From Pity to Sympathy: Tragic Emotions across the
Ages
We begin by alerting our readers that this essay is an
experiment—a trial, as the word “essay” itself suggests. It is motivated by the
idea that ancient Greece was in some ways a different world than ours, not just
in its social arrangements—we are pleased that slavery no longer exists—but also
in more subtle aspects of psychology. We take as our test case the emotions
experienced in the viewing of tragedy. Aristotle posited pity and fear (
eleos and
phobos ) as the principal emotions aroused by tragedy, and we take
it that this is a valid description for the tragedy of his time, and the ancient
Greek audience that attended it. But is it equally the case today? Are these the
emotions that we expect when we attend the theater, and are these the emotions
that writers, directors, and actors—even producers and translators of ancient
tragedy—aim to induce? If not, then it may be that even when ancient tragedy is
produced for a modern audience, there are subtle changes in the way it is
received—changes that may affect its meaning, and the way interactions within
the drama are conceived and enacted. Would a version of
Oedipus
the King in Japanese have quite the same emotional impact as the
original, given the very different acting conventions characteristic of
classical drama and the
Noh play—and even though both
traditions employed the mask for actors? But we do not have to look so far
afield: it may be that even versions in modern Greek, closely as they may adhere
to the original text, differ in subtle ways in the effects they generate, in
part, perhaps, just because they do not seek to arouse pity and fear, precisely,
or not these emotions alone.
Before examining Aristotle’s conception of pity and fear in more detail, and
indicating why these categories may not apply to the modern theater, we would
like to provide some motivation for the idea that emotional responses in ancient
Greece may not have coincided exactly with modern conceptions. Catherine Lutz,
in her book with the engaging title
Unnatural Emotions ,
observes (1988:8): “The process of coming to understand the emotional lives of
people in different cultures can be seen first and foremost as a problem of
translation. What must be translated,” she goes on to say,
are the meanings of the emotion words spoken in everyday conversation, of the emotionally imbued events of everyday life, of tears and other gestures, and of audience reaction to emotional performance. The interpretive task, then, is not primarily to fathom somehow ‘what they are feeling’ inside … but rather to translate emotional communications from one idiom, context, language, or sociohistorical mode of understanding into another.
This is a tall order, especially when the foreign culture under investigation is
no longer a living one, in which we can interrogate native speakers and observe
their interactions, complete with “tears and other gestures, and … audience
reaction to emotional performance.” But we do have particularly rich evidence to
make a start in this endeavor in respect to classical Greece, and are in some
ways better positioned to appreciate their views than we are in the case of some
contemporary societies. This is because the Greeks have provided us with careful
definitions of several emotions, or rather
pathē in their language, something not always available to
students of the history of emotion; what is more, their dramatic works, along
with various kinds of narratives such as epic, history, oratory, and the novel,
allow us to see how emotion terms were used in antiquity and the kinds of
responses that they elicited in others. What is more, we can be sure that the
Greeks were not tailoring their descriptions to the expectations of modern
anthropologists: they were writing for one another, and we are in the enviable
position of being able to eavesdrop on their conversations.
In fact, a close reading of the Greeks’ own statements, both explicit and
implicit, about the emotions reveals that their emotional vocabulary does differ
in important ways, sometimes subtle and sometimes quite palpable, from what are
commonly taken to be equivalent terms in English and at least some other modern
languages, including modern Greek (though the latter still awaits systematic
investigation). This applies in particular to pity and fear, and it is easy to
see why this complicates our original question. For we must not only consider
whether pity and fear are the predominant responses to tragedy today—even to
modern versions of ancient Greek tragedy—as Aristotle and other ancient writers
maintained, but also whether pity and fear, as the classical Greeks understood
the terms, correspond to our own notions of these concepts, or of the words we
use to render them.
