An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Han Baltussen (Nominated Fellow, 2024)
Ancient strategies for coping with grief. Empathy, persuasion or admonition?
When the orator Cicero lost his only daughter after she gave birth (45 BCE), he was heartbroken, but eventually sublimated his grief into perceptive analysis of grief (Graver 2002). When the Platonist Plutarch heard his two-year old daughter had died while he was traveling (ca. 90 CE), a letter to his wife made every effort to console her (Baltussen 2009b). In this talk I report on my long-running project (Baltussen 2007-2018) to understand those written sources in the Greco-Roman world that offered consolation to self or others. Consolatory writings existed in many forms (there is not one genre, Scourfield 2013), but the evidence also harbours an intriguing paradox: we all experience grief (which suggests generalisable insight), but we cannot presume to know what it is like for another person (which suggests a highly individualised experience). I want to explore this tension further by including recent studies of human emotions, which examine their cultural ‘signature’ (e.g. social constructionism, Rosenwein 2002), while in psychiatry disagreement lingers about definition and categories (Greenberg 2013). We regard the act of consolation as an attempt to offer emotional assistance driven by empathy. The need to deal with loss and death is of all ages, but how individuals did this differs across time. I will suggest that ancient modes of advice varied between compassion, persuasion and admonition. I will also show how recent trends in grief studies can offer helpful insights, in particular how the healing arts can harness the ancient wisdom (Bertmann 1999).
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7
References
Baltussen, H. 2009a. ‘A Grief Observed: Cicero on Remembering Tullia’, Mortality 14.4: 355–69.
Baltussen, H. 2009b. ‘Personal Grief and Public Mourning in Plutarch’s Consolation to His Wife’, American Journal of Philology130.1: 67–98.
Baltussen, H. 2011. ‘Cicero’s Translation of Greek Philosophy: Personal Mission or Public Service?’, in S. McElduff & E. Sciarrino (eds) Complicating the History of Western Translation: The Ancient Mediterranean in Perspective (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing; e-book 2014), 37–47.
Baltussen, H. 2013. ‘Cicero’s Consolatio ad se: Character, Purpose and Impact of a Curious Treatise,’ in H. Baltussen (ed.) Greek and Roman Consolations. Eight Studies of a Tradition and its Afterlife (Swansea), 67–91.
Baltussen, H. 2015. ‘Nicolas of Modruš’ De Consolatione (1465-66): A New Approach to Grief Management’, in S. Broomhall (ed.) Ordering Emotions in Europe, 1100-1800 (E.J. Brill), 105–120.
Baltussen, H. 2018. ‘A Curious Sidelight on the Reception of ps.Cicero’s Consolatio (1583): Bodleian MS. Rawl. D. 985’, in Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance LXXX.3: 481–506.
Baltussen, H. (forthc.) Self-Consolation in the Greco-Roman World.
Bertmann, S.L. (ed) 1999. Grief and the Healing Arts: Creativity as Therapy (New York)
Graver, M. 2002. Cicero on the Emotions. Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago).
Greenberg, G. 2013. The Book of Woe. The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry (London).
Rosenwein, B. 2002. ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review 107: 821-45.
Scourfield, J.H.D. 2012. ‘Towards a Genre of Consolation’, in H. Baltussen (ed.), Greek and Roman Consolations. Eight Studies of a Tradition and its Afterlife (Swansea), 1–36.
Walter, T. 1996. ‘A New Model for Grief: Bereavement and Biography’, Mortality 1.1: 7–25.