for the old man’s rudeness to him in refusing to lend cookware. In the
prologue, which is somewhat reminiscent of Aphrodite’s prologue in the
Hippolytus, Pan speaks of the Nymphs’ concern for Cnemon’s pious daugh-
ter but says nothing of revenge against Cnemon. Even the vengeful deities
of Euripidean tragedy are converted by Menander into kindly gods who
reward the good.
In a variety of ways Menander calls attention to his plot innovations
in the Dyscolus. The typical young man in need of forgiveness – or simple
excusing – because of some passionate indiscretion is absent here, replaced
by a male head of household who admits that his core philosophy of life
has been mistaken and who attempts to make amends to his philoi by giving
his daughter a dowry and turning half of his property over to his stepson
to administer. What is missing from this apparent scene of interpersonal
forgiveness is forgiveness itself, since Cnemon does not expressly ask for
it and Gorgias does not expressly give it. The absence of forgiveness per
se its with the character of both father and stepson as well as their lack of
affection for each other. Cnemon openly admits his intellectual mistake
 All in the Family 63

in thinking that a person could live with complete self-suficiency in need

of no one, but he does not admit or seem to understand his ethical mis-
take, that is, how his social hostility harms his family. Gorgias has certain
characteristics of Aristotle’s “greathearted” individual, although as a poor
man without status or honors he does not it the philosopher’s ideal of
that individual.34 For Aristotle, the “greathearted” person never asks help
from others or does so only with reluctance, although he gives aid enthu-
siastically (EN 1124b17–18).35 So here Gorgias responds immediately for
the call to help Cnemon but later is persuaded only with dificulty to marry
Sostratus’s sister and become part of their wealthy family. The greathearted
person also never bears a grudge and overlooks the wrongs done him (EN
1125a3–5). Although Gorgias, like his mother and his half sister, has been
harmed by Cnemon’s disagreeableness, he shows no resentment or desire
for revenge, so that he has no need to forgive Cnemon. Gorgias’s lack of
anger seems partly a product of his acknowledged nobility (γεννɩκν τD̑
τρόπD, 321; νδρς ε%γενεστάτoυ, 723) and partly a result of his identiica-
tion with his stepfather’s way of life, perhaps acquired during his early years
in Cnemon’s household. Earlier in the play he hints at a sympathetic under-
standing of the old man’s character when he warns Sostratus that a poor
man wronged by those of greater means can develop extreme ill temper
(δυσκoλώτατo[ν, 296). Even so, his unhesitating act of rescue is designed
to show the possibility of acquiring nobility from such an isolated life of
hard work; in this play much concerned with the virtue of philanthropia
(cf. 105, 573), he represents the philanthropic counterpart to the misan-
thropic Cnemon. His rescue is pure altruism, or perhaps duty, not driven
by any affection for his stepfather. Cnemon’s lack of loving conduct toward
his family lies at the root of the harm he does and consequently inhibits
the completion of the forgiveness ritual, with emotional bonding. While
Cnemon’s conciliatory gesture of turning over his property goes a long
way toward restoring family stability, his failure to ask for forgiveness leaves
revenge as an option for resolution of the plot.
In the inal scene, the slave Getas and the cook exact their vengeance
on Cnemon (τɩμωρɩ́αν, 891), despite his weakened condition from injur-
ies. Their opportunity arises because the old man adamantly refuses to
attend the marriages of his daughter to Sostratus and of Sostratus’s sister
to Gorgias that are taking place in the nearby cave of Pan. As a result, they
think up the scheme of reenacting the borrowing scene when Cnemon
insulted the cook. They bring the old man forcibly on stage, and again
and again torment him by demanding to borrow crockery from his house.
The inal indignity is forcing him to dance. The close of the comedy has

34
In the Aspis the heroic and unselish Cleostratus, who is thought to have been killed in war,
is speciically designated “greathearted” (τ6ν ψυχ6ν μέγας, 17).
35
Cf. Konstan’s chapter in this volume.
64 Kathryn Gutzwiller

an unsettling effect because the audience members may ind themselves

drawn into the pleasure of revenge against an incompletely repentant
character who is yet pitiable because of his age and injured condition.
In this early play of Menander, which sets a pattern for later plays, a male
authority igure admits wrong and offers recompense but stops short of
requesting forgiveness, which would start a process of healing among
philoi. Cnemon’s recognition of his hamartia is based on his new under-
standing of how human beings should treat others, but he yet fails to com-
prehend the harm he has done to his family. The ritual of forgiveness is
incomplete, and revenge closes the play.36 The audience is left wondering
whether Cnemon’s forced integration into the new household can possibly
lead to happiness for all.
The Samia (Samian Woman) is a second Menandrian play in which a
father and son confront each other in a scene involving a choice between
revenge and forgiveness. David Konstan, in his contribution to this volume,
has reviewed the various conciliatory acts in this play, and therefore my dis-
cussion will focus on what has seemed to some its extraneous ifth act, where
Demeas and his adopted son Moschion explore and heal their relationship
as philoi. The main plot has reached resolution by the end of the fourth
act, where Niceratus agrees for Moschion to marry his daughter Plangon
and Demeas recognizes that his concubine Chrysis is not the mother of
Moschion’s child. The ifth act shows us, however, that the hamartia central
to the plot is not Moschion’s violation of Plangon, to which he confesses in
the prologue (5μάρτηκα, 3; cf. 646–47). This is the typical crime of comic
neaniai, “young men,” committed under the inluence of passion and wine;
falling squarely into the category of forgivable hamartia, it does not create
moral issues having signiicant dramatic effect. The more important error
is the one that the audience observes taking place during the play itself –
Demeas’s mistaken assumption that Moschion has conceived a child with
Chrysis. Moschion’s moral iber is put into question not so much by the
rape or seduction of Niceratus’s daughter as by his dificulty in forgiving

36
Menander’s most thoroughly wicked old man is Smicrines in the Aspis, who insists on marry-
ing his young niece in order to get her inheritance. He even asks a slave at one point (205),
“Do you think I’m making a mistake [μαρτάνεɩν],” or, if an alternate reading is preferred,
“lack sympathetic feeling [γνωμoνεν, P.Oxy. 4094].” Since the second half of this play is
lost, it is unknown whether he found some kind of redemption or suffered punishment; a
likely supplement to a battered line suggests that the clever slave Daos is planning revenge
(τɩμωρɩ́]αν, 369). Two fragments of Menander in which a character argues for revenge as the
best method to stop injustice (frs. 766, 771 Kassel-Austin) indicate the possibility of revenge
endings in yet other plays; cf. Plaut. Bacch. 1187. A comic inversion of the revenge motif
occurs in the Misumenus when the pathetic soldier Thrasonides accuses Crateia of deserting
him as “revenge” for all the good treatment she received at his hands (805, as printed from
P.Oxy. 2656 and 3967 in Arnott’s Loeb edition, 1979–2000). Note, too, that in Terence’s
Heautontimorumenus a father repents having driven his son into mercenary service and pun-
ishes himself by adopting the harsh life of a farmer.
 All in the Family 65

Demeas’s mistaken assumption.37 In the opening prologue, Moschion

delineates Demeas’s character (τρόπoν, 6), as he recounts the kindness
his adoptive father has shown him by rearing him in comfortable circum-
stances and even with indulgence. The play throughout exhibits Demeas’s
basic gentleness,38 and only in the third act when convinced that he has
been betrayed by the two people he loves the most – his concubine and his
son – does Demeas react with anger. As soon as Moschion inds the courage
to confess the rape and so reveal the child’s true parentage, Demeas imme-
diately turns his attention to helping his son win over Niceratus to the mar-
riage and Chrysis to escape Niceratus’s irate attack on the baby.
It comes as a surprise, then, that at the beginning of the inal act Moschion
appears alone on the stage to announce his anger at his father. At irst, he
says, he was quite happy to be free of the mistaken accusation and to have
met with good fortune (ε%τύχημ’, 618, a metaliterary reference to the play’s
peripeteia, or change from bad to good fortune).39 Upon relection, he grew
quite beside himself with resentment at his father for believing he had com-
mitted such a wrong (5μαρτηκέναɩ, 622). If he were not so in love with his
bride, he says, he would leave Athens and take up mercenary service in
Bactria or Caria, so that his father could not ever again falsely accuse him.
Even though Eros prevents that braver course, he will demonstrate that he
is not weak or ignoble by announcing his departure and so frightening his
father. The purpose of the ruse is to prevent Demeas from treating him in
such an unfeeling way in the future (μηθ<ν εFς μ’ γνωμoνεɩν̑ , 637). This is
strong language, suggesting that Demeas lacks any forgiving indulgence for
his impetuous son (like the gods in the Trachiniae), and the irrationality of
Moschion’s angry account, complete with imagined future wrongs, points
to his immaturity and perhaps a more basic weakness of character. The
young man’s concern that ignoring this slight creates vulnerability paints
his ruse as a mild form of timōria, designed to hurt his father.40

37
Lape, Reproducing Athens: Menander’s Comedy, Democratic Culture, and the Hellenistic City (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 142–45, points out that Moschion is the only youth in
extant comedy to express remorse for sexual adventure and argues that his encounter with
Plangon was seduction, not rape. Moschion may, however, have been eliding the forcefulness
of his actions to whitewash his behavior. In any case, in Greek society the social consequences
for the girl were the same and, it seems, the legal consequences for the male lover were also
the same, whether he was caught with a married or unmarried woman and whether his actions
were rape or seduction; see Cohen, Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in
Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 98–132.
38
Pointed out by Niceratus: 1στ’ κεɩ ̑νoς 5δύς (412). Aristotle asserts (EN 1125b33–1126a3)
that the gentle person is normally placid and unemotional but can be driven to anger; he is
not vengeful (τɩμωρητɩκός), but forgiving (συγγνωμoνɩκός).
39
For the critical terminology of drama in Menander’s prologues, see Gutzwiller, “The
Tragic Mask of Comedy: Metatheatricality in Menander,” Classical Antiquity 19 (2000),
pp. 115–17.
40
The ifth act thus its the revenge pattern in the last act of the Dyscolus (and possibly the
Aspis), except that it is derailed and shown to be unworthy of its instigator.
66 Kathryn Gutzwiller

Moschion’s desire for revenge against a loving father is sadly out of

place in late fourth-century comedy.41 When Demeas appears on stage and
sees Moschion equipped for the journey, he makes no frightened plea as
expected but immediately points out his son’s mistake in moral judgment:
feelings of hurt and anger are understandable, but Moschion is overlook-
ing an essential point – the person to whom his bitterness is directed.
“I am your father” (698), says Demeas, and he makes the further point
that this relationship of philia was voluntary, since he chose Moschion as
his legally adopted child. Whatever pleasure Moschion has experienced in
his life, Demeas has provided, and so he ought to endure the pain caused
by his father “as would a son” (Gς Hν Iόν, 702). The argument here is not
based simply on a son’s duty to respect his father but on reciprocation for
the affection shown by Demeas’s caring nurturance. Since we hear noth-
ing of an earlier marriage and Chrysis came into Demeas’s life only after
Moschion reached adulthood, it appears that Demeas raised Moschion as a
single parent. Demeas admits that his earlier accusation of betrayal against
his son was unjust and offers a full admission of error: “I didn’t know, I
made a mistake, I was deluded” (Jγνόησ’, $μαρτoν, μάνην, 703). Demeas’s
own strength of character comes through, however, in his failure to offer
the available exculpatory explanations, namely, that his mistake was under-
standable, given what he knew, and that his anger was so intense because of
his love for the two people who had apparently betrayed him. Instead, he
makes a comparison between his own earlier behavior and Moschion’s cur-
rent actions, based on the caring concern each has shown the other. When
he mistakenly thought Moschion had wronged him, he kept it to himself to
avoid giving their enemies cause to rejoice; Moschion, however, is making
Demeas’s hamartia evident to the world. This error should be overlooked
not just because they are father and son but also because Demeas does not
deserve punishment. The many days of love and care he gave his son should
far outweigh the one day on which he faltered.42 The rightness of this argu-
ment is so self-evident that Moschion is scarcely given a chance to respond
before his bride is ushered outside for the celebration of the nuptials.

41
In “Assuaging Rage: Remorse, Repentance and Forgiveness in the Classical World,” Phoenix
62 (2008), pp. 253–54 (cf. Konstan in this volume), and “El derecho de enfadarse: Un
patrón narrativo en la comedia clásica,” in IV Jornadas Filológicas: aproximaciones interdiscipli-
narias a la antigüedad griega y latina, in Memoriam Gretel Wernher, ed. von der Walde and Rojas
(Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes, 2010), pp. 39–57, Konstan argues that Moschion’s anger is a
sign of his self-assertion as an adult male who has suffered an insult and that Demeas’s apol-
ogy provides recognition of his son’s readiness to form his own household. It seems to me,
however, that within the dynamic of the play, Moschion’s ethical stature is diminished rather
than increased by the exchange.
42
Cf. Aristotle’s Rhetoric 1374b15–16, where fairness (epieikeia) is deined, in part, as looking
not to the sort of person someone is now but to the sort of person someone has been, always
or generally.
 All in the Family 67

As in the Dyscolus, the male authority igure who admits to doing wrong
fails to articulate a request for forgiveness or to receive an explicit statement
of forgiveness. While Gorgias’s lack of anger and Cnemon’s resistance to com-
plete reconciliation with his philoi disrupt the forgiveness ritual, in the Samia
Demeas makes it clear that formal forgiveness is unnecessary. The reason is
that the fatherly love he has shown Moschion, continuously over many years
and just now when in the throes of anger and hurt, ought to exempt him
from the humiliation of asking his son for forgiveness. Moschion’s resent-
ment and attempt to bring him to heel is the true mistake here, because it has
the potential to disrupt Demeas’s gift of love to his adopted son. Menander’s
Samia suggests that forgiveness is to be granted not simply on the basis of
subtle distinctions about kinds of ignorance or youthful impulses driven by
passion but by allowing affection to outweigh hurtful slights and by measur-
ing human failings against the totality of a person’s life. Within the family, the
best forgiveness may be, then, silent forgiveness, the forgiveness that need
not be spoken. Moschion has lost his chance to demonstrate that he has the
nobility of soul to love and to forgive in this unselish way.
In both the Dyscolus and the Samia, the happy ending occurs when a
father and son (actually, stepson or adopted son) enact some permutation
of the forgiveness ritual; for freeborn males to admit wrongdoing and be
forgiven by a woman was far more innovative, because it was more threaten-
ing to traditional morality. In the stereotypic comic plot in which a young
man rapes a virgin, the victim never has an opportunity to confront her
attacker and to decide whether to forgive.43 The usual offer to make amends
through marriage, addressed to the victim’s parent or guardian, is not just
an admission of moral failing but also an offer of recompense, in line with
the old revenge formula. Although the playwright of the Samia could have
chosen to tell the audience that Moschion won Plangon’s forgiveness and
affection in the months during their fathers’ absence, no such information
is provided in either the prologue or any other extant portion of the play.
Likewise, Chrysis, a noble and self-sacriicing igure who yet has many of the
stock characteristics of the hetaira, is not given any active role in the recon-
ciliations depicted in the Samia. Through Demeas’s false assumption about
the child’s parentage and his consequent fury, she suffers an even greater
indignity than Moschion, because she is driven from her home to make her
livelihood as an ordinary hetaira. This scene, chosen for representation in a
mosaic at Mytilene,44 clearly had an emotional impact on the audience, and

43
On silence as a virtue for women, see McClure, Spoken like a Woman: Speech and Gender in
Athenian Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 19–24; Foley, Female Acts,
p. 91; and Traill, Women and the Comic Plot in Menander (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), pp. 134–35.
44
Charitonidis, Kahil, and Ginouvès, Les Mosaïques de la maison du Ménandre à Mytilène (Antike
Kunst, Beiheft 6, 1970), pp. 38–41, pl. 4.1.
68 Kathryn Gutzwiller

the title of the play may indicate sympathetic engagement with the Samian.
Even so, when Demeas realizes his mistake and again shelters her as a family
member, her social status as a noncitizen woman eliminates any need for
Demeas to offer apology or ask forgiveness. Her motivations for return to
his household are left unspoken, so that the audience is free to assume eco-
nomic security rather than affection is at play. In two comedies, however,
Menander does depict women as free moral agents deciding to reconcile
with a husband or lover. In each case the playwright creates this possibility
of agency by placing the woman in a (temporarily) liminal position that is
economically and socially dangerous but ethically empowering. While these
scenarios suggest that forgiveness of a male head of household by a woman
was not the norm in late classical Greek society, the depiction of it never-
theless foreshadows the future importance of forgiveness in interpersonal
relationships, even romantic ones between men and women.
In the Periceiromene (Woman with Shorn Hair), the central hamartia is the
jealous attack of the soldier Polemon on his mistress Glycera. To punish
her for a perceived attempt at inidelity, he cuts off her hair. The goddess
Agnoia (Misapprehension), who speaks the prologue, sets up his violent
abuse as forgivable by explaining that she – that is, his ignorance that
Glycera submitted to Moschion’s embrace because he was her lost brother –
has brought Polemon to a state of anger that is not part of his nature in
order for Glycera and Moschion to ind their birth family. Agnoia, a per-
soniied and deiied element of the dramatic plot, that is, the ignorance
that facilitates the hamartia, constructs Polemon’s actions as conforming
to Aristotle’s category of a hamartēma, an action that takes place through
ignorance, and lies between an atuchēma, which incurs no penalty, and an
adikēma, which may belong to the category of not forgivable behavior (EN
1135b11–1136a9).45 Agnoia’s excusing of Polemon’s action is dramatically
necessary because in the lost opening scene Polemon’s slave Sosias accused
Glycera of encouraging a lover’s embrace.46 Although much about how this
was staged remains unknown, Polemon surely exploded with anger and

45
Fortenbaugh, “Menander’s Perikeiromene: Misfortune, Vehemence, and Polemon,” Phoenix
28 (1974): 430–43, discusses Polemon’s culpability in Aristotelian terms. In my view, he
places too much emphasis on Agnoia as a divine agent who compels Polemon and fails to
take account of the shock value of the opening scene, which probably ended with Polemon
preparing his angry attack on Glycera.
46
We know this from Agnoia’s reference to the prior action (157–62) and two artistic illustra-
tions of the scene. In a badly damaged wall painting in Ephesus (Strocka, Die Wandmalerei der
Hanghaüser in Ephesus [Vienna: Verlag der Österreichisches Akademie der Wissenschaften,
1977], pp. 48, 55–56, pl. 66) and in a new mosaic found near Antioch (Çelik, “Yukari Harbiye
mozaik kurtarma kazisi [Perikeiromene, Philadelphoi, Syaristosai, Theophorosmene],” in
17. Müze Çalişmalari ve Kurtarma Kazilari Sempozyumu [28 Nisan–1 Mayis 2008, Side] [Ankara:
Kültür ve Turizm Bakanliği Dösimm Basimevi, 2009], p. 43, ig. 5), an unhappy Polemon is
seated in the center with a igure to be identiied as Sosias to the right, pointing an accusing
inger at a distressed Glycera, whose hair is still intact beneath the robe pulled over her head.
 All in the Family 69

punished Glycera by shearing her hair, an act apparently carried out off-
stage during the prologue. A settled habit of impetuous reaction, devel-
oped through his career as a soldier (σoβαρς . . . καɩ̀ πoλεμɩκός, 172), has
here been misapplied to a domestic situation, in which his strong love for
Glycera manifests itself as jealous violence. As Agnoia makes clear, his abuse
was designed to shock and disgust the audience (167–68), so that her divine
intervention is necessary to create some sympathetic tolerance of Polemon.
In fact, though, the audience’s sympathy has been irmly established with
the noble Glycera, who keeps silent about Moschion being her brother in
order to protect the high status he has gained through his adoptive family.
As a female character, Glycera is given an unusual opportunity to func-
tion as a free moral agent. Menander constructs a dual social position for
her, somewhere between the nonslave hetaira/concubine she appears to be
and the daughter of a citizen she will be discovered to be. As such she has
both the license to live with whom she pleases and the virtuous character
typical of Menander’s freeborn women.47 When Polemon launches his raid
against the neighboring house where Glycera has taken refuge, he justi-
ies his pseudomilitary action by explaining to his friend Pataecus (later
found to be Glycera’s father) that he has considered Glycera his “wedded
wife” (γαμετ6ν γυναɩ̑κα, 487; cf. 489) and that Moschion has unjustly acted
as an adulterer. This is how the situation feels to Polemon, but Pataecus
explains how it actually is. Once Glycera perhaps liked him but now does
not, and she has left him because he used her badly. She cannot be forced
to return because she is her own mistress (kuria, 497). Under these circum-
stances, the only option for a man suffering from love is persuasion. Perhaps
Moschion’s adikēma (503) merits a legal suit, but Polemon has no standing
to exact physical revenge (τɩμωρɩ́αν, 503). In his misery, half admitting that
he wronged Glycera ( γώ . . . εF τɩ πωπoτ’ Jδɩ́κηχ’ :λως, 514),48 Polemon begs
Pataecus to take up the job of ambassador, to persuade Glycera to return.
His words bring him close to agreeing with Glycera’s maid, who laments
that her mistress has been “unjustly treated” (Gς "δɩκα πάσχεɩς, 188) and
levels the accusation that Polemon enjoyed making Glycera cry. By acknow-
ledging that he has not treated Glycera as one would a beloved wife deserv-
ing of respect and trust from long familiarity (cf. Eur. Med. 870–71, cited
earlier), Polemon takes the irst step in demonstrating the remorse neces-
sary for forgiveness.
The scene in act 4 in which Pataecus attempts to persuade Glycera to
return to Polemon provides our best insight into her character. She begins

As with other depictions of Menander’s plays, the scene chosen is the one with the most dra-
matic impact, and that scene is often, as here, the one that provides the play’s title.
47
Lape, Reproducing Athens, pp. 34–35; Traill, Women and the Comic Plot, pp. 155–56.
48
Cf. Callim. AP 12.118 = 8 Gow-Page = 42 Pfeiffer, where the lover admits to a possible adikēma
and asks his beloved boy to “excuse” (the verb is Kν) his rash wooing, because it was com-
pelled by the force of wine and passion.
70 Kathryn Gutzwiller

by dispelling any illusion that she led to Myrrhine’s house in order to

become Moschion’s lover (still concealing their sibling relationship) and
chastises Pataecus for believing her capable of that. As she redeems her-
self from any charge of typical hetaira behavior, she also explains her sense
of outrage at the treatment she received from Polemon. She considers
his action hubris (Iβρɩζέτω, 723),49 and when Pataecus tries to soften her
judgment (“nothing so dreadful happened,” 723–24), she counters, if we
accept a likely supplement, by calling Polemon’s action “unholy, such as
one would not even do to a little slave girl” (724–25). Her request that
Pataecus retrieve her birth tokens from the soldier’s house (the basis for
the recognition a few lines later) leads to Pataecus’s conclusion that she
has utterly “rejected the man” ([πέγν]ωκας . . . τν "νθρωπoν, 745–46), a
choice of vocabulary, if the supplement is correct, signaling that sungnōmē
is now out of the question. Glycera shows herself unwilling to continue in a
relationship where love may manifest itself as jealous violence and superi-
cial tokens of commitment, such as the clothing and jewelry that Polemon
has so proudly given her, substitute for trust and understanding. While a
husband who caught his wife in adultery could divorce her but was not
permitted to abuse her physically, Glycera’s position as her own kuria gives
her the possibility of insisting on treatment that accords not with her pre-
sent status as a woman without a guardian but with the emotional bond
established by her quasi-marital relationship with Polemon. If his affection
for her is like that for a “wedded wife,” then he should have extended her
some indulgence, even sympathetic understanding (sungnōmē), instead of
violent acts of timōria.
In insisting on this type of respect, she runs a great risk, because she has
no means of support and chances falling into the dificult life of a hetaira.
The happy discovery that Pataecus is her father eliminates the danger and
facilitates the reconciliation with Polemon. Unfortunately, a signiicant loss
of text in the fourth and ifth acts prevents us from knowing exactly how
Glycera’s change of heart took place. She does not come face to face with
Polemon from the opening scene until the inal one in which Pataecus
hands her over as his newly discovered daughter and promises a dowry for
the wedding. As Pataecus enters the stage with Glycera, he quotes her just
spoken words – “I will now be reconciled” (νυ̑ν δɩαλλαχθήσoμαɩ, 1006) – and
then commends his daughter for reconciling at a time of good fortune,
since “it is a mark of Greek character to accept a just return” (1007–8).
For the audience, her decision to reconcile is acceptable dramatically
because they have just seen Polemon remorseful, in despair over the loss of
his beloved. In a conversation with the maid before Pataecus and Glycera

49
Cf. Philippides fr. 27 (quoted earlier), where hubris is deined as “doing something
to the weak by force”; on the general unforgivability of hubris, see Metzler, Begriff des
Verzeihens, p. 57.
 All in the Family 71

appear, Polemon melodramatically threatens suicide. Acknowledging that

he was utterly mistaken in his assumptions and that she kissed a brother,
not a lover, he condemns himself as a vengeful spirit (λάστωρ, 986) and
a violently jealous person (ζηλότυπoς, 987), who insulted Glycera as in a
drunken rage ( παρώɩνoυν, 988).50 When Pataecus has handed over Glycera
as wife, he asks Polemon to give up his soldiering and the impetuous spirit it
fosters, and Polemon eagerly agrees. Declaring that he inds Glycera blame-
less, he speaks to her directly with a plea for forgiveness (1020): “Just be
reconciled, my darling” (δɩαλλάγηθɩ, φɩλτάτη, μόνoν). Glycera’s response is,
however, surprisingly formal (1021–23): “[I agree to reconcile] because
your outrage [τ σν πάρoɩνoν] has now become the beginning of good
things for us. . . . For that reason you have met with forgiveness [συγγνώμης
τετύχηκα[ς].”51 Here we have a complete forgiveness formula with a request
made and granted, but Glycera’s explanation for accepting reconciliation is
not the usual statement of sympathetic understanding through recognition
of human capacity to err; nor, alternatively, is it obviously motivated by a
previous bond of love. Her forgiveness is rather based on a culturally man-
dated benevolence stemming from her good fortune.52
Not coincidentally, her choice also brings the social advantage of estab-
lishing her as a citizen wife who has had only one sexual partner. Although
Glycera echoes Agnoia’s earlier declaration that Polemon’s anger was con-
trived to effect the family reunion of Pataecus with his children, her words
nevertheless suggest that she still feels the sting of her lover’s abuse, since
the phrase τ σν πάρoɩνoν shows that she continues to view his actions as
hubris. If her social position as an honorable citizen wife is secured by this
reconciliation, her emotional bond with Polemon has not yet mended. As
Demeas made it clear to Moschion in the Samia that love obviates the need

50
Fantham, “ΖΗΛΟΤΥΠΙΑ,” Phoenix 40 (1986): 45–57, has shown the violent nature of sexual
jealousy in Greek culture; see, however, Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in
Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), pp. 219–43,
who argues that the ancient concept of romantic jealousy and the modern one are signii-
cantly different.
51
A second hand on the papyrus indicates that the lines are spoken by Glycera, but Sandbach,
Menandri reliquiae selectae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) grants them to Pataecus, to avoid
a fourth speaking part in the scene; see the arguments in Gomme and Sandbach, eds.,
Menander: A Commentary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), ad 1006ff.; cf. Traill, Women
and the Comic Plot, p. 153, n. 56. Other scholars, however, favor Glycera as the speaker: see
Brown, “The End of Menander’s Perikeiromene,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 21
(1974): 43–54 (though with hesitation); Lamagna, Menandro: La Fanciulla Tosata (Naples:
M. d’Auria, 1994), ad 443–44; Arnott, “Further Notes on Menander’s Perikeiromene,”
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 109 (1995), pp. 29–30, and in his text in Menander
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979–2000); and Lape, Reproducing Athens,
pp. 187–88, n. 47. In my view, the direct address to Glycera indicates that she must speak the
response, as the address to Pataecus in 1024 signals a return to conversation with him.
52
Similarly, Fortenbaugh, “Menander’s Perikeiromene,” p. 441.
72 Kathryn Gutzwiller

for formal forgiveness, so Glycera’s response shows that formal forgiveness

does not necessarily repair violations of love. Part of Menander’s genius
as a poet of social comedy is to celebrate the supericial reconciliation of
a household, while leaving the audience to ponder the emotional cracks
remaining within it.
The Epitrepontes (Arbitrants), which ends with a reconciliation between a
young husband and wife, also raises the issue of the role that forgiveness plays
in maintaining bonds of affection within the family. Charisius, after discov-
ering that his wife of ive months has recently exposed a child, has taken up
a life of partying with friends and has hired a hetaira, whose sexual services
he nevertheless scorns. At the moment of greatest misunderstanding, when
it appears that the exposed baby, actually conceived when Pamphile was
raped by Charisius, is the child of Charisius with the hetaira, Habrotonon,
Pamphile’s father presses her to leave her husband. At the beginning of this
scene in act 4, Pamphile establishes her free agency by pointing out that
if Smicrines forces her to leave Charisius, he will no longer be her father
but rather her master. As a wife deserted by her husband and pressed to
divorce him, she, like other Menandrian female characters, occupies a lim-
inal position where she gains freedom of choice, though at extraordinary
risk. Accepting her request to be persuaded, not forced, Smicrines argues
that Charisius will attempt to maintain two households, one for Pamphile
and one for Habrotonon, and that all his attentions will be directed to the
one who (supposedly) mothered his child. Here occurs the much-quoted
line (793–94) “it is dificult for a free woman to ight against a prostitute
[πόρνην].” Smicrines’ motivations are not altogether pure, since he seems
as much concerned to recover his dowry before Charisius squanders it as
he does to protect his daughter’s welfare. Even so, his arguments are logical
ones, given his ignorance of Pamphile’s pregnancy and of Charisius’s lack
of interest in the hetaira. Pamphile refuses, however, in an eloquent speech
that can be seen as an extraordinary act of forgiveness – it is forgiveness
given freely before Charisius has expressed any repentance, and without
any stated belief on her part that his present or predicted behavior deserves
forgiving. She simply points out that she is committed to a common life
with Charisius even if misfortune befalls them. He has indeed stumbled,
but she will endure. She seems to harbor no resentment toward her hus-
band and apparently claims (the papyrus is torn) that her rival, the hetaira,
will ind her well disposed (εCνoυν, 830) to Charisius.53 While in the Samia
the long-standing bond of affection between father and son is shown to call

53
See Sandbach, Menandri reliquiae selectae, p. 350. In EN 1155b32–34 and 1166b30–1167a21,
Aristotle explains that goodwill (eunoia) differs from friendship (philia) or affection (philēsis)
because it consists of friendly feeling that is not reciprocated. Cf. Men. Dysc. 720, where the
adjective is used of Gorgias’s feelings toward Cnemon. In both cases it is a mark of selless
nobility.
 All in the Family 73

for the granting of forgiveness, here Pamphile offers her continuing loy-
alty to Charisius on the formal basis of their marital commitment. Because
citizen women in New Comedy do not openly express feelings of romantic
love, it is unlikely that Menander gave any indication in lost portions of the
play that Pamphile was motivated by affection for Charisius. As a result, she
appears all the more noble. In refusing to leave her husband, she exhibits
the behavior of a virtuous and self-sacriicial wife, who makes herself vulner-
able to a life of degradation, poverty, and loneliness. Menander thus sets up
the audience to consider the consequences of extending forgiveness to one
who remains unrepentant and so undeserving.
Pamphile’s refusal to leave her husband becomes the pivotal point in
the play, the means by which reconciliation occurs.54 Charisius happens
to overhear her conversation with her father and immediately recognizes
that his own behavior falls far below the standard set by his wife. When
he discovered that she had suffered the misfortune of bearing a child out
of wedlock, he offered her no measure of forgiveness (συγγνώμης μέρoς
o%θέν, 897–98), behaving like a pitiless barbarian (βάρβαρoς νηλεής τε,
898–99). To punish him for his arrogant belief that he was without sin ( γώ
τɩς ναμάρτητoς, 908), a divine force, he says, has revealed his human frailty
("νθρωπoς Tν, 912) by showing that he has stumbled in the same manner
as Pamphile. The difference between them is that she was generous to him
whereas he has treated her with disrespect. As a result, he has met with
disaster and is shown to be an unthinking brute (σκαɩς γνωμών τ’, 918).
Although this speech is a monologue and not addressed to Pamphile, it
has many of the elements of the classic request for forgiveness (confession
of hamartia, recognition of error as the human condition, repentance, and
even the association of forgiveness with a Hellenic character). The basis
for Charisius’s repentance, however, takes the unusual form of recogniz-
ing Pamphile’s greater capacity for sympathetic understanding, so that
the audience is asked to compare the moral qualities of the two. Whether
Charisius truly overcomes his blindness to his own lawed character has
been debated by scholars. Konstan has argued that an ancient audience
would have accepted his equation of Pamphile’s “involuntary misfortune”
(κoύσɩoν τύχημα, 914) with his own misstep on his stated grounds that
each had become the parent of a bastard, or noncitizen child, and each in
that respect had a comparable misfortune.55
Charisius’s comparison is certainly logical within the conventions of
Athenian society, since premarital pregnancy would normally disqualify a
woman for marriage and a young man’s rape of a virgin fell within the
range of forgivable error. In my reading of the plays, however, Menander

54
In the ifth act, the slave Onesimus refers to a reconciliation that has taken place between
the spouses (δɩαλλαγ&ς λύσεɩς τ’, 1109), apparently offstage.
55
Konstan, Greek Comedy and Ideology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 145–48.
74 Kathryn Gutzwiller

consistently raises moral challenges to social convention and so colors his

concluding reconciliations darkly (as does Terence in his Menandrian
adaptations). Many in the audience would, in all likelihood, have recog-
nized from their experience in the lawcourts the rhetorical trick of obscur-
ing the difference between atuchēma and hamartēma.56 The hamartēma of
committing rape may be forgivable, but even to consider forgiving the mis-
fortune of suffering rape, by renaming it in terms of its consequence – giv-
ing birth to a bastard – and so to equate it with the “like” consequence of
committing rape, shows that the forgiver has not fully mastered the art of
“critical judgment,” the concept of what is truly fair. Consequently, even in
castigating himself for not affording Pamphile some modicum of forgive-
ness to match her tenderness toward him, Charisius reveals, once again
and even more clearly, his wife’s fundamental moral superiority. Menander
certainly operates within the social rules of fourth-century Athens, but his
dramas acquire much of their enduring interest as literature because he
questions the restrictions of contemporary cultural belief. In his comic
world, as surely in contemporary Athens, forgiveness freely given without
regard to reciprocity or remorse just might work to redeem the wrongdoer
but retains also the possibility of destroying the forgiver.
In criticizing tragedies with double plots in which the ending is happy
for the good characters and unhappy for the bad ones, Aristotle asserts that
the pleasure derived by audiences from such plays is not properly tragic
but comic. He explains: “In that type of play those who are the greatest
enemies in the story, like Orestes and Aegisthus, end up becoming friends
and nobody is killed by anybody” (Po. 1453a36–39). Such plays reverse the
motif of “murder among philoi,” which Aristotle claims is characteristic of
the best tragic plots. If Aristotle’s corresponding discussion of comedy were
preserved for us, we would just possibly ind “forgiveness among philoi” as
the preferred event that turns the plot from bad to good fortune.
In this essay I have sought to identify the capacity to forgive as a cen-
tral ethical concern of Menander’s comedies and to show how that focus
relects ethical trends developing in fourth-century Athenian society.
Individuals surely did sometimes practice forgiveness in earlier Greek cul-
ture, even though the strictures of the archaic moral codes worked against
it. Only from the late ifth century, in the aftermath of Socratic questioning
of traditional morality, did a positive valuation of forgiveness as a “strong”
virtue spread throughout the culture. In tragedy, as we have seen, for con-
ventional women to give or receive forgiveness was relatively unproblem-
atic, while extraordinary women such as Clytemnestra and Medea display
“heroic” behavior by refusing to forgo revenge. The high-status men of tra-
gedy, on the other hand, grant or receive forgiveness only rarely, and even
then under coercion, though the act comes to be explored, particularly by

56
Bremer, Hamartia, p. 50.
 All in the Family 75

Euripides, as a path toward peaceful resolution. Menander, in his remodel-

ing of tragic patterns as comic plots, appears the strongest fourth-century
advocate for forgiveness as a positive good, at least within the family struc-
ture. In some plays forgiveness is shown to be the only morally correct
choice; in the Samia, Demeas’s past kindness requires that Moschion, if he
is to behave ethically, overlook his father’s single mistake. In other plays for-
giveness awarded a person who scarcely deserves it has a redemptive power;
both Charisius in the Epitrepontes and Cnemon in the Dyscolus acknowledge
the effect that forgiving acts have upon them, even if in both instances their
moral limitations point toward dificulties in the future.
Menander’s secluded women ind an opportunity for free agency at a
point of social instability and danger, when they resist the advice of their
fathers in order to make their own choices about forgiving a sexual part-
ner. Glycera in the Periceiromene asserts her freedom to call Polemon’s
abuse of her person unforgivable hubris and listens to his claim of remorse
only when she gains the protection of citizen status (the right to divorce).
Pamphile chooses to accept as a permanent circumstance what appears
to be the alienation of Charisius’s affection, in order to honor and pre-
serve her commitment to their marriage. As many scholars have pointed
out, Menander’s plays are overtly about the social bonds between citizen
men, but it should not be overlooked that in each surviving play the one
most at risk, whether seen or unseen on stage, is a woman. The behav-
ior of some male character(s) must be altered in order to remove these
risks, and this typically involves male confession of error and acceptance of
forgiveness. For high-status men, to engage willingly and intensely in the
reciprocity of forgiveness, to the beneit of women, signals a remarkable
cultural change.
 part iii

FORGIVENESS AMONG THE ROMANS

 5

The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings

Susanna Morton Braund

The purpose of this volume is to seek out and explore what Adam Morton
calls “forgiveness territory.” It is not that dificult to demarcate the general
landscape. For us, forgiveness is located in a cluster of concepts consisting
of pardon, mercy, clemency, indulgence, pity, sympathy, humaneness, and
doubtless others; these concepts are associated with apology, repentance,
remorse, and atonement; they result in remission of punishment or rec-
onciliation or reinstatement; and they occur in the context of the trans-
gression of some kind of code, religious, legal, or moral.1 It is self-evident
that the transgression that gives rise to the opportunity for forgiveness also
provides the possibility of the opposite reaction – of resentment and anger
and the desire to take revenge for the perceived offense. But did this gen-
eral landscape exist in the Roman world?
My aim in this essay is to explore “forgiveness territory” in its Roman ver-
sion, particularly as manifested in the writings of the Stoic philosopher and
imperial tutor Seneca (c. 4 b.c.e.–65 c.e.). To discover what, if anything,
“forgiveness” meant to Seneca it is crucial to understand as fully as possible
the, philosophical, social, political, and literary contexts that shaped his
ideas. It is not adequate to zoom in on a word such as ignoscere, that is often
translated as “to forgive,” and expect to ind easy answers. That much is
demonstrated immediately by considering one of the earliest occurrences
of this verb in Latin literature, in the play Mercator (The Merchant) by the
comic dramatist Plautus, writing in the late third and early second cen-
tury b.c.e. At line 320 a character says humanum amarest, humanum autem
1
Cf. Griswold’s Preface; Morton, “What Is Forgiveness?”; and Morgan, “Mercy, Repentance,
and Forgiveness in Ancient Judaism,” all in this volume. The fullest recent philosoph-
ical account of forgiveness is Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Thanks to Charles Griswold and David Konstan for initiating this excellent project and for
inviting me to participate. Thanks to Hallie Marshall for helping me dot the i’s and cross
the t’s. And above all thanks to Adam Morton. He knows for what.

79
80 Susanna Morton Braund

ignoscere est (to love is human, to forgive is human too). Taken out of con-
text, this could sound like Christian doctrine avant la lettre. But when we
realize that the speaker is an elderly man who has fallen madly in love with
a teenage girl who has been purchased by his son for sex, and that the
speaker is responding to withering criticism of his ridiculous behavior by
another old man, and that in the genre of comedy falling in love is the
exclusive prerogative of adolescents, while lecherous old men never ever
succeed in their cunning plans to sleep with young women, the picture
looks rather different. Now that we know the context, we will do better to
translate the superannuated would-be lover’s specious pleading as “to fall in
love is human [referring to his own behavior], to make allowances is human
too [referring to how he wants his elderly friend to behave toward him, as if
he were an adolescent whose behavior might be excused].” Clearly, context
is everything.
The particular context I scrutinize in this chapter is not forgiveness in
private life between private individuals but the forgiveness of kings: how
autocrats wielding absolute power choose to exercise or restrain their rage
at an offense against them. Although we do ind some representations in
Latin literature of acts of private forgiveness – for example, in Roman com-
edy we ind masters forgiving their cheeky slaves and their wayward sons for
various misdemeanors2 – much of the focus in the extant literature relects
in one way or another the concerns of the Roman elite. The performa-
tive aspect of Roman elite life is well understood; here the performative
aspects of “forgiveness” come to the fore. I touch on the Latin terminology
of “forgiveness” including the noun uenia (pardon) and the verbs parcere
(to spare) and ignoscere (to forgive), but the central focus of this chapter
is on the noun clementia (clemency) and its relation to anger, the latter
being a major theme in Greco-Roman literature. Of the many relevant
texts available for interrogation, I conine myself largely to the writings of
Seneca, in verse and prose; this is, of course, not to deny the relevance or
importance of a great deal of other Roman source material, some of which
is explored in the contributions by Kristina Milnor and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi
in this volume. Of particular interest is the Stoic view of forgiveness – a
negative view – and Seneca’s adaptation of it to his ideological agenda by
presenting it as a virtue. My close study of the terminology and functioning
of “forgiveness” with careful attention to context suggests that, at least in
the public sphere of political power, the Romans did not have an idea of
“forgiveness” that corresponds exactly to our own. That said, if we want to
discover how our modern view of forgiveness arose, it is possible to regard
Seneca as an important stage in the transition from its being a negative

2
Along similar lines to those explored by Gutzwiller in her analysis of forgiveness in the genre
of Greek New Comedy in this volume; her central author, Menander, was of course one of
the main models for Roman comedy.
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 81

phenomenon to a positive one, through his softening of the Stoic position,

given that Stoicism was the system of thought that exercised perhaps the
most fundamental inluence on Christianity.3
I start at the other end of the emotional spectrum from forgiveness with
the alternative reaction to an offense, namely, rage. When we take a global
look at Greco-Roman literature, we cannot fail to be struck by the promin-
ence of anger, resentment, and vengefulness. While portrayals of anger and
revenge and their consequences are myriad, less common are treatments
of the cessation and resignation of anger. For sure, the Iliad, the poem
that famously starts with “the wrath of Achilles,” ends in the uneasy truce
between Achilles and Priam, but Achilles makes it absolutely clear that his
anger might bubble up again at the slightest provocation from Priam. The
Oresteia is certainly a landmark in inding an end to an intrafamilial ven-
detta, not at the individual but at the civic level, with Athena’s referral of
the case to a homicide court, but this resolution follows an entire trilogy
full of fury and Furies, and that resolution is imposed from the outside by
a deity. Overall, in the Greek epic and tragic world populated by mytho-
logical kings, forgiveness is a rarity.
This remains true in Roman poetry. Anger is a dominant theme in Latin
epic poetry, as explored, for example, in three essays in the volume Ancient
Anger.4 Virgil’s Aeneid famously ends with Aeneas’s act of enraged revenge
at a moment when his victim, Turnus, has explicitly requested that he show
pity toward his father by returning his body. Even where we might expect
to ind a personiication of Forgiveness, in the Psychomachia, the classicizing
epic of the fourth–ifth century c.e. Christian poet Prudentius, we do not.
Prudentius pits a number of enraged Virtues against a number of equally
enraged Vices (e.g., Fides vs. Veterum Cultura Deorum, Pudicitia vs. Libido,
Patientia vs. Ira, and Superbia vs. Mens Humilis) in an astonishingly violent
and bloody series of single combats, but the only place where forgiveness
occurs is in a lengthy doctrinal speech by Concordia in praise of Pax, which
is said to “forgive all offenses” (see Psychomachia 781–82).
Anger is dominant in Latin tragedy too. Seneca in his tragedies portrays a
Medea whose resentment of Jason’s treatment of her overwhelms any milder
instincts and leaves her victorious in her rage. He portrays an Oedipus who
promises no leniency for the assassin of his predecessor on the throne of
Thebes. He portrays a Hercules who cannot forgive himself after he has
killed his wife and children under the miasma of madness inlicted by his
resentful stepmother Juno. Above all, in his Thyestes he creates a character

3
For a ine overview of ancient views on forgiveness, see Griswold, Forgiveness, pp. 1–19. The
quotation from Hannah Arendt used by Peter Hawkins toward the start of his chapter in this
volume, making Jesus of Nazareth the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in human affairs,
remains essentially convincing to me.
4
Braund and Most, eds., Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen (Yale Classical Studies
32; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
82 Susanna Morton Braund

whose entire identity is bound up with taking appropriate revenge. His tyr-
ant Atreus is the fullest instantiation of a tyrant’s cruelty, rage, and ruthless-
ness. Atreus is determined to have the most delicious revenge possible on
his brother Thyestes for plotting against him and seducing his wife. We irst
meet Atreus as he goads himself to vengeful action (176–84 and 190–96):
ignaue, iners, eneruis et (quod maximum
probrum tyranno rebus in summis reor)
inulte, post tot scelera, post fratris dolos
fasque omne ruptum questibus uanis agis
iratus Atreus? fremere iam totus tuis 180
debebat armis orbis, et geminum mare
utrimque classes agere; iam lammis agros
lucere et urbes decuit, ac strictum undique
micare ferrum. . . .
haec ipsa pollens incliti Pelopis domus 190
ruat uel in me, dummodo in fratrem ruat.
age, anime, fac quod nulla posteritas probet,
sed nulla taceat. aliquod audendum est nefas
atrox, cruentum, tale quod frater meus
suum esse mallet. scelera non ulcisceris,
nisi uincis.
Idle, inert, impotent, and (what I count the greatest reproach for a tyrant in high
matters) unavenged: after so many crimes, after your brother’s treachery and the
breaking of every principle, do you act with futile complaints – you, Atreus in anger?
By now the whole world should be resounding to your weapons, leets on each coast
should be stirring up the twin seas; by now ields and cities should be alight with
lames, and the drawn sword glinting everywhere. . . . This mighty house of famous
Pelops itself – let it fall even on me, so long as it falls on my brother. Come, my spirit,
do what no future age will endorse, but none fail to talk about. I must dare some
ierce, bloody outrage, such as my brother would have wished his own. You do not
avenge crimes unless you surpass them.5

As the play continues, he carries out his extreme revenge by killing and
butchering Thyestes’ children, then feeding them to their father, then (the
height of pleasure) revealing to Thyestes that he has just consumed his own
progeny. Everywhere in Seneca’s tragedies, then, we ind anger, rage, fury.
Forgiveness? Nowhere.
But what we do ind in several plays is an alternative model of kingship.
Because for Seneca’s tragic kings, the potential for anger is a given, the
issue becomes how, and how much, it can be restrained. That restraint,
where it exists, does not manifest as forgiveness but rather as mildness. This
is clear in several plays where Seneca contrasts the cruel and angry tyrant

5
Translation from Fitch, Seneca Tragedies, vol. 2 (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2004).
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 83

with the good king who is capable of exercising self-control and thus of
winning the affection of his subjects. For example, in Hercules Furens he sets
up a stark contrast between Lycus and Hercules. Lycus is depicted as the
stock tyrannus: he has usurped power (332–53), he takes advantage of the
weak, and he is quick to anger. By contrast, Hercules, before his madness
strikes, is depicted as the good king: immediately before he enters, he has
killed the tyrant Lycus and his associates (895–97), as beits his history of
destroying monsters, and he prays that this act will inaugurate peace and a
new Golden Age (926–39). Seneca presents a similar clash of perspectives
in the argument between Pyrrhus and Agamemnon in Troades (203–352).
In the aftermath of the sack of Troy, Pyrrhus is represented as brutal in
his insistence on the sacriice of Polyxena to the ghost of his dead father
Achilles, while a world-weary Agamemnon advocates the careful wielding
of power, if for no other reason than to prolong power. The incomplete
play Phoenissae presents another similar confrontation when it pits Eteocles
against his brother Polynices, in order to show Eteocles’ ruthless lust for
power and his embracing of hatred (odium) as synonymous with power
(regnum) (653–64). Returning to Hercules Furens, Theseus has an import-
ant speech that contrasts tyrants with good rulers, after his return from the
Underworld, where he saw tyrants being layed by the masses but good rul-
ers destined for the Elysian Fields (Hercules Furens 735–45):
quod quisque fecit, patitur; auctorem scelus 735
repetit, suoque premitur exemplo nocens.
uidi cruentos carcere includi duces
et impotentis terga plebeia manu
scindi tyranni. quisquis est placide potens
dominusque uitae seruat innocuas manus 740
et incruentum mitis imperium regit
animaeque parcit, longa permensus diu
uiuacis aeui spatia uel caelum petit
uel laeta felix nemoris Elysii loca,
iudex futurus. 745
What each man did, he suffers: the crime recoils on its perpetrator, and the criminal
is plagued by the precedent he set. I saw bloodstained leaders immured in prison,
and a ruthless tyrant’s back layed by the hands of the plebs. But anyone who gov-
erns mildly, who keeps his hands guiltless as master of life and death, who conducts
a gentle, bloodless reign and spares lives – he measures the long sweep of a life full
of years, and then reaches either heaven or the happy setting of the blessed Elysian
grove, to serve as judge.6

This emphasis on the good king’s gentle and mild disposition, his inno-
cent and bloodless hands, and his sparing of life provides in microcosm the

6
Translation from Fitch, Seneca Tragedies, vol. 1 (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002).
84 Susanna Morton Braund

constellation of dominant ideas in the “forgiveness territory” that we are

exploring. Yes, there is a manifestation of forgiveness here in the sparing
of life (animae . . . parcit), but it is secondary to the emphasis on restraint, in
particular self-restraint, of the king’s potential anger.
The picture of enraged tyrants that emerges from the tragedies along
with the contrast with good rulers corresponds closely to material in
Seneca’s prose works, in particular De Ira and De Clementia, the former
a treatise addressed to one of Seneca’s brothers and the latter a treatise
addressed to the young emperor Nero soon after his accession in 54 c.e.
with the protreptic purpose of controlling anger and inculcating clementia.
These two works may usefully be considered a diptych exploring rage and
its moderation.7 In De Ira Seneca focuses upon the anger of rulers, par-
ticularly at 3.16.2–21.5, using as examples foreign rulers including Darius
and Xerxes (both kings of Persia); Alexander the Great, killing Clitus
and throwing Lysimachus to a lion; Lysimachus, mutilating Telesphorus;
Cambyses (another king of Persia), embarking on a crazy expedition; and
Cyrus (father of Cambyses), destroying a river. His chief Roman example is
the emperor Gaius, better known (to us) as Caligula. At 2.33.3–6, Seneca
narrates the story of the father of a son executed whimsically by Gaius who
is compelled to act as if nothing awful has happened, and at 3.18.3–19.5,
he reports the torture and impatient execution of Roman senators and
equites (men of the equestrian class). In De Clementia he repeats the example
of Alexander, throwing Lysimachus to a lion (1.25.2); provides snapshots
of three notoriously cruel individuals: Busiris, king of Egypt; Procrustes,
a Greek brigand; and Phalaris, a Sicilian tyrant (2.4); and condemns the
tyrannical behavior of the Roman dictator Sulla (1.12.1–2). In both works,
the anger of rulers is terrifying. In short, he is particularly concerned with
autocratic rulers who can impose punishment and who wield the power
of life and death. He is accordingly concerned with the control of anger
that will lead to self-restraint, providing as examples in De Ira the rulers
Antigonus, Philip, and Augustus (3.22.1–23.8) and in De Clementia offering
Augustus as an example (1.9) as well as inviting Nero himself to maintain
the self-restraint he has already shown (1.1, esp. 1.1.9).8

7
Both treatises seem to have been planned as three books, though De Clementia breaks off
incomplete, and the programmatic statements in both are similar: for fuller discussion,
see Braund, ed., Seneca, De Clementia, Edited with Text, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 70–73. According to Mazzoli, “Seneca de ira e de clemen-
tia: la politica negli specchi della morale,” in Seneca uomo politico e l’età di Claudio e Nerone, ed.
De Vivo and Lo Cascio (Bari: Edipuglia, 2003), pp. 123–38, the two works are distorted mir-
ror images of one another. For a brief overview and contextualization of Seneca’s views on
anger, see my discussion in Braund and Most, Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen,
pp. 282–85.
8
On the protreptic purpose of De Clementia, viewed in the light of Hellenistic kingship
treatises, see Braund, Seneca, pp. 16–30.
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 85

The moderation of the rage of an absolute ruler sometimes results in

actions that we might label as acts of forgiveness, but, as hinted already
in the brief discussion of tragedy, I suggest that the Romans conceptual-
ized them differently.9 The forgiveness of kings is best characterized by the
concept of clementia. This peculiarly Roman concept accordingly occupies
my attention for the remainder of this chapter. I begin by showing how
clementia is one particular manifestation of self-control, which itself was a
cluster of concepts central to Roman elite ideology. A brief glance at the
history of the word clementia indicates its emergence under the Principate,
via the intervention of Julius Caesar, as a standard attribute of the princeps
(the Latin word often used to denote emperor) and a mark of his supreme
power. I explore how clementia played out in action with examples from
Seneca relating to Julius Caesar and Augustus before undertaking a close
examination of Seneca’s deinitions of clementia and, in particular, his
efforts to distinguish clementia from acts of pardon. The result, I hope, is to
indicate the gap in Roman ideology where we might look for the Christian
notion of forgiveness.
I asserted that clementia is a peculiarly Roman concept. Scholars who
have studied clementia agree that there is no Greek equivalent.10 The closest
terms are philanthrōpia, praotēs, and epieikeia, the last of which is the Greek
word usually used to translate clementia in imperial times. But none of them
corresponds exactly. This means that the concept of clementia can afford
especially valuable insights into Roman culture and values and the Roman
virtue economy.
Before we explore the nature of clementia, it is important to understand
that for Roman Stoics such as Seneca, anger was one of the emotions,
affectus, and affectus were negative phenomena that disrupted the operation

9
For rage and Roman emperors, see Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control
in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 243–63 (from
chap. 10, “Restraining the Angry Ruler”); Harris rightly remarks that “the control of inappro-
priate anger had become part of the ideological basis” of the principate (p. 249).
10
Weinstock, Divus Iulius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 233–43; Borgo, “Clementia:
studio di un campo semantico,” Vichiana 14 (1985): 25–73; Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in
the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 1–28 (chap. 1: “Kings,
Dictators, and Orators: Hellenistic Mercy and the Use of Clemency during the Roman
Republic”). Grifin, in “Clementia after Caesar: From Politics to Philosophy,” in Caesar
against Liberty? Perspectives on His Autocracy, ed. Cairns and Fantham, Papers of the Langford
Latin Seminar 11 (2003): 157–82, explores the development of clementia as a political and
philosophical term, marshaling much of the same evidence, but with different emphases.
Also valuable is Konstan’s map of the contours of ancient and modern concepts of pity in
Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth, 2001), in which he surveys related ideas including
clemency, compassion, humaneness, and leniency; particularly useful is his chapter on “Pity
and Power” in Greco-Roman culture (pp. 75–104), including his discussion of clementia,
which “was understood to be a disposition” (p. 101) and not an emotional reaction, a point
developed in his “Clemency as a Virtue,” Classical Philology 100 (2005): 337–46, esp. 342.
See now Braund, Seneca, pp. 30–44 (esp. pp. 33–38).
86 Susanna Morton Braund

of ratio and thereby interfered with or prevented attainment of the Stoic

goal of sapientia. To put it another way, the Stoic wise man or sapiens, as pre-
sented by Seneca in his De Constantia Sapientis, for example, is imperturb-
able by any of the emotions – anger, grief, fear, lust, or greed. By contrast,
the restraint of anger is often represented by a particular cluster of uirtutes,
manifested as either a positive disposition or speciic actions resulting from
that positive disposition. This cluster, which includes clementia, can be sub-
sumed under the general heading of “self-control.”11
Self-restraint was central to the Roman aristocratic male value sys-
tem.12 This is evident when we examine the evidence about the virtue
economy from both the Roman Republic and Principate.13 It must be
said that in texts describing the ideal qualities of a member of the Roman
governing class, including emperors, there was no set canon of “cardinal
virtues.” Rather, there was a pool from which the panegyrist or the pol-
itical theorist might draw for his particular purposes.14 But examination
of typical conigurations of virtues shows some degree of consistency,
for example, from the early irst century b.c.e. prudentia, iustitia, forti-
tudo, modestia (Rhetorica Ad Herennium 3.3) and prudentia, iustitia, forti-
tudo, temperantia (Cicero, De Inuentione 2.159). More than three decades
later, Cicero combines clementia, iustitia, benignitas, ides, and fortitudo (De
Oratore 2.343), integritas, iustitia, clementia, and ides (Ad Atticum 7.2.7, 50
b.c.e.), and fortitudo, temperantia, prudentia, and iustitia (De Finibus 5.67,
45 b.c.e.). A political pamphlet from this period reconstructed on the
basis of Dionysius of Halicarnassus 2.18.1–2 highlights pietas, moderatio,