Now, we should make it clear that the idea that the emotions may vary from one
society to another is not uncontroversial. The discipline of evolutionary
psychology, for example, has developed arguments to show that at least the most
basic emotions, and these normally include fear (and more rarely pity), are and
must be uniform across different cultures. The view may be said to begin with
Darwin’s book
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals , published in 1872, in which he argued that the emotions,
like certain other traits, have evolved through natural selection; they are thus
assumed to have developed in such as way as to meet challenges to the survival
of the species, whether as a result of natural conditions or those prevailing in
early human society (Darwin 1998). Their universality is thus a consequence of
biology. The opponents of this hypothesis—sometimes identified as social
constructionists—emphasize, on the contrary, the way the emotions are shaped by
the values and customs of a given society; as Lutz puts it (1988:8), emotion is
“woven in complex ways into cultural meaning systems and social interaction.” In
this view, the emotions are not simply instinctive reactions, like jumping at a
loud noise or blinking or flinching when something is brought suddenly before
the eyes. Rather, the emotions have a strong cognitive dimension, and depend on
the way we evaluate situations (for discussion, see Konstan 2006). We shall
return to this idea, but we may observe that all the ancient philosophical
schools, and Aristotle in particular, viewed the emotions in this way, and
maintained that they depend crucially on the way we interpret and judge the
behavior and motives of others.
Rather than explore this controversy on a theoretical level here, we should like
on this occasion to concentrate specifically on the tragic emotions, and pity in
particular; we wish to examine how these emotions are translated, and to
consider the ways in which an awareness of differences between ancient and
modern conceptions may affect our understanding of a couple of well-known
classical tragedies in modern dress. To illustrate the nature of the problem, we
may begin by citing some remarks by the eminent Marxist critic Terry Eagleton
(Eagleton 2003), since they explicitly address the larger question under
discussion here and make their point with reference to Greek tragedy. Eagleton
begins by citing the book
On Materialism , by the
distinguished Italian philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro (1975:52): “Cultural
continuities, Timpanaro points out, ‘have been rendered possible by the fact
that man as a biological being has remained essentially unchanged from the
beginnings of civilization to the present; and those sentiments and
representations which are closest to the biological facts of human existence
have changed little’” (Eagleton 2003:xii–xiv). We recognize here a version of
what we have identified above as the universalist position. “However
culturalists may wince at this cheek-by-jowl consorting of ‘sentiments and
representations’ with ‘biological facts,’” Eagleton continues,
it is
surely true that to ask, say, why we feel sympathy for Philoctetes is a
pseudo-problem bred by a bogus historicism. We feel sympathy for Philoctetes
because he is in agonizing pain from his pus-swollen foot. There is no use
in pretending that his foot is a realm of impenetrable otherness which our
modern-day notions can grasp only at the cost of brutally colonizing the
past. There is nothing hermeneutically opaque about Philoctetes’ hobbling
and bellowing.
So much for postmodern relativism, hermetically closed hermeneutic circles, and
queasy hesitations about our capacity to understand the “Other.” Pain is pain. Eagleton pauses a moment to concede that classical tragedy is not wholly
transparent to us: “There is, to be sure, a great deal about the art form in
which he [that is, Philoctetes] figures which is profoundly obscure to us. We
are, for example, bemused and mildly scandalized by Antigone’s declaration that
she would not have broken the law for a husband or a son, as opposed to a
brother. It is not the kind of thing a good liberal would say.” Eagleton, we
understand, is not a liberal but a hardnosed realist who sees in Antigone a
tough-minded comrade, prepared to make unsentimental choices; he is not really
one of the “we” who are “bemused and scandalized” by her. “But,” Eagleton
insists, “as far as his agony goes, we understand Philoctetes in much the same
way as we understand the afflictions of those around us. It is not that such a
response is ‘unhistorical’; it is rather that human history includes the history
of the body, which in respect of physical suffering has probably changed little
over the centuries.”
We are inclined to agree that physical pain has changed little since classical
antiquity—and not just “probably,” in Eagleton’s coy formulation.
