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BEYOND PITY and FEAR: the EMOTIONS of HISTORY* the Last BEYOND PITY AND FEAR: THE EMOTIONS OF HISTORY* The last twenty years or so have witnessed a remarkable flowering of studies concentrating on ancient emotions. Fueled in part by a renewed interest in Hellenistic philosophy, scholars have explored in a series of articles and books the place of the emotions in the intellectual and social milieu of the ancient world1. Their interest is not isolated, but part of a larger trend in modern philosophy, psychology, and science2. Indeed, * This paper is a revised version of my Astor Lecture, delivered at Oriel College, Oxford on 8 May 2002. I am profoundly grateful to Christina Kraus and Christopher Pelling, who nominated me for the lectureship, and who made my week’s stay in Oxford a pure delight. Thanks are due also to the audience for probing questions and stimulating insights. For dis- cussion of some of the basic issues in this paper, I am grateful to Brad Inwood, Michael Silk, and Richard Sorabji, each of whom offered guidance in fields unfamiliar to me and who must certainly not be held responsible for my inevitable failures to understand these complex issues. I also owe special thanks to Robert Kaster, David Konstan, Roberto Nicolai, Richard Rutherford, Guido Schepens, Frank Walbank, and Jessica Wissmann, who read earlier ver- sions of this paper, both correcting errors, and offering helpful insights and suggestions (not all of which I have been able to pursue in the compass of this paper). I alone am responsi- ble, of course, for the interpretations and the errors that remain. 1 See (in chronological order): B. INWOOD, Ethics and Human Action in Early Sto- icism, Oxford 1985, esp. p. 127-181; M. SCHOFIELD & G. STRIKER (edd.), The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, Cambridge–Paris 1986; J. BRUNSCHWEIG & M. NUSS- BAUM (edd.), Passions and Perceptions: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Cam- bridge 1993; B. WILLIAMS, Shame and Necessity, Berkeley–Los Angeles–Oxford 1993; D. CAIRNS, Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Lit- erature, Oxford 1993; M. NUSSBAUM, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton 1994; S.M. BRAUND & C. GILL (edd.), The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, Cambridge 1997; R. SORABJI, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford 2000; D. KONSTAN, Pity Transformed, London 2001; W.V. HARRIS, Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Clas- sical Antiquity, Cambridge (Mass.) 2001; M. NUSSBAUM, Upheavals of Thought: The Intel- ligence of Emotions, Cambridge 2001; M. GRAVER, Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Dis- putations III and IV, Chicago and London 2002. And this is just what has been done in books; a list of the relevant articles would add many more items. As Gill points out, inter- est in the passions has a long and distinguished tradition in continental scholarship. 2 A very selective group, again in chronological order: R.C. SOLOMON, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, New York 1976; revised version, Indianapolis–Cam- bridge 1993; W.E. LYONS, Emotion, Cambridge 1980; R. HARRÉ (ed.), The Social Con- struction of Emotions, Oxford 1986; A. DAMASIO, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, New York–London 1994-1995; K. OATLEY & J. JENKINS, Under- standing Emotions, Oxford 1996; S. BLACKBURN, Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Oxford 1998; P. GOLDIE, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford 2000; D. EVANS, Emotion: The Science of Sentiment, Oxford 2001. 286 J. MARINCOLA when one looks at the recent studies of the emotions or passions (the two are not quite the same, of course, but the terms are often used inter- changeably3), one is impressed by the sophisticated analyses brought to bear on the issue, with full consideration of the complicated nature of what we mean by emotions, as well as of the social and cultural con- structs of the Greeks and Romans. How different the situation is when one looks at studies of the emo- tions in the Greek and Roman historians. Here, most discussions of emo- tional scenes or emotional language quickly narrow to a nearly exclusive focus on Aristotle’s Poetics, and the specific emotions of pity and fear, the emotions that Aristotle saw as the most important ones for tragedy. The reason for this is not hard to find: for over a century now, ancient historiography has been bedevilled by the spectre of ‘tragic history’, first elucidated by Eduard Schwartz, and appearing in various guises in later writers. In its most simplistic form, the belief in tragic history leads schol- ars to frame a stark dichotomy in the writing of history in antiquity, with, on the one side, ‘sober’, ‘pragmatic’ historians who followed a path of inquiry and research, and, on the other side, ‘emotional’, ‘rhetorical’ and ‘tragic’ historians, who cared only to arouse the feelings of their readers without worrying whether any of what they narrated was true. Frank Wal- bank’s masterful article on the common roots of history