Kazantzidis and Spatharas’s Ancient Emotions series, of which this is the fourth volume, is one of many confirmations that the study of emotion in ancient Greece and Rome is now a mature sub-discipline. Publication of a new edited volume in that field, however, is not always unequivocal cause for celebration: all too often, contributors repurpose work on their real interests in ways that contribute only tangentially to research on emotion. It is a pleasure to report that the present volume is not at all of that sort. The quality of the contributions is uniformly high, and a close focus on emotion and its intersection with memory is maintained throughout.
Memory and emotion are intimately entwined. Memory’s role in the formation of experience, knowledge and concepts is one of the operations that enable and inform emotion, but memory too is affectively charged, both at the point of formation and at the point of recall (as several of the volume’s contributors emphasise, with appropriate reference to work in cognitive psychology and related disciplines). Though some chapters tend more towards the role of memory in emotion and others towards that of emotion in memory, the interplay of the two is visible throughout.
Emotion’s role in focusing attention is central to E. Minchin’s opening chapter, ‘Emotions, Memory, and the Wrath of Achilles: Observations from Cognitive Psychology’. Achilles’ perspectives in Iliad 9 on the quarrel in Book 1 are heavily conditioned by persisting emotional attitudes towards a highly emotive episode, but Minchin argues that in Book 1, too, Achilles’ anger leads him to forget the prosocial impulses that lay behind his initial intervention. I am not sure, however, that ‘the poet has left us, the external audience, no helpful clues’ (p. 17) as to how and why Achilles becomes alienated from the comrades he had intervened to help. A crucial stage in Achilles’ readiness to use the Achaeans as pawns in his strategy of demonstrating Agamemnon’s folly (1.240–4) is clearly signalled when he castigates the Achaeans as ‘nobodies’ who acquiesce in Agamemnon’s outrages (1.231–2) and act as his accomplices in the removal of Briseis (1.298–9). In his fury he takes their refusal to side with him as complicity. As Minchin says, ‘the emotional impact of that quarrel … has clouded Achilles’ ability to think beyond what is critical to himself’. The Greek word for that is atê. Achilles uses it of Agamemnon at 1.412, before it becomes the core of Phoenix’s warning that Achilles, too, may come to regret letting anger blind him to his own best interests, which include the interests of his friends (9.502–14). There is scope for bringing Minchin’s use of contemporary psychology into relation with the emic categories of the poem.
J.L. Ready focuses on ‘The Tension between Memory and Emotion in Homer’s Audience’, a tension that for him lies in audiences’ and readers’ ability to remain emotionally involved in the narrative even when they know (and so might be expected to remember) its outcome. Ready’s answer (drawing on his 2023 monograph, Immersion, Identification, and the Iliad) is identification, a vernacular notion, but one for which he proposes a ‘more rigorous’ model drawn from ‘media studies, communications, and psychology’ (p. 23) and which he tests in an analysis of Agamemnon’s aristeia in Iliad 11 (cf. Immersion, pp. 83–93). Ready’s focus on the relation between character and audience emotion brings an indispensable perspective (shared by J. Devereaux’s later chapter), but there is a sense that this model slides too readily from phenomena that are easy to assent to (e.g. that we are emotionally invested in fictional characters realising their goals) to others that need more justification (e.g. that we adopt characters’ perspectives and share their emotions). If Agamemnon strives to achieve his goals and rejoices when he does so, the intentional object of Agamemnon’s affective states consists in his goals; if I fervently hope that Agamemnon will achieve his goals and rejoice when he does so, the object of my affective states is not my goals, and it is not straightforwardly Agamemnon’s goals either, but rather Agamemnon’s achievement of his goals. If Agamemnon and I in some sense constitute a ‘we’, this is a ‘we’ of which I am aware and he is not, whose goals Agamemnon can realise but I cannot. The audience member and Agamemnon do not share precisely the same perspective, and the intentional structure of their emotions differs.
P. Hardie explores ‘The Emotional Memories of Internal Narrators’ in Homer, Virgil and Ovid. ‘Homer is sparing in his use of the vocabulary of memory when his characters remember their pasts’ (p. 46), but emotional recall of previous emotions in Virgil and Ovid tends to merge past and present. As a corollary, one might mention that references to memory are regular in Homer when it is others’ expressions of emotion that trigger characters’ emotions (e.g. Il. 19.301–2, 338–9, 24.509–12; Od. 4.183–202).
In ‘Religious Emotions and Mnemonic Discourses: The Gold Tablets of Memory’ M.F. McClay maps a distinction between doctrinal and imagistic modes of religious experience on to the better-known distinction between semantic and episodic memory to contrast those Orphic gold leaves that emphasise memorisation of instructions with a minority that encompass affectively charged memories of the profoundly emotional experience of initiation.
