Abstract

Politeness forms consist of linguistic strategies by means of which a speaker avoids potentially aggressive or directive requests in order to save his ‘face’ or his social reputation. As a part of pragmatics, these strategies concern the appropriateness of language use and imply colloquial interaction as well as sociolinguistic variants depending on both registers and the social and/or cultural background of the interlocutors.  This entry explores such strategies of politeness used in Ancient Greek.