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

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And those who have committed either many wrongs themselves, or wrongs of the same kind as they are now suffering: for it seems almost no injustice at all, when a man has the same wrong inflicted on him as he himself was in the habit of inflicting (upon others); an assault, for instance, committed on a man who is habitually guilty of wanton insolence or outrage.

αἰκία and ὕβρις are thus legally distinguished. αἰκία is personal violence, a blow, or an assault, εἰς τὸ σῶμα αἰκίζεσθαι πληγαῖς, Pol. VIII (V) 10, 1311 b 24, and is the subject of a δίκη or private action between citizen and citizen. ὕβρις is threefold, (1) δἰ αἰσχρουργίας, (2) διὰ πληγῶν (this is further defined μετὰ προπηλακισμοῦ, which distinguishes it from αἰκία), διὰ λόγων; that is, a violation of the feeling of personal dignity and sense of honour, humiliating, degrading, scornful, wanton, language or acts; the mental injury constituting a great part of the offence. This appears in Aristotle's definition of it, Rhet. II 2. 5, τὸ βλάπτειν καὶ λυπεῖν ἐφ᾽ οἷς αἰσχύνη ἐστὶ τῷ πάσχοντι, μὴ ἵνα τι γένηται αὐτῷ (not for any profit to himself) ἀλλ᾽ ὅπως ἡσθῇ (out of mere wantonness and pleasure in the insult itself). So that ὕβρις is a mixture of intentional insult and wantonness or ‘wanton insult’. To the same effect is the observation in I 13. 10, that it προσσημαίνει τὴν προαίρεσιν, ‘implies deliberate intention’. This then is the ground of the distinction between αἰκία and ὕβρις, and the reason for the latter being made the object of a γραφή, or public prosecution, the honour of the state being considered as compromised in the insult to one of its members. See further on this subject, Meier und Schömann Der Attische Process, p. 319 seq.

Hippodamus, the legislator of Miletus, who drew the plans and laid out the Piraeus, and was the architect of Thurii on its foundation, and of Rhodes, divided crimes into three kinds, as we learn from Pol. II 8, 1267 b 38. περὶ: ὧν γὰρ αἱ δίκαι γίνονται, τρία ταῦτ᾽ εἶναι τὸν ἀριθμόν, ὕβριν, βλάβην, θάνατον, i. e. (1) crimes by which the feelings are wounded and the sense of personal dignity wantonly outraged, (2) those which involve loss or damage to person or property, and (3) murder and homicide.