11
Adam Morton has drawn my attention to behavior by the Ayatollah Khomeini that parallels
the behavior of the sage in antiquity: on the plane bringing him back to Iran after many
years, he was asked by a Western reporter what his feelings were and replied just “hichi”
(nothing) or “hich ehsasi nadaram” (I have no feelings); reported by Axworthy, A History of
Iran: Empire of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2008), p. 259.
12
Nearly all our information about the Greco-Roman world represents the views of the elites.
This emerges clearly from Griswold’s exploration of Aristotle at Griswold, Forgiveness, pp.
7–9, where he expounds Aristotle’s “perfectionist ethical scheme”: Aristotle’s main concern
is with the ethical constitution of the megalopsuchos, whose self-suficiency insulates him from
engaging with others and “from dependence on . . . the ‘moral community’” (p. 16) and
who is not concerned with the actions or sufferings of people of low status. See also Jacobs’s
chapter in this volume.
13
For a fuller discussion, see Braund, Seneca, pp. 30–32.
14
For excellent work on the virtues of emperors, see Charlesworth, “The Virtues of a
Roman Emperor: Propaganda and the Creation of Belief,” Proceedings of the British Academy
23 (1937): 105–38; Weinstock, Divus Iulius, pp. 228–59; Fears, “The Cult of Virtue and
Roman Imperial Ideology,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.17.2 (1981): 827–
948; Wallace-Hadrill, “Civilis Princeps: Between Citizen and King,” Journal of Roman Studies
72 (1982): 32–48; and esp. Wallace-Hadrill, “The Emperor and His Virtues,” Historia 30
(1981): 298–323, who argues powerfully against the idea of a canon of imperial virtues. For
virtues on coinage, see Noreña, “The Communication of the Emperor’s Virtues,” Journal of
Roman Studies 91 (2001): 146–68.
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 87

iustitia, and uirtus,15 while from at least a century later a Stoic Greek
text that is probably addressed to the emperor Trajan urges the need
for phronēsis, dikaiosunē, sōphrosunē, and andreia (Dio Chrysostom, Oration
3.10). A key text is Augustus’s record of his achievements, Res Gestae, in
which he reserves for the climax the award to him by the Senate and
people of Rome in 27 b.c.e. of a golden shield, the clupeus uirtutis, which
was placed in the Curia Julia, bearing a laudatory inscription praising
his “courage, clemency, justice, and piety”: clupeus aureus in curia Iulia
positus, quem mihi senatum populumque Romanum dare uirtutis clementiaeque
et iustitiae et pietatis caussa testatum est per eius clupei inscriptionem (Res Gestae
34.2).16 Iustitia is the only constant in these lists, but they all feature one
of the virtues belonging to the broad category of “self-control”: temper-
antia, moderatio, sōphrosunē, and clementia. This accords with what Cicero
says at De Inuentione 2.164 when he divides temperantia into continentia,
clementia, and modestia. Similarly, Seneca says that clementia in a position
of extreme power is “the most real control of the mind” (uerissima animi
temperantia, De Clementia 1.11.2). Clearly, self-control was crucial to the
image of any elite Roman male. The next question is to ask in what con-
texts that self-control was deployed.
A valuable model for proceeding with such an enquiry is provided by
Robert Kaster’s study of the ethical cluster of “bad vibes” relating to worry,
shame, regret, hostility, and revulsion (uerecundia, pudor, paenitentia, inuidia,
and fastidium),17 in Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome. There
are many excellent features in this study, including the way that Kaster
demonstrates that we can never assume that our emotional economy maps
onto that of the Romans. To demonstrate this, he uses the example of the
Latin inuidia, which does the work of a host of English concepts includ-
ing ill will, spite, indignation (including righteous indignation), jealousy,
envy, dislike, and odium, as well as two Greek ideas, phthonos and nemesis.18
Crucially for us, in our study of forgiveness, Kaster focuses on the oper-
ation of moral qualities in social settings. The hallmark of his approach is
to analyze the concepts in terms of social “scripts” that Roman individuals
play out; these “scripts” consist of intelligible patterns that provide vivid
narratives of the Roman virtue economy. Some of these he presents dia-
grammatically to enhance our appreciation of the complexities involved.
The most complex is the concept of pudor, which generates six different
scripts.19 According to Kaster, pudor is part of the nexus of dignitas and

15
See Weinstock, Divus Iulius, pp. 181–82.
16
See Ryberg, “Clupeus Virtutis,” in The Classical Tradition (Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan),
ed. Wallach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), pp. 232–38.
17
Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), p. 4.
18
Ibid., pp. 84–91.
19
Ibid., p. 31.
88 Susanna Morton Braund

existimatio20 and is “irst and foremost about perceptions.”21 He later dis-

cusses the “theatrical dimension of pudor” according to which the Roman
individual is simultaneously “protagonist” in and “audience” of “a play
about virtue.”22 His emphasis on the way the Roman elite watched and mea-
sured one another’s behavior is important in forgiveness territory too.
Taking a cue from Kaster’s work, then, I suggest that the cluster of behav-
iors relating to Roman self-control also generates a number of “scripts,”
unwritten narratives that the members of the Roman elite almost instinct-
ively found themselves playing out. The one that concerns me here is the
script of clementia. A study of this manifestation of self-control shows that it
occurs in contexts where the individual with this disposition is in a position
of more or less absolute power – as a military leader, as a provincial gover-
nor, and, under the Principate, as princeps. This its with the history of the
word clementia, which, signiicantly, occurs relatively rarely in Republican
texts but much more frequently during and after the shift from Republic to
Principate. In his prosecution speeches of 70 b.c.e. against the gross extor-
tions of the provincial governor Verres, Cicero uses the word in connection
with Roman foreign policy (e.g., In Verrem 2.5.115). In Caesar’s war com-
mentaries, it occurs just twice, combined with mansuetudo (“mercy,” Bellum
Gallicum 2.14.5, 2.31.4), in passages where the Gauls are reporting their
merciful treatment at Caesar’s hands. But from the start of the civil war in
49 b.c.e., Cicero uses it often in his letters and his pro-Caesarian speeches
written during the years 46–45 b.c.e. Augustus asserts his clementia, most
strikingly on the clupeus uirtutis mentioned previously, thus establishing a
paradigm for his successors. The concept changes from being the clementia
populi Romani under the Republic, a virtue of the Roman state and its gen-
erals exercised toward the defeated enemy, into being the virtue of an indi-
vidual Roman, exercised toward his fellow citizens.23
Julius Caesar was clearly the agent of change in the concept of clementia.24
First, he established clementia as a personal benefaction rather than a bene-
faction of the Roman state. Earlier, clementia was the prerogative of Roman

20
Ibid., p. 29.
21
Ibid., p. 33.
22
Ibid., p. 56.
23
Although Konstan, “Clemency as a Virtue,” makes a good case for viewing clementia as exer-
cised by Julius Caesar as a virtue, emphasizing its interchangeability at that period with terms
such as mansuetudo and lenitas, there is no need to try to establish a monolithically positive
view of clementia; the evidence shows that it could be construed both as a virtue and as a
mark of tyranny, depending upon the agenda of the source. For fuller discussions of the
history of clementia, see Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, and Braund, Seneca,
pp. 33–38.
24
This is an abbreviated version of Braund, Seneca, pp. 34–36. The topic of the clementia
Caesaris has generated a lot of discussion, for example, Adam, Clementia Principis: Der Einluß
hellenisticher F ürstenspiegel auf den Versuch einer rechtlichen Fundierung des Principats durch Seneca
(Stuttgart: E. Klett. 1970), pp. 84–86; and Weinstock, Divus Iulius, pp. 241–43. Milnor in
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 89

generals acting on behalf of the Roman state: because any conquered mem-
bers of the enemy were thought to have committed a wrong against Rome
just by waging war, they were liable to be obliterated; if Rome through
its general chose to show clementia, the enemy was spared execution and
became subject to Roman authority. But from early in the civil war, con-
comitant with being declared dictator,25 Caesar was making these decisions
himself without reference to the Roman state. Second, Caesar bestowed his
personal clementia not just on foreigners but on Roman citizens too, from
early in the civil war and often, and this moved clementia into the political
sphere. But to be the recipient of clementia from a fellow Roman citizen
was never likely to be palatable to the elite. As Melissa Barden Dowling
says in her study of clemency, “to be forced to receive pardon as though
they were defeated barbarians, from a man whom many considered their
equal at best, was an insult many could not forgive.”26 The third crucial shift
made by Caesar was to elevate clementia from the plane of human action by
establishing a cult of Clementia Caesaris, in an attempt to mitigate its hier-
archical implications by suggesting that his clemency had divine authority.
Accordingly, in 45 b.c.e., the Senate voted to build a temple to the Clementia
Caesaris (Appian, Civil Wars 2.106; Dio 44.6.4). Although no trace of this
temple survives, Caesar had changed the concept of clementia in a lasting
way: from then onward, it became a mark of the supremacy of the princeps.
In other words, this term that we might regard as a Roman equivalent of
“forgiveness” turns out to be inextricably associated with absolute power:27
clementia implies hierarchy. As Syme puts it: “To acquiesce in the ‘clementia
Caesaris’ implied a recognition of despotism.”28 Only someone in a position
of superiority can grant clementia; the corollary is that he also has the power
to act severely and punitively. This is exactly what Seneca says in his dein-
ition of clementia at De Clementia 2.3.1: “Clemency is ‘restraint of the mind
when it is able to take revenge,’ or ‘the leniency of the more powerful party
toward the weaker in the matter of setting penalties’” (temperantia animi
in potestate ulciscendi uel lenitas superioris aduersus inferiorem in constituendis
poenis). For Seneca, clementia operates primarily in civic and political

this volume discusses Julius Caesar’s deployment of clementia as a disabling or diminishing

tactic involving loss of status.
25
He held the position of dictator, which was an emergency magistracy of supreme power,
briely in 49 b.c.e., again in 48, in 46, and in 45; early in 44 b.c.e. he was declared dictator
perpetuo.
26
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, p. 22.
27
Thus Borgo, “Clementia: studio di un campo semantico,” p. 27: “la clemenza non è più,
ormai, virtù del cittadino privato, ma del signore, di colui incarna il massimo potere e che,
proprio attraverso gli atti di clemenza, può mostrare la sua superiorità sui sudditi.” Earl, The
Moral and Political Tradition of Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 60, is blunter
still, describing Julius Caesar’s clementia as “sharp and hostile”: “It is the quality proper
to the rex.”
28
Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 414.
90 Susanna Morton Braund

contexts, especially legal or quasi-legal contexts. It therefore follows that

celebrations of the clementia of any emperor are de facto acknowledgments
of his superior status and his absolute power. This should not surprise us,
given that our perspective on Roman society is framed by men of elite status
whose quality of life, and life itself, were determined by the disposition and
actions of the supremely powerful princeps.29
What Julius Caesar did, in effect, was to rewrite the script of clementia
to his own political advantage, although this later turned out to be a fatal
miscalculation, given that some of his assassins were men toward whom
he had shown clementia. He refrained from executing his enemies in the
civil war and by sparing them intended to bind them to him by putting
them in his debt for their lives, property, and status.30 One of the most
notable recipients of Caesar’s clementia was Brutus, later one of his murder-
ers. At De Beneiciis 2.20.1–2, in a passage whose implications are crucial
for our understanding of clementia, Seneca tackles the propriety of Brutus’s
allowing Julius Caesar to spare him after the battle of Pharsalus in 48 b.c.e.
(De Beneiciis 2.20.1–2):
It is commonly debated whether Marcus Brutus should have allowed our deiied
Julius to grant him his life, having decided that it was his duty to kill him. . . . My view
is that . . . he was badly wrong here and that his action was not true to Stoic teaching.
Either he feared the very word “king,” although it is under a just king that a state
reaches its best condition. Or he expected civic freedom [libertatem] to survive when
the advantages of autocracy [imperandi] and subjection [seruiendi] were so great. Or
else he thought that the state could be recalled to its former constitution when its
ancient ways had been abandoned; that an equality of civic rights and a due suprem-
acy of law could be maintained, at a time when he had seen thousands of men at war
over the issue not of whether, but to which of two men, they should be slaves.31

Seneca here criticizes Brutus for accepting Caesar’s clementia in a context in

which the slavery of the Roman state to the victor in the civil war was inevit-
able. His association of clementia with autocratic rule is absolutely clear.
The story of Brutus provides a script of the acceptance of Caesar’s
clementia. The same script is developed at some length by Seneca in a story
about Augustus at De Clementia 1.9.32 He depicts Augustus agonizing over
what to do after the revelation of a conspiracy against him. His irst impulse
is to exact revenge, but then he despairs of continually having to execute

29
This observation tallies closely with the chapter by Várhelyi in this volume in which she
examines forgiveness in the Principate as a divine prerogative.
30
Cicero provides explicit testimony about the operation of Caesar’s clementia at Philippics
2.116: suos praemiis, aduersarios clementiae specie deuinxerat (his followers he had bound to him
by rewards, his enemies by a display of clemency).
31
Translation by Cooper and Procopé, Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995 [repr. 1998]).
32
The historian Dio Cassius has a much more elaborate account at 55.14.1–22.2; see my dis-
cussion at Braund, Seneca, pp. 258–60.
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 91

his enemies. Seneca depicts his wife Livia interrupting him with the advice
(De Clementia 1.9.6):
Do as the doctors do. When the usual remedies have no effect, they try the opposite.
Harshness has done you no good so far. After Salvidienus there was Lepidus, after
Lepidus there was Murena, after Murena there was Caepio, after Caepio there was
Egnatius, not to mention the others whose great audacity is shameful. Now, ind out
what effect clemency has for you: pardon Lucius Cinna. He has been detected – he
cannot now do you any harm, but he can enhance your reputation.33

Augustus takes this advice and summons the conspirator Cinna for a private
interview in his bedroom, which goes like this (De Clementia 1.9.8–9):
“Though I found you, Cinna, in the opposing camp, not so much made my enemy
as born my enemy, I spared you and I allowed you to keep your father’s estate intact.
Today you are so prosperous and so wealthy that the conquerors envy you, the con-
quered. When you were a candidate for the priesthood, I granted it to you, passing
over very many people whose parents had fought on my side. Although this is the
service I have done you, you took the decision to kill me.” At these words Cinna
shouted out that he was a long way from that lunacy. Augustus said, “You are not
keeping your promise, Cinna. We agreed that you would not speak till I had in-
ished. You are, I tell you, preparing to kill me,” and he added the place, the accom-
plices, the date, the arrangements of the plot, the name of the man entrusted with
the weapon.

This reduces Cinna to a paralyzed guilty silence. Augustus goes on to inlict

a speech more than two hours long on Cinna, intending this as his punish-
ment, and then says (De Clementia 1.9.11–12):
“For a second time I give you your life, Cinna – the irst time it was as an enemy and
now it is as a conspirator and assassin. From this day let friendship begin between us.
Let us compete with each other to see which of us acts in better faith – I, in grant-
ing you your life, or you, in owing it to me.” Later on, he conferred the consulship
on him unsolicited, complaining of his not venturing to stand for ofice. He found
Cinna most devoted and most loyal and he became Cinna’s sole heir. He was not the
target of any more plots.

These examples provide the essential script of clementia: the emperor

decides not to exercise his power to execute or otherwise punish someone
who has committed an offense against him, most obviously, by planning to
overthrow or assassinate him but also by extension constituting a threat to
his supreme position, and by this act of self-restraint disarms the individual
and places him under permanent obligation.
The only way to avoid the benefaction of clementia was to commit suicide.
The classic case of choosing to take one’s life rather than accept the victor’s
clementia was Cato the Younger, who committed suicide after the battle of

33
All translations from De Clementia are my own, as published in my 2009 edition.
92 Susanna Morton Braund

Thapsus in 46 b.c.e. Seneca in his De Prouidentia gives him a speech explain-

ing his position that starts like this (De Prouidentia 2.10): “Although all the
world has fallen under the sway of one man, although Caesar’s soldiery
controls the lands with his legions and the seas with his leets and besieges
the city gates, yet Cato has a way out. With one hand he will open up a wide
path to freedom.”34 In his biography, Plutarch has him say: “If I wished to
be saved by Caesar’s benefaction, I ought to go to him myself. But I do not
wish to be under any obligation to the tyrant for his illegal acts – and he acts
illegally in saving, as though he were their master, people whom he has no
right to rule as a despot” (Cato 66. 2, my translation).
Now that we have established the connection between clementia and
autocracy and explored the script of clementia, it is high time that we looked
at Seneca’s extensive attempt to deine the concept, since this involves sev-
eral other terms that we might readily associate with forgiveness, namely
the noun uenia (pardon) and the verbs parcere (to spare) and ignoscere (to
forgive). It is important to remember that Seneca is writing in an era when
forgiveness was not regarded as a virtue, as established convincingly by
Charles Griswold in the irst chapter of Forgiveness.35 Seneca devotes consid-
erable attention to distinguishing clementia from its apparent synonyms, or
kindred terms, and to examining its opposites.36 To give a snapshot of his
position, clementia is not the same as misericordia or mansuetudo or moderatio
or indulgentia or lenitas or comitas, of which some but not all are also virtues
in Roman thought.37 The opposite of clementia is not seueritas, which was
itself another virtue, but saeuitia, crudelitas, and feritas. And, most import-
antly for us, the actions denoted by uenia (indulgence of faults, pardon of
speciic offenses) and parcere (sparing, being merciful, acting forbearingly)
and ignoscere (forgiving, pardoning) are not to be identiied with clementia.
Let’s take a closer look at Seneca’s attempts at deinition, especially the
part where he distinguishes clementia from pardon (2.7.1–3):
§1. “But why will he [i.e., the Stoic sapiens] never grant pardon [non ignoscet
umquam]?” Let us now also establish what pardon is [quid sit uenia], and then we
shall realize that it should not be granted by the wise man. Pardon is the remission
of a deserved punishment [uenia est poenae meritae remissio]. The reasons why the wise
man should not give this are explained at greater length by people who subscribe to
this principle. My explanation, to put it briely, as if in someone else’s formulation,
is: “Pardon is granted to a person who ought to be punished [ei ignoscitur qui puniri

34
Translation adapted from Basore, Seneca Moral Essays, vol. 1 (Loeb Classical Library;
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).
35
Griswold, Forgiveness, pp. 1–14.
36
Followed by Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, pp. 6–8.
37
For detail, see Braund, Seneca, pp. 38–40, esp. p. 39 with cross-references there. At De
Clementia 2.4.4–6.4, Seneca takes particular trouble to distinguish clementia from misericordia,
which he labels a defect (uitium): that is, the sapiens will perform acts of pity without experi-
encing feelings of pity.
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 93

debuit]. Yet the wise man does nothing that he should not do and omits nothing that
he should do. Therefore he does not waive a punishment that he ought to exact.”
§2. But he will deliver to you that desired consequence of pardon [illud quod ex uenia
consequi uis] by a more honourable route: the fact is that a wise man will spare [par-
cet] people and consider their interests and reform them. He will in effect grant par-
don but without granting pardon [idem faciet quod si ignosceret, nec ignoscet], since the
person who grants pardon [ignoscit] is admitting that he neglected to do something
he should have done. In one case, he will simply deliver a verbal reprimand with-
out inlicting a punishment, if he sees that the person’s age makes them capable
of reform. In another case, where the person is clearly labouring under the odium
of his crime, he will tell him to go scot-free, because he was led astray, because he
lapsed under the inluence of wine. He will let his enemies go unharmed and some-
times even commend them, if they were incited to ight for honourable motives –
out of loyalty or because of a treaty or for their liberty. §3. These are all the actions
not of pardon but of clemency [non ueniae sed clementiae opera]. Clemency has a
freedom of decision. It forms its judgements not according to the letter of the law
but according to what is right and good [non sub formula sed ex aequo et bono iudicat].
And it is allowed to acquit [absoluere] or to set the damages [taxare] in a case at any
level it likes. It does none of these things with the attitude that its action is less than
justice requires but with the attitude that its decision is the most just course of action
possible [iustissimum]. But to pardon [ignoscere] consists of not punishing a person
who you judge should be punished. Pardon is the remission of a penalty that is due
[uenia debitae poenae remissio est]. Clemency’s prime effect is that it pronounces that
the people it lets off [dimittit] deserved exactly that. It is more complete and more
honourable than pardon [uenia].

As we can see, Seneca is trying hard to distinguish clementia from pardon,

using the noun uenia and the verb ignoscere. But his argument here is def-
initely convoluted – and it was rightly criticized as feeble by his sixteenth-
century commentator Calvin.38 Why does he twist and turn like this?
Seneca’s dificulty here is that, while he wishes to situate himself as a
Stoic, his views run counter to the conventional, hard-line Stoic position.
This becomes obvious if we review the ancient evidence. Thus, as I have
stated elsewhere:
According to orthodox Stoic belief, punishment was a matter of applying strictly the
penalty decreed by law, with no room for discretion in either direction. The ancient
evidence is unequivocal, for example (SVF iii. 640), “They [the Stoics] say that the
good man is not lenient ( πιεικU), for the lenient man is critical of a punishment
that is deserved; and they identify being lenient with assuming that the punishments
ixed by law are too harsh for wrongdoers and with thinking that the law-giver is dis-
tributing punishments contrary to what is deserved,” and again (Diogenes Laertius
7.123 = SVF iii. 641), Stoic wise men “do not experience pity (eleēmonas . . . einai,

38
Calvin’s remark here is “quicquid hic disputat Seneca, uno uerbo subuerti potest”: Battles
and Hugo, Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia (Leiden: Brill, 1969), p. 378. Seneca
seems to betray himself by dismissing the discussion with de uerbo, ut mea fert opinio, controuer-
sia est (The dispute, in my opinion, is just about words, 2.7.4).
94 Susanna Morton Braund

̑ ) or have forgiveness (sungnōmēn . . . echein, συγγνWμην . . . 1χειν) for

λεVμονας . . . ε?ναι
anyone; they do not relax the penalties ixed by the laws, since indulgence (to . . .
eikein, τ . . . εFκειν) and pity (ho eleos, ' 1λεος) and even leniency (epieikeia, πιεXκεια)
are psychological incapacity, pretending kindness in place of punishment.”39

This position goes all the way back to Chrysippus, as is shown by his views on
Justice as paraphrased by Gellius at Noctes Atticae 14.4: “He wished it to be
understood that the judge, who is the priest of Justice, should be digniied,
holy, austere, incorruptible, proof against lattery, pitiless and inexorable
toward the wicked and guilty, upright, lofty and powerful, terrifying thanks
to the force and majesty of equity and truth.” In other words, because for the
Stoics mercy was, or was based upon, an emotional impulse, it was undesir-
able or even reprehensible, and because an act of mercy involved failure to
impose a justly deserved penalty, it was itself less than just.
Seneca is clearly aware of the hard-line Stoic position and of the nega-
tive impression it created. In his deinition of clementia in book 2, he coun-
ters by asserting the importance of humanitas in Stoic thought (De Clementia
2.5.2–3): “I realize that among the ill-informed the Stoic school has a nega-
tive reputation for being excessively harsh and least likely to give good
advice to emperors and kings. It is criticized for saying that the wise man
does not show pity or forgiveness. . . . But in fact, no school is more kind or
lenient, none is more philanthropic or more concerned about the com-
mon good – so that it is its objective to be useful, to be helpful, and to con-
sider not only its own interest but that of communities and individuals.”
In this way, without actually denying the hard-line view, he redirects the
discussion toward another Stoic principle – humanitas, the Latin translation
of philanthrōpia – that better its his advocation of clementia, and he then pro-
ceeds to offer the new deinition of clementia quoted earlier.
Seneca attempts this redeinition of clementia to establish it as a virtue
that Stoics could approve of, to make this manifestation of “forgiveness”
acceptable in Stoic terms – although whether any hardline Stoic would have
been convinced seems doubtful. In essence, he appeals to a larger concep-
tion of “what is right and good” that operates on a higher plane than “the
letter of the law.” Technically, of course, he is still talking about the ideal-
ized Stoic sapiens here, but in effect he is also providing a program for the
ideal ruler, by coalescing the two roles. Here he seems to be making an ori-
ginal move, as there is no trace of this deinition of clementia in earlier Stoic
sources.40 Although Seneca is not usually regarded as an original thinker,

39
Braund, Seneca, pp. 66–67.
40
Thus too Elias, “De notione vocis clementia apud philosophos veteres et de fontibus Senecae
librorum de clementia” (Diss. Königsberg, 1912), p. 53. For a perspective on Seneca “as
an original and innovative exponent of Stoic doctrine,” see Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic
Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 3.
 The Anger of Tyrants and the Forgiveness of Kings 95

we should relect that he was in a novel situation for a Stoic of offering

advice to the ruler of the world, the princeps. He accordingly reformulates
traditional Stoic ideas to meet this new situation, by trying to reconcile the
strictness of Stoicism with the pragmatism of his own position in the imper-
ial court at Rome.41 As he understood very well from personal experience,
the princeps, although in theory merely the “irst citizen,” was in actuality
above the law, and this meant that matters of iustitia became matters of his
personal discretion. Seneca knew this from earlier in his life when he was
exiled by the emperor Claudius for eight years. On several occasions in his
Consolatio ad Polybium, written in exile, he appeals for recall by praising the
emperor’s clementia.42 All this had been well understood a hundred years
earlier by Julius Caesar, when he had himself declared dictator in perpetu-
ity: from that moment on, Caesar was in effect above the law, and clementia
was a benefaction at his personal discretion. In other words, under the
Principate, the exercise of clementia, following the script examined earlier,
replaced the procedures of iustitia.43 Imperial forgiveness – the self-restraint
of a ruler who might exercise his anger, the “forgiveness of kings” in my
title – turns out to be terrifyingly arbitrary and a long way from modern
conceptions of “forgiveness” molded by Christian thought.44
So, to return to the question I posed at the outset, if the landscape of for-
giveness territory as experienced by us and as depicted in Adam Morton’s
chapter did exist for the Romans, we cannot see it. There is no explicit
discussion of “empathy-based forgiveness” (to use Morton’s phrase) in sur-
viving Roman texts. Rather, the concept that captures the attention of those
writing from within Roman culture is speciically clementia. It is no accident
that all three chapters in this volume dealing with Roman culture focus on
clementia: this is the obvious, and perhaps the only, topic that works when
the brief is to discuss Roman ideas of forgiveness. The Roman concern with
clementia, especially under the new regime of the Principate, corresponds

41
Thus Grifin, Seneca, a Philosopher in Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976;
reprinted with postscript, 1992), pp. 169–70; for example, “Seneca’s originality in deining
clementia . . . had its source in political realism.”
42
For example, Seneca hopes that when the emperor considers his case (causam meam) he will
show justice or clemency: uel iustitia eius bonam perspiciat uel clementia faciat bonam; utrumque
in aequo mihi eius beneicium erit, siue innocentem me scierit esse siue uoluerit (Consolatio ad
Polybium 13.3).
43
As is suggested by the fact that the slogan Iustitia features rarely on imperial coinage. For
full discussion of this and the relationship between clementia and the law, see Braund, Seneca,
pp. 40–42.
44
For an exploration of forgiveness in Christian thought, see Hawkins’s chapter in this vol-
ume. Also in this volume, Knust exposes the gap between theoretical Christian claims about
forgiveness and the implicit or explicit horrors that Christian forgiveness can encompass; a
particular point of overlap with my essay is the idea that the bestowing of mercy is a privilege
of the (all-)powerful.
96 Susanna Morton Braund

with the wider Roman preoccupation with power, hierarchy, and social
status. In a society where the paterfamilias had absolute jurisdiction in legal,
social, and economic matters over his entire household – even over adult
sons holding high ofice – it should not surprise us that the only kind of
“forgiveness” to receive attention in Roman texts is one that reinforces
absolute and arbitrary authority.
 6

Gender and Forgiveness in the Early Roman Empire

Kristina Milnor

The story of what happened to the concept of forgiveness – or, at any rate,
to clementia, one of its most visible Roman manifestations – under the pres-
sure of early imperial ideology is fairly well established.1 During the Roman
Republic, clementia is primarily used in military contexts, displayed on the
battleield by a Roman general toward a defeated foreign enemy, although
it also occasionally appeared in the lawcourts, where a convicted defend-
ant might beg for it, or in the domestic realm, given from paterfamilias
to dependent. But there was a certain loss of status entailed in receiving
clemency, because the one who received it necessarily acknowledged the
superior power of the one who was able to grant it (Seneca, De Clem. 2.3).2
Forgiveness, therefore, was not seen as something that one citizen could or
should accept from another. Julius Caesar was the irst of the Julio-Claudians
to recognize the power of clemency as a political tool, as he famously dis-
played mercy toward those who fought against him in the civil conlicts
leading up to his establishment as dictator perpetuus in 44 b.c.e. Although
he does not use the word clementia widely in his own writings, Caesar’s
actions caused others – most notably Cicero – to reevaluate what forgive-
ness could mean as a political virtue. After Caesar and Cicero, we see the

1
What follows is based on Weinstock, Divus Iulius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971),
pp. 233–43; Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 2006), pp. 1–75; and Braund, ed., Seneca, De Clementia, Edited with Text, Translation, and
Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 33–8. Cf. Braund and Várhelyi,
both in this volume. In what follows, I will translate clementia generally as “forgiveness,”
although it can also signify “pardon,” “mercy,” and certain other related concepts. There is,
in fact, no Latin word which completely and neatly encompasses the modern idea of forgive-
ness, but it is clear that clementia was an important element in the “forgiveness territory” (to
use Adam Morton’s term) of early imperial Rome.
2
David Konstan has convincingly argued that throughout the Republic, and even during the
period of Caesar, clementia was seen as a positive virtue in a social superior rather than (as
has been argued by others) the quality of a despot: Konstan, “Clemency as a Virtue,” Classical
Philology 100 (2005): 337–46. Nevertheless, to receive clementia from another entailed

97
98 Kristina Milnor

transformation of clementia into one of the central merits of the emperor:

it becomes a cornerstone of Octavian’s propaganda, found most notably as
one of the four cardinal virtues advertised on the golden shield awarded to
him by the senate in 27 b.c.e. Thereafter, all of the Julio-Claudians would
continue to promote their own clementia, on coinage, in artistic representa-
tions, and in religious observances.
“Forgiveness,” therefore, is an important instance of the ways in which
the rise of imperial governance caused a redescription and redeployment
of traditional virtues in nontraditional contexts. Of course, this shift was
not restricted to the concept of clementia. It has long been recognized that
the reinvention of the Roman state as a monarchy rather than as a republic
entailed not just a change in governmental structures but in the system of
values on which the elite had long relied to understand themselves and
their place in the world.3 Thus, for instance, it has been argued that Seneca
the Younger reformulates through Stoicism the concept of virtus (manli-
ness, courage) so that it no longer simply applies to achievement on the
battleield but to forbearance against bad fortune.4 This seems partially in
response to the fact that, under the Principate, there were fewer and fewer
opportunities for elite Roman men to gain status through military glory,
which was increasingly understood to be the provenance of the emperor
and his immediate male relatives.5 As Matthew Roller argues, “By present-
ing an ethical system in which military achievement emphatically lacks
moral signiicance, yet in which virtus is still attainable because it resides
elsewhere, Seneca offers his audience a new set of ethical signposts to ori-
ent thought and action, new means by which aristocrats can pursue familiar
cultural imperatives . . . in a world in which the old signposts increasingly
fail to point the way.”6 Like virtus, forgiveness too was an old ideal which
came to have new meaning in the changed sociopolitical world of the early
empire: in the past, clementia had been associated with the public display of
a particular kind of civic, imperialistic power, but under the Principate it
became a distinctive personal quality of the princeps, something which he
could and should display to his citizen-subjects.
One of the curious aspects of imperial clementia, however, is the space it
accords to female participation. That is, the republican form of the virtue

acknowledging him as having the right to dispense it, a circumstance which may have led
to a certain bitterness among those Roman aristocrats whose lives were spared after the
civil war.
3
Wallace-Hadrill, “Mutatio Morum: The Idea of a Cultural Revolution,” in The Roman Cultural
Revolution, ed. Habinek and Schiesaro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),
pp. 3–22.
4
Roller, Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 97–108.
5
McDonnell, Roman Manliness: Virtus and the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), pp. 385–89.
6
Roller, Constructing Autocracy, pp. 106–7.
 Gender and Forgiveness 99

was closely associated with the kind of performed public power that was
the hallmark of Roman masculinity. Women could not bestow or receive
clementia because to do so would implicate them in an exchange of social
and political power from which they were barred because of their gender:
as Melissa Barden Dowling has put it, “Clementia is solely a quality of men. . . .
Because clementia is a public action, not an aspect of private ethics, clemency
toward women does not arise because of the fundamentally private pos-
ition of women. . . . Clemency is bound up with ideas of maleness.”7 In other
words, we might distinguish clementia from forgiveness generally through
the fact that it is performed in the public sphere, from which women were
formally excluded because of their sex. Given this, it is curious how prom-
inent a role certain women are given in the development of the image of
imperial forgiveness. This is particularly noticeable in the case of Livia, the
wife of the princeps Augustus, who seems to have been associated both sym-
bolically and actually with the merciful aspects of the new imperial regime.
It is remarkable, for instance, that one of the signal episodes that created
an association between the emperor and clemency was remembered in the
literary-historical record as a conversation between Augustus and Livia, in
which she advises him to spare the conspirator L. Cinna in 16 b.c.e. The
scene is reported by Seneca the Younger in his De Clementia (1.9) and at
greater length by Cassius Dio (55.14–22). Although this may not have been
a genuine historical event, it nevertheless passes into Roman cultural mem-
ory as an important moment in the creation of imperial clemency, and in
each account it is Livia who is credited with deining and arguing for the
path of forgiveness.
In this chapter I discuss how and why clementia becomes gendered in
the early imperial political context. First, why is it that Livia, in particular,
comes to be associated with the emperor’s clemency? I argue that her par-
ticipation is key to the reformulation of imperial clementia as something
different from what it was under the republic; by speaking for public for-
giveness from her place within the domestic sphere, Livia is able to frame
the emperor’s clementia as that shown by a father to his family rather than
that displayed by a triumphant general to a foreign enemy. Not only does
this assist the ideological redescription of the Roman state under Augustus
as an enormous household with the princeps at its head, but it also allows
forgiveness to become less a display of power and more a gesture of healing
and mutual respect. Second, I broaden this discussion to look at other rep-
resentations of women and forgiveness, in order to consider what effect the
role of imperial women in the construction of the emperor’s clementia may
have had generally on ideas of gender and mercy. In particular, I look at the
representations of female forgiveness in the Roman collections of declama-
tory exercises as an example of the ways in which a contemporary cultural

7
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty, pp. 14–15.
100 Kristina Milnor

form wrestled with questions about women’s clementia and also framed it as
a unique form of healing in the case of social rupture. Like Livia, the ic-
tional women of early imperial declamations show how female forgiveness,
by harnessing the power of the private or domestic realm, could play an
important part in the early imperial civic landscape.

Clementia Liviae
The development of Augustan clementia, to which Livia is remembered as
having contributed signiicantly, established it irmly as one of the emperor’s
virtues. Although Julius Caesar clearly began the trend of Roman victors
in civil wars granting clemency to former enemies, the dictator’s assassin-
ation – at the hands of some of those who had accepted his forgiveness –
seems to have compromised the idea that it could be an eficacious political
trait.8 When Octavian, who would become the princeps Augustus, arrived on
the political scene after Caesar’s death, he did so as an avenging son, not a
merciful leader, and he continued in this guise through the establishment
of the triumvirate and the attendant proscriptions of many Roman aristo-
crats. Those proscriptions became legendary for their savagery and (if we
believe the historian Appian’s account) were explicitly linked by the trium-
virs to the failure of Caesar’s policy of clemency: “Had not peridious trai-
tors begged for mercy and, when they obtained it, become the enemies of
their benefactors and conspired against them, neither would Gaius Caesar
have been slain . . . nor should we have been compelled to use this wide-
spread severity against those who have insulted us and declared us public
enemies” (Appian, BC 4.2.8).9 It was only after the defeat of the tyranni-
cides, and during Octavian’s subsequent conlicts with his former fellow
triumvirs, that forgiveness reemerges as a policy of the new regime.10
Thereafter, clementia becomes enshrined as one of the most important of
the emperor’s virtues. This can be seen, as much as anywhere else, in Seneca
the Younger’s treatise De Clementia, in which he advises the young Nero to
emulate his ancestor Augustus in displaying that quality in his dealings with
his subjects. As an exemplum, Seneca offers the story of L. Cinna, who plot-
ted the assassination of the princeps in 16 b.c.e. but was ultimately – on the
advice of Livia – pardoned by Augustus and allowed to rise to the highest
ranks of the government. Susanna Braund has discussed this passage else-
where in this volume and argued that it represents a typical “script” of the
way that imperial clementia should be offered and received. Although this is
clearly how Seneca intends the episode to be read, Livia’s assigned role is
8
As Cicero notes in one of his letters to Atticus (14.22.1), “Forgiveness was for him an evil”
(clementiam illi malo fuisse).
9
Translation by White, Appian’s Roman History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1913).
10
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty, pp. 29–63.
 Gender and Forgiveness 101

curious, especially given its exemplary quality: why is it that she, a woman
and Augustus’s wife, is given the voice of reason, the job of explaining to
the princeps the place that the signal quality of forgiveness should have in
his administration? After all, Seneca does not seem to wish to disguise the
anomaly of Livia’s participation here, as he has her open her speech by draw-
ing attention to it: she begins by asking, “Will you take a woman’s advice?”
(admittis . . . muliebre consilium? De Clem. 1.9.6).11 Moreover, if we consider
the history of this episode as it passes into the literary-historical record, it
is clear that later Roman readers saw Livia as perhaps the most important
player in the drama: when Dio Cassius adopts and adapts this scene from
Seneca in his Roman History (55.14–22), he expands Livia’s speech enor-
mously, transforming it into one of the long oratorical set pieces which he
uses to structure his work; at the same time he entirely omits Augustus’s
response and speech to L. Cinna.
Why, then, does Seneca put the case for clementia into Livia’s mouth? It
is possible that the philosopher may have been inluenced by an actual his-
torical event, since it is clear that Livia did possess an unprecedented access
to and inluence over certain public matters.12 There is, however, another
explanation which can be discerned in Seneca’s text. Although the phil-
osopher is anxious to offer the now-deiied Augustus to Nero as a model of
imperial behavior, he also makes it clear that the present emperor’s great-
grandfather is not an unproblematic example. In introducing the story of
L. Cinna, he contrasts Augustus’s behavior in his middle and old age with
his actions while still a youth: “The divine Augustus was a kind ruler, if
you begin to judge him from the time of his rule; but in the matter of the
shared state [i.e., under the triumvirate] he used a sword. When he was
the age that you are now, just over eighteen years, he had already buried
daggers in the breasts of friends, he had already attacked the side of the
consul Mark Antony by treachery, he had already been complicit with the
proscriptions.”13 Seneca’s point is that Augustus came to his understand-
ing of clementia later in life, after considerable acts of cruelty. He will later
contrast Augustus’s “learned” mercy with the natural kindness that Nero
displays, who has never harmed anyone and thus does not come to clementia
through “the repentance of savagery” (saevitiae paenitentia, 1.11.2).
On one level, Seneca here is simply relecting a combination of histor-
ical reality and Augustan propaganda, which itself was anxious to contrast
the regrettable behavior of the young Octavian with the more statesmanlike

11
Except where otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
12
Purcell, “Livia and the Womanhood of Rome,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
32 (1986): 78–105.
13
Divus Augustus fuit mitis princeps, si quis illum a principatu suo aestimare incipiat; in communi
quidem rei publicae gladium movit. Cum hoc aetatis esset, quod tu nunc es, duodevicensimum egres-
sus annum, iam pugiones in sinum amicorum absconderat, iam insidiis M. Antonii consulis latus
petierat, iam fuerat collega proscriptionis (De Clem. 1.9.1).
102 Kristina Milnor

conduct of the princeps Augustus.14 But part of the point of the L. Cinna
episode in the De Clementia is that it pinpoints the moment of change, from
the savage youth to the forgiving older man. Seneca makes it clear that
Augustus initially does not know what to do about the conspirators: he
wants to avenge himself on them but feels that he should not; he is repre-
sented as agonizing over the problem until Livia offers the solution. Thus,
although there has clearly already been a partial moral shift in the princeps,
we are also presented with the participation of Livia as one of the most sig-
niicant differences between Octavian and Augustus; it is she who gives him
the inal push to leave his savage ways behind and become the model leader
he should have always been. One might say she domesticated him. This is
not simply a useful choice of words. Later in the text, Seneca is explicit that
the kind of clementia which the statesman Augustus displayed was not just
that of a good leader but of a good father. At De Clementia 1.15, the phil-
osopher tells the story of Rufus Lucius Tarius, whose son plotted against
his life; the father was supported by Augustus in showing forbearance by
simply banishing the young man rather than having him killed. This tale in
the De Clementia is introduced with the statement, “I will show through this
example a good ruler whom you might compare to a good father” (hoc ipso
exemplo dabo, quem compares bono patri, bonum principem, 1.15.3). The savage
boy Octavian has become the good father Augustus, a transformation that
is due at least in part to the princeps’s acquisition of and participation in a
household of his own.15
When Livia offers her husband the solution of clementia, therefore, she
can be seen to be speaking as the representative of the kind of familial vir-
tue which, it transpires, is exactly the sort of quality that marks the later
Augustus and the good statesman generally. It is worth noting, however,
that when Livia makes her case for forgiveness in the De Clementia, she does
not do it in the name of the family but for the sake of civic harmony – a goal
that is as much in Augustus’s interest as the state’s, as those whom he for-
gives will be bound to him by a debt of gratitude and thus less likely to plot
against him again. In some ways, this seems to be an uncomfortably self-in-
terested motivation for clemency and might be compared to Julius Caesar’s
similar statement about his practice of forgiveness, “Let this be the new sys-
tem of victory, that pity and generosity build a fortiication around us” (haec

14
Thus, in the longest known passage to survive from Augustus’s autobiography, translated
into Greek by Appian, the princeps preserves a speech in which the fundamental illegal-
ity of the Triumvirate is described, a fact that is underscored with the phrase (addressed
to Augustus) “not even you will deny [this accusation]” (Appian, BC 5.43). The speaker,
however, goes on to excuse the constitutional irregularity of the regime by reference to the
continued threat posed by the tyrannicides.
15
Cf. Seneca’s observation that kings are willing and able to pass their thrones on to chil-
dren and grandchildren, whereas tyrants only hold brief (and, by implication, lonely) power
(De Clem. 1.11.4).
 Gender and Forgiveness 103

nova sit ratio vincendi ut misericordia et liberalitate nos muniamus, Cic. Ad Att.
9.7C).16 But while Caesar chooses a military metaphor to make this point,
speaking of forgiveness as a bastion of defense against enemies, Seneca has
Livia offer a different model to Augustus. In an image that clearly had reson-
ance, the princeps’s wife asks him to imagine himself as a doctor who, when
his patient does not respond to one sort of remedy, tries another (De Clem.
1.9.6); in Dio Cassius’s later rendition of the same scene, the metaphor has
become a fully ledged trope, as Livia urges her husband to remember that
the minds of men are as prone to sickness as their bodies and that doctors
hesitate before resorting to surgery lest they make the patient worse (Rom.
Hist. 55.17.1–4).17 For Livia, forgiveness is a tool as much as for Caesar, but
where he sees it as a strategy in an ongoing civil war, she imagines it as medi-
cine to heal a sick body politic.
In fact, when Livia speaks as an agent of healing and reconciliation, she
is actually enacting a role previously accorded to Roman women. It had
long been the practice of elite republican families to create and maintain
political alliances through intermarriage. During the late republic, as power
became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families and those
families came into increasing conlict, a wedding was one way of healing
rifts and solidifying unstable relationships between men: thus, the marriage
of Julius Caesar’s daughter Julia to Pompey, the marriage of Cato’s daugh-
ter Porcia to Brutus, the marriage of Octavian’s sister Octavia to Antony,
and so on.18 That many of these alliances did not succeed testiies to the
nastiness of sociopolitical life in the later republic, but the symbolic import
of the women’s roles – as potential bandages for the wounds created by civil
war – remains. This trend, and the effect it had upon female participation
(both symbolic and actual) in public life, may be relected in Livy’s retell-
ing of the story of the Sabine women, an episode in Roman history that
received a great deal of attention in early imperial literature.19 The tale had
long had a part in the myth of early Rome: the city’s founder, Romulus,
orchestrated a seizure of women from neighboring communities; when
their enraged male relatives came looking for them, the women interceded
(in Livy’s account, on the battleield itself) and insisted that their natal and
new marital families must make peace. Thereafter, the Romans and their

16
On the self-interested nature of Caesar’s clementia, and its link with established precepts
of royal power in the Greek world, see Treu, “Zur Clementia Caesaris,” Museum Helveticum 5
(1948): 197–217.
17
On this passage, see Guia, “Clemenza del sovrano e monarchia illuminata in Cassio Dione
55.14–22,” Athenaeum 59 (1981): 317–37.
18
Dixon, “The Marriage Alliance in the Roman Elite,” Journal of Family History 10.4 (1985):
353–78.
19
Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Ovid (in addition to Cicero and Plutarch) all offer
their own versions of the myth: on the different sources and their signiicance, see Miles,
“The First Roman Marriage and the Theft of the Sabine Women,” in Innovations of Antiquity,
ed. Hexter and Selden (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 161–96.
104 Kristina Milnor

neighbors became a single state. It has been convincingly argued that Livy,
in contrast with other versions in Ovid and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, puts
a particular focus on the experience of the women themselves, who are
won over by the prayers (preces) of the Roman men, “who begged pardon
for their deed by citing their desire and love” (factum purgantium cupiditate
atque amore, Livy, AUC 1.9.16).20 The ability of the Sabine women to forgive
their rapists and persuade their fathers and brothers to forgive them also is
thus represented as an indispensable tool in repairing and rebuilding the
Roman state.
In the story of the Sabines, therefore, we see another example of the
ways in which female forgiveness could be seen as originating in the pri-
vate world of women but having profound effects on the public world of
men. Returning to Livia and the imperial household, we can see this – and
the representational dificulties which it provoked – expressed again in the
Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone Patre, an inscription that records in the form
of a senatorial decree the results of the conspiracy trial of Cn. Calpurnius
Piso. The decree dates to 20 c.e., or four years after Augustus died and his
stepson Tiberius inherited the position of emperor; because Tiberius was
Livia’s son, however, she continued to have signiicant inluence under his
rule. Piso, who had been appointed by Tiberius as governor of Syria in 17
c.e., was tried on the charge of conspiring against Germanicus, Tiberius’s
nephew and adopted son, who had been given command of the empire’s
military forces in the East. During this time (19 c.e.), Germanicus died
under mysterious circumstances and was rumored to have been poisoned
by Piso and his wife Plancina. Although Piso committed suicide before he
could be tried, the case against him was heard posthumously, and he was
condemned to a number of different punishments; Plancina, on the other
hand, was pardoned by the senate at the request of Tiberius, who himself
had been petitioned by Livia, a longtime friend of the accused.
The word clementia shows up quite early in the inscription, where the
senate claims to have learned the capacity from Augustus and Tiberius,
and which introduces the section of the decree in which it is made clear
that Piso’s son would not be made to suffer for his father’s crimes. This is
in keeping with the importance that the quality was given in much early
imperial propaganda: the emperor is forgiving, and his kindness spreads
throughout Roman society to create general concord. What is more curi-
ous, however, is the fact that the next section details the pardon of Plancina,
which is explicitly attributed to the intercession of Livia through Tiberius.
Indeed, even though the request was brought to the senate by the emperor,
the decree states that it will be granted because of what is owed to Livia,
who was “most well deserving of the republic not only because she gave

20
Brown, “Livy’s Sabine Women and the Ideal of Concordia,” Transactions of the American
Philological Association 125 (1995): 291–319.
 Gender and Forgiveness 105

birth to our princeps but also because of her many and great kindnesses
to men of every order – although she rightly and deservedly should have
the greatest inluence in what she requested from the senate, she used it
most sparingly” (optume de r(e) p(ublica) meritae non partu tantum modo prin-
cipis nostri, sed etiam multis magnisq(ue) ordinis homines beneicis, quae, cum iure
meritoq(ue) plurumum posse in eo, quod a senatu petere<t>, deberet, parcissume
uteretur eo, 115–18).21 The pardon provided to Plancina, then, may have
come through Tiberius, but it is credited to Livia, who has earned the right
to ask for it through both private and public actions: on the one hand, she
has been a good mother, on the other, a ine patroness to men of different
ranks. The rhetorical tension in this description of Livia’s role is evident
in the inal phrases, where her inluence over the senate is excused by her
unwillingness to use it; later in the text, other imperial women are similarly
praised for “their most loyal grief and their moderation in grief ” (dolorem
idelissumum et in dolore moderatione<m>, 145–46).22
A different perspective on the same event is offered in book 3 of Tacitus’s
Annals, the centerpiece of which is the historian’s description of the Pisonian
conspiracy. Here again, however, we see Livia’s ability to secure pardon for
Plancina as an example of her (for Tacitus) unnatural and disturbing inlu-
ence over public affairs. As is recorded in the Senatus consultum de Cn. Pisone
Patre, Tacitus describes how Tiberius appeared before the senate and asked
for mercy for Plancina on behalf of his mother, but the historian adds the,
perhaps imagined, fact that many upright citizens were shocked at Livia’s
activities: “Thus, it was correct for a grandmother to look upon the woman
who murdered her grandson, to speak with her, to remove her from the sen-
ate’s authority” (id ergo fas aviae interfectricem nepotis adspicere, adloqui, eripere
senatui, Ann. 3.17.2).23 Indeed, Tiberius himself is described as embarrassed
by the inluence he has allowed to his mother, as he makes the original
request “with shame and humiliation” (cum pudore et lagitio, 3.17.1) and
later is more merciful to Piso’s son because he is ashamed at how lenient he
has been with the (innocent) boy’s (guilty) mother (3.18.1). Moreover, the
episode with Plancina recalls that of Urgulania, another friend of Livia’s,
who Tacitus says is excused from appearing before the senate because “the
friendship of the Augusta [Livia] had raised her above the laws” (supra leges
amicitia Augustae extulerat, Ann. 2.34.2). Thus, Tacitus sees Livia not as par-
ticipating in the exercise of imperial clemency but as implementing her
own system of justice, which both mimics and threatens the formal legal
procedures of the Roman state.

21
Text and translation from Potter, ed., and Damon, trans., “The Senatus Consultum de Cn.
Pisone Patre,” American Journal of Philology 120.1 (1999): 13–41.
22
Severy, “Family and State in the Early Imperial Monarchy: The Senatus Consultum de Pisone
Patre, Tabula Siarensis, and Tabula Hebana,” Classical Philology 95.3 (2000): 318–37.
23
Woodman and Martin, The Annals of Tacitus, Book 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996). Note that the tone here is one of “indignant sarcasm” (p. 180).
106 Kristina Milnor

Forgiving Women
One of the things that Tacitus seems to ind especially threatening in Livia’s
pursuit of her own ideals of forgiveness is the fact that it testiies to the
existence of a world of inluential women who operate beyond the bound-
aries of male control. Of course, this world of women had existed for a long
time, but it is clear that the chaos of late republican politics and the rise
of the imperial house as a political institution gave real civic signiicance
to domestic relationships, among women and between women and men.
It is worth noting that in Ovid’s exile poetry he both asks Livia directly for
her assistance in obtaining forgiveness from Augustus and begs his wife to
contact the empress (Ep. ex Pont. 2.8.29; 3.1.114–28). Like many of those
who came out on the losing side of a political battle in the late republic
and early empire, Ovid found himself banished to a place far from the cen-
ter of power at Rome; he thus turns for help, as had others before him,24
to the female members of his household, who, because of the exemption
from political vicissitudes afforded to them by their sex, had been able to
remain in the capital. Women may not, in general, be the direct recipients
or purveyors of clementia, but they could certainly be seen as the conduit
between men through which forgiveness might low. This role – which, as
I noted earlier, has clear connections to traditional domestic female func-
tions – seems to have become increasingly politicized under the late repub-
lic and early empire.
As we saw with the story of the Sabine women, however, there are also
instances in which the Romans could see and even honor women’s inde-
pendent exercise of forgiveness in a public context. One of the most curi-
ously celebrated myths in Augustan culture is that of the Danaids, a group
of ifty sisters whose father, Danaus, later king of Argos, was involved in
a territorial conlict with his brother Aegyptus, king of Egypt. Aegyptus,
who had ifty sons, seems to have wished to isolate his brother and insisted
on marriage between the two sets of cousins; Danaus agreed, but then in
secret instructed his daughters to kill their new husbands on their wedding
night. All obeyed except Hypermestra, who spared her bridegroom’s life
and endured the anger of her father; the other Danaids were ultimately
condemned to suffer terrible punishments in Hades. As I noted, the myth
seems to have held considerable importance in Augustan Rome: it forms
the centerpiece of one of Horace’s Odes (3.11) and appears briely but sig-
niicantly in Virgil’s Aeneid, as the image on Pallas’s swordbelt (10.495–99),
which inspires Aeneas to execute Turnus at the end of the poem. In part,

24
For example, Fulvia is reported by Appian to have interceded with the senate on behalf of
Antony in 43 b.c.e. (BC 51); Servilia, mother of Brutus the assassin of Caesar, functioned as
her son’s representative in Rome after the tyrannicides had been forced to lee the capital
(Cicero, Ad Brut. 24.1).
 Gender and Forgiveness 107

these poetic depictions of the myth may have to do with Augustus’s own
use of it as one of the main decorative elements for the public-and-private
building complex that he constructed on the Palatine Hill, dedicated in
28 b.c.e. as one of the irst and most momentous architectural statements
of the new regime after the battle of Actium.25 We are told by Ovid (AA 1.74
and Tristia 3.1.62), Propertius (2.31.1–4), and other sources that part of
the complex – which also included a private dwelling for the princeps and
his family, Greek and Latin libraries, a space where the senate might meet,
and a temple dedicated to Apollo Palatinus – was a portico decorated
with statues of the ifty Danaids along with their father, apparently with an
upraised sword.
The exact ideological signiicance of the Danaids in the Palatine portico
has been the subject of some debate among scholars, who are divided on
whether the murderous daughters should be seen as dutiful daughters who
reject the advances of “foreign” bridegrooms at the behest of their father,
or villainous murderers who violate the sanctity of the marriage bond and
suffer just punishment for it. Either way, however, it is impossible to separate
the “domestic” actions of the Danaids from the public context in which they
arose: their story represents the way that a political struggle can be played
out at the very heart of the household, in the wedding chamber itself. In a
sense, then, the Danaids are a negative image of the Sabine women, as they
reject the role of being the healing and binding link between their war-
ring male relatives. In the case of the Danaids, however, at least part of the
point must be the contrast between the redemptive act of Hypermestra and
the crime of her siblings. Our descriptions of the Danaid portico on the
Palatine do not allude to Hypermestra, so we do not know whether she was
present among the statues there; it has been argued that the portico delib-
erately focuses on the punishment of the murderesses as a way of under-
scoring the implacable justice of the new regime.26 On the other hand, the
fact that Hypermestra’s heroism is not shown on Pallas’s swordbelt, which
seems to show only the dead bodies of the young bridegrooms, has been
seen as deliberate, a way of underscoring the savagery and lack of clementia
that mark civil war generally and in particular Aeneas’s act at the end of the
Aeneid.27 This suggests that the brutality of the story should be measured
against the mercy displayed by Hypermestra, whether or not she is explicitly
part of a given representation; the counterexample of the one named sister
shows how her siblings were understood as lacking the quality of forgive-
ness which she displays.