and tragedy in epic reduced some of the more fanciful or grotesque caricatures that were attendant on discussions of ‘tragic history’, but the creature remains alive, and it continues, I think, to distort our understanding and appreciation of the methods and modes of ancient historiography4. Moreover, because the cardinal text in the discussion of tragic history is Polybius’ criticism of Phylarchus (II 56-59), and because ‘tragic his- tory’ is thought to have arisen as a response to Aristotle’s criticism in Poetics 9 of the value of history, the portrayal of emotions in history is thought to have fully developed with Hellenistic historiography. Not coin- cidentally, perhaps, in many histories and handbooks of Greek histori- ography, the Hellenistic age is portrayed as a premature blight on the splendid summer of the classical era, a severe falling-off from the promise of Herodotus and the full genius of Thucydides. The usual culprits are a pair of attractive but superficial harpies, namely rhetoric and easy moral- 3 See S. BRAUND & C. GILL, Passions (n. 1), p. 1 n. 1; D. FOWLER, Epicurean Anger, ibid., p. 18; R. SORABJI, Emotion (n. 1), p. 7. 4 For the bibliography, see below, n. 33-35. BEYOND PITY AND FEAR: THE EMOTIONS OF HISTORY 287 ism. In place of the dedicated research of Herodotus and Thucydides, the historian of the Hellenistic world, we often read, was mainly concerned with the adornment of language; instead of trying to bring knowledge and understanding, the Hellenistic historian, when he was not idly flat- tering his patron, was thinking mainly of how to move and charm his audience. Hieronymus of Cardia, Polybius and a few others were differ- ent, of course, but Polybius’ incessant strictures on the proper way to write history are in fact the proof of how desperate the situation had become5. For many reasons, such a portrait of Hellenistic historiography is, to say the least, misleading. The era saw the greatest number of historians at work and the greatest variety of historiographical works, as the inhab- itants of new political worlds sought different ways of understanding their past and their present. More importantly, the focus on ‘tragic history’ as a significant mode of Hellenistic historiography has, I think, warped our view of the role that emotions play in the writing and reading of history at all times in antiquity. The nearly exclusive attention given to pity and fear has practically blinded scholars to the whole world of emotion that 5 It would be tedious to cite this pervasive evaluation in detail, but for a representative sample, see J. BURY, The Ancient Greek Historians, London–New York 1909, p. 150-151, 160-161 (the fourth century saw the Greek world «succumbing to the spell of two influ- ences, towards which Thucydides had been detached and independent, … rhetoric and philosophy»), and p. 174 (on Duris: «We may regret this corruption, as we call it, of history»); P.G. WALSH, Livy. His Historical Aims and Methods, Cambridge 1961, p. 27 («It is clear that with a few honourable exceptions such as Hieronymus and Polybius, Hel- lenistic historiography had strikingly declined from the standards of Thucydides. Its pur- pose was now not to give practical instruction, but to charm, divert, and edify»); K. MEIS- TER, Die griechische Geschichtsschreibung, Stuttgart 1990, p. 80-81 («Rhetorische, tragische und tatsachenbezogene Geschichtsschreibung sind die Hauptrichtungen der hel- lenistischen Historiographie. Sie existieren jedoch von vornherein nicht idealtypisch und führen kein Eigendasein, sondern beginnen sich frühzeitig zu überschneiden und zu ver- mischen, und so lassen sich zahlreiche Historiker namhaft machen, deren Darstellungen sowohl rhetorische wie auch tragische und ‘pragmatische’ Elemente, freilich in ganz unter- scheidlichem Umfang, aufweisen»); T.J. LUCE, The Greek Historians, London 1997, p. 108 («Another effect [sc. of rhetoric] was on the truthfulness of history … Readers expected to be entertained as well as instructed. In the hands of some practitioners history became a substitute for the adventure novel, for others a repository of marvels and of tales involv- ing aberrant or affecting behavior»). The reader who thinks my summary above is a car- icature would do well to read the recent remarks of S. REBENICH, Historical Prose, in S.E. PORTER (ed.), Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period, Leiden 1997, p. 265-337, esp. 267-270. There are good remarks on the devaluation of historiography after Herodotus and Thucydides in S. HUMPHREYS, Fragments, Fetishes, and Philosophies: Towards a History of Greek Historiography after Thucydides, in G. MOST (ed.), Collect- ing Fragments / Fragmente Sammeln, Göttingen 1997, p. 207-224. 288 J. MARINCOLA is delineated in ancient histories. The focus on Aristotle’s Poetics (which was not particularly influential in the later ancient tradition) has seduced our attention away from the much more important rhetorical tradition (beginning with Aristotle’s Rhetoric) with its emphasis on the role that emotion plays in the business of persuasion.
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