S.'s monograph on envy and jealousy in Classical Athenian oratory, comedy and tragedy contributes to the growing body of work on the emotions in Humanities and Social Sciences research or what R. Leys calls the ‘turn to affect’ (‘The Turn to Affect: a Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37 [2011], 434–72). In the introduction, S. outlines the limitations of earlier lexical approaches and opts for a combination of lexical research with what he calls (after R.A. Kaster) a ‘script’ based approach. Kaster carefully defines emotional scripts as narratives that express ‘judgments, beliefs and desires’ in texts written by Roman elites (R.A. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome [2005], pp. 9–10). S. extends this approach to include the scripts of modern psychology as comparanda.
In Chapter 1, S. summarises modern theories of the emotions and makes useful distinctions between English terms for ‘envy’ in order to define emotion scripts (or ‘prototypes’). He implies that these scripts, like ‘covetous envy’ or ‘possessive jealousy’, are transferable to other places and times. Amid anecdotal material (‘Those who are envious often express themselves with such comments as …’), S. tells us what various researchers conclude (‘Rawls argues that there are three conditions required for general envy …’), but he does not tell us how they reached these conclusions. It is therefore unclear how these modern scripts map onto the highly rhetorical ancient sources or what they might tell us about the relation between the emotions and cognition. Still, S.'s interdisciplinary approach yields two useful observations. First, that envy and jealousy can be masked by other emotions. And second, that jealousy, unlike envy, arises from an exclusive relationship with the person or object that triggers it. Like the assertion that jealousy carries less of a social stigma than envy, however, these observations may also mask a certain universalism.
In Chapter 3, S. turns to Greek expressions of envy and jealousy. In a review of lists of passages in which phthonos and its cognates appear, S. notes that phthonos covers a broader range of scripts than do English ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’. But lists stint on context. Among the kotos passages listed, S. mentions Aeschylus' ‘envious rivalry’ against Euripides in Frogs (844) and Clytemnestra's ‘grudge’ against Cassandra in Agamemnon (1261). Here the shared use of kotos is noteworthy precisely because the motivations, contexts and genres in which it occurs are so different. In Frogs, Dionysus tells Aeschylus not to heat up his innards in anger and with kotos (καὶ μὴ πρὸς ὀργὴν σπλάγχνα θερμήνῃς κότῳ). In the comedy's poetic contest, and spoken by its inconsistent judge, envious rivalry is attended by hyperbole. In Agamemnon, Cassandra puts the word in the mouth of Clytemnestra. How does this appeal to kotos by its target affect our reading of the script to which it is assigned? The Greek emotions may be guided by scripts, but these scripts are complicated by the literary narratives in which they are embedded.
In Chapter 4, S. considers Aristotle's account of the emotions, principally in the Rhetoric. For Aristotle, phthonos is felt by bad people against people similar to themselves, regardless of whether the envied object/attribute is deserved or not. Aristotle makes a distinction between phthonos (envy) and to nemesan (indignation) or between what S. usefully calls ‘bad phthonos’ and ‘good phthonos’. This distinction guides the overall argument of the book. The chapter illustrates the overlap and differences between Aristotle's account of the emotions and those of modern psychology and the overlap and differences between Aristotle's account and those of Classical authors. I am not fully convinced that the two aims complement each other. The implication that Aristotle's account of envy successfully mediates between the ancient authors and the conclusions of modern psychology only raises the question of the relevance of the latter; S.'s discussion of Aristotle stands on its own.
The distinction between good and bad phthonos is the focus of Chapter 5 on the Attic Orators. S. identifies two uses to which phthonos is put in forensic speeches: in accusations against opponents (they are motivated by bad phthonos) and as an emotion to be aroused or suppressed in a jury. In the case of the latter, he notes that nowhere in the corpus does a speaker attempt to arouse bad phthonos in his listeners. The chapter includes excellent summaries of complex legal cases including Demosthenes' Against Leptines. In this case, support for exemptions from liturgies requires the speaker to accuse his opponent of being motivated by bad phthonos while suppressing it in the jurors; the point is to prove that the wealthy deserve their exemptions. It is perhaps not surprising that jurors are encouraged to feel good phthonos, what Aristotle calls to nemesan, in cases dealing with money, honours and power. What is somewhat surprising is the paucity of this strategy among the orators, a fact that S. explains by the fact that they use the same word for bad and good envy, i.e. phthonos.
Chapters 6 and 7 treat the arousal of political phthonos in drama beginning with how it provokes comic pleasure in an audience. S. argues that feelings of envy for the money, power and perks of politicians is the source of this pleasure and, following Bakhtin, that comedy provides an outlet for an emotion that might turn ugly outside the theatre. In Chapter 6 this conclusion is explored in brief discussions of Acharnians, Wasps and Knights in which the activation of phthonos – or at least bad phthonos – is a kind of hidden comic weapon: it is an emotion that causes delight precisely because it is proscribed. The chapter would have benefited from further discussion of the Bakhtinian effect and the ways in which parody incites envy.
Chapter 7 includes brief discussions of the phthonos experienced by dramatic characters. In his discussion of Ajax, S. argues that Ajax feels (bad) phthonos towards Odysseus over the possession of Achilles' arms, even though this emotion is not specifically attributed to or claimed by Ajax. This conclusion seems plausible but also raises the question of a logic of reading that attributes feelings to characters based on their actions, or on the findings of modern psychology. We are left to wonder why these characters do not attribute their own actions to good phthonos or the actions of others to bad phthonos.
The final and longest chapter deals with ‘sexual jealousy’ in tragedy and, to a lesser extent, in oratory and New Comedy. S. reads Euripides' Medea (contra Konstan, 2003), Sophocles' Trachiniae and Euripides' Andromache as studies in sexual jealousy (D. Konstan, ‘Before Jealousy’, in D. Konstan and N.K. Rutter [edd.], Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: the Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece [2003], pp. 7–27). Here again, phthonos is neither claimed by nor attributed to the three female protagonists but is inferred in the interplay of other emotions, principally anger. The conclusion that Medea, Deianeira and Andromache feel sexual jealousy may seem obvious while the extent to which S. takes a lexical approach to erotic emotions (in words for ‘bed’, for example) is somewhat at odds with his script approach. Defined in terms of anger towards a rival, exclusivity and covetous envy, S. shows how sexual jealousy involves a complex set of emotional responses in both female and male characters (Orestes in Andromache). S. observes that the sexual jealousy of female characters in extant tragedy may explain its almost complete absence in male characters, a point that deserves further exploration.
S.'s book is a serious contribution to our understanding of the emotions in Athenian drama and oratory. He makes a good case for the limits of a lexical approach to the subject, but the methodology is sometimes strained by an insufficiently critical assumption that the ancient emotions can be elucidated by the insights of modern psychology.
