Fear of crime, the pain of crime victims, anger at criminals, and the suffering of prisoners currently affect public policy largely through their representations in public works. A scholar has insightfully observed:

The modern {criminal justice} system is remarkable in {its} emotionless day to day operation and mechanical output which leads to a displacement of the public’s emotional input into criminal law. … To put it another way: as the process of criminal adjudication becomes less of an emotional enterprise en mass, the public seeks alternative ways to redress its affective need for input into criminal law and adjudication. Legislation becomes an easy outlet for this need; and it is easy for all of the entities involved. … Calls for adding more crimes to the code is systematically easier (and cheaper) than taking more cases to trial.^

Public works about crime and punishment, which are highly successful in competition for attention, are emotionally fraught. Like any other structure of communication, public works temporally organize emotions. The daily news, the 24-hour news channel, the news story, the novel, or movie, all stimulate emotions within a particular time structure. Emotions experienced through these public works traverse a wider range of emotional types in less time than emotions experienced in a jury trial for a specific criminal case, in personal communication with crime victims, and in personal communication with prisoners.

A huge emotional time span is a feature of human nature. Humans’ emotional tones have time spans varying by roughly a multiple of 100 billion. Humans react emotionally to stimuli having durations as short as 16 to 40 milliseconds. Visual stimuli of that duration can induce a bad mood, prompt an angry facial reaction, generate negative judgmental bias, reduce consumption of a sweet, fruit-flavored drink, and decrease willingness to pay for such a drink. These effects occur even though the visual stimuli are subliminal. Persons cannot describe in words what appeared before their eyes, but their bodies react emotionally to an image.

Human emotional tones extend to much longer durations. Moods typically refer to emotional tones extending for hours, days, or longer. Personality or temperament is a significantly heritable cluster of traits that distinguish persons across their whole lifetimes. Yet persons of all different temperaments feel at different times in their lives surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and joy. Long-enduring emotional tones affect short-duration emotional reactivity. Long-enduring emotional tones also change through accumulated experiences. Persons grew content in the experience of being loved and appreciated, or embittered from years of disappointments and frustrations.

Competition for attention favors different emotional dynamics than does competition for acclaim. Short-duration emotional reactions attract an organism’s attention biologically by activating and orienting the organism’s sensory and cognitive resources to the stimulus. Resulting approach-avoidance behaviors use relatively simple, low-cost neural resources. In competition for attention, a person encountering a work can exit at any time, e.g. put down the book. Competition for attention implies an ongoing approach-avoidance constraint for attracting and holding an audience. Public works successfully competing for attention cannot develop emotional states that prompt persons to avoid the work.

Public works created in competition for attention may have different emotional tones, but they have common emotional dynamics. Persons attending a horror film differ in prior emotional expectations than persons attending a love-story film. In both film genres, shorter-duration emotional cues help to sustain longer-duration moods.^ Popular films in both genres average about two hours in length. After such films, persons exit into a public space that has the same emotional tone as when they entered the darkened theatre. Both types of films favor an emotional experience that prompts the viewer to encourage others to attend the film.

Competition for acclaim is more likely to produce emotionally unattractive public works. Unlike competition for attention, competition for acclaim points to an externally structured judgment point. Low-level, short-duration approach-avoidance affects are less relevant to the success of a work. Instead, competition for acclaim encourages activation of sensory, memory, and cognitive resources to render judgment on the merits of a work at the judgment point. Feelings deeply embedded in long-term experiences and enduring patterns of thinking can counter-balance immediately elicited emotions in such a judgment. Bitter symbolic medicine might be judged a necessary curative. Enduring a harrowing symbolic ordeal might be highly valued as a convincing expression of a fundamental moral commitment.

Competition for acclaim is less likely to produce works with short-duration, intense feelings across multiple emotions. Unlike competition for attention, competition for acclaim tends to be associated with a public related geographically, temporally, and socially. Such a public differs significantly from an imagined community or a public of readers. Real personal relations foster emotional synchronization within a timeframe of tens of minutes. In emotional space-time, a geographically, temporally, and socially related public canalizes an individual person’s feelings. Persons less geographically, temporally, and socially related are more likely to experience emotions that vary in type, intensity, and direction in a timeframe of minutes or less.

Traditional belief in the fickleness of crowds is misleading with respect to a short timeframe and widely varying stimuli. Emotional synchronization among persons watching together a seven-minute video occurs only over time periods greater than 30 seconds.^ An individual’s emotional reaction can occur within a second. Emotional signals travel much faster within a single human body than across a large group of human bodies. A single human body can experience a wider range of emotions more quickly than can a crowd.

In fifth-century Athens, tragedies were associated with relatively long-duration, narrow-scope, interpersonally correlated emotional experiences. At the City Dionysia, Athenians experienced tragedy as three consecutive days of three tragedies and a satyr play. Total performance time for the three tragedies each day was probably about four hours.^ Greek tragedies typically have a unified plot, few changes in location, and a diegetic span of usually no more than a day. Common features of tragedies are the occurrence or threat of horrendous violence among close family members and terrible suffering.^ Athenians experienced tragedy in daylight in close bodily contact with each other:

Most of the seats were narrow and had no arms, and the spectators were jam-packed, shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee. Standing spectators would be closer still. If someone beside you sobbed or shuddered or trembled, you would feel it directly, and a wave of physical reaction could pass like an electric shock through all your neighbors. In this way the audience was a united group, a thíasos, not a collection of individuals.^ ^

In addition to being geographically, temporally, and socially gathered for an intense experience, persons attending the City Dionysia probably drank enough wine to be at least mildly intoxicated during the performances.^ They thus had favorable physiological preparation for emoting. During the City Dionysia, a large share of men in Athens probably felt acute emotions of horror and sympathetic grief for hours each day.

Theatrical movies at the turn of the millennium have much different emotional dynamics. Transitions between film shots (“cuts”) occur in movies on average every three to six seconds. Most scenes last for a minute and a half to three minutes.^ The typical running-time of a movie is slightly less than two hours. The size of the audience at a typical movie viewing today is about 5% of that at a tragic performance in fifth-century Athens. Only about 5% of movie viewing is of horror movies of various types. Viewers’ emotions at horror movies are volatile and wide-ranging.^ Neighbors independently choose what, when, and where to see movies. They watch movies in the dark, in seats that physically separate them from each other. On any one day, movies do not produce hours of horror and sympathetic grief across a large share of a local population.

Emotional distinctions between tragedies and modern popular films aren’t contrasts between stylistic levels or decorum. Literary critics have distinguished between high, mixed, and low styles, and between tragedy, mixed, and comic works. Distinguishing emotional dynamics is not equivalent to distinguishing these stylistic levels or these generic categories. While a work presenting a ruling family may generate powerful emotional dynamics more easily than a work presenting a shopkeeper’s family, the issue is the emotional dynamics, not that status of the characters or the seriousness of their concerns. Fifth-century Athenian tragedies typically did not present violence on-stage. Whether a killing is presented explicitly or described, the issue is emotional dynamics, not decorum. Whether a work ends in a killing or a joyful marriage doesn’t determine the emotional dynamics of the work.

Works that represent Prometheus show different effects of competition for acclaim and competition for attention on emotion in communication with prisoners. Prometheus Bound was created as a tragedy to be presented in competition for acclaim in Athens, probably at the City Dionysia. Centered on the bound prisoner Prometheus, Prometheus Bound in fifth-century Athens stimulated enduring emotions of horror, fear, pity, and grief. In contrast, Greco-Roman Promethean works and nineteenth-century Promethean works were created within intense competition for attention. Prometheus became “the chained liberator, admirable in the bitter enjoyment of his own tragedy.”^ In competition for attention, Promethean public works stimulate feelings that change in seconds and often span the full range of contrasting emotions.

Compared to competition for acclaim, competition for attention generates feelings less effective for motivating political accountability for prisoners’ sufferings. Relatively consistent, long-duration feelings create bodily resources for subsequent feelings. Mixed, volatile, short-duration feelings have less enduring significance for subsequent feelings. Competition for acclaim, which favors the former type of feelings, creates a bodily accountability that competition for attention, which favors the latter type of feelings, does not. Moreover, imaginative works created in competition for attention must satisfy immediate emotional demands of the sought public. Competition for acclaim can provide relatively long-duration emotions independent of common, public emotional demand.

Acclaim for a work that stimulates negative emotions makes a claim for public action to effect change. Both bodily economics and interpersonal economics suggest that public work shifting from competition for acclaim to competition for attention lessens political accountability for prisoners’ sufferings.

Created in competition for acclaim, the fifth-century Athenian tragedy Prometheus Bound doesn’t merely represent terrible suffering. Prometheus Bound profoundly examines the timeframe and plotting of emotions. Prometheus Bound includes stories of suffering. It also includes representations of suffering day after day. The ancient Greeks believed that grief could arise only from unexpected occurrences. A public sentence of punishment, like the plot of a known story, provides foresight of pain. Prometheus Bound insists on suffering and grief from foreseen pain. It insists on personal accountability for known plots of punishment.

Within Prometheus Bound, Io tells the story of her father’s terrible action against her. Io tells that dreams tormented her with “soft, seductive voices.” They urged her to go out into a grassy meadow and there satisfy Zeus’s sexual passion for her. Unable to free herself from these dreams, Io revealed them to her father. Her father consulted the gods through the renowned oracles at Delphi and Dodona. After some “riddling, muddled oracles,” a clear message came from Delphi: banish your daughter “from your house, / from your country, / let her wander the wide Earth to its / very ends.”^ Io’s father, with tears in his eyes, banished Io from home and country. She immediately was transformed into a cow, maddened, stung by a gadfly, chased into the meadow, and then across the world, all the while suffering terribly. Io’s story briefly describes this horrible family drama. Io’s story is like those that tragic performances enact at length.

Io’s story draws strong, immediate emotional reaction from the chorus. The chorus responds in pain and fear, with non-verbal ejaculations, and then with aversive words:

I can’t listen!
Can’t listen!
Terrible!
Terrible words
I never thought to hear!
Horrible story, horrible!
Suffering!
Terror!
Outrage!
I can’t watch,
can’t see it!^

Throughout Prometheus Bound, Io represents a human transformed into a terribly suffering animal. The unusual meter of this sudden, frenzied choral response sympathetically matches that of Io’s entrance into the play.^ That meter represents emotion that changes persons’ attention and physical position.

In addition to being associated with Io’s disfigured character, the chorus’s emotional response is marked as disordered temporally. Prometheus responds to the chorus:

You cry out too soon.
Hold off your moans and fears
till you hear what’s to come.^

The chorus immediately affirms Prometheus’s response and implores Prometheus to speak about the future:

Speak, instruct; for the sick take comfort, in fact,
In knowing fully and clearly what suffering remains.^

The Greek text uses the word didaske. That word has the same root as didaskalos. Didaskalos was the term for the tragic poet. It was associated with instruction. The persons who are sick, who are suffering, and who need to be instructed, are not just the chorus. They are also Io, Prometheus, and the city gathered at the Dionysian festival for the performance of Prometheus Bound. The chorus’s response acknowledges that current circumstances alone do not determine the appropriateness of emotions. For the ancient Greeks, emotions must be judged with respect to events over time.

Some fifth-century Athenians believed that expecting undesirable events makes them easier to endure if they occur. In a fifth-century Athenian tragedy by Euripides, the Athenian hero Theseus praised rehearsal of future ills to lessen their impact:

I learned this from a wise man: over time
I pondered in my heart the miseries
to come: a death untimely, or the sad
escape of exile, or some other weight
of ill, rehearsing, so that if by chance
some one of them should happen, I’d not be
unready, not torn suddenly with pain.^

Theseus, the legendary founder-king of Athens, notably displays within Athenian tragedy the compassionate grief characteristic of it.^ A school of thought in fourth-century Athens explicitly taught that grief results only from unexpected occurrences.^ Expecting undesirable events was an inoculation against grief. That cure doesn’t require foresight. It requires only the ability to imagine horrors.

Prometheus Bound mocks imagination of horrors. Io, just after ending her tragic story and just before the chorus’s emotional eruption, implores Prometheus:

What’s left to suffer, indicate it. Don’t out of pity
Try to soothe me with lying words: the most shameful
Sickness is, I say, to fabricate stories.^

Io seeks a cure for her suffering. In response, Prometheus narrates exotic, horrible spectacles loosely related to Io’s future wanderings. To the east:

Skythian nomads who live in the air in
wicker huts on ox-carts with
sturdy wheels. Beware,
these people are archers who kill from
great distances.

Then to the southwest:

Here you will find the daughters of Phorkeus,
three ancient virgins who
share one eye and one tooth, and whose
hair is as white as a swan.
Neither sun nor moon has ever
seen them.
Near them their three sisters abide,
Gorgons,
man-hating winged women with
snakes for hair, whom no one
looks on and survives.

