the cross-cultural study of the emotions requires a special kind of self-awareness on the part of the scholar. For we tend to think of our own emotional repertoire as natural and to assume, consequently, that it is universal. People everywhere, we suppose, must experience anger, love and fear in much the way we do. How could we begin to understand them if they did not?

And yet there is ample reason to suppose that this is not the case. Anthropologists have identified many such ostensible disparities or décalages between different cultures. In her book Unnatural Emotions. Catherine Lutz describes her stay with the Ifaluk, a people who live on a small atoll in the South Pacific. One of the fundamental emotion terms that she encountered among them was ‘fago’, which she parses as the combined expression ‘compassion/love/sadness’. ‘This concept required’, she writes, ‘more than did most other Ifaluk emotional concepts, an effort to disentangle my own native emotional understanding from theirs’ (Lutz 1988: 119). Again, Michelle Rosaldo (1984: 142) reports that ‘the Balinese no more feel “guilt” than we feel lek. the Balinese emotion closest to our “shame” ‘. It is not unreasonable to suppose that comparable differences exist in relation to classical Greek.

To take an illustration from classical Greece, Aristotle defines anger or orgê as ‘a desire, accompanied by pain, for a perceived revenge, on account of a perceived slight on the part of those who are not fit to slight one or one's own’ (Rhetoric 2.2, 1378a31—33).