25
On the Palatine complex and the place of the Danaids within it, see Milnor, “Reading and
Writing Gender on the Augustan Palatine,” in Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 47–93.
26
Leach, “Hypermestra’s Querela: Coopting the Danaids in Horace Ode 3.11 and in Augustan
Rome,” Classical World 102 (2008): 13–28.
27
Spence, “The Danaids and the End of the Aeneid,” Vergilius 37 (1991): 11–19.
108 Kristina Milnor

Perhaps most notable, however, is the fact that in Horace’s poem that
features the myth of the Danaids at its center, Hypermestra’s act is expli-
citly described as clement. In her speech at the end of the poem, Horace
has her bid her new husband to lee while he can, leaving her to the wrath
of her father: “Let my father load me down with savage chains because
I, forgiving [clemens], spared my unhappy husband” (me pater saevis oneret
catenis/quod viro clemens misero peperci, 3.11.45–46). The poem is a challen-
ging one and is certainly experimenting with poetic aesthetics as well as
political resonances.28 Yet the use of the word clemens here is noticeable,
not just because of the new and important role which clementia was being
given in contemporary Augustan politics (Odes 1–3 were published in 23
b.c.e.) but also because it is here used in the context of a conlict of family
loyalties, emphasized by me pater . . . viro clemens.29 At the same time, how-
ever, Horace goes out of his way to emphasize the fact that Hypermestra’s
act – although it takes place in the most private of contexts, the wedding
chamber – is emphatically public in its implications. Horace opens his nar-
rative by describing Hypermestra as “a girl spectacularly deceitful toward
her father and glorious through the ages” (in parentem splendide mendax et in
omne virgo nobilis aevom, 35–36), the adverb emphasizing the visibility of her
act and the second prepositional phrase, its durability. Moreover, Horace
has Hypermestra herself close the speech by bidding her groom to “carve
a plaintive song on my tomb as a memorial” (nostri memorem sepulcro/scalpe
querellam, 51–52). She clearly wishes her story to be known and repeated
beyond the immediate physical and chronological context.
That Hypermestra has succeeded in becoming exemplary is proved by
her appearance in Horace’s poem, where her story is actually adduced
as part of the poet’s attempt to seduce a young woman – a deeply ironic
“private” use of a tale that had been weighted with so much resonance in
contemporary politics. Hypermestra remains, however, a counterexample
to the principle that “women do not extend clemency in Latin literature,”
although her story also illustrates the rule that they can do so only in con-
texts that complicate the relationship between their private roles and the
public performance of forgiveness.30 Moreover, we might say that the paral-
lel stories of the Danaids and the Sabine women – both of which were the
subject of considerable attention in the early imperial period – represent
a more general cultural interest in what we might call the dynamics of
female forgiveness: that is, when women forgive, when they do not, and
what effects their choices have on the men around them. Although it may
have been exacerbated by the unprecedented power wielded by imperial

28
Lowrie, Horace’s Narrative Odes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 275–97.
29
Nisbet and Rudd, A Commentary on Horace: Odes, Book III (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), p. 162.
30
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, p. 14.
 Gender and Forgiveness 109

women such as Livia, Roman concern with the relationship between gen-
der and clemency was expressed in contexts beyond those dealing directly
with the female members of the ruling house. In this sense, we might say
that the association between Livia and clemency which I discussed earlier
was a natural outgrowth of her already anomalous position between the
domestic world of the household and the public sphere of her husband
and son. But the Roman interest in female forgiveness in other frameworks,
I would argue, testiies to a particular concern with the kind of offenses
that might be committed against women and how those women should be
expected to respond.
One noteworthy example of this occurs in the popular early imperial
educational entertainment known as declamation.31 This practice grew out
of the Roman tradition of oratorical training for young men of the elite
and gradually developed as a leisure-time activity under the early empire:
Augustus himself was supposed to have viewed declamatory performances
on more than one occasion (see Seneca, Controv. 2.14.12–13; 10.5.22)
and Tiberius was apparently a student of the famed rhetorician Theodorus
(Seneca, Suas. 3.5.7). A declamatory exercise consisted of a statement of
legal principles – fake ones, because the regulations and penalties thus artic-
ulated bear little resemblance to the canon of either Greek or Roman law –
and a situation to which those principles should be applied. The students
or participants would then “declaim” on one side of the case or another,
seeking out the cleverest arguments and turns of phrase in an effort to
persuade a hypothetical jury. We possess several collections of these exer-
cises and samples of the speeches made in response to the prompt, one by
the Elder Seneca, father of the philosopher, from the early irst century
c.e., and others that seem to date to the second century c.e. or later.32 In
general, it is clear that Roman taste in declamatory exercises ran strongly
to the baroque, and the casts of characters who populate the hypothet-
ical situations seem closer to those found in Greek New Comedy than to
those of the world of the Roman courts: pirates are popular, as are wicked
stepmothers, tyrants, exiles, and Vestal Virgins. Thus, as a single example
among many, Minor Declamation 342 concerns the case of a slave girl who
was sent disguised as a freewoman to a pirate chief as ransom for her mas-
ter’s son; the pirate dies and leaves her his property; when she returns to
her original community, the declaimers ask, is she free or still a slave? And
to whom (therefore) does her inheritance belong?

31
For a basic introduction to declamation, see Bloomer, “Roman Declamation: The Elder
Seneca and Quintilian,” in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, ed. Dominik and Hall (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 297–306.
32
The Declamations of Calpurnius Flaccus and the Minor Declamations ascribed to Quintilian are
both probably from the second century c.e.; the Major Declamations also attributed to Quintilian
are probably fourth or ifth century c.e. See Kennedy, “Roman Declamation in the Generation
after Quintilian,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 13.4 (2007): 592–97.
110 Kristina Milnor

Despite the fact that the particular situations discussed in our extant
examples of declamation seem so extreme, it has been argued that practice
oratory represents a kind of “cultural mythmaking” among the Romans of
the early empire. As such, it provides a window, not so much onto the moral
or ethical world of the Romans, but onto the problems and potential solu-
tions with which they were concerned as a society.33 As Mary Beard writes,
[Declamatory texts] construct a ictional world of “traditional tales” for negotiat-
ing, and re-negotiating, the fundamental rules of Roman society; they “naturalize
the arbitrariness” of those rules by setting them in the context of legal sanction;
they offer a vision of higher authority – deined not in terms of divine interven-
tion, but in terms of the social sanction of Roman law; they provide a focus for
the re-presentation and constant re-resolution of central Roman/human conlicts
that everyday social regulations do not (and can not) solve; they offer an arena for
learning, practicing and recollecting what it is to be and think Roman.34

For Beard, then, the fact that many declamations include or even focus
on the relationships between citizen men and slaves, women, or foreign-
ers is due to the interest of the genre in the boundaries of society and
the ways in which the idea of Roman law – even if not its actual letter – is
able to regulate confusing or complicated social interactions. In this sense,
the declamatory exercises may represent a more comprehensive means of
understanding elite Roman values than the philosophical essays of Cicero
or Seneca the Younger.
It is telling, therefore, that forgiveness appears as a theme in a number
of the scenarios presented to the declaimers. Dowling cites the example
represented in Controversiae 7.1.13, where a father with two sons orders one
to punish the other for the crime of parricide; the irst is hesitant to kill the
second and instead sets him adrift in a boat, but he escapes and becomes
a pirate chief; the father is eventually captured by the pirate but subse-
quently freed; the father then tries to disinherit the son who failed to kill
his brother.35 The arguments in the case necessarily turn on the question
of whether it was appropriate for the one son to excuse the crime of the
other to the extent that he remitted the penalty of death. Clearly the father
is unwilling to forgive the parricide even when his life has been saved by the
son who once plotted against it, and many of the speakers in the case seem
to have judged that the best defense was one that contrasted the forgiving
son’s (laudable) behavior with the (shameful) severity of the father. The
idea that the son acted with generosity and mercy is seen as key to his exon-
eration. Indeed, Seneca the Elder tells us that intelligent people (prudentes)

33
Beard, “Looking (Harder) for Roman Myth: Dumézil, Declamation and the Problems of
Deinition,” in Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms, ed. Graf (Stuttgart:
Teubner Press, 1993), pp. 44–64.
34
Ibid., pp. 55–56.
35
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World, pp. 184–87.
 Gender and Forgiveness 111

did not like the argument adduced by Hispanus that the boat solution was
preferred by the irst son because it was harsher, because slower rather than
more merciful. As Seneca notes, “What hope of acquittal does he have if
[he admits that] he neither obeyed [his father] nor spared [his brother]?”
(quam etiam spem habet absolutionis si nec paruit nec pepercit? Contr. 7.1.24).
The issue of forgiveness in this instance, then, has to do with questions of
character and the ways that a cultural bias in favor of more merciful people
might be harnessed to save the forgiving son.
When we turn to the question of women’s forgiveness, however, it is clear
that different problems occupy the declaimers. For instance, and most not-
ably, one of the best known ictional laws to be adduced in the declamatory
exercises is the one which states that a girl who has been raped is allowed to
choose to marry her attacker or to have him put to death. As noted above of
declamatory regulations generally, this is a “law” which has been invented
solely for the purpose of constructing arguments around it, as actual Roman
law clearly prescribed death for the rapist (Dig. 48.6.3.4). Moreover, it is
extremely popular, recurring again and again in different contexts and
applied to different scenarios. Some address the choice directly: What if
a girl’s father wanted her to choose marriage but her brother pressed her
to choose death (Contr. 4.3)? Others are more indirect: If the twin sister of
a raped girl, who killed herself in shame, is brought to court by her father
and asks the rapist be killed, should the father then be convicted of hav-
ing unlawfully sought the rapist’s death (Decl. Min. 270)? What is clear in
each instance, however, is that the choice is framed as one between severity
(death) and forgiveness (marriage). Thus, a case is presented in which a
young rapist sends his relatives to beg his victim to choose marriage; she
hesitates, and he stabs himself; she then opts to marry him (Decl. Min. 247).
The overall case concerns the question of whether she should inherit his
property, but the oration in favor of the girl spends most of its time on the
generosity of her choice: “Consider how great a favor she wanted to give –
indeed, did give, to the extent it was within her power: she forgave the
injury to her raped virginity – she, to whom the law allowed vengeance even
to the point of death. . . . Such an implacable rapist, who made so tragic an
example out of the greatest forgiveness!” (cogitate quantum beneicium dare
voluerit, immo, quod ad ipsam pertinet, dederit: remisit iniuriam raptae virginitatis
ea cui lex et morte vindicare permisit. . . . Pro <raptor> immitis, qui de summa clem-
entia tam triste fecit exemplum! Decl. Min. 247.12, 18).
Of course, one of the curious facts about the “law” in this instance is
that it contains the possibility of its own subversion. That is, the point of
setting out a penalty in an edict against a violent crime would seem both to
deter people from committing it and to punish them once they have. Here,
however, one of the possible consequences of being found guilty under
the law is the remittance of retribution, which raises the risk of abuse: as
one declaimer remarks of a man convicted under the law, “Would that the
112 Kristina Milnor

fact that he knew of his judge’s [ability to grant] forgiveness had not freed
him from fear” (utinam non hoc illum liberaret metu, quod iudicis suae clemen-
tiam novit, 7.8.6). Another disturbing – for the Romans – prospect was that
the victim would be more forgiving than her male relatives. Thus, one of
Calpurnius Flaccus’s declamations concerns a father who refuses to allow
his raped daughter to appear in court to make her choice, by implication
because he thought she would choose marriage (Decl. 34). The preserved
speech on behalf of the perpetrator praises the fact that the choice belongs
to the girl alone: “The laws provide for nothing more generous than that, in
the case of rape victims, it is not permitted for anyone else to make the judg-
ment. There is no mediator for these [two parties]. I am the defendant, but
you must produce my judge!” (nihil equidem leges clementius paraverunt quam
quod de lege raptarum non licet alii iudicare. Medius his nemo est. Sum reus, sed
exhibe iudicem meum!). Far from being excluded from “clement” practice,
the woman here is seen as more likely to forgive than her male relatives,
who were only indirect victims of the crime in question.
Indeed, it would seem in part to be the nature of rape as a crime that
made it useful to the declaimers as a way of generating, irst, the strange but
useful “law” of death versus marriage and, second, compelling situations to
which the law might be applied. As in many patriarchal societies, among
the Romans a sexual offense against a female member of a family was seen
as a strike against the male head of her household, and for this reason it was
his duty to avenge it. Women were not seen as fully mature under Roman
law and could not, therefore, be responsible for themselves in court.36 What
is curious about the law and situations discussed by the declaimers, how-
ever, is the extent to which they recognize women’s subjectivity, both by
putting the choice of penalty into her hands and by enabling her, if she
chose marriage, to make her own matrimonial arrangements even if they
were against the wishes of her male relatives. Rather than treating her as
merely an extension of her family, and the violence that she suffered as a
crime against her father, the declaimers recognize that she is the offended
party and that, therefore, the decision to punish or forgive should be hers.
By doing this in the context of the lawcourt – albeit a ictional one – the
elite men who participated in the declamatory games gave formal, public
attention to women and their (at least theoretical) right to act in public on
their own behalf in certain instances. At the same time, however, the point
of having the option of forgiveness be represented by marriage would seem
to be that it reincorporates the crime and the criminal into a traditional
domestic framework; the illicit sex of the original attack and the public
offense it represents are rehabilitated by the willingness of the victim to
contract a socially acceptable private sexual relationship with her attacker.

36
On this issue, see the discussion of Dixon, “Womanly Weakness in Roman Law,” in Reading
Roman Women (London: Duckworth Press, 2001), pp. 73–88.
 Gender and Forgiveness 113

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, at least in one instance, a woman’s

choice to return to good domesticity by forgiving and marrying her attacker
is seen as having civic implications. In Minor Declamations 251, a case is pre-
sented in which a husband wishes to divorce his wife, whom he had had to
marry because he raped her, on the grounds of barrenness. Although this
is presented as perfectly legal, the example speech argues that the hus-
band cannot be allowed to forget the generosity that his wife showed him
at the beginning of their relationship: “It is clear that you [sc. the husband]
received the greatest of kindnesses: harmed, she gave you life; while justly
angered, she gave you life; she gave life to you as you were about to perish
in humiliation and shame” (Beneicium te accepisse summum manifestum est:
vitam tibi dedit laesa, dedit vitam iuste irata, dedit vitam perituro per supplicia, per
dedecus, 251.5). In addition, the speaker continues, there is not even a legit-
imate argument to be made from public interest: “But this woman has the
power to return a complete rationale not only to her husband but also to
the state. For even though she does not have a son, nevertheless she saved
a young man, a human being, and a citizen” (Haec vero non tantum marito
sed etiam rei publicae reddere plenam potest rationem. Nam etiamsi non habet ilium,
at servavit tamen iuvenem, tamen hominem, tamen civem, 251.7). These inal
sentences depend on the idea that the production of offspring is a duty that
adults owe to the state, a curious, though legally well-established principle37
that confounds the traditional Roman divide between domestic and civic
life. In the same way, the wife’s choice to forgive her attacker rather than
exact the vengeance due to her is understood not just as a private act but
one that serves the interests of the res publica.
In other words, like the conduct of Livia, of the Sabine women, and of
their negative mirror the Danaids, this unnamed woman’s forgiving behav-
ior is seen as having public implications, despite her “natural” place in the
private realm. Clementia may formally have been “bound up with ideas of
maleness” because of its association with the public exercise of power, but –
as is shown in the description quoted earlier of the beneicium granted to the
rapist by the victim – it is clear that under the empire women too could be
seen to have potency beyond the conines of the domestic sphere. But what
is perhaps most important about the representation of female forgiveness
in the declamatory exercises is that it is understood as a woman’s refusal
of the power she has been given in the civic realm: she could legally have
had him killed, but she chose not to do so. Like the description of Livia’s
inluence in the SC de Pisone Patre, the existence of women’s authority is sim-
ultaneously made awesome and acceptable by her unwillingness to employ

37
A principle perhaps most notably represented in Roman law by the lex Julia et Papia, part of
Augustus’s social legislation, which offered rewards to members of the elite who produced
children and imposed penalties to those who did not. See McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and
the Law in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 70–84.
114 Kristina Milnor

it. This may, then, explain in part why early imperial culture became inter-
ested in creating a close connection between women and forgiveness: faced
with the reality that certain elite women were moving into positions where
they might pose a real threat to men, it was reassuring to believe that they
were generally inclined toward forgiving behavior.
At the same time, however, the existence of a female version of clementia
necessarily added another dimension to the masculine virtue that had been
inherited from the republic, so that it could be understood as something
more than and different from the quality that a social superior might show
to an inferior. Instead, the declamations in particular seem to suggest that
clementia, especially as it is found in women, is a gesture whose practice puts
the recipient in not only social but also moral or ethical debt to the one
who has forgiven him. Because women were by their gender excluded from
the games of one-upmanship that characterized the Roman hierarchy, their
ability to dispense forgiveness to those who had wronged them was seen as
emerging from a different world of virtues and values, the private or domes-
tic sphere. The prominence given to women in early imperial culture, in
turn, meant that their brand of forgiveness began to have real effects on
public life, even at the same time that the emperor’s clementia was seen as
deeply connected to his “domestic” role as father to the Roman state. This
blurring of the boundary between the domestic and civic spheres was a hall-
mark of the period, but it is important to note that its effect on the concept
of clementia seems to have been to push forgiveness toward its more modern
incarnation as a private, interpersonal exchange rather than as something
that had meaning only within a social hierarchy. In this sense, women’s
participation in early imperial culture changed not only the meaning of
clementia but also what role morality generally was seen to have in public
and private life.
 7

“To Forgive Is Divine”

Gods as Models of Forgiveness in Late Republican
and Early Imperial Rome

Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

In late republican Rome the question of reconciliation was not only of the-
oretical import: the city was preoccupied, for decades, by political inight-
ing of the most deadly kind. While there was a wide variety of competing
notions concerning what an ideally peaceful Rome should be like, there
was, de facto, no feasible prospect for the resolution of the civil war. In
the larger mix of dificult, potentially violent altercations, religious argu-
ments and actions had a particular edge. Since the 80s b.c.e., leaders such
as Sulla and Pompey exploited religious symbols in order to advance or
emphasize their particular powers. Most poignantly, Pompey’s claim to his
“greatness,” which obviously sought to mimic that of Alexander the Great,
referenced an ideal of divinely sanctioned leadership that challenged the
limits of Rome’s traditional structure of government. Of course, no Roman
leader would have gone so far as Alexander to claim direct divine parent-
age and demand religious honors equal to a god for himself, but similar, if
less direct, references to divine power became part of the many contested
ideals of leadership. The years under Julius Caesar and his adoptive son,
Augustus, saw especially intense discussions about the religious status and
actions of Roman leaders – exactly at the same time when the resolution of
the long civil inighting brought notions of reconciliation into the focus of
attention. In this chapter, I examine a few key moments in the process from
which the notion of imperial clementia (clemency) emerged – a process that,
I argue, included both religious and political concerns.
My main argument engages a nexus of religious, political, and philo-
sophical notions that, I believe, interacted in shaping what we can call, with

The origins of this paper go back to a fascinating class with the late Jacques Derrida at the
New School in New York. I owe thanks to him as well as to Charles Griswold, Ágnes Heller, and
David Konstan for encouraging my investigation of this topic, and to Jennifer Knust for her
help with the inal version of this essay. The reference in my title is to Alexander Pope’s An
Essay on Criticism, line 525 (in volume 2 of Pope’s Poetical Works, edited by H. Davis, with a new
introduction by P. Rogers [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978]).

115
116 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

Adam Morton, the “forgiveness territory” in this period.1 With reference to

other critical concepts of this era, such a multiply inluenced process has
already been recognized; we know, for example, that the emerging idea of
the leader capable of resolving civil conlict was understood, at least in part,
through religious language and associations. The salus (well-being) of the
state was increasingly seen in connection to that of the commander who
could ensure it, and the Salus of that leader was now the subject of prayers.
My point is that the idea of imperial clementia also emerged, at least in part,
through a religious understanding and that the success of clementia in par-
ticular also had to do with its unique characteristics among the speciic reli-
gious connotations of reconciliation, forgiveness, and clemency in the late
republic and early empire.

The Problem: Clementia from Caesar to Augustus

There is no evidence for the worship of Clementia as a goddess in Rome
before the mid-irst century b.c.e., when it emerged as one of those reli-
giously understood concepts usually referred to as abstract deities.2 In a
recent monograph Anna Clark convincingly showed that abstract divinities
such as Clementia, Concordia, Libertas, Salus, Victoria, and Virtus may be
best understood as special “divine qualities,” whose signiicance and inter-
pretation were continually explored by identifying individuals’ and groups’
positions relative to them.3 A good example is the divine quality Libertas:
while the notion of libertas (freedom) was subject to intense public debate
in general, these discussions reached a new level in 58 b.c.e., when a trib-
une, Clodius, proposed to consecrate a new shrine to Libertas on a site on
the Palatine that had been occupied by a house of the now exiled orator, M.
Tullius Cicero, who was, not incidentally, Clodius’s archenemy. The dedi-
cation was meaningful on multiple levels, and not only because Clodius
sought to deprive the famous orator of the right to reclaim his house ever
again but also because he simultaneously claimed religiously sanctioned
libertas from the tyranny of Cicero (referencing Cicero’s execution of citi-
zens without trial in 63 b.c.e.). Cicero’s response, when he later tried to
reclaim his house, offered a different interpretation of libertas/Libertas:
he called Clodius’s goddess a foreign courtesan and argued that only he,
Cicero, could restore a truly Roman Libertas. In this debate, the proper
interpretation of the divine quality Libertas and the respective relation-
ships of Clodius and Cicero to it were the central issue.

1
See Adam Morton’s chapter in this volume.
2
Beard, North, and Price, Religions of Rome, vol. 1: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), p. 62.
3
Clark, Divine Qualities: Cult and Community in Republican Rome (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), pp. 255–63. In this essay, “clementia” refers to the notion or virtue of
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 117

Such discussions were not an exclusively political matter, of signiicance

only to the elite, but were played out on a wider, popular stage as well,
including at performances in the city’s theaters. For example, as Cicero
later recounted, libertas came to be in focus at a certain performance of
Accius’s Brutus in 57 b.c.e., at the time when the conlict of Clodius and
Cicero was at its height. Cicero, who had no royal heritage but whose family
name was Tullius, boasted that the audience loudly echoed the line “Tullius,
who had established libertas for the citizens”; while that line was originally
meant to refer to the sixth archaic king of Rome, Tullius, who was respon-
sible for establishing the centuriate assembly, the audience’s intense reac-
tion, at least on Cicero’s later reading, relected its expectation that its own
“Tullius,” that is, Cicero, would soon be recalled from exile.4
We do not know at exactly what point in the irst century b.c.e. clementia
emerged as a divine quality subject to political and religious discussion.
Already in the mid-irst century, statesmen could be praised for their mild-
ness in general (so Diodorus Siculus fr. 38.16, and Cicero, Pro Sulla 72).5
Still, popular references, such as a few aphorisms from the mime writer
and actor Publilius Syrus, suggest that mild behavior in general, and clem-
entia in particular, were not necessarily seen as beneicial when extended
to enemies.6 Thus, we ind “Fear, not clementia, subdues the ill-disposed”
(Metus improbos compescit, non clementia, M49), a maxim that suggests
contempt for clementia. Another aphorism, however, praises the quality:
“He who relies on clementia conquers forever” (Perpetuo vincit qui utitur
clementia, P51). This is not to say that someone who had been defeated and
spared would not have praised the clementia received. But we do know that
some, such as Cato the Younger, who was defeated in the battle of Thapsus
in 46 b.c.e., preferred not to wait for any positive outreach from the vic-
torious Julius Caesar. We cannot know for sure whether Cato’s dislike was
due especially to his concerns about the religious, political, or status asso-
ciations of receiving clementia or, as has also been suggested, to the pity
implied in any such offer. His suicide – before Caesar could have extended
any such offer – suggests resistance to the beneits offered by the larger
political program of Caesar, which included clementia.
Caesar himself seems to have followed a mixed policy of mildness and
severity: in a letter of 49 b.c.e. he refers to his misericordia (mildness) and
his liberalitas (generosity) as his new way of conquering (nova ratio vincendi,
Cic. Att. 9.7C). But, as a matter of fact, after the just mentioned battle of

clemency. By contrast, “Clementia” refers to the abstract divinity, or “divine quality” as I call
it following Clark.
4
Ibid., pp. 220–24.
5
For clementia as a praiseworthy quality see Konstan, Pity Transformed (London: Duckworth,
2001), p. 97.
6
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty in the Roman World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2006), pp. 25–26.
118 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

Thapsus in 46, he did not extend any mildness to his enemies, choosing
rather to slaughter some ten thousand enemy soldiers. If the varied out-
comes of mildness and cruelty suggest a policy being worked out as Caesar
went along, the same can be said about the phraseology employed: Caesar
does not seem to have chosen any one term – certainly not clementia exclu-
sively – to depict the rationale he employed when dealing with his defeated
enemies. From 48/47 b.c.e., when he published his own version of events
in his Civil War (Bellum Civile), he tended to use lenitas (gentleness, mild-
ness) to depict his lenient attitude (e.g., 1.74.7; 3.98.2), besides the previ-
ously mentioned misericordia and liberalitas.
One danger in seeing Caesar’s attitude as a strategy invented and
employed top down is that we fail to consider the wider social context in
which these values and divine qualities were discussed and acted upon. That
the initiative may not have come exclusively from Caesar was irst argued by
Stefan Weinstock, who suggested that it was Cicero who made the connec-
tion between Caesar and the divine quality Clementia.7 Famously in his Pro
Marcello of 46 b.c.e., a eulogy of Caesar, Cicero opened with the following
praise for Caesar’s pardon of Marcellus:
For by no means can I pass quietly over such mildness, such unusual and unheard of
clemency, such moderation while holding the greatest power over everything, and
inally such incredible and almost divine wisdom. (1.1)8

Cicero’s rhetoric here rises up from the regular encomiastic subject,

Caesar’s particular virtues – his mildness, clementia, moderation, and
wisdom – all the way to suggesting that, at least in the case of Caesar’s
sapientia, such a virtue could carry almost divine potential.9 Clementia in its
divine potential was central to two later speeches, the Pro Ligario late in the
same year and the Pro rege Deiotaro written in 45; in these speeches, clementia
was described in exclusively positive terms and associated with the divine
quality Clementia.10
While this evidence from Cicero’s works is signiicant, it is unlikely that
his appeal to the divine quality Clementia would have been unique, of his
own invention alone. Rather, the interest in Clementia as a divine quality

7
Weinstock, Divus Iulius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 233–43.
8
Cicero, Pro Marcello 1.1: Tantam enim mansuetudinem, tam inusitatam inauditamque clementiam,
tantum in summa potestate rerum omnium modum, tam denique incredibilem sapientiam ac paene
divinam, tacitus praeterire nullo modo possum. All translations of ancient Greek and Latin are
mine unless otherwise indicated.
9
Winterbottom, “Believing the Pro Marcello,” in Vertis in Usum: Studies in Honor of Edward
Courtney, ed. Miller, Damon, and Myers (Munich: Saur, 2002), pp. 34–37, offers a review of
earlier debates and convincingly shows that Cicero is not being ironic in the divine compari-
son here. See also De Marcello 8: “I don’t just compare him to the greatest men, but I judge
him most similar to god” (non ego eum cum summis viris comparo, sed simillimum deo iudico).
10
Rochlitz, Das Bild Caesars in Ciceros Orationes Caesarianae: Untersuchungen zur “clementia” und
“sapientia Caesaris” (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1993), pp. 14–31.
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 119

was produced in a wider context, including political discussions among

members of the elite and, to some extent, even the wider public. That these
discussions included some religious considerations is clear from the fact
that in 45 the senate decided to vote to award special honors to Caesar that
included a temple, most likely dedicated to Caesar and Clementia. Unlike
any rhetorical or political argument, the temple offered a permanent loca-
tion in Rome highlighting the connection between the statesman and the
goddess. The ritual occasions there would have continually reafirmed the
connection, while also applying pressure on Caesar to act upon the prin-
ciple implied in clementia.11 Our sources disagree on the exact phrasing of
the temple dedication: coins dated to 45 depict a building with the label the
“the clemency of Caesar” (Clementia Caesaris, Crawford, RRC 491, 480/21),
but Appian records that the cult image consisted of the igures of Caesar
and Clementia holding one another’s right hands in the so-called dextrarum
iunctio, a juxtaposition, as if equals, of the two igures (Appian, Bellum
Civile 2.106). The juxtaposition described by Appian provides an interest-
ing alternative to the other two possible visual depictions of Clementia at
this time: irst, as a goddess by herself and, second, in depictions of com-
manders, who are crowned by a lying Victory and shown reaching out to
a female Rome kneeling in front of them, thereby indirectly referencing
Clementia.12 While the coins issued by Caesar’s partisans depict the temple
and emphasize the clemency of Caesar, the temple’s cult image as described
by Appian suggests a different emphasis, juxtaposing Caesar and the divin-
ity Clementia.
The choice of Caesar and Clementia holding hands – especially over the
option of depicting a kneeling Rome in front of a victorious general – is
suggestive of a desire on the part of Caesar’s contemporaries to emphasize
a particular meaning of clementia. There is a shift in emphasis away from
the hierarchical bond between the victor and his submissive and defeated
enemy to a parallel juxtaposition of Caesar and (his policy of) Clementia.
Scholars have long pondered the potential constitutional implications of
such divine associations and, in particular, whether the juxtaposition with
a divine quality made Caesar as powerful as a god and so above the con-
stitution. From a political perspective Cicero’s praise of Caesar’s clemen-
tia and the senate’s religious initiatives of a cult and honors can be easily
seen as sheer sycophancy.13 But I want to propose that this juxtaposition
can be interpreted positively in a way that is signiicant for the history of
the “forgiveness territory.” Clementia here is not simply a contested polit-
ical value, which would make the clemency of Caesar so laden with victory

11
Clark, Divine Qualities, pp. 247–48.
12
Hölscher, s.v. Clementia, in Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae (Zurich: Artemis,
1981–2009), vol. 3, pp. 295–99.
13
Most famously Syme, Sallust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 119.
120 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

and control over life and death on the one hand and defeat and subjuga-
tion on the other hand. Rather, the divine worship connects clementia to
the religious notion of an abstract quality associated with and sought in
Caesar. While Romans much debated the political notion of clementia, espe-
cially in terms of whether it is a good way to gain political control, the new
(and cultic) juxtaposition of Caesar and Clementia underplayed the power
dynamic of an interchange between one party offering and another seek-
ing clementia. By shifting the focus to the divine nature of Clementia, the
debate over the status of clementia as a tool of government is rendered less
signiicant; further, connecting Caesar to the divine Clementia implies that
offering clemency is an unequivocally positive act. The political and consti-
tutional implications of the Clementia of Caesar sidelined our appreciation
for this more exclusively positive depiction of clementia, which marked the
development of an eficacious association within the “forgiveness territory”
I am investigating here.
As a goddess, Clementia thus received her irst public cult in Rome in
association with Caesar, which enshrined, literally and iguratively, a posi-
tive notion of divine clemency in Rome’s cultural and religious landscape.14
Further contemporary developments conirm that Clementia was only one
of many possible religious associations for Caesar at this time, and today
there is scholarly agreement that a plan for a cult of Caesar, with Mark
Antony as a priest, was in place at the time of his murder on the Ides of
March, 44 b.c.e. The following months saw the new political situation inter-
rupt the building of the temple to Caesar and Clementia, as well as new
leaders declaring their own understandings of this concept.
During the following, post-Caesarian period, Cicero’s language sug-
gests that he saw that the newly intensiied civil war was no time to reine
one’s policy on clementia; he advised Brutus that the time was not itting for
clemency now, advocating healthful severity instead.15 As Caesar’s heirs,
Marc Antony and the future Augustus, together with their ally, Lepidus,
formed a triumvirate to avenge his death, and they declared, as Cassius
Dio later claimed, that “they would copy neither the cruelty of Marius and
Sulla, so that they should be hated, nor the clementia (epieikeia) of Caesar,
so that they should be despised and consequently plotted against.”16 Even
if the historicity of Cassius Dio’s language here cannot be absolutely ascer-
tained, his point is clear: he connects the Caesarean policy of clementia
with something negative. Clementia here implies the potential for Caesar
to lose face if he offers reconciliation and indirectly even allowing plots

14
See already Lott, The Neighborhoods of Augustan Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 109, with reference to the coins minted in 44 by P. Sepullius Macer depict-
ing the temple inscribed Clementia Caesaris.
15
Cicero, Ad Brut. 5.5 and 8.2; with Weinstock, Divus Iulius, pp. 239–40, n. 8.
16
Dio 47.13.4.
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 121

on his life because of his loose control. If this was indeed the view of
Caesar’s heir, it would conirm that the political upheavals in the wake of
his death led to a return to the politically polarizing reading of clementia,
the clemency of Caesar, and the usefulness of relying on this tool was
again up for debate.
The religious association of Clementia/clementia and its potential to raise
clemency above the political debate did not disappear. When peace inally
succeeded following this inal surge of violence, divine clementia reemerged
once again: in 27 or 26 b.c.e. Augustus was rewarded with a golden shield
inscribed with his virtues, which included, besides virtus, pietas, and iusti-
tia, clementia (Res Gestae 34). Displayed in the senate meeting house, the
Curia, the shield was granted on the initiative of the Roman senate, which
suggests that it saw some beneit in emphasizing, among other virtues, cle-
mentia in connection to Augustus, and had little concern about the divine
associations this implied. With the shield, we see clementia reinscribed as a
positive, divine quality, assumed by a leader who promised reconciliation in
a Rome tortured by civil war for a century – this time successfully.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Divine Forgiveness

As the preceding discussion suggests, the public engagement within the
“forgiveness territory” in irst-century b.c.e. Rome was primarily through
the notion of clementia, rather than through one of forgiveness. But a pas-
sage of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek living and writing in Augustan
Rome, is well situated to offer an insight into the notion of forgiveness
itself within this contested landscape. Uniquely among his contemporaries,
Dionysius relies on a notion of divine “forgiveness” (sungnōmē) rather than
clementia (epieikeia) in his Roman Antiquities, a Greek take on Roman history
from its mythical beginnings down to the First Punic War. The irst (and
better preserved) half of this work was published under Augustus, prob-
ably soon after 8/7 b.c.e.,17 and these books center on four programmatic,
monumental stories narrated at excessive length: Romulus’s foundation of
the city, the establishment of the republic, the legend of Coriolanus, and
the institution of the Twelve Tables by the Decemvirate.
Of these, it is the story of Coriolanus in which Dionysius extensively
references notions surrounding “forgiveness” (sungnōmē). The narrative
is about a historical igure, C. (or Cn.) Marcius, a war hero; he received

17
Schultze, “Dionysius of Halicarnassus: Greek Origins and Roman Games (AR 7.70–73),” in
Games and Festivals in Classical Antiquity, Proceedings of the Conference held in Edinburgh 10–12
July 2000, ed. Bell and Davies (British Archaeological Reports International Series 1220;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 95. In the remainder of this chapter, Roman
Antiquities is referenced as AR. For the Greek text of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I relied on
Antiquitates romanae, trans. Cary (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–50).
122 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

the epithet “Coriolanus” for his capture of Corioli in 493 b.c.e.18 But his
career in Rome soon took a turn for the worse, when, two years later, he
opposed grain distribution to the starving plebs as a political ploy. After
being charged with tyrannical behavior, Coriolanus was exiled. Practically
becoming a freelance mercenary leader of the condottieri kind, typical of
early republican Italy, Coriolanus moved to neighboring Antium,19 setting
out from there to return to Rome and take the city at the head of an attack-
ing Volscian army.
On Dionysius’s reading, the Coriolanus story grows larger than life,
stretching over almost two full books (from AR 6.91 to 8.62). What makes
it especially relevant for my discussion is that from among the three other
stories narrated at a similarly excessive length, it is this one that is primarily
preoccupied with the resolution of civic conlict rather than with constitu-
tional concerns or the actualities of warfare. In fact, the resolution of civic
ighting is one of the great themes Dionysius sets out to handle in this por-
tion of his work. As he emphasizes in his introduction:
I also speak about all the foreign wars of the city as many it fought in those times,
and the internal factions it formed: from what causes they came about and in what
ways and by what speeches they were resolved. (AR 1.8.2, emphasis added)20
It is just such a speech leading to the resolution of a major conlict between
Rome and its exiled leader, Coriolanus, which I focus on in the following
discussion.
Before turning to the speech itself, however, let us take a look at
Dionysius’s narrative landscape, his particular narrative choices and prefer-
ences, especially in comparison with other retellings of these same events.
The story of Coriolanus survives in four major versions, of which the one
in Dionysius of Halicarnassus is the earliest: the slightly later version in
Livy offers an interesting contemporary alternative, while two later nar-
ratives in the second-century Plutarch’s Life of Coriolanus and the slightly
later fragmentary Roman History of Appian offer a few additional insights.
The embassies that come to Coriolanus to convince him to turn away from
attacking Rome are the obvious high point of each narrative, even though
there is some confusion as to the total number of embassies (three or four).
The irst two were senatorial embassies, one of which (or, in other versions,
a third in addition) had priests; but all sources agree that the last embassy

18
For a full discussion of the historical aspects of the story, see Cornell, The Beginnings of Rome:
Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000–264 BC) (London: Routledge
1995), p. 81, esp. n. 28. For another reading of the same episode in Coriolanus, see Konstan,
Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2010),
pp. 79–81.
19
The motivation Shakespeare later used, namely the homoerotic desire of Coriolanus for the
leader of Antium, is unlikely to be historical.
20
Dionysius, AR 1.8.2: δɩ YοZων τρόπων τε καɩ̀ λόγων κατελύθησαν.
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 123

was made up of Roman women.21 The sequence of embassies has great

potential for symbolic signiicance; with Arnaldo Momigliano we can see
that the third embassy, of the women, serves as an anticlimax in a political
narrative, offering a kind of inal straw.22 Similarly, in another famous early
Roman story, the brave Roman girl Cloelia offered a third appeal to the
Etruscan Porsenna in one, last attempt to ward off the threat to the city and
inally succeeded in turning the enemy away: the female characters in these
instances can achieve something that men and the traditional practices of
conlict resolution could not.23
In the context of the third appeal in the Coriolanus story, Dionysius pres-
ents a long speech by Coriolanus’s mother, Veturia, who journeys to the
enemy camp of the Volsci, along with her son’s wife and children, in order
to plead with her son and convince him to abandon his planned attack on
Rome. The narrative portrays Veturia’s presence in the embassy as unex-
pected, and a surprised Coriolanus hurries to his mother and family. In
Dionysius’s depiction, the so far completely guarded and stern Coriolanus
all of a sudden gets “carried away by his emotions into a human condi-
tion”; he hugs and kisses his mother, crying, and caresses his children.24 But
Veturia interrupts this emotionally loaded family moment and asks to speak
directly with her son with all others present listening to them (8.45.2). She
then invites what resembles an almost theatrical chorus of weeping women,
as she herself cries, arousing pity (eleos) among all those who see them.
In her ensuing speech, her irst point is to establish a position of moral
excellence for the Romans, who – she says – did not abandon her and
Coriolanus’s other relatives after his exile from the city. Their proven great-
ness is the reason, she claims, why she allowed them to persuade her to
undertake leading this, the third, embassy to her son. Coriolanus interrupts
his mother, responding that what she is asking is impossible: he has commit-
ted himself to the cause of Rome’s enemies by pledges to his fellow Volsci
soldiers and by oaths to the gods and daimones. Nothing else is left for him
than to deliver the same message to the women about the war to come
that he had already given the other embassies. Veturia, in turn, counters
that all she asks is for her son to persuade the Volscians to moderate them-
selves (metriasai) and to make an honorable peace, with friendship (philia)

21
Livy enumerates two senatorial embassies, one with priests, and inally one of women (Livy
2.39.10–2.40.10); Plutarch lists two embassies of senators, one of priests, and inally one
of women (Coriolanus 30.3–36); and Appian enumerates two embassies of senators, one of
priests, and inally one of women (Roman History 2.5).
22
Dumézil’s elaborate reading of a trifunctional Indo-European mentality, with the embassies
representing the military, priestly, and reproductive functions, is of limited help to clarify
their signiicance and is to be read with the corrective offered by Momigliano, “Georges
Dumézil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization,” History and Theory 23
(1984): 312–30.
23
Cf. Milnor’s chapter in this volume.
24
AR 8.45.1: λλ Y \χετo φερόμενoς Iπ τω̑ ν παθω̑ν πɩ̀ τò νθρώπɩνoν.
124 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

and reconciliation (diallagē) (8.48.1–2). She practically offers her son the
arguments for such a discussion through maxims, such as “any peace is
preferable to war,” and “a voluntary agreement between friends is better
than concessions forced by necessity,” which she thinks he could rely on
when trying to convince the Volscians to make peace with the Romans.
In recounting these arguments, she makes a strong claim that there is a
path for peaceful settlement without Coriolanus having to act unjustly or
impiously toward either side. Veturia then assures her son that this will not
be shameful in the eyes of the Volscians, given that Coriolanus has already
served them well in war, in exchange for their earlier hospitality to him.
Finally, at the rhetorical apex of Veturia’s speech, she makes one last
argument: a point, she claims, that is strong if judged by consideration,
but weak if judged by anger (orgē, 8.49.4). Veturia refers to what she calls
Coriolanus’s unjust hatred toward Rome. She particularly criticizes what
she sees as Coriolanus’s way of bearing the misfortune that has befallen
him: he should behave “humanely and with moderation” (anthrōpinōs kai
metriōs). She contrasts his behavior with the example of Collatinus, another
exiled Roman leader (and, incidentally, one of the irst two consuls of the
free Roman Republic), who did not have any resentment (emnēsikakei) and
who did not march against the city at the head of an enemy army. Notably,
on this view reconciliation does not need to involve a full judicial resolution
of the conlict, such as a formal recall from exile. Veturia’s focus is, rather,
on the emotional resolution: even if we accept, she says, the right of those
injured to direct their anger against all the rest, on her view Coriolanus has
already taken suficient revenge; anything beyond this point is only “mad
rage” (mainomenē orgē, 8.50.1). Indeed, sending the two prior embassies of
senators and of priests away with haughty and tyrannical words was already
an expression of madness. She then continues:
I, however, will not be able to commend these harsh and overproud statements,
which depart from human nature, as I see that a refuge has been invented for all
men and for the apologies for the things in which they erred against each other, in
the form of suppliant requests and prayers. By these all anger is quenched, and one
pities one’s enemies instead of hating them. All people who treat these stubbornly
and abuse suppliants’ prayers will be revenged by the gods and, coming to mis-
fortune, will not prosper. For the gods themselves irst set down and gave us these
requests and prayers, they are forgiving [sungnōmones] of errors and are placatable,
and many people who have erred against them in great ways have propitiated their
anger with prayers and dedications. Unless you, Marcius, assume that the anger of
gods is mortal, but the anger of men is immortal. You will thus act justly and ittingly
for both you and for your homeland herself, forgiving [apheis] her on the charges,
as she repents and is different and is now returning to you what she took from you
earlier. (AR 8.50, emphasis added)25

25
AR 8.50 (emphasis added): α%τoɩ̀ γ&ρ δ6 πρω̑τoν oɩ̔ ταυ̑τα καταστησάμενoɩ καɩ̀ παραδόντες 5μɩ̑ν
θεoɩ̀ συγγνώμoνες τoɩ̑ς νθρωπɩ́νoɩς εɩ̓σɩ̀ν μαρτήμασɩ καɩ̀ ε%δɩάλλακτoɩ, καɩ̀ πoλλoɩ̀ _δη μεγάλα
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 125

Contrasting “mad anger” with the divine example of forgiveness, Dionysius’s

version of Veturia’s speech offers a quite speciic directive for Coriolanus in
handling this situation. The depiction of mad anger expressed by a hero in
contrast to divine forgiveness can also usefully be contrasted with how other
writers narrated this same story of Coriolanus. Writing a decade later, Livy
used the same plea by Veturia to her son in a way that assigned to anger a
positive value (2.40). He also characterized Coriolanus as mad (ut amens)
as part of the narrative, but the anger went both ways: in Livy’s version,
Veturia herself turns from prayers to anger (in iram ex precibus versa) as she
makes her signiicantly shorter speech, criticizing Coriolanus for having
turned against his homeland. The interaction of the angry mother with
the angry son suggests a very different dynamic, essentially an impassioned
family feud, unlike Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s account, where the calm
resolution of a sociopolitical conlict remained front and center. Livy pres-
ents a different understanding of the acceptability and unacceptability of
certain instances of anger: Livy’s Veturia relies on a set of traditional Roman
values, which she feels justiied to defend in an angry manner. On her view,
no matter how angry and vengeful Coriolanus might have found himself,
reaching the borders of his homeland should have led to the end of his
anger (ingredienti ines ira cecidit).
The representation of anger and its resolution in Dionysius follow a dif-
ferent pattern and a different rationale from the representations chosen
by Livy. The solid foundation of Roman values that overrides concerns for
emotion or passion in Livy is of little concern to Dionysius. How anger was
attributed in different depictions seems even more relevant when we real-
ize that the Coriolanus story was recognizable to Romans as an appropriate
subject of rhetorical ictionalization: in his philosophical dialogue, Brutus,
dated 46 b.c.e., Cicero and Atticus joked about the different possible ways
one could tell this very story (Brut. 41–43). Thus, Cicero declared, for
Coriolanus he would choose Themistocles as a comparison, the Athenian
politician who led the Greek leet to victory against the Persians in 480,
only to be ostracized ten years later, and who ended his life, after a sojourn
in Argos, serving as a governor for the Persians in Asia Minor. This com-
parison of the two igures went beyond what the newly popular comparative
history of Greece and Rome advocated, and emphasized, instead, the rela-
tive fortunes of the two heroes, independently of their cultural contexts.26

εɩ̓ς α%τo`ς ξαμαρτόντες ε%χαɩ̑ς καɩ̀ θυσɩ́αɩς τν χόλoν ξɩλάσαντo· εɩ̓ μ6 σύ, b̑ Μάρκɩε, ξɩoɩ̑ς τ&ς
̑
μ<ν τω̑ν θεω̑ν 3ργ&ς θνητ&ς ε? ναɩ, τ&ς δ< τω̑ν νθρώπων θανάτoυς. δɩ́καɩα μ<ν o%̑ν πoɩήσεɩς καɩ̀
σεαυτD̑ πρέπoντα καɩ̀ τη̜̑ πατρɩ́δɩ α%τη̜̑, φεɩ̀ς τ& γκλήματα μετανooύση̜ γε καɩ̀ δɩαλλαττoμένη̜ καɩ̀
:σα πρότερoν φεɩ́λετo σoɩ̀ νυ̑ν πoδɩδoύση̜.
26
For a discussion of comparative trends in this period, see Feeney, “The Odiousness of
Comparisons: Horace on Literary History and the Limitations of Synkrisis,” in Horace and
Greek Lyric Poetry, ed. Paschalis (Rethymnon: University of Crete, Department of Philology,
2002), pp. 7–18.
126 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

As Cicero claimed, what united Coriolanus the Roman with Themistocles

the Greek was that both men, unjustly exiled after excellent deeds to their
homelands, went over to the enemy’s side, yet they each “calmed down
the impulse of anger by their own deaths” (conatumque iracundiae suae morte
sedavit, Brut. 42).
Other writers also compared Coriolanus to famous historical characters
in terms of their responses to a situation evoking anger. Writing about two
centuries later, Plutarch chose another Athenian statesman, Alcibiades, as
the Greek counterpart of Coriolanus for his Parallel Lives. Cicero’s emphasis
in choosing Themistocles as Coriolanus’s pair was on the journey from
greatness, through exile among enemies, and inally to suicide, rather
than on Coriolanus’s anger against his own homeland. In contrast, in his
comparison with Alcibiades, Plutarch emphasized the self-willed character
of both the Greek leader and of Coriolanus, reading the latter’s ultimate
withdrawal from attacking Rome as a private response to his mother, but
nevertheless a public dishonor to his own country (Comparison of Alcibiades
and Coriolanus 4.4). Plutarch chose to contrast Coriolanus with other Greek
aristocratic leaders as well, including Metellus, Aristides, and Epaminondas.
These men, he stated, never let their anger get the better of them:
Due, however, to their true contempt for things that the people have power to give
and take away, although they were often ostracized, defeated in elections, and con-
demned in courts of law, they did not feel any anger [ōrgizonto] against their country-
men for their unfair actions, but tolerated them again when they repented, and were
reconciled with them when they asked for it. (Comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus
4.6, emphasis added)27

Thus, on Plutarch’s reading, Coriolanus was a leader who cared too much
about the appreciation of the people and could therefore be pushed all the
way to anger by popular disapproval, an anger of which he was unwilling
to let go.
In light of these comparisons, it is now time to ask about the compari-
sons and contexts that Dionysius had in mind when composing his par-
ticular rendering of the Coriolanus story. We may be tempted to read this
narrative, so full of discussion about rage, within the conceptual framework
of philosophical anger control in the ancient world. Yet, by suggesting that
the gods are angry and passionate, Dionysius’s passage can be clearly disso-
ciated from Epicurean and Stoic teachings: no philosophical school of the
period would choose to set angry gods as an example. Dionysius is thus not
thinking within what Charles Griswold succinctly identiied as the perfec-
tionist ethical systems of the period.28 And although Dionysius ultimately

27
Plutarch, Comparison of Alcibiades and Coriolanus 4.6 (emphasis added): o%κ bργɩ́ζoντo τoɩ̑ς
πoλɩ́ταɩς γνωμoνoυ̑σɩν, λλ Y Jγάπων αdθɩς μεταμελoμένoυς, καɩ̀ δɩηλλάττoντo παρακαλoύντων.
28
Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), pp. 2–19.
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 127

advocates anger control, a message itting Stoic ideals, his terms do not
seem to match that framework either.
Given the many details provided on the embassies that offer apologies,
Dionysius’s focus seems to be not on inding the just resolution but rather
on the process of working out differences in what appears to be primar-
ily not a judicial but a societal impasse. Through his narrative emphasis
on embassies that seek to persuade an angry hero to return to the side of
his homeland, Dionysius is evoking a comparison with the ultimate Greek
epic of war, Homer’s Iliad, whose main subject is the anger of its hero,
Achilles. More speciically, the Iliad mentions an embassy that Phoenix
leads to the angry Achilles, aimed at reconciling the hero with the principal
Greek leader, Agamemnon. It seems even more relevant that in a story-
in-a-story moment in the Iliad, Phoenix recounts to Achilles the parallel
story of Meleager. Meleager, the mythological hero, withdrew from a battle
between his own Aetolians and the Curetes out of anger, and a succession of
embassies, irst priests and elders, then father, mother, and sister, followed
by his comrades, and ultimately his wife, tried in turn to convince him to go
back to ighting.29 The successions of embassies in the Meleager and in the
Coriolanus story form an obvious intertextual parallel, which connects the
Coriolanus narrative in Dionysius to the larger Homeric context, the story
of a hero who is even more famous for his anger, namely Achilles.
It goes without saying that the Iliad was a widely known reference point
in Augustan Rome, and not just among Greek historians and rhetoricians
such as Dionysius, yet there are at least two further reasons that may have
encouraged an author working in Rome to connect Coriolanus to Achilles.
Dionysius himself reports that certain Roman heroes were celebrated in
popular songs: he mentions this about Romulus and Remus (1.79.10) and
Coriolanus (8.62.3). Momigliano convincingly suggested that these were
real songs, which must have evolved in the late second or irst century b.c.e.
and were most likely known to Dionysius.30 Thus, both Achilles, the hero of
the Iliad, and Coriolanus, a hero of these popular Roman songs, were con-
nected not only by their famous anger but also by their anger being, just as
famously, the subject of notable songs. But what Coriolanus has in common
with Achilles is anger, as Achilles is possibly the character in Greek literary
history most famous for this emotion, and the combination of anger with
one or more embassies trying to reverse it convincingly connects the two
heroes. Without rehearsing the manifold arguments about the nature of

29
The connection between the Meleager and the Coriolanus story was irst made by
Schönberger, “Zur Coriolanus-Episode bei Livius,” Hermes 83 (1955): 245–48; now to
be read with the comments of Davies, “Coriolanus and Achilles,” Prometheus 31 (2005),
pp. 144–45.
30
Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), p. 94.
128 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

the infamous anger of Achilles, I want to remark here only on the similar-
ity between what David Konstan identiied as the Aristotelian reading of
Achilles’ anger in this portion of the epic, that is, “the resentment induced
by an undeserved slight,” and Coriolanus’s rage.31
In alluding to this epic comparison, Dionysius is participating in a larger
cultural dialogue about heroic leaders and their anger. A Greek writing in
Augustan Rome, Dionysius clearly belonged to the educated elite of the
time, who were familiar with Hellenistic philosophical teachings about the
restraint of anger and revenge, even if many of them would have accepted
what they saw as justiied anger and associated retaliation.32 In fact, the view
Veturia represents appeals to those who might follow this more traditional
line of argument: ultimately it is not orgē-anger in itself that she is challen-
ging but rather the unlimited nature of Coriolanus’s anger. In this con-
text, the depiction of Dionysius is once again more closely related to the
epic genre, not least with the Augustan epic par excellence, Vergil’s Aeneid,
written a decade before Dionysius’s Roman Antiquities. The Aeneid very pub-
licly participated in the construction of Augustan ideals, yet one problem-
atic aspect of its idealizing stance has remained the ending, in which the
founding hero, inlamed by furies (furiis accensus, 12.946), kills a wounded
enemy, Turnus, who is begging for mercy.
The comparison with Vergil allows us to identify the choices that
Dionysius made in divine representation, as the Latin author abounds in
examples of divine vengefulness. Relying on the divine world of the Aeneid
in order to set an example, Dionysius could just as well advocate revenge
through angry gods, yet he depicts gods as open to forgiveness. That this
is not an accidental or narratively motivated feature of Dionysius’s Roman
history is conirmed by another passage in the early books of Roman
Antiquities. In book 1, Dionysius recounts the events leading up to the
foundation of the city of Rome. Discussing the conlict in which Aeneas
tried to take land from Latins by force, Dionysius describes an encounter
between Aeneas and the Latin leader, Latinus, in which Aeneas defends
his aggressive move:
We beseech you, in supplication, not to treat with anger [orgē] what happened, tak-
ing into consideration that we did not act out of arrogance [hubris], but constrained
by necessity. Everything involuntary deserves forgiveness [sungnōmon]. And you do
not need to bring a resolution against us, as we reach forth our hands to you, but
if you do, we will ask the gods and daimones that rule this very land to be forgiving

31
Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 52.
32
Cf. Harris, Restraining Rage. The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 217–28, who suggests that this view became widely
accepted among the educated elite about a half a century later, by the time of Seneca the
Younger.
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 129

[sungnōmonas] to us and of the things we do out of necessity, and we will try to fend
you off as assailants in this war. (AR 1.58.3–4)33

Aeneas’s defense has two key parts. First, he suggests that the Latins should
forgive the Trojans because their motivation – and, in particular, the absence
of hubris – should be considered when an offense is to be resolved. The
notion that involuntary actions deserve forgiveness was a Greek common-
place, already known to Thucydides (3.51). More original and interesting
is the connection made in the second part of the speech, namely that, if the
conlict was to evolve, the Trojans would then go on to ask the forgiveness
of the gods, for both their past and future actions in ighting against the
Latins. On the depiction of Dionysius, in a situation where there is a direct
conlict between two opposing parties that cannot work out their differ-
ences or forgive one another (not unlike the civil war of the late republic),
the solution is to approach the gods. Here the historian clearly projects the
idealized resolution of such conlicts onto the divine world.
While in this passage from book 1 Dionysius does not elaborate in detail
how the process of divine forgiveness works, in book 8, in the Coriolanus
story, Veturia’s speech speciies the workings of the divine example. Her
speech makes the gods a model and explains that an injured hero, like the
gods, can move from hatred (misein) to pity (eleos) toward his enemies upon
receiving suppliant prayers. In fact, the trajectory from anger to pity on the
part of the offended party, in response to the offender’s repentance, is also
shared with the Iliad: the anger of Achilles at the opening of the epic turns
to pity by the end as the Homeric hero responds to the appeal of Priam
to be allowed to bury his son, Hector. In the Iliad, when the embassy irst
appeals to Achilles for pity, it fails.34 In this sense, the embassy with which
Veturia’s can be best compared in the Iliad is that of Thetis, mother of
Achilles, who ultimately succeeds in moving her son to pity, which inally
allows the hero to return the body of Hector for proper disposition.35
Along the same lines, Dionysius uses the idealized notion of forgiving
heroes to advise his readers about how to proceed when a conlict reaches
an impasse. The message is ultimately not about justice but rather about
the preference for and the process of forgiveness in such conlicts. Unlike
the philosophical schools of his time, when Dionysius turns to the divine
example, he does not hesitate to suggest that the gods can be passionate

33
AR 1.58.3–4: ɩ̔κέταɩ δ< Iμω̑ ν γɩνόμεθα μ6 πρς 3ργ6ν τ& πεπραγμένα λαμβάνεɩν, νθυμηθέντας Gς
o% σ`ν eβρεɩ, λλ Y Iπ Y νάγκης ταυ̑τα βɩασθέντες πoɩoυ̑μεν· fπαν δ< σύγγνωμoν τ κoύσɩoν. καɩ̀
δεɩ̑ Iμα̑ς μηδ<ν έναντɩ́oν βoυλευ̑σαɩ περɩ̀ 5μω̑ ν χεɩ̑ρας πρoεχoμένων, εɩ̓ δ< μή, θεo`ς καɩ̀ δαɩ́μoνας oZ
κατέχoυσɩ τήνδε τ6ν γη̑ν παραɩτoύμενoɩ συγγνώμoνας 5μɩ̑ν γενέσθαɩ καɩ̀ G̑ ν Jναγκασμένoɩ δρω̑μεν
πεɩρασόμεθα πoλέμoυ "ρχoντας Iμα̑ς μύνεσθαɩ.
34
Hammer, “The Iliad as Ethical Thinking: Politics, Pity, and the Operation of Esteem,”
Arethusa 35 (2002): 203–35.
35
Loraux, Mothers in Mourning; with the Essay, Of Amnesty and Its Opposite, trans. Pache (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 47.
130 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

and angry like humans; in fact, this comparison is essential in allowing the
human-divine comparison. But even an impasse with the divine can be
overcome, Dionysius suggests, when, upon the repentance of the wrong-
doer, these passionate gods are willing to forgive. In setting the gods as an
example, Dionysius introduces divine forgiveness as a guiding principle for
the clash of humans’ opposing desires, practically raising forgiveness above
the face-to-face conlict. Signiicantly for my reading, this resolution of the
discord is not a story with an unquestionably happy ending: by following his
mother’s advice, Coriolanus loses status and esteem. Rather, the promise of
forgiving follows a route different from saving face in the traditional sense.
In Seneca’s De Clementia, a comparison with Augustus and the perfect Stoic
sage is used to convince Nero that forgoing punishment will not mean loss
of status or esteem;36 for the Coriolanus of Dionysius, however, forgiveness
(sungnōmē) is advocated on the example of the gods and, at least intertext-
ually, of the almost divine Greek hero, Achilles. That the process is charac-
terized by an essentially human, interpersonal script of an offense followed by
anger, then repentance followed by forgiveness, is nevertheless suggestive
in terms of Dionysius’s hopes for his own times: when dealing with an irre-
solvable human conlict, he suggests that it will take an almost divine ges-
ture on the part of humans to overcome it. To ind reconciliation, one has
to move beyond the regular economy of human interactions, but the alter-
native is not to follow the model of perfect, passionless divinities or sages;
rather, one can embrace the example of passionate, yet forgiving gods.