Prometheus also describes “Chalybes, / iron workers … savages, and / death to strangers,” “Amazons, women warriors / who hate men,” “unbarking hounds with sharp beaks, / the Griffins,” and “the one-eyed Arimaspians, / horse warriors who live beside Pluto’s stream / that flows with gold.”^ A variety of late-fifth century sources indicate Athenians’ interest in sight-seeing.^ Since no later than Homer’s Odyssey, wandering was also associated with lying.^ Prometheus’s descriptions of Io’s future wanderings fabricate horrible sights to entertain the theatrical audience.^ In fifth-century Athens, a tragic performance typically invoked horror in a much different way.

Prometheus’s tale of Io’s wandering rapidly turns to events with prototypically positive affect. By Zeus’s gentle touch, Io will give birth to a son. Io’s son will gather a great harvest. A descendant of Io will fall passionately in love and rescue her lover from death. She will marry him and beget a line of Argive kings. From that line will come a famous archer-hero, Heracles, who will release Prometheus from his suffering. Release from suffering, marriage, new birth, and harvest are universal literary themes associated generally with romance.^ Prometheus’s story of Io’s wandering doesn’t support horror at length. It switches from horror to happiness in seconds.

Prometheus Bound questions the curative value of tales and foresight for emotional ills. In fifth-century Athens, tragedy generated horror and compassionate grief in its audience. By doing so, it served as instruction and medicine.^ Nonetheless, tragic plots typically were based on myths well-known to the audience. Within Prometheus Bound, Prometheus’s power of foresight doesn’t mitigate his suffering. Moreover, after Prometheus reveals in story Io’s future, Io exits in frenzied screaming, much like she entered.

Prometheus himself seems to lose interest in the tale he tells about Io. Prometheus initially presents his story of Io’s wanderings as having great importance. He instructs Io, “take my words to heart,” “Write them, / inscribe them in your mind, and / remember.” Prometheus wants Io to understand fully all the details:

If anything I’ve said has not been clear,
ask and I’ll explain.
I have the time,
and more than I would like.

Prometheus, however, ends his story with repeated concern about its length and lack of practical use:

To tell it all to you would be
a long tale,
…
How it will happen and when is too
long a tale to tell you,
and would be of no use to you.^

Fantastic tales tend to be episodic, of essentially unbounded length, and not of practical use. Ancient Greek tragedies, in contrast, usually had a unified plot, a diegetic span of usually no more than a day, and were regarded as being of great civic importance. Prometheus’s loss of interest in the tale he tells contrasts it with the more important activity of tragic performance.

Prometheus declares that speech acts should respect the natural state and time-course of emotions. Okeanos, long-winded and full of epigrams, says to Prometheus:

You know this, don’t you, Prometheus, that
Words are physicians for a sick disposition?

In response, Prometheus subordinates words to bodily state:

Yes, if you poultice the heart at the right moment
And not put pressure on a swollen spirit by force.^

Prometheus’s response distinguishes the task of the tragic poet from merely telling tales of horrors. Tragedy originally was intended to instruct and treat emotions. That is the central idea of catharsis.^ To serve as medicine for emotions, tragedy must work within bodily constraints. The tragic plot cannot, by the force of imitation alone, treat emotions. Unlike a tale, a tragic plot must develop in accordance with the body’s rhythm.

Prometheus’s subordination of words to the body’s emotional functioning was an idea that continued through Greco-Roman consolation literature. A fourth-century member of Plato’s Academy may have quoted Prometheus on choosing the right time to console a grief-stricken heart.^ ^ A third-century leader of the Stoic school echoed Prometheus’s belief that one should not attempt to treat freshly inflamed emotions.^ The first-century Roman statesman Cicero quoted both Okeanos’s and Prometheus’s couplets.^ Cicero himself struggled with intense grief following his beloved daughter’s death. The images in Prometheus’s statement about timing emotional treatment play confusingly in Cicero’s self-perception:

Now this grievous blow has again inflamed the wounds I thought healed.^

… my Consolation, which I composed in the midst of sorrow and pain, not being a wise person myself. I did what Chrysippus says one should not do: applied a remedy to the mind’s swelling while it was still fresh. I brought the force of nature to bear upon it, so that my great pain would give way to the greatness of the medicine. … different methods work for different people. In my Consolation, for instance, I combined virtually all these methods into a single speech of consolation. For my mind was swollen, and I was trying out every remedy I could. But with sickness of mind, no less than with those of the body, it is important to choose the right moment for treatment.^

The venerated Greco-Roman declares that never being born is best, and that the next best is to die as soon as possible.^ That declaration points to escape from human time. Io proposes this idealistic view to Prometheus. Prometheus rejects it as not being relevant to his actual circumstances as an immortal god.^ Concern about choosing the right time to treat emotions directs attention to bodily processes in time in order to improve the common practice of verbal consolation.

Prometheus’s sufferings are explicitly embedded within time. In Prometheus Bound, none of the characters who speak to Prometheus succeed in consoling him. The final visitor, Zeus’s messenger Hermes, warns Prometheus of Zeus’s eagle-hound:

the ravening eagle
will invite himself to your banquet,
tearing your flesh to ragged bits,
and all day long feast on your liver till it’s
black with his gnawing.^

Hermes tells Prometheus that this anguish will be continual. Because Prometheus is immortal, he cannot have the relief from pain that death brings. But Prometheus’s sufferings are not set in an immortal realm. As a fragment from Prometheus Unbound makes clear, Prometheus is denied healing in mortal time:

And always on the third day, for me, the light of day
is black,
when Zeus’s horrible pet glides in at me –
the EAGLE
that digs in with crookt claws
gouging out
her feast, until her crop’s
bloated, rich with liver.
Then
screaming
wheeling skyward … her tail feathers
drag through blood,
my blood.
And once again, my rag of a liver
swells up like new, and again
the bloodthirsty banqueter comes back for more.^ ^ ^

Prometheus’s wounds are continually inflamed and continually made fresh in the human timeframe of days.

A Greek epic poem from the third-century BCE registers the ancient emotional force of the eagle’s assaults on Prometheus. The poem decorously describes visually only the eagle:

This creature they glimpsed at evening, flying over the ship’s topmast,
cloud-high, with sharp-whirring pinions; yet despite its distance
it shook all the sails with its wing-beats, speeding past.
For it did not share the nature of birds of the heavens,
but the long quill-feathers it flapped were like polished oars.
And not long after they heard the agonized outcry
of Prometheus, as his liver was lacerated: the clear air
rang with his screams, till they saw the eagle speeding
back the same way from the mountain and its feast of raw flesh.^

The eagle, huge and lethal, makes the ship’s sails shake, as would the reader. In the Prometheus Unbound fragment, the eagle, pushing skyward, drags its tail feathers through Prometheus’s blood. That image transforms from water to blood the Homeric description of “long slim oars, / wings that make ships fly.”^ The tormented Prometheus, demeaned to being food for an animal, is rowed over. The epic poem can bear only to allude to this horror: “the long quill-feathers it flapped were like polished oars.”

Surviving Greco-Roman visual art showing Prometheus is heavily weighted toward his suffering. Salient events in myths concerning Prometheus are his theft of fire from the Gods, his transmission of fire to humans, his gifts of other technologies and arts to humans, his chaining, his liberation, and his creation of humans from clay. About 50% of surviving visual artifacts of Prometheus depict him enchained or just liberated.^ Moreover, some of the artifacts showing Prometheus suffering date from the seventh century BCE. The earliest surviving visual representations of Prometheus’s creation of humans, theft of fire, or gifts to humans date from about 300 BCE.^ Most of the images of Prometheus enchained or just liberated communicate suffering, deprivation, and humiliation. A Roman orator declaimed:

Paint Prometheus – but paint him creating man, paint him distributing fire; paint him, but amid his gifts rather than amid his agonies.^

His rhetoric had a historical point. A fragment of fifth-century Greek poetry, possible from Prometheus Pyrkaeus (Prometheus the Firekindler) describes joyous remembrance of Prometheus’s acts:

The nymphs, I know full well, shall join their dances in honour of Prometheus’ gift!

Sweet, I think, will be the song they sing in honour of the giver, telling how Prometheus is the bringer of sustenance and the eager giver of gifts to men^

Despite the possibility of depicting a variety of joyous scenes, visual representations of Prometheus predominately showed Prometheus suffering.

Representations of Philoctetes and Heracles indicate the distinctiveness of Prometheus’s suffering. Philoctetes received Heracles’s bow and quiver at Heracles’s immolation on Mt. Oita. Philoctetes was bitten on the foot by a snake and abandoned on an island. He eventually participated in the sack of Troy. Sophocles’s tragedy Philoctetes powerfully evokes Philoctetes’s pathetic suffering. Aeschylus and Euripides also wrote tragedies named Philoctetes. About two-thirds of surviving Greco-Roman visual representation of Philoctetes shown him wounded or being wounded. However, many of these images also represent Philoctetes’s strength and virility as a warrior. Overall, visual representation indicating pathetic suffering or calling for compassionate grief are less prevalent and less compelling for Philoctetes than for Prometheus.^ Heracles, the most commonly represented figure in surviving Greco-Roman visual art, suffered excruciatingly. Heracles’s suffering and death was the subject of Sophocles’s tragedy, Trachiniae. Among about 3,500 surviving Greco-Roman representations of Heracles, none shows Heracles suffering terribly.^

Visual representations of Prometheus specifically indicate his suffering. Sixth-century Greek painted images of Prometheus suggest that he is impaled on a stake going from his buttocks on ground level to the back of his head. He’s typically naked with legs folded. Thus he’s depicted in a low position of bodily compression and exposure.^ The eagle attacking Prometheus is human-sized in several images and usually digs into Prometheus at the middle of his torso. Some images show blood dripping from Prometheus.^ Sculptors, apparently keen to include the tormenting eagle, carved a standing Prometheus with one thigh raised. The sculpted eagle was attached to Prometheus’s raised thigh. From there the eagle digs into Prometheus’s chest.^ ^

Tragic performances in fifth-century Athens, especially Prometheus Bound, had lasting emotional effects. Plato and Aristotle analogized the effects of performed poetry to the effects of drugs.^ ^ ^ Drugs typically work on time scales of hours and days. Tragic performances at the fifth-century Athenian City Dionysia generated emotions of horror and grief over hours and days. Prometheus Bound represented in tragic performance enduring suffering like suffering through a sentence of punishment.

Prometheus Bound contrasts the emotional experience of punishment with much more rapid movement through a story’s sentences. Io’s recounting of her history offers tragedy as a short story. Prometheus’s foretelling of Io’s future rapidly moves through a wide range of emotions. In the middle of the first century BCE, a Roman jurist advised his grief-stricken friend Cicero:

Do not be like a bad physician, who professes medical knowledge to his patients but does not know how to treat himself. … There is no grief that is not lessened or softened by the passage of time. For you to wait for this time to pass, instead of anticipating the results by your own good sense, does you discredit.^

In other words, Cicero should rationally anticipate and simulate the effects of the passage of time. The creator of a symbolic work can anticipate the passage of time and move the work’s sense rapidly across a wide range of emotions. The stories told within Prometheus Bound exemplify this technique. Prometheus Bound as a whole also disparages that technique. Fifth-century Athenian tragedies were meant to stimulate emotions of fear and pity for hours and days.

Prometheus Bound is not unusual among fifth-century Athenian tragedies in its emotional dynamics. Recent scholarship on tragic pathos has claimed the distinctiveness of Prometheus Bound:

Prometheus Bound is an unusual play in many respects; perhaps most remarkably, it presents the continuous suffering of the Titan on stage and various internal models of viewing this suffering. … pity in the play appears to require direct participation in a sufferer’s misfortune rather than involvement mediated by imagination, which Aristotle prefers.^

The bodily dynamics of emotions that festival participants experienced from Prometheus Bound weren’t unusual. Those emotional dynamics were an important and historically distinctive feature of all fifth-century Athenian tragedies.

Prometheus Bound is unusual in the directness of its political relevance to ordinary Athenians. Like a known plot, a public sentence of punishment provides foresight of pain. Prometheus Bound presents at length suffering and grief from foreseen pain. It insists on personal response to the suffering and grief of persons being punished.

In competition for attention in the Greco-Roman world, representations of Prometheus became more emotionally labile. Writing in the first-century CE, Dio Chrysostom, a Greek public officeholder, described Prometheus as “a sort of sophist … being destroyed by popular opinion.”^ A Prometheus fragment from the Roman tragedian Lucius Accius ironically questions Prometheus’s suffering, perhaps in the context of impressive sophistic capabilities of speech: “Surely then / No eagle has riven his breast as these propound?”^ Prometheus had long been associated with sacrilegious ambition. Competition for attention increased the emotional dynamics of Prometheus’s ambition: “for his liver swelled and grew whenever he was praised and shrivelled again when he was censured.”^ Rather than an eagle tearing it anew every other day, Prometheus’s liver wound became an emotional wound in verbal competition. The pain of wounding became mixed with pride and joy in others’ praise.

