Cautious Affection, Wild Emotions. The Rhetorical Construction of Democratic Empathy in Classical Athenian Law

BUIS, EMILIANO JERÓNIMO

Ciudad de México

Congreso; International Meeting on Law and Society *Walls, Borders, and Bridges: Law and Society in an Inter-Connected World*; 2017

Law and Society Association (LSA)

Law is usually conceived as a rational ground, a social construction emanating from the need to objectivise passionate controversies and to find discursively structured solutions to avoid the use of vengeance. Nonetheless, it is also possible to think of law as the result of passions and therefore emotionally apprehensible. A historical approach will show that in classical Athens it is possible to find several sources addressing how citizens *felt* their involvement in judicial affairs, either as litigants, jury members (dikastai) or spectators. From an interdisciplinary perspective focused in law and classics, what I intend to show here is that legal interactions in ancient Athens were in fact guided by a complex *affective* machinery that resorted to rhetorical arguments on the basis of endorsing ?shared? feelings and discarding ?personal? subjective interests. In the opposition between common emotions and individual *pathe*, Athenians identified the democratic appropriation of judicious civic feelings as antithetical to uncontrolled hyper-emotivity. In Athenian trials empathy between the speaker and the jurors is rhetorically created on the basis of (culturally) accepted and rejected emotional experiences.