Comic *Pathos* and the Legal Emotional Community: Destabilizing Judicial Pity and Anger in Aristophanes

Abstract

It has been said that, through the opposition between common and individual *pathe*, Athenians identified the democratic appropriation of judicious civic emotions as antithetical to uncontrolled hyper-emotivity. In Athenian trials, thus, an affective bond between the speaker and the jurors was rhetorically created on the basis of (culturally) accepted and rejected emotional experiences. The purpose of this chapter is to support that statement and explore some passages from Old Comedy to assess the ways in which the genre relied on very efficient techniques to play on the affective dimension of politics and justice. By making use of the concept of a *legal emotional community*, The paper focuses on the communicative experience provided by comic drama and address how Aristophanes revisited emotions such as anger (*orge*) and pity (*eleos*) in order to disarticulate and destabilise them in front of an audience which was capable of understanding judicial rituals and their inherent affects.