Concluding Thoughts: Gods and “Forgiveness”

in the Early Imperial Era
As Augustan political imagery embraced clementia/Clementia as a value, the
kind of independent discussions we saw in Dionysius vanished, or at least
they were less likely to leave traces in the literary record. In a process paral-
lel to the philosophical developments around anger control, the main gods
of the Greco-Roman pantheon were increasingly seen as passionless and
benevolent in elite philosophizing discussions, just as emperors were urged
to follow benevolent virtues over potentially destructive passions. By the
middle of the irst century c.e., seeking divine forgiveness came to appear
almost countercultural. Thus, it was depicted as something a Nero would do
in order to appease the Furies and the Manes of his murdered mother, but
even he would need the magi, not regular Roman priests, to perform the
special rites.37 Angry gods were now restricted to literature, and they were

36
See Braund’s chapter in this volume.
37
Suet. Nero 34.4: Neque tamen conscientiam sceleris, quamquam et militum et senatus populique gratu-
lationibus conirmarentur, aut statim aut umquam postea ferre potuit, saepe confessus exagitari se
materna specie verberibusque Furiarum ac taedis ardentibus. Quin et facto per Magos sacro evocare
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 131

unlikely to be open to practicing forgiveness.38 As a new, Stoic morality was

projected onto the divine world in philosophical works, the notion of div-
ine forgiveness we have seen in Dionysius of Halicarnassus lost its context.
Even the goddess Clementia remained without personality, little more than
a personiied virtue without evidence for a signiicant ongoing cult;39 and
the divine associations of clemency now mainly emerged in connection with
imperial clementia, the almost superhuman capacity of a leader to resolve
civil conlict, a theme that steadily recurred in imperial panegyric for cen-
turies to come.40 Signiicantly, part of the Stoic interest in clementia lay in its
capacity to limit revenge; ultimately – in order to it the divine order of rea-
son – the Stoic philosophical project focused on the moderation of anger
or revenge in the offended party and on the potential for educating the
wrongdoer when exacting punishment.
It is reasonable to ask here why such a notion of clementia suited the Stoics
and why divine forgiveness did not. In striking contrast to Dionysius’s gods,
who acted out a social sequence in which passions were aroused and then
forgiveness was sought and granted, when Seneca advocated forgiveness
(venia) he suggested that ideally one should forgive through contemplat-
ing one’s own prior human mistakes and by extending forgiveness to the
wrongdoer on the basis of one’s own failings (De Ira 1.14).41 Yet, whether
mercy requires humanitarian sympathy in general is at least debatable in
contemporary philosophy.42 In fact, the fair judge (aequus iudex) granting

Manes et exorare temptavit. (Nevertheless, Nero could not, then or ever afterward, bear the
conscience of his evil deed, although the soldiers, the senate, and the people reassured him
with congratulations; he frequently admitted that he was haunted by his mother’s ghost and
by the whips and blazing torches of the furies. Further, he even tried to summon the shades
and to entreat them with a sacred ritual performed by the magi.) Suetonius’s exorare suggests
an attempt to compel the shades to “forgive.”
38
Fantham, “The Angry Poet and the Angry Gods: Problems of Theodicy in Lucan’s Epic of
Defeat,” in Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Braund and Most (Yale Classical
Studies 32; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 231, which usefully contrasts
the philosophical expectation of divine morality and justice with other, less moral notions
of divine control.
39
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty, pp. 214–15. Cf. also the distinction Sevenster irst made
between Seneca and Paul in their focus on virtue: the latter’s almost complete disinter-
est suggests just how anthropocentric virtue ethic was in contrast to the Christian ethos:
Sevenster, Paul and Seneca (Leiden: Brill, 1961), p. 156.
40
Dowling, Clemency and Cruelty, p. 194, with the late irst-century c.e. Calpurnius Siculus,
Eclogues 1.59 (insanos Clementia contudit enses [Clementia quelled the mad swords]), speaking
about the resolution of civic inighting in particular.
41
Seneca, De Ira 1.14: Cogitet quam multa contra bonum morem faciat, quam multa ex iis quae egit
ueniam desiderent: iam irascetur etiam sibi. Neque enim aequus iudex aliam de sua, aliam de aliena
causa sententiam fert. (Let him consider how much he does in contrast to good custom, how
many of his actions require pardon: he will be angry even with himself. For no fair judge
makes one judgment in his own case and a different one in the case of someone else.)
42
Cf. Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (1993): 83–125, who
connects the notion of mercy to humanitarian sympathy, now to be read with the critical
132 Zsuzsanna Várhelyi

forgiveness (venia) in Seneca’s De Ira is oddly different from Seneca’s com-

plete ban on forgiveness in De Clementia 2.7.43 Forgiveness in this context
appears to have retained some association with human imperfection, unlike
the idealizing and uncompromising Stoic assessment of a divine judge,
whose perfect character any aspiring sage ought, at least ideally speaking,
to imitate.44 The divine is now made a measure of moral perfection, edu-
cating humans through a model of clemency. Such a morally perfect divine
can now be internalized as a judge. Listening to its call and modeling our-
selves on such divine perfection, we shift away from engaging with those
who wronged us, although the recognition of our shared human imperfec-
tion could have also encouraged us to seek forgiveness and reconciliation.
On a inal note, an interesting comparison is provided here by Philo of
Alexandria, a Jew of Hellenistic philosophical training, with whom, it is gen-
erally argued, Jewish philosophy took a new turn, away from a religion with
a passionate deity toward a Hellenized, legalistic, or philosophical system
of thought inluenced by Middle Platonism and Stoicism. How does the
stripping of the Hebrew God of his passions, including anger, in Philo’s
allegorical readings, shape his model role in forgiving? David Winston use-
fully compares Philo’s and Seneca’s internalized judge as part divine;45 in

appraisal of this view by Sitze, “Keeping the Peace,” in Forgiveness, Mercy, and Clemency, ed.
Sarat and Hussain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 194–201.
43
De Clementia 2.7.1: Venia est poenae meritae remissio. Hanc sapiens quare non debeat dare, reddunt
rationem diutius, quibus hoc propositum est; ego ut breviter tamquam in alieno iudicio dicam: Ei ignosci-
tur, qui puniri debuit; sapiens autem nihil facit, quod non debet, nihil praetermittit, quod debet; itaque
poenam, quam exigere debet, non donat. (Pardon is the remission of a deserved punishment.
The reasons why the wise man should not give this are explained at greater length by people
who subscribe to this principle. My explanation, to put it briely, as if in someone else’s
formulation, is: “Pardon is granted to a person who ought to be punished. Yet the wise
man does nothing that he should not do and omits nothing that he should do. Therefore
he does not waive a punishment that he ought to exact.”) Translation from Braund, ed.,
Seneca, De Clementia, Edited with Text, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), p. 149. Cf. Inwood’s note on the differential use of venia between De Clementia
and De Ira in a discussion highly relevant here: Inwood, “Moral Judgment in Seneca,” in
Stoicism: Traditions and Transformations, ed. Zupko and Strange (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), pp. 76–94, reprinted in Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at
Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 204–9. There is the vexed issue here in
the distinction between the fair judge and the strict judge (severus or rigidus iudex); I do not
intend to engage in the debate concerning the two ethics (the perfect vs. the human), only
to associate certain problems with the divine.
44
In Seneca’s De Beneiciis, the gods are used as the ultimate judges of the ungrateful man,
when there is no legal option. Cf. De Benef. 3.6.2: neque absolvimus illud, sed cum dificilis esset
incertae rei aestimatio, tantum odio damnavimus et inter ea reliquimus, quae ad iudices deos mittimus.
(And yet we have not acquitted it [being ungrateful], but, since it is dificult to judge a thing
of uncertain quality, we have condemned it only to hatred, and have left it among the things
to be sent to the gods as judges.)
45
Winston, “Philo’s Ethical Theory,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.21.1 (1984),
pp. 389–91.
 “To Forgive Is Divine” 133

Philo, without parallel in the Hellenistic philosophical tradition, this leads

to the introduction of the notion of human sinfulness and adds the virtue
of repentance to those already in the Stoic canon.46 But this repentance is
not aimed at a human audience, as ultimately the source of forgiveness is
God. In Jean Laporte’s itting phrase, “What is essential, therefore, is that
man repent, and God forgive.”47 Thus, again, the forgiveness sequence is
focused on an imperfect human and a perfect divine, reinscribing the sep-
aration of the two over and over again.
Against this background, Dionysius of Halicarnassus seems unusual in
using divine forgiveness as an exemplary yet parallel model for a human
version of the same, in which human and divine could interact as parties,
moving from passions to their resolution. The Stoic, Hellenistic Jewish,
and ultimately even the Christian conceptualizations focused on a differ-
ent association of the divine in forgiving: as a measure of true forgiveness
among human beings they inserted a command of clemency inspired by
the model of a perfect and dispassionate divinity. Forgiveness, a drama of
interpersonal relations between two imperfect humans, was now turned
into a morality play of divine commands in which humans endlessly aspire
to divine perfection.

46
Winston, “Philo’s Doctrine of Repentance,” in The School of Moses: Studies in Philo and
Hellenistic Religion in Memory of Horst R. Moehri, ed. Kennedy (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995),
pp. 28–40.
47
Laporte, “Sacriice and Forgiveness in Philo of Alexandria,” Studia Philonica Annual 1
(1989), p. 42.
 part iv

JUDAIC AND CHRISTIAN FORGIVENESS

 8

Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness

in Ancient Judaism

Michael L. Morgan

Survivors of the Nazi atrocities, of the sufferings of apartheid in South Africa,

and of the Rwandan genocide are often asked if they should, and indeed
if they can, forgive those who persecuted and assaulted them. Forgiveness
can, of course, be a mundane and common occurrence, but the most visible
and dramatic cases of it are of this type. They involve survivors or relatives of
survivors; the perpetrators are conceived of collectively or, on occasion, as
individuals; the injuries and suffering are extreme; the victims may or may
not have been compensated, and the perpetrator typically was punished or
is undergoing punishment; culpability is not in question; and the offender
most likely has not expressed remorse or regret or asked for forgiveness.
The most publicized cases have these features. Numerous discussions of
these types of cases are available.1
I want to set aside the question of collective forgiveness – that is, of
whether we can make sense of a notion of forgiveness for collective entities
such as states or nations or peoples – and focus on the interpersonal case.
In these modern situations, and in much of the literature on forgiveness
of the past few decades, the emphasis has been on the individual victim.
Commentators ask when forgiveness is justiied; whether it is morally obliga-
tory or supererogatory; if it is an emotion or attitude or something akin to
both; whether the disposition to forgive is a virtue; and whether the high-
est form of forgiveness – what Calhoun calls “aspirational forgiveness” – is
not best expressed by unconditional forgiveness, when it is granted by the
victim without the offender asking for it, showing regret, or possibly even
knowing about it.2 The way these questions have been discussed in recent
1
Within a Jewish context, among the most interesting are Wiesenthal’s The Sunlower: On the
Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness (New York: Schocken Books, 1970 [rev. 1998]), with the
numerous responses to the question of forgiveness by other authors, and Levinas’s Talmudic
lesson, “Toward the Other,” in Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), pp. 12–29.
2
See Calhoun, “Changing One’s Heart,” Ethics 103 (1992): 76–96.

137
138 Michael L. Morgan

literature certainly indicates an individualist and, in some cases, a volunta-

ristic tendency. Moreover, the locus of interest in recent discussion is by and
large on the victim of harm and injury. The focus is on the decision of that
victim to forgive, the self-respect exempliied by the choice, and that of the
sinner acknowledged in the choice.3
Turning to the literature of ancient Judaism, in particular to the Hebrew
Bible, midrashic collections, the Mishnah and the Talmud, what we dis-
cover is decidedly different. In these texts, we do ind a rich and fascinating
display of topics of which forgiveness is one, but the focus of attention does
not seem to be on forgiveness in this modern sense, as a voluntary change
of attitude by an individual victim toward the one who has wronged her
and injured her. First, forgiveness is one of a cluster of related concepts –
law, sin, sacriice, justice, mercy or compassion, repentance, atonement,
puriication, pardon, and forgiveness. It is dificult to extricate forgiveness
from this cluster or network and to deal with it alone. Second, the primary
“victim” of wrong, so to speak – the one who is wronged and the one with
whom a relationship has been breached by the wrong – is God. The pri-
mary context for forgiveness, that is, is the divine-human relationship. To
be sure, there are examples, and there is attention to interpersonal wrong-
doing and forgiveness, but it occurs alongside and in relation to the pri-
mary context, which is the divine-human one, and the attitude toward such
forgiveness is articulated only as interest shifts to it within the context of the
divine-human relationship. Third, the burden for action, in the wake of sin
or wrongdoing, falls on the sinner; the question of how the sinner should
respond to the recognition of his own culpability is primary. In the divine-
human case, how the victim (i.e., God) should then respond is important,
to be sure, but in a sense it is a matter of the divine nature, whereas how the
sinner in interpersonal cases should respond is a matter of what he ought
to do, that is, of his obligations. Only gradually is there any attention to
how the human victim, when there is one, should respond to the wrong-
doer. What this means, inally, is that whereas recent discussion focuses on
forgiveness, ancient Jewish texts focus on atonement, repentance, and the
requirement to repent as an important, perhaps a necessary condition of
forgiveness. Moreover, the forgiveness of interest is God’s forgiveness and
not the forgiveness of any human victim of wrongdoing, if there is one.
In this chapter I try to clarify some of these distinctive features and to
shed light on the way in which, in the Bible and rabbinic literature, the
divine-human case is related to the interpersonal one. I show too that some
of the features and types of forgiveness that, in the modern West, we take to
be preeminent ones are considered in ancient Jewish thinking only insofar

3
See especially Holmgren, “Forgiveness and the Intrinsic Value of Persons,” American
Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1993): 341–52, and Novitz, “Forgiveness and Self-Respect,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (1998): 299–315.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 139

as they are embedded in a more embracing conception of how God and

man should respond to sin.
The biblical God is a lawgiver. Sin is transgression of divine law: it is
disobedience to divine command and an affront to God, an act of rebel-
lion.4 The normative response of God to sin is anger and retribution. The
biblical God is a just God, and this justice is a feature of divine life and
cosmic order that is canonized in the book of Deuteronomy and expressed
extensively throughout the Bible. But this same God is also a compassion-
ate and merciful God; the people of Israel are his “children” as well as his
“subjects.” He is their ruler and their parent, and hence, although angry
with their disobedience, God has an abiding interest in maintaining his cov-
enantal relationship with this people. When members of the people breach
their relationship by disobeying his commands, he is disposed to recover
their relationship, and given his commitment to retribution, this means that
he is disposed to mitigate or erase the punishments and penalties due them
as transgressors. That is, Divine compassion or mercy or love is primarily
expressed in the Bible as God’s disposition to overcome his fury and to par-
don the transgression, which means not to forget it as much as it is to forgo
punishment for it. This is God’s way of expressing his abiding love for the
children of Israel, the subjects of his rule and law.5
There is substantial biblical evidence, I think, for this picture. In the
priestly strand of biblical religion, sin (chet, pesha, avon) is associated with
impurity or what the Greeks called miasma. Jacob Milgrom, for example, in
his monumental work on the book of Leviticus, identiies a “non-ritual form
of impurity, a spiritual miasma caused by sin that stains the sanctuary even
while it does not ritually deile the sinner in any distinct way.” This claim
is part of his account of the “sin-offerings,” described in Leviticus, which,
Milgrom claims, “do not effect atonement on the sinner personally; rather,
these rituals serve to purge the sanctuary of the stain left upon it by the spir-
itual miasma that sin brings about.”6 Speciically, the altar and the land are

4
The Hebrew word pesha means rebellion; see Petuchowski, “The Concept of Teshubhah in
the Bible and the Talmud,” in Studies in Modern Theology and Prayer (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society, 1998), p. 15.
5
The biblical God is not the God of natural theology, with a set of attributes precisely deined
and conceptually articulate. Arguments based on such a philosophical conception of God,
for example, the argument that divine forgiveness is incoherent because God does not have
feelings of resentment or anger or the argument that God is omniscient and cannot undergo
change, do not apply to the divine-human relationship in the Bible. See Minas, “God and
Forgiveness,” Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975): 138–50.
6
Klawans, “Ritual Purity, Moral Purity, and Sacriice in Jacob Milgrom’s Leviticus,” Religious
Studies Review 29 (2003), p. 21. As Klawans points out, Milgrom’s early work showed how a
system of moral deilement was present in Leviticus 4 and 5; other scholars extended it to
other texts, for example, Leviticus 18, as Milgrom did in his later work, the completed com-
mentary on Leviticus. See Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and
Commentary (Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998),
140 Michael L. Morgan

deiled by idolatry, sexual sin, and murder, and the sacriices are intended
to purify them. Milgrom’s views are controversial, to be sure, and there are
many who reject them and, in contrast, take sin offerings as an effort to
atone for individual sins. But whether one takes such sacriices to be a gift
to God in an effort to seek atonement and reconciliation (selicha) or a way
of purging the altar and the earth of a deilement caused by sin (kapara),
the structure of these ritual practices presupposes the same background.
It involves divinely forbidden practices, transgressions of those practices, a
breach in the divine-human relationship, and a required human practice
that is aimed at erasing the breach or the taint. The background for such
a structure includes God, divine law, human transgression, and a desire on
the human side to seek recovery for the community and perhaps for the
individual as well.
One can surmise that in another strand of biblical literature –
Deuteronomy and the prophets – this framework of divine law, sin, and
retribution is interpreted in terms of divine punishment, expressions of
God’s call to the people of Israel, and his threats regarding sin, together
with the recognition of divine mercy and compassion toward sinners. At
Exodus 34:6–7, as Moses replaces the broken tablets with two new ones
after the episode of the golden calf, God announces himself to Moses: “The
Lord, the Lord, God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant
in goodness and truth; keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, for-
giving iniquity and transgression and sin; and that will by no means clear the
guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the
children’s children, unto the third and unto the fourth generation.” Moses
responds with a plea to the effect that this is a “stiff-necked people” and
that God should “pardon [their] iniquity and sin,” to which God responds
by making a covenant with the people. Mercy expresses itself in this case as
a forgiveness of sin that is an act of pardoning the sin, that is, canceling the
punishment. Here we have a famous self-portrait of the biblical God and yet
a complex one, for he characterizes himself as merciful and yet at the same
time ever cognizant of sin and its legacy for the descendants of the guilty.
Moreover, Moses asks for a pardon for the people’s sin with the golden
calf, and God responds favorably. Instead of punishment and rejection,
God proceeds to make his covenant with them.7 Here, then, divine mercy
is expressed in an act of divine pardon that involves God’s overcoming his

and Leviticus 17–22: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Yale Bible
Commentaries; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
7
Cf. Exodus 32:7–14, where God reports to Moses, still on the mountain, what the people
have done, and Moses pleads with him to forgo his anger and his punishment because of the
merit of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Israel) and the promises God had made to them. Micah
7:18–20 recalls this same pattern. In Deuteronomy 28, Moses reports an extensive list of
divine rewards and punishments, and then in Deuteronomy 32, in his song, Moses eulogizes
divine justice but notes, too, how it will be mitigated by divine mercy. Cf. Leviticus 26.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 141

anger with a rebellious people and forgoing punishment in favor of his

remembering the promises he had made on behalf of the people of Israel.
Jeremiah, in a famous passage, compares the northern kingdom of Israel
to a harlot who has committed adultery, like her sister Judah to the south,
but with whom God pleads to acknowledge her sin, presumably idolatry,
and to return to him. God charges Jeremiah: “Go, and proclaim these
words toward the north, and say: Return, thou backsliding Israel, Saith the
Lord; I will not frown upon you; For I am merciful, saith the Lord, I will not
bear grudge for ever. Only acknowledge thine iniquity, That thou has trans-
gressed against the Lord thy God, And has scattered thy ways to the strang-
ers Under every leafy tree, And ye have not hearkened to My voice, saith
the Lord.”8 Here, too, God is conceived as a merciful God who expresses an
eagerness to forgive if only the people acknowledge their sin and return to
him. But in this case, divine mercy is expressed not in the mitigation of pun-
ishment and the overcoming of divine anger as much as in the willingness
to welcome the sinful people’s return, to accept her back into his home, as
it were.
The merciful God’s willingness to pardon the penitent is expressed by
and large toward the people of Israel. But in principle his mercy can be
expressed toward other nations as well. The most prominent biblical case
is reported in the book of Jonah, when Jonah prophesies to the Ninevites
that God will punish them for their iniquities by overthrowing them in forty
days; they believe the prophecy and repent, only to be pardoned by God
and not destroyed by him. Here too it is clear that divine mercy responds to
repentance and remorse and a change of heart, and it does so by mitigating
or canceling a punishment. It is tempting to treat this latter as the act of for-
giving. But what I would suggest is that there is more to divine forgiveness
than acts of pardoning justiied punishment. The biblical conception takes
God to be merciful, which means that he is disposed not to destroy the
sinful person but to reconcile with her. He has an abiding commitment to
her, which, at the moment of sinful rejection, expresses itself in anger and
retaliation but also in a tendency to overcome that anger and to rescind
that retaliation.
Overcoming the anger might be distinct from abandoning the punish-
ment or retaliation. It is certainly possible to read these biblical texts in
such a way that divine mercy is simply expressed in reducing or canceling
the punishment due the sinner, but on such a reading, the act would be
pardon and not forgiveness. Alternatively, it is possible to read this act
of pardoning as forgiving. However, there are texts that clearly state that

8
Jeremiah 3:12–13. This challenge from a merciful God to a sinful people to repent and
return to him is found often; see also Ezekiel 18:21–23; 1 Kings 21:27–28; 1 Kings 8:46–52.
David calls upon God to respond to his sinfulness with mercy in Psalms 51:3–6. See also
Micah 7:18–20 and Ezekiel 36:22–31.
142 Michael L. Morgan

God overcomes his wrath or anger with Israel; this is certainly the case
with the golden calf incident and God’s response to Moses’ plea that he
forgive Israel for its stubbornness and rejection of him. Here God’s initial
response is emotional; according to the metaphor that Jeremiah later uses,
the people are like an adulterous wife, and God is not simply angry with
her sin. He is offended, demeaned, and resentful. His anger is of a special
kind, and in a sense it is demeaning to him not only to be rejected but also
to be overcome by his sense of resentment and to be overcome by his fury.
It is undigniied, unworthy of divine status. Moses’ plea calls upon him to
act on his love and compassion by overcoming his fury. Whether or not this
compassion results in a reduction of punishment or a stay of execution, as
it were, there is more to God’s response, and this supplement is what for-
giving involves. Forgiving is not excusing wrongdoing and injury; it is not
accepting or condoning it, nor is it mitigating or canceling punishment
for it. Forgiving is a surplus that includes a change of attitude, a sense of
goodwill, and an overcoming of the sense of being violated, humiliated, or
diminished. The Bible does not thematize this surplus, but it does hint in
its direction.
Human sin and divine forgiveness are dominant motifs in the biblical reli-
gion. Relatively speaking, there is very little attention paid to interpersonal
wrongdoing and forgiveness. But the Bible does relate a few incidents that
involve interpersonal injury, repentance, and forgiveness, and there is one
legal text that mentions this cluster of ideas. One such case involves Jacob
and Esau. Many years after Jacob had swindled Esau out of his birthright
and after Jacob had led and married Leah and Rachel, the two brothers
met once again. Although the text does not use the language of sin, resent-
ment, repentance, and forgiveness, the passage in Genesis does describe
their encounter in a way that suggests the propriety of such a vocabulary.
It tells us that Jacob feared his brother’s anger but bowed before him and
drew near to him; in response, “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him,
and fell on his neck, and kissed him; and they wept.”9 These words sug-
gest an act of remorse and repentance and a request for acceptance, and
Esau’s response certainly seems like the kind of change of attitude and act
of acceptance that is associated with forgiveness.
Another prominent case is Joseph’s reconciliation with his brothers in
Egypt, although Joseph’s disclosure to his brothers, after their pleas to save
Benjamin, is not a simple act of forgiveness. In this case, Joseph, the victim,
does not literally ascribe culpability to his brothers, for he seems to base
his change of heart on his belief that all that had transpired was a mat-
ter of divine providence, that it was not his brothers who were ultimately
responsible for having sold him into slavery but rather God who had sent
him to Egypt to prosper and hence to be available to help his family in a

9
Genesis 33:3–4 and generally chap. 33.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 143

time of famine.10 Joseph seems to have justiied or at least rationalized what

had happened to him; his reconciliation with his brothers may not have
been easy for him, but ultimately it was grounded in his commitment to the
hegemony of divine agency. Neither he nor his brothers were free agents;
they were all instruments of divine will.
No consistent picture of interpersonal forgiveness in the biblical world
emerges from these incidents. In one case, there seems to have been repent-
ance of a kind, but in the other Joseph’s brothers were not even aware that
the Egyptian oficial was Joseph, their long-lost brother, whom they had
sold into slavery. Clearly there was no direct request for forgiveness. But
Judah, in his long petition to Joseph, did express a deep sense of obligation
to their father Jacob and a concern for both Jacob and Benjamin, Joseph’s
brother, so that we can surmise that Joseph saw in Judah a person of sensi-
tivity and concern, someone worth forgiving. But at the same time, whereas
Esau seemed to welcome Jacob voluntarily, in spite of his brother’s injury
to him, Joseph quite clearly ascribes the whole sequence of events that led
to his brothers’s petitions of him to divine will, as if it were important for
him to excuse their culpability before he could reconcile with them. The
two cases, then, do not make clear what is involved in the change of heart
that we would call forgiveness, nor do they clarify the role of culpability,
excuse, mercy, and punishment. What does seem evident in both cases is
that forgiveness, both for Esau and for Joseph, involves overcoming anger
of a certain kind, although neither story is nuanced enough to help us to
understand what kind of anger is being set aside or neutralized.
There are in the biblical codes, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy,
no speciic laws or statutes that command forgiveness. The one passage
that comes closest to it occurs at Leviticus 19:17–18 in the course of the
famous Holiness Code: “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart; thou
shalt surely rebuke thy neighbor, and not bear sin because of him. Thou
shalt not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy
people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord.” The pas-
sage can be read as a directive not to suffer another’s sin against you and
not say anything publicly about it. Rather, you should express your anger
and yet not allow it to fester and to become resentment toward the sinner’s
descendants. Hence, on one reading, the divine imperative seems to com-
mand the people of Israel not to allow the anger to see the unexpressed,
nor to seek revenge or to remember past wrongdoing and injuries but
rather to love the other, even when he has sinned against you.
But these verses may not say this at all. The verses follow a series of pro-
hibitions, which include those against stealing, lying, swearing falsely, with-
holding wages until the next day, cursing the deaf, ignoring the poor and

10
See Genesis 45, especially vv. 1–15. For a more complicated case, see 1 Samuel 25, the story
of David, Nabal, and Abigail.
144 Michael L. Morgan

favoring the wealthy, and defaming your neighbor. In our verses, then, not
hiding one’s anger and not taking vengeance or holding a vendetta against
one’s fellow citizens and their descendants is a continuation of this list. One
is called upon to love him as you love yourself not simply by abandoning
such acts but also by not stealing, lying, and so forth. Moreover, it is not
clear what it means here to “love” your fellow citizen other than in general
to behave well toward him and not to do injury or harm to him by transgress-
ing any of the previously listed prohibitions or by cultivating resentment
toward him. In short, the passage, which may look like an encouragement
to forgive, in fact might better be taken as a general imperative to treat
one’s fellow citizens well.11
As we turn to rabbinic literature, we ind continued emphasis on the
divine-human relation but also, on occasion, a more nuanced awareness
of interpersonal sin and forgiveness. We begin with a biblical incident that
receives an especially interesting treatment in the Talmud; it concerns David,
the Gibeonites, and the descendants of Saul. Part of what makes it so intri-
guing is that, unlike the other episodes we discussed, this one deals with a
failure to forgive. The story is told in 2 Samuel 21:1–14. There was a three-
year famine in the land, and David asked God the reason for the famine. He
was told that it was retribution for the sin of Saul, who had put to death the
Gibeonites. What was that sin? When the people of Israel under Joshua’s lead-
ership irst entered the land, the Gibeonites had heard of their success and,
fearing them, used a ruse to trick Joshua and to elicit a promise from him to
let the Gibeonites live (Joshua 9:3–15). Later, in an incident not recorded in
the text, Saul sought to persecute and wipe them out, and this was the crime
for which the famine during David’s reign was retribution. David called rep-
resentatives of the Gibeonites before him and asked them what he should
do to atone for Saul’s sin of breaking the ancient covenant. Refusing com-
pensation and the execution of any Israelites, the Gibeonites asked for seven
of Saul’s grandchildren to be turned over to them so that they could hang
them as sacriices to God, and David complied with their request. Sparing
Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s son, he sent them two sons of Rizpah, Saul’s con-
cubine, and ive sons of Michal, Saul’s daughter. After the grandchildren
were hanged and left for birds of prey and wild beasts, Rizpah took up the
post of sentry, guarding their corpses from the beginning of the harvest until
the rainy season and protecting them from being abused and devoured.
Even though David was justiied in acceding to the Gibeonites’ request,
the rabbis were perplexed by the story. As they saw it, David agreed but
only reluctantly, irst, because he did not think that sons should be pun-
ished for the sins of their fathers and, second, because he thought that the
Gibeonites should have acted out of mercy and not justice. Why, then, does

11
See Schimmel, Wounds Not Healed by Time: The Power of Repentance and Forgiveness (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 17–18, 83–84.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 145

he hand them over? In order to make clear the principle that promises
and covenants should be honored and that vulnerable outsiders should be
treated with respect. The implication of the Talmudic commentary, then,
is that David was torn between honoring the old covenant and showing
respect for the stranger, on the one hand, and forgiving a crime (i.e., Saul’s
crime against the Gibeonites), on the other. Had David been the victim of
wrongdoing, he would have pardoned his enemy and not exacted just ret-
ribution. The Gibeonites prove to be different from the Israelites in this
regard. They are not merciful and forgiving. But the mercy in question is
narrow; it is the cancellation of a punishment that is deserved and nothing
more. The Gibeonites seem to show no anger or resentment; they do not
come to David, but rather he comes to them. They are simply responding
to his request for a means of expiation. Their failure to forgive is in fact the
expression of a irm sense of justice and fairness.
A text that seems to come closer to our sense of forgiveness as a change
of heart regarding a person who has done wrong to us, without excusing his
culpability or reducing his punishment, occurs in the Babylonian Talmud,
at Mishnah Baba Kamma 8:7.
Even though he (the perpetrator) pays (monetary compensation) to (the victim
of his insult), he is not forgiven until he requests (explicitly forgiveness) from him
(whom he has insulted), as it is written [Genesis 20:7], “. . . he is a prophet and he
will intercede on your behalf, and you shall live.” And whence do we derive the prin-
ciple that he who is called upon to forgive should not be hardhearted (or cruel)? It
is written [Genesis 10:17], “Then Abraham interceded with God, and God healed
Abimelech . . .”

Commentators regularly cite this Mishnaic passage as evidence for forgive-

ness that is more than a merciful or compassionate pardon or mitigating
of punishment. Here we are told that forgiveness does not excuse the sin
or cancel the punishment, that what elicits the forgiveness from the victim
(and from God) is a request for forgiveness – which many identify with
repentance – and inally that the human victim should not withhold for-
giveness once it is requested. If we take the text at face value, then human
forgiveness is valuable, dependent upon prior request, and yet condition-
ally obligatory – that is, due the sinner who asks for it.
Throughout the biblical and rabbinic texts that deal with sin, punish-
ment, repentance, pardon, and forgiveness, the burden of responsibility
has consistently been on the perpetrator, the sinner. Since the basic frame-
work for the individual Jew’s life is the covenant of the people of Israel with
God, the responsibility for threatening that relationship or breaching it is
human responsibility.12 Hence, the responsibility to take the irst steps to

12
The high priest, according to the description in Mishnah Yoma, uses three words for sin: het
refers to an unwitting offense, avon to a deed of insolence, and pasha to an act of rebellion
146 Michael L. Morgan

mend that relationship must also be human responsibility, and that means
the responsibility of the sinner. He is as capable of sin and transgression as
he is of allegiance and obedience, and yet he is as capable of repentance
and “return” as he is of sin. In rabbinic literature, human nature is marked
by a motive impulse, a drive or tendency, which can be turned to good or
ill (the yetzer ha-ra). If, through neglect or passion or choice, the individual
sins against God, either by violating a ritual requirement or by doing harm
or injury to his fellow, then in addition to being subject to divine retribu-
tion, he is also capable of acknowledging his sin, returning to an attitude of
loyalty and devotion, and committing to a life according to the law.
In this Mishnah, such an emphasis on the sinner is in evidence. On the
one hand, he is not forgiven by the victim of his insult until he asks for it;
the initial move toward reconciliation must be his. On the other hand, he
should have conidence that such a request will be effective, for the vic-
tim is duty-bound to respond with forgiveness once the request has been
made. In a sense, because ultimate forgiveness and ultimate reconciliation
are with God, the human victim of the sin mediates between the sinner and
God; his role, thereby, is as a kind of divine delegate, to respond positively,
as God will also respond, to the sinner’s act of repentance. The text almost
seems to do what it can to elide human voluntarism with the overwhelm-
ing force of divine compassion. The critical choice is the sinner’s, not the
victim’s, and the ultimate response is God’s.
The way in which the sinner’s repentance is directed, in a sense, both to
the human victim of his sin and to God is evident in the biblical incident
that the Mishnah cites in support of its two claims, the incident of Abraham
and Abimelech. The crucial fact is that when God reveals to Abimelech
in a dream that Sarah is in fact Abraham’s wife, he tells Abimelech that
Abraham will intercede with God on his behalf and that only then will God
allow him to live. And so it is, as we read in Genesis 20:16–17, that after
Abimelech compensates Abraham, the latter then requests of God that he
forgive Abimelech and allow him to live. In a sense, it is Abraham here who
both receives Abimelech’s compensation and transmits to God Abimelech’s
request for forgiveness. The human victim, Abraham, acts both as the recipi-
ent of compensation and repentance and as the deputy of repentance, and
it is God who ultimately dispenses forgiveness to the sinner by mercifully
canceling any punishment of him.
What we ind in this Mishnah, then, is an acknowledgment of the inter-
personal scene as one place in which the divine-human dialectic of sin,
punishment, repentance, and forgiveness occurs, and hence the Mishnah
depicts a way of attending to the human victim that places him within the

against God. See Yoma 36b, cited by Arzt, Justice and Mercy (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1963), p. 191: “The Yom Kippur liturgy is suffused with the belief that sin alienates
man from God” (p. 193).
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 147

overall parameters of the divine-human relationship. But the understand-

ing of this intersection of the divine-human relationship and interpersonal
encounters is complicated by an alternative text dealing with the same situ-
ation, Tosefta Baba Kamma 9:29:
He who injures his fellow, even though the one who did the injury did not seek
[a plea to God for mercy] from the injured party, the injured party must seek mercy
for him. As it says, “Then Abraham prayed to God” (Genesis 20:17).
The Tosefta cites the same biblical text as the Mishnah and refers to the
same incident, with Abraham and Abimelech. But the Tosefta interprets
the story differently. We interpreted the Mishnah so that the case involves
Abimelech’s compensation to Abraham and his repentance, as one reading
of the irst statement in the Mishnah suggests, a repentance that Abraham
then conveys to God as a request for mercy concerning Abimelech.
Alternatively, the Tosefta reads the text to be saying that Abimelech did not
ask Abraham to seek mercy from God; Abraham did so on his own volition.
One might take the Tosefta to be agreeing with the Mishnah but then going
beyond it by saying that even if the sinner does not ask for forgiveness, the
victim should still ask God for it. But, as Judith Hauptman argues, it is more
likely that we have here two independent readings of Genesis 20:17, one
that assumes that Abimelech did ask for mercy and another that takes the
text literally and does not understand him to have asked for mercy.13 In
either case, however, my point is that Abraham, the human victim, acts as
a mediator between the sinner and God. To be sure, Abraham’s role in the
exchange is not incidental, but it is nonetheless not that of an independent
agent. Interpersonal sin and forgiveness occur only within the background
framework of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. The
focus is on Abimelech and God; Abraham is the link between them and not
the primary focus of attention. If the divine-human rupture is to be healed,
it must depend upon the person responsible for the breach and God. To
the rabbis, it makes little sense to deal with the human victim of wrong-
doing as the primary person of interest, nor is it natural to focus atten-
tion on human forgiveness as either an independent duty or an important
virtue. Priority is given to God’s willingness, indeed his eagerness, to heal
the divine-human relationship and the human commitment to a change of
attitude that is required for divine mercy to be activated. The role of the
human victim is, in rabbinic literature, simply less fundamental than that of
the repentant sinner.
This same pattern emerges in Tractate Yoma of the Talmud and the
Mishnah, which deals with repentance and the Day of Atonement. A day of

13
For discussion of this tension between the Mishnah and the Tosefta, see Hauptman, Rereading
the Mishnah: A New Approach to Ancient Jewish Texts (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 2005),
pp. 154–56.
148 Michael L. Morgan

puriication and atonement or reconciliation is described in the Bible with

an extensive ritual of fasting, cessation of work, sacriices, and ritual purga-
tion (see Leviticus 16; Exodus 30:10; Leviticus 23:27–31; 25:9; Numbers
29:7–11). In the Mishnah we ind a description of the elaborate ritual as
practiced when the Temple existed in Jerusalem, before 70 c.e., and in
particular the conduct of the high priest. Mishnah 8:8–9 deals with the
role of teshuvah (repentance) in this process of atonement or reconciliation
(kapara). The thrust of this text is that the ritual practices of Yom Kippur are
a vital part of the process of reconciliation. There are cases when repent-
ance is suficient for that reconciliation. But for serious transgressions, these
rituals are also necessary, along with repentance; until the rituals occur, the
punishment for the transgression is withheld. The ritual practices are an
expression of God’s puriication and his conirmation of the reconciliation
with the sinner; in a sense, they manifest God’s acceptance of the repent-
ance and hence His mercy, the cancellation of the punishment.
However, one might ask: this pattern suits transgressions between man
and God – that is, one repents and God responds insofar as the rituals of
the Day of Atonement conclude the reconciliation and purify the sinner,
but what about interpersonal transgressions? Does Yom Kippur also pur-
ify in these cases? Is the human victim of harm or injury to be ignored,
as it were? The text says that the same principle operates here as with the
transgressions against God, with the modiication that one has a human
intermediary, the direct victim of the wrongdoing. The Mishnah makes the
following, widely cited point:

For transgressions done between a person and God, the Day of Atonement atones
[provides puriication; i.e., seals the reconciliation]. For transgressions between one
person and another, the Day of Atonement atones, only if the irst one appeases
[y’ratzeh, compensates] the other. This is as Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah states: “From
all your sins shall you be clean before the Lord” (Leviticus 16:30) – for transgres-
sions between a person and God does the Day of Atonement atone. For transgres-
sions between one person and another, the Day of Atonement atones, only if the
irst one appeases the other.

The standard reading of this passage is that it emphasizes the unique role
of the victim of interpersonal wrongdoing and injury. Such a victim must
irst be compensated, before the sinner turns to God in repentance, and
hence one requires the victim’s forgiveness before the rituals of the Day of
Atonement can be effective. But, in fact, if we recall that all of these cases
presume repentance, the issue being raised concerns the punishment for it.
Once there is repentance, if there is a human victim, that person should be
compensated for the harm or injury before the rituals of Yom Kippur serve
to conirm God’s cancellation of the punishment and his forgiveness of the
sinner. In other words, we have here a case similar to the one we discussed
from Mishnah Baba Kamma 8:7 and the kind of interaction that occurs
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 149

between Abraham and Abimelech. There is one person who wrongs another.
Before God is called upon to act mercifully and erase the punishment due
the wrongdoer, the victim must be compensated. In the Baba Kamma case,
this is explicit. In the encounter between Abraham and Abimelech, the
compensation is explicit, but the issue seems to turn on whether Abraham
asks God’s forgiveness with or without Abimelech’s having irst asked for
Abraham’s forgiveness. Regardless, however, here as there, the focus is on
God’s acceptance of the ritual acts and the repentance. The human victim
of the wrongdoing, while he or she must be compensated irst, is nonethe-
less an incidental factor in the sinner’s effort to reconcile with God and to
be forgiven by God.
In short, the text we have quoted is not introduced into the Mishnah
in order to single out and highlight the importance of interpersonal for-
giveness. Its purpose is to clear away a possible objection to the eficacy of
the rituals of the Day of Atonement and to accommodate a potential obs-
tacle to divine mercy. Of course, we shall have to ask why a human victim
might pose a problem. But, for the moment, it is suficient to notice the
consequence of considering it. Moreover, the solution the text states is one
that follows the Mishnah in Baba Kamma; it is that repentance can work
with God only when the human victim has already been compensated. One
might take such compensation to be part of the act of repentance or as the
limit for divine pardon. And, as we have already seen, the victim should
receive the compensation and issue his own forgiveness without reluctance,
in order to facilitate God’s ultimate act of pardon.
But the Talmud does not leave the Mishnah in Yoma at this stage. It
turns its attention to the case of interpersonal sin and forgiveness and, in
so doing, elaborates on the picture that has thus far emerged. The Talmud
is not systematic. Questions, debates, and examples are strung together as
comments based on the Mishnaic text we have just been discussing.
First, the Talmud emphasizes the importance of teshuvah (repent-
ance) in general by recording a whole series of aggadic [interpretive,
homiletical] stories or sayings that illustrate how “great” it is.14 For example,
R. Chama bar Chanina said “Great is repentance, for it brings healing to
the world,” citing Hosea 14:5: “I will heal their waywardness, I will love them
freely.” This healing is a consequence of repentance, for Hosea 14:3 says
“Return to the Lord, say to Him: Forgive all iniquity, and accept that which
is good.” The repentance of one person brings healing, puriication, to
the whole world. Furthermore, the text goes on to teach that repentance is
great for a number of other reasons as well, because it reaches to the divine
throne, because it even sets aside or overrides negative commandments in
the Torah, because it brings nearer the inal redemption, because it makes

14
B. Talmud Yoma 86a. See also B. Pesachim 54a and the claim that repentance was built into
the structure of the world before creation as the antidote to sin.
150 Michael L. Morgan

willful transgressions count as inadvertent errors, because it lengthens the

years of a person’s life, and because, if a single person repents, the whole
world is pardoned.15 Throughout these texts, it is repentance directed to
God and not to another person. To be sure, God can pardon even without
repentance, but the paradigm is to require repentance; the breach with
God is a human responsibility, and hence the value of recovery and return
is inestimable.
With the text in the Mishnah we discussed earlier, however, concern-
ing interpersonal sins, the Talmud turns its attention to the human victim,
what is directed to him or her by the sinner, and the forgiveness that is
sought. The Gemara [the Talmudic text commenting on the Mishnah], for
example, records a defense of the Mishnah against an objection of R. Yosef
bar Helba, who cited 1 Samuel 2:25 as saying that for interpersonal sins,
God (i.e., Yom Kippur) does confer atonement – that is, God does forgive
the sin. First, the Gemara reads the word “Elohim” to mean “judges” and
not “God,” claiming that the verse does in fact state that interpersonal sins
require human compensation and response irst. Second, even if this point
is challenged, the Gemara suggests reading the verse as meaning not that
when one person sins against another, God accepts the sinner’s appease-
ment, but rather that when one person sins against another and appeases
the victim, then God carries out the inal puriication. The point of the
defense is that, in interpersonal cases, the victim must irst be approached,
compensated, and petitioned for forgiveness.
And the latter part of the verse means that when a person sins against
God, what appeases God is the sinner’s repentance and good deeds. The
word that is translated here as “appease” means to “compensate.” Thus
far there is no explicit mention of repentance to the victim, that is, of an
acknowledgment of culpability and apology to the victim for the sin and for
any disrespect that accompanies the sin, what we might take to be grounds
for resentment. But it seems to be assumed by commentators that the
“appeasement” incorporates compensation together with such a request.
The Gemara records an incident that shows the seriousness of the obli-
gation to acknowledge one’s culpability and seek forgiveness, to repent.
The context is the Mishnah’s requirement that before Yom Kippur, one
must compensate the victim of one’s sin and seek forgiveness from him.
R. Yose bar Chaninah claims that the victim should be approached for for-
giveness no more than three times. The incident that is reported concerns
Rav, who had been offended or injured by a butcher. But during the year
the butcher had not approached Rav to compensate him and to seek his
forgiveness. With Yom Kippur drawing near, Rav decided to present him-
self to the butcher in order to provoke the butcher’s acknowledgment and
repentance. Along the way, Rav Huna, a student of Rav’s, saw him and asked

15
B. Talmud Yoma 86a–b.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 151

him what he was doing. When he heard, he warned Rav that what he was
doing might very well lead to the butcher’s death. Rav went anyway, pre-
sented himself before the butcher, who was shattering an animal’s head.
The butcher was angry and shouted at Rav to go away and leave him alone.
As he was continuing to break the animal’s head, a bone shot up and hit the
butcher in the throat, killing him instantly.
This enigmatic tale seems to highlight how seriously the obligation to
repent was taken. But it is important to realize that Rav’s reason for provok-
ing the butcher to repent was not his own beneit, nor was it the butcher’s
beneit in some restricted sense, even to facilitate the butcher’s overcoming
his anger or resentment. Nor was it to reconcile himself with the butcher,
for there is no indication that Rav is concerned with his personal relation-
ship with the butcher. Rather, Rav is concerned that the man would enter
Yom Kippur without having performed the prerequisites without which rec-
onciliation with God would not be possible. Rav Huna’s worry, however, is
that there was a dire risk that the man would refuse to ask for forgiveness,
to repent, and in so doing would insult a sage, which was akin to insulting
God and thereby making himself subject to the death penalty, so to speak.
His death, caused by the accidental lodging of the bone in his throat, was
in fact a matter of divine providence. God is both merciful and just; when
the man angrily banished Rav, the just response was to punish him for this
new and extreme sin.
What role does human forgiveness play in this story? Very little indeed.
One can assume that Rav would have willingly received the butcher’s
request, had it been made. What worried him was the butcher’s failure to
repent. Faced with the prospect that the butcher would remain perman-
ently estranged from God, Rav was willing to risk the most severe punish-
ment. But his own response to the never-offered repentance is itself not
in question. Like God, Rav, we can presume, was eager for the butcher to
make the irst move, and his effort to make a move antecedent to it was risky
and ultimately deadly. The story makes clear that the fundamental relation-
ship of interest to the rabbis was that between the sinner and God and not
that between the sinner and his human victim. The Talmud is concerned
with human indignation, anger, and such emotions; it clearly wants human
beings to eliminate such feelings. But the person of interest in this regard
is not the victim of harm but rather its perpetrator.
The Gemara reports another incident that addresses the principle that
one should ask forgiveness from another only three times prior to Yom
Kippur, but for our purposes this story is especially fascinating because
of what it tells us about granting forgiveness to one who seeks it. Rav was
discussing a passage from the Prophets or the Writings (Psalms, Proverbs,
etc.) before Rabi (R. Yehuda ha-Nasi), when R. Chiya entered; Rav returned
to the beginning of the passage out of deference to R. Chiya. He did the
same thing when Bar Kappara and R. Shimon bar Rabi entered. But when
152 Michael L. Morgan

R. Chanina bar Chama entered, Rav objected and did not start once again.
R. Chanina bar Chama was offended. For thirteen years thereafter, prior to
Yom Kippur, Rav went to R. Chanina to ask for forgiveness and R. Chanina
was not appeased.
The Gemara irst asks how Rav could have returned thirteen times to ask
forgiveness, because R. Yose bar Chanina said that one should not ask more
than three times, the assumption being that if the victim has not forgiven
for three successive Yom Kippurs, he is not going to do it. Since he is obli-
gated not to be heartless and unforgiving, one does not want to increase
his sin, so to speak. The Gemara’s answer to this question is that Rav is
different: he took the rule of asking three times to mean that, while one is
obligated to ask only three times, it is permissible – and especially virtuous –
to ask more times, if forgiveness has not been granted. Because asking for
human forgiveness is preparation for divine reconciliation, it is especially
praiseworthy of a sinner to continue to ask for it even when one is ignored
or rejected many times. Others, however, take Rav’s conduct to be indica-
tive of any case where the victim of one’s sin is one’s teacher. In such a case,
there is no limit to how far one should go to seek forgiveness.
All of this is interesting; it suggests that in cases of interpersonal wrong-
doing and repentance, there are contextual and historical issues that deter-
mine what is required of the perpetrator, some of them having to do with
his character and some having to do with the person whom he has injured.
But I have called attention to this story not for these reasons but because of
what now follows. Thus far the Gemara has been considering Rav’s behavior;
he is the sinner, and the issue is his repentance. But now the Talmudic text
turns to R. Chanina. What he did seems equally puzzling and perhaps even
more puzzling. After all, although he was insulted and humiliated by Rav’s
refusal to defer to him, he proceeds to refuse forgiveness thirteen times.
But we have already read in Mishnah Baba Kamma that the victim should
not be cruel or hardhearted; if asked, the victim should readily forgive. And
we have seen why: in part because God Himself is merciful and compassion-
ate, as a matter of imitatio Dei, and in part because the human victim of sin
should make reconciliation as easy as possible for God to conirm.
The Gemara’s answer is that R. Chanina’s refusal was based on a dream
he had about Rav, that he was hanged from a palm tree. Tradition tells us
that anyone hanged from a palm tree will become a head or leader. Hence,
R. Chanina, who was himself the head of the academy in Israel, thought to
himself that Rav wanted to become a leader, the head of the academy. He
refused to be appeased so that Rav would go to teach Torah in Babylonia.
On the face of it, however, the story is surprising. It seems to condone
R. Chanina’s refusal on the grounds that he was jealous, for it seemed to
him that Rav aspired to take R. Chanina’s place as head of the academy. But
surely this cannot be the kind of reason that the Gemara would encourage.
Could it be that the text is introduced to warn the reader about how hard
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 153

it may be to be forgiving when there are issues of self-interest in play? Or

could it be introduced to show that even the most pious among us can be
driven to jealousy? Or could it be that the Gemara takes this to be a serious
matter and that for anything less serious, forgiveness should certainly be
granted without delay? None of these is a very satisfying reading of the story
and the meaning of the dream. On the face of it, although the Gemara
knows that the victim should not withhold forgiveness when asked, it can
take R. Chanina’s refusal to be justiied and even praiseworthy. Minimally,
then, the text suggests that there are times when forgiveness can be with-
held and when it is justiied to do so. A irm and unconditional disposition
to reconcile is not always noble. There are times when forgiveness is some-
how inappropriate; there are cases – people or crimes or circumstances –
that involve the unforgiveable.
It is possible to derive such a lesson from the Gemara, but it is even
more tempting to treat R. Chanina’s own reason as exceedingly petty or,
if not petty, at least self-serving. If there are persons or crimes that are
unforgiveable, then surely they are not of this kind. But what makes it hard
for us to ind something beneicial in the Gemara is that we are tempted
or inclined to treat Rav as at worst impetuous and immature. We do not
think that his slighting R. Chanina could possibly be a serious matter. But
perhaps there is more to the story. R. Chanina was Rav’s senior, a person
due respect. And Rav was also a scholar and teacher, a man who should
have known what respect for R. Chanina required. R. Chanina may be jus-
tiied in withholding forgiveness because, even though Rav was his student
and was penitent, one has a right to expect more of him. He should have
known what to do, and yet he chose not to do it. Emmanuel Levinas, in his
famous reading of this story, treats R. Chanina’s refusal this way; his dream
told him that Rav had aspirations and pretentions that needed to be held
in check, just as, Levinas reminds us, was the case with Martin Heidegger,
who should have known better. Levinas might also have pointed out that
Heidegger never repented; he never asked for forgiveness and never admit-
ted his fault, nor did he present himself as sensitive to those who suffered
as a result of his decisions and the decisions made by others like him. It is
hard to forgive Heidegger, and, once we take into consideration who Rav
was and what R. Chanina and others would have expected of him, it might
easily have been hard for R. Chanina to forgive him, even to facilitate a
reconciliation with God.
It is tempting to ind in biblical and other ancient Jewish texts an antici-
pation of our own interest in interpersonal wrongdoing and forgiveness.
Contemporary discussions are framed by discussions such as the famous
one by Bishop Butler that treats forgivingness as a virtue precisely because
it aims to mitigate anger, hatred, and resentment toward the other who has
wronged us. If such anger and resentment are considered a moral law, then
a disposition to forgive and to overcome such feelings would be considered
154 Michael L. Morgan

a moral beneit. Moreover, in view of such an interest, there is in recent lit-

erature a fascination with unilateral and unconditional forgiveness; there
are some striking cases often cited of victims of persecution, rape, and even
genocidal atrocities who express such unconditional forgiveness as an act
of grace, as it were. In addition, contemporary philosophical analysis, with
its interest in the victim’s conduct, is concerned with whether forgiveness
is an obligation, a virtue, or a supererogatory act, and there is much discus-
sion about whether it is voluntary, exactly what kind of change of attitude is
involved, and whether the more unconditional it is, the more pure or genu-
ine it is. As we have seen, however, much of this is simply not found in the
ancient Jewish texts. I have tried to show that there is very little attention
paid to the human victim in situations of interpersonal wrongdoing and
injury; compensating the victim is considered almost pro forma. The real
issues are the sinner’s commitment to change his or her ways, to seek God’s
mercy and pardon, and to recover a proper relationship with God.
There are hints that these ancient Jewish texts appreciate the special
character of forgiveness as a change of attitude, something beyond the
acknowledgment of the sinner’s repentance and a mitigation or can-
cellation of punishment. To be sure, in modern discussions, there is an
emphasis on how forgiveness does not cancel culpability or any punish-
ment; it is something beyond excuse, pardon, condoning, and mercy. In
these Jewish texts, in general, the sinner does seek to have the punishment
diminished or erased. Nonetheless, what forgiveness is – as a special kind
of change of attitude toward the sinner – does go beyond these matters.
But these hints about the “surplus” that is involved in forgiveness, a kind of
reacceptance or reconciliation, are generally focused on God. Moreover,
his forgiveness, as part of what is expressed by his mercy and compassion,
and human forgiveness are conditional upon the sinner’s repentance.
There is a clear perception in these texts that the breach of relationship
is primarily and fundamentally the sinner’s responsibility, and until he or
she has made the irst move, there is no hope of reconciliation. It may be
that contemporary philosophical discussion, for all its indebtedness to the
Christian tradition, is by and large secular and that it is therefore focused
on respect for persons. What the Jewish tradition shows, however, is that
such respect should not be treated independently of the relationships
within which wrongdoing and harm take place and which are the context
for considering the possibility of reconciliation of one kind or another. In
Judaism, that background of relationship is a divine-human one; but in
modern secular venues, it would be communal, social, and cultural. The
point is that when talking about forgiving, we are not talking about an iso-
lated psychological phenomenon. We are talking instead about a subtle
set of attitudinal changes that are part of various networks of practices,
expectations, and relationships.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 155

Contemporary accounts of forgiveness provide careful analyses of what

kind of psychological-moral state forgiveness is. Even within the parameters
of ancient psychological understanding, there is nothing like this in ancient
Judaism. In part, of course, this deiciency is a function of the secondary sig-
niicance in rabbinic writings of the state of the victim of sin and of human
forgiveness, and of the primary signiicance of the divine-human relation-
ship. But, in concluding our account, there is one thing that we can do to
ill out this picture. Because the rabbis were deeply interested in repent-
ance, they do say some things about the psychological character of repent-
ance. Because the sinner, in repenting, must overcome a failure or defect,
just as in forgiving the victim must overcome the disposition to anger and
resentment, we might be able to learn something about what is involved in
forgiveness by looking at what the rabbis say about how repentance over-
comes the tendency to sin, what the rabbis called “wickedness.” It might
be that a similar change of attitude on the part of the victim will clarify the
“surplus” – that is, overcoming resentment toward the wrongdoer – that we
referred to earlier and that is the central feature of forgiveness.
In the Talmud, in the passage we looked at earlier from Tractate Yoma
dealing with repentance and the Day of Atonement, there is a valuable
comment that might be helpful to us. At Yoma 86b, the Gemara reports
two, seemingly contradictory statements by Reish Lakish. He said, on the
one hand, that repentance is great, for because of it intentional acts are
accounted to the sinner as if they were unintentional; on the other hand,
Reish Lakish said that repentance is great, for because of it intentional acts
are accounted to the sinner as if they were merits. The Gemara resolves the
apparent contradiction by noting that Reish Lakish’s irst claim refers to
repentance performed out of fear, that is, fear of God’s punishment for the
transgression, whereas the second refers to repentance performed out of
love, that is, love of God and a sense of loyalty to him. In short, the issue that
the irst claim raises is that of responsibility: once the sinner has repented,
God treats him as having performed the act without knowing what the con-
sequences would be, and hence he is excused from the punishment as a
result. God treats him as behaving without full responsibility. But the sinner
is still the same person; his openness to sin is checked by knowledge of the
penalties, but the sinfulness is not removed. The issue that the second claim
raises is the issue of a change of character; once the sinner has repented,
he is no longer the same person, in a sense. He eradicates a tendency to sin
and uncovers or recovers a love of God that disposes him regularly to do
what God expects of him. Repentance from fear involves a kind of separ-
ation from the particular sin in question; it requires a public confession and
elicits from God a pardon or act of mercy. Repentance from love involves
a more radical separation from sinfulness itself; it requires inward repent-
ance and elicits from God forgiveness, for the penitent has left behind one
156 Michael L. Morgan

self, the sinful self, and engaged in an act of self-creation in which he has
become a new person.16
In order to use this rudimentary account to help us understand human
forgiveness, we need to make two modiications. First, rather than focus
on the sinner, we need to consider the emotional or attitudinal changes
that the victim undergoes in forgiving the one who harmed him; and,
second, we need to treat the human victim and not God. Furthermore, the
human forgiveness we are concerned to understand psychologically is a
response to the wrongdoer’s repentance, directed both to the human vic-
tim and to God.
What does the human forgiving involve? One forgives out of love when
the wrongdoer repents out of love; to forgive is to express a love for God
and a love for the other person, the one who has harmed me. Once he
has repented, I do not want his reconciliation with me and with God to
be blocked. In terms of my own attitude, I set aside any sense of indignity
or insult. In terms of how I take the wrongdoer, I acknowledge him as a
new person, one no longer disposed to sin and transgression. I still take
him to have done wrong and to be worthy of punishment, if in fact God
and others judge him so. But my hostility toward him is gone.17 Forgiving
is not a matter of changing my judgment about his guilt or responsibility.
Moreover, my setting aside anger and resentment is something I do, just as
the puriication that comes through repentance is something that the peni-
tent accomplishes. Reconciliation with God may require divine forgiveness
as well as human repentance, but the recovery of my nonvengeful self is
something that I choose to accomplish and achieve myself. Human forgive-
ness is something that the victim of wrongdoing does himself, in response
to God and to the one who has harmed him.
But, as Lucy Allais puts it, there is still a psychological question to be
answered: “What is involved in overcoming hostile feelings while continu-
ing to hold on to the judgments that make them appropriate; why should
this be thought to be a good thing; and can we explain the metaphor of wip-
ing the slate clean in these terms?” There are two possibilities here: the rab-
binic account of repentance can help us to understand forgiveness either
by adding something to our notion of what it means to overcome the hostile

16
This account of repentance miyirah [from fear] and repentance meahavah [from love] is
indebted to Kaplan’s account of the distinction in the writings of Joseph Soloveitchik; see
Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on Repentance,” Journal of Jewish
Thought and Philosophy 13 (2006): 213–58, esp. pp. 222–33 and 252–53. As Kaplan describes
Soloveitchik’s view, which I take to relect the rabbinic texts, holiness is essential to who the
Jew is. Sin arises from external inluences, and it deiles the holy in the Jew. Repentance
from love is the act of purging oneself of the sinful crust and exposing the holy core. It is in
this sense that one becomes a new person.
17
See Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean: The Heart of Forgiveness,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 36
(2008), pp. 35–36.
 Mercy, Repentance, and Forgiveness 157

feeling (such as resentment) or by clarifying what is involved in that change

of feeling or overcoming.18 The rabbinic account of repentance suggests
that just as repentance involves departing from the “path of sin,” as Kaplan
puts it,19 rather than simply committing not to perform this particular type
of sin again, so forgiveness involves setting aside any tendency to see the
perpetrator’s act as somehow expressive of who he really is. Allais calls this
“not holding the act against her.” Divine mercy is one thing; human forgive-
ness is another. Here the act is acknowledged; so is the act’s connection to
the perpetrator. But it is not held against her.20 But where Allais takes this
reaction to be detachable from how one takes the other person overall, the
rabbinic view seems to be that to forgive someone is precisely to take one to
be a better person overall than one’s single act would indicate. Not to hold
the act against the wrongdoer is precisely to treat him or her as a better
person than the act might indicate. And what justiies this is the offender’s
repentance. Allais is interested in trying to explain unconditional forgive-
ness; what I am trying to do is understand human forgiveness, as the rabbis
would have seen it, which means in response to the sinner’s repentance.
The penitent separates himself from all sin, and forgiveness is to give up
the hostility or resentment I have by taking him to be on a new path, and I
do this because I do not hold his sinful act against him. In part, then, the
rabbinic account of repentance from love helps us to see that interpersonal
forgiveness is both a response to a commitment to being a new person and
itself an expression of giving up that hostility that ties the other person to
the act that has harmed me.
Throughout this chapter, I have shown how ancient Jewish texts treat
the cluster of concepts that includes sin, repentance, mercy, pardon, and
forgiveness as a whole; how they feature the divine-human relationship; and
how their primary focus is on God’s mercifulness and the repentance of the
sinner. At the same time, I have been attentive to when and in what ways
interpersonal injury occurs and compensation and repentance are directed
to the human victim of the wrongdoing. Although I found little direct atten-
tion to the human victim as a subject of forgiveness, I have shown that there
are some resources within these texts for what later would become a greater
attention, ethically and psychologically, to that subject. But if there is such a
reorientation on the part of the Jewish tradition, it comes much later in the
history of Jewish experience.