[1] Pain, however, is not an
emotion. It is, as Aristotle says, a sensation (his word is
aisthēsis ); as he makes clear in the
Rhetoric , pain and pleasure are part of an emotion or
pathos , but not the whole thing. But our
responses to pain include emotional responses, and here it is not so clear that
nothing has changed over the centuries. If Gorgias (
Defense of
Helen 9), Plato (
Republic 10, 606b–c), and
Isocrates (
Panegyricus 112, 168), as well as Aristotle
himself (
Poetics 1452a2–3, 1452b32–33, etc.) are at all
reliable guides, then a Greek in the theater of Dionysus would not have
professed to “feel sympathy for Philoctetes” because of his pain, a reaction
that Eagleton takes to be a transhistorical constant.
[2] A Greek would have spoken rather of pity
(
eleos ), and pity, as Aristotle and
others make clear, is aroused not by suffering as such but by
undeserved suffering. In Aristotle’s words, pity is “a kind of
pain in the case of an apparent destructive or painful harm
in one not
deserving to encounter it , which one might expect oneself, or one of
one’s own, to suffer, and this when it seems near” (
Rhetoric 2.8, 1385b13-16). Raw sympathy for pain is not the emotion
that Aristotle, at least, identified as the characteristic response to tragedy. The cognitive component of the emotion pity stands out clearly in Aristotle’s
definition: one must, in order to experience this emotion or
pathos , make a judgment as to the moral desert of
the person suffering misfortune. An instinctive response to another’s pain does
not qualify; for Aristotle, pity is a moral emotion, and hence specific to human
beings (and to gods).
We can perhaps gauge something of what the original audience of Sophocles’
Philoctetes might have experienced upon observing
Philoctetes’ suffering from the reactions of Neoptolemus and the chorus in the
play.
[3] At the sight
of Philoctetes’ miserable cave the chorus exclaim: “I pity him: no human being
to care for him, with no companion in sight, miserable, forever alone, he is
afflicted by a savage disease and wanders at the mercy of every need that
arises” (169–175). Note the emphasis on Philoctetes’ isolation, which they
remark on even before his physical agony.
[4] Later in the play, Neoptolemus is
provoked by Philoctetes’ stubborn refusal to go to Troy, even though his wound
can be cured only if he does so: “it is not just to pardon or to pity those who
are involved in self-willed harm, like you” (1318–1320), he asserts. As
Aristotle says, pity is aroused by undeserved suffering, and someone who suffers
willingly fails to qualify. For an ancient Greek, then, the mere spectacle of
pain was not enough to elicit pity—something one might have inferred, it seems
to me, from a consideration of such practices as the judicial torture of slaves
(it is odd that a Marxist critic should have overlooked this).
Between Greek pity and modern English sympathy there is a deep cultural divide,
extending to basic conceptions of the self. Sympathy involves putting oneself in
the position of another so as to feel what the other person feels. Thus, Edmund
Burke (1757:41) writes that “sympathy must be considered as a sort of
substitution, by which we are put into the place of another man, and affected in
many respects as he is affected.” David Hume, in turn, supposes that the thought
of another’s passion may acquire “such a degree of force and vivacity, as to
become the very passion itself” (Hume 1739:317). Such a description of sympathy
has little to do with Greek pity, and its roots lie elsewhere.
[5] The spectators of
Philoctetes’ suffering, whether on stage or in the audience, did not expect to
be affected as he was affected, or that his passion would become theirs. As a
distinct emotion in its own right, pity did not mean identifying with the
experience of another; rather, it was just insofar as one did not share
another’s misfortune that one was in a position to pity it. Aristotle indeed
observes in the
Rhetoric (2.8, 1386a25–27) that “people
pity those who are similar to themselves, whether in age, character,
disposition, rank, family,” or the like; but the reason is not that likeness
enables empathy, but rather, as Aristotle explains, that in such cases we more
easily perceive that a comparable misfortune might befall us as well. Similarity
between the pitier and the pitied is thus a condition for the vulnerability
principle, and likewise presupposes a difference in current fortunes. This same
consideration accounts for why Aristotle excludes from the domain of pity those
who are intimately connected to us. As he puts it (immediately preceding the
reference to similarity), “people pity their acquaintances (
gnōrimoi ), provided that they are not exceedingly
close in kinship; for concerning these they are disposed as they are concerning
themselves.… For what is terrible (
deinon ) is
different from what is pitiable, and is expulsive of pity” (1386a18–23). Aristotle cites the remark of one Amasis, who did not weep when his son was led
out to die but did so in the case of a friend: “the latter was pitiable, the
former terrible,” Aristotle comments.
