While previous research has placed great emphasis on ὀργή, furor and ira, little interest has so far been devoted to the feeling of hatred, which has remained a great desideratum in emotional studies. Although several articles have been written on hatred, A.'s study, a revised version of his Ph.D. dissertation, is the first to investigate it as a phenomenon in its own right. For this purpose, A. examines the meaning of hatred from the end of the Roman Republic to the second century ce, enriching our understanding by exploring the emotion in all its facets. One of the virtues of this book is the method used to deduce emotions and the norms attached to them from historical records. A. takes the focus away from the usual lexical approach by emphasising problems related to translating emotional vocabulary. Thus, adopting R. Kaster's script-based approach (Emotion, Restraint, and Community [2005]), A. examines the emotion from a cognitive perspective by focusing on the processual understanding of hatred (p. 49). Although the added value of this approach has already been demonstrated by E. Sanders, who successfully drew on Kaster's work to complement the usual lexical methodology in a study on envy (Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens [2014], p. 5), it has been applied in few subsequent studies. Based on a modern cognitive understanding of the emotion, A. explores the three central components (scripts) of emotional processes of hating: its perception, its evaluation and, finally, the response (i.e. avoidance or intention to cause harm). Thus, A.'s aim is not to show how people felt, but rather to determine which emotions were attributed to which people or which emotions they could express (p. 63).

The book consists of eight chapters, followed by a substantial bibliography. Given the many challenges of grasping emotions, particularly the existing dichotomy between emotional states and their expression (pp. 52–63), A. studies the multifaceted nature of ancient hate-vocabulary, concluding that both the Greek (μῖσος, στυγέω, ἐχθρός) and Latin (odium, invidia) terms carry ambivalent meanings (pp. 87–106). These terms can also refer to cognate emotions, where the context in which they are used plays a significant role in connecting the terms with hatred. In Chapter 4 A. explores which forms of hatred were assessed by applying, mutatis mutandis, B. Rosenwein's concept of ‘emotional communities’ to the Roman aristocracy. Hatred is generally viewed as negative due to its strong destructive power, which, in contrast to aristocratic ideals, was ascribed to the mali principes such as Domitian, whose hatred was directed against the common good (p. 187). Of great importance are A.'s insights into the rhetorical use of hatred; he shows how political speeches deliberately evoked hatred against the accused, who endangered the common good. In this context, a morally good group was created and united in hatred against a bad and immoral person. It is unfortunate that A. devotes little space to the role of collective hate in a military context (he laconically summarises this phenomenon as ‘military utilization’, p. 114), in which soldiers also are united in hatred against the enemy, who is portrayed as a violator of social norms. In exploring collective hatred in rhetoric A. ignores the potentially devastating consequences of the communitisation of hatred. Importantly, compared to other emotions such as fear or grief, which can create emotional communities, hate, like anger (recently studied by P.A. Tuci, ‘Apronoētos Orgē’, in A. Kapellos [ed.], Xenophon on Violence [2019], pp. 31–5), is more prone to eliciting violent acts, such as assassinations or military conflict.

A. further stresses that displaying hatred was a sign of control, independence and strength among the emperors (p. 230). Following this, A. combats the solely negative connotation of hatred by convincingly showing that the rules for its display significantly depended on the context (p. 232), including the effect of the hatred (removal of a tyrant or destabilisation of the existing order), the target of the hatred (bad emperor or bad aristocrat) as well as the reason for the hatred (violation of social norms or personal interests).

The last section of the book explores the different strategies by which hatred and its expression could be controlled or deliberately evoked and simulated. In the first case study A. considers the different emotional reactions to the poisoning of Britannicus, particularly that of Octavia, who, unlike Agrippina, was capable of controlling her emotions due to her education (p. 237). This observation raises the question of whether women and men were thought to have different levels of emotional control. Unfortunately, we hear little about the expression of hatred by women in the previous chapters, even though related emotions such as anger and envy are often used as topoi for the female sex. More interesting is A.'s emphasis on the dichotomous evaluation of hatred: as part of their education, young aristocrats were taught not only to control emotions such as hatred but also to evoke or simulate them (p. 244). A. makes many other interesting observations: ways to contain hatred and its expression include self-reflection, redirection of hatred to a more acceptable target, masking and overplaying hatred and, as a last resort, withdrawal. As hatred cannot easily be eliminated, many different methods have been established to help people to control and channel this emotion in the best possible way. A. finally demonstrates that, while there are also strategies through which hatred is deliberately simulated and evoked, they are attested in the sources much less frequently than the control of hatred. The conclusions (pp. 271–4) of this study are slightly disappointing inasmuch as they give the results of each section of the book in a nutshell instead of integrating the observations en bloc into a larger framework.

The study would have benefited from a detailed discussion of the individual source passages (or fewer passages, but more context) and a systematic collection of the material. Readers are confronted with an embarras de richesses of material from different genres (speeches, letters, historiography, epic, poetry, philosophy etc.) packed into a small space. While A. adopts a broad perspective by considering and combining different genres in discussion, one wonders whether this method is beneficial to his argument. It might have been better to separate the genres or even the subjects displaying hatred (i.e. the emperor, the nobility and the collective) and likewise the public and private context. Additionally, more consideration might have been given to the question of how emotions such as hatred, and their valuation, changed among the Roman elite, particularly from the republican to the imperial period and in view of the different social circumstances. Of particular interest is emotional communitisation around the time of the end of the Republic, in the midst of the civil wars, where the evocation of hatred towards moral transgressions seems to have taken on greater importance due to its order-creating function. Furthermore, A.'s study calls for a comparison with the evaluation and handling of hatred in classical Athens, where, as in ancient Rome, it was not just devalued in terms of its impact (see D. Konstan, Anger, Hatred, and Genocide in Ancient Greece [2007]). As A. convincingly shows, hatred in antiquity was viewed as a moral emotion, whose evaluation depended less on general norms than on its impact on the community; this impact oscillated between potentially serious damage and the creation of order.

However, A. does a marvellous job of critically reflecting on the methodological approaches to studying emotions in history. The methodological value lies in the ability to grasp hate-related phenomena when the feeling is not described in emotional terms, but is instead only recognisable by the action. In particular, A.'s work encourages a shift away from a purely lexical approach to a cognitive investigation of the emotion by considering not only the affective but also the cognitive dimensions of hatred. Everyone concerned with emotions in the ancient world should acquire this book for their personal library.