Emotions in the Classical World: Methods, Approaches, and Directions

The study of ancient emotion has become a substantial and thriving sub-discipline in the fields of Classics and Ancient History, enabling Classicists to make a significant contribution to the wider upsurge in interest in the emotions that has taken place across a range of scholarly disciplines in recent years. In the belief that now is the time to take stock of what has been achieved so far and to attempt to give a sense of research opportunities to come, this volume assembles an international team of experts, including a number of those who have already made essential contributions to the study of ancient emotion, to offer an authoritative and representative selection of contemporary methods and approaches. With a chronological range from Homer to Seneca, this volume deals with disgust, hope, horror, pity, grief, sympathy, and anger in a variety of contexts, including the poetics of emotional expression, philosophical theories of emotion, the role of emotion in historiography, intertextuality and the emotions, and the role of art and material culture in the representation of ancient affectivity.