[6] We recall that, in his definition of pity, Aristotle
specified that the anticipated harm must be such as can befall either oneself or
one’s own. The afflictions of those nearest to us are perceived as ours rather
than another’s, and “people stop pitying when something terrible is happening to
them,” presumably since misfortune is now present rather than prospective. Pity,
then, is excited only at a certain remove; when the connection with the sufferer
is too close, we experience the misfortune itself, not the anticipation of it
(of course, one may solicit the pity of others for the misfortunes of our kin;
cf. Apsines 403 Spengel; see Dilts and Kennedy 1997 for translation).
Contrast with this conception of pity the recent book by Alison Gopnik,
The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth,
Love, and the Meaning of Life : “Babies imitate, and imitation is a
way of taking on an emotion as one’s own.Joy reflects joy, sorrow provokes
sorrow, not only as a facial expression but as a state of feeling between
caregiver and baby.”
[7] Gopnik writes (2009:207–208):
It’s possible that babies literally don't
see a difference between their own pain and the pain of others. Maybe babies
want to end all suffering, no matter where it happens to be located. For
them, pain is pain and joy is joy. Moral thinkers from Buddha to David Hume
to Martin Buber have suggested that erasing the boundaries between yourself
and others in this way can underpin morality.
The reviewer adds,
“Thus attachment, empathy, and morality are inseparable, though none is
inevitable.”
What all this suggests is that Eagleton’s facile assimilation of ancient Greek
pity to modern sympathy fails to perform the work of translation that
understanding the ancient emotions requires. Now, the above observations have
been made principally with reference to translations from ancient Greek into
English, and more specifically in relation to the classical Greek word
eleos and modern English “sympathy.” Although it
is easy to fault Eagleton for too casual an equation of the two concepts, his
mistake may be taken as a stimulus to entering upon a deeper and more
interesting question. For although the term “sympathy” may be out of place when
analyzing the original Greek audience’s expectations and responses to tragedy,
and to Sophocles’
Philoctetes in particular, it is
entirely possible that it is the appropriate term to represent a modern
audience’s response to the play, especially if it is seen in translation. If so,
then a translation of a drama such as
Philoctetes will,
however faithful it may be, inevitably undergo a certain transformation, for it
will invite responses that fall within the range of sentiments available to the
culture in which it is performed—and we cannot assume a priori that our culture
is the same as that of classical Athens.
[8] What is more, these responses may be
projected, as it were, back into the drama itself, with the result that the way
the characters themselves interact may acquire new dimensions for us that were
not present in the original work or perceived in the same way by the spectators
at the original performance. It may even be that the vocabulary of the ancient
work, if properly distinguished from our own, will help subtly to transform the
languages into which it is rendered and in which it is received—a view of the
effects of translation that Walter Benjamin envisaged, when he wrote
No
translation would be possible if, in accord with its ultimate essence, it
were to strive for similarity to the original. For in its continuing life,
which could not be so called if it were not the transformation and renewal
of a living thing, the original is changed.… For just as the tone and
significance of great literary works are completely transformed over the
centuries, the translator’s native language is also transformed. Indeed,
whereas the poetic word endures in its own language, even the greatest
translation is destined to be taken up into the growth of its language and
perish as a result of its renewal. Far from being a sterile similarity
between two languages that have died out, translation is, of all modes,
precisely the one called upon to mark the after-ripening of the alien word,
and the birth pangs of its own.
Benjamin 1997:155–156
n.9 In Benjamin’s
view, words do not merely persist in fossilized form, they ripen and mature, and
this occurs at least in part as a result of the contact between languages—of
translation. Thus, the process that Benjamin suggests occurs not only across
languages, but within any given language, as it develops over time: and what
better material for a case study than translations of ancient Greek into modern
Greek!
