Regulating Empathy in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Ancient Greek culture presents us with a paradox, the coexistence of a nearly unanimous and unquestioning acceptance of exploitation and collective acts of violence with a robust and modern-seeming culture exploring the moral duties owed by one person to another. In this dissertation, I will argue that this paradox is the result of a conflicted attitude towards empathy, which was seen as a benefit for strengthening intracommunal bonds but also as a threat to cultural practices, such as slavery, believed to be necessary. As a result of this anxiety, they developed a set of social norms that strictly limited empathy to their social and political in- groups, while denying it to outsiders. These norms conflicted with a natural tendency to feel empathy towards those, like slaves, for whom it should theoretically be denied. As a result of this conflict, the experience of empathy in ancient Greece was ambivalent and unsettling.

In chapter two I will propose that litigants’ appeals to the pity of jurors in Athenian legal trials represented a discourse defining the Athenian community through empathy by limiting it according to the values of the ideal citizen. The strength of this discourse will also be used to explain how the Athenian state managed to secure a high degree of compliance from its citizens despite a lack of formal methods of coercion. I will also explore how empathy could not be completely contained within the limits imposed by the legal system. This chapter will therefore present two sides of empathy in ancient Greece: the norms that were often effective in limiting it in ways believed to be prosocial, and the tendency to experience it in ways incompatible with these norms.

In chapter three I will discuss the diachronic development of moral attitudes towards collective acts of violence against social and political outsiders. The world of the late Dark Ages and early Archaic Period (roughly the eighth and seventh centuries BC) had few moral sanctions preventing violence against those outside of one’s circle of family members and intimate friends. But the norms permitting this level of violence towards outsiders became increasingly problematized during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The high level of intercommunal violence revealed, for example, by the Homeric poems conflicted with a tendency to experience empathy spontaneously that could not be completely suppressed. I will argue that Panhellenism (the belief that the members of the various ancient Greek communities shared an ethnic and cultural identity) represented a way of addressing the increasing discomfort felt concerning the permissive attitude towards violence of the Dark Ages by developing objective moral duties, defined by ethnicity, towards others. At the same time, the development of moral duties based on Panhellenism was interdependent with attitudes defining “barbarians” as undeserving of empathy and, consequently, a new manifestation of cultural bigotry.

In chapter four I will examine an exception to the normal rules limiting empathy in ancient Greece, narratives of monarchic legitimacy depicting the monarch experiencing empathy in exceptional ways. These narratives were a part of attempts to portray monarchs as able to transcend the informal rules limiting empathy for everyone else as a part of their claims to charismatic authority. Monarchic empathy does not represent an attempt to subvert the norms restricting empathy, but it did rely upon the widespread desire for a freer experience of it. By exceptionalizing monarchic empathy as a part of their claims to elevated, often divine, statuses, these narratives of charismatic authority confirmed the norms of empathy for everyone else while also offering a vicarious liberation from them.