Over the last 25 years, the subject of human emotions – what they are, how they operate and what they contribute to human flourishing – has attracted attention across disciplines as divergent as neuroscience and music theory. The pioneer of emotion research in Classics, to whom this edited volume is warmly dedicated, is David Konstan. All the contributors have benefited from Konstan's personal and intellectual mentorship, and their contributions bear the unmistakable mark of his careful historicism and interdisciplinary approach.
The book takes the growing body of Classical scholarship on emotions in a welcome new direction, correcting the ‘fixation on negative emotions’ (p. 2) such as anger, envy and remorse with a turn to positive emotions. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Hope’, ‘Joy and Happiness’, and ‘Fellow-Feeling and Kindness’. One could construct a narrative relating these categories – hope as an aspiration for happiness, fellow-feeling and mercy as the emotions and inclinations that proceed from a privileged position of felicity – but the introduction does not offer such a narrative, and the reader is left wondering how these broader categories hang together beyond their loose affiliation as ‘positive’ emotions. This is a minor shortcoming, however. The introduction does an excellent job paying homage to Konstan's legacy while delineating the uncharted terrain explored by the subsequent chapters.
D. Cairns’ opening chapter on the metaphorical construction of hope in Greek poetry lays the groundwork for understanding the subtle operations of this emotion, quickly dispelling the reader's hope of finding an uplifting alternative to traditional Greek pessimism. Drawing on the principles of cognitive linguistics, Cairns surveys the Archaic and Classical imagery surrounding elpis to recover the affective experience of hope in Greek life and to compare this experience to our own. While the semantic range of elpis spans neutral expectation as well as desiderative hope, in its desiderative manifestations the Greek emotion largely overlaps with English hope. But whereas English hope is typically celebrated, Cairns shows that Greek elpis metaphors typically portray it as an ambivalent force because of its potential to mislead and delude; elpis thus emerges as another symptom of human ignorance and impotence in Greek thought.
D. Nelis’ chapter on emotions in Virgil's Georgics detects a comparable ambivalence surrounding spes and related emotions in a Latin context. His reading of the poem reveals a continuity between the emotional world of the farmers struggling to live productively and harmoniously in nature with the emotional life of Rome's tumultuous political world in the aftermath of Julius Caesar's assassination. Nelis tracks the poet's oscillation between hope and despair at the possibility of success in both arenas, where a common vulnerability to fortune and divine interference threatens human, animal and vegetal flourishing. The poem suggests that the solution lies in strictly regulating emotions to manage better the dangers of an unpredictable world. The chapter ends with the poet's precarious and potentially fruitless hope that the new Caesar will herald a better world for his Roman audience.
A turn to the Greek novel in the final chapter on hope by L. Fulkerson offers a more sanguine picture of this emotion in ancient literature. Fulkerson emphasises the future orientation of elpis and retrospective evaluations of its justifiability to explain both negative attitudes towards hope typical of Greek literature and the uniquely positive role of hope in the novel. Because the novel predictably rewards the hopes of its protagonists, elpis is a marker of their special status rather than their deluded judgement, while the hopes of secondary characters are usually disappointed to set this status in greater relief. Fulkerson ends with an Aristotelian explanation of the peculiar operations of hope in this genre; hope according to Aristotle is characteristic of the young, the virtuous and the survivors of misfortune, stereotypes to which the novel's protagonists largely conform.
The section on joy and happiness begins with C.’s chapter on gaudium in Roman comedy. C. instructively distinguishes joy from happiness by drawing attention to joy's ephemerality, physicality and sudden, eruptive nature. Both Plautus and Terence depict characters overcome by this experience, but where Plautine joy is shadowed by sorrow at its eventual passing and the awareness of mutability in human fortune, Terence positively emphasises joy's transformational and elevating power. Terence's characters revel in their joy, experiencing it as a momentary taste of divine bliss; their anxiety stems not from joy's transience but its unintended effects on social relationships. Responses to another character's joy reveal a network of private interests that often conflict, allowing Terence to explore the potentially isolating effects of joy.
M. Putnam shifts our attention to the literary dimension of emotion concepts in his chapter on ‘felicitous’ poetics in Horace's poetry. Ancient praise of Horace's felicitas prompts Putnam to ask what this emotional designation means as a literary evaluation. Choosing Carmen 4.2 as a case study, Putnam locates the source of Horatian felicity in the successful emulation of seemingly inimitable Greek masters, whom Horace masters in turn by submitting the scope and grandeur of Pindaric lyric and Homeric epic to the discipline of the refined Horatian ode. Literary felicity follows when a risky act of literary daring is, through deft selection, discretion and discipline, improbably accomplished.
