Atimia
（
ἀτιμία). The forfeiture, in Greece, of a man's civil
rights. It was either total or partial. A man was totally deprived of his
rights—both for himself and for his descendants—when he was convicted of
murder, theft, false witness, partiality as arbiter, violence offered to a magistrate, and so
forth. This highest degree of
ἀτιμία excluded the person
affected by it from the Agora, and from all public assemblies; from the public sacrifices, and
from the law courts; or rendered him liable to immediate imprisonment if he was found in any
of these places. It was either temporary or perpetual, and either accompanied or not with
confiscation of property. Partial
ἀτιμία involved only the
forfeiture of some few rights, as, for instance, the right of pleading in court. Public
debtors were suspended from their civic functions till they discharged their debt to the
State. People who had once become altogether
ἄτιμοι were
very seldom restored to their lost privileges. The converse term to
ἀτιμία was
ἐπιτιμία. See
Lelyveld,
De Infamia ex Iure Attico (1835); Meier and Schömann,
Att. Process, p. 563; Wachsmuth,
Hellen. Alterth. (2d ed.), ii.
195 foll.; and the article
Infamia.
