The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature

Aristotle’s Emotions Are Social Judgments, Not Psychic Forces—and This Changes Everything About How We Read the Greeks

David Konstan’s The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks dismantles one of the most stubborn assumptions in classical reception: that when Aristotle catalogues orgē, phobos, eleos, and the rest in Book II of the Rhetoric, he is describing the same inner states that modern psychology labels anger, fear, and pity. Konstan argues the opposite. Each Aristotelian emotion is defined by a complex cognitive appraisal involving the perceived status of the agent, the social relationship between the parties, and a judgment about whether the action in question was deserved or undeserved. Orgē is not raw anger; it is a response to a perceived slight (oligōria) by someone not entitled to slight you. Phthonos is not envy in the modern sense of coveting what another has; it is pain at the undeserved good fortune of an equal. Remove the social-relational scaffold, and the emotion ceases to be the same emotion. This is not a minor philological correction. It is a wholesale reframing of how the ancient Greek emotional world functions—and it carries consequences far beyond classics departments.

The depth psychology tradition has drawn heavily on Greek emotional vocabulary without always honoring its semantic architecture. Karen Armstrong, summarizing Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, writes that katharsis effects “a purification of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth,” treating these emotions as transhistorical universals awaiting ritual transformation. Edward Edinger, in The Psyche in Antiquity, goes further: early Greek philosophical concepts are “living psychic organisms” encountered in the modern unconscious, and Jungian psychology “redeems the relevance of ancient philosophy” by recognizing these images as they appear in dreams. Konstan’s meticulous lexical analysis poses a sharp challenge to both positions. If eleos is not “pity” in the modern therapeutic sense—if it specifically requires the judgment that the sufferer does not deserve their fate and that the observer could face similar misfortune—then appropriating it as a universal psychic category smuggles in modern assumptions about identification and empathy that the Greeks did not share. The Aristotelian emotion is a social cognition, not an archetype.

The Greek Emotional World Is Structured by Honor, Not Interiority—and Depth Psychology Must Reckon with the Difference

Konstan’s most provocative move is to demonstrate that the entire system of Greek emotion, as Aristotle theorizes it, is organized around a horizontal axis of social evaluation rather than a vertical axis of psychic depth. Emotions do not well up from an interior reservoir; they are elicited by assessments of worth, status, and desert within a community of recognized peers. This places Konstan’s analysis in direct tension with James Hillman’s project of reading Greek myth as “accounts or witnesses of the imaginal,” where the gods and their passions function as “psychological actualities” transcending historical context. Hillman, in Re-Visioning Psychology, insists that “Greece” is “an inscape rather than a landscape, a metaphor for the imaginal realm in which the archetypes as Gods have been placed.” Konstan’s philology asks: whose Greece? The Greece of the imaginal realm or the Greece of the dikasterion, the law courts, where speakers manipulated precisely calibrated emotion-terms to win verdicts? Hillman himself admitted that his psychological method is “shamefacedly syncretistic” and may “offend the patient devotion to scholarly research.” Konstan’s book is, in effect, the scholarly research that calls the syncretism to account—not to invalidate the archetypal project, but to insist that Greek emotions cannot function as depth-psychological evidence unless the interpreter first understands what those emotions meant in their original cognitive and social ecology.

Cody Peterson’s recent work on the thumos and the Middle Voice provides an illuminating parallel case. Peterson argues that the thumos was “the organ of feeling, the seat of relational valuation, the chamber where the sacred entered and value was forged”—and that its abolition at the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 869 AD impoverished the Western soul. Konstan would not dispute the importance of thumos in Homeric psychology, but his method would demand that we specify which relational valuations the thumos performed and resist collapsing them into a single modern category like “embodied feeling.” The thumos in Homer deliberates, rages, endures, and persuades—but each of these operations has specific social conditions and interlocutors. Peterson’s retrieval of the Middle Voice as the grammar of convergence is powerful precisely because it attends to the structural specificity of Greek grammar rather than treating it as a metaphor for modern therapeutic insight. Konstan’s philological rigor, applied to the emotional lexicon, performs the same service for the affective domain.

Why This Book Is Indispensable for Anyone Who Uses Greek Concepts in Psychological Practice

What Konstan ultimately provides is a discipline of precision that the depth psychology tradition urgently needs but rarely exercises. It is not enough to say, with Edinger, that “the early Greeks were trailing clouds of glory” and that their concepts are “laden with the numinosity that accompanies all newborn things.” Numinosity without philological accountability produces inflation, not insight. Konstan does not deny that Greek emotional categories illuminate the human condition; he denies that they illuminate it by being identical to ours. The gap between orgē and “anger,” between aidōs and “shame,” between eleos and “pity” is itself the most psychologically interesting thing about these terms—because it reveals that emotions are not fixed biological programs but culturally structured evaluative responses that can be organized in radically different ways. For the clinician or scholar who draws on Greek material, Konstan’s book is the necessary corrective that transforms casual appropriation into genuine dialogue with antiquity. No other single work performs this function with comparable rigor, clarity, and breadth across the full Aristotelian emotional taxonomy.