Emotion And Persuasion In Classical Antiquity

Appeal to emotion is a key technique of persuasion, ranked by Aristotle alongside logical reasoning and arguments from character. Although ancient philosophical discussions of it have been much researched, exploration of its practical use has focused largely on explicit appeals to a handful of emotions (anger, hatred, envy, pity) in 5th-4th century BCE Athenian courtroom oratory. This volume expands horizons: from an opening section focusing on so-far underexplored emotions and sub-genres of oratory in Classical Athens, its scope moves outwards generically, geographically, and chronologically through the "Greek East" to Rome. Key thematic links are: the role of emotion in the formation of community identity; persuasive strategies in situations of unequal power; and linguistic formulae and genre-specific emotional persuasion. Other recurring themes include performance (rather than arousal) of emotions, the choice between emotional and rational argumentation, the emotions of gods, and a concern with a secondary "audience": the reader.

This book is an addition to the burgeoning secondary literature on ancient emotions. Its primary aim is to suggest possible ways in which recent approaches to emotions can help us understand significant aspects of persuasion in classical antiquity and, especially audiences' psychological manipulation in the civic procedures of classical Athens. Based on cognitive approaches to emotions, Skinner's theoretical work on the language of ideology, or ancient theories about enargeia, the book examines pivotal aspects of psychological manipulation in ancient rhetorical theory and practice. At the same time, the book looks into possible ways in which the emotive potentialities of vision -both sights and mental images- are explained or deployed by orators. The book includes substantial discussion of Gorgias' approach to sights ' emotional qualities and their implications for persuasion and deception and the importance of visuality for Thucydides' analysis of emotions' role in the polis' public communication. It also looks into the deployment of enargeia in forensic narratives revolving around violence. The book also focuses on the ideological implications of envy for the political discourse of classical Athens and emphasizes the rhetorical strategies employed by self-praising speakers who want to preempt their listeners' loathing. The book is therefore a useful addition to the burgeoning secondary literature on ancient emotions. Despite the prominence of emotions in classicists' scholarly work, their implications for persuasion is undeservedly under-researched. By employing appraisal-oriented analysis of emotions this books suggests new methodological approaches to ancient pathopoiia. These approaches take into consideration the wider ideological or cultural contexts which determine individual speakers' rhetorical strategies. This book is the second volume of Ancient Emotions, edited by George Kazantzidis and Dimos Spatharas within the series Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes. This project investigates the history of emotions in classical antiquity, providing a home for interdisciplinary approaches to ancient emotions, and exploring the inter-faces between emotions and significant aspects of ancient literature and culture

This volume provides an overview of some of the salient aspects of emotions and their role in life and thought of the Greco-Roman world, from the beginnings of Greek literature and history to the height of the Roman Empire. This is a wide remit, dealing with a wide range of sources in two ancient languages, and in the full range of contexts that are covered by the format of this series. The volume's chapters survey the emotional worlds of the ancient Greeks and Romans from multiple perspectives – philosophical, scientific, medical, literary, musical, theatrical, religious, domestic, political, art-historical and historical. All chapters consider both Greek and Roman evidence, ranging from the Homeric poems to the Roman Imperial period and making extensive use of both elite and non-elite texts and documents, including those preserved on stone, papyrus and similar media, and in other forms of material culture. The volume is thus fully reflective of the latest research in the emerging discipline of ancient emotion history.

"Disgust is an essential human emotion, relatively neglected even in recent scholarship taking the "emotional turn." Fifteen essays by historians and literary scholars examine disgust in theory and practice. Topics range from medicine, drama, oratory, historiography, fiction, biography, to the status of witches, eunuch priests, and theatrical professionals."--

This tightly focused collection of essays by a distinguished group of scholars analyses the degree to which expressions of emotion in ancient literature and art become an 'artistic' rather than a 'social' construct. To what degree do literary genres, philosophy and visual arts produce expectations for the arousal of certain emotions? Are the emotions of women, for example, represented differently in different genres? How and why do literary genres and visual arts concentrate on specific emotions and stylise them accordingly, and how do particular emotions relate to gender within literary texts? The book will be of interest to all students and scholars of classical literature and gender studies.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

This volume focuses on the under-explored topic of emotions' implications for ancient medical theory and practice, while it also raises questions about patients' sentiments. Ancient medicine, along with philosophy, offer unique windows to professional and scientific explanatory models of emotions. Thus, the contributions included in this volume offer comparative ground that helps readers and researchers interested in ancient emotions pin down possible interfaces and differences between systematic and lay cultural understandings of emotions. Although the volume emphasizes the multifaceted links between medicine and ancient philosophical thinking, especially ethics, it also pays due attention to the representation of patients' feelings in the extant medical treatises and doctors' emotional reticence. The chapters that constitute this volume investigate a great range of medical writers including Hippocrates and the Hippocratics, and Galen, while comparative approaches to medical writings and philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, dwell on the notion of wonder/admiration (thauma), conceptualizations of the body and the soul, and the category pathos itself. The volume also sheds light on the metaphorical uses of medicine in ancient thinking.