Schadenfreude and its Wicked Delights in Ancient Greece

Schadenfreude, "pleasure in other people's misfortunes", is an emotion that pervades Greek texts and pervaded Greek communities. Many of their salient characteristics provided the ideal terrain for schadenfreude: competitiveness, a fierce attachment to honor and reputation, the neat partition between friends and enemies, and the exposure of people's lives to the public eye. This book draws on the major literary genres--epic, archaic poetry, tragedy, comedy, historiography, oratory, and philosophy--and on sources describing a variety of cultural practices and beliefs--symposiastic entertainments, sport competitions, curses, the fear of fortune and of the gods, punishments on earth and in the underworld--to tease out the specific configurations of schadenfreude in ancient Greece from the archaic period to roughly the second century CE. Among the emotion's striking features are its tendency to take a loud voice, as mockery or laughter, its being often released in public, and subsequently its damaging force and the intensity with which it was feared. While we tend to think of schadenfreude as a passive, private, unexpressed, and unconfessed emotion, the Greeks often endowed it with an active power. They were also freer to show it because they ignored the love commandment; on the contrary, to rejoice in an enemy's misfortune was common practice and even met with approval. But at the same time, Greek authors ask the questions: when is schadenfreude acceptable? How much of it? Shouldn't we refrain from displaying it, if not from feeling it, in certain cases, for instance at the expense of a dead individual, even if the individual was an enemy? This book seeks to map the Greek answers to these and related questions.

Silvia Montiglio holds a Doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She taught Greek and Latin at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1996 to 2010, and at The Johns Hopkins University from 2010 to 2022.