A Roman should not feel that...
Un Romain ne devrait pas ressentir ça...
The transgression of emotional norms in ancient Rome
La transgression des normes émotionnelles dans la Rome antique
Published on Monday, January 22, 2024
Abstract
This conference aims to deepen our knowledge of the norms governing emotional expression in Rome and their evolution, from Republican times to Imperial era. It is part of a wider research project looking at the role of collective emotions in Roman civic life. This conference will focus more specifically on episodes of emotional transgression which are described as such in our sources, when an individual or a specific group expressed unexpected or inappropriate emotions depending on the circumstances.
Announcement
2024, November 7th and 8th
Argument
In a pioneering article published in the Annales in 1941, Lucien Febvre called for a history of feelings and emotions, because, as he wrote, “there would be no possible history” without it[1]. The relevance of this call has since been confirmed by various studies in anthropology, social psychology and neuroscience, which have proven that emotions, as other affects, influence the decision-making of individual and collective social agents. These findings are a welcome reminder that women and men’s choices and actions cannot be explained only by utilitarian reasonings, such as the rational choice theory which assume that social actors act according to the available information in order to gain the greatest benefice at the lowest cost.
However, it was not until the last decades of the XXth century that historians finally considered emotions as a true object of study. Among them, classicists were the last to explore this field, although ancient authors frequently attributed the decision-making and behaviour of history’s actors, whether individual or collective, to their emotions[2]. Since the early 2000s, several studies have sought to clarify the meanings of the expression of some specific emotions and the judgments made about them by the Romans: thus, about anger[3], fear[4], or sadness as expressed by crying[5]. Others studies have focused on the emotions expressed by some particular political and social actors, such as the emperor[6] or games’ audience[7], and their representations in art[8].
Of course, we will never know with certitude what ancient people really felt: we can only grasp their emotions through words, gestures and signs, which are sometimes ambiguous and which we know only through the medium of ancient authors, who only mentions them as long as they make sense in their accounts, depending on their opinions about them[9]. Without denying their natural reality, emotions are also social and cultural constructions, whose expressions and perceptions can vary from one society to another[10]. Works of anthropologists, sociologists and historians show that the sharing of emotions contributes powerfully to the bonding of communities, whose members recognize as their fellows those who express the same emotions as them[11]. The medievalist Barbara Rosenwein has coined the concept of “emotional communities” to define those social groups whose members adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value or devalue the same emotions[12]. This can be applied to the ancient Rome, where laws and mos maiorum required individuals to conform to some rules of conduct and to express or repress certain emotions according to their status and/or circumstances: these rules established an “emotional regime”, defined by the historian William Reddy as the set of emotional norms advocated by the ruling power to protect the political stability[13].
In our documentation, these norms never appear more clearly as when they are challenged or violated. Norms differ from customs or conventions by the fact that anyone who breaks them risks being punished by his community, depending on the value placed by that community on what the rule protects[14]. In this respect, we should emphasize that norms have different “spheres of validity”: norms can be institutionalised and defended by the authorities or emanate only from social consensus; they may be considered fixed and intangible or, quite the contrary, be the subject of negotiations and therefore subject to certain changes[15]. In fact, norms can sometimes compete with each other, and it is then up to individual or collective social actors to choose between them, according to the context, their representations and their interests, but also, as said above, on the respective value of each rule according to the society. Transgression, in fact, does not exist in itself, but results from a work of social qualification, which brings moral reprobation to some boundary crossings and thus creates strong and violent emotional reactions within the society[16].
This conference aims to deepen our knowledge of the norms governing emotional expression in Rome and their evolutions, from Republican times to Imperial era. It is part of a wider research project looking at the role of collective emotions in Roman political life. This conference will focus more specifically on episodes of emotional transgression which are described as such in our sources, when an individual or a specific group expressed unexpected or inappropriate emotions depending on the circumstances: senators or emperors deemed too indifferent to plebeian grievances or, on the contrary, too much moved and giving in to these requests; people unable to control their anger and disrupting the smooth running of assembly of public ceremony; frightened soldiers who try to flee the battlefield; superstitious people showing excessive fear of the gods; couples exchanging signs of affection deemed inappropriate in civic spaces; fathers judged to be too harsh or too lenient towards their children; etc.
Contributions will use case studies to answer the following questions: how do individuals and groups express their emotions? To what extent does emotion determine action? Which judgment(s) did witnesses and authors have on such expressions of transgressive emotions? How were these emotions justified by those who expressed them and explained by the authors who reported the facts? To what extent could these emotions be shared by other people or groups? What were the sanctions for those who expressed emotions deemed inappropriate by civic authorities and/or their social groups? To what extent could the expression of transgressive emotion become a precedent and thus contribute to the evolution of prevailing norms? Reflections raised by these questions will help us to better understand how individual and collective emotions and their perception by Roman society, or by the various communities within it, could guide the behaviour of social actors in different contexts.
