Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity

by William V. Harris

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.

Genres: History

480 pages, Paperback

First published January 30, 2002

About the author

William V. Harris was born on 13 September 1938 in Nottingham, England. He attended Bristol Grammar School (1949–1956) and then was an Open Scholar in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He earned first class in Classical Moderations in 1959, then first class in Literae Humaniores in 1961. From 1961 he pursued graduate studies as a State Student at Oxford, spending the year 1961-1962 in Rome (where he worked with J.B. Ward-Perkins), and was then the T.W. Greene Scholar in Classical Art and Archaeology. His dissertation supervisor was M. W. Frederiksen, and he received his D. Phil. in 1968.

From 1964 to 1965 Harris served as Lecturer in Ancient History at Queen's University, Belfast. In 1965, he joined the faculty of the Columbia University History Department, which he chaired from 1988 to 1994. In 1995 he was awarded the William R. Shepherd Professorship in History at Columbia. Since 2000, he has been director of Columbia's Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, which he co-founded. Since 2002 he has been Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and in 2008 he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2011 he was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having an interest in the history of emotions, I was very pleased to find this book, which describes, as the title suggests, efforts to control anger in antiquity. Perhaps the most important point Harris makes is that we cannot assume that all languages and cultures slice the pie of emotions in the same way. Since the Greek orge cannot be simply translated with the English word anger, we have to think about Greek attitudes towards orge differently than we do American attitudes towards anger.

[Popebrak · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me SO ANGRY!!!

. . . no, I'm only fooling. This was an excellent analysis of the topic of anger management in classical and philosophical texts.

I read it for fun. I suppose that says something about me, ay?