M. Graver offers the first philosophical perspective on positive emotions in her chapter on Seneca and the gaudium tradition. Graver approaches the Senecan corpus as a fruitful site of Stoic debate over the role and value of joy in the sage's life. Seneca often assumes the orthodox Stoic view of joy as a normative response to the exercise of one's own virtuous activity, but he also acknowledges that joy is an appropriate response to externalities when they are understood to be ‘preferred indifferents’ rather than absolute goods. Joy can be a stable, psychological condition as well as an occurrent, affective event. Joy is never the ultimate good but a supervienient adjunct to virtue. The multiple and sometimes conflicting philosophical conceptions of joy at work in Seneca show him to be a dynamic thinker willing to explore philosophical alternatives without compromising his Stoic allegiance.
C. Gill interrogates Stoicism from a modern perspective: can we endorse the Stoic way of life, if it means accepting an emotionally barren and socially detached life? Gill maintains that we can, arguing first that Stoicism admits a wider range of affective response than the three eupatheiai codified by the doxagraphic tradition, and second that these emotions are expressive of a deeply embedded social existence. Seeing eupathic emotions in the context of a practical ethical project, as we do in the writings of Marcus Aurelius, reveals a richness and connectedness to the emotional life of the Stoic aspirant, whose welcoming and kindly disposition towards the world derives from his understanding of his place in an ordered and providential whole.
The final section, on fellow-feeling and kindness, begins with a historical survey of goodwill in Attic forensic oratory by E. Sanders. Sanders compares rhetorical theory with oratorical practice, and notes where the two diverge. Aristotle makes careful distinctions between reciprocal friendship (philia) and unidirectional goodwill (eumenia/eunoia), while forensic speeches assume reciprocity in their appeals to both. Aristotle and pseudo-Aristotle make specific recommendations for when to request goodwill (prosecutors in the peroration, defendants in the prologue), but this pattern varies in practice. The speaker's explicit bid for goodwill is less common than his use of covert strategies to elicit the jury's sympathy, such as emphasising his own goodwill towards the city, or presenting his character in a favourable light.
D. Armstrong's chapter returns to Hellenistic philosophy, where recent editions of Philodemus offer new insights into Epicurean theories of friendship and their application in a Roman social context. Armstrong identifies three levels of epicurean friendship ascending from those of mutual utility to pure pleasure independent of any obligation. The highest form of friendship exists between gods, but humans can access it retrospectively in the memory of a deceased friend, and strive for it in intermediate levels of friendship based on intimacy and affection. Armstrong devotes the second half of his chapter to showing the practical operations of these philosophical principles in Philodemus’ Roman reception, both among the low-ranking elite carving out an Epicurean space for themselves in a stratified political world, and among poets like Horace who depend on the support of wealthy patrons to create conditions for higher forms of friendship.
G. Clark's chapter on Augustine makes a theological case for love and the emotions generally in the life lived ‘in accordance with God’. Focusing on Book 14 of City of God, Clark argues that Augustine, following scriptural rather than philosophical practice, uses a range of terms for love not to distinguish types but to assimilate them into a general category of righteous love directed at God. Unlike ancient philosophers who condemn emotions for their bodily origin, Augustine claims the body as good in origin and vitiated by sin only when the will is misdirected. Clark's nuanced analysis of voluntas, understood as a combination of choice and desire, concludes with the idea that a properly aligned will generates positive emotions, including apparently ‘negative’ ones such as sadness and fear, because their objects are oriented by God.
The volume ends with M. Nussbaum's examination of mercy in Mozart's opera La Clemenza di Tito in light of Stoic views of clementia. As the title suggests, the opera's central theme is Titus’ heroic act of clemency: the Roman emperor pardons his best friend for making a failed attempt at his life. Why? To answer this question, Nussbaum distinguishes the ‘monarchical mercy’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is bestowed as a gift from on high, from the ‘egalitarian mercy’ of the classical tradition, which proceeds from an understanding that both judge and culprit share a common humanity and vulnerability to error. Formative of this latter view is the mitigating attitude of the Stoics towards punishment and culpability. Seneca's work on mercy and anger in particular shows us how a sympathetic imagination can lead to the triumph of love and forgiveness over destructive vengeance, a position borne out by the opera's stirring finale.
This book's focus on positive emotions clears fertile ground for new developments in the study of ancient emotions, offering a fitting tribute to Konstan's own groundbreaking work. One would have liked to see a greater distribution of subjects; Latin poetry and Hellenistic philosophy are disproportionately represented, while history is scarcely represented at all. The consistently high quality of the contributions, however, compensates for the uneven distribution. There is a missed opportunity, in this author's view, for offering an alternative to cognitivism in scholarly approaches to emotion – one that takes its bearings from Plato rather than Aristotle and the Stoics – but that leaves more for future studies to pursue in the wake of this important book.
