Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (review)

Emotion, Restraint, and Community has much in common with William Miller's well-known The Anatomy of Disgust (1997). There is their interest in disgust, their focus on the social and literary life of the emotions, and, best of all, their tone. The ironic, fresh, often funny, and personal tone of Kaster's book is very like that of Miller's. The tone is utterly unlike anything one normally expects from a learned classical volume from a learned press. Similarities end there. While Miller focuses on the modern world, Kaster's book on the social life of the emotions takes as its research object Roman literature up until Christianity becomes the religion of the Roman Empire. In five chapters, Kaster looks at five emotions (verecundia, pudor, paenitentia, invidia, and fastidium) and offers, as a conclusion, a vision of what it must have been like for a Roman male to have control over the workings of these five emotions. That person, he suggests, is what would have been termed integer—upright, honest, and undamaged.

Based on word searches and contextual analyses for each of the terms, Kaster's discussion provides an engaging way of describing the life of these emotions. Rather than relying on dictionary definitions, he briefly analyzes and illustrates his terms in their literary contexts. Then he produces scripts, which consist not just of the things you think, feel, and do as they relate to these five emotions, but which also show how they are played out in a social context. What does it feel like to be the object of fastidium, for example, or to direct it at another? Kaster's analysis, therefore, concerns itself more with the cognitive dimension of these emotions rather than the affective. Or, to adapt his own terminology, the analysis is on the occurrent (situational) rather than dispositional (psychological).

How does Kaster understand the basis of each of these terms and how it is that they are defined socially? Verecundia ("respect" or "shame"—the subject of chapter 1) "animates the art of knowing your proper place in every social transaction and basing your behavior on that knowledge; by guiding behavior in this way, verecundia establishes or affirms the social bond between you and others, all of whom (ideally) play complementary roles" (15). Kaster makes his understanding even more clear when he states that "verecundia is what might be called 'ignorability': not being invisible, quite, but being seen to claim the minimum amount of social space needed to carry out a given line of action" (17). Pudor ("decency," "shame," "embarrassment"), the subject of the second and longest chapter, can be paraphrased as "being aware of others being aware of you" (28–29). He expands on this to add that "while it was understandably your goal to receive the largest possible share of creditable attention ('honor') and experience the least possible discomfort from discrediting attention ('shame'), honor and shame were experienced as complementary, rather than opposed" (29).

Kaster is not, therefore, interested in the modes by which verecundia and pudor can become internalized. He does not believe that a Roman's valuation of what action could or could not be judged as invoking verecundia or pudor can be made without immediate recourse to others (cf. 59). He is not interested, for example, in the way that Seneca, with his recommendation for daily (Epistles 83) self-scrutiny (so, for example, Epistles 16.2: excute te et varie scrutare et observa) might have evaluated an action. Seneca, as we know, suggested that you judge an action, hence its capacity to evoke an emotion such as verecundia, by checking it against a judge internal to your mind, such as an imagined Scipio, Cato, or Laelius (Epistles 25.5–6; see Edwards, G&R 54, 1997). The point is an important one. Kaster sees little shift in the way verecundia and pudor, or indeed his five emotions generally, are understood throughout the period he covers (roughly 200...