The Roman-era tragedy Hercules Oetaeus, attributed to Seneca the Younger, similarly gives a Promethean figure a wide emotional ambit. In Hercules Oetaeus, the mad Hercules intends to assault the heaven and attack “my unnatural father’s unbridled rule.” He declares, “Let the Titans in rage prepare war {against heaven} under my leadership.” One of those Titans is Tityos. Tityos, like Prometheus, had been punished by having vultures continually tearing his liver. In Hercules Oetaeus, Tityos joins Hercules’s imagined attack on heaven: “Tityos has escaped the underworld, and stands so close to heaven, his chest all torn and empty!”^ Promethean suffering is thus united with triumphal revenge.

Varro’s Prometheus Freed, written about 70 BCE^, apparently had extraordinary emotional range. Varro was a Roman renowned for vast learning. Varro’s Prometheus Freed powerfully communicates emotions of Prometheus, suffering in punishment. Here are surviving fragments in tragic verse:

I, unfortunate one, why couldn’t I defend myself from attack and throw my enemy to hellish punishment? In vain I repeatedly try to tear away the shackles from my hands

then like high bark or the top of an oak tree dying of thirst

limbs bloodless from pain, the color fades

no one hears me, but an engulfing view of inhospitable Scythian desert

my boiling mind never dreams, my eyes are not shaded with sleep

Prometheus Freed also conveys, in prose, sophisticated thinking highly abstracted from bodily feelings:

for knowledge, hear and understand what you say is false; that is, a person who has eyes doesn’t need them

Moving to yet another emotional register, Prometheus Freed uses the body as an object for scatological humor:

for shit to flow out, I made in the behind a valley

And also romantic humor:

Golden-sandal orders for himself a mistress of milk and Taretine honey-wax, which Milesian bees have sipped from all the flowers, a mistress without bones or gristle, without leathery skin, without a beard, pure, clean, tall, white, tender, beautiful

There’s also biting harangue:

They live in darkness, in a pig-pen; indeed, the Forum is a pigsty, and most men today act like pigs.^ ^ ^

While only fragments of it have survived, Varro’s Prometheus Freed surely had much different emotional characteristics than did Prometheus Bound. Prometheus Freed stimulated a wide range of emotions that changed quickly across short passages of reading.

Prometheus Freed itself suggests effects of competition for attention. Varro seems to have been:

a professional writer, worried about literary fame, not achieving the respect of his audience, and depicting paradoxically both the effort of his production and the erudition that lies behind it^

A fragment of Prometheus Freed points to the effects of symbolic competition:

emulates and a critic of that art, from which he realized no profit for several years

This difficult fragment plausibly describes work like Prometheus Bound failing in popular competition with newer styles of symbolic work.^ Prometheus Freed and other works in Varro’s Menippean Satires contain obscure vocabulary, arcane knowledge, and difficult rhetoric. Varro’s Menippean Satires seem not to have been written for popular success and have survived only in fragments despite Varro’s contemporary renown. Their literary form and emotional dynamics probably mocked other first-century works that were successful in competition for attention.

The emotional work of Prometheus Bound in fifth-century Athens provided material for literary satire in the Greco-Roman world. The circumstances of symbolic competition changed from competition for acclaim to competition for attention from fifth-century Athens to the Greco-Roman world of the third century and later. The emotional dynamics that the Greco-Roman world highly valued, and the symbolic work that was successful, featured much more labile emotions.

Competition for attention was much greater in the Hellenistic period than in fifth-century Athens. The geographic expansion of Hellenistic culture in the fourth and third centuries expanded the market for symbolic works far beyond the boundaries of Athens or any other individual city. In addition, the fragmentation of Alexander’s empire after his death in 323 BCE raised the stakes of political competition. Competing successors to Alexander commanded enormous resources. They had both strong incentives and ample means to serve as lucrative sources of patronage. Ambitious scholars, writers, performers, and other symbolic producers could anticipate a high return from currying favor with politicians.^ ^ Intense competition for attention played out across the broad geographic scope of Hellenistic culture and continued through the imperial Roman era.

Composing and arranging literary epigrams become a prominent form of elite competition in the Hellenistic world. Most epigrams inscribed on stone from sixth-century BCE Greece to the present take a non-literary form that satisfies personal, circumstantial interests (funerary commemoration). However, about the beginning of the third-century BCE, epigrams began to be collected and circulated on papyrus for pleasure and instruction. The first author-edited collection of epigrams probably also dates to the third-century BCE.^ ^ The Milan Posidippus Papyrus, a collection of epigrams from the late third century or early second century BCE, shows considerable literary sophistication and an orientation toward elite patronage. Allusions to prior compositions, self-conscious variations on literary conventions, serial revisions by different authors, and other inter-textual competitive strategies played out quickly through the short texts of epigrams. Occasional epigrams inscribed on stone were much less in competition for attention than were literary epigrams circulated on papyrus.

In the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, having actors sing highlights from well-known tragedies largely replaced staging of complete tragedies. No complete Greek tragedy from after the fifth-century BCE has survived. No evidence exists for the performance of complete tragedies after the early third-century CE through to early modern times.^ In the Hellenistic period and during the Roman Empire, tragic performances tended to eliminate the chorus and present, often by a solo actor, highlights from fifth-century Athenian tragedies. For example, a third-century BCE performance excerpted and re-arranged lyrical highlights from a Euripidean tragedy. Another performance from the early second century CE or earlier excerpted from different tragedies scenes related to a common mythic figure. In the Greco-Roman period, Euripides was the most popular source for tragic excerpts. The performance of tragic texts became more like an entertaining recital or musical concert than like a dramatic narrative.^ ^ ^

An actor singing highlights from well-known tragedies has important advantages in competition for attention. Compared to presenting unknown work, staging material from revered, well-known tragedies lessens promotional effort and has a lower risk of popular rejection. Choosing highlights from well-known tragedies allows the most attractive material to be presented at the least cost of audience time and attention. Highlights allow a wide range of intense emotions to be staged within a single performance. Highlights shift attention from plot to character. Both emotional lability and emphasis on character are associated with competition for attention. The Hellenistic pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata observes that “men take greater pleasure in listening to those who are singing such music as they already know than music which they do not know.”^ The prevalence of serials and sequels among popular twenty-first-century books and movies also testifies to the importance of established brands in competition for attention.

Lessening the number of actors and institutionally organizing actors both plausibly relate to growing competition for attention. Performances of tragic highlights in the Greco-Roman period typically involved only a solo actor. There was no chorus. Lessening the number of actors in a performance fosters the development and exploitation of celebrity actors. While celebrity actors existed before the Hellenistic period, the growth of the inter-city market for actors in the Hellenistic period magnified the earning potential of celebrity actors.^ Most actors undoubtedly were not celebrities. Formal, pan-Hellenistic trade organizations of actors, such as the Artists of Dionysus, date to the early third century BCE.^ Organizing a trade is a characteristic response to competition detrimental to the interests of most persons (non-celebrities) within the trade.

Competition for attention spanned a wide variety of visual and verbal forms. In early second-century BCE Rome, Terence, a highly successful Roman playwright, claimed that one of his plays had been interrupted. Attracted by rumors of a different type of event, a noisy crowd had poured into the theater. The actors’ leader described what happened:

When I started to act it for the first time, talk about boxers spread,
(not to mention the hope of a tightrope walker)
an army of slaves formed, disorder grew, women were shouting;
these before the end forced me to leave the stage.^

About five years later, another attempt was made to perform the play. A large crowd seeking a different type of show again interrupted it:

I brought {the play} out again;
I was a success in the first bit, when meanwhile there came a rumor
that gladiators were about to be presented. A crowd flocked in,
they made an uproar, they shouted, they fought for seats.
I meanwhile couldn’t keep my place.^

These accounts rhetorically contrast popular entertainment with elite theater. They highlight elite concern for social status (“I … couldn’t keep my place”). An army of slaves, disorder, women screaming – these details all signal, in second-century BCE Rome, a low-status environment. Terence’s plays were popular relative to other playwrights’ plays. But his plays were much less popular than chariot races and gladiator shows. The account of the interruptions testify to competition for attention between narrative drama and other spectacles.

The insecurity of high-status performers in competition for attention also underlies an account of success. The orator Adrian held the prestigious Chair of Rhetoric in Rome in the mid-second century CE. A historian celebrating the lives of leading orators wrote:

{Adrian} so successfully drew the attention of all Rome to himself that he inspired even those who did not know the Greek language with an ardent desire to hear him declaim. And they listened to him as to a sweet-voiced nightingale, struck with admiration for his facile tongue, his well-modulated and flexible voice, and his rhythms, whether in prose or when he sang in recitative.

Here “all Rome” refers to Roman elites, as the subsequent text makes clear:

So much so, that, when they were attending shows in which the vulgar delight – these were, generally speaking, performances of {pantomime} dancers – a messenger had only to appear in the theatre to announce that Adrian was going to declaim, when even the members of the Senate would rise from their sitting, and the members of the equestrian order would rise, not only those who were devoted to Hellenic culture, but also those who were studying the other language {Latin} at Rome; and they would set out on the run to the Athenaeum, overflowing with enthusiasm, and upbraiding those who were going there at a walking pace.^

The humor in this third-century-CE account would obvious to readers of its time. Describing senators and equestrians (Roman elites) attending the “vulgar” pantomime performance presents a status incongruity.^ Other details develop it into comedy. The messenger, a characteristic feature of fifth-century Athenian tragedy, textually motivates the formal description of these high-status men rising from their seats. But then, abandoning concern for dignitas, the men run to the Athenaeum, “overflowing with enthusiasm.” Moreover, emphasizing the comic reversal, they disparage those going there at a walking pace. Competition for attention spanned popular pantomime dancing and elite display oratory. It undermined status hierarchies.

The festivals that Roman leaders Aemilius and Anicius organized about 167 BCE contrast competition for acclaim with competition for attention. Aemilius and Anicius had separately led military victories over Greek peoples. Aemilius celebrated his victory with a festival in the Macedonian home kingdom of Alexander the Great:

he put on a show at Amphipolis with great display: he had planned it well in advance and had sent messengers to the cities of Asia and the kings to announce it and, when he had himself toured the Greek states, he had informed the leaders. For a mass of every sort of craftsman involved with putting on the show, and athletes and famous horses, gathered from right across the whole world, along with embassies with sacrificial victims, and everything else that is usually done in Greece for gods and men at great games was done in such a way that they marveled at not only the splendor, but also his practical wisdom in putting on spectacles, at which the Romans were then inexperienced. Feasts were also prepared for the embassies, with the same opulence and care. A saying of Aemilius himself was widely circulated: that to prepare a banquet and to put on games were the task of the same man who knew how to win at war. … The crowd who came had as a spectacle no less than the stage show, no less than the competitions of men and the racing of horses, all the booty of Macedon laid out to view^

These “games” probably included music, dance, and verbal performances drawing upon Greek traditions; “a mass of every sort of craftsman involved with putting on the show” can also be translated as “a crowd of all sorts of professionals in the art of entertainment.”^ Another account notes Aemilius’s concern for propriety and detail:

In managing and arranging these feasts, and in seating and greeting the guests and discerning what degree of respect and consideration was due to each of them, he displayed a high degree of precision and care. The Greeks were impressed to see a man with so much important business to conduct not belittling these amusements, but paying appropriate attention even to trivial details. … If anyone expressed amazement at the care with which he prepared these feasts, he used to tell him that the same mental facility was involved in taking charge of a military formation and a symposium; the only difference was that you had to make one strike as much fear as possible into the enemy, and the other give as much pleasure as possible to the guests.^

Aemilius, with keen appreciation for history and Greek culture, apparently sought to reproduce in Greece a proper, major Greek festival. Doing so would help him to receive Greek acclaim as the new ruler of the Greek states.

