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 person. Achilles is only disarmed by the poignancy of someone else’s emotion: Priam, abasing himself at the feet of his son’s killer, saying, “Think of your father.”
The classicist Angelos Chaniotis, formerly at All Souls College, Oxford and now at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, has previously edited the two-volume Unveiling Emotions: Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World. In “A World of Emotion: Ancient Greece, 700 BC–200 AD,” on view at the Onassis Cultural Center, he and a small team have selected a wide-ranging group of objects designed both to display emotions and elicit them. And they do: one woman visiting on the day I was there was so taken with a statue of a confident little boy beaming at his pet goose that she couldn’t stop herself from exclaiming “Look at the expression!”
On steles and pots of all sizes and shapes, the physical language of