18
Ibid., pp. 43–44. I adapt here Allais’s point about modern secular accounts and apply it
to the rabbinic account of repentance. How does one understand the rabbi’s belief that
repentance involves overcoming one’s disposition to sin? Surely it is more than simply trans-
gressing; there is some kind of offense to God involved in the transgressing. When one
repents out of love, one not only commits not to do this thing again, but one comes to be a
new person and to leave the “path of sin” altogether. What does this mean?
19
Kaplan, “Hermann Cohen and Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik on Repentance.”
20
Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean,” pp. 56–57.
 9

A Man Had Two Sons

The Question of Forgiveness in Luke 15

Peter S. Hawkins

Coventry’s Cathedral of St. Michael was destroyed in a German air raid on

the night of November 14, 1940. All that remained of the late medieval
structure was the church’s tower, its Gothic spire, and a portion of the
apse. Only two decades after the bombing an imposing modern cathedral
was built on the site – but not at the expense of the “bare ruined choir”
left standing in the open air. The ruins remain, and to enter the new build-
ing you must pass by the shattered skeleton of the old. Your eye is caught
there by an altar constructed out of medieval rubble standing at the cen-
ter of the former apse. On it is a cross of two burned oak beams; behind
it, engraved in gold into the sandstone of the wall, a fragmentary text:
father forgive.
These words come from Luke’s account of the cruciixion, where Jesus
responds to the jeers of the crowd by pleading, “Father, forgive them, for
they do not know what they are doing” (23:34).1 The rebuilders of Coventry
effectively took father forgive as the new cathedral’s motto. The phrase
also became the impetus for an international ministry of reconciliation
forged initially between Britain and Germany, and now shared more widely.
On site, the engraved words are provocative. The ruins and the charred
cross refuse to let the past slip away unnoticed. The destruction has not
been erased, and if there is forgiveness, there will be no forgetting, no pre-
tense that the Axis pilots did not release thousands of bombs on a terrifying
night in 1940. Yet the handwriting on the wall does not ask the Father (or
anyone else) to forgive “them” in particular. Nor does it exonerate “us,” for
the open call to forgive means remembering not only the Axis enemy that
started it all but also the lethal Allied attacks on the civilians of Dresden

1
Contemporary study Bibles, such as the New Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard
Version (3rd ed., 2001) used throughout this essay, bracket Luke 23:34 and add a note,
“Other ancient authorities lack this sentence.” In this volume Knust discusses the issues at
stake in the manuscript variants as well as the larger signiicance of the saying.

158
 A Man Had Two Sons 159

and Hamburg, not to mention the American atom bombs that devastated
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With disasters like these on both sides of the war-
time divide, it becomes dificult to settle a score or even keep track of one.
In the spirit of Coventry, then, there may be nothing more to do in the face
of such catastrophic circumstances than to recall the agonized Christ’s call
for a mercy that, in this two-word iteration, is open-ended, making no issue
of “them” or “us.” Perhaps in the wreckage of the twentieth century, with
enough blame to go around, the last word should simply be forgive.
Is there something quintessentially Christian about the cathedral’s
response to its devastation – something connected to turning the other
cheek or returning no one evil for evil? Hannah Arendt has claimed that
“the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was
Jesus of Nazareth.”2 Whether or not this is true – whether ancient Greeks,
Romans, and Hebrews had only a rudimentary awareness, as she says, that
“forgiveness may be the necessary corrective for the inevitable damages
resulting from action” – other essays in this volume can assess.3 What is indis-
putable, however, is that the mandate to forgive – “be kind to one another,
tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you”
(Eph. 4:32) – has been a distinctively Christian preoccupation from the
time of the New Testament right through to the World Wide Web of today.
The emphasis begins in the mid-irst century c.e. with Paul: “Bear
with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive
each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive”
(Col. 3:13). There is no doubt here that it is God who initiates the par-
don necessary to salvation; but the overall emphasis in the Pastoral Epistles
is on the implications of the original divine mercy for what Arendt calls
“human affairs.” Throughout the Pauline corpus there is practical advice
on how God’s forgiveness is to be mediated within the community. They
are to “bear with one another” (Col. 3:13). They should resolve complaints
and disputes, avoiding lawcourts (1 Cor. 6:1–8). There are times when it is
important to impose corrective discipline and others when it is right to be
tenderhearted (1 Cor. 5:1–12; 1 Cor. 7: 12–16). Referring to an unspeci-
ied case, Paul writes to the Corinthians, “This punishment by the majority

2
Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 238.
If New Testament writers continued the Hebrew Bible’s emphasis on forgiveness ultimately
resting with God (see Morgan’s chapter in this volume), their new emphasis was on the
importance of interpersonal relationships, on the forgiving of one another’s trespasses.
“Without exhibiting, in their relations with one another, the Divine spirit of forgiveness, men
need never hope to experience God’s pardon for themselves. This . . . is the most striking fea-
ture in the ethical creations of Jesus’ teaching” (Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, rev. Everit and
Rowley [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963], p. 304). Overviews of Christian under-
standing of forgiveness are offered by Moule in Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Biblical and
Theological Essays (London: Society for the Promoting of Christian Knowledge, 1998), and
Bash, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
3
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 239.
160 Peter S. Hawkins

is enough for such a person, so now instead you should forgive and console
him, so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I urge
you to reafirm your love for him” (2 Cor. 2:6–8). What happens, however,
when there is no repentance and amendment of life? “I am writing you not
to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister who is
sexually immoral or greedy, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber.
Do not even eat with such a one” (1 Cor. 5:11). Paul’s stated warrant for this
hard line – “Drive out the wicked person from among you” (1 Cor. 5:13) –
comes straight from Torah, where the phrase “So you shall purge the evil
from your midst” is invoked several times by the Deuteronomist in especially
hard cases (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 22:21–24). Thus, while the reafirmation of
love, of mutual forgiveness, may be the ideal, the healthy community needs
to ight off contamination. Mercy is conditional upon repentance.
So the apostle counsels the neophyte churches of the Mediterranean
diaspora. But surely there were those who, even if they received his instruc-
tion as authoritative, nonetheless wanted to know what Jesus himself had
actually said and done. Paul himself reveals next to nothing about either.
Scholars assume, however, that he, as well as the churches he wrote to, had
access to a collection of Jesus’ sayings along with scattered stories about
his life and teaching that emerged out of Palestine and the inner circle in
Jerusalem. After Paul’s death (c. 67 c.e.), these traditions would eventually
crystallize into the narrative composition of gospels.
The authors of what have become the canonical four – Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John – gathered together what was available to produce quite
distinctive accounts of their own. Forgiveness, speciically its role in Jesus’
teaching, plays a prominent role in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and
Luke); among these three, it is Luke who pursues the theme most thor-
oughly, irst in his Gospel and then in its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.
In this chapter, I deal exclusively with his Gospel and in particular, with a
parable that, like the saying “Father, forgive,” appears uniquely in Luke.4
Perhaps the most renowned and indeed inluential of Jesus’ Lukan stor-
ies, with a long afterlife in the arts as well as in commentary tradition, the
parable is commonly identiied as pertaining to “the prodigal son.” The
traditional title misleads. There are, in fact, two problematic sons in
the text, but the crucial igure is neither of them. Rather, it is the pater famil-
ias who stands between them, who pardons each in his turn, who attempts
reconciliation on all sides, and to whom the storyteller gives the summary
formula (about death and life, about being lost and being found) not once
but twice. If the parable does not offer the Christian view (there is none),
or even a single Lukan perspective on forgiveness (there are several), it
nonetheless gives us one of the most poignant representations of what the

4
“Father forgive them” in Luke 23:34 is echoed by the Christian protomartyr Stephen in Acts
7:60: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
 A Man Had Two Sons 161

evangelist and other New Testament writers variously explore through the
verbs charizomai (e.g., Luke 7:42–43) and aphienai. The latter appears 146
times in the New Testament (14 of them in Luke), and means to dismiss
or release, to let go of, to forgive. There is also a related noun, aphesis, that
occurs 17 times, and half of them in Luke-Acts (e.g., Luke 1:77, 3:3, 24:47;
Acts 2:38, 5:31, 10:43, 13:38, 26:18).5 Aphesis expresses the sense of forgive-
ness as remission of sins, or, as in Luke 4:18, as freedom or release. None of
these words actually appears in the Luke 15 parable. They do not need to,
however, for the entire narrative is quite evidently a dramatization of what
forgiveness looks like and what it costs. The story is the verb.
Before turning to the parable I want at least to sketch the context in
which it appears within the Gospel by pointing to major moments when
forgiveness is enjoined or performed. To begin, Luke presents Jesus at the
outset of his ministry as following in the footsteps of his kinsman, John the
Baptist, who “went into all the region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism
of repentance for the forgiveness [aphesis] of sins” (3:3). Jesus is himself
baptized by John but never performs the rite himself. Nor does he generally
speak in the mode of John’s harangue against “You brood of vipers! Who
warned you to lee from the wrath to come?” (3:7). To be sure, religious
leaders – the priests, scribes, and Pharisees – receive from Jesus quite as
much provocation as they give him. His outreach, however, is not primar-
ily to them; rather, the favored penitent in Luke is a man or woman who
is marginal, suffering, and in some way broken. The form of his or her
repentance, however, is no ritual bath in the Jordan or any other traditional
act of piety. This coming to God is often portrayed only as a person’s pas-
sionate, full-throttle desire for a change of life – metanoia – a radical turn
around of self-understanding and, with it, the onset of remorse (or sheer
desperation) necessary for real transformation to occur. Sometimes, as with
the prostitute Luke identiies as “a woman of the city, who was a sinner,”
remorse predominates: the frantic need to be forgiven is what makes the
woman whole (7:36–50). Elsewhere, what comes to the fore is not so much
remorse as the longing to be healed of inirmities thought to be the result
of sin, as with the paralytic whose friends break through a roof in order to
lower him down to an otherwise inaccessible Jesus (5:17–26). To him Jesus
says, “Friend, your sins are forgiven” (5:20), before going on to perform a
miracle to demonstrate “that the Son of Man has authority on earth to for-
give sins” (5:24).
But the forgiveness of sins is not exclusively Jesus’ prerogative; it is
also incumbent upon his followers, who are taught not only to follow
his example but to be like the Most High who sends down rain upon
the unjust and the just, who “is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.

5
Richards, Expository Dictionary of Bible Words (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1985),
pp. 289–92, esp. pp. 289–90.
162 Peter S. Hawkins

[Therefore, be] merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (6: 36). As

Jesus preaches in his “sermon on the plain” – Luke’s shorter account
(chap. 6) of what Matthew places at much greater length “on the Mount”
(chaps. 5–7) – forgiveness is proclaimed less as a discrete act than as an
entire way of life.
Furthermore, it is to be extended not only to the “poor in spirit” or
broken in lesh – who are Luke’s personae gratae – but also to those who
wish harm or actually perform it. “Love your enemies,” he says to his dis-
ciples, “do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for
those who abuse you. . . . Forgive, and you will be forgiven” (6:27–8, 37).
(Alas, such generosity does not characterize his relationship with his
own antagonists, the scribes and Pharisees.) There is also a corollary that
makes this forgiveness of others a necessity, a quid pro quo. As Jesus says in
Matthew, “if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your
trespasses” (6:15).
Unlike Paul, Jesus does not often address the particularities of social life.
He does not offer advice about what to do when a given man in Corinth,
say, persists in living scandalously with his father’s wife (1 Cor. 5:1–2).
Instead, he teaches his followers to pray for their daily bread wherever they
are and, just as regularly, ask God to “forgive us our sins, as we ourselves
forgive everyone indebted to us” (Luke 11:4). No details are provided, but
his “policy” is clear enough, at least for those who are his followers:
If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance,
you must forgive. And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and
turns back to you seven times and says, “I repent,” you must forgive. (Luke 17:3–4,
emphasis added)

Despite this injunction to ongoing pardon-upon-repentance, there are

exceptions to the rule. The one who does not forgive cannot be forgiven.
And in the same passage where Jesus asks the person who has been offended
to forgive his fellows seven times – or “seventy-times seven” as Matthew’s
Jesus has it (18:22) – he says darkly that anyone who causes one of “these
little ones” to stumble, that is, to lose the faith, is better off dead, a millstone
hung around the neck and thrown into the sea (17:2).6 Likewise, those who
deny the Son of Man before others will also be denied “before the angels
of God” (12:9). Paradoxically, those who speak against him can be forgiven;
but more mysterious still, “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit
will not be forgiven” (12:10). Long a conundrum for commentators, most
view this unpardonable sin as some form of apostasy, the willful turning

6
Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke (X–XXIV) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985), p. 1037,
suggests the offenders here are those who lead disciples into apostasy: “The disciple who
would cause another to waver in idelity is not worth continued existence in this life; he
heaps guilt upon himself, and the eschatological connotation of the warning is not hard to
perceive.”
 A Man Had Two Sons 163

away from God that will have a deleterious effect on others – a negative or
reverse metanoia.7
How do we understand Luke’s distinction between what must be forgiven
over and over again, and what warrants a once-and-for-all millstone around
the neck? For Arendt, what is at stake is the difference between the very rare
instances of “crime and willed evil” (skandala) – which are to be dealt with
not through human retribution but by God alone at the Last Judgment – and
those ordinary “trespasses” (hamartiai) that can easily take place seven times
a day. A trespass warrants forgiveness when a person comes to him- or herself,
changes mind and heart, turns around, and repents (metanoein). Once par-
don is granted, it is possible “for life to go on” in new ways. Whereas refusing
mercy means remaining stuck in the past, forgiving opens the door onto
the unpredictable, onto surprise. It is, Arendt says, “the only reaction which
does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by
the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both
the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.”8
“Both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven” brings us to
the story of the father and his two sons that Luke places at the Gospel’s
structural middle. After an account of Jesus’ Galilee ministry (3–9:50), and
before his Passion and Resurrection (19:28–24), Luke traces his journey to
Jerusalem “when the days drew near for him to be taken up” (9:51). A new
element in these nine chapters is eschatological prophecy about the com-
ing of the kingdom of God. Mostly, however, the journey section continues
what we ind in the Galilee segment, with tension and bitterness mounting
as Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem and heals, teaches (predominantly
through parables), and engages in controversy with authorities over infrac-
tions of Jewish law. What is most irksome to the guardians of religion is the
dubious company he keeps.
Now all the tax-collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the
Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners
and eats with them.” (15:1–2)

Following on this rubric – a narrative set up for what is to come in the rest
of the chapter – are three stories aimed primarily at the righteous who
come “grumbling” to the new rabbi about purity violations: Jesus not only
welcomes sinners into his presence but eats with them. In contrast to the
righteous, the sinners come not to grumble but to listen. Thus, Luke wants

7
Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, summarizes the various interpretations of the unfor-
givable or eternal sin. He sees it as the knowing rejection of God, “a mentality which obstin-
ately sets the mind against the Spirit of God, and as long as that obstinate mindset perdures,
God’s forgiveness cannot be accorded to such a person” (p. 964). See Aquinas’s lengthy
exploration of the “blasphemy against the Holy Ghost” in Summa Theologica IIa-IIae, q. 14,
art. 1–4.
8
Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 241.
164 Peter S. Hawkins

us to imagine a mixed company for the storyteller, those who belong at the
table and those who, according to law, do not. As is so often the case in the
New Testament, the issue comes down to table fellowship: with whom will
you share food?
This differentiation between Pharisees and sinners, between those who
judge versus those who have been pardoned, might lead one to expect the
reversal of values celebrated at the Gospel’s outset in Mary’s Magniicat:
“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,/and lifted up the
lowly;/he has illed the hungry with good things,/and sent the rich away
empty” (1:52–53). Yet revolutionary fervor, and the scorn for the rich and
powerful that goes with it, are not, in fact, what we ind in Luke 15. Instead
of a clearly drawn “us” and “them,” nay-saying grumblers versus sympathetic
listeners, the parables invite us into a scenario where individuals are over-
joyed to retrieve what they have lost. First, there is a herdsman, who res-
cues the one sheep out of a hundred that has gone astray; then, a woman
who ransacks her house upside down until she retrieves a single silver coin
gone missing from her stockpile of ten; inally, a father, whose younger son
makes his way home to the family estate (and elder brother) he abruptly
abandoned. In each of these cases, Jesus caps his tale in similar ways. The
“inding” of sheep, coin, or son leads to a call to rejoice. Furthermore, the
rejoicing extends beyond the person who makes the discovery – the one
who stands to gain most from the retrieval – to a group of friends and
neighbors who are less vitally concerned with the return but are nonethe-
less happy to turn “home” into a place of celebration.
The third parable in the series, apart from its considerably greater com-
plexity and length, differs from its predecessors in two ways. In the herds-
man and housewife stories, Jesus offers a theological conclusion that brings
the parable from earth to heaven precisely by connecting the human event
to heavenly joy over a lost soul’s metanoia:
Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than
over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance. (v. 7)
Just so, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner
who repents. (v. 10)

In the third story, however, there is no “benediction”: Jesus says nothing

in conclusion. Nor is the mood of the parable inally celebratory, despite
the background music and dancing, the smell of a feast. The merrymaking
crowd disappears from view, as does the “sinner who repents” now wearing
the gifts of his welcome home. Despite the father’s afirmation that there is
itting justice in the experience of joy, that a restored life must always carry
the day, there is no narrative resolution. Instead, the story leaves us with
questions. Should one forgive the prodigal or not? Are there conditions to
be met before the elder son can attend the feast? Is anyone willing to face
up to the past, move beyond it, and begin anew?
 A Man Had Two Sons 165

Then Jesus said, “There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to
his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’ So he
divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he
had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dis-
solute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout
that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one
of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his ields to feed the pigs. He would
gladly have illed himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave
him anything.” (12–16)

The story opens with a triangle of family members consisting of a father and
two sons. Any relationship between brothers is fraught in the context of the
Hebrew Bible, with its recurring tales of sibling rivalry and preference for
younger sons: Abel over Cain, Jacob over Esau, Joseph and David over their
elder brothers, Solomon over Absalom. Of all these father-son relation-
ships, it is Isaac and his twins Esau and Jacob who come irst to mind and,
with them, the vexed issues of birthright, blessing, inheritance, and pride of
place. “A man who had two sons” is a hornet’s nest as old as Genesis.
The audacity of the younger son’s request (give me my inheritance now)
and the immediacy of the father’s compliance with it (the quick division of
his property) are both striking features of the story.9 Some biblical commen-
tators adduce ancient precedents for what the younger son asks;10 others
emphasize his impertinence: “For a son to claim his share of the inherit-
ance while his father is still alive is a challenge to his father’s authority, as
well as an upset of the family economy.”11 There is common agreement,
however, on the consequences of the request.12 The younger son would get
roughly one-third of the estate’s value (not the elder’s two thirds or remain-
der upon his father’s death). He would relinquish all future claims, ben-
eits, or connections, so that the relationship between him and his family,
legal or otherwise, would be severed.

9
See Bovon and Rouiller, Exegesis: Problems of Method and Exercises in Reading (Genesis 22 and
Luke 15), trans. Miller (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1978), pp. 52–53; Marshall, The Gospel
of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1978), p. 607; and
Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, p. 107.
10
Moxnes, The Economy of the Kingdom (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), p. 61.
11
Bailey offers a lively reading of the parable in Finding the Lost: Cultural Clues to Luke 15
(St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1992), pp. 109–93. It draws on his long experi-
ence of living in the Near East, on study of two medieval Christian manuscript commentar-
ies, and on consultation of several twentieth-century Arab commentators. Following their
lead, Bailey says, “[To] ask for the inheritance while a father is still alive is to wish him dead.
A traditional Middle Eastern father can only respond one way. He is expected to refuse and
drive the boy out of the house with verbal if not physical abuse” (p. 112). In this light, both
younger son and father are in their radically different ways exceptional.
12
Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, pp. 606–7, sifts through the discussions of inheritance and
comes up with the consensus I give here. See also Hanson and Oakman, Palestine in the Time
of Jesus: Social Structures and Social Conlicts (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), pp. 46–51.
166 Peter S. Hawkins

David Holgate is not primarily interested in interpreting the son’s request

according to Jewish law or social custom. He reads the entire parable from a
Greco-Roman moral philosophical perspective and, particularly, in light of
a venerable classical topos, “On Covetousness.”13 In this light, the younger
son’s demand for his portion of the estate is an expression of his rank avar-
ice, his rejection of shared ownership, and of common good – in short, of
all that is meant by “ours,” as Augustine has it in a sermon on the text:
Anything divided is diminished. If [the two brothers] had stayed amicably together
in their home . . . they would each have possessed the whole estate. For example, if
they had had two country cottages, they would both have belonged to both of them,
and if you had asked about either of them, they would both have said it was theirs.
If you had asked one of them “Whose is this cottage,” he would have answered,
“Ours.” Again, if you had asked whose the other was, you would have received the
same answer: “Ours.” But if each brother had taken one of them, the estate would
be diminished, the answer would change. Then if you asked, whose is this cottage,
he would answer, “Mine.” Whose is this one? “My brother’s.” You haven’t acquired
one, but lost one, by dividing them.14

The younger son’s impetuous act leads to a quick succession of events.

He gathers his belongings (i.e., turns what he has into cash). He leaves
home to travel “to a distant country.” Once there, he “scatters his sub-
stance” (diaskorpizei) by living dissolutely.15 No detail is given as to what this
squandering amounts to, only the utter depth of degradation to which it
leads. That depth is suggested by just how low he sinks in what is evidently
Gentile territory where “citizens” keep swine as well as sheep and goats.
Desperately poor, the younger son tends the most unclean animal of all; he
also descends to the level of pigs by virtue of what he is willing to eat. Yet he
is even lower than they on any scale of regard. In contrast to the swine that
he feeds with carob pods, he is “dying of hunger,” for “no one gave him any-
thing.” Thus, in a complete reversal of fortune, the one who in the safety
and comfort of home once made his abrupt demand, “give me the share of
the property that will belong to me,” ends up nowhere with nothing.
But when he came to himself he said, “How many of my father’s hired hands have
bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to

13
Holgate, Prodigality, Liberality and Meanness in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: A Greco-Roman
Perspective on Luke 15:11–32 (Shefield: Shefield Academic Press, 1999), esp. pp. 90–130.
14
Augustine, Sermon 107A, “Homily on the Gospel of the Two Brothers,” in The Works of
Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Sermons III/4 (94A–147A), ed. Rotelle
(Brooklyn, NY: New City Press), p. 119. All further references to Augustine’s sermons are
from the Rotelle edition.
15
The wicked steward of Jesus’ parable in Luke 16 stealthily squanders his master’s property
(16:1) but acts shrewdly when his bluff is called and in the end is praised: “And his master
commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this
age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light”
(16:8).
 A Man Had Two Sons 167

my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before
you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired
hands.’” So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father
saw him and was illed with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and
kissed him. Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and
before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his
slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe – the best one – and put it on him; put a ring on his
inger and sandals on his feet. And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and
celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
And they began to celebrate. (17–24)

The parable now pivots on a crucial phrase, “when he came to himself ”

(eis heauton de elthōn). What we take these few words to mean determines
how we understand the working of forgiveness in the parable. That is, how
conscious of his wrongdoing, how full of regret, must a penitent be once
he igures out that he has, in the language of Alcoholics Anonymous, “hit
bottom”? The traditional reading, held by ancients and moderns alike,
sees the younger son’s coming to his senses as the keen realization of what
he has thrown away and whom he has offended. It is a signal of metanoia.
Remarkably, moreover, he has come to himself on his own. There is no
prophet Nathan to rebuke an errant king, no philosopher to set the young
fool straight.16 Lacking the outer voice of a wise counselor to convict or
exhort him, what spurs the wastrel’s self-realization is starvation. Hunger
sends him back to the father.
Or to the Divine Father, as Christian interpreters have always had it.17
In his sermon on “The Two Sons from the Gospel,” Augustine sees the
parable as a paradigm for conversion. When the younger son decides to
return home, he does so burdened by remorse for sinning against heaven
and the forfeit of his status as son. He sees at last that he is not worthy of
being loved but only, at most, of being hired. This contrition is a necessary
irst step in repentance, says Augustine, for in the words of the Psalmist,
“The Lord is near to the broken hearted, and saves the crushed in spirit”

16
One thinks of David forced to “come to himself” about his adultery with Bathsheba and the
dispatch of her husband, Uriah the Hittite, thanks to the narrative trap set for him by the
prophet Nathan (2 Samuel 12); or of what Epictetus writes in Discourses 3 about the moral
conversions of young men who turn around their lives because of a philosopher’s eloquence
(Holgate, Prodigality, Liberality and Meanness in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, pp. 201–4).
17
The earliest patristic commentaries on the parable are by Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria,
Gregory Thaumaturgus, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine. Summaries of them can be
found in Tissot, “Patristic Allegories of the Lukan Parable of the Two Sons, Luke 15: 11–32,”
in Bovon and Rouiller, Exegesis: Problems of Method and Exercises in Reading (Genesis 22 and
Luke 15), pp. 362–409; selections are also offered by Just, Ancient Christian Commentary on
Scripture: New Testament III Luke (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), pp. 246–52.
For Aquinas’s compendium, see Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected Out of
the Work of the Fathers; Luke, vol. 3, trans. J. H. Cardinal Newman (London: Saint Austin Press,
1997), pp. 529–47.
168 Peter S. Hawkins

(Ps. 34:18). Augustine then goes on to portray the true penitent as one who
is more than simply aware of his sins, more than hungry for forgiveness: he
is actively enraged with himself.
Repentance, you see, always means being angry with yourself, seeing that you are
angry you punish yourself. That’s the source of all those gestures in penitents who
are truly penitent, truly sorry; the source of tearing the hair, of wrapping oneself in
sackcloth, of beating the breast. Surely these are all indications of being savage with
oneself, being angry with oneself. What the hand does outwardly, the conscience
does inwardly; it lashes itself in its thoughts, it beats itself, indeed, to speak more
truly, it slays itself. . . . Just so, then, this lad by pounding, humbling, beating his
heart, slew his heart.18

This highly emotional drama relects traditional Christian penitence

(“all those gestures”) as practiced widely in Augustine’s day and still, in
some quarters, in our own. Augustine also recalls here the highly wrought
psychological world of the Confessions, which takes the parable as a sub-
text for his spiritual autobiography and adopts the prodigal, both in his
error and in his return to God, as a igure for his younger self.19 More
particularly, the “pounding, humbling, beating” of the sermon’s prodigal
matches his reported behavior precisely at the point just before his own
conversion, before “the light of conidence looded into my heart.” A self
divided, Augustine turns against himself in the Milanese garden where he
would shortly hear the life-changing words, tolle, lege. “I tore my hair and
hammered my forehead with my ists; I locked my ingers and hugged my
knees” (Conf. 8.8).20
This may be what those who are truly and earnestly sorry for their sins
act like, but is this what we ind in the parable? Does the prodigal give
any indication of such interiority or, indeed, any hint of a “slain” heart?
I think not. He comes home; he realizes that he cannot rightly hope for
much. But rather than highlight the depth of the younger son’s contri-
tion, the storyteller gives us every reason to see his “coming to himself,”
at least initially, as a manifestation of enlightened self-interest. In place of
the elaborate remorse Augustine describes – and that most contemporary
exegetes, in their milder way, assume to be case – the prodigal’s return
looks more like a strategy than a wholehearted conversion; less a desperate
measure than a calculation.21 That there is a game plan is suggested by the

18
Augustine, Sermons, p. 136.
19
For the importance of the parable to the Confessions, see Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother:
Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1991), pp. 21–48.
20
Here I follow the translation of R. S. Pine-Cofin, Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. with
introduction by R. S. Pine-Cofin (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 171.
21
In my understanding of the younger son’s motives – made shallow, I would argue, to
heighten our sense of the father’s generosity in forgiving him – I ind myself in agreement
with Bailey, and therefore subject to the same criticism Bailey receives from Nolland, Luke
 A Man Had Two Sons 169

careful construction of a speech designed to do many things at once: (1)

acknowledge the gravity of the past offense: “Father, I have sinned against
heaven and before you”; (2) state the obvious given what has been done:
“I am no longer worthy to be called your son”; and (3) plead humbly for a
little rather than expect a lot: “Treat me like one of your hired hands.” The
young man in extremis is no mean rhetorician!
The immediate goal of the son’s return home is to ind something more
edible than pig’s feed. He wants to be where “hired hands have food enough
and to spare,” not only with enough to keep a body alive but also with
a surplus of leftovers. The exegetical tradition, however, has never found
this motivation suficient. A long history of allegorical readings sees the
prodigal’s hunger as deep spiritual longing for his true spiritual self, even
for God as his ultimate home.22 What the storyteller presents, however, is
much less lofty: the growl of an empty belly motivates the return. Rather
than dwelling on the son’s “coming to himself” – or giving evidence that he
deserves the acceptance shortly to be lavished on him – Jesus draws us away
from the son and forward into the depth of the father’s generosity, his will-
ingness to give so much on the basis of so little. His mercy is what matters
here, not the degree to which the son deserves it.
We have already learned about the father’s everyday liberality within the
household, with slaves (douloi ) and even day-worker “hirelings” (misthioi ) –
to descend the hierarchy of help – all receiving “food enough and to
spare.”23 Yet nothing prepares us for the scene that follows. Whereas the
son carefully calculates his strategy (“I will get up and go to my father, and I
will say to him”), we ind the recklessness of an older man who, whether by
the standards of the ancient world or our own, has no business acting as he
does here. Scanning the horizon in what may be a daily search for the son
he lost, the father sees someone who is “still far off.” The mere sight of him –
one imagines, ilthy and emaciated – is enough to inspire deep compassion,
a word (splanchnizomai) that goes to the visceral core of a person, meaning
literally “to have one’s bowels yearning.”24 So strong is this gut-level long-
ing for his boy that he disregards his own age and position – his dignity.

9:21–18:34, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 2 (Dallas: Word, 1993), p. 784; Green, The Gospel
of Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985), p. 580; and Bock, Luke (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker, 1996), p. 1314.
22
Augustine, Sermon 96, Sermons, “Because he had fallen from himself and gone away from
himself, he irst returns to himself in order to return to the one from whom he had fallen,”
p. 30.
23
The hireling or day laborer lacks the security of belonging to a household that is “enjoyed”
by a slave (Green, The Gospel of Luke, p. 583).
24
Mounce, Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of the Old and New Testament Words (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2006), p. 128, notes the twelve appearances of splanchnizomai in the
Synoptic Gospels (it does not appear in John), and speciies three passages where the word
moves “beyond compassion into the realm of pity or mercy”: Matthew 18:27, Luke 10:33
and 15:20.
170 Peter S. Hawkins

Behaving more like a hired hand than lord of the manor, he runs in his
son’s direction. But this is not all: he demonstrates his compassion by irst
throwing his arms around the boy and then kissing him.
These two highly emotional gestures – the father’s falling upon his son’s
neck (epepesen epi ton trachēlon autou) and his kiss (katephilēsen) – recall the
homecoming of Jacob to Esau in Genesis 32, which gives us a Hebrew Bible
precedent for a wholly undeserved welcome that is offered before a word is
spoken. When Jacob has every reason to fear his betrayed brother’s wrath
after gaining his birthright and stealing Isaac’s blessing twenty years earlier,
what he inds when he comes home are spontaneous gestures of love: “Esau
ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him,
and they wept” (Gen. 33:4). Nothing warrants Esau’s greeting, certainly
neither the unrepented offenses of the past nor the present situation, when
all Jacob and his retinue have done is show up, uninvited, on the scene.
Jacob’s proffered gifts of livestock, the presence of wives and children, are
all meant to soften the blow of his return to Canaan. But Esau, the formerly
aggrieved, will have none of it: “I have enough for myself, brother; keep
what you have for yourself” (33:9). All that Jacob can do in the end is realize
that in his forgiveness his brother had moved beyond the merely human:
“for truly to see your face,” he tells Esau, “is like seeing the face of God –
since you received me with such favor” (33:10).
“Such favor” is exactly what we ind in the parable as a merciful father
throws decorum to the wind. One might expect that the younger son would
be brought up short by the sight of his father running toward him and then
by his overwhelming embrace. No need after all to trot out the prepared
words! Perhaps he is indeed overwhelmed by the embrace and therefore
fails to inish his own speech out of sheer gratitude; perhaps he is simply
interrupted before he reaches his premeditated “treat me as one of your
hired hands.” We are not told one way or the other because, once again, the
narrative emphasis falls not on him but on his father. He goes into action
with a rapid-ire sequence of commands, orders on behalf of “this son of
mine” issued to his slaves. Not only is the boy welcomed as a son, but he is
to be treated like a visiting dignitary who deserves nothing but the best the
household has to offer. All of this is ordered “Quickly,” as if the patriarch on
the run wants to ensure that his household does likewise.
Everyone is in motion, that is, except the prodigal, who is so different
from the feverish Augustine of the Confessions or the remorseful penitent
imagined by the commentators. As if the storyteller wants to emphasize
his passivity – like the lost sheep hurled on the shepherd’s shoulders or
the lost coin clutched in the housewife’s hand – the younger son does
nothing in the face of this onslaught other than receive it. Servants are
told to bring “a robe – the best one,” to put a ring “on his inger,” and
place shoes “on his feet,” all in preparation for a massive celebration. He
who once demanded his share of his father’s property is now showered
with what he neither asks for nor deserves. He is simply there. His actual
 A Man Had Two Sons 171

motivation for the return, the true depth of his remorse, the careful rhet-
oric of his prepared speech, his enlightened self-interest – none of this
is known by the father or, it would seem, of any concern to him. All that
matters is the fact that “this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he
was lost and is found!”
The story might have ended here, with the same rejoicing (on earth as
in heaven) that followed upon the rescued sheep and the retrieved coin.
To do so, however, would be to bypass the third principal character in the
parable. The elder brother must react to what has come to pass.
Now his elder son was in the ield; and when he came and approached the house,
he heard music and dancing. He called one of the slaves and asked what was going
on. He replied, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fatted calf,
because he has got him back safe and sound.” Then he became angry and refused to
go in. His father came out and began to plead with him. But he answered his father,
“Listen! For all these years I have been working like a slave for you, and I have never
disobeyed your command; yet you have never given me even a young goat so that
I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came back, who has
devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fatted calf for him!” Then
the father said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.
But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has
come to life; he was lost and has been found.” (25–32)

The sound of music and dancing that overtakes the household welcomes
one brother home but so infuriates the other that he stays outside, refusing
to “go in.” The elder has been “in the ield,” at work, building up rather
than squandering; he has been engaged as usual in his father’s business,
which is ultimately, of course, his own. Upon the father’s death, the ields
and their produce – everything on the estate – will be entirely his. There is
no one with whom to divide up the paternal inheritance.
Or is there? The sounds of celebration coming from the house are
unusual, perhaps because the estate until now has been mourning for the
one who left. Wanting to know the cause of this sudden joy, he calls over
a servant to ind out “what is going on.” The irst bit of news should by all
rights have been the most shocking: “Your brother has come.” But what
sends him into a rage is the double blow that he feels his father has dealt
him: irst, a reception for the prodigal based merely on his being alive, “safe
and sound,” and then the sheer extravagance of the feast being thrown for
him. There is not only its “orchestra and choral dancing”25 but also the
delicacy speciically ordered by the father. Quite beyond robe, ring, and
sandals, the fatted calf is the celebration’s pièce de résistance. And well it
might be: in a world where meat was a rarity, reserved for high religious
feast days, a calf specially fed and prepared for such occasions was meant to
feed not just a household but an entire village.26

25
Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, p. 1090.
26
Bailey, Finding the Lost, pp. 155–56; Bock, Luke, p. 1315.
172 Peter S. Hawkins

Aware of his elder son’s absence from the merriment, the father leaves
the house and goes out into the ield – thus mirroring his earlier “outreach”
to his younger son – in order to plead with the elder to come in. Again,
he breaks with decorum. He abandons his proper role as host of the feast,
acts the suppliant rather than the patriarch, begs instead of commands. He
pleads with his irstborn to join the party and, if only tacitly, to rejoice in his
brother’s well-being. But this is precisely what the elder cannot bring him-
self to do.27 In contrast to the prodigal’s composed speech, invented in the
far country and rehearsed on the threshold of home, he blurts out a spon-
taneous stream of hurt feelings and jealous recriminations.
As is often the case in human affairs, it all comes down to something like
a fatted calf. Beginning with an assault that in effect pins his father to the
wall – “Listen!” – he summarizes the time he has spent since his brother’s
departure. For “all these years” he has “worked like a slave”; he has done this
service “for you” and without once disobeying a commandment. And yet,
in all this time, no banquet has been planned in his honor so that he might
celebrate with his friends – friends who, like him, presumably have stayed
where they belonged and followed the rules. Note that the one accused
thus far is not the prodigal, who has not yet been mentioned, but the father
who allegedly has neglected and withheld. The one who ills his slaves and
hirelings “with food enough and to spare” has never slaughtered so much
as a scrawny goat for the dutiful son who deserved the recognition.
With the phrase, “But when this son of yours came back,” the prodigal
is explicitly brought into the discussion. The elder identiies him not as his
own brother but only as his father’s spawn, rather like Adam’s dismissal
of Eve to God as “the woman whom you gave to be with me” (Gen. 3:12).
Instead of slaving away on the family estate, and in the process fulilling
every ilial expectation, “this son of yours” lived like a swine among swine,
squandering his portion of what was once common family property with
prostitutes, women no doubt as Gentile and unclean as far-country pigs.
(Here the elder imagines facts about his brother’s dissolution we do not
otherwise know – perhaps the result of his fervid imagination.) The tirade
reaches its crescendo with what amounts to the father’s unforgivable sin:
“you killed the fatted calf for him.”
During this invective, the father remains as unlappable as when his
younger son demanded “the share of the property that belongs to me.” He
responds with neither outrage nor reproof. There is no eyebrow raised at
the mention of the heir apparent “working like a slave” and never falter-
ing at a command (although the ifth commandment, to honor father and
mother, has been forgotten in the heat of the moment). Quite the contrary,

27
The refusal to share food in a society where kinship is established at table is an offense par-
allel to asking for one’s inheritance before it is time. On the importance of table fellowship,
see Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 249–75.
 A Man Had Two Sons 173

he begins his response by calling his prosecutor “son,” as if to establish

their relationship on the bedrock of blood connection. In doing so, more-
over, he disregards the neutral noun huios, which heretofore has been used
eight times in the parable. Instead, he addresses his irstborn as teknon,
which raises the stakes of affection by turning my “son” into my “child,”28
my “beloved boy.”29 The word in effect caresses the son who viciously turns
against him.
The father goes on to remind the elder that the two of them have never
been separated (“you are always with me”). Furthermore, the entire estate,
though it is the father’s as long as he lives, is inally the son’s exclusive prop-
erty (“all that is mine is yours” both now and in the future). The goats have
always been his for the asking, just as the celebration and fatted calf await
him in a house that one day will belong exclusively to him. In the end, how-
ever, the father will not engage in any balance sheet discussion of luxury
commodities, the privilege of inheritance and possession, or status within
family and workplace. Nor he will he compare the outrage of either son’s
offense, neither the younger man’s blithe cheek in asking for his inherit-
ance nor the elder’s frontal assault on his father. Instead, he will transform
the latter’s accusatory “this son of yours” into a new connection with the
sibling he has disowned, “this brother of yours” – wordplay that in effect
becomes an “invitation to restoration.”30 Moreover, he will “re-set” the life
and death priorities that were irst articulated when the prodigal returned
from his self-imposed exile, priorities that are repeated now in hope that
the elder son will not only approach the house but come inside – come
home. Celebration is the order of the day because “this brother of yours
was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.” For the
father, the return home trumps every other consideration. Should it not
for everyone?
Perhaps not. Charles Griswold has argued that if forgiveness is to be
authentic it must be twofold: the wrongdoer must take steps to deserve
pardon and the one who has been wronged freely let go of resentment and
see the other in a new light.31 If we consider only the two sons of the par-
able as it stands, then the story is a study in forgiveness failure. On the one
hand, we have the offending younger, whose only steps to deserve pardon
are those that bring him home; on the other, there is the offended elder,
who clings fast to resentment against brother and father alike. The parable,
however, is not limited to the man’s two sons and what they are capable of
realizing and doing. There is also the father. Bridging the divide that keeps
his sons apart, he offers the entire household a chance to see everything

28
Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke, p. 1091.
29
Bailey, Finding the Lost, p. 183.
30
Green, The Gospel of Luke, p. 586.
31
Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), pp. 62–72.
174 Peter S. Hawkins

in a new light. By both actions and words, he attempts to scatter (in Adam
Morton’s phrase) the “shadow of blame” that could so easily cast its pall
over the entire community. Of both sons he asks only that they cooperate –
after how many years and in the light of whatever grievances – by joining
in a bountiful feast to be shared with all. To return to the house, to come
in from outside, is his call to both boys, whether they have been wandering
astray in the far country or dutifully staying put in the ields of home. In
the face of life over death, retrieval over loss, there is an overriding duty to
“eat and celebrate.” Indeed, “we had to celebrate and rejoice,” as the father
reminds his elder son.
If the story has any resolution, it takes place only in a hypothetical future
after the narrative ends. The father issues a pardon to both his sons that
is unconditional, that offers a new light in which it may be possible to see
everything afresh. He offers a “linkage” (to use Adam Morton’s term)
that may restore a shattered family so that broken ties once again become
ties that bind. Pardon lows from the father’s largesse and comes without
strings: it can only be accepted or rejected. This extraordinary offering
is where the story ends. The question that hovers implicitly at the end of
the tale, however, is what either son will make of what the father gives. It
remains to be seen – in the imagination of listener or reader – whether
from the father’s mercy any negotiated settlement of forgiveness can take
place between the brothers. What will it actually mean for the prodigal to
be welcomed back with such graciousness, not as a hireling with limited
responsibilities but as a son given another chance? Will pardon inspire him
to undertake the hard work of deserving forgiveness? Or the elder brother:
can he reinvent his own place in the family not as beleaguered drudge but
as what he’s been called, teknon, “beloved boy”? Will the one son grow in
depth, the other in generosity? What is the chance that “forgivingness” will
prevail in the end – that present-participle, work-in-progress disposition to
forgive in the face of human frailty?32
Given the narrative frame of Luke 15, with its fractious double audience
of saints and sinners, it seems likely that Luke’s Jesus intended his listeners
to raise such questions, and, by answering them, to repent of shallow con-
trition or lingering resentment. If so, then the parable serves as a heuristic
device designed to force everyone to come to him- or herself. If you join the
feast, whoever you are, what will you need to become once you are there?
What will those pardoned need to take on, and what will the offended need
to give up?
Although the parable has long been identiied with the prodigal, it is the
elder son (and behind him, the scribes and Pharisees) who bear the heav-
ier burden of the tale. It is meet and right to rejoice, says the father, but to
do so is inally a choice. Heaven rejoices over those who come home, tax

32
Ibid., p. 17.
 A Man Had Two Sons 175

collectors and sinners though they be; but one must decide to feast with
them – or not. So it is in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, when in the closing
scene music and dancing bring together unlikely people in a reconigured
community where everyone is given another chance to reconcile and to live
anew. Not everyone joins in. Like Malvolio, the elder brother of the parable
may refuse present mirth and cling to the conviction that he has, in fact,
been “notoriously abused.” He may cry out, as well, “I’ll be revenged on the
whole pack of you!” (5.1.390). To call for revenge, however, would be to fall
into a version of the same “death” that befell the prodigal when he chose
the far country over his own home. It would represent another kind of fam-
ine, another bout with starvation.
Being willing to eat together after all that has taken place may in fact be
the “point” of the parable, its curve ball (para-bolē) thrown alike to the bad
and the good. As we’ve seen, the story itself does not work out the terms
of reconciliation that true “forgivingness” entails; it does not offer a philo-
sophical exploration, and it lacks the speciicity of injunctions about whom
to forgive, or how to do so. Instead, Luke’s Jesus conjures a iction in which
a pater familias forgives both sons without conditions and in doing so gives
each an opportunity to become either more responsible or more gracious
than he has been. In the face of loss and death, he offers the possibility of a
new life that can yet be discovered if everyone at odds comes into the feast.
Once there, the gathered community will have to work with the prodigal to
determine how he is to be reintegrated into the world he abandoned. The
elder son will have to igure out if nurtured grievances against father and
brother are worth holding on to, or whether they might in the end actually
be manifestations of inlated self-regard that is best let go of, even repented.
Hence the urgency of the father’s inal plea to his irstborn, as if to say:
clinging to resentment is a way to die alone, but “forgivingness” is a way to
go on living together.
 10

Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness

Jennifer Wright Knust

“In a Christian life,” German theologian Siegfried Lefler stated in 1939,

“the heart always has to be disposed toward the Jew, and that’s how it has to
be.” Yet, he goes on to argue, as a Christian one must also follow the laws of
the state and, as such be prepared to kill him:
Even if I know “thou shalt not kill” is a commandment of God or “thou shalt love
the Jew” because he too is a child of the eternal Father, I am able to know as well
that I have to kill him, I have to shoot him, and I can only do that if I am permitted
to say: Christ.1
As Susannah Heschel demonstrates in her devastating account of German
theology before, during, and after the Third Reich, such sentiments
were common, systematic, and not limited to avowed Nazis. Preiguring
the “inal solution,” the attempt to dejudaize Christianity institutionally
and theologically “effectively reframed Nazism as the very fulillment of
Christianity,” making the killing of Jews appear to be both morally accept-
able and divinely ordained.2
One would hope that such a deplorable combination of the love com-
mandment with a concomitant obligation to kill particular people on
God’s behalf would be anathema to Christian theology, and indeed to all
theology in general, but unfortunately it would appear that theologians
and Bible scholars are not immune to fomenting the kind of hatred that
makes violence possible, whether or not they participate in actual killing.3

1
Translated and discussed by Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi
Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 10.
2
Ibid., p. 17.
3
See further Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in
History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
I would like to thank Charles Griswold, Susannah Heschel, David Konstan, and Christopher
Stroup for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. Any remaining mis-
takes and infelicities are, of course, my own.