Anicius, in contrast, staged a spectacle consistent with Roman competition for attention. Anicius’s military victory was neither as important nor as bountiful as Aemilius’s. Moreover, Anicius ranked considerably below Aemilius in familial prestige and personal reputation. Anicius could not compete successfully with Aemilius in the field of well-established, well-structured claims to merit. Anicius could, however, compete with Aemilius for attention. That meant organizing popularly successful games in Rome. Anicius did just that:

having sent for the most celebrated scenic artists from Greece and constructed an enormous stage in the circus, he first brought on all the flute-players at once. These were Theodorus of Boeotia, Theopompus, Hermippus and Lysimachus, who were then at the height of their fame. Stationing them with the chorus on the proscenium he ordered them to play all together. When they went through their performance with the proper rhythmic movements, he sent to them to say they were not playing well and ordered them to show more competitive spirit. They were at loss to know what he meant, when one of the lictors explained that they should turn and go for each other and make a sort of fight of it. The players soon understood, and having got an order that suited their own appetite for licence, made a mighty confusion. Making the central group of dancers face those on the outside, the flute-players blowing loud in unintelligible discord and turning their flutes about this way and that, advancing towards each other in turn, and the dancers, clapping their hands and mounting the stage all together, attacked the adverse party and then faced about and retreated in their turn. And when one of the dancers girt up his robes on the spur of the moment, and turning round lifted up his hands in boxing attitude against the flute-player who was advancing towards him, there was a tremendous applause and cheering on the part of the spectators. And while they were thus engaged in pitched battle, two dancers with musicians were introduced into the orchestra and four prize-fighters mounted the stage accompanied by buglers and clarion-players and with all these men struggling together the scene was indescribable. As for the tragic actors Polybius says, “If I tried to describe them some people would think I was making fun of my readers.”^

Scholars differ about whether this performance was a deliberate parody of a Greek festival or an earnest, but under-rehearsed attempt to adapt Greek culture for a Roman audience.^ ^ ^ Those aren’t the only possibilities. The performance occurred on “an enormous stage in the circus” in Rome. That puts it at the center of competition for attention in Rome. The performance included celebrity flute-players. Employing celebrities helps to attract attention. Anicius re-directed the performance in mid-course to generate audience applause. Overall, the account conveys Anicius’s keen practical knowledge in competing for attention. Polybius’s account of the performance, although plausibly first-hand, might be greatly exaggerated or largely fabricated to contrast competition for acclaim (Aemilius in Greece) with competition for attention (Anicius in Rome).

The most popular attractions in the Roman Empire were chariot races, gladiator fights, staged animal hunts, and pantomime shows. Huge permanent structures were built to house the audiences attracted to these public spectacles. Elite men competed vigorously in sponsoring public spectacles. The magnitude and frequency of the spectacles, much less than the substance of particular performances, shaped public opinion about elite men. At least in some instances, spectacles were advertised so as to attract attention to them. For performers, objective victories and attractiveness to the public were primary measures of performative success. Performers in these spectacles usually came from low-status groups — prisoners, slaves, foreigners, non-citizens. Performing in the theater, arena, or circus was in itself a disreputable act. Nonetheless, some chariot racers, gladiators, and pantomimes became celebrities. These celebrities acquired great wealth and personal access to leading politicians.^ Success in competition for attention through public spectacles created political power both for elite sponsors and for celebrity performers.

Emotions generated during Roman spectacles apparently were volatile and wide-ranging. Chariot racing most likely generated the sorts of emotions that persons now feel at car races and running races. Chariot racing, however, was much more dangerous than either. Spectators often saw chariot drivers being seriously injured and killed.^ In gladiator fights, death was a regular feature of the event. Some spectators probably felt deep revulsion in seeing a gladiator suffer a bloody, painful death. But repetition and in-group/out-group psychology could generate other emotional reactions. A description of Emperor Claudius’s behavior at a gladiator contest associates his behavior with that of the masses:

He gave many gladiator shows and in many places…. Now there was no form of entertainment at which he was more familiar and free, even thrusting out his left hand {indicating death to the loser}, as the commons did, and counting aloud on his fingers the gold pieces which were paid to the victors; and always and repeatedly he would address the audience, and invite and urge them to merriment, calling them “domini” (masters) from time to time, and interspersing feeble and far-fetched jokes.^

Most Roman spectators probably reacted to the violence of gladiator contests like early twenty-first-century U.S. spectators react to the violence of U.S. football matches. They feel short bursts of excitement, joy, dejection, and anger against a baseline feeling of well-being, the well-being of relaxing for entertainment.

Lucian’s second-century-CE text on pantomimes, The Dance, hints at contrasting imperatives between competition for attention and competition for acclaim. The Dance is a dialogue between two characters, Crato, who initially deplores pantomimes, and Lycinus, who defends them. The Dance begins with Lycinus acknowledging to Crato, “this is a truly forceful indictment {against pantomime dances} that you have brought, after long preparation.”^ After five relatively brief dialogue turns, Lycinus issues a lengthy, learned encomium on pantomime. Just before Lycinus’s peroration, he acknowledges a weakness in the case for pantomime performances:

As in literature, so too in dancing what is generally called “bad taste” comes in when they exceed the due limit of mimicry and put forth greater effort than they should; if something large requires to be shown, they represent it as enormous; if something dainty, they make it extravagantly effeminate, and they carry masculinity to the point of savagery and bestiality.

Something of that sort, I remember, I once saw done by a dancer who until then had been in high esteem, as he was intelligent in every way and truly worth admiring; but by some ill-luck, I know not what, he wrecked his fortunes upon an ugly bit of acting through exaggerated mimicry.^

The reference to literature and “bad taste” evokes criteria of acclaim, rather than attention. So too do the subsequent references to “high esteem,” “intelligent,” “worth admiring,” and “ugly.” The “ill-luck” by which the actor “wrecked his fortunes” was spectacular:

In presenting Ajax going mad immediately after his defeat, he so over-leaped himself that it might well have been thought that instead of feigning madness he was himself insane; for he tore the clothes of one of the men that beat time with an iron shoe, and snatching a flute from one of the accompanists, with a vigorous blow he cracked the crown of {the actor playing} Odysseus, who was standing near and exulting in his {play} victory; indeed, if his watch-cap had not offered resistance and borne the brunt of the blow, poor Odysseus would have lost his life through falling in the way of a crazy dancer. The pit, however, all went mad with Ajax, leaping and shouting and flinging up their garments; for the riff-raff, the absolutely unenlightened, took no thought for propriety and could not perceive what was good or what was bad, but thought that sort of thing consummate mimicry of the ailment^

In short, the dancer presenting Ajax made a giant leap toward being a celebrity pantomime. Others judged the dancer’s actions differently:

the politer sort understood, to be sure, and were ashamed of what was going on, but instead of censuring the thing by silence, they themselves applauded to cover the absurdity of the dancing, although they perceived clearly that what went on came from the madness of the actor, not that of Ajax.^

Shrewd, status-conscious academics today respond similarly to the work of some of their peers. With equal shrewdness, the dancer after his performance seated himself between two high-status persons (senators) in the audience. The dancer was said to have subsequently repented of his performance in accordance with the imperatives of competition for acclaim:

What irked him {the dancer} most was that his antagonist and rival, when cast for Ajax in the same role, enacted his madness so discreetly and sanely as to win praise, since he kept within the bounds of the dance and did not debauch the histrionic art.^

Lucian was a highly sophisticated rhetorician. Across Lycinus’s lengthy declamation, the concluding spectacle seems to be the most affective. Crato abruptly declares, “all agog, ear and eye alike,” his new interest in attending pantomime dances. How Lucian truly felt about pantomime dancing isn’t clear.^ But Lucian clearly recognized how to attract attention.

Lucian ironically indicated that acclaim was the measure of pantomime dance. In response to the point that pantomime dance generally was not part of the competition at public games, Lucian countered: “if the dance does not feature in contests, I maintain that it is because the governors of the games thought the thing too important and too grand to be called into competition.”^ That’s absurd. Gladiator contests, chariot races, animal hunts, and pantomime performances were primary attractions at public games in imperial Rome. These spectacles were not in competition for acclaim. Theatrical contests with institutionalized selection of competitors and institutionalized judgments of success weren’t typical for imperial Roman games. To the extent that theatrical contests were included, they were probably mainly used to evoke the cultural prestige of ancient Greece. Pantomime dancing never participated in contests for acclaim like dramatic festivals in fifth-century Athens.

Compared to fifth-century Athenian tragedies, pantomime performances evoked a wider range of emotions and moved across emotions more quickly. Lucian’s The Dance directly compares tragic drama and pantomime dance:

The themes of tragedy and the dance are common to both, and there is no difference between those of the one and those of the other, except that the themes of the dance are more varied and more unhackneyed, and they contain countless vicissitudes. … In general, the dancer undertakes to present and enact characters and emotions, introducing now a lover and now an angry person, one man afflicted with madness, another with grief, and all this within fixed bounds. Indeed, the most surprising part of it is that within the selfsame day at one moment we are shown Athamas in a frenzy, at another Ino in terror; presently the same person is Atreus, and after a little, Thyestes; then Aegisthus, or Aerope; yet they all are but a single man.^

The typical pantomime staging — a single, unspeaking dancer, with musical accompaniment — is an apt arrangement for rapid shifts in emotional tone. Musical instruments allow a trained musician to shift emotional tones easily, quickly, and effectively. The dancer, synchronizing emotionally with the music and free from the task of producing emotionally appropriate sound, could concentrate on physical movements communicating the selected emotion.

The pantomime’s movements emotionally presented different characters in rapid succession. Lucian declares through Lycinus, “The chief occupation and the aim of dancing, as I said, is impersonating.”^ Emphasis on character relative to plot is typical in competition for attention. Describing pantomimes’ rapid transformations, a rhetorician in fourth-century-CE Antioch figured them with gods:

the possibility of each of the actions being accurately observed has been taken away by the speed of their body repeatedly undergoing a change to whatever you like. Each one of them is almost Proteus the Egyptian. You would say through the wand of Athena, which transforms the shape of Odysseus, they take on every guise; old men, young men, the humble, the mighty, the dejected, the elated, servants, masters. With respect to their feet, one might even question whether they possess the advantage over Perseus.^

A single pantomime dancer could not rapidly present different characters through realistic narrative. Lucian writes that a barbarian, upon learning about pantomime, remarked to the dancer, “I did not realize, my friend, that though you have only this one body, you have many souls.” The word pantomime combines verbal forms indicating all (pan, panto) and mimicry (mime). Lucian explicitly references this etymology: “the Greeks of Italy quite appropriately call the dancer a pantomime, precisely in consequence of what he does.” ^ ^ Libanius further describes pantomimes presenting multiple characters: “the theatre saw Deianeira, but also Oeneus and Achelous and Heracles and Nessus.”^ The pantomime, taking up five different masks in a single performance, was one body that presented many souls. Those many souls were brief, emotional characterizations.

Much of the pantomime’s communication with the spectators occurred without distinct signifiers. The pantomime did not merely use gestural-representational movement as a substitute for words. A Latin epigram from sometime before the early sixth-century CE re-enacts pantomimic technique:

Declining his masculine breast with a feminine inflection and molding his pliant torso to suit either sex, the dancer enters the stage and greets the people, promising that words will come forth from his expert hands. For when the sweet chorus pours forth its delightful song, what the singer declaims, the dancer himself confirms with his movements. He fights, he plays, he loves, he rages, he reverses, he stops. He illuminates the truth, he imbues everything with grace. He has as many tongues as limbs, so wonderful is the art by which he can make his joints speak although his mouth is silent.^

As one scholar has insightfully observed, this epigram “hints at the full drama of the pantomimic performance with its account of the dancer’s slow, controlled entrance; the lightning-fast repertoire of actions and movements; the bursts of rhythm and energy punctuated by climactic stops.”^ The three paratactic sets of contrasting action-pairs range from complex movements closely related to a person’s external circumstances (fighting and playing) to non-specific actions expressing internal emotional states (loving and raging) to simple movements meaningless apart from their circumstances and emotional coloring (reversing and stopping). An extended metaphor inconsistently links words, speaking, and dancing throughout the epigram. Words come forth from hands, but limbs are tongues, and joints speak. Singers declaim like orators who confuse the grammatical gender of words. Most significantly, the epigram describes sweet, delightful, and graceful dances. Pantomime dancing also presented tragic myths such as Agave in a bacchant frenzy tearing off her son King Pentheus’s head.^ Only the grotesque image of “as many tongues as limbs” and a contextualization of “rages” (bacchatur, in the noun form bacchae, suggests the action in tragedies such as Euripides’s Bacchae) imply pantomime dancing that prompts horror and disgust. Contemporary readers would have recognized those popular pantomimic emotions in the epigram’s silent joints.

