I have argued in the previous chapter that the ancient Greek and Latin terms sungignôskô and ignosco, usually rendered as forgive in English, do not properly bear that meaning, as forgiveness is commonly understood today – that is, a response to an offense that involves a moral transformation on the part of the forgiver and forgiven and a complex of sentiments and behaviors that include sincere confession, remorse, and repentance. I suggested that, on the contrary, the appeasement of anger and the relinquishing of revenge were rather perceived as resting on the restoration of the dignity of the injured party, whether through compensation or gestures of deference, or else by way of discounting the offense on the grounds that it was in some sense involuntary or unintentional. Is it true, then, that remorse and repentance played little or no role in the process of reconciliation between wrongdoer and victim? If not, did the Greeks and Romans have some moral equivalent to our modern forgiveness in their vocabulary and ethical system?

In this chapter, I approach an answer to these questions through an examination of scenes of reconciliation and the assuaging of anger, where we can perhaps catch a glimpse of how these processes worked in practice.