[10]
We begin by taking as an illustrative example the passage cited above from
Sophocles’
Philoctetes , in which the chorus expresses
pity for the wounded and abandoned hero (“I pity him: no human being to care for
him,” etc. [169–175]). The ancient Greek is clear:
oiktirō nin , “I lament his condition.” In the modern Greek
version by Tasos Roussos (1991; first performed in June of 1967), which aspires
to be quite literal and in general succeeds, the phrase is rendered
pōs thlibomai ki afton . What does the use of the
verb
thlibomai suggest here? It would seem to
collapse the distance between the chorus and the wretched man for whom they are
feeling, indicating that they are struck personally, affectively, by
Philoctetes’ situation. Everything depends on nuance, to be sure: is there a
hint in the text that the anticipated reaction to what Philoctetes is going
through, on the part of the audience as well as of the chorus, is a kind of
instinctive or visceral response to his misery, unmediated by ethical
considerations of desert? Let us take a look next at the second passage cited
above, in which Neoptolemus gently scolds Philoctetes for not seeking a way out
of his misery. His words in the ancient Greek text are: “all who are involved in
voluntary harm like you, for these it is not just (
dikaion ) to receive either excuse (
sungnōmēn ) or that anyone feel pity (
oiktirein ).” In Roussos’s rendering, the words are:
den einai dikaio mête kaneis na tou lupatai mête na
sukhôrei (1991:129). Here again, the sense seems to be subtly
transformed: instead of directing attention to the conditions under which one
morally or cognitively responds with pity, an emotion understood by Aristotle
and his contemporaries to presuppose, as we have seen, a certain distance from
the sufferer and the ability to judge more or less objectively the rights and
wrongs of the misfortune that has befallen him, Roussos, in line with modern
sensibilities, appears to import a greater feeling content by employing words
that suggest being sorry (
lupatai : the root
sense derives from the word
lupē , meaning
“pain” or “distress,” someth ing like
sumponia ) and forgiveness (
sukhōrei ). Both the chorus and Neoptolemus seem, in the modern
version, to experience a sympathetic reaction rather than to engage in an
ethical judgment. And this may be, moreover, just what the modern audience
expects and is expected to feel when watching a tragedy: we are given to
empathy, perhaps, in contexts in which the ancient Greeks responded more with
pity—or
eleos —in their sense of the term.
Modern Greek has retained, of course, the word
eleos , along with another ancient term for pity, namely
oiktos . But a case can be made that the
significance of these terms has shifted somewhat.
Oiktos , for example, was in antiquity associated particularly
with grieving out loud or wailing: one could hear
oiktos coming from inside a house. In modern Greek, the term
tends to connote a certain disrespect or contempt for the person who is pitied,
just as in English, too, the idea of pity has acquired negative associations, as
though pity implied looking down at the sufferer and so not treating the other
person as a proper equal. It is just for such reasons that terms like
“compassion,” and still more “sympathy” and “empathy,” have begun to replace
“pity” in common parlance. Modern Greek also makes use of
eleemosune , a coinage that arose in the
Hellenistic period (there is an instance in a fragment of Callimachus) and
became particularly prominent in Christian discourse, as well as of
sumpatheia ,
sumponia , and other such terms; by comparison,
eleos itself has acquired a more elevated tone,
often used in connection with God’s mercy. This evolution in the sense of the
ancient terms is also part of the transformation of emotional and moral
sensibilities, and alerts us once again that, when watching a play like
Sophocles’
Ajax or
Philoctetes , we must inquire whether what we are feeling is quite like
pity or fear in the classical sense, and how our response may affect the
interpretation we bring to bear on the feelings of the characters themselves in
the plays.
Let us consider one more passage in ancient tragedy, for the sake of
illustration, since the present argument hardly pretends to be exhaustive. It is
remarkable that in Sophocles’
Ajax , Odysseus is
represented as experiencing pity for his archenemy, who has just attempted to
slay all the Greek leaders, including Odysseus, out of resentment that the arms
of Achilles were awarded to Odysseus rather than to himself. After rendering
Ajax mad, and causing him to torture and kill sheep in the mistaken belief that
they are his enemies, the goddess Athena invites Odysseus to gloat at the
spectacle of his fallen antagonist. Odysseus wisely refuses, expressing instead,
in the ancient Greek text, pity for Ajax in his tormented state: “I pity him
(
epoiktirō de nin ) in his misery, even though he is hostile to me, for he has been
yoked to an evil madness. Yet I look not to his fate more than to my own, for I
see that we are nothing more than figments, we who are alive—a fleeting shadow.”
