The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks by David Konstan

Author:David Konstan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004190
ISBN: 9781442674370
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2006-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Jealousy

Jealousy per se is the same everywhere.

Baumgart 1990: 26

Jealousy in the twentieth century neither continues unaltered – a human or Western constant – nor neatly shifts from common to rare as part of a tidy then-now contrast.

Stearns 1989: 176

The cross-cultural study of the emotions requires a special kind of self-awareness on the part of the scholar. For we tend to think of our own emotional repertoire as natural and to assume, consequently, that it is universal. Pity, which, as we have seen, was included among the basic emotions in classical antiquity, today often signifies something more like charity or a dutiful disposition to help another person in distress, a sense that eleos was already acquiring in ancient Christian texts; so conceived, pity seems out of place in the company of such visceral passions as anger, love, and fear (see Konstan 2001a: 3–4, 120–2). It is still more difficult to imagine that an emotion that we consider basic might be entirely absent in another culture. Linda Wood (1986: 194) has argued that loneliness today has the status of an emotion, though it is of recent vintage even in English: before the twentieth century, she observes, ‘the term “loneliness” appears to refer most frequently to the physical absence of persons,’ whereas ‘by the 1970s, loneliness was treated as a feeling quite separate from isolation.’1 Certainly, there is no corresponding term in classical Greek.

Jealousy is a still more elementary emotion in the modern lexicon than loneliness, and enjoys a far longer pedigree. Yet I argue in this chapter that no term in classical Greek or Latin quite answers to the English ‘jealousy’ and its equivalents in other languages, for example the Italian gelosia, French jalousie, and Spanish celos. What is more, I go so far as to suggest that ancient Greeks in the classical period may not have known jealousy at all in the modern, romantic sense of the word, and that what we call ‘jealousy’ may rather have been distributed among a variety of other sentiments. The very concept, that is, may have been lacking. Finally, I propose to identify the moment at which a notion resembling romantic jealousy entered classical literature – not Greek literature, in this case, but Latin, during the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. If this is right, then we may be able to witness the birth of an emotion that had hitherto gone unrecognized in the Graeco-Roman world.

Perhaps one ought not to be entirely surprised if jealousy is parcelled out among different emotions in cultures other than our own. Many scholars and scientists have remarked upon the composite nature of jealousy as an aggregate or alloy of other, more fundamental sentiments. Lily B. Campbell (1960: 148) observes that ‘[jjealousy was, in the thinking of the Renaissance, not one of the simple or elementary passions but a derivative or compounded passion. It is a species of envy, which is in turn a species of hatred ... It is this curious mingling of love and hatred with grief or fear that we see in jealousy’ (cited in Friday 1997 [1985]: 39).

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