In ‘Remembering Emotions’ A. Chaniotis surveys the use of emotional memories in inscriptions, arguing ‘that the reproduction of an emotional episode that occurred in the past served specific purposes: it aimed to arouse or enhance emotions, to shape attitudes and belief, and to persuade’ (p. 97). Chaniotis is right to emphasise that ancient historians and Classicists ‘do not study what people experienced or remembered but only what they communicate in writing about their memories and experiences’, but this is not simply because ‘we lack the tools of a modern psychologist or neuro-scientist to approach individual memories’ (pp. 87–8). Though there are subjective experiences that people choose not to communicate, no one (as Wittgenstein insists) has a private language for such experiences; no feeling to which one attends – whether one’s own or another’s – is wholly unaffected by the intersubjective cultural and linguistic categories that structure experience. Ancient historians and Classicists are in fact somewhat better placed to study these than neuroscientists.
N. Fisher’s contribution, ‘Exploitation of (Alleged) Memories in Demosthenes and Aeschines’, treats cases in which these two orators do and do not use second-person forms to steer their audiences’ present emotional reactions by ‘reminding’ them of how they allegedly reacted on past occasions, exploiting forms of ‘common knowledge’ and ‘emotional community’ to enhance the persuasiveness of the speaker’s interpretation.
S.M. Connell’s chapter, ‘Aristotle on Memory and Emotion in Human and Non-human Animals’, is key in its detailed demonstration that Aristotle sees both memory and emotion as cognitive functions that humans and non-human animals share. Emotions are thus ‘cognitive’ in a sense broader than that often attributed to Aristotle in the Rhetoric. Connell rightly notes that the Rhetoric’s accounts of emotion are functional for the purposes of that treatise, but not definitive for the study of all forms of affective experience. That being the case, there is perhaps no need to press the argument that non-human anger may resemble the human in involving ‘revenge’ (timôria) for some form of slight (oligôria, pp. 134–5). Though many non-human animals are in fact acutely sensitive to status-challenge, Aristotle never associates timôria or the associated notions of timê and axia with non-human behaviour (though he does credit various species with thymos). The emphasis on timôria, timê and axia is a feature of the Rhetoric’s account of anger in human societies; when offering a more general definition of the emotion that might also in principle fit non-human behaviour, Aristotle uses not timôria but antilypêsis (De an. 1.1, 403a30–1).
In a dense and stimulating chapter, ‘Emotive Memory Traces in Roman Literature’, J. Devereaux investigates how the encoding of ‘memory traces’ of embodied emotional experience in Latin texts facilitates readers’ engagement with texts’ emotional affordances, both by exploiting intertextual networks of cultural models and by enlisting readers’ own emotional experience, itself partly formed by exposure to such networks of culturally encoded traces.
E. Strazdins, ‘Herodes Atticus, Material Memories, and the Expression and Reception of Grief’, discusses Herodes Atticus’ use of monuments on his private estate – portrait herms of his favourite foster-sons, inscribed with curses against vandals, and the Arch of Eternal Concord, commemorating his wife, Regilla – as ways of recording his grief and of enlisting the public to share it, which drew the mockery of both Philostratus (VS 2.1.558–9) and Lucian (Dem. 24). These monuments are ‘a snapshot of his larger memorial programme that aimed, via largescale public euergetism, to build his and his family’s memory into the significant spaces of Greek culture and history’ (p. 190).
In ‘Memory and Emotion in Philostratus’ Heroicus’ J. Downie makes productive use of J. Assmann’s categories of cultural (archival) memory and communicative (affective) memory to show how Philostratus uses emotion to bridge the gap between these two forms. The dialogue between the Greek vinedresser, a passionate devotee of the hero, Protesilaus, and the Phoenician sailor, keen to exploit the cultural capital of Greek paideia, effectively demonstrates that continued participation in communities of affective and communicative memory is essential to keeping cultural memory alive.
The final chapter, ‘Nostalgia and Reading in Augustine’s Confessions’, by M. Mastrangelo treats the ‘nostalgic pose’ that underpins the Christian saint’s reflections on his past, his spiritual progress and especially his formative experiences as a reader of pagan and Christian texts. Though Mastrangelo may stretch the reference of nostalgia beyond its normal remit, he gives ample evidence both of that intrinsically blended, mixed affective state and of a range of other intriguingly mixed emotions that complicate the relation between past experience, the emotions felt at the time and the emotions elicited by memories of the person one used to be.
The volume’s thematic coherence in dealing throughout with questions of fundamental importance to students and scholars of ancient emotions is high. Its only shortcoming lies in uneven attention to detail on the production side. One chapter suffers from a very high number of typos, including multiple misspellings of scholars’ names. That chapter is one of several to misattribute scholars’ work (including my own). In another chapter, an intrusive line of Latin quoted elsewhere twice displaces the author’s original text, whatever it may have been. De Gruyter clearly do not check for such things, so authors and editors will have to.
