E. M. Cope, Commentary on the Rhetoric of Aristotle

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This section is the commencement of the third division of the analysis of shame and its opposite; the subjective view of them, shewing how they appear in the persons themselves who are affected by them.

‘The likely subjects of shame themselves are, first of all men of such a disposition, or in such a state of mind, as if they had certain others standing to them in the same relation as those of whom we said they stand in awe’. Such are persons whom they respect and admire, whom they regard as authorities, whose judgment and opinions they look up to. A somewhat complicated assemblage of words to express this simple meaning, that the disposition to shame is the same state of mind as that which has been before described as felt in the presence of certain classes of persons of whom we stand in awe; which are immediately specified. ‘These were (i. e. are, as we described them, ὧν τις τῆς δόξης φροντίζει, τῶν θαυμάζοντων, καὶ οὓς θαυμάζει κ.τ.λ. ante §§ 14, 15) either those that we admire, or that admire us, or by whom we wish to be admired, or those from whom we require any aid or service which we shall not obtain if we lose our credit with them; and these either as actually looking on, actual spectators (of what we say or do), of which Cydias’ harangue on the allotment of Samos furnishes an example—for he required them to imagine the entire Greek people to be standing round the Athenians in a circle, as actual spectators, and not mere (future or expectant) listeners, of the decree they are about to make—or if such be near at hand, or likely to be listeners’ (to what we have to say: this especially for the deliberative speaker).

The Σάμου κληρουχία here referred to is not the allotment of the Samian lands amongst Athenian citizens after the revolt of the island and its subsequent reduction by Pericles in 440 B.C. Thucydides, who gives an account of the treatment of the Samians after their defeat, I 117, makes no mention of any such allotment. It is referred by Ruhnken, Hist. Crit., and by Grote, Hist. of Gr. X 407 and note, 408, to Timotheus' conquest of Samos in 366, and the subsequent Athenian settlement there in 352; of the former of which Cornelius Nepos speaks, Vit. Timoth. c. 1, ap. Clinton F. H. sub anno 440. It was against this allotment of Samos that Cydias (of whom nothing seems to be known beyond this notice, his name does not even occur in Baiter and Sauppe's list of Orators,) made his appeal to the Athenian assembly, and invited them to decide the question of spoliation, as though all Greece were standing round them looking on. Isocrates, Paneg. § 107, is obliged to defend his countrymen from the reproach (ὀνειδίζειν) of this and similar practices, not specially named, by the plea that the appropriation of the territory was not due to rapacity, but solely to the desire of securing the safety of the desolated properties by planting a colony to defend them.

‘And therefore also men in misfortune don't like (are ashamed) to be seen by their quondam rivals or emulators, because these are admirers’; and therefore, by the rule previously laid down, they are ashamed to appear before them in this undignified and melancholy condition.