Table Of ContentAntike und Abendland
De Gruyter
Antike
und
Abendland
Beiträge zum Verständnis der Griechen und Römer
und ihres Nachlebens
herausgegeben von
Werner von Koppenfels · Helmut Krasser
Wilhelm Kühlmann · Peter von Möllendorff
Christoph Riedweg · Wolfgang Schuller
Rainer Stillers
Band LVI
2010
De Gruyter
Manuskripteinsendungen werden an die folgenden Herausgeber erbeten: Prof. Dr. Werner von Koppenfels,
Boberweg 18, 81929 München – Prof. Dr. Helmut Krasser, Institut für Altertumswissenschaften, Universi-
tätGießen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, Haus G, 35394 Gießen– Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Kühlmann, Universität Heidelberg,
GermanistischesSeminar, Hauptstr. 207–209, 69117 Heidelberg– Prof. Dr. Peter von Möllendorff, Institut für
Altertumswissenschaften, Universität Gießen, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, Haus G, 35394 Gießen – Prof. Dr.
Christoph Riedweg,Kluseggstr.18, CH-8032 Zürich– Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Schuller, Philosophische Fakultät,
Universität Konstanz, Postfach 5560, 78434 Konstanz – Prof. Dr. Rainer Stillers, Institut für Romanische
Philologie der Philipps-Universität Marburg, Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6D, 35032 Marburg. Korrekturen und
Korrespondenz, die dasManuskript und den Druck betrifft, sind an den Schriftleiter Prof. Dr. Helmut Krasser zu
richten.
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ISBN (Print): 978-3-11-022267-8
ISBN (Online): 978-3-11-022268-5
ISBN (Print + Online): 978-3-11-022269-2
ISSN (Print) 0003-5696
ISSN (Online) 1613-0421
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Inhaltsverzeichnis
William V. Harris
History, Empathy and Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Ernst A. Schmidt
Rudolf Borchardts Pindarübersetzung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Jorge Uscatescu Barrón
Heidegger und die griechische Dichtung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Alexander Rubel
Demokratie, Mythos und Erinnerung. Die «Tyrannenmörder» in Athen
und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Gian Biagio Conte
Viktor Pöschl und die Poetik des Symbols. Festvortrag anlässlich der Gedenk-
feier zum 100. Geburtstag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Lothar Zieske
Fernando PessoasMensagem und Vergils Aeneis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Werner Suerbaum
Rettet Vergil Homer vor dem Zugriff der Zeit? Überlegungen zu einem
allegorischen Titelbild von 1688 zu Vergils Aeneis und zur Chronos-
Ikonographie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Christian Zgoll
Ovids heimliches Bündnis mit Venus im Eröffnungsgedicht des dritten
Amoresbuches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Marko Marincˇicˇ
Paene poeta Teutonicus: Ovids Exil in den deutschen Gedichten
von France Presˇeren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Henning Horstmann
Ein staunender Franzose in Rom? Joachim Du BellaysRomae Descriptio (1558) . 181
Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp
Pompeji 79–2009 n.Chr.– Fall und Aufstieg einer antiken Stadt . . . . . . . . . 196
VI
Mitarbeiter des Bandes
Prof. Dr. Gian Biagio Conte, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Piazza dei Cavalieri, 7,
56126 Pisa, Italia
Prof. Dr. William V. Harris, 624Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University, New York, NY
10027, United States of America
Henning Horstmann, Seminar für Klassische Philologie, Georg-August-Universität
Göttingen, Humboldtallee19, 37073 Göttingen
Prof. Dr. Marko Marincˇicˇ, Oddelek za klasicˇno filologijo, Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska
fakulteta, Asˇkercˇeva 2, SLO-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenija
Prof. Dr. Alexander Rubel, Institutul de Arheologie Iasi, 700107 Iasi, Romania
Prof. Dr. Ernst A. Schmidt, Universität Tübingen, Philologisches Seminar, Wilhelm-
straße36, 72074 Tübingen
PD Dr. Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp, Historisches Institut, Professur für Alte Geschichte,
Otto-Behaghel-Str 10G, 35394 Gießen
Prof. em. Dr. Werner Suerbaum, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Abteilung
für Griechische und Lateinische Philologie, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1, 80539 München
Dr. Jorge Uscatescu Barrón, Raimundus-Lullus-Institut, Platz der Universität 3, 79085
Freiburg
Dr. Lothar Zieske, Nerzweg 1a, 22159 Hamburg
Dr. Christian Zgoll, Seminar für Klassische Philologie, Georg-August-Universität Göttin-
gen, Humboldtallee19, 37073 Göttingen
Inhaltsverzeichnis
William V. Harris
History, Empathy and Emotions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Ernst A. Schmidt
Rudolf Borchardts Pindarübersetzung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Jorge Uscatescu Barrón
