Art May 2017
On “A World of Emotion: Ancient Greece, 700 BC–200 AD” at the Onassis Cultural Center, New York.

Photo: Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports—Archaelogical Receipts Fund
If the past is a different country because they do things differently there, the emotions of the past might be a passport in. The first word of Western literature names an emotion: wrath. The Iliad is indeed a story of emotions twisted up to tautness and their fatal unspooling. The reasons for Achilles’ implacable wrath are distant, but the fact that we too can be peeved, vexed, angry, furious, incensed, and possibly even wrathful gives us a way into the bronze age. Or something even more foreign: the heart of another...