Restraining Rage

by Harris, William V.

• ISBN13: 9780674013865
• ISBN10: 0674013867
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-03-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

The angry emotions, and the problems they presented, were an ancient Greek preoccupation from Homer to late antiquity. From the first lines of the Iliad to the church fathers of the fourth century A.D. , the control or elimination of rage was an obsessive concern. From the Greek world it passed to the Romans. Drawing on a wide range of ancient texts, and on recent work in anthropology and psychology, Restraining Rage explains the rise and persistence of this concern. W. V. Harris shows that the discourse of anger-control was of crucial importance in several different spheres, in politics--both republican and monarchical--in the family, and in the slave economy. He suggests that it played a special role in maintaining male domination over women. He explores the working out of these themes in Attic tragedy, in the great Greek historians, in Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers, and in many other kinds of texts. From the time of Plato onward, educated Greeks developed a strong conscious interest in their own psychic health. Emotional control was part of this. Harris offers a new theory to explain this interest, and a history of the anger-therapy that derived from it. He ends by suggesting some contemporary lessons that can be drawn from the Greek and Roman experience.

Author Biography

William V. Harris is Shepherd Professor of History at Columbia University and Director of the Center for the Ancient Mediterrancan

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
Abbreviations	xi
I. Approaches
Striving for Anger Control	3	(29)
Science and Feelings	32	(18)
The Greek and Latin Terminology	50	(21)
The Minds of Ancient Authors	71	(9)
A Tradition of Self-Control	80	(8)
Philosophies of Restraining Rage	88	(43)
Appendix: Treatises on the Emotions and on Anger	127	(4)
II. Anger in Society and in the State
The Heroes and the Archaic State	131	(26)
Living Together in the Classical Polis	157	(44)
The Roman Version	201	(28)
Restraining the Angry Ruler	229	(35)
A Thesis about Women and Anger	264	(21)
III. Intimate Rage
Family and Friends	285	(32)
Slavery	317	(22)
IV. Anger and the Invention of Psychic Health
Anger as a Sickness of the Soul in Classical Greece	339	(23)
Can You Cure Emotions? Hellenistic and Roman Anger Therapy	362	(29)
From Sickness to Sin: Early Christianity and Anger	391	(10)
Retrospect and Prospect	401	(20)
Bibliography	421	(36)
Index	457