ABSTRACT
Hybris is one of the most familiar Greek words, often used in English in untranslated form by people who have never learned Greek at all. The first point to notice, in view of the fact that Konon showed his hybris by crowing like a cock, is that hybris is not confined to human beings. Hybris in fact is connected with koros, 'fullness' or 'satiety'. Another activity characteristic of hybris is fighting and doing physical harm to people. Hybris may also show itself in an act of taking from someone else a thing which belongs to him, or preventing him from receiving what should be his. Besides, the Athenian law explicitly forbids anyone to treat a slave with hybris; it cannot have been illegal to treat a slave as a slave, and so treatment of a person as a slave cannot be the definition of hybris.