Ancient reports emphasize pantomime dancers’ expressive hands. An observer in the second century CE described a pantomime dancer’s movements:

fracturing his body in all sorts of ways, now making his eyes flash, now making sinuous movements with his hands and raging from behind his clay mask^

Pantomime dancers in imperial Rome wore a silk robe and a scarf, both of which contributed importantly to their performances.^ Nonetheless, hand movements seem to have been the most important aspect of a pantomime’s performance. A leading scholar of ancient pantomime observes that ancient literature contains:

constant references to them as “speaking with their hands.” Artemidoros states that it is “obvious to everyone” that “not to have hands is not a good thing for sailors, dancers, and jugglers as they are unable to do their work without them.” Almost every source mentions the eloquent hands of the dancers, some to the exclusion of all else^

Indian dance forms such as Kathakali evince hands’ expressive capabilities. This expressive capability is not merely an instrument of the mind. Like emotions, hand movements can function sub-consciously and generate mental states.^ ^

Modern scientific data supports hands’ emotional expressiveness. Researchers recorded actors eliciting fourteen emotions using relevant situation descriptions. As part of their expressions, the actors uttered two standard sentences. The standard sentences were non-semantic syllable strings constructed from six European languages. Video recordings of the actors uttering the standard sentences, which had durations of two to three seconds, were the controlled representations of emotional expression. Coders categorized bodily movements during these representations. Four types of hand movements statistically differentiated among some of the fourteen emotions. Emotions differentiated via the two-to-three-second hand movements were hot anger, elated joy, despair, fear, shame, and interest. Hand movements naturally express emotion intentionally expressed verbally.^

Persons observing masked dancer-actors can recognize different emotions through mere seconds of bodily movements. Researchers recorded actors portraying happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust. The researchers carefully controlled the circumstances of the actors’ emotional representations, including the actors’ costumes:

The actors wore uniform dark-grey, tight-fighting clothes and headwear, so that all parts of their anatomy were covered. One large and one small suit were created, to ensure reasonable fit for all actors. The headwear consisted of several layers of tights, which allowed the actor’s head orientation and movement to be seen, but not the features or expressions of his or her face.^

The actors’ costumes included strips of reflective tape so that point-light representations of the actors’ movement (point-movement schemas, known as biological movement representations) could be extracted. The actors were instructed to complete each emotional representation in about six seconds. The resulting video recordings were then used in controlled tests of humans’ ability to identify emotions from bodily movements. In a forced-choice categorization among the five emotions expressed, experimental participants correctly identified the emotion in 75% to 91% of trials. Participants correctly identified emotions only slightly less well when shown the extracted point-light patterns of movement.^ These and other similar experiments show convincingly that seeing bodily movements can effectively convey different emotions through only seconds of expression.

Along with solo tragic singers, pantomimes brought adaptations of fifth-century Athenian tragedies into competition for attention in the Roman Empire. In the fourth century CE, Libanius asserted pantomimes’ cultural pedigree and attested to the broad popularity of tragic pantomime:

So, up to the point where the race of tragic poets was in bloom, they continued to come into the theatres as universal teachers of the people. But when, on the one hand, tragic poets dwindled and, on the other hand, only the very rich could participate in the instruction offered in the schools of art and poetry, while the majority of the people were deprived of education, some god took pity on the lack of education of the many and, to redress the balance, introduced pantomime as a kind of instruction for the masses in the deeds of old. Consequently, a goldsmith now will do not badly in a conversation with a product of the schools about the house of Priam or of Laius.^

A second or third century epitaph for the pantomime Krispos states that he won “the greatest prize for rhythmic tragedy” and declares, “The world marveled at and praised the graceful movements of his hands, and saw in him the golden flower of its theaters.”^ In competition for attention with chariot racing, gladiator shows, and animal hunts, pantomime performances — performances of intense, labile emotions — became the new theatre of tragedy.

Under the Roman Empire, competition for attention among rhetoricians, pantomimes, and other performers played out in part through contrasting claims about the value of seeing and hearing. Rhetoricians were keenly aware of pantomime’s success in competition for attention.^ Rhetoricians appealed less visually to their audience than pantomimes did to spectators. Moreover, rhetoricians speaking in Greek or Latin weren’t intelligible to the share of the population who didn’t understand those languages. Just as for epigramists writing about visual art, a challenge for rhetoricians was to out-perform verbally visual effects.^ In competition for attention, out-perform meant in part to evoke more effectively a wide range of emotions.

Philostratus’s Imagines is a telling textual artifact of competition for attention. Seneca, a politically prominent philosopher of the first-century CE, complained:

Who respects a philosopher or any liberal study except when the games are called off for a time or there is some rainy day which he is willing to waste? And so the many schools of philosophy are dying without a successor. … But how much worry is suffered lest the name of some pantomime actor be lost for ever! The House of Pylades and of Bathyllus continues through a long line of successors. For their arts there are many students and many teachers.^

Pylades and Bathyllus were leading Augustan-era pantomimes. In celebrity (and wealth), they far exceeded any philosophers. Philostratus seems to have been a sophist, a type of rhetorician, in the period now called the Second Sophistic. Philostratus is generally thought to be Philostratus the Elder (Philostratus of Lemnos), born about 190 CE. In any case, Philostratus’s position relative to pantomimes probably wasn’t any better than that which Seneca described for philosophers.

Philostratus’s Imagines seems to respond to Seneca’s lament. According to Philostratus, Imagines records his discourses at a villa outside the walls of Naples. Philostratus stayed there in the days of the public games in Naples. According to Philostratus, despite the public games in the city, young men kept coming to his villa-lodging outside the city and importuning him to speak. Unlike rhetoricians longing for a large audience such as gathered for public games, Philostratus was reluctant to speak publicly to the young men pleading for his teaching. His host’s son, a ten-year-old, an “ardent listener and eager to learn,” persistently sought from Philostratus his interpretation of the paintings covering the villa’s walls. Philostratus, “in order that he {his wealthy host} might not think me ill-bred,” agreed to teach the boy.^ Philostratus placed the importuning young men as a secondary audience to the boy. Philostratus described a rhetorician’s fantasy. It reverses Seneca’s lament.

Wealth was associated with performative success in the Roman Empire. In the Introduction to the Imagines, Philostratus highlights his luxurious accommodations:

I was lodging outside the walls in a suburb facing the sea, where there was a portico built on four, I think, or possibly five terraces, open to the west wind and looking out on the Tyrrhenian sea. It was resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury, but it was particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in the walls, paintings which I though had been collected with real judgment, for they exhibited the skill of very many painters.^

Persons who traveled to see public games generally had crude accommodations. A second-century-CE text discussing popular travel to Olympia states:

Well, aren’t difficulties found at Olympia? Don’t you get hot? And crowded? Isn’t bathing a problem? Don’t you get soaked through in your seats when it rains? Don’t you finally get sick of the noise, the shouting and the other irritations? I can only suppose that you weigh all those negatives against the worth of the show, and choose, in the end, to be patient and put up with it all.^

For physical comfort, being with Philostratus was much more appealing than being at public games.

In his Imagines, Philostratus verbally evokes emotional experiences even more labile than those of pantomime performances. Consider, for example, the section entitled Antilochus. Philostratus first uses phrases and events from Homer’s Iliad to interpret for the boy a scene mixing eros, joy, grief, and fear:

That Achilles loved Antilochus you must have discovered in Homer, seeing Antilochus to be the youngest man in the Greek host and considering the half talent of gold that was given him after the contest. And it is he who brings word to Achilles that Patroclus has fallen, for Menelaus cleverly devised this as a consolation to accompany the announcement, since Achilles’ eyes were thus diverted to his loved one; and Antilochus laments in grief for his friend and restrains his hands lest he take his own life, while Achilles no doubt rejoices at the touch of the youth’s hand and at the tears he sheds.^

Philostratus declares “such is the scene in Homer.” Homer’s scene, however, is emotionally quite unlike Philostratus’s scene. Homer’s epic relentlessly moves forward with much more unified emotion. The eros and joy in Antilochus and Achilles’s relationship is completely submerged in the action of the relevant Homeric passage:

And the women he and Patroclus carried off as captives
caught the grief in their hearts and keened and wailed,
out of the tents they ran to ring the great Achilles,
all of them beat their breasts with clenched fists,
sank to the ground, each woman’s knees gave way.
Antilochus kneeling near, weeping uncontrollably,
clutched Achilles’ hands as he wept his proud heart out –
for fear he would slash his throat with an iron blade.
Achilles suddenly loosed a terrible, wrenching cry^

After emotionally re-coloring this Homeric text, Philostratus describes a related painting ostensibly present on the wall before him. Color in the painting adds terror to Homer’s story:

Memnon coming from Ethiopia slays Antilochus who had thrown himself in front of his father, and he seems to strike terror among the Achaeans – for before Memnon’s time black men were but a subject for story

Grief is pervasive among the figures:

the army mourns the youth, standing about him in lamentation; and, their spears fixed in the ground and their legs crossed, they stand, most of them in their grief bowing their sorrowing heads on their spears. … {Achilles} laments, throwing himself on the breast of Antilochus

Philostratus’s account ends figuring Antilochus’s bloody, dead body with eros and joy:

Let us next look at Antilochus. He is in the prime of youth, just beyond the period of downy beard, and his bright hair is his pride. He leg is slender and his body proportioned for running with ease, and his blood shines red, like colour on ivory, where the spear-point penetrated his breast. The youth lies there, not sad of aspect nor yet like a corpse, but still joyous and smiling; for it was with a look of joy on his face (because, I fancy, he had saved his father’s life) that Antilochus died from the spear-thrust, and the soul left his countenance, not when he was in pain, but when gladness prevailed.^

The description “his blood shines red, like colour on ivory, where the spear-point penetrated his breast” may allude to royal female sexual initiation.^ Philostratus’s Imagines associates paintings’ use of color and shading with more effective, intimate reading of eyes and with the ability “to recognize the look, now of the man who is mad, now of the man who is sorrowing or rejoicing.”^ Pantomimes evoked intense, labile emotions. Philostratus’s Imagines also does so to an extraordinary extent.

Philostratus’s Imagines seems to have been historically influential in shaping understanding of the philosophical enterprise. In the intellectually vibrant culture of ninth-century Abbasid Baghdad, the eminent scholar Hunayn ibn Ishaq described the origin of schools of philosophy in picture rooms:

These philosophical gatherings originated from the fact that the rulers of the Greeks and of other nations used to teach their children philosophy and instruct them in various kinds of literary culture. They erected for them houses of gold, decorated with a variety of pictures, which were to serve to refresh hearts and attract eyes. The children stayed in these picture houses in order to be educated with the aid of the pictures found in them.^

Refreshing and engaging hearts and eyes describes emotional response. Hunayn’s aetiology of philosophical teaching probably was based on Philostratus’s Imagines. As a section in Hunayn’s book Anecdotes of the Great Philosophers, Hunayn’s description circulated widely across western Eurasia. Ibn Abi Usaybi’ah copied it into his Lives of the Physicians, written in Damascus in the thirteenth century. Echoes of Hunayn’s text seem to exist in the thirteenth-century Spanish Sindibad work, Book of the Wiles of Women.^ All these works are within the main stream of Greco-Roman-Islamic intellectual culture.

Emotional dynamics depend more on the structure of symbolic competition than on the nature of the media. A scholar of sophists like Philostratus stated:

Competition for status was the foundation upon which the entire edifice was built: sophistry was at once a collective celebration of the exclusivity of elite culture, and a forum within which individual members of the elite could vie for personal prominence.^

Entry into competition with sophists was quite open, formal institutions for judging merit and bestowing acclaim were quite weak, and attracting attention and followers was the primary path to sophistic success. The status of sophists like Philostratus was determined in intense competition for attention. The magnified emotional dynamics of Imagines are characteristic of such competition for attention.

Seneca, meaning Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, was a leading statesman, Stoic philosopher, and dramatist in the first century of the Roman Empire. Seneca was personally and intellectually versatile and pragmatic. He was elected to a quaestorship. He won recognition as a brilliant orator. After Seneca got into political difficulties, Nero’s mother Agrippina called Seneca back from exile to be tutor to her son. Seneca became an adviser and speech-writer for Nero when Nero became Emperor. Seneca wrote books of political satire (Apocolocyntosis), essays in applied Stoic philosophy, and studies of nature (Naturales quaestiones). These works acquired enough notice and circulation to have survived to the present.

Seneca expressed disdain for competition for attention and popular success. Seneca’s play Hercules Furens described acclaim by “the mob” and vagaries of popular success:

One is more dazed by popular acclaim;
the mob, more shifting than seawaves,
hoists him as he swells with an empty breeze.
…

Another may be carried to many countries
by Renown; garrulous Rumour may praise him
through every city^

Seneca lamented and philosophically analyzed pantomime’s greater popular success than philosophy:

For who that is pleased by virtue can please the crowd? It takes trickery to win popular approval; and you must needs make yourself like unto them; they will withhold their approval if they do not recognize you as one of themselves. … if I see you applauded by popular acclamation, if your entrance upon the scene is greeted by a roar of cheering and clapping, — marks of distinction meet only for actors, — if the whole state, even women and children, sing your praises, how can I help pitying you? For I know what pathway leads to such popularity.^

According to an ancient historian, Seneca was a speech-writer “whose pleasing talent was so well suited to a contemporary audience.”^ Seneca wrote the speech that soon-to-be-emperor Nero spoke at Emperor Claudius’s funeral:

On the day of the funeral the emperor pronounced his predecessor’s praises. While he recounted the consulships and Triumphs of the dead man’s ancestors, he and his audience were serious. References to Claudius’ literary accomplishments too, and to the absence of disasters in the field during his reign, were favourably received. But when Nero began to talk of his stepfather’s foresight and wisdom, nobody could help laughing.^

The audience’s laughter at Nero’s delivery of Seneca’s words of false praise defies a wooden, dispassionate interpretation. Seneca’s disdain for pleasing the crowd is Stoic. Given Seneca’s versatility and his appreciation for trickery, his theatrical work should not be interpreted stoically. Seneca apparently tricked Nero.