176
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 177

In Christian circles, one solution to this problem has been to invoke God’s
unconditional love, conclusively demonstrated by God’s self-emptying in
the incarnation and Christ’s willingness to accept “even death on a cross”
(Philippians 2:8). Imitating Christ’s example, Christians are to let go of
hatred, put aside vengeful anger, and forgive, graciously, generously, and
without expectation of return. When victimized, they are to imagine them-
selves in light of the divine victim, forgiving anyway, loving anyway, and
wishing the best for the offender and the enemy.4 As Irenaeus of Lyons
explained to his second-century audience, when persecuted, Christians
must exhibit the long-suffering patience, compassion, and goodness
of Christ, who prayed for those who put him to death, saying “Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Adversus haereses 3.18.5
[Luke 23:34a]).5
As attractive as this argument is, however, I worry that the effort to meet
hatred and violence with a call to unconditional love cannot actually address
the kind of hostile disavowal that underlies Siegfried Lefler’s paradoxical
assertion that he loves the Jews and yet must kill them. Perhaps God, as the
absolute sovereign from whom and through whom all grace and forgive-
ness must abound, is able to offer the sort of unequivocal forgiveness that
Irenaeus and other Christians have sometimes recommended, but human
beings seem far less capable of overlooking offenses and extending forgive-
ness, even when God’s love is the topic and forgiveness the (purported)
goal. Thus, Irenaeus brings up Christ’s prayer not so that he can lovingly
welcome and forgive those who have injured him, but so that he can dem-
onstrate just how wrong and objectionable they actually are. “For when an
account is demanded for their blood and they obtain glory,” he argues,
“then all who dishonor their martyrdom will be put to shame by Christ”
(Adversus haereses 3.18.5).6 In other words, the love and forgiveness extended
by Christ and the martyrs at the moment of death only postpones the vio-
lence and death God actually intends for the persecutors. Their forgiveness
serves as a warrant for God’s violence, their love as an excuse for the eter-
nal death that necessarily awaits them. Of course, Irenaeus’s context was
quite different from that of Siegfried Lefler: Irenaeus had no access to the
instruments of death and destruction so carefully employed by the Third
Reich; he had no choice but to wait for divine revenge while he participated
in a larger discursive attempt to wrest legitimacy and honor from those who

4
For a helpful overview of Christian ethical perspectives on conditional and unconditional
forgiveness, see Bash, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), esp. 63–74.
5
Greek text edited with French translation by Rousseau and Doutreleau, Irénée de Lyon. Contre
les hérésies, Livre III (Sources Chrétiennes [hereafter SC] 211; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2002),
pp. 360–61.
6
SC 211: 358–59.
178 Jennifer Wright Knust

would persecute the followers of Jesus.7 Nevertheless, embedded within his

call for forgiveness and love is an obvious wish for the destruction, not the
lourishing, of his enemies.
When calling for an extraordinary attitude of forgiveness from his
Christian audience, Irenaeus was operating out of both a very different set
of circumstances and a very different set of assumptions from those sup-
porting arguments for the importance of unconditional, forgiving love
today.8 It would not occur to Irenaeus to request divine forgiveness for his
enemies unconditionally, without expectation of any change on their part.
Unlike contemporary advocates of “radical forgiveness,” Irenaeus’s depic-
tion of Jesus and the martyrs as exceptionally merciful, preternaturally calm
in the face of death, and willing to grant forgiveness to the ignorant serves
to demonstrate that Jesus and the Christians suffered unjustly and courage-
ously and were therefore capable of the kind God-like pity (eleos) expected
of the best men.9 Irenaeus explains:
As our Lord is alone truly Master, so the Son of God is truly good and patient, the
Word of God the Father having been made the Son of man. For he fought and
conquered. . . . For He is a most holy and merciful Lord, and loves the human race.
(Adversus haereses 3.18.6)10

7
See esp. Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era
(New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 104–23; Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian
Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 33–68; Shaw, “Body/Power/
Identity: Passions of the Martyrs,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 269–312.
8
Important studies of the incommensurability of ancient and modern assumptions about
forgiveness, pity, and anger include Konstan, Pity Transformed (Classical Interfaces; London:
Duckworth, 2001); Konstan, “Ressentiment ancien et ressentiment moderne,” in Le
ressentiment, ed. Ansart (Brussels: Bruylant, 2002), pp. 259–76; Konstan, The Emotions of the
Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2006); Harris, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Kaster, Emotion, Restraint and Community in Ancient
Rome (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Braund, “The Anger of Tyrants and
the Forgiveness of Kings,” in this volume. On unconditional forgiveness as a Christian eth-
ical stance, see Bash, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics, pp. 72–73, 78, 104–10. Bash concludes:
“Notwithstanding that the idea of unconditional forgiveness is dificult to defend from a
pragmatic, practical and philosophical point of view, most people still believe that to forgive
unconditionally is a moral good and sometimes represents what is noble and virtuous in
human beings” (p. 78).
9
As Várhelyi points out in her contribution to this volume, the perfection of the divine and the
forgiveness required from this divinity had emerged as a central value among Irenaeus’s non-
Christian contemporaries as well. Also see Konstan, Pity Transformed, pp. 118–24. Konstan
points out that divine pity was a particular interest of Christians and Jews. Nevertheless,
the new importance of clementia, associated not with the emperors but with God’s son Jesus
and the martyrs, appears to have played a role in the claims of irst- and second-century
Christians. Also see Braund’s chapter in this volume.
10
SC 211: 362–63; English translation edited by Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers,
vol. 1: The Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus (repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson,
1995), p. 447.
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 179

Irenaeus’s contemporary Clement of Alexandria offered a similar point

of view: the true Christian “does not ever remember wrongs, and does
not get angry with anyone. . . . For he worships the creator, and loves the
one who shares life, feeling pity [oikteirō] and praying for him on account
of his ignorance” (Stromata 7.11.62).11 The martyrs and the Christians are
therefore “in the know,” Irenaeus and Clement suggest, and can afford to
pray for their enemies, however shameful their deaths may appear to be.
The disgrace of cruciixion and of death in the arena cannot touch them;
instead, it rebounds back to those who seek to dishonor them, shaming the
shamers and bringing certain destruction upon them, should they fail to
repent of their deeds.
To these second-century Christians, then, the privilege of bestowing
mercy and forgiveness implies just this, privilege. In a situation where some
Christians were in fact being executed for their treasonous superstitio (their
illegitimate religious practices), however rarely, and all claimed as their
divine hero a man who had undergone the most shameful punishment of
all,12 the assertion that Jesus forgives sins and knows more than his persecu-
tors rejects the lesson that was supposed to be learned from ignominious
deaths, that criminals deserve what they get.13 The statement “Father forgive
them, for they know not what they do,” attributed to Jesus by Irenaeus and
known in some quarters from the Gospel of Luke, therefore its within a
larger effort to claim a status of hero, gentleman, athlete, and philosopher
for Christians, even those who had been degraded and killed. In the case
of Jesus, his exemplary forgiveness also afirmed his divinity. Placed within

11
Greek text edited with French translation by Boulluec, Cl ément d’Alexandrie. Les Stromates,
Stromate VII (SC 428; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997), p. 198. On Clement’s theory of forgive-
ness, see Ilaria Ramelli’s chapter in this volume. As Ramelli points out, Clement’s concern is
the moral improvement made possible by both punishment and divine grace, not uncondi-
tional forgiveness. Also see Konstan, Pity Transformed, pp. 118–19.
12
The shame of cruciixion was already discussed by Paul, who intensiied its disgrace by quot-
ing Deuteronomy 21:23 (LXX, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”) and then applied
the curse to Jesus (Galatians 3:13). From Paul’s perspective, by becoming accursed through
the cruciixion, Christ lifted the “curse of the law” from Gentiles. Apparently, one curse
required another to be undone, so that the Gentiles could also receive blessing. See fur-
ther Johnson Hodge, If Sons, Then Heirs: A Study of Kinship and Ethnicity in the Letters of Paul
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. 84–86, 120–26, 138–41. On the shame of
the arena, see esp. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological
Enactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 80 (1990): 44–73, and Potter, “Martyrdom as
Spectacle,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 51–88.
13
As Castelli points out, “Read through Christian lenses, the story of Christian encounters with
their Roman others is a cosmic battle narrative in which the opposition embodied by the
Roman authorities takes on demonic auras and resonances. Read through Roman lenses,
this same story is often an incidental account of a minor set of skirmishes with unruly sub-
jects – or, indeed, a story that does not even merit being recorded” (Martyrdom and Memory,
36). Also see Perkins, The Suffering Self, pp. 27–40.
180 Jennifer Wright Knust

Luke’s Gospel, the saying retains this nuance, but with an added implica-
tion: the forgiveness Jesus extends to some of his murderers at the moment
of death is gradually revoked, so that by the end of Luke’s two-volume work,
the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, the blame for killing Christ and
the Christians has been shifted to Jewish critics of the Jesus movement,
who are promised eternal punishment.14 In Luke-Acts, the hostility embed-
ded in requests for divine forgiveness is intensiied and applied largely to
certain Jews, paving the way many centuries later for theologians such as
Siegfried Lefler.15

“Father, Forgive Them” within Luke-Acts

Jesus’ famous statement on the cross “Father forgive them, for they know
not what they do” (Luke 23:34a) is remarkable not only for the seemingly
broad scope of forgiveness it offers but also because it is omitted from
important late antique copies of the Gospel of Luke. Missing from two
of the very early manuscripts favored by modern text critics – P75, a third-
century papyrus copy of Luke and John, and Codex Vaticanus (B), a fourth-
century pandect Bible known for its pristine text – it was also excluded by
the scribes of Codex Bezae (D), an early ifth-century Greek-Latin diglot,
the ifth-century Freer Gospels (W), Codex Koridethi (Q), and various Old
Latin and Syriac copies.16 Though initially present in the highly regarded
Codex Siniaticus, it was placed in brackets by an early corrector, only to
be reestablished in the ifth century by yet another editor.17 Despite these

14
Though Bash interprets this passage differently, he, too, observes, “what Luke is emphasiz-
ing is that Jesus, in the context of brutal and unjust suffering, modeled the ideal of forgive-
ness, without at the same time being vengeful, angry or deiant” (p. 93). To Bash, Jesus’
nonvindictive response to suffering expresses his voluntary surrender of power. I argue,
however, that in the larger context of Luke-Acts, Jesus’ statement serves as a reafirmation of
his power, justifying the divine punishment meted out to his enemies at a later time.
15
On the complexity of the term “Jews” (Iudaioi), see esp. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness:
Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Schwartz,
“‘Judean’ or ‘Jew’? How Should We Translate Ioudaios in Josephus,” in Jewish Identity in the
Greco-Roman World, ed. Frey, Schwartz, and Gripentrog (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 3–28;
Stroup, “Jews and Judeans: Identity Construction and the Ioudaioi in Acts,” forthcoming.
16
For a full account of the textual evidence, see Daube, “‘For they know not what they do’:
Luke 23, 34,” in Studia Patristica 4, Papers Presented to the Third International Conference on
Patristic Studies Held at Christ Church, Oxford, 1959, Part II, Biblical, Patres Apostolici, Historica,
ed. Cross (Texte und Untersuchungen 79; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1961), pp. 58–70;
Delobel, “Luke 23:34a: A Perpetual Text-Critical Crux?” in Sayings of Jesus: Canonical and
Non-canonical; Essays in Honour of Tjitze Baarda, ed. Petersen, Vos, and de Jonge (Leiden:
Brill, 1997), pp. 25–36; and Whitlark and Parsons, “The ‘Seven’ Last Words: A Numerical
Motivation for the Insertion of Luke 23.34a,” New Testament Studies 52 (2006): 188–204.
17
A sixth-century corrector also added the verse to Codex Bezae; see Parker, Codex Bezae:
An Early Christian Manuscript and Its Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
pp. 42, 162–63.
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 181

striking omissions, Jesus’ prayer can be found in other important manu-

scripts, including Codex Alexandrinus (A) and Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus
(C), as well as manuscripts belonging to the textual groups Family 1 and
Family 13. Such a divided textual record is puzzling, suggesting that some
Christians accepted the passage as an authentic Gospel saying of the Lord,
while others ignored it, or were unaware of its existence, or, perhaps, went
so far as to delete it from their copies of Luke.
Patristic evidence is equally complex. Cited by Irenaeus, Jesus’ prayer
was also included within a popular second-century Gospel harmony, the
Diatessaron.18 There are references to the passage in the Pseudo-Clementine
literature (Homily 11.20; Recognitions 6.5)19 and also in the Didascalia
Apostolorum (6, 25).20 The pseudo-Ignatian longer recension of the letters
of Ignatius of Antioch employs the prayer to urge Christians to love their
enemies in imitation of the Lord, despite any persecutions they may face
(Ephesians 10.3).21 Origen of Alexandria discusses the passage on at least
three occasions, most prominently in his account of the Passover festival,
which, he argues, preigured the sufferings of Christ.22 Interestingly, the

18
The most important evidence for inclusion in Tatian’s Diatessaron comes from Ephraem the
Syrian’s fourth-century commentary on this text, 10.14, 21.3, 21.18 (French translation
of the Syriac and Armenian fragments by Leloir, Éphrem de Nisibe. Commentaire de l’Évangile
concordant ou Diatessaron [SC 121; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1966], pp. 192, 376, 384).
19
Greek text edited by Rehm and Strecker, Die Pseudoklementinen, vol. I: Homilien (Die
Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte 42 [hereafter GCS];
Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1992), p. 164, and vol. 2: Rekognitionen (GCS; Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 1994), p. 190. On the Grundshrift that may lie behind both the Homilies and the
Recognitions, see Kline, The Sayings of Jesus in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies (SBL Dissertation
Series 14; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), pp. 11–27. Whatever source underlies the pseudo-
Clementine literature, however, these works employ Jesus’ sayings to address their own con-
cerns and within the context of fourth-century Syria (Kline, pp. 26, 34–35).
20
Syriac text with English translation edited by Vööbus, Didascalia Apostolorum (Corpus
Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 402 Scriptores Syri 175–76, 179–80; Louvain:
Secrétariat du Corpus CSO, 1979), 175: p. 72; 176: p. 64; 179: p. 240; 180: pp. 220–21.
21
Greek text edited by Funk and Diekamp, Patres apostolici, vol. 2, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Laupp,
1913), pp. 234–58. On the history of the longer, shorter, and middle recensions of Ignatius’s
letters, see Schoedel, A Commentary on Ignatius of Antioch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1985), pp. 1–7. Also see Hannah, “The Setting of the Ignatian Long Recension,” Journal of
Biblical Literature 79.3 (1960): 221–38, and the response to Hannah by Brown, “Notes on the
Language and Style of Pseudo-Ignatius,” Journal of Biblical Literature 83.2 (1964): 146–52.
22
Origen, Contra Celsum 2.25 may contain an allusion to the passage (“The Savior saw what
disasters would befall the people [of Israel] and Jerusalem to avenge the acts which the
Jews had dared to commit against him, and it was simply because of his love to them, and
because he did not want the people to suffer what they were to suffer, that he said, ‘Father,
if it be possible, let this cup pass from me’ [Matthew 26:39, Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42].”).
Greek text edited with French translation by Borret, Origene. Contre Celse. Tome I (Livres I et II)
(SC 132; Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2005), pp. 354–55. English translation Chadwick,
Origen. Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 90. His Homilies
on Leviticus 2.1, which survives only in Latin translation, certainly does. Latin text edited
by Baehrens, Origenes Werke, vol. 6: Homilien zum Hexateuch in Ruins Übersetzung (GCS 29;
182 Jennifer Wright Knust

prayer was attributed not only to Jesus but also to James, the brother of
the Lord. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, a second-century Christian
writer named Hegesippus recorded the last words of James as, “I beseech
you, Lord God Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are
doing,” an obvious parallel to Jesus’ prayer in Luke (Historia Ecclesiastica
2.23.16).23 Perhaps, then, a statement once associated with Jesus’ brother
was later applied to Jesus himself, and added to the Gospel at an appropri-
ate location.24 Alternatively, perhaps a prayer already known as Jesus’ own
was applied to the martyrdom of his brother as well, lending further sig-
niicance to James’s death by means of repetition and comparison. Clearly
there is no easy solution to the question of this passage’s place within the
Gospel of Luke. Nevertheless, Jesus’ statement was familiar and appreci-
ated, at least in some quarters.
Once placed within Luke, however, the saying its well with other themes
raised by the evangelist, whether he originally included it there or not. This
Gospel, together with its companion volume the Acts of the Apostles, dis-
plays a particular interest in the bounty of divine forgiveness and emphasizes
the innocent suffering of both Jesus and his followers, in part, by focusing
on the generosity they display toward their enemies.25 In Acts, the apostle
Peter also claims that those who cruciied Jesus were ignorant of the full
implications of their actions (Acts 3:12–26). The apostle Paul makes a simi-
lar assertion, suggesting that the residents of Jerusalem handed Jesus over
to Pilate only because they failed to understand the words of the prophets,
though he then points out that they heard the prophetic books read “every
Sabbath” (Acts 13:27–28). Jesus’ statement is also consistent with a prayer
offered by the proto-martyr Stephen, stoned to death by a mob of Jews

Leipzig: Akademie Verlag, 1920), p. 290. Also see Clements’s Commentary on Matthew 125
(Latin text with Greek fragments edited by Klostermann, Origenes. Matthäusklärung [GCS
41; Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1933], p. 261) and Peri Pascha 2.43 (Greek text with French transla-
tion edited by Guéraud and Nautin, Origène. Sur la Pâque [Christianisme Antique 2; Paris:
Beauchesne, 1979], pp. 238–39).
23
Greek text with French translation by Bardy, Eusèbe de Césarée. Histoire ecclésiastique (SC 31;
Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2001), pp. 88–89. Here one inds an almost word-for-word parallel
with Jesus’ prayer and also a scenario almost identical to the death of Stephen as described
in Acts: both are stoned by a mob of Jews, both fall to their knees, and both intercede for
their persecutors.
24
Daube, “‘For they know not what they do’: Luke 23, 34,” p. 58; Flusser, “‘Sie wissen nicht,
was sie tun’: Geschichte eines Herrnwortes,” in Kontinuität und Einheit für Franz Mußner
(Freiburg: Herder, 1981), pp. 393–410 (at 404–7); Brown, The Death of the Messiah, vol. 2:
From Gethsemane to the Grave (Anchor Bible Reference Library; New York: Doubleday, 1994),
p. 977. The decision to include the saying would have had the added beneit of providing
Jesus with seven last statements on the cross, so long as these sayings are drawn exclusively
from the fourfold Gospel collection. See Whitlark and Parsons, “The ‘Seven’ Last Words.”
25
See Hawkins’s chapter in this volume and Beck, “‘Imitatio Christi’ and the Lucan Passion
Narrative,” in Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament, ed. Horbury and McNeil
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 28–47.
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 183

in Jerusalem (Acts 7:54–8:1). Immediately before he dies, Stephen states,

“Lord, do not set this sin against them” (Acts 7:60), a close parallel to Jesus’
(possible) statement, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34a), but without
any mention of Jewish ignorance.26 Jesus’ appeal for divine forgiveness on
behalf of those witnessing his death is therefore consistent with the larger
theological program of Luke-Acts.
Yet, in the narrative world of Luke-Acts, the forgiveness Jesus requests
appears to have fallen short. The overall focus in Luke-Acts is on repentance
as a necessary requirement for forgiveness, not on the unconditional love
shown by God toward all people irrespective of their sins.27 As sovereign, the
evangelist assumes, it is God who forgives and the people who must over-
come their ignorance and repent. Without repentance (metanoia), the evan-
gelist argues, divine punishment will surely follow.28 Shifts in attributions of
ignorance over the course of Luke-Acts make the point clear: irst, Jesus
asks that God forgive (aphiēmi ) his murderers on the basis of their ignor-
ance (Luke 23:34a); next, in a lengthy speech before the assembled people
of Jerusalem, Peter grants that both the Jews of Jerusalem and their rulers
acted in accordance with ignorance (kata agnoian), yet he lays the blame for
the death of Jesus squarely on Jewish shoulders (“But you rejected the Holy
and Righteous One . . . and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised
from the dead,” Acts 3:14–15);29 a few chapters later, Stephen prays that
the Lord (Jesus) might not set (histēmi ) the sin of his stoning against these
same Jews, avoiding the term “forgive” (aphiēmi ) and neglecting to mention
their ignorance;30 inally, preaching to Jews in the Diaspora, Paul refers to
the lack of understanding of the residents and leaders of Jerusalem – they
do not listen and understand the prophets, he complains – but he does not
mention forgiveness. Instead, he condemns Jews for their decision to hand
Jesus over (Acts 13:27–29), ending his speech with a warning:
Let it be known to you, Men, Brothers, that through this man forgiveness of sins is
proclaimed to you, and by him everyone who believes is justiied from all things of
which you were not able to be made righteous by the law of Moses. Watch, there-
fore, that the saying of the prophets does not fall upon you, “Behold, those who
despise, and be amazed and perish, because I am performing a work among you

26
Delobel, “Luke 23:34a: A Perpetual Text-Critical Crux?” p. 35.
27
For a different perspective, see Bash, Forgiveness and Christian Ethics, esp. 96–97.
28
On metanoia in Luke-Acts, see Bovon, Luke the Theologian: Fifty-ive Years of Research, 2nd rev.
ed. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), pp. 307–9, 325–28, and Hawkins in this
volume.
29
Unless otherwise noted, New Testament translations are taken from the New Revised
Standard Version.
30
As Matthews has pointed out, Stephen’s execution underscores the author’s representation
of Jews as bloodthirsty and incapable of executing justice (“The Need for the Stoning of
Stephen,” in Violence in the New Testament, ed. Matthews and Gibson [New York: T&T Clark,
2005], pp. 124–39).
184 Jennifer Wright Knust

in these days, a work, which you will not believe, even if someone tells you.” (Acts
13:38–41, my translation)

In other words, according to the evangelist, the forgiveness extended

“through this man” was largely rejected, despite the many instructional
speeches of the disciples and apostles, and those who have failed to believe
will certainly face God’s wrath. As the audience of Luke-Acts knew, Paul’s
warning would soon come true: Jerusalem was destroyed a decade later,
about twenty to thirty years before Luke-Acts was composed.
Thus, when placed within Luke-Acts, Jesus’ prayer does not so much
extend forgiveness as amplify blame, at least toward those who do not share
the evangelist’s perspective that Jesus is God’s Messiah. The prayer intensi-
ies the horror of Jesus’ death, depicting Christ as an honorable, innocent
man who suffers nobly and unjustly, a point brought home by the centurion
at the cross who, after witnessing Jesus’ execution, gloriies God and states,
“Truly this man was innocent” (dikaios, that is, “righteous” and “just,” Luke
23:47). God will forgive those who repent and accept Christ, even if they
were involved in his death,31 but those who pursue violence against Jesus
and his followers will be punished, irrespective of their ignorance. Luke’s
version of the parable of the obedient, disobedient, and ignorant slaves
offers a further demonstration of this principle (Luke 12:42–48; compare
Matthew 24:43–51). “Who is the faithful and wise man,” Jesus asks in this
parable, “whom the master will place over those who serve him?” He then
lists four types of managerial slaves who might be put in charge of those in
the master’s service: the slave who does as the master instructs; the slave
who beats the children while the master is away; the slave who knows the
will of the master but fails to do it; and the slave who does not know what
the master wants and so acts improperly but out of ignorance. The irst type
is blessed, Jesus declares, the second will be divided into pieces (dichotomeō),
the third will be thrashed many times, and the fourth will be thrashed just a
few times.32 Since, in the moral economy of the slave parables, God can be
cast in the role of master and God’s people as slaves, the point seems to be
that those who disobey God will be punished, ignorant or not.33 By contrast,
those who cannot claim ignorance will be severely whipped for their dis-
obedience, or, if they dare to commit violence against God’s children, they
will be cut in two. Once this parable is applied to those who kill Jesus and

31
The centurion offers a good example: he clearly participates in Jesus’ execution, and yet he
comes to recognize Jesus’ true identity, declaring him to be innocent and praising God. The
depiction of Paul in Acts makes a similar point. Paul, the author ominously notes, approved
of the killing of Stephen (Acts 8:1), though an encounter with the risen Christ miraculously
changed his mind (Acts 9:1–25), transforming him from persecutor to heroic apostle.
32
Luke shares this parable with the Gospel of Matthew, but the discussion of slaves who did or
did not know the master’s will is unique to this Gospel.
33
On the troubling implications of the slave parables, see Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 102–29.
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 185

Stephen, unconditional forgiveness can scarcely be in view, even for those

ignorant of God’s will.34

God’s Vengeance Realized

The disrupting of both divine forgiveness and Jewish repentance is fur-
ther emphasized in Luke’s Gospel by references to the First Jewish Revolt
(66–73 c.e.), a disastrous war that left Jerusalem in ruins, the Temple
destroyed, and thousands of Judeans dead or enslaved. From the evangel-
ist’s perspective, these events indicate that divine punishment is already
underway, a point that is made through a series of speciic allusions to the
war and its aftermath: calling Jerusalem the “city that kills the prophets and
stones those sent to it,” Jesus observes, “your house is destroyed” (Luke
13:31–35);35 teaching in the Temple, Jesus declares that not a stone of
God’s former house will remain standing (Luke 21:6); describing the com-
ing age, Jesus instructs his disciples that they will see Jerusalem surrounded
by armies, the people taken away as captives, and Jerusalem trampled by
Gentiles “until the times of the Gentiles are fulilled” (Luke 21:20–24). In
these passages, the author substantially reworks earlier versions of Jesus’
apocalyptic sayings (compare Mark 13:14–20), adding a reference to the
Roman legionary camps that surrounded Jerusalem during the siege and
mentioning enslaved Jewish captives, some of whom were paraded through
Rome during Titus’s triumph.36 He also foreshadows the concluding scene
of Acts. In the last few lines of that book, Paul observes that the prophets
were right: the people of Israel “listen, but never understand,” “look, but
never perceive,” and therefore fail to return to God (Acts 28:25–27). His
closing words seal the fate of Jews who reject Jesus: “Therefore let it be
known to you that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they
will listen” (Acts 28:28). Failing to repent, Jewish enemies of Jesus and the
apostles have refused to replace their ignorance with knowledge and there-
fore the opportunity for forgiveness has been withdrawn.
Luke is not alone in his decision to interpret the destruction of Jerusalem
as a form of divine punishment for Jesus’ cruciixion. This claim became a

34
Daube also connects this parable to Jesus’ statement on the cross; “‘For they know not what
they do’: Luke 23, 34,” pp. 62–64. Also see Luke 19:12–27.
35
Note the interesting play on words here: the evangelist chooses to employ aphiēmi in its
negative sense, as given up, handed over, or let loose, though more often he uses the verb
positively, in the sense of remit, release, or set free.
36
Compare Josephus, Jewish War 5.2.1; 6.2.1, 7; 7.5.3–6. Greek text with English translation
by Thackeray, Josephus in Nine Volumes, vol. 3: The Jewish War, Books IV–VII (Loeb Classical
Library 210; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), pp. 216–21, 380–83,
590–93. Fitzmyer also views Luke’s changes to Mark as intentional references to the siege of
Jerusalem (The Gospel According to Luke (X–XXIV) [Anchor Bible; Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1985], pp. 1343–44).
186 Jennifer Wright Knust

trope in post-70 c.e. Christian writings, as Christian writers sought to drive

a wedge between the followers of Jesus and other Jews or to assert Christian
difference in a situation where this difference was not at all clear. Thus,
depicting the Jews of Jerusalem as calling for their own destruction, the
author of the Gospel of Matthew inserts their (in)famous cry “His blood
be on us and our children!” in the passion account (Matthew 27:25).
From Matthew’s perspective, the ruin of Jerusalem was a divinely ordained
extraction of bloodguilt from the Jews of that city, paid when Jerusalem was
destroyed; Israel’s special role as God’s chosen people was therefore main-
tained, though only if Jesus was regarded as God’s Messiah.37 By contrast,
a half century later Justin Martyr interpreted the miseries brought by both
the First and Second Jewish Revolts (132–135 c.e.) as evidence of a foreor-
dained, divinely planned removal of election from Jews, who are replaced
with “true Israel,” that is, the Christians, Jewish or Gentile. Arguing that the
practice of circumcision was given to Jews so that they could more readily
be singled out for execution by the Romans, he attributes the desolation
of Judea, the plunder of Judean lands, and the exclusion of the Jews from
Colonia Aelia Capitolina, that is, the former city of Jerusalem, to divine
decree (Dialogus cum Tryphone 16).38 He thereby deines the suffering of
non-Christian Jews as outside of Christian concern, though, as he acknow-
ledges in this same work, some followers of Jesus are both circumcised
and Torah observant (Dialogus cum Tryphone 47).39 In the fourth century,
Eusebius of Caesarea offered a further elaboration: warned by a divine
prophecy, the Christians of Jerusalem migrated out of the city before the
First Jewish Revolt, abandoning both Jerusalem and its inhabitants to their
divinely ordained fate – total annihilation (Historia Ecclesiastica 3.5.3).40
Such annihilation was to be expected, he argues, given that the Jews killed

37
See Levine, “Anti-Judaism and the Gospel of Matthew,” in Anti-Judaism and the Gospels, ed.
Farmer (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999), pp. 9–36 (at 34–35).
38
Greek text edited by Marcovich, Iustini Martyris Dialogus cum Tryphone (Patristische Texte
und Studien 47; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 96–97; English translation by Falls, Saint
Justin Martyr (Fathers of the Church 6; Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press, 1948), p. 172. For further discussion, see Knust, “Roasting the Lamb: Sacriice and
Sacred Text in Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho,” in Religion and Violence: The Biblical Heritage,
ed. Bernat and Klawans (Recent Research in Biblical Studies 2; Shefield: Shefield Phoenix,
2007), pp. 100–13; Lieu, “Accusations of Jewish Persecution in Early Christian Sources,
with Particular Reference to Justin Martyr and the Martyrdom of Polycarp,” in Tolerance and
Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity, ed. Stanton and Stroumsa (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), pp. 279–95. On the provisions of Hadrian’s establishment of
Colonia Aelia Capitolina on the site of former Jerusalem, see Boatwright, Hadrian and the
Cities of the Roman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 196–203.
39
Marcovich, Iustini Martyris, p. 147; Falls, Saint Justin Martyr, p. 218.
40
SC 31: 101. The implications of Eusebius’s argument are fully explored by Reed, “‘Jewish
Christianity’ as Counter-History?” in Antiquity in Antiquity, ed. Gardner and Osterloh
(Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 123; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebek, 2008), pp. 173–216
(at 205–7).
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 187

Jesus, devised plots against the apostles, stoned Stephen, arranged for the
beheading of James, son of Zebedee, and then stoned James, the brother of
the Lord (Historia Ecclesiastica 3.5.2).
The anti-Jewish implications of the Jesus’ forgiveness prayer as it appears
within Luke-Acts can therefore be placed within a rising tide of Christian
anti-Jewish polemic linking the destruction of Jerusalem with the death
of Jesus and the apostles. Noticing the coincidence, some scholars have
wondered if the absence of the prayer from various copies of the Gospel
might be connected to this growing sense that Jews cannot and should not
be forgiven, even by God.41 Thus, as Adolf von Harnack posited in 1901,
the conviction that the destruction of Jerusalem was a direct consequence
of the murder of Jesus by the Jews likely led second-century Christians to
suppress the passage. After all, if Jesus had forgiven them, why did God
allow the city to fall, especially when, as Matthew states, the Jews had openly
taken on the guilt of his blood?42 Writing in 1925, B. H. Streeter afirmed
Harnack’s point of view, noting that, as far as second-century Christians
were concerned, God had certainly not forgiven the Jews: “Twice within
seventy years Jerusalem had been destroyed and hundreds of thousands
of Jews massacred and enslaved. It followed that, if Christ has prayed that
prayer, God had declined to grant it.”43 A close analysis of Codex Bezae (D)
by Eldon Jay Epp offers further support to this hypothesis.
Comparing the text of the early ifth-century manuscript Codex Bezae
to that of the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus (B) in 1962, Epp observed
a series of small differences that cumulatively point to a larger pattern of
anti-Jewish editorial revision, either by the scribes of Bezae or at some earl-
ier point along the chain of textual transmission.44 For example, in Peter’s
speech at the beginning of Acts, the B-text reads, “And now, brothers, I
know that you acted in accordance with ignorance, as did your rulers. In this
way God fulilled those things which he foretold through the mouths of all
the prophets: his Messiah would suffer” (Acts 3:17–18, B), but Codex Bezae
states, “And now, men, brothers, we are aware that you acted wickedly, in

41
Apparently, Luke-Acts did not go far enough but left the ultimate disposition of the Jews
somewhat ambiguous. As Wills has pointed out, Luke-Acts does not so much write the Jews
out of salvation as demonstrate that “the Jews are every bit as disorderly and rebellious as
one could expect,” given their involvement in three bloody rebellions in seventy years (“The
Depiction of the Jews in Acts,” Journal of Biblical Literature 110 [1991]: 631–54, at 653–54).
42
Harnack, “Probleme im Texte der Leidensgeschichte Jesu,” Sitzungsberichte der preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften 1 (1901): 251–66 (at 259–60).
43
Streeter, The Four Gospels: A Study of Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1925), p. 138. Also see
Brown, The Death of the Messiah, p. 973; Petzer, “Anti-Judaism and the Textual Problem of
Luke 23.34,” Filologia Neotestamentaria 5 (1993): 199–203; Haines-Eitzen, Guardians of Letters:
Literacy, Power, and the Transmitters of Early Christian Literature (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), p. 123.
44
Epp, “The ‘Ignorance Motif ’ in Acts and Anti-Judaic Tendencies in Codex Bezae,” Harvard
Theological Review 55.1 (1962): 51–62.
188 Jennifer Wright Knust

accordance with ignorance, as did your rulers. In this way God fulilled that
thing which he foretold through the mouths of all the prophets: his Messiah
would suffer” (Acts 3:17–18, D). These minor additions and changes – the
“you” is emphasized by adding the personal pronoun, the “brothers” are
also called “men,” their deed is identiied with “evil” (ponēron), and Peter
states that he and the apostles are “are aware” (epistēmi) instead of that he
“knows” (oida) of their ignorance – heighten the culpability of the Jews for
Jesus’ death, a parallel that is also found in Bezae’s version of Jesus’ words
on the cross. Not only does Bezae omit the statement “Father, forgive them
for they know not what they do”; this manuscript also presents the honor-
able criminal cruciied with Jesus as stating, “But he [Jesus] did nothing
evil [ponēron]” as opposed to, “But he did nothing wrong [atopos]” (Luke
23:41). In other words, though the Jews acted wickedly in crucifying Jesus,
Jesus himself had done nothing evil. As Epp puts it, “The contrast is vivid
and effective.”45
In the D-text, then, any original forgiveness motif in Luke-Acts has been
qualiied, intensifying the blame placed on Jews for the death of Jesus by
refusing the excuse of ignorance. Yet Codex Vaticanus also omits Jesus’
prayer from Luke, despite its more mild text in Acts, and thus any inten-
tional excision on the basis of anti-Jewish sentiment must have taken place
earlier, independently of the transmission of the D and B texts of Acts.
Moreover, as we have seen, the narrative of Luke-Acts already implies that
Jews who reject Jesus and the apostles have also been rejected and, even
further, that Jews, not the Romans, are largely responsible for Jesus’ death.
The transition from the death of Jesus to the death of Stephen emphasizes
the point: whereas Romans and Jews are both depicted as responsible for
Jesus’ cruciixion in the context of the Gospel, only the Jews of Jerusalem
are present for the stoning of Stephen, who prays not for the forgiveness of
his murderers but for God’s forbearance in punishing them. Thus, whether
or not the “original” text of Luke included the line “Father forgive them
for they know not what they do,” the polemic against Jews remains clear.
Forgiveness in Luke-Acts is a conditional proposition from which non-
Messianic Jews are excluded.

Divine Forgiveness and Universal Salvation

In 1940 the Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Inluence
on German Church Life published its irst and most ambitious project, a
revised New Testament purged of Jewish inluence and capable of demon-
strating that Jesus was the Universal Man, a savior for all. Led by the famous

45
Ibid., p. 56. See further Epp, The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Catabrigiensis in Acts
(Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 3; Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1966), esp. pp. 41–171.
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 189

German biblical scholar and theologian Walter Grundmann, a committee

of New Testament scholars and pastors set out to uncover the authentic
Gospel message, buried below later accretions, so that the pristine, non-
Jewish Jesus could inally be revealed.46 Produced according to the best his-
torical- and text-critical methods available at the time, Die Botschaft Gottes
reorganized the Gospel message topically, arranging excerpts from the New
Testament books in such a way that the repudiation of Judaism by Christ
was made plain. Not surprisingly perhaps, the statement “Father forgive
them for they know not what they do” was omitted, along with the Lukan
description of Jesus’ death. Only excerpts from Mark (15:22–32a) and a
brief, highly edited portion from Luke (23:39, 43) were included. Gone
as well are Jesus’ cry of despair on the cross (Mark 15:33), the details of
his discussion with the criminals cruciied on either side of him (Luke
23:39–42), and all the information found in the Matthean account because
the Gospel of Matthew, viewed as a Jewish-Christian corruption, was entirely
overlooked.47 Apparently, Nazi-era German biblical scholars were unwilling
to tolerate even a hint of forgiveness for the Jews.
The reception of this revised Message of God was not universally posi-
tive, however, as Heschel notes. Defending the integrity of the original bib-
lical canon, the equally famous German New Testament text critic Hans
von Soden accused the editors of behaving like “Pharisees” by emending
the biblical text. Still, his objections were rooted in their methodology, not
their anti-Judaism.48 Heschel explains:
From the perspective of the German Christians, the Bible was a body that had to
be puriied of Jewish corruption. For the Confessing Church, if Scripture was the
body, it was the German Christian movement that, in its violation of the integrity of
Scripture, represented the spirit of Jewishness that was threatening Christianity. In
both cases, the Nazi prohibition against “Rassenschande,” sexual relations and mis-
cegenation of Aryans with non-Aryans, was transferred to the scriptural level.49

Retaining “Father forgive them” within the Gospel was clearly no more
“loving” than keeping it out, a phenomenon we have already encountered
in the interpretation of Luke-Acts we have been pursuing here.
Still, perhaps there is a way to imagine an abundance of divine forgiveness
without embedding a murderous wish within Jesus’ prayer. Must “Father
forgive them” necessarily carry anti-Judaism as its (natural) implication or
a hostile death wish as its (true) message? A citation of this same passage
in the writings of the third-century theologian Origen of Alexandria may

46
Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, pp. 106–13.
47
Grundmann et al., Die Botschaft Gottes (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1940), pp. 91–92. See Heschel,
The Aryan Jesus, pp. 108–11.
48
Heschel, The Aryan Jesus, p. 112. Von Soden’s work continues to be widely used and cited
today.
49
Ibid., pp. 112–13.
190 Jennifer Wright Knust

suggest an alternative. Operating out of his doctrine of apokatastasis – the

eventual return of all creatures to the Good – Origen promotes a different
interpretation of Jesus’ prayer from what we have encountered thus far, one
that avoids reference to the destruction of Jerusalem and makes no apoca-
lyptic threat regarding the disastrous punishments that will necessarily fall
upon those who reject Christ.50 Quoting Luke 23:34a in a treatise on the
Passover, he applies Jesus’ statement to all of humanity, Jew and Gentile
alike, suggesting that everyone beneits from the sacriice Jesus brings: “For
the sacriice [of Christ] which took place through them [the Jews] by ignor-
ance, because ‘they do not know what they do’ (Luke 23:34a) – and for
this reason he forgives them. For ‘it is good for one person to die for the
sake of the entire people’” (Peri Pascha 43.30–34; cf. John 1:29).51 Though
he accepts the by then traditional view that Jews killed/sacriiced Jesus, he
also emphasizes the universality of salvation, conlating Jesus’ prayer with
a statement by Caiaphas drawn from the Gospel of John.52 Moreover, he
attributes ignorance not only to those Jews who killed Jesus/the Lamb, but
also to Pharaoh, who oppressed Egypt in the darkness of ignorance, and
the Gentiles, who up to this point had yet to hear “the prophet’s call,” that
is, the prophecies pertaining to Jesus Christ (Peri Pascha 43.6–30). Pursuing
the “spiritual” (pneumatikos) interpretation of both Exodus and Luke, he
argues that all are equally subjected to ignorance and equally invited to
accept divine forgiveness.53 Through his death, Jesus sets humanity free
from the tyrannies of a spiritual Egypt, cleanses the world, and paciies all
things by the blood he shed on his cross (Peri Pascha 47.24–31, 47.1–4).54

50
As Ilaria Ramelli points out in this volume, Origen promotes a doctrine of apokatastasis,
the eventual return of all creatures to the Good following an appropriate and edifying pro-
gram of divinely applied suffering. Also see Ramelli, “Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of
Universal Salvation,” Harvard Theological Review 102 (2009): 135–68.
51
Guéraud and Nautin, Origène, pp. 238–39. Note that Origen quotes a slightly different ver-
sion of the saying than what is found in most manuscripts, rendering the verse as mē ginōskein
ho poiousin as opposed to ou oidasin ti poiousin.
52
Compare Origen, Commentarii in evangelium Ioannis 28.154–70, where he argues that
Caiaphas’s statement was uttered under the direction of the Spirit (Greek text edited with
French translation by Blanc, Origène. Commentaire sur Saint Jean, vol. V [SC 385; Paris Éditions
du Cerf, 1992], pp. 138–42); also see Clements, “Peri Pascha: Passover and the Displacement
of Jewish Interpretation within Origen’s Exegesis” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1997),
p. 320.
53
On Origen’s exegetical method, particularly his preference for “spiritual” (pneumatikos)
or allegorical interpretation, see Dawson, Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient
Alexandria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp. 291–29; Mitchell, “Patristic
Rhetoric on Allegory: Origen and Eustathius Put 1 Samuel 28 on Trial,” Journal of Religion
85.3 (2005): 414–45; Torjeson, Hermeneutical Procedure and Theological Method in Origen’s
Exegesis (Patristische Texte und Studien 28; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1986); Clements, “Peri
Pascha,” esp. pp. 5–19, 38–70.
54
Guérard and Nautin, Origène, 244–46; Clements, “Peri Pascha,” p. 321.
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 191

Divine wrath against all the disobedient, whoever they are, has therefore
been forsworn, and divine forgiveness reaches everyone, not uncondition-
ally, but freely, inviting all to repentance (metanoia), salvation, and know-
ledge. In the end, no one faces eternal death, not the Jews, not the Gentiles,
and not even Satan himself, though all must repent and all will suffer the
purifying ire of divine vengeance in proportion to the sins committed dur-
ing one’s lifetime.
Origen does posit a fundamental difference between Christians and
Jews, however, a difference rooted in exegetical method rather than in
the ultimate disposition of the soul before God. Throughout Peri Pascha,
he asserts that Jews have decisively misunderstood the leshly Passover
described in Exodus 12 and, therefore, that they have also failed to
understand the divine Passover of Christ. Properly understood, the literal
Passover, deined by Origen as the crossing from Egypt into the promised
land and the accompanying sacriice of the lamb during the festival, is
merely a igure of Christ, who passes over from death to life, performing
the spiritual Passover that enables believers to do the same. Overcoming
ignorance by practicing the sort of spiritual exegesis Origen recommends,
they too “depart from Egypt,” gain knowledge of divine origin, and cross
over into salvation (Peri Pascha 2.19–3.31; 4.14–33). Thus, Origen’s read-
ing of Jesus’ prayer may not harbor a violent wish, but it does contain
a competitive bid for the exegetical and theological priority of Christian
interpretation, a priority that necessarily subordinates “Jewish reading”
to the authority of the Christian Logos.55 The teleological character of
God’s steadfast mercy and ultimate (but conditional) forgiveness is not
in question. Human distinction, however, is: Origen preserves the notion,
already found in Clement of Alexandria, that Christians know more and
understand better and so therefore ally themselves more effectively with
God’s purposes. His theory of divine forgiveness, granted to all through
Christ, may produce divine-human reconciliation, but reconciliation
between those “in the know” and those who remain in exegetical ignor-
ance is foreclosed.

Conditional Forgiveness
Authentic forgiveness between human actors, Charles Griswold has argued,
requires a change on the part of the offender and the victim both: the

55
Compare Clements, “Peri Pascha,” p. 369: “Origen’s relegation of ‘the Jews’ to the literal
(carnal) realm, and his insistence on the Christian community as the locus of true spiritual
celebration of the Passover (which fulills and supersedes the Jewish celebration), subjects
the ongoing religious vitality of ‘the Jews’ to the rhetorical control of a Christian hermen-
eutical and theological framework.”
192 Jennifer Wright Knust

wrongdoer must take steps to deserve forgiveness and the victim must
voluntarily let go of resentment and see the offender in a new light.56
Unconditional forgiveness can therefore too easily collapse into excuse and
condonation, requiring little of the offender. Early Christians rejected the
notion of unconditional forgiveness as well, if it ever occurred to them,
though their concern was divine forgiveness and the repentance this for-
giveness necessarily demands from sinners, not the forgiveness that might
heal damaged human relationships in a deeply troubled world.57 Their
God is exceptionally merciful, these Christians insisted, and so willing to
pardon the penitent, even those involved in murdering and persecuting
Christ and the martyrs, so long as the murderers accept Christ and join the
Christian movement.58
Yet, as we have seen, an appeal to divine love and mercy can also con-
tain within it a wish for divinely initiated destruction, particularly toward
an enemy within. In this way, a statement about forgiveness can become
an occasion for hate and Jesus’ prayer on the cross taken as a proof of the
superiority of Christ and particular Christians. Forgiveness, then, becomes a
cover for deep ressentiment of the sort contemporary philosophers deride.59
In the case of Luke-Acts, the desire for divine vengeance was focused princi-
pally at non-Messianic Jews, who were blamed for executions they could not
actually have undertaken – cruciixion was a Roman punishment and the
stoning of Stephen by an angry Jewish mob is historically implausible. As
such, the evangelist depicts certain Jews as radically Other at a time when,
from an outsider’s perspective, Jews and Christians were still very much
the same. Irenaeus of Lyons makes a similar rhetorical move, blaming not

56
Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), esp. pp. 62–72. Also see the exchange between Griswold and Meninger, “Forgiveness
and Apology,” Tikkun 23.2 (March–April 2008): 21–26, 62–64; also available at http://www.
tikkun.org/forgiveness.
57
In this way they shared much in common with earlier biblical precedents and with their
Jewish contemporaries, as outlined by Morgan in his chapter in this volume.
58
As Morton reminds us in his contribution to this volume, monotheistic religions envision
God as a judge who can suspend forgiveness in response to repentance, precisely the idea in
play here as well.
59
I do not mean to imply that ancient Christian writers held anything like a theory of
ressentiment but rather that their desire for God’s vengeance, expressed here by means of a
prayer for divine mercy, may be fruitfully compared to the harboring of a wish for vengeance
described by Nietzsche and others. For further discussion, see Nietzsche, On the Genealogy
of Morals, trans. Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 21–24. Also
see Griswold, Forgiveness, pp. 14–15; Danto, “Some Remarks on The Genealogy of Morals,”
in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Solomon and Higgins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
pp. 13–28 (at 22–25); Fitzpatrick, “Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution,”
French Historical Studies 24.2 (2001): 579–88 (at 579–80). For a helpful discussion of the
dificulty of mapping modern theories of ressentiment onto ancient categories, see Konstan,
“Ressentiment.”
 Jesus’ Conditional Forgiveness 193

Jews but “heretics,” those enemy Christians within who, he argues, malign
the martyrs and refuse to suffer, going so far as to deny Christ for the sake
of saving their own skin (Adversus haereses 3.18.5; also see 1.24.6). Irenaeus
may have been attempting to defend the sanctity of Christians as a whole
in light of possible instances of public shaming and death, but he was also
eager to differentiate his particular form of Christianity from those types he
identiied as illegitimate, even demonic. The pseudo-Christian Valentinians
will have to answer for their slurs, he insists, stained as they are by the blood
of martyrs they have failed to acknowledge.60 Divine justice therefore makes
human forgiveness possible: with the destruction of their enemies guaran-
teed, Christians can afford to “love.”
Appeals to unconditional forgiveness, Griswold points out, often fail
to produce the circumstances necessary for the victim and the offender
to repair their moral relationship. Unconditional forgiveness is therefore
imperfect at best, and unlikely to reconcile the one who forgives with
the one who is forgiven. Other philosophers have wondered if forgive-
ness is even possible, concluding that resentment and hostility always lin-
ger, or that forgiveness all too often denies a traumatic reality that is then
ignored.61 Certainly appeals to divine forgiveness can function to disguise
hostility – a belief in a loving, generous God does not appear to guaran-
tee love or generosity on the part of those holding such a belief, despite
assertions to the contrary. In a world where institutes of scholars gather
together to dejudaize the Christian Bible, where theologians argue that
divine love obligates them to kill, and where the destruction of a city and
the annihilation of a city’s inhabitants can be interpreted as just punish-
ment, divine or human, the forswearing of resentment can seem a dificult
if not impossible task. Nevertheless, as Peter Hawkins reminds us, clinging
to resentment is “a way to die alone” but forgivingness is “a way to go on
living together.”62 The nursing of hatred will hardly bring reparation and
relief, interpersonally, psychically, or politically. Some kind of reparation
is needed, some way of crossing over and passing through, some kind of

60
Michael Allen Williams has called into question the reliability of accusations that the
“gnostics” refuse martyrdom, lodged by Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and
others. It may be the case that the Valentinians, Irenaeus’s particular target here, sought
to avoid martyrdom, but “orthodox” Christian literature is also rife with warnings about
overly zealous would-be martyrs, all too eager to die for Christ. See Williams, Rethinking
“Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996), pp. 103–6.
61
See, for example, Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Dooley and Hughes
(London: Routledge, 2001), esp. pp. 39, 44–45. On forgiveness as a “leap of fantasy”
that foreshortens the necessary work of psychic healing, see Smith, “Leaps of Faith: Is
Forgiveness a Useful Concept?” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 89 (2008): 919–36.
I thank Susannah Heschel for bringing this article to my attention.
62
I refer to Hawkins’s chapter in this volume.
194 Jennifer Wright Knust

return to the Good, universally available to all.63 Yet appeals to uncondi-

tional forgiveness appear to me to be a poor strategy of attaining this wor-
thy goal. All too often, such appeals work to preserve a sense of superiority
on the part of the forgiver, divine or human, not to enable the kind of
truth telling that might make reconciliation possible.

63
See further Young-ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and
W. H. Auden (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 153–56.
 11

Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy

The Importance of Repentance and the Centrality of Grace

Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

An analysis of forgiveness in the most philosophically minded and represen-

tative patristic authors, especially Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory
of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine, and also John Chrysostom, sug-
gests that they understood forgiveness, whether it comes from God or from
human beings, as deeply related to the core notion of divine grace but not
as unconditional. In addition, a crucial role in their relection on forgive-
ness was played by their soteriological and eschatological doctrines.

Clement
Clement was the disciple of the Christian Stoic Pantaenus in Alexandria, and
his thought can be considered a precursor of the doctrine of apokatastasis,1
which was then developed by Origen, who may have been a disciple of his,
and who, in any case, was well acquainted with his works. Clement attaches
a great importance to forgiveness, including interpersonal forgiveness,2
even to the point of presenting it as an essential feature of the “gnostic” –
that is, the perfect Christian, in Stromateis 7.13.81:3 such a person “never
remembers those who have sinned against him but forgives [aphiēsi] them.
1
See my “Origen, Bardaisan, and the Origin of Universal Salvation,” Harvard Theological Review
102 (2009): 135–68.
2
On interpersonal relationships in Clement, see also Osborn, Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 226–53 (chap. 11: “Twofold Hope”) on love and
reciprocity. For the idea of forgiveness in some fathers, I also refer readers to Konstan,
Before Forgiveness: The Origins of a Moral Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
pp. 125–45 (chap. 5: “Humility and Repentance: The Church Fathers”); see also my review
in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2011.03.21.
3
Edition by Früchtel, Stählin, and Treu, Clemens Alexandrinus, vols. 2, 3rd ed., and 3, 2nd ed.
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2:1960; 3:1970), 2:3–518; 3:3–102. Clement was very sensitive
to the notion of degrees of knowledge and perfection and of teaching appropriate to each
I am very grateful to Charles Griswold and to David Konstan, and to all those who read and
discussed my manuscript.

195
196 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

This is why this person righteously prays, too, saying: ‘Forgive [aphes] us,
since we forgive [aphiemen] in turn.’ For this, too, is one of the things that
God wishes: to crave nothing, to hate no one. For all humans are the work
of one will [henos thelēmatos].”4 According to Clement, a “gnostic” will forgive
because he or she will hate no one, because God wanted all human beings
to exist, and because they all come from one single will. The idea of the
unity of all humanity in Clement is essential, as it is in Origen and, with
particular emphasis, in Gregory of Nyssa; indeed, it is one of the main bases
for their universalism in soteriology. Moreover, the notion of creation as an
act of will is typical of the Alexandrian school in the time of Clement: both
Pantaenus and Ammonius Saccas – who was the teacher of Origen and of
Plotinus as well – saw creation as the fruit of God’s will, which made itself
substance. Pantaenus in fragment 2 Routh says that the logoi in God’s mind
are called by scripture “God’s wills,” because the Godhead created every-
thing by its will (thelēmati) and knows all beings “as its own wills” (hōs idia
thelēmata),5 and Ammonius (ap. Hierocles of Alexandria ap. Phot. Bibliotheca
cod. 251.461b–462b) claimed that God’s will (boulēma) was enough for the
constitution of the beings and that the divinity created each thing by its will
(thelōn) and knows the beings “as its own wills” (hōs idia thelēmata).6
Clement was quite familiar with Jesus’ exhortation to his followers to
be perfect like their heavenly Father, who makes the sun shine upon both
the righteous and the sinners. And he emphasizes God’s forgiveness even
more than he recommends human interpersonal forgiveness. He states
that there is absolutely no place where divine mercy is not operating; its
providential activity is always present, in heaven, on earth, and even in
hell, where repentance and conversion can still occur if they did not occur
earlier on earth:
The Savior, in sum, is always active, because his own work is to save. And this he did pre-
cisely by drawing to salvation those who wanted to believe in him, thanks to preach-
ing, wherever they were found. . . . All those who believed will be saved, although they
came from paganism, because down there [sc. in hell] they have confessed their
faith: salviic and educative are God’s punishments! They inspire conversion and want
the sinner to repent rather than to die [Ez. 18:23; 33:11]. . . . They repented, converted, and
believed, even though they were imprisoned in hell. . . . It is thus demonstrated with
certainty that God is good and able to save, with impartial justice, those who repent and
convert, in this world or elsewhere; for it is not only on this earth that God’s active power
extends, but it is everywhere, and it operates always [even in hell]. (Strom. 6.6.45–47)

of them. See Kovacs, “Divine Pedagogy and the Gnostic Teacher according to Clement of
Alexandria,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 9 (2001): 3–25, also with wide-ranging bibliog-
raphy. Here I do not intend to tackle the question of the “Secret Gospel of Mark.”
4
Translations of all passages in the present essay are mine.
5
Edition by Routh, Reliquiae Sacrae 1.2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1846).
6
Edition by Henry, Photius. Bibliothèque, 8 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1:1959; 2:1960;
3:1962; 4:1965; 5:1967; 6:1971; 7:1974; 8:1977).
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 197

Divine providence and forgiveness are clearly not considered by Clement

to be unconditional but to respond to, and at the same time elicit, a moral
improvement on the part of humans. For punishment itself serves God’s
purpose of purifying and improving humans: “Penury and disease, and
such trials, are often sent for admonition, for the correction of the past,
and for care for the future” (Strom. 7.13.81). He also remarks that
the future life we shall enjoy with the “gods” in God, after being liberated from every
punishment and suffering which we endure [or shall endure] because of our sins for an
education which is salviic [paideian sōtērion]: after the payment of this debt, repayments
and honors are rendered to those who have been made perfect, after completing
their puriication. . . . Then, once they have become pure in their hearts according to
that which its the Lord, they will enjoy the apokatastasis in eternal contemplation [aïdiōi
theōriai apokatastasis]. (Strom. 7.10.56.4–5)

Clement has a strongly therapeutic and pedagogical conception of God’s

salviic oikonomia, another trait that is deeply relevant to his eschatology.7
Conversion and repentance must be voluntary in each one for them to
be effective in producing God’s forgiveness, but at the same time they
are strongly favored by the pedagogical and therapeutic action of Christ-
Logos (the Son of God and God’s Logos), who is teacher and physician,
and who “almost compels people to salvation out of an excess of goodness”
(Strom. 7.14.86.6). This concept of God who compels people to salvation
appears again in Origen and in Cassian, although they both attach the
highest importance to human free will as well. Also, for Clement, forgive-
ness depends on the offender’s repentance and moral improvement, which
is voluntary and indeed represents the best fruit of human free will.

Origen
All these hints offered by Clement were developed by Origen, whose eschat-
ology is the very center of his thought and is all based on forgiveness and
grace, two closely related concepts in his view.8 It is to be noticed that Origen
is primarily, even if not exclusively, interested in forgiveness on the part of
God rather than in interpersonal forgiveness.9
Indeed, with Paul (Rom. 6:23) – who is the main inspirer of his
soteriology10 – Origen stresses that eternal life, that is, salvation, is a free

7
See my Gregorio di Nissa Sull’Anima e la Resurrezione (Milan: Bompiani and the Sacred Heart
University, 2007), irst integrative essay.
8
See ibid.
9
See also the chapter by Jennifer Knust in this volume.
10
The main passage is 1 Cor. 15:28, which will be pivotal in Gregory of Nyssa’s soteriology
as well (to the point that he devoted to this verse a whole Trinitarian and eschatological
treatise: In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius). But there are also many other passages, including those
which he considered to have been written by Paul, such as 1 Tim 2:4–6: “God wants all
198 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

gift from God,11 which, for the mystery of divine oikonomia, will be bestowed
upon all in the end. After the due puriication, therapy, and instruction
(which will also guarantee the perfect accomplishment of divine justice),
all will adhere to the Good, that is, God, voluntarily. The order of justice
applies to punishments in the other world, and the order of grace applies
to blessedness, salvation, and eternal life. Therefore, while punishments
will be perfectly commensurate with one’s deeds in this life (Homiliae in
Ieremiam 12.2), and thus will be limited, eternal blessedness, which is par-
ticipation in divine life and ultimately a theōsis (deiication), cannot possibly
be commensurate with one’s merits but is only a work of divine grace and
has no limit (Commentarii in Romanos 3.1.155–75).12
Origen, who devoted a substantial commentary to the Epistle to the
Romans, takes over Paul’s claim that, as all became culpable in Adam, so
will all be justiied in Christ (Rom. 5:18–19), that God has made all culpable
in order to bestow mercy upon all (Rom. 11:32), and that Christ took up all
of humanity and died for all when all were still sinners (Rom. 5:8–9), pre-
cisely in order to emphasize that salvation and beatitude – that is, the telos of
apokatastasis – is due to divine grace, not to the personal merits of anyone.
But at the same time Origen ascribes a crucial importance to human free
will and responsibility – a pivotal part of his theodicy in his vehement and
lifelong polemic against Valentinian determinism – and is far from thinking
that the inal restoration will entail God’s forgiveness of all sins bestowed
upon anyone without the conversion of the sinners. In order to attain the
eventual eternal blessedness, all will have to be puriied (through the neces-
sary suffering), healed, and illuminated. In this way, once their intellectual
sight is made clean, they will voluntarily and happily reject evil, which will
thus disappear – as it has no ontological subsistence of its own but consists
only in the free will’s wrong choices13 – and adhere to the Good (i.e., God)
and thus enter eternal beatitude.
Origen indeed stresses that conversion is necessary for anyone to obtain
forgiveness from God, for the sake of our improvement and puriica-
tion. That also implies – and this echoes Plato’s preference for peithō over
anankē – that the adherence to the Good will not mean a forced submission

human beings to be saved and to attain the knowledge of Truth.” Most of these passages
were particularly helpful for Origen to buttress his doctrine of apokatastasis.
11
“Eternal life is a free gift [kharisma] of God: it does not come from us: it is God who offers us
this present [dōron].” See Ramelli, “Origen’s Exegesis of Jeremiah: Resurrection Announced
throughout the Bible and Its Twofold Conception,” Augustinianum 48 (2008): 59–78.
12
Editions by Nautin, Origène, Homélies sur Jérémie, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1977);
Hammond Bammel, Der Römerbriefkommentar des Origenes, vol. 1 (Freiburg: Herder, 1990).
13
The ontological nonsubsistence of evil is the main metaphysical pillar of the theory of
apokatastasis in Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Evagrius. See my “Christian Soteriology and
Christian Platonism: Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and the Biblical and Philosophical Basis of
the Doctrine of Apokatastasis,” Vigiliae Christianae 61 (2007): 313–56.
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 199

for anyone; rather, it is a matter of knowledge of Good and the spontan-

eous adherence to it through love. In fact, Origen explicitly identiies the
universal submission to Christ foretold in 1 Corinthians 15:24–28 with
universal salvation, for example, in De Principiis 1.6.1: “The name of the
submission [subiectio] in which we will be subjected to Christ indicates the
salvation [salus], coming from Christ, of those who will submit.”14 In his
Commentary on John, Origen will repeat this interpretation and will add that
this is the only way of interpreting that submission “in a manner worthy of
the goodness of the God of the universe” and worthy of the Son, “God’s
lamb, who takes up the sin of the world” (6.295–96).15 A different inter-
pretation, entailing violence and compulsion on the part of God, would be
unworthy of God.
Origen also values human forgiveness, as is clear, for example, from
his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer (De Oratione 18–21),16 whose verse
on forgiveness he quotes – in accord with his philological sensitivity17 – in
both the Matthew and the Luke version (respectively, “remit [aphes] us our
debts [opheilēmata], just as we too remit them to our debtors” and “remit
[aphes] us our sins [hamartias], for we too remit them to every debtor”).
He observes that the meaning is the same. In the former recension, he
interprets opheilēmata as “that which is due to someone,” and he links Jesus’
precept to Paul’s recommendation in Romans to render to all what is due
to each of them (tributes to the emperor, honor to God); what humans owe
to each other is agapē (love), and this is due all the more to God, whom
humans should love “with all their heart, strength, and mind.” But we are
also indebted (opheiletai) to Christ, who has redeemed us by means of his
blood, and to our friends, our parents, and so on. The result, Origen com-
ments, is that we are always indebted (opheilein) in many ways to many. So
we should remit the debts of our debtors remembering that we are much
more indebted to others and to God. He cites the parable of the debtors to
this effect: the master will not remit the debt of the bad servant who does
not remit the debt of his own debtor, but will insist on his debt up to the last
coin. If we can remit the sins of our debtors, it is because we imitate God
who, properly, is the only one who has the power of remitting sins.
That forgiveness is not at all unconditional for Origen is further proved
by his quoting Luke 17:3–4 (“If your brother sins, rebuke him, but if he

14
Edition by Crouzel and Simonetti, Origène, Traité des Principes Livres 1.2 (Paris: Cerf, 1978).
15
Edition by Preuschen, Origenes Werke, vol. 4: Der Johanneskommentar (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1903).
16
Edition by Koetschau, Origenes Werke, vol. 2: Die Schrift vom Gebet (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1899).
17
His philological skill induced him to prepare the monumental Hexapla and is manifest
especially in his great commentaries. See my “Origen and the Stoic Allegorical Tradition:
Continuity and Innovation,” Invigilata Lucernis 28 (2006): 195–226, as well as Grafton and
Williams, Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 86–132.
200 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

repents [metanoēsē], forgive [aphes] him. And if he sins seven times a day
against you and seven times he returns to you, saying, ‘I repent [metanoō],’ you
will forgive him”) in De Oratione 28.7.18 This emphasizes that forgiveness
depends on the repentance of the offender and its expression, and is in
perfect agreement with the importance that Origen ascribes to repent-
ance and to its expression, by words and/or tears.19 Indeed, the only tears
Origen approves of – in that they are not elicited by a passion, which would
be contrary to his ideal of apatheia – are those of repentance, which are
good in that repentance leads to forgiveness and hence salvation. Thus, for
instance, Origen interprets the sinner who washed Jesus’ feet in contrition
as a symbol of the pagans who came to Christ in repentance and conver-
sion, metanoia (Fragmenta in Ioannem 78; cf. Commentarii in Matthaeum 12.4;
Commentarii in Ioannem 6.57.294). Repentance is also recommended by
Origen in Fragmenta in Lucam 59, who in Commentarii in Romanos 9.16.20.31
praises conversion that brings about salvation through forgiveness of sins. In
Fragmenta in Ieremiam 57, he notes that God listens to the weeping of those
who repent; God will liberate them from evil in Christ, and they will sing
God’s glory. Tears are a symbol of repentance leading to salvation thanks to
Christ also at Selecta in Psalmos PG 12.1544.22, in which the passage’s “very
bitter repentance” is followed by forgiveness and the capability of seeing
“God’s face” – that is, Christ, who is the image of the invisible God. This is
why Origen remarks that it is thanks to the appearance of Christ that a per-
son’s repentance leads straight to salvation.
Salvation through forgiveness clearly is the goal of repentance; hence,
in Fragmenta in Lucam 59 Origen exhorts people to cry and repent because
repentance will bring them to salvation. To the person who has repented
and converted (metanoēsanti), God will say to stop weeping (Fr. in Lucam
78).20 The cathartic value of tears of repentance and their effectiveness
is such that they are eficacious in the next world as well. It will be God
himself who will provide suffering for the conversion of sinners (Hom.
in Ier. 20.6). Through repentance, sinners come to life. Those who will
be conined to the “outer darkness,” that is, hell, will desire the light and
repent, praying God to rescue them from there (Comm. in Matth. 17.24).
Thus, God will cast them into hell with the precise aim that they may repent

18
I argue, on the basis of massive evidence, that forgiveness is not unconditional either in
the New Testament (for which the one I have just adduced is a good example) or in early
Christianity, in “Unconditional Forgiveness in Christianity? Some Relections on Ancient
Christian Sources and Practices,” in The Ethics of Forgiveness: A Collection of Essays, ed. Fricke
(London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 30–48.
19
On the latter form, see Ramelli, “Tears of Pathos, Repentance, and Bliss: Crying and
Salvation in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa,” in Tears in the Graeco-Roman World, ed. Fögen
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), pp. 367–96.
20
Edition by Rauer, Origenes Werke, vol. 9, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1959), pp.
227–336.
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 201

and ask for divine help. Another example of tears of repentance is offered
by Peter, who, after betraying Jesus, bitterly cried (a passage also mentioned
in Contra Celsum 2.18; 2.39), because he repented and was already seeking
Christ again (Comm. in Io. 32.31.383). In Commentarii in Matthaeum, Origen
notes that, if Peter cried, it was because he felt the bitterness of his sin and
was repenting, which was very good.21
The idea of exclusion and suffering intended to produce repentance
and health is well expounded in Fragmenta in I Corinthios 24:22 God will
separate the sinners from the good in the next world, so that they may not
spread their contagion among all, just as a shepherd separates an ill sheep
from the lock. But in doing so, he will not abandon the sinners; on the
contrary, he will cure them, in that he will have them repent for their sins.
Consequently, this will be a therapeutic and pedagogical suffering: what
will be consumed will be their “leshly way of thinking” – where “lesh,”
in Pauline terminology, does not mean “body” but “sin” – whereas their
soul will not be consumed but healed. In Selecta in Psalmos 1576.12–17,
Origen draws a parallel between baptism and metanoia, in that they both
lead to the remission of sins and thus salvation. Baptism involves no suf-
fering, because it is Jesus who has already suffered for all therein, but
the aim and the result are the same in both cases: forgiveness of sins
and salvation.
Another important feature in Origen’s thought on repentance and for-
giveness is his dynamic conception of moral progress in individual rational
creatures and in history as a whole.23 For Origen, who overtly rejected the
Stoic idea of aeons that cyclically repeated themselves identically, always
with identical behaviors of identical people (C. Cels. 4.12; 4.67–68; 5.20;
De Princ. 2.3), all of history is a progress pointing to one telos – which is the
apokatastasis or universal salvation.24 The sequence of aeons postulated by
Origen, unlike that of the Stoics, will cease in the apokatastasis, when “all
beings will be no more in an aeon, but God will be all in all” (De Princ.
2.3.5). Origen sees this progression realized in the attainment of God’s like-
ness. For being in God’s image (eikōn) is a datum for all humans, but being
in God’s likeness (homoiōsis) will be achieved only in the end, as a result of
21
Edition by Klostermann, Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller 11 (Leipzig: Hinrichs,
1933), p. 241.
22
Jenkins, “Documents: Origen on 1 Corinthians,” Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1908):
232–47, 353–72, 500–14; 10 (1908): 29–51.
23
For a compendious treatment, see, for example, Lettieri, “Progresso,” in Origene: Dizionario,
la cultura, il pensiero, le opere, ed. Monaci Castagno (Rome: Città Nuova, 2000), pp. 379–92.
24
See my Gregorio di Nissa, irst integrative essay; Tzamalikos, Origen: Philosophy of History
and Eschatology (Leiden: Brill, 2007), with my review in Rivista di Filosoia Neoscolastica 100
(2008): 453–58; Pietras, “L’inizio del mondo materiale e l’elezione divina in Origene,”
in Origeniana Nona, ed. Heidl and Somos (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), pp. 653–68. I am very
grateful to Henryk Pietras for sharing and discussing his study with me long before its
publication.
202 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

personal engagement and moral improvement and progress.25 Of course,

this notion of homoiōsis depends not only on the irst Genesis account of the
creation of the human being but also on the Platonic tradition of homoiōsis
theōi or assimilation to God as the ethical end; it is precisely Plato whom
Origen quotes in De Principiis 3.6.1: “The highest Good [summum bonum],
which is the end of all rational creatures and is also said to be the end of all
[inis omnium], is described in this way by very many philosophers as well:
‘the highest good [summum bonum] is the assimilation to God [similem ieri
Deo] insofar as possible.’”
This conception of moral progress, again, points to a close link between
Origen’s conception of forgiveness and his soteriology and eschatology. It
is also clear that for Origen forgiveness, either interpersonal or divine, is
never unconditional, not even in the eventual apokatastasis.

