RAGE: Roman and Greek Emotions

Abstract

The study of emotions in ancient Greek and Latin literature has largely been qualitative, relying on close reading, while existing computational methods often focus on coarse-grained sentiment polarity, which limits their use for nuanced literary analysis. To bridge this gap, we present RAGE (Roman And Greek Emotions), a new corpus of approximately 100 000 words of annotated classical literature spanning multiple genres and authors. Our multi-layered annotation framework, inspired by semantic role labeling, is designed for fine-grained analysis, capturing not only the emotion itself but also its experiencer, cause, and target. We adopt a nuanced emotion taxonomy and enrich each emotion instance with additional layers for intensity, explicitness, and negation. To facilitate comparative analysis, characters are linked to Wikidata or a local ontology. We demonstrate the utility of our corpus through corpus-level exploratory analyses and an in-depth case study. RAGE and its accompanying guidelines provide a valuable resource for applying quantitative methods to the study of emotions in classical texts.

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