Seneca wrote his tragedies in ways that favored their popular success. Compared to fifth-century Athenian tragedies, Seneca’s tragedies communicate more from a third-personal standpoint. Running commentaries, which do not occur in Greek tragedy, are a common third-personal form in Seneca’s tragedies. Narrative set-pieces are another common third-personal form.^ Nominally first-person speech also often has a third-personal standpoint. For example, Megara in Seneca’s Hercules Furens declares: “A cold shudder runs through my stunned body. What outrage has struck my ears?”^ The third-personal standpoint common in Seneca’s tragedies characterizes competition for attention.

Other features of Seneca’s tragedies also indicate competition for attention. Compared to fifth-century Athenian tragedies, Seneca’s tragedies have a looser narrative thread and more focus on characters’ internal psychological dynamics.^ Fifth-century Athenian tragedies represent persons in action. Seneca’s tragedies represent passions in persons and environments.^ Passions in Seneca’s tragedies are more volatile and wide-ranging than passions in fifth-century Athenian tragedies. These differences indicate a shift from competition for acclaim to competition for attention.

Seneca magnified emotional dynamics in his tragedies. Trojan princess Polyxena’s execution in Seneca’s Trojan Women moves emotions quickly across contrasting feelings. Helen, who was the object of the terrible battle at Troy, links marriages and funerals:

Any marriage that is funereal and joyless, that brings lamentations, slaughters, blood, and groans, deserves Helen as its sponsor.

Helen falsely tells Polyxena of the gods’ kindly favor: “plans to dower you with a blessed union,” “the holy rites of lawful wedlock” uniting Polyxena to Pyrrhus, son of Greek hero Achilles and heir to the throne of a Greek kingdom. Andromache, widow of a slain Trojan hero, believes Helen’s story. Andromache declares:

For the ruined Phrygians {Trojans} this was the one woe missing – to rejoice. Pergamum’s {Troy’s} wreckage is blazing all around: an apt time for a wedding! … Go on, prepare the wedding! What need of pine brands and ceremonial torches, what need of fire? Troy lights the way for this strange wedding. Celebrate the nuptials of Pyrrhus, you Trojan women, celebrate them worthily – with sounds of blows and groaning.

Subsequently a messenger reports the truth:

O cruel deaths, harsh and pitiable and horrible! What crime as grim and savage has Mars beheld in these twice five years? What shall I first tell with tears: your griefs {to Andromache} or yours, old woman {to the mother of Polyxena}?

A crowd of Trojans and Greeks gathers for Polyxena’s execution for conspiring in the killing of Achilles. The crowd gathers at Achilles’s burial mound in a space that “slopes up in the form of a theatre.” Gathering in a theatre, the play’s spectators hear a messenger describing the crowd in a space like a theatre watching Polyxena’s execution.^ This double layer of spectatorship removes the play’s spectators further from a second-personal standpoint. The messenger reports Polyxena being led to her death:

Both peoples {Trojans and Greeks} were held paralyzed by dread. She {Polyxena} herself lowered her gaze in modesty, but her eyes were radiant nonetheless, and her beauty shone forth more than usual at its ending, as Phoebus’ light is always lovelier at the moment of setting, when the stars take up the cycle and failing daylight is threatened by night’s closeness. The whole crowd was awestruck. Some were moved by her beauty, some by her tender years, some by life’s shifting changes; all were moved by the braveness of her spirit, facing death head-on; they marveled and felt pity.^

The description of Polyxena’s radiant eyes and her beauty (“as Phoebus’ light…”) gives the messenger’s speech the same emotional lability as is found in Philostratus’s Imagines. Seneca’s Medea similarly describes Medea showing “evidence of each and every emotion.” That emotional lability is foreign to fifth-century Athenian tragedy.

As the execution ritual continues, the range of emotions widens along with the viewpoint on the action. The Trojan War was fought over Helen. Pyrrhus, Polyxena’s false groom, was the son of Archilles. Archilles desired Polyxena. The messenger’s description of Pyrrhus killing Polyxena aligns eros with death:

When his hand did plunge the blade-thrust deep into her, and then withdrew the death weapon, blood suddenly erupted through the massive wound.

While only a few lines earlier Polyxena “lowered her gaze in modesty,” her emotional tone quickly shifts again:

Nevertheless in dying she still maintained her pride: she fell, so as to make the earth heavy for Achilles, face downward and with angry force.

The messenger’s perspective continues to retreat and widen:

Each group wept, but the Phyrgians {Trojans} uttered timid laments, while the victor {Greeks} lamented more loudly. Such was the order of the ritual. The spilt gore did not stand or flow on the ground’s surface: immediately the tomb swallowed and savagely drank down all the blood.^

An astute scholar of Seneca’s tragedies noted that in Seneca’s Trojan Women:

the dramatic action is particularly incoherent and episodic. … Seneca was aiming at portraying the most dramatic, pathetic, or spectacular episodes within the Trojan saga, without any particular interest in creating dramatic coherence as well as dramatic illusion.^

Emotions change too rapidly in Seneca’s tragedies to flow throughout the human body. Only the brain can entertain them.^ The emotional dynamics of fifth-century Athenian tragedy, in contrast, had the bodily physiology of drunkenness.

Seneca’s Hercules Furens has characteristically greater emotional lability than does Euripides’s Herakles. In Seneca’s prologue, Juno rages against Hercules:

Onward, my anger, onward! Crush this overreacher! Grapple with him, tear him apart with your own hands.

Because she is not truly in a Bacchic frenzy, Juno’s reasoning continually pushes back her emotion:

My mind will aggressively pursue undying anger, and my fierce resentment will abolish peace and wage eternal warfare.

What warfare? Any fearful thing the hostile earth produced, or sea or air brought forth, however frightening, monstrous, poisonous, dreadful, savage, has been broken and tamed. He prevails….

Juno summons violent, fearsome Furies against Hercules, then immediately asks herself, “Juno, why are you not raging?” Juno is not raging only in the sense that her rage does not overwhelm her reason. She summons the Furies to madden her, but then immediately her reason prompts an abrupt change in emotional tone:

I must change my prayer: may he return and find his sons safe, I pray, and may he come back strong of hand.^

Juno’s plan is to set Hercules at war with himself, just as she has been at war with herself. Hercules’s loss will be her victory and her revenge.

Euripides’s prologue to Herakles is less volatile. Amphitryon starts proudly, declaring his famous name and describing his prominent family. He then describes the background narrative for the drama. The actions of that narrative transform him into a pathetic figure. He becomes a “blathering old nuisance,” and his family, “worse than beggars.”^ That transformation occurs through minutes of narrative apparently traversing years of time. In contrast to Juno’s psychological turmoil, Amphitryon’s emotions are tightly bound to specific external circumstances represented in narrative.

In Seneca’s Hercules, Amphitryon and Megara enter with speeches containing unmotivated, counter-balancing shifts between confidence and despair. Amphitryon questioningly contrasts Hercules’s past heroics with his current impotence. But he concludes with sudden, unlimited confidence in Hercules:

He will be with us, seeking vengeance, and suddenly emerge to the sight of the stars. He will find a way, or else make one.

Megara picks up dramatically on Amphitryon’s confidence:

Emerge, my husband! Dispel the darkness by force, break it open! If there is no way back, if the path is closed, then return by rending the earth, and release with you all that lies in the grip of the black night.

But despair closes in on Megara and encompasses her:

Either return safely and defend us all, or drag us all down. — You will drag us down, no god will rebuild our broken lives.^

Amphitryon’s and Megara’s concluding positions set up a short argument between them. But the emotional movements that took them to their positions occur with no reason for those different positions.

In Euripides’s Herakles, the emotional contrast between Amphitryon and Megara is more muted. With her first speech, Megara follows Amphitryon’s emotional movement in the prologue from pride to despair. A short argument between Amphitryon and Megara arises with Amphitryon’s weak justification for doing nothing:

My girl, I don’t know what to say. Our troubles
Call for hard thought, not casual chatter.
When you’re weak, what can you do but wait?
…The tears welling up
In your boys’ eyes, brush them away;
Tell them a story that will make their crying stop,
No matter how much a lie the story seems to you.

In Euripides, imagined stories with emotional effects are merely lies for children. External circumstances drive adult emotions:

The wind blowing against us, that makes you
Desperate now, won’t always be this strong —
It’ll blow itself out.^

While storms within the mind can vanish in seconds, storms in the natural world take hours or days to blow out. Emotions in Seneca often vanish in seconds. Emotions in Euripides typically last hours.

Hercules’s madness is less narratively motivated and more internally generated in Seneca than in Euripides. Concluding a prayer for a peaceful natural order, Seneca’s Hercules adds:

If the earth is even now to produce some wickedness, let it come quickly; if she is furnishing some monster, let it be mine.^

A monstrous madness then immediately clouds Hercules’s mind. Hercules instantly becomes the monster that he seeks. In Euripides, madness appears as a personified phantom that the chorus first sees above the roof of Hercules’s house. Madness is a caring but dutiful woman who first argues against Hera’s plan to madden Hercules. Recognizing that she must do her job, Madness describes what she will do and then describes her actual maddening of Hercules. While in both plays madness comes upon Hercules instantaneously, the difference in the dramatic framing makes the madness in Seneca’s play more abrupt and surprising. The monstrous murderer that Oedipus seeks in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus is revealed to him slowly. That’s consistently with the longer narrative development of Hercules’s madding in Euripides relative to in Seneca.^

Hercules’s madness ends with external action in Euripides and internal action in Seneca. In Euripides, the maddened Hercules ultimately charges at his step-father Amphitryon. Only Athena knocking Hercules down with a boulder checks his madness. In Seneca, Amphitryon despairingly urges Hercules to kill him, too:

Look, the victim stands at the altar, his neck bent, and awaits your hand. I present myself, willingly, insistently: perform the killing!

At this height of pathos and horror, Hercules emotionally metamorphoses:

What is this? Are my eyes failing, and grief dulling my sight, or do I see Hercules’ hands trembling? His eyes are closing in sleep…^

Unlike in Euripides, in Seneca no external physical object strikes Hercules. Hercules’s hands trembling hint at an internal emotional break. The action is psychological. That enables emotions to be both more extreme, and more volatile.

Seneca had disdain for popular competition for attention. Seneca’s plays, however, have the emotional lability characteristic of competition for attention. Despite his disdain for it, the emotional lability of Seneca plays indicate that he participated in competition for attention.

Beginning in the late 1920s, a new theatrical form sought to change theatre’s emotional relations. Theatre spectators’ empathetic identification with characters tends to generate emotional mirroring:

Yes, I have felt like that too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are inescapable – That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world – I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.

From greater critical distance, theatre spectators’ judgments that characters’ circumstances are extraordinary, unnecessary, and unjust can reverse emotional responses:

I’d never have thought it – That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable – It’s got to stop – The sufferings of this man appall me, because they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.^

Bertolt Brecht thus reversed the audience response that Horace described in Ars Poetica.^

Brecht dramatically declared his new theatrical form to be epic theatre. Epic theatre sought to motivate its audience to take action to change oppressive social circumstances: “instead of identifying itself with the hero, the audience is called upon to learn to be astonished at the circumstances within which he has his being.”^ Rather than being theatre that “implicates the spectator in a stage situation / wears down his capacity for action / provides him with sensations,” epic theatre “turns the spectator into an observer, but / arouses his capacity for action / forces him to take decisions.”^ Formal characteristics of epic theatre include montage, a mix of realistic and non-realistic scenery and costuming, episodic dramatic structure, and actors who are not tightly bound to characters and who on occasion directly address the audience. These formal characteristics contribute to more general strategies of emotional distancing and defamiliarisation.

Consider this story. After other women harshly criticize her, a good-hearted young female prostitute approaches a young man who has thrown a rope over branch of a willow tree in the rain. Recognizing that he is preparing to hang himself, she urges him not to. They talk. He is bitter, proud, and scornful of her. She tells him the story of a crane with a broken wing. She begins to cry. They talk of love. She lovingly purchases a cup of water for him, but he, exhausted, has fallen asleep. That summarizes Scene 3 of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan.

New theatrical forms cannot change the structure of symbolic competition. An insightful critic has observed: “Epic theory cannot always be taken literally. It does not even square with Brecht’s practice.”^ This critic translated the title of Brecht’s play less literally as The Good Woman of Setzuan. That translation points to the play’s “poor dear” sexual structure, a structure with deep roots in human nature. Perhaps spectators viewed The Good Person of Szechwan with detached scorn for the extraordinary circumstances. More likely, spectators would feel a range of emotions quickly evoked in ways common in symbolic works competing for attention. If in a dinner theatre the food sufficed to attract the audience, then that restaurant could offer a new form of theatre. But a playwright alone cannot create successfully a new form of theatre that a large public actually experiences.