Gregory of Nyssa
Gregory of Nyssa, who in the fourth century was a fervent admirer of
Origen and was deeply inluenced by him, treated the theme of forgiveness
especially in his De Oratione Dominica, discourse 5.26 Here, the verse of the
Lord’s Prayer concerning forgiveness, in its Matthean form, is commented
on: “Remit us our debts, just as we too remit them to our debtors.” Gregory
points out that the remission (aphesis) of debts (ophlēmatōn) is proper to
God, and he conlates debts and sins in supporting his claim by means of
the Gospel quotation that nobody but God can remit (aphienai) sins; as a
consequence, remission of sins results from an imitation (mimēsis) of God.
In this, too, as in much else, he shows the inluence of Origen. According
to a conception that is very dear to Origen and to him, he stresses that we
ought to acquire a similarity (homoiotēs) to God in forgiving sins and being
philanthrōpoi, thus really “becoming God ourselves,” according to the ideal
of theōsis. In this way, if we forgive, we shall be forgiven by God, and he will

25
As Origen remarks, “What [Scripture] said, ‘He made the human being after the image of
God,’ without adding ‘and after God’s likeness,’ points to nothing else but the following:
the human being received, to be sure, the dignity of God’s image at the moment of its irst
creation, but the perfection of God’s likeness awaits humanity only in the end. This, clearly, was
established in order for the human being to gain God’s likeness through a personal effort, by
imitating God.” “Hoc ergo quod dixit ad imaginem Dei fecit eum et de similitudine siluit, non
aliud indicat nisi quod imaginis quidem dignitatem in prima conditione percepit, similitu-
dinis vero ei perfectio in consummatione servata est: scilicet ut ipse sibi eam propriae industriae stu-
diis ex Dei imitatione conscisceret” (De Princ. 3.6.1; emphasis added and translation mine).
See also Crouzel, Théologie de l’image de Dieu chez Origène (Toulouse: Aubier-Montaigne, 1956);
Rabinowitz, “Personal and Cosmic Salvation in Origen,” Vigiliae Christianae 38 (1984):
319–29.
26
Editions by Oehler, Gregor’s Bischof’s von Nyssa Abhandlung von der Erschaffung des Menschen
und fünf Reden auf das Gebet (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1859), pp. 202–314; then Callahan,
Gregorii Nysseni Opera (hereafter GNO), 7/2.5–75 (Leiden: Brill, 1992).
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 203

forgive us much more than we forgive others, because his nature is not
limited as ours is but is a source of a hyperbolē of goods.
So, because God’s own nature is ininite, Gregory envisages an ininity
of forgiveness on the part of God, for which he uses aphesis, eleos (which
properly means “mercy”), amnēstia tōn plēmmelēmatōn (forgetting of sins),
and even megalodōrea (abundant gift) to make it clear that grace – to which
Gregory also alludes by employing kharisasthai – is an essential component
of God’s forgiveness, although the latter always requires human repent-
ance. But it is grace that ills up the gap between human merit (good deeds
and repentance) and the ininitude of God’s gifts, of the goods bestowed
by God. This belief in the ininity of God is one of the typical features of
Gregory’s thought, which he shares with Philo, as indeed much else of
his theology, anthropology, allegorical exegesis, and other studies, often
via Origen; even Philo’s usage of aphesis was known to both Origen and
Gregory.27 Indeed, Gregory had no problem in accepting even the most
criticized aspect of Origen’s apokatastasis theory; for example, Gregory
does not doubt that even the devil will be forgiven in the end and saved.
Of course, according to Nyssen (and to Origen), this will not occur with-
out the devil’s, and all other sinners’, metanoia: for, in the view of both of
them, metanoia will be attained by all, sooner or later, through a process of
instruction, puriication, and sanctiication thanks to which all will reject
evil and choose the Good (i.e., God) voluntarily.28 This very process is due
to God’s grace, which extends to all of humanity and at the end of which
evil will utterly disappear; Gregory and Origen share this conviction, which
is grounded not only in the ontological nonsubsistence of evil but also
in Paul’s revelation in 1 Corinthians 15:26 that death will eventually be
destroyed: for both understand this death not only as physical death but
also as spiritual death, which is caused by sin.

27
Philo speaks of the liberation (aphesis) of the soul from slavery (De Sacriiciis 122); the same
meaning is attested in Deterior 63, in which Philo even uses the couple aphesis kai eleutheria.
The same expression is employed in De Congressu 108, De Mutatione Nominum 228, Sacr. 122,
and in Her. 273, in which Philo explains that remission and liberation are granted by the
Godhead to the souls that pray for it. In Congr. 89 Philo refers the aphesis to the remission
of debts and the return to the original condition (see also De Specialibus legibus 2.122), a
connection that Origen and Gregory will apply to the relation between the remission of sins
and the apokatastasis. Likewise, the meaning of aphesis as liberation from slavery and death,
referring to the people of Israel in Egypt in De Vita Mosis 1.123, will be recovered by these
patristic authors in the sense of liberation from sin. Aphesis speciically refers to the remis-
sion of sins in Spec. leg. 1.190; 1.237, where it is linked, not to repentance, but to sacriices
for the remission of sins (in Legatio ad Gaium 287, aphesis bears the meaning of remission of
tributes).
28
This is especially clear in Gregory’s In Illud: Tunc et Ipse Filius, a work that shows a profound
Origenian inluence, from both the eschatological and the Christological point of view. See
Ramelli, “Origen’s Anti-subordinationism and Its Heritage in the Nicene and Cappadocian
Line,” Vigiliae Christianae 65 (2011): 21–49.
204 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

In Gregory, too, it is evident that the meditation on repentance and for-

giveness is profoundly connected with the issues of grace, soteriology, and
eschatology. At the same time, it is also clear that he did not conceive of for-
giveness without repentance – neither in interpersonal forgiveness, which is
an imitation of God’s forgiveness, nor even in the eventual restoration.

Apokatastasis and Conditional Forgiveness:

aphesis and aphiĒ mi in Origen and Nyssen
The doctrine of apokatastasis, as theorized by Gregory and Origen, surely
bears an important relation to forgiveness, as the remission of all sins is an
indispensable premise to the universal restoration. But this does not mean
that forgiveness will be unconditional. Gregory in De Anima et Reurrectione
101–4, interpreting the parable in Matthew 18:23–25 and Luke 7:41,
observes that in the other world all will have to pay the due “debt” con-
tracted by the sins they committed in this world and that they will be unable
to enjoy beatitude before they have paid it up to the very last coin. This
unequivocally shows that God’s forgiveness will not be unconditional but
also indicates that there will be a last coin and everyone’s “debt” will be
entirely repaid, and therefore canceled, sooner or later:
God’s right judgment is applied to all, and extends the time of repayment of the
debt according to its amount . . . the complete eradication of debts does not take
place through a money payment, but the debtor is handed to the torturers, until
he has paid his whole debt . . . through the necessary suffering, he will repay the debt
accumulated by means of participation in miserable things, which he had taken
upon himself during his earthly life . . . after taking off all that which is alien to him-
self (that is, sin), and getting rid of the shame deriving from debts, he can achieve
a condition of freedom and conidence. Now, freedom is assimilation to what has
no master and is endowed with absolute power, and at the beginning it was given us
by God, but subsequently it was covered and hidden by the shame of debts. Thus,
as a consequence, everything that is free will adapt to what is similar to it; but virtue
admits of no masters: therefore, everything that is free will be found in virtue, since
what is free has no master. Now, God’s nature is the source of all virtue; thus, in it
there will be those who have attained freedom from evil, so that, as the Apostle says,
God may be “all in all.”29

This passage, likewise, makes it clear that for Gregory, just as for Origen,
puriication in the next world will be commensurate with one’s sins (and for
this reason is limited), whereas eternal bliss, which is the gracious gift of God,
who is ininite, has no limit and no end. The inal presence of God as “all in
all” (1 Cor. 15:28) is the fruit of this grace. It is out of love that the divinity
draws all souls to itself, as Gregory explains especially in De Anima; Gregory
calls God’s love agapē and even erōs when he wants to highlight its intensity.

29
Edition by Ramelli, Gregorio di Nissa.
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 205

Origen uses aphesis and aphiēmi in reference to forgiveness of sins about a

hundred times in the extant Greek works, Gregory much less, even though
his work has survived in much better condition than Origen’s has. This is
also due to the fact that almost all of Origen’s surviving works, either in
Greek or in translation, are exegetical. Both Origen and Nyssen, indeed,
mostly use the vocabulary of forgiveness in an exegetical context, in refer-
ence to scripture or liturgy.
In fact, when he speaks of forgiveness, Origen is almost always citing
or commenting on a biblical passage. The expression aphesis hamartēmatōn,
“remission/forgiveness of sins,” usually occurs in the context of biblical
quotations, such as in C. Cels. 1.47.4, in which it refers to John the Baptist,
who baptized for the remission of sins.30 This expression occurs again,
for instance, in another exegetical work, in fragment 12.5 from Origen’s
commentary on John: “Grace, through the remission of sins, prevents the
punishment of sinners according to the law.” An equivalent expression is
aphesis hamartiōn in Hom. in Ier. 12.2, where Origen cites Jesus’ words on
the institution of the Eucharist.31 Aphesis anomiōn (forgiveness/remission
of iniquities) is also parallel to aphesis hamartēmatōn and aphesis hamartiōn,
and is found in Comm. in Rom. 186.12–18 and 188.2, and (from catenae)
23.1, always as a gloss of Pauline expressions. Likewise, aphesis paraptōmatōn
is the remission of transgressions, produced by Christ through his sacri-
ice, in Commentarii in Ephesios 4.9, 4.16, 4.18, 4.21 and 5.19;32 and aphesis

30
The same syntagm is used for the Baptist also in Comm. in Io. 6.26,136; 6.42.221; Hom. in
Luc. 21.128–29; fr. 84.5 in Comm. in Luc.; Schol. in Luc. PG 17.325.44; Comm. in Matt. 16.6;
the same syntagm, in reference to the Bible and in exegetical context, is found ibid. 12.4
and 16.17; De Princ. 3.1.16–17; Philoc. 1.21.15; Comm. in Cant. p. 226.31; Fr. in Eph. 23.8;
fr. 9.28 from Comm. in Io.; Martyr. 30.2, in which Origen observes that Christ’s martyrdom
has been eficacious for the whole world and has replaced the remission of sins through
animal sacriices typical of the Jewish law (30.13; cf. Comm. in Matt. 16.6 and Fr. In I Cor.
26.16, where baptism is said to remit sins); Hom. in Luc. 14, 87; De Or. 5.4, against the
Gnostic view that it is useless to pray for the remission of sins; 8.1, in which Origen recom-
mends sincerity in one’s request for forgiveness and coherence in the forgiveness of one’s
brothers; 14, where the Jewish jubilee remission of debts (commented on also in Sel. in Ps.
12.1076) is interpreted by Origen as the preiguration of that of which the Lord’s Prayer
speaks (which is commented on also in 28.5; 31.3); 28.8–9, on the apostles, to whom Jesus
gave the power to remit sins (see also Comm. in Matt. 12.14); Comm. in Rom. 23.1, in which
Origen discusses the issue of faith and works in relation to the remission of sins; ibid. 162.8,
where Origen glosses Paul’s expression paresis tōn hamartēmatōn (passing over sins) with aph-
esis hamartēmatōn (remission of sins). In Sel. in Lev. PG 12.401 aphesis means “remission” and
is a quotation from the biblical book.
31
See also Sel. in Ios. PG 12.824.4; PG 12.1412.2; 1429.6; 1512,48.
32
“Remit us our transgressions” (aphes hēmin ta paraptōmata) is in fr. 70.5 and 135.2 on John;
the variant aphes hēmin ta opheilēmata hēmōn (same meaning) is quoted in De Or. 18.2; 28.1;
28.8 with the Lucan form aphes hēmin tas hamartias hēmōn (remit us our sins). Paraptōmata
and hamartēmata (transgressions, sins) are used as synonyms depending on aphiēmi (to
remit) also in Fr. in Eph. 23.8.
206 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

parelēluthōtōn in De Or. 33.1, where it is said that for this remission one can
pray both for him- or herself and for all.
In his Commentary on John, fragment 9.21, Origen paraphrases Jesus’
words, explaining that the Savior has come “not to punish those who have
erred but to provide forgiveness [aphesin] to those who have behaved in
that way.” It is not stated that this remission will be unconditional, though.
Aphesis alone is used also in Comm. in Io. 13.60.421, in which Origen inter-
prets allegorically the Gospel episode of the resurrection of a boy, who is
liberated by Jesus “from his illness, that is, sin”; Jesus gives life again to him
“thanks to forgiveness (of sins).” It is meaningful that in the fragments from
his Commentary on 1 Corinthians 27:46, Origen recommends that one not
take the forgiveness of God, who “remits the sins” (aphiēsi ta hamartēmata),
as an excuse to behave badly. Origen is adamant that, even though all will
be saved in the end, each one will have to be puriied from his or her own
sins. Origen, indeed, also in other passages, shows a sharp concern that
the awareness of the eventual apokatastasis might induce morally imma-
ture people to sin (a concern that is not absent, but much less urgent, in
Gregory of Nyssa).33
Other expressions all derive from biblical quotations, for example, the
Isaiah passage concerning the announcement “of the forgiveness/liber-
ation to prisoners” (aikhmalōtois aphesis) read by Jesus in the synagogue
in Nazareth and which he proclaimed was being fulilled.34 A quotation
of John is in the commentary on this Gospel, 2.10.74 and 11.79: whoever
speaks against the Son of the Human Being will be forgiven (aphethēsetai
autōi), but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not have the
remission of this sin (aphesis) assured either in the present world or in
the future. The same passage is referred to in Comm. in Io. 2.11.79–80;
28.15.124–25; 19.14.88: the sin against the Holy Spirit is not remitted
either in this or in the next world, in that, according to Origen’s inter-
pretation, it must be punished, even though he did not think that such a
punishment is eternal.35

33
See my Gregorio di Nissa, irst integrative essay. The same verbal construct is found in Comm.
in Io. 5.7.1.
34
De Princ. 4.2.1; Comm. in Io. 1.10.66; Fr. in Ier. 58.3; Fragmenta in Lamentationes 2.6; Fragmenta
in Lucam fr. 102.1; Philocalia 1.8; Selecta in Psalmos PG 12.1108.34; 12.1285.1–5; 12.1497.5.
35
Another quotation of Jesus’ words, “your sins have been remitted,” is in Hom. in Ier. 16. 5.
In Comm. in Matt. 11.3, the question is of the Jewish jubilee remission; ibid. 14.5, in which
Jesus’ recommendation to forgive seventy times seven is cited (see also Schol. in Matt. PG
17.300.23 and 34–35); ibid. 14.5; 14.76; 14.6; 14.17, in which, according to the example
of the parable interpreted by Origen, forgiveness of others’ sins is recommended in order
to obtain forgiveness from God: “even of those sins which have been already forgiven
[sunkhōrēthentōn] by God, for which he has obtained the remission. There might be, how-
ever, a repayment even after the remission”; the object of Origen’s critique are those whom
in 14.13 Origen describes as “those who have obtained the remission of sins but do not, in
turn, forgive [sunkhōrountes] their brothers.”
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 207

Gregory mentions the “forgiveness/remission of sins” (aphesis hamartiōn)

through Christ’s lesh, quoting St. Paul in Adversus Apollinarium GNO III/1
154.21, 351.27, and parallel expressions elsewhere.36 He cites the Lord’s
Prayer in Contra usurarios GNO IX 203.11 to warn usurers that it is recom-
mended that they remit their debts, and of course in the previously men-
tioned De Oratione Dominica 290.26, in which the remission of debts (aphesis
tōn ophlēmatōn) is said to be a prerogative of the Lord; in 266.2 Gregory
emphasizes the notion that only God can remit sins (aphiēsi hamartias), that
the Son takes upon himself the sin of the world and eliminates it, and that
the Holy Spirit puriies the world from the contaminations of sin. Gregory
returns to this notion in 296.3 and 21, in which he observes that the human
being, although deserving punishment for originally apostatizing from the
Creator, obtains the aphesis. In 306.31 he remarks that human forgiveness
should be inspired by that of God.
The meaning of aphesis is not so much “forgiveness” as “liberation” – as
in De Anima 101–4 and, earlier, in Philo – in De Tridui Spatio GNO 9.280.11,
in which Gregory celebrates the victory of Christ over death: “The iron
gates of death have been destroyed, the bronze locks of Hades have been
broken, and the prison of death has been opened; now to prisoners there
is announced liberation [aphesis].” The meaning is both “forgiveness” and
“liberation” together in In sanctam luciferam resurrectionem Domini GNO
9.315.22, in which the resurrection is seen as the correction of the ancient
fall, which means the liberation and forgiveness of sinners (tōn hamartolōn
aphesis), who are thus set free from sins and from enslavement to sin.
That forgiveness, including God’s forgiveness, is fundamentally con-
ceived as conditional by both Origen and Nyssen is further indicated by
the widespread attestation of metanoia (repentance/conversion) in their
writings. In Origen there are more than three hundred occurrences, in
Gregory almost ifty. In In S. Pascha GNO 9.250.11, Gregory observes
that it is repentance (metanoia) that produces rectiication (diorthōsis),
and in In s. lucif. resurr. Dom. GNO 9.318.7 he remarks that it is through
metanoia that one can gain heaven, as even the wrongdoer who was cruci-
ied with Jesus was saved because he repented after a whole criminal life.
Repentance produces puriication (katharsion: In inscriptiones Psalmorum
GNO 5.89.10) and liberates from the contamination of sin (In Ecclesiastem
GNO 5.408.15); it is a medication (pharmakon) thanks to which evil cannot

36
Aphesis euthunōn (forgiveness/remission of deeds of which one must give account), in In diem
luminum GNO 9.222–23; ibid. 224.4: aphesis plēmmelēmatōn (remission of transgressions),
in reference to baptism; Homiliae in Canticum Canticorum GNO 6.24.6: aphesis paraptōmatōn
(remission of falls); Adversus eos qui baptismum differunt PG 46.429.30: aphesis enklēmatōn
(remission of charges/crimes). In Oratio funebris in Flacillam GNO 9.487.17, Gregory
observes that a complete aphesis implies the liberation from punishment (eleutherōsai tēs
timōrias): this is the same concept I have pointed out in De Anima 101–4 concerning the
complete repayment of debts (sc. sins) and liberation from enslavement to sins.
208 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

prevail.37 The strong link between repentance (and forgiveness) and life
is highlighted by Gregory in Epistula canonica 45.221.32: repentance pro-
duces the rejection of sinful deeds, the “dead works,” and puts people on
the “way of life.” Precisely because it leads to life and salvation, through the
remission of sins – as he stresses also in De Beatitudinibus PG 44.1220.49 –
Gregory can even regard repentance as a mustērion (De Vita Mosis 2.269),
thus related to the eventual restoration of all rational creatures to the
Good, which is the end and aim of the whole salviic economy. Indeed, it is
through repentance that the original condition of the human being, free
from evil, is called back (anakalesai tēi metanoiāi tēn prōtēn katastasin: Adversus
eos qui castigationes aegre ferunt: PG 46.312.30). Remarkably, this exactly cor-
responds to the apo-katastasis, that is, the restoration of the original con-
dition or katastasis of the human being, which was created in the image
of God, so that it is once more free from sins and mortality. And it passes
through conversion and forgiveness of sins.
Origen too observes that metanoia, which he also calls metanoēsis with no
signiicant difference, leads to rectiication (diorthōsis) in C. Cels. 3.62; repent-
ance is a renovation (anakainizein: Comm. in Io. 28.15.126) and is a work
of God in human souls. For “it is God’s goodness that leads you to repent-
ance” (C. Cels. 4.72; Princ. 3.1.6; 3.1.11; Comm. in Rom. cod. Athos Laura 184
B6 2.5; Philocalia 21.5; 27.10), an idea that I have already pointed out in
Clement and which will be taken over by Cassian. Repentance, in turn, leads
to salvation and to life, thanks to a repudiation of “dead deeds” (metanoia
apo nekrōn ergōn: Hom in Ier. 9.3).38 Basing himself on the Gospel description
of John the Baptist, Origen stresses the close relation between repentance
and forgiveness in Comm. in Io. 6.26.136: “repentance for the remission of
sins” (metanoia eis aphesin hamartiōn), and in Fragmenta ex Commentariis in I
Corinthios 26: “when he wants, he repents [metanoei] and obtains forgiveness
of sins [aphesin hamartēmatōn].” Likewise, he refers to Jesus’ precept to forgive
a person “all the times he sins against you, if he repents [metanoēi]” (Scholia in
Matthaeum PG 17.300.23). Repentance “covers” sins (epikaluptei: Sel. in Ps. PG
12.1544.24), that is, produces their cancellation, which is their forgiveness.
Sins are remitted. This is why, according to Jesus’ words commented on by
Origen (in De Or. 11.1 and Explanatio in Proverbios PG 17.205.30), there is a
great feast in heaven among angels for each sinner who repents. The salva-
tion effected by repentance is described by Origen in terms of a resurrection,
anastasis (Sel. in Ps. PG 12.1497.23; 1497.28), of a recovery of the image of
God (Fragmenta in Ieremiam from the Catenae fr. 14), and of a transformation
from a terrestrial to a celestial being (Sel. in Ps. PG 12.1504.34).

37
Gregory of Nyssa, GNO 5.133.19; cf. Contra Eunomium 2.1.425; De Beat. PG 44.1221.31; In
sextum Psalmum GNO 5.192.12.
38
Comm. in Io. 28.4.26; 10.17.102; De Or. 13.3; Fr. in Lam. 59; Excerpta in Psalmos PG 17.149.16;
Sel. in Ps. PG 12.1105.29.
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 209

There is no doubt that the apokatastasis, according to both Origen and

Gregory of Nyssa, will not take place without repentance and puriication.
What makes Origen and Gregory sure that the apokatastasis will be universal
is simply their certainty that all, thanks to puriication and illumination –
chiely performed by Christ-Logos, Teacher and Physician39 – will indeed
repent and convert, and will adhere to God, who is the Good, voluntarily.
Puriication and conversion will bring about the remission of sins and eter-
nal life in blessedness for all, when “not only in few or in many people, but
in all God will be all, when there will exist no more death, nor death’s sting
[sc. sin], nor evil, absolutely. Then God will truly be ‘all in all’” (Orig. Princ.
3.6.3). The apokatastasis will take place when all sins have been remitted,
which in turn will be the result of the repentance of all sinners and their
voluntary adhesion to the Good.

Gregory Nazianzen
Gregory of Nazianzus also had much sympathy for the doctrine of
apokatastasis 40 strongly supported by Gregory of Nyssa and certainly was very
well acquainted with Origen’s thought, to the point of being the editor,
together with Basil, of the Philocalia, an anthology of Origen’s works. He
even used the image of the “baptism of tears” to signify purifying repent-
ance (metanoia), as a necessary step for the attainment of forgiveness (also
called eleos, “mercy,” here by Nazianzen, under the inluence of the Old
Testament quotation concerning the Lord who wants mercy, eleos, rather
than ritual sacriice, thusia). Forgiveness, as Nazianzen argues, was granted
by the Lord, who loves humanity and is philanthrōpos, even to Peter, who
denied him thrice.41 So, even to those who have denied their faith – it is to
be noticed that apostasy was one of the three worst sins in early Christianity –
it is necessary to grant forgiveness with eleos, if they repent (Oratio 39.18, PG
36.336–60). Gregory notably bases himself not only on the New but also
on the Old Testament, by quoting the previously mentioned sentence of

39
Origen in Princ. 3.6.5 expresses his conviction that Christ-Logos, who also created all crea-
tures, will be able to heal all of them from the illness of evil: “Nothing is impossible for the
Omnipotent; no creature is incurable for the One who created it.” Incurable is aniatos, and
it seems to me that with this statement Origen is referring to Plato’s conviction that some are
too hardened in evil to be curable and to be puriied from evil; they are aniatoi, incurable,
and therefore they will never leave punishment in Tartarus. Origen thinks that there is only
one who can cure these aniatoi: Christ-Logos, who is also their creator. This is why he is able
to cure them.
40
My argument for this interpretation is set out in the section on Nazianzen in my Apokatastasis
(forthcoming).
41
On Nazianzen’s interpretation of Peter’s threefold denial, corrected by his threefold prot-
estation of love for Jesus, in the context of patristic exegesis of these two Gospel passages, see
Ramelli, “Simon Son of John, Do You Love Me? Some Relections on John 21:15,” Novum
Testamentum 50 (2008): 332–50.
210 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

God on which already Origen had insisted: “I want mercy rather than sac-
riicial offerings.” Gregory refers it directly to Jesus, “who has come for the
conversion of sinners.” The key word metanoia means both conversion and
repentance, the “change of one’s mind” or nous, for, as Paul says, being
truly Christian entails having “the nous of Christ.”
Of course, one crucial question was whether after one’s death a meta-
noia was still possible in case it had not yet taken place. Gregory of Nyssa’s
answer is undoubtedly positive and consistent with the deep continuity that
he sees between the present and the future life; Nazianzen’s answer is per-
haps less clear, in part because he does not directly treat this problem, but
many elements suggest that it is positive as well.
Nazianzen too takes over Origen’s notion of Christ as Physician, who
healed (etherapeusen) Peter’s threefold denial with his threefold request of
love in John 21. Most remarkably, Nazianzen insists above all on what is one
of the main pillars of the doctrine of apokatastasis: punishment absolutely
must not exceed the measure of sin, because in this way it would produce
only despair, not repentance and improvement. Nazianzen is clear that
forgiveness must be granted only to those who repent – and to stress this
point he uses a colorful expression, “consumed by tears” (ektakentes tois
dakrusin) – but at the same time he recommends mildness with a view to
the rectiication (diorthōsis) of sinners: if a sinner is oppressed by a pun-
ishment that is not commensurate with his sins but exceeds them (ametria
tēs epiplēxeōs), he will be “swallowed up by an excessive anguish.” Gregory
is borrowing Paul’s words, and that they were dear to him is shown by his
quoting them elsewhere (in In Eccles. GNO 5.408.11), but he is also tak-
ing up Origen’s principle that punishment must be commensurate to sin,
and thus limited; in this, God’s justice will have its expression. But after
the right and proportionate purifying punishments, we are in the realm of
God’s grace, since eternal life and bliss cannot possibly be commensurate
to anyone’s deserts, but are a gift from God, which has no limit.
The same idea was taken up, in about the same period, by Evagrius as
well, another admirer of Origen, and a disciple of the faithful Origenian
Didymus the Blind in Alexandria. For Evagrius maintained that the con-
templation of God’s justice, as expressed in the Judgment, is important,
because justice will be deinitely done, but it is not the last stage, because it
is followed by the contemplation of God’s mercy and grace (which, on the
eschatological plane, corresponds to the apokatastasis).
Nazianzen too, like Origen and Nyssen, sees punishment as remedial
and therapeutic (which eternal punishment could never possibly be), as a
way to improve each one and to render each worthy of forgiveness. For in
punishment, he says, the philanthrōpon must prevail – and the Lord is pre-
cisely philanthrōpos. His relection on forgiveness further points to an intim-
ate link between it and the issues of grace and salvation. At the same time,
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 211

it also reveals that for him forgiveness depends on the sinner’s sincere and
thorough repentance.

John Chrysostom on Interpersonal Forgiveness

and God’s Forgiveness
John Chrysostom was not endowed with the philosophical skills of Origen
or Augustine, but his views are worth considering, at least briely, on account
of his large impact. Moreover, he was very learned and his relation to the
Origen tradition seems to be closer than previously supposed. For instance,
together with Olympia, deacon of the Constantinople church, he chose to
help the so-called Tall Brothers, Origenian monks chased by Theophilus of
Alexandria from Egypt, since he was well aware that they were not heretics
at all, and for this reason he underwent an exile that led to his death. But
also many features of Chrysostom’s thought and exegesis reveal an adher-
ence to the Origenian tradition; moreover, he was a disciple of Diodore of
Tarsus, who criticized biblical allegoresis (the allegorical interpretation of
scripture) but embraced Origen’s doctrine of apokatastasis.42
One of the most prominent conceptions that John drew from Origen
is that of Christ as Physician, which in turn was already well developed
in Clement. John states that, even if one has reached the extreme limit
of evil, the Physician will open up many ways of forgiveness and salva-
tion. In Chrysostom there is even more emphasis than in Origen and the
Cappadocians on the aspect of a sinner’s metanoia as a basis for God’s for-
giveness. Especially in his Homilies on the First Letter to the Corinthians
(PG 61.194–96) he insists that repentance and good deeds are the steps
that sinners must take in order to obtain forgiveness. He observes that all
humans are sinners (“all of us, so to say, have fallen down and are lying
down on the ground”), but for each one it is possible “to stand up again,”
that is, to obtain the remission of one’s sins: “So, my exhortation is not to
avoid falling down, but rather, I say to those who are lying down that they
can stand up again [anastēnai].” Notably, this is the same verb, anistēmi, that
denotes the resurrection, anastasis, and John did not use it by chance but
chose it on purpose. For the remission of sins is the spiritual component
of the resurrection. According to a holistic view of the resurrection typ-
ical of Origen and Nyssen and also shared by their followers,43 the physical

42
See my Apokatastasis, sections devoted to Diodore and to Chrysostom.
43
Origen did admit the resurrection of the body, but he also took this resurrection in a spir-
itual sense, as is clear especially from his Commentary on the Psalms, in a passage that can
be reconstructed thanks to Methodius, De Resurrectione 1.12–16, 20–24, and Epiphanius,
Panarium 64.10–12. Here, he interprets the resurrection, as prophesied in Ez 37, in a spirit-
ual way (just as he does also in Comm. in Io. 28.7.54): not a resurrection of bones, skin, and
nerves, as it would be on the literal level, but a resurrection from the death caused by sin,
212 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

component of the resurrection is the liberation from physical death, but

its spiritual component is the liberation from evil and the restoration of
the soul to the Good. It is against this backdrop that Chrysostom’s lexical
choice becomes meaningful.
He also exhorts his hearers “to help one another to stand up” and hum-
bly includes himself – as Origen also had done – among those who have
fallen and are ill with sin. He uses the metaphor of being wounded in order
to introduce the motif, dear to him too, of Christ as Physician: those who are
sick with evil “need the Physician who applies medications.” Like Origen,
John too is convinced that Christ can heal where human physicians (of
bodies and souls) cannot: “Do not despair: for even though your wounds
are dificult to be healed, they are not incurable [ouk aniatoi]. Our Physician
[iatros] can: so skilled is he,” which echoes Origen’s previously quoted claim
that “no being is incurable for the One who has created it.” In turn, Origen
was “correcting” Plato’s view that some souls become so corrupt and sinful
as to be incurable (aniatoi) and will never attain puriication.
What is necessary is only to be “aware of one’s wounds,” that is, of one’s
sins, which is the premise of repentance (metanoia) and forgiveness. If one
repents, and as a consequence begins to do the good rather than the evil,
there is no sin that cannot be remitted, however serious:
Even if we should reach the deepest point of evil [to eskhaton tēs kakias], he creates many
ways of salvation [sōtērias] for us. Indeed, if you give up your anger toward your
neighbors and forgive them, your transgressions will be forgiven to you [aphethēsetai
soi plēmmelēmata]. For if you forgive [aphēte] your fellow human beings, your heavenly
Father also will forgive [aphēsetai] you. And if you give alms, he will forgive you your
sins [sungkhōrēsei soi ta hamartēmata]. In fact, he says: Wash away your iniquities in
alms. Also, if you pray with zeal, you will enjoy the remission [aphesis]. This is what
is shown by the widow who managed to convince that harsh judge by way of insist-
ing continually. And if you condemn your sins yourself, you will be comforted; be
the irst to confess your sins, so as to be justiied [dikaiōthēis]. And if you suffer for
these sins, this too will be an enormously effective medicine [pharmakon megiston]
for you. . . . And if you suffered anything bad, but tolerated it nobly, you have complete
remission, for Abraham too told the rich: Lazarus sustained his sufferings, and is now
comforted here. And if you pity [eleēsēis] a widow, your sins are washed away [plunetai
sou ta hamartēmata]. For the Lord says: Do render justice to the orphan, and give

the death that hands us to our enemies, the powers of evil, because of our sins. This is why
Jesus calls the sinners “sepulchers” in Matthew 23:27; now, Origen says, “it becomes God to
open the sepulcher of each of us, and bring us out, alive again, just as the Saviour brought
out Lazarus.” This is clearly the spiritual resurrection, the liberation from sin, salvation. In
Origen’s view the two interpretations of death and resurrection, bodily and spiritual, do not
exclude one another at all. Also in his exegesis of the Bible, both the literal and the spirit-
ual senses remain and coexist, with no reciprocal exclusion, and this constitutes one of the
main differences between Origen’s hermeneutical method applied to scripture and pagan
exegesis applied to myths, which tended to annihilate the literal meaning. See also Ramelli,
“Origen’s Exegesis of Jeremiah.”
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 213

what is right to the widow, and then come here and let us discuss: and even if your
sins [hamartiai] were scarlet, I shall make them snow white. Even if they were like
purple, I shall render them as white as wool.44

The irst of the good deeds that Chrysostom recommends is interpersonal

forgiveness, which is directly related to God’s own forgiveness, as already
noted in the Lord’s Prayer, and another is contrition in repentance itself.
All other good deeds follow: almsgiving, justice, pity, patience, and so on.
Chrysostom insists, here and in many other passages of his abundant and
mostly homiletic work, that repentance and adequate expressions of it
bring about remission of sins and, indeed, salvation and the liberation from
the eternal death of hell.45 It is also clear that, in his view, repentance is a
conditio sine qua non for forgiveness; as he puts it, one has to acknowledge
one’s wounds in order to be healed.

A Comparative Look at Augustine

In disagreement with Origen, who believed and argued that God will apply
both justice and grace to all in the end, Augustine was convinced – at least
in his mature thought, since there are traces of his own early adherence
to the doctrine of apokatastasis, later rejected by him46 – that God will
apply justice to some and grace to others. The latter are those predestined
from the beginning to enjoy grace and be saved from the massa damna-
tionis, a doctrine that was attacked soon thereafter, no doubt also on the
basis of some misunderstandings of Augustine’s thought, and was accused
of reintroducing predestination, which Origen had strenuously fought in
Gnosticism.47 Indeed, Augustine thought that, for some, divine forgiveness
would be ruled out forever, essentially because he was persuaded – unlike
Clement, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa – that after death these people

44
The scriptural quotation is Isa 1:16–20, abundantly quoted by patristic authors, beginning
with Clement of Rome (Ad Corinthios 8) and Justin (Apologia I 61.6–7). The quotation is
from the same homily; the emphasis is added.
45
The speciic example of almsgiving is studied by Marotta, “Eleemosyna a morte liberat (Tob
12:9). Sul valore salviico dell’elemosina,” in Pagani e Cristiani alla ricerca della salvezza: Atti del
XXXIV Incontro di Studiosi dell’Antichità Cristiana, Roma, Augustinianum, Maggio 2005 (Rome:
Augustinianum Press, 2006), pp. 817–27.
46
For substantiation of this claim, see Ramelli, “The Theory of Apokatastasis in Some Late
Platonists, Pagan and Christian (Martianus, Macrobius, Nyssen, and the Young Augustine),”
lecture delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2009, published as
“The Debate on Apokatastasis in Pagan and Christian Platonists (Martianus, Macrobius,
Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine),” Illinois Classical Studies 31 (2006): 197–230.
An example of the young Augustine’s dependence on Origen, although unrelated to the
doctrine of apokatastasis, was offered by the groundbreaking note of Teske, “Origen and
Saint Augustine’s First Commentaries on Genesis,” in Origeniana Quinta, ed. Daly (Leuven:
Peeters, 1992), pp. 179–86.
47
Documentation will be found in Ramelli, Apokatastasis, chap. 2.
214 Ilaria L. E. Ramelli

would have no more chance to repent and thereby gain both forgiveness
and remission of sins.
Nevertheless, he offered sublime relections on forgiveness, even given
his skepticism about the extent to which forgiveness is relevant. While com-
menting on John 13:10–15, he inserts a meditation on the Lord’s Prayer,
on the same words that were already commented on by Origen and Nyssen:
“forgive [dimitte] us our debts [debita], as we also forgive our debtors.” He
links this to the exhortation to forgive one another just as Jesus forgave;
indeed, he allegorically interprets the exhortation to wash one another’s feet
as the recommendation to forgive one another and pray for one another.
For what we remit on earth will be remitted in heaven as well. Christ is pre-
sented by Augustine as intercessor and forgiver, both here in his Homily 58
on the Gospel of John and elsewhere; however, this intercession, based on
Christ’s sacriice, according to Augustine is effective only for some.48
At stake was the scope of divine grace and indeed a whole theodicy.
Once Origen’s theodicy was rejected, only two alternatives remained: that
of Pelagius, who did not admit of grace just as he did not admit of the
notion of an original sin; and that of Augustine, who retained grace as cru-
cial to salvation, as Origen did, but reserved it only for some, according to
God’s inscrutable election (which sounded to some like a new predestina-
tionism). Augustine too, like Origen, heavily relied on Paul’s Epistle to the
Romans but with a different understanding of the width of divine grace.
This was surely inluenced also by Augustine’s polemics against Pelagianism.
Indeed, it is no accident that Augustine began to criticize Origen’s doctrine
of apokatastasis overtly – or at least what he thought was Origen’s position,
as he was informed by Horosius and Jerome in quite an imprecise manner
about it – just after his hostilities against Pelagianism had begun.49 As for
the conditions of forgiveness, it is clear that Augustine too deemed repent-
ance indispensable for forgiveness, to the point that he thought that sin-
ners who have not repented in this life will not be forgiven in the other,
precisely because in the other world, according to him, it will be impossible
to repent.

Conclusion
From the present investigation, including a close lexicographical analysis, it
emerges that all the patristic philosophers I have analyzed deem forgiveness
to be conditional and, in particular, to depend on the offender’s repentance.

48
Origen, on the contrary, supported the universality of the salviic effectiveness of Jesus’ sac-
riice, as I point out in “The Universal and Eternal Validity of Jesus’s High-Priestly Sacriice:
The Epistle to the Hebrews in Support of Origen’s Theory of Apokatastasis,” in A Cloud of
Witnesses: The Theology of Hebrews in Its Ancient Contexts, ed. Bauckham et al. (London: T&T
Clark, 2008), pp. 210–21.
49
As I have argued in “The Theory of Apokatastasis.”
 Forgiveness in Patristic Philosophy 215

Although they are also interested in interpersonal forgiveness – especially

Clement, Origen, Chrysostom, and Augustine, as I have pointed out – their
principal focus is on God’s forgiveness, and here the issue of forgiveness
becomes closely intertwined with that of divine grace. For, as Origen and
Nyssen put it, while punishments – or, better, puriications – will be exactly
commensurate with each one’s sins, eternal blessedness cannot possibly
be commensurate with each one’s merits but is a gift of grace. This, how-
ever, does not mean that divine forgiveness is regarded by these thinkers
as unconditional; for even those patristic philosophers who believed in the
eventual universal apokatastasis considered it to be not a sort of general
amnesty independent of each sinner’s repentance and moral improvement
but as the result of each one’s repentance, puriication, moral and spiritual
progress, instruction, illumination, and voluntary adherence to the Good.
Clement, Origen, Nyssen, and Nazianzen tended to think that this con-
version and spiritual development can take place also after one’s death,
since rational creatures are never deprived of their reason and free will,
and since God’s providence is always active everywhere (even in hell, as
Clement stated) – hence, their adherence to the theory of apokatastasis. At
least in his old age, Augustine did not believe that repentance and spiritual
development are possible after one’s death and, moreover, was convinced
that God’s grace – which he too, like Origen, conceived as indispensable
for salvation – is not for all but only for some, foreknown by God from eter-
nity. Only some will enjoy God’s grace; the others will experience God’s
justice – hence Augustine’s belief in the eternity of hell. Soteriology and
eschatology thus prove to be closely related to these patristic philosophers’
relections on forgiveness. That theme is prominent in their thought, to the
point that Clement made of forgiveness one of the main characteristics of
the “gnostic,” the perfect Christian. Indeed, all of these patristic thinkers
regarded it as a major trait of the divinity itself.
 12

Forgiveness and Perfection

Maimonides, Aquinas, and Medieval
Departures from Aristotle

Jonathan Jacobs

Maimonides and Aquinas employ extensive resources from Aristotle in

their moral thought. Like Aristotle, they present perfectionist accounts
of human nature and consider the virtues to be fundamental to moral
life. They too regard intellectual activity as central to human perfection.
And yet there are fundamental differences between Aristotle, on the
one hand, and Maimonides and Aquinas on the other, and additional
important differences between Maimonides and Aquinas. The differences
made by Jewish and Christian theistic commitments show that neither
Maimonides nor Aquinas should be described as “basically Aristotelian,
with some religiously based modiications.” The present discussion brings
into relief some differences between their views and Aristotle’s, with the
aim of explicating their understandings of the nature, signiicance, and
role of forgiveness. Topically, the discussion could, of course, be extended
to include the Islamic tradition as well, but here our attention is conined
to the Jewish and Christian traditions, examined through the thought of a
key igure in each.

I
Some issues of moral psychology crucially important for Jewish and Christian
thinkers did not arise for Aristotle or did not arise with the same signii-
cance. They include gratitude, repentance, and forgiveness. Each is related
to God’s graciousness, that is, God’s offer of help to human beings by means
of revelation and, in the Christian tradition, the offer of salvation through

I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation for a generous grant supporting my work on this
and other projects while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish
Studies in 2008. Also, Colgate University’s Research Council was very supportive. And I would
like to thank Charles Griswold and David Konstan for the opportunity to contribute to this vol-
ume and for their many helpful suggestions and critical comments.

216
 Forgiveness and Perfection 217

Christ. In Aristotle’s conception of an excellent and happy life there really

is not a correlate to a wise, just, and merciful God whose providence governs
the created order. In that respect the irst cause in the Jewish and Christian
faith traditions is radically different from Aristotle’s. Aristotle writes:
The person whose activity accords with understanding and who takes care of under-
standing would seem to be in the best condition, and most loved by the gods. For
if the gods pay some attention to human beings, as they seem to, it would be rea-
sonable for them to take pleasure in what is best and most akin to them, namely
understanding; and reasonable for them to beneit in return those who most of all
like and honor understanding.1

However, the religious view relevant here is that a just and merciful God
not only created the world but also offers help to human beings. Revelation
offers guidance without which we would go astray and fail of perfection.
It is part of God’s providential governance to offer help graciously to
human beings in a manner, and for an end, differing from what is found in
Aristotle’s conception of how the gods might inluence human happiness.
In the Christian tradition this need for divine assistance is heightened by
the fact that human nature is fallen, wounded in a way such that it can-
not heal itself. Also, in the religious view there is a place for imitatio Dei
(imitation of God) in the conception of perfection in a manner not found
in Aristotle’s view, and it is relevant to understanding forgiveness.
For Aristotle, in acting and living well or badly we are not answering
to God and are not being judged by God. Aristotle held that there is a
divine element in us and that we should strive to be as godlike as we can.
However, even the most perfective activity of a human being does not bring
the individual to a loving cognition of a irst cause that is also a just and
merciful creator and redeemer. In addition, for Aristotle we should say that
the vicious agent does a poor job of being a human being, but judgment of
that life ends there, so to speak. There is no counterpart to the Jewish and
Christian conceptions of how we stand before God, of being judged on the
basis of how we have lived our lives. God as both judge and ideal has a very
different role in the faith traditions.
It is signiicant that, because of revelation, in Judaism and Christianity
what is morally required is accessible to an agent, even if that agent has a
corrupt character. Even the very bad person can know what is required.
In Aristotle’s conception of the vicious agent, that person’s character has
become ixed in bad habits, wrong values, and a disigured sensibility. All of
that can render the person unable to attain a correct grasp of ethical con-
siderations. The plasticity of his character may be substantially exhausted,
and his judgment and dispositions irremediably corrupted, so that he

1
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd ed., trans. Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 1179a23–29.
All of my quotations from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are from this edition.
218 Jonathan Jacobs

cannot bring himself to act rightly. Even if he somehow manages to achieve

a correct ethical awareness, his second nature may be an impediment to
changing his character and acquiring virtuous dispositions. Some very bad
people may be conined to painful regret of their vices, unable to overcome
them. There may be no “better self” the vicious agent can come to exhibit.
His second nature is ixed.
There are other agents who do not even acknowledge their vices. Some
vicious agents may be strongly committed to their (wrong) values and ind
it gratifying to act on them, though the pleasure they take in doing so indi-
cates a corrupt character. Vicious agents who do attain some sense of the
wrongness of their values and their defects of character will ind it painful
to be the sorts of persons they are. Either way, the agent with vices leads a
life that cannot be a happy life. Aristotle writes:
Besides, vicious people seek others to pass their days with, and shun themselves.
For when they are by themselves they remember many disagreeable actions, and
anticipate others in the future; but they manage to forget these in other people’s
company. These people have nothing lovable about them, and so have no friendly
feelings for themselves.2

The awareness of bad character and the regret one feels for bad acts will
make happiness impossible for such an agent when there is acknowledg-
ment of one’s vices.
For both Maimonides and Aquinas, an agent’s resources for ethical
judgment are not similarly limited by one’s acquired second nature. For
Maimonides, the Torah (including Written and Oral Law) supplies guid-
ance accessible to even the corrupt agent. In addition, Maimonides argues
that agents possess the volitional capacity to reorient themselves ethically.
The agent with vices can act virtuously, and the virtuous agent is still capable
of vice or sin. Maimonides writes that “whoever is bad is so by his own choice.
If he wishes to be virtuous, he can be so; there is nothing preventing him.
Similarly, if any virtuous man wishes to, he can be bad; there is nothing
preventing him.”3 One’s virtue is never altogether proof against acquiring
vices, and one’s vices are not insurmountable obstacles to acquiring virtues.
Aquinas’s explanation of these possibilities is different, but they are pos-
sibilities in his view also. There is guidance for a rightly lived Christian
life, and there are sacraments by which grace is conveyed. Thus, a person

2
Nicomachean Ethics, 1166b15–19. My focus on Aristotle is not a basis for generalizing about
the moral psychological theories of the ancient Greeks. Stoics and Epicureans, for instance,
held views quite different from Aristotle’s, and there are some interesting afinities between
the Stoic sage and the Maimonidean pious man. However, it is fair to say that creation, reve-
lation, and redemption do mark crucial differences between the Abrahamic faith traditions
and ancient Greek thought.
3
Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” in Ethical Writings of Maimonides, trans. Weiss and Butterworth
(New York: Dover, 1983), p. 89.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 219

need not be wholly lost, without direction toward the good. Ultimately,
through one’s own effort of will with the assistance of grace, one can “turn”
toward virtue, and redemption is possible. Perfection – which in the faith
tradition involves a redemptive dimension – is not out of even a very bad
person’s reach. This is because revelation supplies the needed guidance,
and the will is held to be capable of responding to correct guidance, des-
pite the agent’s vicious disposition. The will does not become fully ixed in
unchangeable dispositions.
Maimonides thought that in order for the Law not to be futile, human
beings must be able to follow it even when their characters dispose them in
ways contrary to its requirements. The “ought” of the Law must be matched
with a “can” of agency. God’s justice necessitates this. Because the Law is
accessible – it has been revealed and has been taught, elaborated, expli-
cated, and passed down by tradition – no one need become thoroughly
and irretrievably alienated from what is morally required. God is gracious
in making the gift of the Law, but it is our task to study it, to know it, and
to live in accordance with that understanding. The Law would be pointless
unless it is possible for us – whatever the particular state of one’s character –
to do what it requires. “Even if a man was wicked all the days of his life and
repented at the end, nothing of his wickedness is recalled to him, as it is
said ‘And as for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not stumble thereby
in the day that he turns from his wickedness’ (Ezek. 33:12).”4 There is a key
difference between Aristotle and the faith traditions regarding the connec-
tion between moral epistemology and the volitional capacities of agents.
We should note, however, that Maimonides held that there were some
wrongs so awful that the punishment for them is denial of the possibility of
repentance. This is how Maimonides interprets the issue of the hardening
of Pharaoh’s heart (a problematic case that is nearly a ixture of medieval
Jewish thought about free will and moral responsibility). God prevented
Pharaoh from repenting his ill-treatment of the Hebrews and then pun-
ished Pharaoh the more severely because of his continued ill-treatment of
them. Maimonides denied that preventing Pharaoh from repenting was
unjust because “repentance shall be withheld from him and liberty to turn
from his wickedness shall not be accorded him, so that he may die and
perish in the sins which he committed.”5 This is because of the depth of
Pharaoh’s sin, aggravated by his stubborn refusal to let the Hebrews go even
after agreeing to do so. This is an example of those rare cases in which “God
withheld repentance from those who multiplied their transgressions,”6
because of the gravity of the wrong.

4
Maimonides, “Laws of Repentance,” in Mishneh Torah: The Book of Knowledge, trans. Hyamson
( Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1981), p. 82a.
5
Ibid., p. 88a.
6
Ibid., p. 88b.
220 Jonathan Jacobs

To sum up, God did not decree that Pharaoh should ill-treat Israel, or Sihon sin in
his land, or that the Canaanites should commit abominations, or that Israel should
worship idols. All of them sinned by their own volition; and all accordingly incurred
the penalty that repentance should be withheld from them.7

Perhaps the abolition of free will, and thus the elimination of the possi-
bility of repentance, is the most severe punishment for the most grievous
wrongs. What could be a worse punishment than shutting out the agent’s
attempt at ethical self-correction? Here we will not assess the plausibility of
Maimonides’ handling of the issue and its relation to the question of free
will. (His view is similar in important respects to Saadia Gaon’s discussion
two centuries earlier in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions.) The issue is men-
tioned only to highlight the importance of free will to his moral psychology
and to indicate that only extremes of sin could justify disabling someone
for repentance and for being forgiven. In his view, it seems that there are
at least some unforgivable wrongs, but they are unforgivable because the
repentance of some vicious agents is not genuine. There are some agents
whose repentance is ineficacious because the agents’ corruption renders it
inauthentic. Pharaoh’s case may include that aspect as well as his sin being
especially serious.
For Aquinas, too, free will is crucial. The turning of the will involves
freedom of the will, though grace is also required. He writes, “Man’s turn-
ing to God is by free-will; and thus man is bidden to turn himself to God.
But free-will can only be turned to God, when God turns it, according to
Jeremiah 31:18: ‘Convert me and I shall be converted, for Thou art the
Lord, my God’; and Lamentations 5:21: ‘Convert us, O Lord, to Thee, and
we shall be converted.’ ”8 In the same text he also said, “It is the part of man
to prepare his soul, since he does this by his free-will. And yet he does not
do this without the help of God moving him, and drawing him to Himself,
as was said above.”9 These are elements of the conception of free will in the
religious traditions that are not found in Aristotle’s conception of voluntari-
ness and rational self-determination.
Aquinas held that, in the damned, the agent’s deliberate will is always
evil, while the natural will in them can still be good, for it is the will given
by God. “But their deliberate will is theirs of themselves, inasmuch as it is
in their power to be inclined by their affections to this or that.”10 It is always
evil in the damned, “because they are completely turned away from the
last end of a right will, nor can a will be good except it be directed to that

7
Ibid.
8
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 109, art. 6. This, and the following quotations from
Aquinas are from Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province,
Online Edition, copyright by Kevin Knight (2008) (hereafter ST). Available at www.
newadvent.org/summa.
9
Aquinas, ST, q. 109, art. 6, reply obj. 4.
10
Aquinas, ST, supplement to III q. 98, reply obj. 4.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 221

same end.”11 Aquinas’s philosophical theology makes room for incorrigible

vice, but the incorrigibility is explicated on the basis of agents having been
(justly) damned. Before that judgment, they were able to be contrite, repent-
ant, and recipients of grace. As with Maimonides, the agent’s exercise of will has
a fundamental role in the intersection of sin, repentance, and forgiveness.
Given the metaphysical, ethical, and redemptive signiicance of grace
in both Judaism and Christianity, there is a role for gratitude not found in
Aristotle. There is no counterpart in his thought for the gratitude for God’s
creating the world and for God’s redemptive providence, so pronounced
in the theistic traditions. Aristotle discusses gratitude in Nicomachean Ethics
and Rhetoric, and he was alert to its signiicance in the social world and in
political culture (see, e.g., NE, 1133a 4–5, 1164b 26–33, and Rhet., book II,
chap. 7). But his view does not include the faith traditions’ powerful sense
of metaphysical dependence upon God for the very being of things and
gratitude for God’s redemptive graciousness. For the Jew and the Christian,
gratitude is much more than a feeling, even a feeling based on good reasons.
It is a fundamental orientation to God. In Christianity, God’s grace extends
not only to the Incarnation and Christ’s Passion but also to the possibility
of turning the will so that we love God properly and are saved. In Judaism,
according to Maimonides, God will protect and preserve the people Israel,
ending its oppression and creating conditions in which it (and the peoples
of the world) will live in peace and will be close to God. Gratitude can be a
deep, abiding aspect of our nature and its relation to God. Again, that God
is a wise, merciful, providential irst cause, with an intentional relation to
the created order, makes a deep and pervasive difference concerning how
we are to regard and engage with reality.

