Ancient Greek, Roman, and Early Christian Philosophy

This book brings together nineteen scholars to rethink the role of public speech in the Roman Republic. Speech was an integral part of decision-making in Republican Rome, and oratory was part of the education of every member of the elite. Yet no complete speech from the period by anyone other than Cicero survives, and as a result the debate on oratory, and political practice more widely, is liable to be distorted by the distinctive features of Cicero’s oratorical practice. With careful attention to a wide range of ancient evidence, this book shines a light on orators other than Cicero, and considers the oratory of diplomatic exchanges and impromptu heckling and repartee alongside the more familiar genres of forensic and political speech. In so doing, it challenges the idea that Cicero is a normative figure, and highlights the variety of career choices and speech strategies open to Roman politicians. The chapters in the book also demonstrate how unpredictable the outcomes of oratory were: politicians could try to control events by cherry-picking their audience and using tried methods of persuasion, but incompetence, bad luck, or hostile listeners were constant threats.

The passions were a topic of widespread interest in antiquity. This is a study on their role in Roman love elegy (1st c. BCE), a genre rife with passions and jealousy in particular. Jealousy does appear in a number of earlier genres, but never with the centrality and importance it has in elegy. This book offers an exceptional opportunity to investigate the ancient representation of jealousy in its Roman context, as well as its significance for Roman love elegy itself. The narrators portray themselves as poets and as experts of love, championing a view of love that stands in marked contrast to the criticisms that Stoic and Epicurean philosophers had raised. Elegy provides rich evidence of the genesis and development of erotic jealousy: we find suspicions and rumors of infidelity, obsessive attention to visual clues, and accusations and confrontations with the beloved. The Roman elegists depict the susceptibility and reactions to jealousy along gendered lines, with an asymmetric representation of skepticism and belief, violence and restraint. But jealousy has ramifications well beyond the erotic affair. Underlying jealousy are fears about fides or trust and the vulnerability of human relations. These are prominent in love relationships, of course, but the term has broader application in the Roman world, and the poetic narrator often extends his fears about trust into many other dimensions of life, including friendship, religion, and politics. The infidelity rampant in the love affair indicates a more general breakdown of trust in other human relations. All of these features have implications for the genre itself. Many of the distinctive elements of Roman elegy—its first-person narration, obsessive recordkeeping, and role-playing – can be seen to derive from the thematic concern with jealousy. As such, jealousy provides a new way of understanding the distinctive features of Roman love elegy.

This book, arising out of a conference at University College London in 2009, examines erôs as an emotion in ancient Greek culture. It considers the phenomenology, psychology, and physiology of erôs; its associated language, metaphors, and imagery; the overlap of erôs with other emotions (jealousy, madness, philia, pothos); its role in political society; and the relationship between the human emotion and Eros the god. These topics build on recent advances in understanding of ancient Greek homo- and heterosexual customs and practices, visual and textual erotica, and philosophical approaches to erôs as manageable appetite or passion. However, the principal aim of the volume is to apply to erôs the theoretical insights offered by the rapidly expanding field of emotion studies, both in ancient cultures and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, thus maintaining throughout the focus on erôs as emotion. The volume covers a very broad range of sources and theoretical approaches, both in the chronological and the generic sense: all important thinking about the nature of erôs is considered, spanning the entire period from Hesiod to the Second Sophistic, including the input offered by figurative arts. Generically the volume ranges from Archaic epic and lyric poetry, through tragedy and comedy, to philosophical and technical treatises and more, and includes contributions from many scholars well published in the field of ancient Greek emotions – thus marking an important addition to this field.