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Yes, I would like for my family to take care of each other. I love you Angel, Let’s ride. I guess this is it.^

Yes. I just want to let you all know that I appreciate the love and support over the years. I will see you when you get there. Keep your heads up. To all the fellows on the Row, the same thing. Keep your head up and continue to fight. Same thing to all my pen friends and other friends, I love you all. I can taste it.^

To my family, I love them. To Kami, I love you and will always be with you. That’s it Warden.^

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Since the mid-eighteenth century, European literature circulating in competition for attention has represented highly labile emotions. In competition for attention, representations of imprisonment are associated with happiness and an outpouring of lyrisme cellulaire.^ The early nineteenth-century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, ambitious and insecure, naturalized this emotional arrangement:

Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle: tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.^

After declaring that the patronage-oriented artist Michelangelo “has no sense of beauty,” Shelley asks: “What is terror without a contrast with, and a connexion with, loveliness?”^ That question makes sense only in circumstances of attempting to circulate the experience of terror. Connecting a long sentence of terror now to some future promise of bliss tends to be associated with the highly concentrated symbolic market of institutionalized religions. More competitive symbolic markets imply more rapid emotional changes. In Shelley’s words:

Poetry, in a general sense, may be defined to be ‘the expression of the Imagination’; and Poetry is connate with the origin of man. Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody.^

This imaginative expression does not describe poetry universally. Emotions that are ever-changing across the wide range from terror to pleasure characterize poetry and other symbolic works produced in competition for attention.

The Man of Feeling, first published in Edinburgh in 1771, is a canonical representative of the literature of sensibility. It includes the story of a betrayed woman, exploited and forced into prostitution. The protagonist comforts the fallen woman. Her father bursts into the room and misinterprets the scene. The protagonist, struggling to explain, declares, “My heart bleeds for you.” The daughter prostrates herself at her father’s feet and begs him to strike her dead:

Her hair had fallen on her shoulders! her look had the horrid calmness of out-breathed despair! Her father would have spoken; his lip quivered, his cheek grew pale! his eyes lost the lightning of their fury! there was a reproach in them, but with a mingling of pity! He turned them up to heaven — then on his daughter. — He laid his left hand on his heart — the sword dropped from his right — he burst into tears.^

Bursting into tears happens frequently in The Man of Feeling. A nineteenth-century editor noted, “it is hardly to be called a dry book.” The editor then added, “As a guide to persons of a calculating disposition who may read these pages I append an index to the Tears shed in ‘The Man of Feeling.’”^ The index lists 49 occurrences.

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Yes, sir. Where’s Mr. Marino’s mother? Did you get my letter? Just wanted to let you know, I sincerely meant everything I wrote. I am sorry for the pain. I am sorry for the life I took from you. I ask God for forgiveness and I ask you for the same.^

Yes I do. Mike and Ms. Allison, I would like to tell you that I am responsible and I am sorry for what I did and the pain I caused you all. I love you Earline and all of my friends that stood by me. I feel blessed to have had you all. Stay strong and take care of them kids. Set me free Warden. Father, accept me.^

Yes sir, Warden. Okay I’ve been hanging around this popsicle stand way too long. Before I leave, I want to tell you all. When I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead. I’ll see you in Heaven someday. That’s all Warden.^

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Emotional lability in symbolic works extends with the market for attention. Central features of the literature of sensibility are generalizations of emotional lability: excess, mixture, and mobility.^ Literary history typically dates the literature of sensibility in Europe to the period roughly from 1748 (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa) to 1778 (Frances Burney’s Evelina). But literature of labile emotion has a more expansive history. Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin are widely recognized as sentimental novels. They were best-sellers published in the U.S. in 1850 and 1852, respectively. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1886, concludes with a parody of European sentimental captivity narratives. It thus testifies to the ongoing significance of the literature of sensibility. One scholar, hedging shrewdly against pugnacious Romantic scholars, suggests that scholars should consider seriously the question of whether sensibility might be an “expansive tradition, one that essentially swallows the Long Eighteenth Century and much of the nineteenth, from the Restoration until well into Victoria’s reign?”^ The matter can be put more directly. The literature of labile emotions is a historical superstructure of commercial publishing industries competing to sell to a mass market.

Frankenstein exemplifies the contrast between labile emotions in competition for attention and more inertial emotions in competition for acclaim. The preface added to the third edition of Frankenstein explicitly asserts exclusive authorial credit. It disingenuously claims authorial reticence and implicitly naturalizes Frankenstein’s literary success:

It is true that I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print; but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can scarcely accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.

Near the end of the additional, 1831 preface comes another claim for authorial credit:

At first I thought but of a few pages – of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develop the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would have never taken the form in which it was presented to the world. From this declaration I must except the preface. As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.

Attempts to take away something that they regard as theirs – a bone, an area of space, a belief in which they are deeply invested – arouses in humans and other animals a characteristic physiological reaction that endures with little change as long as the threat persists. That’s the emotional dynamics typical of competition for acclaim.

The 1831 preface to Frankenstein shows little influence from the literature of sensibility. That preface describes significant boundaries between the mind and the external world. It locates the creative impulse within the self. The 1831 preface states:

I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations.

In the literature of sensibility, sensations stimulate responses that connect bodies and blur individual identities. In repeatedly emphasizing “think of a story,” the 1831 preface highlights individual activity disconnected from sensations of others. The 1831 preface also denies the efficacy of textual sensibility:

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happier days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart. Its several pages speak of many a walk, many a drive, and many a conversation, when I was not alone; and my companion was one who, in this world, I shall never see more. But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations.

Daily emotional experience here is separated from effects of mere words. In this account, the reader’s experience has nothing to do with the author’s experience at the moment of the text’s creation. The horror of Frankenstein, according to this account, was created in happy days when grief was but words.

The 1831 preface to Frankenstein is much less emotionally labile than the text of Frankenstein itself. That preface describes Frankenstein as arising from “so very hideous an idea.” Frankenstein was created to be a ghost story:

One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and to quicken the beatings of the heart.

According to the 1831 preface, one night, after “the witching hour,” Shelley had a frightful dream – “hideous phantasm,” “supremely frightful,” “odious handywork,” “horror-stricken,” “hideous corpse,” “horrid thing.” The idea of Frankenstein was to communicate that experience:

O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten the reader as I myself had been frightened. … “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” {use of quotation marks as in original}

The emotional tone of Frankenstein in this account ranges little beyond horror-terror. At least some readers’ receptions of the printed text of Frankenstein support this limited emotional range. Within the printed text of Frankenstein, Walton wrote to his sister that he was recording Victor’s story. Walton declared, “This manuscript will doubtless afford you the greatest pleasure.” Making notes on the 1818 printed text of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley underlined pleasure in this sentence and wrote in the margin, “impossible.”^

The 1831 edition of Frankenstein nostalgically rationalized the sense of pleasure that Walton claimed. Following “afford you the greatest pleasure,” the 1818 printed text reads:

but to me, who know him, and who hear it from his own lips, with what interest and sympathy shall I read it in some future day!^

The 1831 edition doesn’t change these sentences, but adds sentences of sad, despairing nostalgia such as one might feel for an idealized, lost lover:

Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story, frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it – thus!^

The concluding “thus” echoes the concluding word of Frankenstein. These added sentences make sense as Mary Shelley remembering Percy Bysshe Shelley and his death on a boat overturned in a storm. The added sentences weakly connect realistic pleasure to abstractly imagined horror.

On a per word basis, Frankenstein is less weepy than The Man of Feeling. The Man of Feeling has a literary reputation for exquisite sensibility. It contains 49 references to tears or weeping. The 1818 edition of Frankenstein contains 63 references to tears or weeping. Normalized by total words in the respective texts, the weeping rate in The Man of Feeling is 1.33 per thousand words. Frankenstein is 34% drier with 0.88 weeping references per thousand words.

Frankenstein, however, is more emotionally labile. In terms of trembling, shuddering, and frowning, Frankenstein has 0.51 references per thousand compared to 0.05 references per thousand in The Man of Feeling. Frankenstein also has a much higher rate of anguish, horror, and terror. Nonetheless, Frankenstein also exceeds The Man of Feeling in the rate of bodily actions expressing joy and pleasure (smile, kiss, laugh/laughter, delight) or similar state descriptors (joy, happy). Moreover, these positive-valence emotions occur more frequently in Frankenstein than either tears or weeping; or anguish, horror, or terror. Emotional lability characterizes the literature of sensibility. That characteristic is more pervasive in Frankenstein than in The Man of Feeling.

Comparative Emotional Dispositions:
Man of Feeling vs. Frankenstein

Some vignettes in Frankenstein could easily be placed as chapters in The Man of Feeling. Like The Man of Feeling, Frankenstein has a nested narrative structure that explicitly references its own textuality. Like The Man of Feeling, Frankenstein includes vignettes with primarily sensational value. Walton describes his shipmaster with a story of the shipmaster’s aborted wedding:

He saw his mistress once before the destined ceremony; but she was bathed in tears, and, throwing herself at his feet, entreated him to spare her, confessing at the same time that she loved another, but that he was poor, and that her father would never consent to the union. My generous friend reassured the suppliant, and on being informed of the name of her lover instantly abandoned his pursuit. He had already bought a farm with his money, on which he had designed to pass the remainder of his life; but he bestowed the whole on his rival, together with the remains of his prize-money to purchase stock, and then himself solicited the young woman’s father to consent to her marriage with her lover.^

The creature’s description of the cottagers embodies similar heights of sensibility:

The silver hair and benevolent countenance of the aged cottager won my reverence, while the gentle manners of the girl enticed my love. He played a sweet mournful air, which I perceived drew tears from the eyes of his amiable companion, of which the old man took no notice, until she sobbed audibly; he then pronounced a few sounds, and the fair creature, leaving her work, knelt at his feet. He raised her, and smiled with such kindness and affection that I felt sensations of a peculiar and over-powering nature: they were a mixture of pain and pleasure, such as I had never before experienced, either from hunger or cold, warmth or food; and I withdrew from the window, unable to bear these emotions.^

While pursuing a great prize in world exploration, Walton earnestly seeks sensibility:

But I have one want which I have never yet been able to satisfy; and the absence of the object of which I now feel as a most severe evil. I have no friend, Margaret: when I am glowing with the enthusiasm of success, there will be none to participate my joy; if I am assailed by disappointment, no one will endeavour to sustain me in dejection. I shall commit my thoughts to paper, it is true; but that is a poor medium for the communication of feeling. I desire the company of a man who could sympathize with me; whose eyes would reply to mine.^

Victor evaluates his professors according to sensibility:

M. Krempe was a little squat man, with a gruff voice and repulsive countenance; the teacher, therefore, did not prepossess me in favor of his doctrine. …

{M. Waldman} appeared about fifty years of age, but with an aspect expressive of the greatest benevolence; a few grey hairs covered his temples, but those at the back of his head were nearly black. His person was short, but remarkably erect; and his voice the sweetest I had ever heard. … His manners in private were even more mild and attractive than in public; for there was a certain dignity in his mien during his lecture, which in his own house was replaced by the greatest affability and kindness.^

Walton’s claim that writing is a poor medium for communicating feelings doesn’t stop him from communicating his feelings in writing. Walton’s desire for a man of feeling doesn’t attract him to the shipmaster whose exquisite sympathy for his ex-mistress Walton described. Victor describes his feelings towards his professors so that readers will know their characters. Feelings evoked in Frankenstein serve the reader, rather than Frankenstein’s plot.

