Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As a moral term ‘shame’ appears to have disappeared almost entirely from normal discourse (bar the self-satisfied ‘fat-shaming’). That tells us much about ourselves.

Aristotle discusses the term in some depth. He does not see it as an active virtue, but rather as a ‘condition involving a range of feelings’, which he defines as: ‘A kind of pain and agitation concerning the class of evils, whether present, past or future, that seem to bring a person into disrespect’. His definition is well in tune with the evidence of ancient Greek literature, in which the presence or absence of shame puts your reputation at stake. Mythical heroes often challenged each other by exclaiming: ‘What will people say of you if …’

Politicians regularly made the point (‘What will the Greek world make of Athens …?’). The Athenian Demosthenes (d. 322 BC), who led the fight against the Macedonian king Philip II’s efforts to enslave Greece, said that ‘the prospect of shame at what has been done is the greatest compulsion upon free men’ and claimed that his own political career had been concerned first and foremost with putting the honour of Athens and her reputation above all self-interest ‘as a power willing to sacrifice herself on behalf of the wronged and oppressed’. Such sentiments meant that ‘when men’s fated end comes, they do not lie forgotten and without honour but are remembered and flourish eternally in men’s praises’.

Shame, in other words, could make you feel bad about yourself after the event, but could also act prospectively to prevent you behaving badly in the first place. That was why Aristotle saw shame as an important feeling to encourage in the young, ‘because they live by feelings which can lead them to do wrong’. The shame they learnt to feel would guide them along the path of virtue.

But one can only imagine trash like the Andrew Tates and Russell Brands and others of their like rejoicing in epitaphs celebrating them as the scum of the digital age.