Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Aristotle offers this definition while analyzing the emotions (pathē) in his rhetorical theory, where understanding feelings is essential for persuasion in civic life. In the Athens of the 4th century BCE, public speaking in courts and assemblies depended on a speaker’s ability to diagnose and evoke emotions in an audience. Aristotle therefore treats fear not as a moral failing but as a describable psychological state with typical causes and objects—especially future harms that seem near and plausible. The definition belongs to a broader effort to classify emotions by their triggers, bodily/mental character, and the kinds of people and situations in which they arise.

The line defines fear as a kind of present suffering generated by imagining a future threat. Fear is thus not identical with the evil itself, but with the mind’s projection of it: anticipation turns what is not yet real into a felt pain now. This helps explain why fear can be manipulated rhetorically—by making dangers seem imminent, vivid, and likely—and why it can be disproportionate to actual risk. Aristotle’s framing also implies that reducing fear involves altering judgments about probability, proximity, and severity of harm, not merely suppressing emotion. It is an early, influential account of fear as cognitively structured rather than purely instinctive.

1) “Fear may be defined as a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.”
2) “Fear is a kind of pain or agitation derived from the imagination of a future evil that is destructive or painful.”