Implicit Knowledge

Greek readers brought to a text or performance a cultural repertoire of values, emotions, and habitual practices that informed their responses to the work at hand. They may not have reflected on these implicit sensibilities, any more than we do in relation to our own, but it requires an effort for us to recover something of their way of thinking if we are to appreciate their literature to the full. In this chapter, I consider classical Greek conceptions of anger, beauty, erotic passion, pity, jealousy, friendship, and free (or frank) speech, as well as the kinds of responses that were expected of readers and theater-goers, and apply these ideas to the interpretation of texts from Homer and tragedy to Thucydides and beyond.