Er?s in Ancient Greece

This edited volume brings together eighteen articles which examine the role of erôs as an emotion in ancient Greek culture. Arising out of a conference held at University College London in 2009, the volume ranges from Archaic epic and lyric poetry, through tragedy and comedy, to philosophical and technical treatises and more, and includes contributions from a variety of international scholars well published in the field of ancient Greek emotions. Taking into account all important thinking about the nature of erôs from the eighth century BCE to the third century CE, and covering a very broad range of sources and theoretical approaches, both in the chronological and the generic sense, 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 the 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 the study of 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.

1 - Introduction
2 - Between appetite and emotion, or Why can't animals have erôs?
3 - Mad erôs and eroticized madness in tragedy
4 - Sexual jealousy and erôs in Euripides Medea
5 - Love's battlefield: Rethinking Sappho fragment 31
6 - Monstrous love? Erotic reciprocity in Aelian's De natura animalium
7 - Challenging Platonic erôs: The role of thumos and philotimia in love
8 - Galen, Plato, and the physiology of erôs
9 - Sex and the city: Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Kition on erôs and philia
10 - Stoic erôs is there such a thing?
11 - Eros in Hesiod
12 - From the gymnasium to the wedding: Eros in Athenian art and cult
13 - Love theory and political practice in Plutarch: The Amatorius and the Lives of Coriolanus and Alcibiades
14 - The imagery of erôs in Plato's Phaedrus
15 - The language(s) of love in Aristophanes
16 - Worlds of erôs in Ibycus fragment 286 (PMGF)
17 - Lamp and erotic epigram: How an object sheds light on the lover's emotions
18 - Male bodies, male gazes: Exploring erôs in the twelfth book of the Greek Anthology

Ed Sanders is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on emotions in ancient Greece, especially in the literature of the Classical period. His forthcoming monograph, based on his PhD, is entitled Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens (OUP). Chiara Thumiger is a Research Associate at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Her present research focuses on mental insanity and its ancient representations in the Hippocratic texts and other literary sources. She has also worked on Greek tragedy and on animals in ancient literature, and is the author of Hidden Paths: Self and Characterization in Greek tragedy: Euripides' Bacchae. Christopher Carey is Professor of Greek at University College London. His research interests are very broad, including Pindar, drama, and above all oratory. He is the author of Democracy in Classical Athens as well as a large number of articles. He has also published a range of translations, commentaries, and edited volumes, in particular relating to the Attic oratorical corpus; these include the recent Oxford Classical Text Lysiae orationes cum fragmentis (Oxford, 2007), The speeches of Aeschines, Lysias: Selected Speeches, and Trials from Classical Athens. Nick J. Lowe is Reader in Classical Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is both a Greek and Latin literary specialist, and is particularly interested in comedy, prose fiction, narrative, and the interface between literary theory and cognitive science. He is the author of The Classical Plot and the Invention of Western Narrative and Comedy.