‘Anger’

Herodotus employs a rich variety of terms and descriptions of anger, and anger is among the most prominent forms of emotional motivation in his work. As in other ancient Greek sources, anger in the Histories focuses on perceived slights and threats to the status of an individual or a group and is normally manifested in a desire for redress or retaliation. Whether at an individual or a communal level, anger is reactive and presupposes that the other part initiated the offense. Thus anger can be moral as well as non-moral, concerned with justice as well as with justification. A very large number of the most memorable cases of anger in the Histories, however, concern its more extreme and pathological forms and its most violent and lethal expessions.