The prime minister has been sounding off about the importance of 'respect', which he does not define but clearly thinks is a vote-winner. In fact, as ancient Greeks saw, 'respect' - aidôs - is the other side of a far less cuddly emotion, 'shame'. Aidôs in Greek is to do with the judgement one makes about one's self- image in front of other people - either positively recognising someone else's status ('respect'), or acknowledging a sense of inhibition at the way one has oneself performed ('shame'). Feeling 'abashed' about oneself before others might cover both usages.

In Homer, aidôs tends to be generated by external sanctions, i.e. by what other people will say about you if you behave in a certain way. When Andromache begs her husband Hector to defend Troy from behind its fortifications, Hector replies that he would feel nothing but aidôsbefore Trojans and their wives if he slunk like a coward from the fighting; besides, he adds, 'my heart forbids me, since I have trained myself to be a good warrior, to take my place in the front line and try to win glory for my father and myself'.

When near the end of the Iliad, however, Hector admits that he has destroyed the army by his stupidity in leading them out to confront Achilles, he says he feels nothing but aidôs before Trojans and their wives in case some second-rater says of him 'Hector trusted in his might and destroyed his people'. He concludes 'better to waste no time but to get to grips [with Achilles myself] and find out to which of us Zeus hands the victory'. Driven by aidôs to perform heroics in battle, Hector is also driven by it to realise that he has made a wrong judgement and then to shoulder the responsibility of trying to put it right.

Aidôs is clearly a powerful force for good, but later Greeks wondered whether the external sanction was enough. What, for example, of the criminal who could always escape detection? Aidôs would have no effect on him. It awaited the fifth-century philosopher Democritus to think of aidôs as a form of internal sanction, rooted in some concept of conscience, when he argued that one should feel aidôs first and foremost not before others but before oneself - the only way to ensure that one's behaviour corresponded with one's ideals.

One can see why respec', man, should appeal to a politician. How they would love a little. They might get some if they occasionally showed some of its other half, shame.