Cognitive Classics: New Theoretical Models for Approaching the Ancient World

Gorgias, Plato, Aristotle and Isocrates all described Athenian drama as having the ability to “move the soul” – these ancient commentaries on drama were concerned with the affect of mimesis and drama’s emotional power. In this paper I will outline my recent work that approaches ancient drama from the perspective of the affective sciences, particularly neuroscience research concerning human emotional processing and empathy.

Can scholars of ancient Greece and Rome do without an understanding of the mind and a theory of mental representation? Only, I would argue, if it is possible to view meaning making in language and in literature (or indeed in symbolic activity of whatever sort) as something entirely divorced from any human context.

In this paper, I suggest that the power of Tacitean prose – and what has caused him to be designated as the greatest of all Roman historians (cf., e.g., Martin 1981: 234) – is that it meets the Gibbonian ideal that “the style of an author should be the image of his mind”. Not, however, in the typical sense that “le style c’est l’homme même” – namely, that an author’s style is indicative of his moral character (a view much advocated by, e.g., Seneca the Younger: cf. Dominik 1997).

I aim to expose some aspects of the cognitive structure of orthoprax, collective Roman ritual. I focus on rituals in which Roman children participated in order to show how cognition synchronically structured discrete ritual performances, and to suggest that the cognitive structure of collective ritual facilitated the diachronic transmission of Roman religion. I hope to demonstrate that practice is itself dependent on and structured by belief and other intentional states shared by ritual agents, such as attention, goals, and norms.

Viewing crowds as inherently volatile and regressive, Gustav Le Bon, in his still influential 1897 study, took a dim view of the crowd member: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian – that is, a creature acting by instinct” (Le Bon 1897: 12). Individuals in a crowd become subsumed into a “collective mind” (the modern term for this process is “de-individuation”).