ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to address four related questions. First, what emotions appear in Polybius’ Histories? How does each of these emotions function within the text, and how are they distinguished from one another? Lastly, are Polybius’ emotions unique? To answer these questions, this chapter surveys the emotion terminology in Polybius’ Histories. Polybius continues patterns of usages seen in his historiographical predecessors Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon and complicates a universal application of Aristotle’s standard list of ancient Greek emotions. Polybius’ greater range and more varied usage of emotion terminology attests to the importance of historiography as a source on ancient emotion, demonstrates an acute awareness of emotion by this historian, and possibly reflects increased interest in emotion in his time period. Moreover, these analyses of the individual emotions begin to deconstruct common assumptions about the negative subjects and results of emotion.
