"... By contrast [to oligarchic constructions of upstarts as threats], the Athenian democratic ideology construed the threat to public order, the prime suspect of "paranomic" activity, as the hubristic individual - he who was strong enough and arrogant enough to seek to establish preeminence via the humiliation of others within the polis. By combining the language of the hubris law itself and Demosthenes' normative language in explicating that law, we may say that Athenians saw women, children, slaves, and (presumably) foreigners, along with the weaker of the citizens (i.e. those commanding few resources) as the potential objects of illegitimate activity, rather than the willful originators of threats to the public order. The powerful hubristic individual was imagined as seeking to establish hierarchical relations within the polis on his own terms by demonstrating his capacity to humiliate, by outrageously insulting weaker persons by speech or deed (especially sexual violation), and by seeking to do so with impunity. And if he (or the class of powerful persons he represented) were successful in establishing a secure "personal" social hierarchy within the polis, a social space free from the legal authority of the democratic state, it would clearly mean the end of the effective rule of the demos: this is why a successfully perpetrated, unchastised act of hubris could be characterized as signifying "the overthrow of the democracy."..."
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