Terms of submission
This call for papers is primarily aimed at PhD students and young doctors. Proposals for papers, with title and abstract of no more than around 500 words, should be sent to the following address: mathias.nicolleau@univ-lyon3.fr.
before March 15, 2024.
Please specify in your mail your current status, PhD title, university and laboratory. Communications will last 30 minutes and will be made in French or in English. All submissions will be assessed by the scientific committee and may be accepted according to their relevance. You will be notified of the outcome of your submission by mid-May 2024.
Scientific committee
- Patrice Faure, professor in Roman history, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3.
- Frédéric Hurlet, professor in Roman history, Université Paris Nanterre.
- Romain Loriol, lecturer in Latin literature, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3.
- Pascal Montlahuc, lecturer in Ancient history, Université Paris-Cité.
- Mathias Nicolleau, lecturer in Roman history, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3.
Notes
[1] L. Febvre, « La sensibilité et l’histoire : comment reconstituer la vie affective d’autrefois ? », Annales d’histoire sociale, 3, 1941, p. 5-20.
[2] Historians of ancient Greece began to work on this topic before the specialists of Roman history: cf. the works of David Konstan, Angelos Chaniotis, Douglais Cairns or Damian Nelis.
[3] W. V. Harris, Restraining rage. The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge (MA)-London, 2001.
[4] S. Coin-Longeray & D. Vallat (ed.), Peurs antiques, Saint-Étienne, 2015.
[5] S. Rey, Les larmes de Rome. Le pouvoir de pleurer dans l’Antiquité, Paris, 2017; J. Hagen, Die Tränen der Machtigen und die Macht der Tränen: eine emotionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung des Weinens in der kaiserzeitlichen Historiographie, Stuttgart, 2017; J. Vekselius, Weeping for the res publica. Tears in Roman Political Culture, Lund, 2018; cf. also the contributions in T. Fögen (dir.), Tears in the Greco-Roman world, Berlin-New York, 2009.
[6] S. Rey (dir.), Le prince ému. Le gouvernement des sentiments, d’Auguste aux Sévères, in : Dialogues d’Histoire Ancienne, 48/1, 2022, p. 9-122.
[7] S. Forichon, Les spectateurs des jeux du cirque à Rome (du Ier siècle a.C. au VIe siècle p.C.) : passion, émotions et manifestations, Bordeaux, 2020.
[8] H. von Ehrenheim & M. Prusac-Lindhagen (dir.), Reading Roman Emotions. Visual and Textual Interpretations, Stockholm, 2020.
[9] R. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint and Community in Ancient Rome, Oxford, 2005 suggests going beyond simple semantic analysis to identify narrative sequences (“scripts”) alluding to some conventional emotions.
[10] R. Harré (ed.), The Social Construction of Emotions, Oxford-New York, 1986. For a critical and nuanced approach aiming to reconcile constructivist and naturalist theories on emotions, cf. S. Lepine, « La construction sociale des émotions : enjeux conceptuels et limites d’une hypothèse », Klesis. Revue philosophique, 23, 2012, p. 134-165.
[11] Cf. the emotion aroused throughout France by the tragic events of January and November 2015.
[12] B. Rosenwein, Emotional communities in the early Middle Ages, Ithaca, 2006.
[13] W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge, 2001.
[14] Cf. the contributions in H. Hastings, L. Nicolas et C. Passard (ed.), Paradoxes de la transgression, Paris, 2012.
[15] C. Lundgreen, « Norme, loi, règle, coutume, tradition : terminologie antique et perspectives modernes », in T. Itgenshorst et Ph. Le Doze (dir.), La norme sous la République romaine et le Haut-Empire. Élaboration, diffusion et contournements, Bordeaux, 2017, p. 17-33.
[16] H. Hastings, L. Nicolas et C. Passard, « Introduction. L’épreuve de la transgression », in H. Hastings, L. Nicolas et C. Passard, op. cit., p. 9.
Subjects
- Prehistory and Antiquity (Main category)
- Periods > Prehistory and Antiquity > Roman history
- Society > History
Places
- Centre de la recherche Eugène Chevreul - 18 rue Eugène Chevreul
Lyon, France (69)
Event attendance modalities
Full on-site event
Date(s)
- Friday, March 15, 2024
Keywords
- histoire romaine, émotion, norme, transgression, émotion individuelle, émotion collective
Contact(s)
- Mathias Nicolleau
courriel : mathias [dot] nicolleau [at] univ-lyon3 [dot] fr
Information source
- Mathias Nicolleau
courriel : mathias [dot] nicolleau [at] univ-lyon3 [dot] fr
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« A Roman should not feel that... », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Monday, January 22, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/vmws
