Plato equated humiliating a child with the capital crime of hubris

Evidence

Mēte plēgais. Not by blows. Mēte hubrizousi. Not by humiliation — the word hubris in this context is the same Greek word that gives us the modern English hubris, but in classical Greek it is much more legally specific: hubris is the deliberate degradation of one person by another. It is the crime of humiliation. In Athenian law, hubris against a free person was a capital offense. You could be executed for inflicting hubris on a citizen. Plato is using exactly that word. And he is saying: do not educate children with hubris. That is to say — do not inflict, on children, the kind of degradation you would, in a court of law, execute a man for inflicting on his neighbor. — , The Rod and the Child, 393

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies that Greek hubris means the specific legal crime of deliberate degradation, unlike modern usage.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the legal gravity Plato wanted attached to child-rearing, contrasted with modern law’s near-total non-protection of children from humiliation.