NO SHAME WITHOUT DIVINE NECESSITY: POLITICS AND IMPIETY IN PLATO’S LAWS AND EURIPIDES’ HIPPOLYTUS

Plato’s Laws devotes considerable attention to heterodox ‘impious’ criminals. Why are these criminals so worrisome for Plato’s Cretan city? Using evidence from both Plato and Euripides’ Hippolytus, this paper investigates why Plato might have thought that religious heterodoxy was so dangerous. The answer lies in the interaction between religious practice and the prevailing ‘shame culture’ that characterized the moral economy of polis-life. While scholars have long noticed that the affective power of shame plays an important role in Greek political philosophy, including the Laws, few have recognized the way in which the shame response is uniquely vulnerable to the breakdown in social consensus that both Plato and Euripides feared would follow from a breakdown in cultic consensus.