The literature of sensibility concerns immediate bodily reaction to persons and objects, rather than plot. In “On Love” (1818), Shelley explained:

if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything that exists.^

“On Love” concludes with a reference to Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey. Shelley appreciated the central tropes of the literature of sensibility.^

In the original, 1818 preface to Frankenstein and in a self-written review, Shelley described Frankenstein with central tropes of sensibility. According to its 1818 preface, Frankenstein was written with the stimuli of enjoyable social interaction and magnificent natural scenery. Shelley sought to provide the reader with “exquisite combinations of human feelings”; “This novel rests its claim on being a source of powerful and profound emotion.”^ ^ Frankenstein’s plot, Shelley explained, provides “a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield.”^ Shelley’s preface to The Cenci contains similar declarations.^ Frankenstein, like The Cenci, was crafted with a lofty purpose:

The elementary feelings of the human mind are exposed to view; and those who are accustomed to reason deeply on their origin and tendency will, perhaps, be the only persons who can sympathize, to the full extent, in the interest of the actions which are their result.^

But even readers who cannot reason deeply and sympathize to the full extent can feel Frankenstein’s effects:

The sentiments are so affectionate and so innocent – the characters of the subordinate agents in this strange drama are clothed in the light of such a mild and gentle mind – the pictures of domestic manners are of the most simple and attaching character: the pathos is irresistible and deep. …

The scene between the Being and the blind De Lacey in the cottage, is one of the most profound and extraordinary instances of pathos that we ever recollect. It is impossible to read this dialogue, — and indeed many others of a somewhat similar character, — without feeling the heart suspend its pulsations with wonder, and the tears stream down the cheeks.^

According to Shelley’s self-written review, “the direct moral of the book” is that social sensibility shapes character. With respect to the creature in Frankenstein, Shelley’s describes this lesson without some specifics:

It is impossible that he {the creature} should not have received among men that treatment which led to the consequences of his being a social nature. He was an abortion and an anomaly; and though his mind was such as its first impressions trained it, affectionate and full of moral sensibility, yet the circumstances of his existence are so monstrous and uncommon, that, when the consequences of them became developed in action, his original goodness was gradually turned into the fuel of an inextinguishable misanthropy and revenge.^

To understand this description fully, you need to read the book. Both the creature and Elizabeth explicitly echo this lesson in Frankenstein.^ The creature has a horrid appearance and a harsh-sounding voice. Frankenstein emphasizes that these sensible features repulsed persons who met the creature.^ Treated with scorn, the creature became wicked and began murdering Victor’s family and friends.

Frankenstein presents striking examples of rapidly mixed emotional extremes common in the literature of sensibility. The creature describes gaining his first understanding of the world through his sensations. Fire delights him. Then he touches the live embers and recoils with a cry of pain.^ After withdrawing his hand in pain from the fire, the creature immediately reports, “How strange, I thought, that the same cause should produce such opposite effects!” The creature apparently had been studying Platonic philosophy.^ ^

Emotional lability in Frankenstein generally takes cognitively developed forms. The novel’s very first sentence mixes rejoicing, disaster, and evil forebodings:

You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.

Walton is journeying to the north pole. He describes the pole with an emotional contrast:

I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.^

When he boards Walton’s ship, Victor is “generally melancholy and despairing, and sometimes he gnashes his teeth.” His emotional expression, however, changes instantaneously in response to an external stimulus:

if any one performs an act of kindness towards him, or does him the most trifling service, his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness that I never saw equaled.

… Once, however, the lieutenant asked, Why he had come so far upon the ice in so strange a vehicle?

His countenance instantly assumed an aspect of the deepest gloom^

With respect to his forthcoming journey, Walton writes that he feels ineffable, mixed sensations:

I cannot describe to you my sensations on the near prospect of my undertaking. It is impossible to communicate to you a conception of the trembling sensation, half pleasurable and half fearful, with which I am preparing to depart.^

The inadequacy of verbal language to represent sensibility is a central trope in the literature of sensibility.^ Emotions in literature of sensibility often change too rapidly to be actually bodily. These rapidly changing emotions can only be emotions experienced through higher cognitive processes in the brain.

Shelley explicitly associated emotional lability with cognitive development. Victor attempts to lift his mood by climbing a mountain. He remembers that the view from the summit had “filled me with a sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the soul.” On the ascent he encounters a “terrifically desolate” scene, devastated trees, somber pines, and “rain poured from the dark sky.” He naturally feels melancholy. Reaching a high point, Victor sees mountain peaks, and his feelings transform:

Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds. My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy

But then Victor spots a figure racing toward him with superhuman speed:

I was troubled: a mist came over my eyes, and I felt a faintness seize me; but I was quickly restored by the cold gale of the mountains. I perceived, as the shape came nearer (sight tremendous and abhorred!) that it was the wretch whom I had created. I trembled with rage and horror, resolving to wait his approach, and then close with him in mortal combat. He approached; his countenance bespoke bitter anguish, combined with disdain and malignity, while its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes.

Just prior to these emotional changes, Victor reflected on human sensibility:

Alas! why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free; but now we are moved by every wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that that word {wind} may convey to us.^

Underscoring Victor’s claim that higher sensibility imprisons human emotions in their sensible circumstances, Frankenstein quotes (without attribution) the last two stanzas from Shelley’s poem, Mutability: “laugh, or weep, … be it joy or sorrow, …Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow; / nought may endure but mutability!”^

Shelley’s translations and revisions show concern to heighten emotions. The fifth-century Athenian Prometheus Bound describes the sensations, changing daily, to which Prometheus is subject. Here’s a recent scholarly translation of the relevant lines:

… baked by the sun’s bright flame,
Your skin’s bloom will wither, and you’ll be glad
When night in her robe of stars removes the light,
And the sun again dispels the frost at dawn.^

A recent poetic translation of those same lines lessens the emotional mutability and accentuates Prometheus’s pain and desperation:

The sun’s bright rays will
scorch you black with his
fire so that you will cry out for
night with her mantle of stars;
and then again for dawn and the sun that
scatters the frost and renews your terrible
pain.^

About July, 1817, Shelley translated the first third of Prometheus Bound. Shelley’s translation apparently was dictated to Mary Godwin, perhaps from a working draft. It was not polished for publication. Here are Prometheus’s daily-changing circumstances in Shelley’s translation:

But slowly scorched by the burning beam of the sun
The flower of thy skin will perish – delightful to thee
Night with robe of many hues will hide the light.
And the sun will dissipate again the eastern frost^

Shelley’s unpolished translation is more lyrical than either of the above. “Flower of thy skin” and “night with robe of many hues” adds colors to the contrasting colors of scorching sunlight and frost. The alliteration and rhythm of “slowly scorched by the burning beam of the sun” give that line a punishing force that the other translations lack. Yet within the same small, temporally cycling passage, “delightful to thee / night” heightens positive emotion far beyond “you will cry out for / night” and “you’ll be glad / When night.” Shelley’s translation does so both semantically and with its “night” rhyme with “light.”

Shelley revised the ending of Frankenstein to heighten contrasting emotions. In an early draft of Frankenstein’s penultimate paragraph, the creature declares:

I shall ascend my pile triumphantly & the flame that consumes my body will give rest & blessing to my mind.^

The corresponding passage in Frankenstein as published in 1818 is more lyrical and forceful:

I shall ascent my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus.^

Both versions welcome death as a victory that brings serene oblivion. The revision, however, extends and enacts the prior version. Specifying more precisely “my pile” as “my funeral pile” heightens the contrast with “triumphantly.” This contrast is pushed even higher with “exult in the agony of the torturing flames.” The subsequent sentences enact the fading away. The wind acts through a sibilant-stressed, passive verbal construction: “be swept into the sea.” “My spirit” is described impersonally, abstractly, and distantly. The revision thus gives effective poetic form to the emotional contrast set up in the earlier version.

Shelley recognized different emotions in different circumstances of symbolic competition. Horrified by the results of his work in natural philosophy and delighted with Clerval’s arrival at university, Victor joined with Clerval in study of Greek and Latin, and then Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew. Victor explains:

I … found not only instruction but consolation in the works of the orientalists. Their melancholy is soothing, and their joy elevating to a degree I never experienced in studying the authors of any other country. When you read their writings, life appears to consist in a warm sun and garden of roses, in the smiles and frowns of a fair enemy, and the fire that consumes your own heart. How different from the manly and heroical poetry of Greece and Rome.

Shelley elsewhere contrasted the bucolic and erotic poetry of the Hellenistic East with Homer’s epics and fifth-century Athenian tragedy. The bucolic and erotic poetry of the Hellenistic East is “intensely melodious; like the odour of the tuberose it overcomes and sickens the spirit with excess of sweetness.”^ Homer’s epics and fifth-century Athenian tragedy “endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight.” Shelley most clearly compares the two literatures in terms of the “inner facilities of our nature” and the external ones. The external facilities make a person sensible to “pleasure, passion, and natural scenery.” The inner facilities provide power to retain and transform ongoing sensations.^ Competition for attention was much greater in the Hellenistic era than in fifth-century Athens. Shelley’s contrast between poetry of the Hellenistic East and fifth-century Athenian tragedies maps onto the contrast between competition for attention and competition for acclaim. As Shelley understood well, the circumstances for public works in early nineteenth England were predominately competition for attention.

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I don’t want you to worry. I don’t want you to suffer. I am not mad at you. Shed no tears for me. Even though you don’t know me, I love you, I love ya’ll. I ask ya’ll in your heart to forgive me^

My love to my son, my daughter, Nancy, Kathy, Randy, and my future grandchildren. I ask for forgiveness for all of the poison that I brought into the US, the country I love. Please forgive me for my sins. If my murder makes it easier for everyone else let the forgiveness please be a part of the healing. Go ahead Warden, murder me. Jesus take me home.^

Jennifer, where are you at? I’m sorry, I did not know the man but for a few seconds before I shot him. It was done out of fear, stupidity, and immaturity. It wasn’t until I got locked up and saw the newspaper. I saw his face and his smile and I knew he was a good man. I am sorry for all your family and my disrespect – he deserved better. Sorry Gus. I hope all the best for you and your daughters. I hope you have happiness from here on out. Quit the heroin and methadone. I love you dad, Devin, and Walt. We’re done Warden.^

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Competition for attention heightened emotional mixing in Romantic images of imprisonment. London theater at the beginning of the seventeenth century depended on a mix of royal patronage and appeal to the extraordinarily populous city. In these circumstances, William Shakespeare wrote King Lear. Toward the end of that play, the king, a man of immediate feeling, is wondrously united with his daughter. Then both are captured in a battlefield loss. The king is neither vengeful nor despondent. Refusing his daughter’s hints of confrontation, he exclaims to her:

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.
We two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage.
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too —
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out —
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by th’ moon.^

Lear imagines happiness in personal actions that his excited mind generates with great specificity and range. He presents ordinary communication as providing a superior perspective on courtly competition for status. Despite ample motivation for emotional change, his joy endures.

Lear’s romantic imagination of imprisonment takes a characteristically different form in Shelley and Byron. Immediately after Prometheus is unbound in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Prometheus declares that he and Asia, the “light of life,” henceforth shall not part. He imagines living in a cave with the lovely Asia, and also with Asia’s sister nymph Ione. While the cave is a space for realizing the beautiful, good, and true, it isn’t a place of emotional stability:

A simple dwelling, which shall be our own;
Where will sit and talk of time and change,
As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged.
What can hide man from mutability?
And if ye sigh, than I will smile; and thou,
Ione, shall chant fragments of sea-music,
Until I weep, when ye shall smile away
The tears she brought, which yet were sweet to shed.^

In Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon, a stanza’s worth of negation places the prisoner in a void – “Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!” Then a bird’s carol flashes across the prisoner’s sensory imagination. The bird’s song connects sound and sight:

The sweetest song ear ever heard,
And mine was thankful till my eyes
Ran over with glad surprise

The prisoner’s senses come back to their “wonted track” and “the dungeon walls and floor / close slowly round me as before.” But the prisoner perceives a glimmer of the sun, and then the bird. His emotions flip back to joy:

A lovely bird, with azure wings,
…
And it was come to love me when
None lived to love me so again,
And cheering from my dungeon’s brink,
Had brought me back to feel and think.

The prisoner imagines that the bird might be his brother’s soul. The bird flies away:

And left me twice so double lone, —
Lone – as the corpse within its shroud,
Lone – as a solitary cloud,
A single cloud on a sunny day,
While all the rest of heaven is clear,
A frown upon the atmosphere,
That hath no business to appear
When skies are blue, and earth is gay^

Byron’s bird is an abstract, extra-sensory idea that prompts for the prisoner oscillating emotions. More generally, Byron and Shelley represent not just an inner protected world of inmates or prisoners, but one in which emotional changes are the focal actions. Byron’s Lament of Tasso (1817) projects Tasso’s temporal, circumstantial rejection and suffering into eternal, abstract romantic union and fame. Actions of ordinary life are largely walled out.

A starling in a cage cries, “I can’t get out, I can’t get out.” Through the gift economy and the money economy, the bird in the cage circulates widely. But the bird remains in the cage. Look at the bird through the lattice of your mind:

I beheld his body half-wasted away with long expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of heart it was which arises from hope deferr’d. Upon looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish: in thirty years the western breeze had not once fann’d his blood – he had seen no sun, no moon in all that time – nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice – his children … I burst into tears. – I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn.^

So you put down the book, change the channel, click to another page, or touch to a different view. From then (the year 1768) to today, competition for attention to symbolic works has intensified greatly. So too has the number of prisoners.

Prisoners today have relatively poor opportunities for personal communication with their families and friends. Laughter and tears are part of life. Communicative circumstances affect how closely laughter and tears are temporally mixed and the extent to which they motivate action. If Adam Smith were alive today and writing a sequel to his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he would recognize the significance of the nature and extent of symbolic markets on prisoners’ welfare.^