II
Gratitude has a metaphysical basis, and there is a metaphysical dimen-
sion to forgiveness, as well. We need God’s forgiveness because we nearly
always fall short of what is required of us – “to do justice, to love mercy, and
to walk humbly with thy God” (Micha 6:8). Judaism does not include the
notion of fallenness, so basic to Christianity, but it does include the notion
that we cannot attain our highest end unaided. In Maimonides’ interpret-
ation, Adam and Eve erred in the Garden, inasmuch as they allowed them-
selves to become distracted from knowledge of God as suficient for their
perfection.12 In Aquinas’s view, the irst people fell in a way that destroyed

11
Aquinas, ST, q. 98, art. 1.
12
Judaism shares with Christianity the Genesis story of the Garden, but it does not interpret
it in the same way, as a basis for understanding human nature as profoundly wounded or
depraved. Judaism regards human beings as lawed and as needing divine aid. But it does
not share with Christianity the notion of original sin.
222 Jonathan Jacobs

the integrity of human nature. Maimonides and Aquinas – each in agree-

ment with religious orthodoxy on this matter – regard pride as a sin. Pride
relects distraction from God’s majesty and graciousness and a distorted
valuation of the self. In that respect, it is fair to characterize pride as a kind
of idolatry of the self.13 Or, it can be idolatry of whatever it is human beings
wrongly take to be normatively authoritative.
On this matter there is a sharp difference between Aristotle on the one
hand and Maimonides and Aquinas on the other. Moses, a paradigmatic
example of a virtuous man for Maimonides, is described in the Bible as very
humble. He was not humble in many of the ways in which we might (at least
initially) think of a person as humble. He was a great leader, courageous,
and exhibited extraordinary fortitude, contending with diverse and formid-
able challenges. But he was humble in the most relevant respects, which
chiely include regard for God with obedient awe and devotion. (But also
with understanding: his was not blind, thoughtless, or mechanical obedi-
ence. For Maimonides, Moses’ unique stature as a prophet is explained by
his having knowledge of God of unmatched depth.)14
In his discussion of the role of the mean in “Laws Concerning Character
Traits,” Maimonides writes:
In the case of some character traits, a man is forbidden to accustom himself to the
mean. Rather, he shall move to the other [i.e., far] extreme. One such [character
trait] is a haughty heart, for the good way is not that a man be merely humble, but
that he have a lowly spirit, that his spirit be very submissive. Therefore it was said of
Moses our master that he was “very humble,” and not merely humble. And there-
fore the wise men commanded: “Have a very, very, lowly spirit.” Moreover they said
that everyone who makes his heart haughty denies the existence of God.15

13
Bahya ibn Pakuda’s The Book of Direction to Duties of the Heart, trans. Mansoor (Oxford:
Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), contains an extensive, detailed discussion
of the ways in which our own intellects can mislead and ethically misguide us through
a diversity of strategies of rationalization, self-deception, and sophistical reasoning. He
often interprets inclinations as specious reasons rather than interpreting them as desires
or passions in contrast with reasons. Pakuda’s book is an important work of spiritualized
intellectualism. It includes a particularly inluential conception of repentance and its
signiicance.
14
See Deut. 4:6. It is one of the key passages highlighting the fact that study of Torah will be
the wisdom of the Jewish people, something that will be evident to other nations. Even
nonrationalistic Jewish thinkers often stress the role of the intellect, study, and wisdom in
a well-led Jewish life. That we are to strive to attain wisdom through study of the Law is
a central element of Judaism. It was emphasized in a pronounced way by those medieval
Jewish philosophers who developed a rationalistic current of thought. Saadia Gaon, Moses
Maimonides, and Bahya ibn Pakuda are signiicant contributors to this view of the import-
ance of relective understanding.
15
Maimonides, “Laws Concerning Character Traits,” in Ethical Writings of Maimonides, trans.
Weiss and Butterworth, pp. 31–32.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 223

The core of humility is humility before God, which in turn, shapes our atti-
tudes toward worldly things, such as the honor bestowed by others and the
way we see ourselves in relation to others. As David Shatz has written,
For Aristotle pride is “the crown of the virtues” (he refers here to moral as opposed
to intellectual virtues) and the “prize” for (moral) virtue. According to Daniel
Frank, the fact that Maimonides demands not merely humility but extreme humil-
ity relects his belief that “to take an interest in worldly honor is to forget God,
to live as if God did not exist. It is to place the mundane above the divine.” As
Maimonides states in the name of the rabbis, “whoever is haughty is as if he denies
God.” So whereas Aristotle values honor, Maimonides, with his theocentric per-
spective, disdains it.16

Maimonides’ view of anger follows similar lines. For Aristotle, “The person
who is angry at the right things and toward the right people, and also in the
right way, at the right time, and for the right length of time, is praised.”17
Daniel Frank writes of Aristotle’s view:
The good-tempered man, appropriately angered by an insult and reacting to it in
like manner, has a view of the self (of himself) rich enough to “notice” a slur upon
his character. He has a sense of himself as one worthy of admiration, of the honor
and esteem of others. Consequently, he is angered, on such occasions when he is
angered, at personal insults, displays of disrespect toward him (or even his close
associates).18

Frank goes on: “But for Maimonides, it is precisely this lack of feeling
which is praiseworthy. For Maimonides, the virtuous, inirascible man
feels no anger; the emotion has been extirpated, and when the iniras-
cible man acts angrily, he does so on the basis of no correlative feelings.”19
He is “imitating God’s lack of feeling of anger on such occasions when
He is angry.”20 Thus, in Maimonides’ view, “such anger as ought to be
manifested is a total dissimulation, displayed for the sake of arousing
fear and not a manifestation of an inner feeling of anger.”21 To feel anger
genuinely would be a way of being overcome by a passion and distracted
from what is involved in walking in God’s ways. The show of anger may
be ethically appropriate but the virtuous agent will be as little susceptible
to emotion as possible.

16
Shatz, “Maimonides’ Moral Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, ed. Seeskin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 175.
17
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1125b31–33.
18
Frank, “Anger as a Vice: A Maimonidean Critique of Aristotle’s Ethics,” History of Philosophy
Quarterly 7 (1990), p. 272.
19
Ibid., p. 275.
20
Ibid., p. 276.
21
Ibid.
224 Jonathan Jacobs

With regard to anger (as with pride) a person should not “accustom
himself to the mean.”22 This is because
anger is an extremely bad character trait, and it is proper for a man to move away
from it to the other extreme and to teach himself not to become angry, even over
something it is proper to be angry about. . . .The wise men of old said: “Anyone who
is angry – it is as if he worships idols.” They said about anyone who is angry: If he
is a wise Man, his wisdom departs from him, and if he is a prophet, his prophecy
departs from him.23

The virtuous agent rebukes and punishes but without feeling anger. He will
feel no vengeful desire to wound the offender. Moreover, the virtuous per-
son will not be wounded by others’ contempt or by being treated in degrad-
ing ways. His self-control will keep him from bitter or lasting resentment.
Given Maimonides’ negative theology, we know God through his actions,
through our knowledge of important features of the created order and
revelation. Accordingly, in our attempts to imitate God we are to engage in
actions that are informed by the aspiration to imitate God’s loving-kindness
and justice. The attempt requires more than exclusively contemplative activ-
ity. “One achieves holiness, not by becoming like God (hardly a possibility
for any creature), but by imitating God’s attributes of action; by acting, as
it were, like God.”24 Forgiveness is the human act that imitates God’s mercy
and graciousness. Forgiveness restores relations between people, is a check
against developing a disposition of resentment and vengeance, and in being
a check against that, it serves the aspiration to attain intellectual perfection
by composing the soul rather than aggravating disorderly passions.
In the Jewish tradition, offering and seeking forgiveness relect humil-
ity and control of anger. Louis Newman has said that “the granting of for-
giveness may be viewed as an extension of humility, another moral virtue
often praised by the rabbis.”25 Unlike the Aristotelian virtuous agent, the
Maimonidean virtuous agent will be very much alive to forgiveness. For
him, the susceptibility to lapses and errors at the basis of the need for
forgiveness is never eliminated and, while being above feeling slighted or
dishonored, this person will be willing to forgive those who show disres-
pect toward him. Also, a virtuous person will recognize the importance of
rebuke, forgiveness, and repentance for the sake of well-ordered relations
and for the sake of striving toward perfection. Maimonides writes, “The
Torah was particularly concerned only about animosity,” in the context
of remarking that if “the sinner is exceedingly simple or his mind is dis-
traught – and if he [the person wronged] forgives him in his heart and

22
Maimonides, “Laws Concerning Character Traits,” p. 31.
23
Ibid., p. 32.
24
Kellner, “Spiritual Life,” in Seeskin, The Cambridge Companion to Maimonides, p. 287.
25
Newman, “The Quality of Mercy: On the Duty to Forgive in the Judaic Tradition,” in Past
Imperatives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 89.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 225

bears no animosity toward him and does not rebuke him, this is indeed
the measure of piety.”26
In the Thomistic view, all human beings are alike in needing supernat-
ural help in order to overcome their fallenness. All human beings should
have a sense of their need for God’s mercy and of the sinfulness of pride.
This awareness is relected in the appropriateness of humility and the need
for forgiveness. Aquinas writes:
Hence, as regards man, who has God above him, charity which unites him to God is
greater than mercy, whereby he supplies the defects of his neighbor. But of all the
virtues which relate to our neighbor, mercy is the greatest, even as its act surpasses
all others, since it belongs to one who is higher and better to supply the defect of
another, in so far as the latter is deicient. . . . Consequently meekness, in so far as
it restrains the onslaught of anger, concurs with clemency towards the same effect;
yet they differ from one another, inasmuch as clemency moderates external pun-
ishment, while meekness properly mitigates the passion of anger. . . . Meekness and
clemency make us acceptable to God and men, in so far as they concur with charity,
the greatest of the virtues, towards the same effect, namely the mitigation of our
neighbor’s evils.27

The differences between this and Maimonides’ view are explained in

large part by the Christian/Thomistic account of the sinfulness of pride as
grounded in the conception of man as wounded by original sin. Fallenness
is not only original in being attributable to the irst human beings. It belongs
to the origin of every human being by being transmitted from the irst man
and woman, as a feature of human nature. In that respect Aquinas’s con-
ception of the basis of humility differs from Maimonides’ while sharing
the conception of human dependence upon God’s greatness, grace, and
loving-kindness.

III
The Aristotelian great-souled man would regard himself as above forgive-
ness, seeing himself as largely above the slights and the disrespect that
many people feel it is gracious to forgive. Aristotelian self-awareness and
self-criticism are not itted into a larger, ultimate concern in the way that
they are in the religious tradition. Nor is piety a centrally important virtue.
Aristotle’s virtuous man is aware of his merit and concerned to always do
what is just and honorable, but he does not attend to the question of the
adequacy of his virtue in the way that striving for holiness (or the awareness
of fallenness) requires. The Aristotelian agent can have merited conidence
in his excellence. The faith tradition’s concern (whether Jewish, Christian,
or Muslim) with becoming rightly related to God through doing what God

26
Maimonides, “Laws Concerning Character Traits,” p. 49.
27
Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 30, art. 4; q. 157, art. 1; q. 157, art. 4, reply obj. 2.
226 Jonathan Jacobs

commands and striving to fulill a transcendent (and humbling) standard

of holiness is not a concern to the Aristotelian agent.
On Aristotle’s view – or the absence of a view – regarding forgiveness,
Griswold writes:
Why is it that Aristotle nowhere praises forgiveness (as distinguished from par-
doning and excusing) as a virtue? The core answer lies in the character of his
perfectionist ethical scheme, for it is one that seeks to articulate and recommend
the character of the man – and in Aristotle, it is a man – of complete virtue. The
gentleman possessing the perfection of moral virtue – the megalopsuchos – certainly
has no need (by his own lights, anyhow) for being forgiven, because by deinition
he is morally perfect (and in any case, his pride would not allow him to recognize
himself as in need of forgiveness). He also would seem unforgiving of others, for
three reasons. First, he has no interest in sympathetically grasping the situation
and faults of non-virtuous persons – they are of little account to him. Second, he
would judge himself immune to being injured by them morally. . . . The third rea-
son why forgiveness is not part of the magnanimous person’s outlook is implicit in
the hierarchical value scheme that is part and parcel of his [Aristotle’s] perfection-
ist outlook, and comes across in the dismissiveness that characterizes the attitude
of the megalopsuchos toward “inferior people.”28

Griswold notes that for both Plato and Aristotle the notion of sympathy
“plays little ethical role. Indeed, we might add . . . that reconciliation
between individuals who have injured one another also plays little role in
their ethical outlooks. . . .”29 For Maimonides and Aquinas forgiveness ultim-
ately has a ground in the fact that no one is so virtuous – or even so capable
of perfect virtue – that he or she will not sin and not need to be forgiven.
Also, no one is above forgiving in the way that a Platonic or Aristotelian per-
fectly virtuous agent would be.
In Aquinas’s view, man’s fallenness disturbed the order of nature and
grace in a way that involves guilt meriting everlasting punishment:
Man can avoid each but not every act of sin, except by grace, as was stated above.
Nevertheless, since it is by his own shortcoming that he does not prepare himself
to have grace, the fact that he cannot avoid sin without grace does not excuse him
from sin.30
It is because our nature no longer has its original integrity that we sin, but
our sinning is nonetheless voluntary. Given the fall, it is inevitable that each
of us will sin, and we need supernatural help to overcome our sinfulness.
Compare the Thomistic view to Maimonides’, expressed as follows:
For an individual cannot but sin and err, either through ignorance – by professing
an opinion or a moral quality that is not preferable in truth – or else because he is

28
Griswold, “Plato and Forgiveness,” Ancient Philosophy 27 (2007), pp. 282–83.
29
Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), p. 12.
30
Aquinas, ST, q. 109, art. 8, reply obj. 1.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 227

overcome by desire or anger. If then the individual believed that this fracture can
never be remedied, he would persist in his error and sometimes perhaps disobey
even more because of the fact that no stratagem remains at his disposal.31

Given human nature, we are bound to err. But this is not because of deprav-
ity or a deeply wounded, corrupted nature. Thomistic anthropology dif-
fers from Maimonides’, with Aquinas specifying the main elements of the
dynamic of sin and redemption as follows:
I answer that, Christ’s Passion is the proper cause of remission of sins in three ways.
First of all, by way of exciting our charity, because, as the Apostle says (Romans 5:8):
“God commendeth His charity towards us; because when as yet we were sinners . . .
Christ died for us.” . . . Secondly, Christ’s Passion causes forgiveness of sins by way of
redemption. For since He is our head, then, by the Passion which He endured from
love and obedience, He freed us, as His members, from our sins, as by the price of
His Passion: . . . Thirdly, by way of eficiency, inasmuch as Christ’s lesh, wherein He
endured the Passion, is the instrument of the Godhead.32

Maimonides and Aquinas both thought it a moral requirement to “rebuke

one’s neighbor” as an expression of moral concern. Aquinas says that the
“correction of a wrongdoer,” when it is “fraternal correction,” helps to do
away with the wrongdoer’s evil and that is a way of procuring his good, and
thus, “fraternal correction is also an act of charity.”33 He quotes Augustine:
“You become worse than the sinner if you fail to correct him.” Thus, he con-
cludes: “Fraternal correction is a matter of precept.”34 Rebuking can con-
structively serve the community when done in the spirit of moral reminder
and guidance. It need not be hostile and should not be hostile. As one
commentator notes:
Contrary to Aristotelian imitatio Dei, which is apolitical, evincing divine unconcern
for the material world, Maimonidean imitatio Dei, paradigmatically illustrated by
Mosaic prophecy, mirrors God’s providential care for Its creation. For Maimonides,
human beings achieve their true end and best express their knowledge and love of
God by ennobling the created order.35

Maimonides writes: “If someone sees his fellow man who has sinned or who
follows a way that is not good, it is a commandment to make him return to
the good and to make known to him that he sins against himself by his evil
actions. As it is said: ‘You shall surely rebuke your neighbor.’”36 Rebuking

31
Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Pines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963),
III, 36, p. 540.
32
Aquinas, ST, III, q. 49. 1.
33
Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 33. 1.
34
Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 33, art. 2. Aquinas is quoting Augustine (De Verb, Dom. xvi, 4).
35
Frank, “Maimonides and Medieval Jewish Aristotelianism,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Medieval Jewish Philosophy, ed. Frank and Leaman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), p. 153.
36
Maimonides, “Laws Concerning Character Traits,” p. 48.
228 Jonathan Jacobs

one’s neighbor shows concern for the created order through the effort to
improve relations between people.
Likewise, the willingness to forgive indicates concern for the welfare of
the person forgiven. Forgiving can be instrumental in restoring relations
between people, in overcoming resentment of wrongs done, and in show-
ing that the person forgiven is not seen as morally rotten or as distanced
from the moral community. To forgive, however, is not to condone. The
person sinned against should be willing to forgive, but the rabbinic trad-
ition holds that one should forgive only the wrongdoer who admits the
wrong done and seeks forgiveness. Forgiving can help a person in the dir-
ection of repentance, and it is related to the obligation to rebuke.
Rebuking and forgiving can be morally educative and can restore mor-
ally healthy relations among people. The former offers guidance and cor-
rection to the sinner, and it is prophylactic against resentment and a desire
for vengeance. Forgiveness restores trust and is protection against unfairly
despising or contemning the sinner. The Jewish tradition is especially con-
cerned that people should not bear grudges. It is a transgression to do so.
Maimonides writes:
Rather, he shall blot out the matter from his heart and not bear a grudge. If he bears
a grudge over something and remembers it, he might come to take vengeance.
Therefore the Torah was particularly concerned with grudge-bearing so that the
wrong done be completely blotted out from a man’s heart and he not remember it.
This is the appropriate character trait; it makes possible the settlement of the earth
and social relations among human beings.37

Maimonides puts the signiicance of this in perspective:

The Law as a whole aims at two things: the welfare of the soul and the welfare of
the body. As for the welfare of the soul, it consists in the multitude’s acquiring cor-
rect opinions corresponding to their respective capacity. . . .As for the welfare of the
body, it comes about by the improvement of their ways of living one with another.
This is achieved through two things. One of them is the abolition of their wronging
each other. . . . The second thing consists in the acquisition by every human individ-
ual of moral qualities that are useful for life in society so that the affairs of the city
may be ordered.38

Also, “the irst aim can only be achieved after achieving this second one.”39
Human relations stained and torn by resentment and the desire for ven-
geance would delect people from pursuit of the good. Both rebuke and
forgiveness strengthen the ethical fabric of the community.
Yosef Yitzhak Lifshitz writes, “Jewish law recognizes the need to
impose moral and religious principles on individuals, in order to foster

37
Ibid., p. 52.
38
Maimonides, Guide, III, 27, p. 510.
39
Ibid.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 229

righteousness among citizens and sustain them in the community. The rab-
bis called this ‘setting the boundaries,’ or migdar milta.”40 He goes on to
quote Maimonides:
He who does not want to give charity, or gives less than is proper, will be forced to
do so by the rabbinical court, even to the point of striking him, until he gives his
due, and the court will examine and assess his property in his presence, and take
what is proper for him to give. And they may take collateral for charity, even on the
eve of the Sabbath.41

This illustrates the importance of community life to Maimonides and also

the responsibility of the community to guide (and even push, to some
extent) individuals in the direction of virtue. A few shoves, accompanied
by instructive explanation, could lead the person to acquire the relevant
disposition needed to attain the relevant virtue.
Tradition shaped by the Torah supplies ethical guidance and, there-
fore, determinate ways to address moral issues. In fundamental respects,
tradition preserves the covenant between God and the descendants of the
Israelites. What is crucial with regard to the requirements of moral life is
not simply that “God commands thus and such” but that all aspects of life
are opportunities for holiness, and there are normatively authoritative ways
for that holiness to be realized. Tradition combines and transmits specii-
city and authority, linking generations in a continuity of holiness through
stability in the form of an aspiration for righteousness. In Christianity much
of this has its locus in sacrament as well as tradition. Tradition (in Judaism)
and sacrament (in Christianity) sustain a human connection to the divine.

IV
I noted earlier that Maimonides and Aquinas (in distinct ways) differ from
Aristotle in making room for the genuine ethical reorienting of the will,
even in the very bad person. That change is involved with other import-
ant issues of moral life such as humility, forgiveness, and repentance, the
latter centrally involving recognition of the need to be forgiven. In that
respect the faith traditions diverge from Aristotle’s ethics and moral psych-
ology. Repentance is an important theme in medieval Jewish and Christian
thought, given how it relates human beings to God and also to each other.
Martin Stanley Stern’s discussion of Bahya ibn Pakuda’s conception of
repentance applies as well to Maimonides. In that conception, after the
wrongdoer has acknowledged his wrong,
He must then be aware that the particular act(s) he committed are disobedient
and, therefore, evil. He must accept and confront the inevitability of retribution

40
Lifshitz, “On Judaism and Economics,” Azure 18 (Autumn 2004), p. 55.
41
Liftshitz is here quoting Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, “Laws of Giving to the Poor,” 7:10.
230 Jonathan Jacobs

which lows from man’s accountability. Further, he must be assured of the eficacy
of repentance as a cure and remedy for his condition of alienation. Without this he
would sooner despair and give up any attempts at behavior modiication. Finally, he
must become conscious of God’s greatness and the measure of His bounty.42

In Aristotle’s thought there is not anything like this regard for God as an
object of awe, regarded with a combination of fear, love, and gratitude.
(This fear is not primarily a matter of feeling threatened. It is awareness of
God’s power and authority, and awareness that turning away from God can
be ruinous both in terms of how one corrupts oneself and in terms of God’s
just punishment.) Aristotle’s virtuous agent is immune to the “need” for
radical ethical self-correction while the faith traditions do not understand
human nature to be capable of that immunity.
In accord with Jewish tradition, Maimonides reminds us:
Repentance and the Day of Atonement only secure forgiveness for transgressions
against God; as, for example, when one has partaken of forbidden food or indulged
in illicit intercourse, and so forth. But transgressions against one’s fellow-men, as for
instance, if one wounds, or curses or robs his neighbor or commits similar wrongs,
are never pardoned till the injured party has received the compensation due to him
and has also been appeased.43
Compensation is not suficient; seeking forgiveness through a direct
approach to the aggrieved must be sought. There are, however, limits to
the effort one is required to make in this regard.
If however, the injured party is unwilling to forgive, he should bring three of his
friends at one time, and they should entreat the person offended, and solicit his
pardon. If they fail, he should take with him a second and even a third group. If the
offended person continues obdurate, he leaves him alone and goes away. The one
who refused to forgive is now the sinner.44

This may sound awkwardly formulaic but its speciicity coheres with the
Maimonidean view that part of the greatness of the gift of Torah is that
it supplies guidance where our judgment on its own might not arrive at
conident or agreed conceptions of what is right. Newman notes that
“Maimonides emphasizes what the Mishnah passage only implied, that the
offender bears primary responsibility for initiating the process of forgive-
ness. Moreover, Maimonides suggests that this duty is not canceled either
by the victim’s reticence to grant forgiveness or even by that person’s death.
The offender can fulill his or her moral obligation to the other person only
through sincere and persistent attempts to effect a reconciliation.”45 (Two

42
Stern, “Al-Ghazzali, Maimonides, and Ibn Paquda on Repentance: A Comparative Model,”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47 (1979), p. 598.
43
Maimonides, “Laws of Repentance,” pp. 83a–83b.
44
Ibid., p. 83b.
45
This is a point emphasized by Newman in his discussion in “The Quality of Mercy,” pp. 88–89.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 231

centuries earlier, Saadia had argued that, even for those parts of the Law
that reason could ascertain on its own, revelation was needed in order to
provide the speciicity that we otherwise would not have been able to settle
upon, and thus, a great deal of disagreement and uncertainty is avoided.)46
It is not Maimonides’ view that the victim unconditionally owes forgiveness
to the offender. The latter must make an effort at reconciliation.
In seeking forgiveness from one’s fellow human being, the aggrieved
party is to be entreated by others to forgive and to restore relations. It is not
the offender alone who has a role in composing the matter. Moreover, the
issue is not entirely private to the offender and the victim; others may have
a role in seeking to compose the matter. Maimonides’ thought may be that
an injury to a member of the community damages the community and that
the community has a role in healing the wound. Not to forgive is to remain
alienated from the person seeking forgiveness, and that is further damage
to the community. No one’s standing is so low that apology is not required.
No one’s standing is so high that it is appropriate to contemn the offend-
er’s entreaty to be forgiven. The Maimonidean view includes a basic moral
equality foreign to Aristotle’s thought.
We saw that Maimonides understood repentance as a real turning of the
will and not just an expression of fear or a dawning, painful realization of
how badly led one’s life has been. While it may come late in life, it is still
more than regret and is genuine ethical self-correction.
Repentance atones for all transgressions. Even if a man was wicked all the days of
his life and repented at the end, nothing of his wickedness is recalled to him, as it
is said “And as for the wickedness of the wicked, he shall not stumble thereby in the
day that he turns from his wickedness” (Ezek. 33:12).47
And:
What is perfect repentance? It is so when an opportunity presents itself for repeat-
ing an offence once committed, and the offender, while able to commit the offence,
nevertheless refrains from doing so, because he is penitent and not out of fear or
failure of vigour.48
In one form of repentance, the person so distances himself from the wrong-
ful act that he
gives charity according to his means; keeps far away from that wherein he sinned;
changes his name, as much as to say: “I am another individual and not the one who
committed those deeds”; changes all his activities for a better course, for the righteous

46
Saadia Gaon’s The Book of Belief and Opinions is a key work in medieval Jewish philosophy. In
it, Saadia formulated all or nearly all of what would be the main problems of medieval Jewish
philosophy. His distinction between “laws of reason” and “laws of revelation” is especially
important to the complex history of the issue of “reasons of the commandments.”
47
Maimonides, “Laws concerning Repentance,” p. 82a.
48
Ibid., p. 82b.
232 Jonathan Jacobs

way; and exiles himself from his former place of residence, since exile atones for ini-
quity, inducing, as it does, humility, meekness and lowliness of spirit.49

Through genuine repentance, a “better self” is realized and one renounces

the self that committed the wrong. In Aristotle’s view, that may not be a
genuine possibility for the vicious agent. Again, the accessibility of the Law
is crucial because of the guidance it supplies, showing the person what
needs to be done in order to reconstitute one’s self ethically through chan-
ging one’s dispositions. (Because Maimonides, Saadia, Bahya, and others
were well aware of how dificult that can be and that lapses often occur, they
accordingly discussed the issue of relapse and its implications.)
Repentance is connected to the issue of redemption concerning the
Jewish people as a nation. It is not just a matter for each individual consid-
ered as such. On this matter, David Hartman writes: “The biblical promise
of redemption does not refer to God’s miraculous intervention in history,
but is based upon the conviction that a change in man’s moral life will
ultimately affect a change in man’s political conditions.”50
Torah trains the believing Jew to recognize the power of teshuvah [repentance] to
alter his political and economic condition by constantly reminding him that his pol-
itical and material life is determined by his relationship to God. It is this training
which can explain the prophet’s certainty that Israel will repent.51

In Judaism, issues of moral life are fully integrated into the life of the Jewish
people as a covenanted community with distinctive responsibilities and a
providential history. Repentance is signiicant for the people Israel and
not just for the repentant individual. The same is true with regard to for-
giveness. Both are elements of the aspiration to realize moral excellence,
which, in turn, makes a difference to the people’s history and fate. We can-
not hope to imitate God without the ethical repair accomplished by repent-
ance and forgiveness.
For Aquinas, too, repentance is crucial as a way of orienting one’s self to
the good – to God. Repentance is acknowledgment of sin but also an act
by which the individual can restore his or her relationship with others and
with God. According to Aquinas,
A person may repent of sin in two ways: in one way directly, in another way indirectly.
He repents of a sin directly who hates sin as such: and he repents indirectly who hates
it on account of something connected with it, for instance punishment or something
of that kind. Accordingly, the wicked will not repent of their sins directly, because
consent in the malice of sin will remain in them; but they will repent indirectly, inas-
much as they will suffer from the punishment inlicted on them for sin.52

49
Ibid., p. 83a.
50
Hartman, Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest (New York: Jewish Publication Society,
1976), p. 151.
51
Ibid., p. 152.
52
Aquinas, ST, Supplement to III, q. 98, art. 2.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 233

He expresses agreement with Augustine by noting: “However obstinate

men may be in this world, they repent of their sins indirectly, if they be
punished for them.”53
Repentance is painful. It needs to be painful if it is to motivate ethical
self-correction effectively. It is different from the pain of regret. It is not
only indicative of a falling short or a lapse with respect to what is morally
required. Repentance also involves awareness of what is owed to God and
awareness of the substance of the task of moral improvement. A second
feature is that repentance is not consistent with the sort of satisfaction with
one’s self enjoyed by the virtuous Aristotelian agent. The merited self-love
of that agent is not (and should not be) persistently aware of virtue’s fragil-
ity and the distance one never closes between one’s current state and what
piety or holiness requires. I do not mean that the Aristotelian agent is com-
placent. Concerning any agent not yet established in virtue (and that would
be most of us), Aristotle writes:
We must also examine what we ourselves drift into easily. For different people have
different natural tendencies toward different goals, and we shall come to know our
own tendencies from the pleasure and pain that arises in us. We must drag ourselves
off in the contrary direction; for if we pull away from error, as they do in straighten-
ing bent wood, we shall reach the intermediate condition.54

Nevertheless, the genuinely ethically excellent agent need not be always

humbly aware of how his virtue may be incomplete and susceptible to lapse.
The ideal of the agent ixed in virtue is not often attained, but it is a realis-
tic ideal for Aristotle. While Maimonides did not stress the loss of integral
human nature and the hopelessness of redemption without infused super-
natural virtue, he did think that even the most virtuous agent should be
aware of how easy it is to sin and should also be aware of how necessary it is
to repent. The contrast with Aristotle is quite stark.
Aristotle’s thought does not include a place for a spiritual battle between
the righteous and the evil inclination or the devil. Nor does it have a
place for patient humility waiting upon God’s redeeming grace. Medieval
Christian understandings of forgiveness need to be seen in the context of
that spiritual drama. Confession, penance, and forgiveness are key ibers
of the Christian fabric of soul. They relect convictions concerning the
wounded nature of the human soul, the profound humility proper to it,
and its utter dependence upon saving grace.
In some ways the faith traditions are less optimistic than Aristotle about
perfection and less optimistic about human beings acquiring second
natures that are imperturbably virtuous. They are optimistic in regard to
ultimate cosmic justice, dependent upon God’s providential governance.

53
Aquinas, ST, Supplement to III, q. 98, art. 2, reply to obj. 4.
54
Nicomachean Ethics, 1109b1–8.
234 Jonathan Jacobs

But they are less optimistic about the extent to which perfection is attain-
able through our own efforts. Aquinas writes of mercy that it
takes precedence of other virtues, for it belongs to mercy to be bountiful to others,
and, what is more, to succor others in their wants, which pertains chiely to one who
stands above. Hence mercy is accounted as being proper to God: and herein His
omnipotence is declared to be chiely manifested.55

God is known through graciousness, through loving-kindness, which

includes revelation. Revelation supplies guidance on how to manage
human tendencies to resentment, to be unforgiving, to think our selves
better than our neighbor. That guidance is important for ethically ordering
ourselves and for shaping and sustaining ethically well-ordered communi-
ties. Revelation also supplies the promise of redemption. Human beings
are at risk of being alienated from God, but they can also be united with
God through virtue and righteousness. Forgiveness and repentance are
vitally important. If we try to do without them, we will condemn ourselves
to a kind of spiritual self-destruction. With them, we are capable of a type
of holiness that perfects us.

Conclusion
Commenting on the interpersonal character of forgiveness, Griswold writes:
“The interdependence of offender and victim in the scene of forgiveness
again illustrates that virtue’s rootedness in the human world that is, from
the standpoint of classical perfectionist theory, deeply imperfect in just
this way: interdependent, social, vulnerable.”56 The interdependence is, he
notes, “part of the logic of forgiveness.”57 The contrast of Aristotle’s perfec-
tionism with Maimonidean and Thomistic perfectionism does indeed reveal
a difference over the issue of interdependence, even taking into account of
Aristotle’s emphasis on the social nature of human beings and the import-
ance of friendship, for example. The Jewish and Christian religious tradi-
tions (notwithstanding important differences between them) have a more
pronounced sense of humanity’s common predicament as lawed beings,
of our dependence upon God, and of the moral requirement to love one’s
neighbor. Forgiving is a way of showing that the bonds between people have
not been irrevocably severed by the wrong done and the resentment felt;
the offender is not expelled or rejected in a manner that is inal. This has
nothing to do with pardoning or excusing. It concerns the injured person’s
willingness to show that he or she is not so estranged from the offender
as to cease to regard the offender as a neighbor. Forgiveness keeps the
offender and the victim in dialogue.

55
Aquinas, ST, II-II, q. 30, art. 4.
56
Griswold, Forgiveness, p. 49.
57
Ibid.
 Forgiveness and Perfection 235

Behind these differences between Aristotelian perfectionism and

Maimonidean and Thomistic perfectionism is the signiicance of cre-
ation, revelation, and providence to the anthropologies of the Jewish and
Christian faith traditions. They are crucial to the faith traditions’ explana-
tions of some of the most basic features of the human predicament. These
features include humanity’s lack of self-suficiency; God’s graciously given
help; and the possibility of perfection, redemption, and salvation. Jointly,
these make possible a type of moral transformation we do not ind as a
possibility in Aristotle’s view. There are important differences between the
Jewish and Christian understandings of these, but they can be grouped
together in contrast to Aristotle’s in regard to some fundamental issues.
These differences also help explicate the religious notion of love of one’s
neighbor. We are neighbors just on account of sharing human nature and
the common human predicament. In Aristotle’s view, in the best kind of
friendship one sees another as a friend because the other is another “one’s
self,” like one’s self through likeness in virtue. The faith traditions’ con-
ceptions of loving one’s neighbor are quite different from Aristotle’s view
of friendship. The chief point is not that Aristotle’s view is egoistic. It is
not morally suspect in that way, and the contrast with the faith traditions
has a different basis. It has to do with seeing each individual as a being in
God’s image and as a unique individual with intrinsic worth and capable of
redemption, even if the person is not an example of human excellence.
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 Index
Abraham and Abimelech, 145–49
Achilles, 24–25, 31–32, 41–47, 81,
127; and Coriolanus, 127–29
Acts of the Apostles, 182–84
Adkins, Arthur, 42, 49
Aeneas, and Coriolanus, 128–29
Aeschylus, Oresteia, 81
Allais, Lucy, 156–57
altruism, 63
amnesty, xi
anger, of Achilles, 23–25, 81,
127–29; appeasement of, 18–19,
81; Aristotle on, 18–20, 223;
of Coriolanus, 124–28; of God
(in the Hebrew Bible), 139,
141–42; of gods, 124, 126–27,
130–31; in Latin literature,
81–82; Maimonides on, 223–24;
in Menander’s Samia, 27–30;
in Senecan philosophy, 84; in
Senecan tragedy, 81–82; Stoics
on, 20–21, 126–27; in Virgil, 81
aphesis (forgiveness, remission; verb
aphiēmi), 161, 183, 205–7
apokatastasis (universal salvation),
195–96, 199, 202–3; and
conditional forgiveness,
204–13
apology, xi, 17, 21, 26, 29–30,
53–54, 68, 79, 150, 231
253
Appian, Civil War, 100; Roman
History, 122
Aquinas, and Aristotle, 216,
220–21; on clemency, 225;
free will in, 220–21; and
humility, 225; on mercy, 234; on
repentance, 232–33
Arendt, Hannah, xii, 22, 32,
159, 163
Aristophanes, Acharnians, 51
Aristotle, on anger, 17–20, 223;
and Aquinas, 216, 220–21;
on double plots, 74; on
emotion, 39; on fear, 37; on
forgiveness, 226; and God,
230; on the greathearted
man, 63; on humility, 18, 223,
233; and Maimonides, 216,
218–20, 223–24, 230; and
perfectionism, 216–18, 225–26;
on philoi (dear ones), 74; on
pity, 37, 39; Poetics, 37, 59, 74;
on revenge, 20; Rhetoric, 17–19,
27, 39; on sungnōmē, 19, 48;
on the virtuous agent, 216–18,
225–26
Atonement, Day of, and
Maimonides, 230; in the
Mishnah, 147–49; in the Talmud,
150–51, 155–56
254 Index
Augustine, 213–14; Confessions,
168; on the prodigal son,
166–69; on repentance, 168
Augustus, and clemency, 88, 90–91,
99–106, 120; and Danaids (on
the Palatine portico), 106–9; Res
Gestae (Achievements), 87
Bash, Anthony, 21–22
Beard, Mary, 110
Bible, Hebrew. See Hebrew Bible
blame, 8–9, 12–13
Botschaft Gottes, Die, 189
Brown, Peter, 38
Butler, Bishop, 153
Butler, Judith, on Sophocles’
Antigone, 32, 46
Caesar, Julius, and clemency,
88–90, 95, 102–3, 117–19; and
mildness, 118; temple of, 119–20
calming down, Aristotle on, 18–19
Calpurnius Flaccus, 112
Cato the Younger, 117
change of heart, and forgiveness,
22; Maimonides on, 23; in the
Talmud, 156
change of mind, 22. See also
metanoia
Christianity and forgiveness, xii,
158–215
Chrysippus, 94
Cicero, on clemency, 88, 118, 120;
on Coriolanus, 125–26;
on virtues, 86–87
clemency, 8–9, 57; in Aquinas,
225; and Augustus, 88, 90–91,
99–106, 119–20; and Caesar,
88–90, 97–98, 102–3, 117–20;
in Cicero, 88, 118, 120; and
the Danaids, 106–9; dangers
of, 120–21; and declamation,
109–13; as divine, 118–19,
130–31; as an emotional script,
88; vs. fear, 117; and gender,
98–114; as humiliating, 89–92;
of Livia, 99–106; as a masculine
quality, 98–99; personiication
of, 117–20; and power, 88–92; a
Roman concept, 85; and Roman
religion, 115–33; and the Sabine
women, 103–4; and senatorial
decree on Cn. Calpurnius Piso,
104–5; Seneca on, 21, 85–96,
99–102; and Stoicism, 86,
131–32; temple of, 119–20; as a
virtue, 94–95, 98, 100; and war,
97–98; and women, 123–25
Clement of Alexandria, 179,
195–97
Clementia (personiication of
clementia, clemency), 117–19;
Caesar and, 118–19; temple
of, 119
compassion, etymology of, 36
confession, Christian, 233;
Montesquieu on, 24
contrition, 12
conversion and forgiveness, 192,
198–99
Coriolanus, 121–31; and Achilles,
127–29; and Aeneas, 128–29
Coventry Cathedral, 158–59
Danaids (on the Palatine portico),
106–9
David and Gibeonites, 144–45
debts, and forgiveness, 11–12,
204–5; in Gregory of Nyssa, 203;
in Origen, 199. See also aphesis
declamation, and clemency,
109–13; and forgiveness, 110–13
Declamations, Minor, 109, 111, 113
de Sousa, Ronald, 5
Dio Cassius, Roman History, 101,
103, 120
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman
Antiquities, 121–31
 Index
divine forgiveness, as conditional
(in Christianity), 177–85,
191–94, 195–97, 199–202,
204–13; in Judaic tradition,
138; in Origen, 179–81,
197–202; in Philo, 133; in Rome,
118–19, 131. See also “Father,
forgive them”
Dowling, Melissa, 89, 99, 110
drunkenness and forgiveness,
60–61
emotion, 5–6, 33; and forgiveness,
xiv, 6–8; as narrative scripts,
86–88; and Stoicism, 85–86, 131
empathy, xi, 13–14, 33; in
animals, 40; critique of, 39–40;
deinition, 36; etymology of, 37;
in Herodotus, 33–34; historical
development of, 40–41; in the
Iliad, 41–47; vs. pity, 33, 37–38;
and slavery, 38–39
Epp, Eldon Jay, 187–88
error (hamartia), 59–61, 64; in
Aquinas, 226–27; in Maimonides,
226–28
eternal punishment, 179–80
etymology, 35–37
Euripides, Andromache, 52; Electra,
52; Helen, 53; Hippolytus, 54–55,
58; Ion, 51; Iphigenia among the
Taurians, 51; Medea, 52; Orestes,
53–54; Suppliant Women, 54
Eusebius, 186–87
Evagrius, 210
exculpation, 27–28
excuse, xi, 9, 17
extenuation of guilt, 19; and
ignorance, 55–56, 68, 188; in
Spanish law, 23–24; and youth,
54, 64
family, and forgiveness, 54–58; vs.
misanthropy, 62–63
255
“Father, forgive them,” 158–60,
177, 179–80; anti-Jewish
implications, 185–88; and James,
182; in Luke, 182–85; omitted
in Die Botschaft Gottes, 189; in
Origen, 189–91; and Paul, 182;
and Peter, 182; textual tradition,
180–82, 187–88
fear, Aristotle on, 37; vs. clemency,
117
forgive to be forgiven, 162, 195–96
forgiveness, between Abraham and
Abimelech, 145–49; and Aeneas,
128–29; and altruism, 63; and
apokatastasis (universal salvation),
204–9; in Aquinas, 226–27,
233–34; in archaic Greece,
49–50; in Aristophanes, 51; and
atonement, 138, 147–49; in
Augustine, 213–14; and blame, 8,
12–13; and change of heart, 22;
and Christianity, xii, 158–215;
and clemency, 8–9, 21, 57,
85–96; in Clement of Alexandria,
179, 195–97; cognitive nature of,
in classical Greek, 48; collective,
137; and community, 228–29;
as conditional, 177–85, 191–95,
195–97, 199–213; conditions
for, 21–22; and conversion,
192, 198–99; and Coriolanus,
121–31; in the courtroom, 58;
on Day of Atonement, 147–49,
155–56; of debts, 11–12, 199,
204–5; in declamations, 110–13;
deinitions, 20–22, 32–33;
divine, in Judaic tradition,
138; divine, in Philo, 133;
divine, at Rome, 121–31; and
drunkenness, 60–61; and
emotion, xiv, 6–8; and error,
59–61, 64; Esau’s, 142–43, 165,
170; and eternal punishment,
179–80; in Euripides, 51–55,
256 Index
58; vs. exculpation, 27–28; vs.
excuse, xi, 9, 17; in the family,
54–58; “Father, forgive them,”
158–60, 177, 179–83, 188–91;
and gender, 49–53, 59–60,
67–74; general, xi–xii, xiv–xv,
3–14, 17, 32–33, 138, 154,
191–92; God’s, 138, 154–57,
185–94, 197–202; and grace,
198, 203, 205, 225, 234; and
greatheartedness, 63, 225–26;
and Greek character, 70, 73;
Greek terminology for, 160–61;
in Gregory of Nazianzus, 209–11;
in Gregory of Nyssa, 202–4,
207–8; and hatred, 176–80,
185–93; in the Hebrew Bible,
46, 139–44; and humaneness,
58, 63, 79, 85, 94, 124, 202,
209–10; and ignorance, 11, 19,
54–55, 67–68, 178–79, 182–91,
226–27; in the Iliad, 24–25,
31–32, 41–47; and imagination
(empathic), 13–14; impossibility
of, 153, 162–63; and impurity,
139–40; and interdependence,
234–35; Irenaeus on, 177–79,
192–93; and Jesus, xii, 32,
159–62, 178–80; and John the
Baptist, 161; in John Chrysostom,
211–13; and Judaism, xii; vs.
justice, 20–21; Latin terminology
for, 80, 92; as a linkage, 6–7;
and love, 53, 60, 67, 156, 199,
235; in Luke, 160–75, 182–85;
Maimonides on, 22–23, 230–32;
by men, 53–54; in Menander,
26–30, 49, 59–75; and mercy,
139–41; in the Mishnah, 145–49;
and monarchy, 58, 80–96, 98;
and monotheism, 46; obligation
to, 151–52, 162, 228; in the
Odyssey, 25–26; in Origen,
189–91, 197–202, 205–6, 208–9;
in the parable of the paralytic,
161; vs. pardon, xi, 7, 10, 57,
92–94; in Paul, 159–60, 182; and
perfectionism, xiii, 20–21, 32,
56; Pittacus on, 49, 51; Plato’s
neglect of, 20; and polytheism,
46; as a process, 21–22; and the
prodigal son, 160–75; purpose
of, 13; and rabbinic literature,
144–57; and rape, 111–13; and
reciprocity, 74; vs. reconciliation,
71–72; and remorse, 21; and
repentance, 21, 138, 149–50,
156–57, 162, 199–202; in
Seneca, 131–32; in Simonides,
50; of sin, 139–41; in Sophocles,
50–51, 53; and status, 49–55,
67–68; in the Talmud, 149–53,
156–57; territory of, xiv, 4–5,
7–8, 79, 138; in Thucydides,
51–52; and tragedy (Greek),
26, 48, 54–55; of trespasses,
163; unconditional, 177–78,
191–95; unilateral, xii, xiv, 74;
as unpredictable, 163; and
virtue, 224–26; and voluntary
wrongdoing, 20, 58; and
vulnerability, 49–50; by women,
98–109; in Xenophon, 55–58
Frank, Daniel, 223
freedom (libertas), 116–17
free will, in Aquinas, 220–21; in
Maimonides, 220
gender, and clemency, 98–114;
and forgiveness, 49–53, 59–60,
67–74
Gibeonites, in the Hebrew Bible
and rabbinic literature, 144–45
God (Judaic), and anger, 141–42;
and mercy, 139–41; and sin,
139–41
gods, as angry, 124, 126–27
Gospels. See Luke; New Testament
 Index
grace, 198, 203, 205, 225, 234
Grandin, Temple, 40
gratitude, 221
greatheartedness (megalopsukhia),
63, 225–26
Greek character and forgiveness,
70, 73
Gregory of Nazianzus, 209–11
Gregory of Nyssa, 202–4, 207–8
Griswold, Charles, 13, 20–21,
32–33, 41, 92, 126, 173, 191–92,
226, 234
Grundmann, Walter, 189
Harnack, Adolf von, 187
Hartman, David, 232
hatred and forgiveness, 176–80,
185–93
Hauptman, Judith, 147
Heath, Malcolm, 19
Hebrew Bible and forgiveness, 46,
139–44; God’s anger in, 141–42
Hegel, on Sophocles’ Antigone, 32
Hegesippus, 182
Heidegger, Martin, 153
hell, repentance in, 196, 210
Hermogenes, on sungnōmē, 19
Herodotus, and empathy, 33–34,
39; and pity, 33–34, 37–38
Heschel, Susannah, 176, 189
Holgate, David, 166
holiness code, in Hebrew Bible,
143–44
Homer, Iliad, 23–25, 31–32, 38,
41–47, 81, 127; Odyssey, 25–26
Horace, Odes 3.1, 106, 108
humaneness (philanthrōpia,
humanitas), 58, 63, 79, 85, 94,
124, 202, 209–10
humanity, shared sense of, 33, 41,
54–56
humility, Aquinas on, 225; Aristotle
on, 18, 223, 233; Maimonides
on, 23, 222–25
257
ignorance, as an excuse, 11, 19,
54–56, 67–68, 178–79, 182–91,
226–27; personiied, 68
ignoscere (forgive, make allowance
for), 79–80
imagination (empathic) and
forgiveness, 13–14
impurity, in the Hebrew Bible,
139–40
invidia (envy, indignation), 87
involuntary wrongdoing and
forgiveness, 58
Irenaeus, 177–79, 192–93
Jacob and Esau, 142–43, 165, 170
Jankélévich, Vladimir, 20
Jeremiah, 141
Jerusalem, destruction of, 185–87
Jesus, 158–75; discoverer of
forgiveness, xii, 32, 159; his
parables, 164–75; and sinners,
163–64
Jews, failure to repent (in New
Testament), 182–86
John the Baptist, 161
John Chrysostom, 211–13
Jonah, 141
Joseph and his brothers, 142–43
Judaism and forgiveness, xii, 22–23,
137–57
juries and forgiveness, 58
justice, vs. forgiveness, 20–21
Justin Martyr, 186
Kaster, Robert, 22, 87–88
Kim, Jinyo, 45
kindness, 58
Konstan, David, 35, 73, 128
Laporte, Jean, 133
Latin terms for forgiveness, 80, 92
Lefler, Siegfried, 176–77
leniency, Stoic view of, 93–94
Levinas, Emmanuel, 153
258 Index
Libertas (personiication of libertas,
freedom), 116–17
Lifshitz, Yosef Yitzhak, 228–29
linkages, 6–7, 9, 174
Livia (wife of Augustus), and
clemency, 99–106; and Ovid, 106
Livy, 103–4, 122, 125
love of enemies, 162; and
forgiveness, 53, 60, 67, 156,
199, 235; unconditional
(Christian), 177
Luke, and forgiveness, 160–75,
182–85
MacLachlan, Alice, 21–22
Maimonides, Moses, on anger,
223–24; and Aristotle, 218–20,
223; on community, 228–29;
on grudges, 228; and the
Law, 219; and the Mishnah,
230; On Repentance, 22–23; on
repentance, 231–32; on regret
(metanoia), 22
men, and clemency, 98–99; and
forgiveness, 53–54
Menander, 59–60, 74–75; Aspis
(Shield), 64n36; Dyscolus
(Grouch), 61–64, 67; Epitrepontes
(Arbitrants), 72–74; Misumenus
(Hated Man), 64n36; Periceiromene
(Woman with Shorn Hair), 68–72;
Samia, 26–30, 49, 64–68; women
in, 64–75
mercy, xi; divine, 10; of God (in the
Hebrew Bible), 139–41
metanoia (change of mind, regret),
in the Gospels, 161, 163–64, 167,
183, 207, 210; in Maimonides, 22
Milgrom, Jacob, 139–40
misanthropy, 62–63
Mishnah, on Abraham and
Abimelech, 145–49; and Day
of Atonement, 147–49; on
forgiveness, 145–49
monarchy and forgiveness, 58,
80–96, 98
monotheism and forgiveness, 46
Montesquieu, Baron de, on
confession and repentance, 24
morality, 11
Musonius Rufus, on response to
offenses, 21
Nazism, 176, 188–89
Newman, Louis, 224, 230
New Testament, 158–75
Origen, 189–91, 197–202, 205–6,
208–9
Ovid, Letters from Pontus, 106
parable, etymology of, 175
parables of Jesus, 164–75
paralytic, parable of, 161
pardon, xi, 7, 10, 57; in Seneca,
92–94
Paul, St., and forgiveness,
159–60, 182
perfectionism, and absence of
forgiveness, xiii, 20–21, 32, 56,
126; in Aristotle, 216–18
Peter, St., 182–83
Philippides, 60–61
Philo of Alexandria, on forgiveness
(divine), 132–33; and Gregory of
Nyssa, 203; on repentance, 22,
133; On Virtues, 22
philoi (friends, dear ones), 38, 59,
64, 74
Piso, Cn. Calpurnius, senatorial
decree concerning, 104–5; in
Tacitus, 105–6
Pittacus, 49, 51
pity, xi; Aristotle on, 37; and dear
ones (philoi), 38; vs. empathy and
sympathy, 33, 43; Herodotus,
33–34; in the Iliad, 43, 45–46
Planalp, Sally, 35
 Index
Plato, on forgiveness, 20
Plautus, Mercator (Merchant),
79–80
Plutarch, Cato Minor, 92; Comparison
of Alcibiades and Coriolanus, 126;
Coriolanus, 122
pollution, 42
polytheism and forgiveness, 46
power and clemency, 88–90
pride, 223–25
prodigal son, 160–75; Augustine
on, 166–69
Prudentius, Psychomachia, 81
Publilius Syrus, 117
Pucci, Pietro, 45
pudor (shame), 87–88
punishment, commensurate with
sin, 210; eternal, 179–80; as
therapeutic, 196–98, 210–12
rabbinic literature, 144–57
rape and forgiveness, 111–13
reciprocity and forgiveness, 74
reconciliation, xi, 8–9; vs.
forgiveness, 71–72; offender’s
responsibility for, 230–31
redemption, 9, 219, 227, 232–35
Redield, James, 45–46
regret, 11, 22; vs. repentance, 233
religion (Roman) and clemency,
115–33
remorse, 10, 21; not discussed by
classical philosophers, 22
repentance, 21; in Aquinas,
232–33; Augustine on, 168; in
Clement of Alexandria, 196;
in the Gospels, 162, 164; in
hell (possibility of), 196–97;
impossibility of, 219–20;
and Jerusalem’s destruction,
185–87; in Luke-Acts, 183;
in Maimonides, 232–33;
Montesquieu on, 24; in Origen,
199–202; in Philo, 22; vs.
259
regret, 233; in Spanish law,
23–24; in the Talmud, 149–52,
156–57
responsibility, 9, 20; in Homer, 42;
of offender, 230–31
revenge, in Aristotle, 20; in
Menander, 62, 66; in Seneca,
81–82
Rhetoric to Alexander, 58
Roller, Matthew, 98
Sabine women, 103–4
Sandbach, F. H., 29
self-control, as a virtue, 86–87
Seneca the Elder, 109–11
Seneca the Younger, 80–81;
anger in, 81–82; on clemency,
21, 85–96; De Beneiciis (On
Benefactions), 90; De Clementia
(On Clemency), 84, 89–96,
99–102; Consolatio ad Polybium
(Consolation to Polybius), 95;
De Constantia Sapientis (On the
Consistency of the Sage), 86; on
forgiveness, 131–32; Hercules
Furens (Mad Hercules), 83; De Ira
(On Anger), 84, 131; on pardon,
92–94; Thyestes, 81–82; Troades
(Trojan Women), 83; Phoenissae
(Phoenician Women), 83; De
Providentia (On Providence), 92
Sermon on the Mount (or the
Plain), 161–62
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, 175
Shatz, David, 223
shock, vs. empathy or sympathy, 37
Simonides, 50
sin, 139–41; original, 227–28
slavery and empathy, 38–39
Sophocles, Ajax, 26, 53;
Antigone, 32, 46; Trachiniae,
50–51, 53
Spanish law, repentance and
extenuation in, 22–23
260
status and forgiveness, 49–55,
67–68
Stephen, St., 182–83
Stern, Martin Stanley, 229–30
Stoics, on anger, 20–21, 126–27; on
clemency, 131–32; on leniency,
93–94; on punishment, 21
Streeter, B. H., 187
sungnōmē (pardon, forgiveness),
in Aristotle, 19; in Hermogenes,
19; meanings of, 26, 46, 48; in
modern Greek, 31
Syme, Ronald, 89
sympathy, xi, 33; deinition, 36;
etymology of, 37; vs. shock, 37
Tacitus, Annals, 105–6
Talmud on forgiveness, 149–53; on
repentance, 149–52, 156–57
Tertullian, 22
Theognis, 50n8
Thucydides, 51–52, 129
tragedy (Greek), 26, 54–55, 74–75.
See also Aeschylus; Euripides;
Sophocles
trespasses, as forgivable, 163
tyrants, vs. kings, 81–85
unconditional forgiveness,
177–78, 191–95. See also divine
forgiveness; forgiveness, as
conditional
Index
unforgivable acts, 153, 162–63,
219–20
universal salvation, 195–96,
198–99, 202–3; and forgiveness,
204–9. See also apokatastasis
venia (pardon), 92–93, 131–32
Virgil, Aeneid, 81, 106–7, 128
virtue, and forgiveness,
incompatible in Aristotle,
224–26; no one possesses wholly,
226–27
virtues, Roman, 86–87; clemency
as, 94–95, 100
voluntary wrongdoing and
forgiveness, 20, 58
vulnerability and forgiveness,
49–50
Waal, Frans de, 40
Weinstock, Stefan, 118
Winston, David, 22, 132
women, and clemency, 98–114;
in declamations, 111–13; and
forgiveness, 123–25; marriage
of, as political alliance, 103;
and forgiveness (see gender;
Menander)
Xenophon, Cyropaedia, 55–58
Yom Kippur. See Atonement, Day of