KAKOS Mnemosyne Supplements Monographs on Greek and Roman Language and Literature Editorial Board G.J. Boter A. Chaniotis K. Coleman I.J.F. de Jong P.H. Schrijvers VOLUME 307 KAKOS Badness and Anti-Value in Classical Antiquity Edited by Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008 This book is printed on acid-free paper. ISSN: 0169-8958 ISBN: 978 9004 16624 0 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands CONTENTS ListofContributors.................................................... vii Chapter 1. GeneralIntroduction ..................................... 1 Ineke Sluiter Chapter 2. Generic Ethics and the Problem of Badness in Pindar .. 29 Kathryn Morgan Chapter 3. Ugliness and Value in the Life of Aesop.................... 59 Jeremy B. Lefkowitz Chapter 4. Beetle Tracks: Entomology, Scatology and the DiscourseofAbuse ................................................. 83 Deborah Steiner Chapter 5. ‘Bad’ Language in Aristophanes ......................... 119 Ian C. Storey Chapter 6. Badness and Intentionality in Aristophanes’ Frogs ....... 143 Ralph M. Rosen Chapter 7. Imagining Bad Citizenship in Classical Athens: Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae 730–876 ................................ 169 Matthew R. Christ Chapter 8. The Bad Boyfriend, the Flatterer and the Sykophant: Related Forms of the kakos inDemocraticAthens................. 185 Nick Fisher Chapter 9. KAKIA inAristotle......................................... 233 J.J. Mulhern Chapter 10. Pathos Phaulon: Aristotle and the Rhetoric of Phthonos... 255 Ed Sanders Chapter 11. The Disgrace of Matter in Ancient Aesthetics.......... 283 James I. Porter vi contents Chapter 12. With Malice Aforethought: The Ethics of malitia on StageandatLaw ................................................... 319 Elaine Fantham Chapter 13. ‘The Mind of an Ass and the Impudence of a Dog’: A ScholarGoneBad................................................ 335 Cynthia Damon Chapter 14. From Vice to Virtue: the Denigration and Rehabilitation of superbia inAncientRome........................ 365 Yelena Baraz Chapter 15. Omnis Malignitas est Virtuti Contraria: Malignitas as a Term of Aesthetic Evaluation from Horace to Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus .......................................................... 399 Christopher S. Van Den Berg Chapter 16. The Representation and Role of Badness in Seneca’s Moral Teaching: A Case From the Naturales Quaestiones (NQ 1.16).................................................................. 433 Florence Limburg Chapter 17. Nature’s Monster: Caligula as exemplum in Seneca’s Dialogues ............................................................. 451 Amanda Wilcox Chapter 18. Heliogabalus, a Monster on the Roman Throne: The LiteraryConstructionofa ‘Bad’Emperor ........................ 477 Martijn Icks IndexofGreekTerms................................................. 489 IndexofLatinTerms.................................................. 493 IndexLocorum ........................................................ 495 GeneralIndex ......................................................... 509 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Yelena Baraz is Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Christopher S. van den Berg is a Lecturer of Classics at Dartmouth College. He previously held the APA/NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship to the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich. Matthew R. Christ is Professor of Classical Studies at Indiana Uni- versity, Bloomington. Cynthia Damon is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Elaine Fantham is Giger Professor of Latin Emerita, Princeton Uni- versity; currently teaching at University of Toronto Canada. Nick Fisher is Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University. Martijn Icks is writing a Ph.D. thesis on Heliogabalus at the Radboud University Nijmegen. Jeremy B. Lefkowitz is a doctoral candidate in the department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Florence Limburg has written a Ph.D. thesis on Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones at Leiden University. Kathryn A. Morgan is Professor of Classics at the University of Cali- fornia, Los Angeles. J.J. Mulhern is Adjunct Associate Professor of Classical Studies and Government Administration, and Director of Professional Education in the Fels Institute of Government, at the University of Pennsylvania. viii list of contributors James I. Porter is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, and author of The Origins of Aes- thetic Inquiry in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience. Cambridge University Press [forthcoming]. Ralph M. Rosen is Rose Family Endowed Term Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Associate Dean for graduate studies in the school of Arts and Sciences. Ed Sanders is a Ph.D. student in Classics at University College Lon- don. Ineke Sluiter is Professor of Greek at Leiden University. Deborah Steiner is Professor of Greek at Columbia University. Ian C. Storey is Professor of Ancient History & Classics at Trent University in Ontario, and also Principal of Otonabee College, Trent. Amanda Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Classics at Williams College. chapter one GENERAL INTRODUCTION Ineke Sluiter 1. Introduction Living together in any society entails a constant mutual apportioning of credit and blame, and equally constant attempts to claim credit and reject blame for ourselves. In discussing actions, people and even sto- ries, we negotiate to align our values to such an extent that meaningful joint action becomes possible.1 The volume before you looks at the way the ‘blame’ part of this story works out in different domains in classi- cal antiquity. It concentrates primarily on the discourse of badness and evil in social interactions of different kinds, rather than on the way the ancient Greeks and Romans dealt with ‘the problem of Evil’, conve- niently divided in modern studies into natural, moral, and metaphysical evil.2 A few words about that choice may be in order. In her recent and excellent study of evil in modern thought, Susan Neiman demonstrates how major historical events have influenced the philosophical debate on ‘evil’, and have in part made certain conceptions ‘impossible to think’. The devastating natural disaster at Lisbon created an invinci- ble obstacle for those trying to reconcile natural evil with notions of a theodicy. Auschwitz silenced philosophers through the sheer incompre- hensibility and incommensurability with verbal accounts of the events 1 See Tilly 2008; on ‘alignment’, Appiah 2006, 29. 2 E.g., Burton Russell 1988, 1ff. In the modern period, the prototype of natural evil was the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, followed by terrible fires and floods, which killed innumerable people (see Neiman 2002, 1ff. and passim). For orientation on recent work on evil, see also Ricoeur 1986 and Safranski 1997. Moral evil is defined by Burton Russell (1988, 1) as taking place ‘when an intelligent being knowingly and deliberately inflicts suffering upon another sentient being’. Metaphysical evil is conceptualized as a characteristic of a flawed created world (the problem of theodicy). 2 ineke sluiter for which it came to be shorthand.3 ‘Thinking Evil’ in this way and on this scale was never central to ancient thought at any time, particulary not before the advent of Gnosticism and Christianity.4 On the other hand, antiquity hardly suffered from a lack of imagination in think- ing of all kinds of malicious agents, often under the guise of demons: even before the time of Gnosticism and early Christianity, there was a plethora of these beings, especially in folk metaphysics, who could be blamed for all the unhappiness and misery that may befall an unsus- pecting human being, and there was apparently quite a bit of spe- cialization going on among them. One demon could ‘jump upon you’ and cause a nightmare, other scary creatures could make your children die, and specific agents were responsible for smashing all the pots in your kitchen.5 If this volume chooses to focus on a less colorful, but no less exciting aspect of ‘badness’ in antiquity, the choice is not faute de mieux.6 As it is, the present study of the discursive and argumentative roles of ‘badness’ forms part of a larger research project on the language, discourse and conceptualization of values in classical antiquity.7 We are interested in the use, organization, function and effects of value dis- course in different cultural and historical contexts in classical antiquity. 3 Neiman 2002. 4 It can be argued that ancient philosophy in particular is focused on eudaemonism and the attainment of virtue and the good life to such an extent that it will take a revolution in moral psychology in order for thinkers to start focusing on vice and evil. On the other hand, the topic of theodicy is an issue that comes up regularly