Classical Culture and Society is a new series from Oxford that emphasizes innovative, imaginative scholarship by leading scholars in the field of ancient culture. Among the topics covered will be the historical and cultural background of Greek and Roman literary texts; the production and reception of cultural artifacts; the economic basis of culture; the history of ideas, values, and concepts; and the relationship between politics and/or social practice and ancient forms of symbolic expression. Interdisciplinary approaches and original, broad-ranging research form (...) the backbone of this series, which will serve classicists as well as appealing to scholars and educated readers in related fields. Emotion, Restraint, and Community examines the ways in w hich emotions, and talk about emotions, interacted with the ethics of the Roman upper classes in the late Republic and early Empire. By considering how various Roman forms of fear, dismay, indignation, and revulsion created an economy of displeasure that shaped society in constructive ways, the book casts new light both on the Romans and on cross-cultural understanding of emotions. (shrink)

The emotions have long been an interest for those studying ancient Greece and Rome. But while the last few decades have produced excellent studies of individual emotions and the different approaches to them by the major philosophical schools, the focus has been almost entirely on negative emotions. This might give the impression that the Greeks and Romans had little to say about positive emotion, something that would be misguided. As the chapters in this collection indicate, there are representations of positive (...) emotions extending from archaic Greek poetry to Augustine, and in both philosophical works and literary genres as wide-ranging as lyric poetry, forensic oratory, comedy, didactic poetry, and the novel. Nor is the evidence uniform: while many of the literary representations give expression to positive emotion but also describe its loss, the philosophers offer a more optimistic assessment of the possibilities of attaining joy or contentment in this life.The positive emotions show some of the same features that all emotions do. But unlike the negative emotions, which we are able to describe and analyze in great detail because of our preoccupation with them, positive emotions tend to be harder to articulate. Hence the interest of the present study, which considers how positive emotions are described, their relationship to other emotions, the ways in which they are provoked or upset by circumstances, how they complicate and enrich our relationships with other people, and which kinds of positive emotion we should seek to integrate. The ancient works have a great deal to say about all of these topics, and for that reason deserve more study, both for our understanding of antiquity and for our understanding of the positive emotions in general. (shrink)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca—whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson—to his (...) rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities. _ Anger, Mercy, Revenge _comprises three key writings: the moral essays _On Anger_ and _On Clemency_—which were penned as advice for the then young emperor, Nero—and the _Apocolocyntosis_, a brilliant satire lampooning the end of the reign of Claudius. Friend and tutor, as well as philosopher, Seneca welcomed the age of Nero in tones alternately serious, poetic, and comic—making _Anger, Mercy, Revenge_ a work just as complicated, astute, and ambitious as its author. (shrink)