Odysseus feels, not sympathy for his antagonist, but rather a sense of his own
vulnerability, in accord with Aristotle’s account of pity; he knows that he is
not at present in the condition of Ajax, and so he does not identify with his
state of mind; rather, he feels a mixture of fear and a sense of the
disproportion between the punishment of Ajax and his earlier status: he is
reflecting on how far Ajax has fallen, and how quickly. Mortals are playthings
of the gods, who are free, like Athena, to enjoy the spectacle of our
humiliation. Although Odysseus does not identify with Ajax, he can recognize his
misery as the common lot of mankind, at least potentially. We may note too that,
as Odysseus gazes on the mad Ajax, while remaining invisible to him (thanks to
Athena), he is like the members of the audience, who are looking on together
with Odysseus at the plight of the fallen hero. Here too, as in the
Philoctetes , the response of characters within the play
may be a cue as to how the spectators reacted or were expected to react.
In the modern Greek version by Roussos, Odysseus’ words are rendered
me pianei thlipsē gi'afton ton ermo, as einai ekhthros
mou (1990:43); how shall we understand his language here? The term
thlipsē indicates a kind of sorrow or
inward oppression (cf. the song,
Stin Kardia Mou Mono
Thlipsi [
Στην Καρδιά Μου Μόνο
Θλίψη] , by Elena Paparizou). Comparably, Kostas Georgousopoulos’s
version (published under the pen name of K. Myres) of the
Ajax , produced in the year 2000 (2000:53)
to xero kai ton lupamai ton eremo ki as itane o ekhthros mou ,
where
lupamai means roughly “feel sorry for.”
So too, at line 510, where Tecmessa asks Ajax to have pity for their son, the
imperative
oiktire in the ancient Greek is
rendered as
lupēsou by both Roussos and
Georgousopoulos (cf. 652, where
oiktirō in
the original becomes
lupamai in Roussos’s
version and
phrittō , “feel horror” in that of
Georgousopoulos). The noun
oiktos at line
525, where the chorus seconds Tecmessa’s appeal, becomes
splankhnia in Roussos’s version, and for the
chorus’s own sensibility Georgousopoulos offers
summerizomai , where the emphasis is on the shared feeling. This
is, we suggest, just what a modern audience does feel at the sight of the still
proud and arrogant Ajax, boasting to Athena, in his mad state, of his triumph in
slaying the Greek generals: we feel sorrow, sympathy, and identification; where
Odysseus, and the original ancient Greek audience, perhaps experienced something
more like Aristotelian pity, retaining their distance from the sufferer and
remarking, even as they acknowledged their vulnerability to such misfortune, the
degree to which he has brought it upon himself.
Since this is, as we began by saying, an essay, a trial balloon, we will not
carry the argument any further, and will simply draw, not conclusions, but some
possible implications and questions for further investigation. We wish to make
it absolutely clear that we are not in any way criticizing Roussos’s translation
for a lack of fidelity to the Sophoclean originals. On the contrary, we believe
that he was in a sense being perfectly faithful, even as he subtly transformed
the sense of the terms involved. For what was pity to the ancients
is sympathy for us: where they felt themselves removed from the
suffering of another, save for an awareness of their common vulnerability, we
identify and enter into the feelings of the other. Tragedy does mean something
different to us, and it should. The idea is to be conscious of the changes, and
to reflect perhaps on their meaning.
