Reading Emotional Intelligence: Antilochus and Achilles in the Iliad

Abstract

The construct “emotional intelligence” has come to the fore only in recent decades, emerging from investigations into the links between cognition and emotion: the specific focus of scholars has been the extent to which and the ways in which human reasoning takes emotions into account. This chapter begins with an account from social and developmental psychology of the mental aptitudes that constitute emotional intelligence. It demonstrates through reference to a number of Iliadic episodes, that Homer’s Antilochus exhibits all four. The chapter argues that he shares these aptitudes and that his smile at 23.555 is all that Halliwell says of it, but that it is also, significantly, a smile of recognition. It has been shown that individuals who are better able to recognize and to reason about their own emotions and those of others and who are better able to reason about the emotional consequences of events are judged to have higher emotional intelligence. Show more