The Early History of 'Natural' Sympathy: Contagious Affect and Universal Kinship in the Hellenistic Mediterranean

This chapter follows how the language of 'sympathy' (sumpatheia) reshapes the semantic ground of pity (eleos, oiktos) in Greek between the fourth and the first centuries bce. It argues that, by tracing the rise of intersubjective 'sympathy', we can better resist contemporary deployments of 'universal' or 'natural' sympathy as spontaneous evidence of a common humanity and instead focus on analysing the ethics and politics around claims of emotional identification. The chapter also complicates genealogies of sympathy that begin in modernity while also rejecting sympathy as a hallmark of 'classical' Greek humanism. Rather, it shows how intersubjective 'sympathy' first starts to take form in writings influenced by natural philosophy as the problem of 'contagious affect', which slips below the threshold of cognitive evaluation characteristic of pity in classical Greek sources. It then traces how sympathy begins to merge with pity, especially in Hellenistic historiographers narrating the rise of Rome as a 'philanthropic' empire. It argues that sympathy emerges in the last centuries bce as a strategically compelling sign of universal human kinship.