The book under review sets out to investigate the emotion of hatred in Rome by unearthing its distinctive traits as well as its social and political implications mainly during the Late Republic and Early Empire. The chosen time span certainly makes good sense, as Aubreville’s study can rely on a significant range of literary sources to which he has recourse in order to delineate the salient aspects of hatred from different perspectives. In general, I believe that the book represents a welcome addition to the (still thriving) research field of affective science in Ancient Literature, in particular in light of its markedly thematic structure. The volume shares the unitary thematic focus on a single emotion with other recent publications, like, only to mention a few, the five multi-authored volumes on emotions in Ancient Drama that came out between 2018 and 2023 (on fear, joy, anger, and jealousy respectively).1

Aubreville’s initial chapters serves the purpose of introducing the object of his investigation from a conceptual and methodological angle. He situates Hass within the field of ‘hate studies’ pointing to the status of emotions as sociocultural products. He also takes stock of the existing literature on the topic and delves into the problematic equivalence between ancient and modern terms (see e.g. discussion on odium, inimicitia, invidia), which goes hand in hand with the Fassbarkeit of ancient emotions and their actual recognizability as well as a possible overlap between similar emotions (see e.g. p. 75, where the notion of Feindseligkeitstriade, the triad of anger, disgust, and contempt, is brought up). Aubreville then moves on to describe hatred as a dynamic process revolving around three pivotal ‘moments’, perception (Wahrnehmung), evaluation (Bewertung), and reaction (Reaktion), under whose lens he scrutinizes and thrashes out several episodes of the history of Rome, sometimes offering fine readings of their emotional shades (see e.g. his discussion on the aspects of Bewertung and Bewertungsmuster in Tacitus’ account of Subrius Flavus’ hate against Nero at pp. 132–133). This is indeed a very hefty chapter (maybe too hefty?), packed with many examples and tapping into several issues and, therefore, overall, not so easy to review.

Readers have to wait until p. 167 to finally encounter the thematic and argumentative kernel of the book. In chapters VI and VII, Aubreville tackles the key issues of his investigation, which is specifically aimed at illustrating the significance and function of hatred as a distinctive emotion of Roman aristocracy. Aubreville borrows the notion of ‘emotional communities’ from Barbara Rosenwein’s 2006 book on emotions in the Early Middle Ages and puts it to test within the new context of use (see esp. pp. 171 and ff. and passim).2 As pointed out in the book, the members of the Roman élite identified with common ‘rules’ to live by, also from the emotional standpoint. Auberville, without ever losing sight of his Ausgangspunkt, maintains that hatred was an ambivalent feeling and could play both a negative and a positive role according to his sources, thus concluding that this emotion, depending on the contingent public circumstance, could be kept at bay, promoted and even intentionally feigned by Roma aristocrats. The author reviews a significant array of case-studies, starting with those displaying examples of ‘problematic’ hatred. He argues that, on the one hand, personal hate occasionally had to be suppressed for the sake of common good or, on the other hand, that such an emotion was tolerated or encouraged owing to its (quite unexpected, at least from a modern viewpoint) virtuous connotations. The pages of these two chapters are replete with good points and fine readings (see e.g. at p. 210 on hatred as a guarantee of ‘Romanness’; at p. 220–222 on odium regni against Caesar, or at p. 268 on hate as a strategy to gain political fame) and certainly succeed in painting a very detailed picture. Nonetheless, I must confess that it can be challenging to read them through because of the abundance of cited examples, which makes the argumentative flow somewhat desultory: the author must have been aware of this since he has felt the need to equip each of his chapters with a Zusammenfassung.

In my view, Aubreville’s book has both strong and weak points. Despite its richness and wide range of content, it suffers from the typical maladies of its genre, in that it is too long and tends to be sometimes repetitious (and a bit tiresome). Also, bulky footnotes, though in general valuable, cause the reading to be rather disjointed. Aubreville undeniably displays both a vast bibliographical knowledge and a remarkable first-hand knowledge of ancient sources. However, the structure of some chapters may turn out to be somewhat confusing, as the author gathers, under the same subheading, many passages or, rather, ‘snapshots’ taken from different authors and works, also from disparate time periods. I think (this is, of course, just my personal – and therefore disputable – opinion) that the volume, in terms of clarity, would have perhaps benefited from a different organization of content, one that could have brought to the fore, for example, single prominent figures of the literary and political life of the Late Repulic and Early Empire with a view to looking into the way they portrayed the emotion of hatred in their respective fields across the decades. I would have envisioned some major chapters devoted, for example, to Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, Tacitus, etc., whose works are indeed amply and extensively cited by Aubreville across chapters, but in a scattered and discontinuous way. He has obviously opted for a completely different organization of the subject matter, ‘synchronic’ instead of ‘diachronic’, so to speak, which privileges, also in light of the thematic unity pursued, a social and transhistorical interpretation of the emotional phenomenon of hatred over an ‘author-centred’ (or even ‘genre-centred’) approach to the topic.

Notes:
1 Mattia De Poli (ed.), Il teatro delle emozioni: la paura, Padua 2018; id. (ed.), Il teatro delle emozioni: la gioia, Padua 2019; id. (ed.), Il teatro delle emozioni: l’ira, Padua 2021; id./ P. Vesentin (eds.), Il mostro dagli occhi verdi. Studi sulla gelosia nel teatro antico (e moderno), Tübingen 2022; id. (eds.), Il teatro delle emozioni: la gelosia, Padua 2023.
2 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca 2006.