Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 143-146 [Access article in PDF] William V. Harris. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 468 pp. Cloth, $49.95. It is a mark of evolving interests in the discipline that a well-known ancient historian should choose to write a major book on the ancient understanding of a single emotion. This reflects both an ever-widening conception of what social history can include (and of how social and political history are interconnected) and the intense study in recent years of ancient ideas about the nature and therapy of the emotions, especially in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy. This book combines specificity of focus with breadth of evidence examined. The topic is not just anger but, more precisely, the ideology, broadly understood, of anger control. The evidence discussed ranges from Homer to early Christian ideas in late antiquity; it embraces literature, historiography, and philosophy, among much else. The combination of a single line of enquiry and comprehensiveness of material is crucial to the character and value of this study.The project of the book can be defined more exactly. Harris sets out to examine the evidence for ancient thought about anger and to contextualize it, placing it in a socially oriented history of ideas. This project explains the structure of the book. Part 1 considers the relevant material, above all the Hellenistic-Roman philosophical treatises on control of anger, and explores questions of method and approach. Key points include the difference between Greek or Roman and modern English vocabulary, such as the Greek distinction between violent temper ( orge \) and "spirit" or impulse ( thumos), and the importance of placing the Hellenistic treatises in a developing tradition of emotional self-control from the fifth century B.C. onwards. Part 2, the largest, connects Greco-Roman thought about the restraint of anger with salient features of political and social structure; this is extended, in part 3, to family life and the treatment of slaves. Part 4 returns to ancient ideas, especially in philosophy, about anger as a "sickness of soul" to be treated by "therapy"; these ideas are now placed within a larger history of anger control from archaic Greece to late antiquity.Inevitably, with a topic of such breadth, some of the discussion surveys material examined more fully by scholars writing from more specialist standpoints. This is so, for instance, in the review of philosophical ideas on control of anger in chapters 6 and 14-15 (though these ideas have not, I think, been assembled before in a single study). The main originality of the book lies in the social contextualization of ideas, particularly in parts 2 and 3. Here, a set of substantively new claims are offered, bearing especially on the explanation of the [End Page 143] prominence of the theme of anger control in Greek and Roman culture. For instance, the presentation of Achilles' rage in the Iliad as intensely problematic, taken with the more positive characterization of Odysseus' revenge (which depends on restraint of anger) in the Odyssey, is seen as expressing a growing awareness of the dangers of heroic or kingly rage in a period (ca. 700 B.C.) when the Greek archaic city-states were emerging from their pre-polis form (chapter 7, especially 145-46). Analogously, the preoccupation with the destructive impact of violent anger ( orge \) and the reiterated stress on emotional control ( so \ phrosune \) in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., in contexts such as drama, historiography, and oratory, are taken as integral elements of the growth of cooperative life in the polis. Harris draws on Norbert Elias's thesis that the internalisation of doctrines restraining the motives (including anger) that generate violent aggression constitutes a key part of the development of civilized society (150).A comparably wide range of sources is reviewed for Roman attitudes; much of the evidence is drawn from the late Republic, a period when violent anger played a major role in the disruption of social and political order—although this connection is not...