To take this investigation further, one might examine not just the words in the
plays themselves, as we have done, but also the accounts of the translators; the
actors; the audience, where these are available; and the write-ups in reviews,
program notes, and the like for the modern Greek versions. We could then compare
and contrast these descriptions with what Aristotle and other sources have to
tell us about the characteristic response to tragedy in antiquity. This would be
a highly worthwhile exercise, we believe (one of us—Kiritsi—is undertaking
something of this sort for Menandrean comedy in its modern adaptations). We have
remarked that relatively little work has been done so far, at least to our
knowledge, on the relation between emotion terms in ancient and modern Greek. We
hope that this brief essay serves to stimulate further interest in such a
project.
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Footnotes
Note 1
Felix Budelmann, citing this same passage in Eagleton's book, remarks
(2010:111): “As Eagleton says, pain is a universal phenomenon. The
biochemistry of pain is fundamentally the same in everybody and will
have been the same for over a hundred thousand years.… Yet this is not
the whole story.” Budelmann notes the varied ways in which Philoctetes’
pain has been staged over the centuries, and concludes (2010:112): “The
way Sophocles makes him [Philoctetes] express his pain is influenced by
cultural contexts. Philoctetes’ description of his suffering reflects
Greek notions of the self and of bodily sensations insofar as pain is
described as an outside agent attacking the body.… As a consequence of
the interplay of nature and culture, Sophocles’ experience and
conception of pain are different from mine.” See also Budelmann 2007.
Charles Martindale (1993:64) remarks of Ovid’s description of the
flaying of Marsyas: “Marsyas’ pain is aestheticized, objectified, made
the focus of artistic vision. But isn’t that in a sense what any
artistic representation of pain is, and must be?” Just in this respect,
then, pain is not always the same. For discussion of aesthetics and its
relation to reception and performance, see Goldhill 2010 (on Marsyas’
“pain,” page 62), and the response by Martindale in the same volume
(Martindale 2010).
Note 2
Plato employs the term sumpaskhō at
Republic 605D, but the sense is apparently “to feel pain or pleasure
along with someone” (cf. sunkhairō )
rather than “to experience another person’s emotion by a process of
identification.”
Note 3
Cf. Halliwell 2002:208–211, who points out that “it is an extraordinary
feature of Philoctetes that it invites its
audience to recognize the increasing aptness of pity … without having
access, until much later, to Neoptolemus’s own reactions” (209).
Note 4
The chorus’s pity does not necessarily signify a disposition to help
Philoctetes; Philoctetes himself mentions that merchants who from time
to time took refuge on Lemnos pitied him ( eleousi ), indeed, but refused to take him aboard their
ships (307–311).
Note 5
Modern ideas of sympathy are inspired by an epistemological question:
how is it that human beings, each locked into his or her own private
world of sensations, ever come to know and appreciate the feelings of
other people? This is the so-called problem of other minds, and it is a
major issue in philosophy today. The ancients, however, are almost
entirely silent on it. They took it for granted that we know what others
feel, and were concerned principally with the ethical character of our
responses. For a splendid analysis of the difference between ancient
pity, as an emotion specific to a detached observer, and modern notions
of identification, see Halliwell 2002:207–216.
Note 6
The story is related in a slightly different form in Herodotus 3.14; cf.
Ben-Ze’ev 2000:342–343 for discussion.
Note 7
Gopnik 2009, reviewed by Greenberg 2010; quotation taken from Greenberg
2010:27.
Note 8
Hall and Harrop 2010 is an excellent introduction to the issues involved
in performance theory and reception: see especially the chapters by
Michelakis, who raises penetrating questions about the evidence for
performances (“Publicity may have a different agenda from censorship,
but it is equally dependent upon a process of archivisation which
regulates what the spectator sees” [Hall and Harrop 2010:101] ); Foley,
who emphasizes the different generic expectations of ancient and modern
audiences; and Perris, who questions the sharp distinction between the
literary and the performance reception of Greek drama, and asks
pointedly (2010:188): “Why should spectating outrank reading? Why should
the collective outrank the individual?” See also Hall 2004.
Note 10
For a survey of modern Greek productions of the Philoctetes, see
Chatzepantazes 2010. On Roussos’s conception, see Minotis 1988a and
1988b; Minotis directed and played the role of Philoctetes in
productions that used Roussos’s translation.