Heidegger und die griechische Dichtung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Alexander Rubel
Demokratie, Mythos und Erinnerung. Die «Tyrannenmörder» in Athen
und der militärische Widerstand gegen Hitler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
Gian Biagio Conte
Viktor Pöschl und die Poetik des Symbols. Festvortrag anlässlich der Gedenk-
feier zum 100. Geburtstag. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Lothar Zieske
Fernando PessoasMensagem und Vergils Aeneis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Werner Suerbaum
Rettet Vergil Homer vor dem Zugriff der Zeit? Überlegungen zu einem
allegorischen Titelbild von 1688 zu Vergils Aeneis und zur Chronos-
Ikonographie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
Christian Zgoll
Ovids heimliches Bündnis mit Venus im Eröffnungsgedicht des dritten
Amoresbuches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Marko Marincˇicˇ
Paene poeta Teutonicus: Ovids Exil in den deutschen Gedichten
von France Presˇeren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
Henning Horstmann
Ein staunender Franzose in Rom? Joachim Du BellaysRomae Descriptio (1558) . 181
Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp
Pompeji 79–2009 n.Chr.– Fall und Aufstieg einer antiken Stadt . . . . . . . . . 196
History, Empathy and Emotions 1
William V. Harris
History, Empathy and Emotions
I. Introduction
Both empathy and emotions are in the frontier zones of contemporary history-writing.
Should historians welcome them with open arms? What might be the consequences of
doing so?
In this paper,* I shall first set out what I think‹empathy› means in the context of histori-
cal study. Next, I shall attempt to show that historians cannot really practise empathy,
either in an intellectual or in an emotional sense. In the third part, I shall argue that what
historians who might be taken to be empathetic have practised has been sympathy –
a highly desirable quality in a historian – rather than empathy. Finally, I shall maintain
(there is now nothing at all original about this) that even though historians should not at-
tempt to feel the emotions of their subject populations, they should do more to build emo-
tions into the study of mentalities, and I shall try to improve on the prevailing rationales for
this kind of historical activity.
For most contemporary historians, to judge at least by what they write, empathy is not
an issue. They probably associate the term with the writings of illustrious but no longer
very relevant figures in the history of historiography, in particular with Dilthey and Col-
lingwood, perhaps also with Vico. If you look at the last twenty years ofPast and Present,
for instance, you will find only a few significant references to empathy as a historical
method (as distinct from a desirable quality in a human being, supposedly lacking for
example in King Charles I). But what will matter of course is not so much whether the con-
tributors to learned journals are talking about empathy as whether they are practising it.
In some other more or less humane fields empathy has sometimes enjoyed a fair amount
of prominence. It began, in the form ofEinfühlung (which may be subtly different, but that
will not concern us here), as a concept in aesthetics in the late nineteenth century. Later it
began a career in psychiatry,1 and as recently as 2004 theRevue française de psychanalyse de-
voted an entire issue to the subject. Cognitive scientists have recently had much to say
about it.2 There was a period when sociologists were also interested in empathy in yet an-
* An earlier version of this article was given as the Syme Lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford on October30,
2008. Its present form owes much to discussions with Christopher L. Brown, Caroline Bynum, Diego
Gambetta, and Silvana Patriarca, none of whom, obviously, is to be blamed for the result.
1 See Nancy Eisenberg and Janet Strayer (eds.),Empathy and its Development (Cambridge, 1987), George W.
Pigman,‹Freud and the History of Empathy›,International Journal of Psycho-analysis 76 (1995), 237–56.
2 See for example Tania Singer,‹The Neuronal Basis and Ontogeny of Empathy and Mind Reading: Review
of Literature and Implications for Future Research›, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 30 (2006),
855–63, Jamil Zaki, Kevin N. Ochsner, Josh Hanelin, Tor D. Wager and Sean C. Mackey,‹Different Cir-
cuits for Different Pain. Patterns of Functional Connectivity Reveal Distinct Networks for Processing Pain
in Self and Others›,Social Neuroscience 2 (2007), 276–91.
2 William V. Harris
other form.3 Academic literary critics have weighed in, and recently one of them published
a book entitledEmpathy and the Novel.4 In anthropology, too, empathy or something very
like it has had a long career, beginning in the days of that extraordinary pioneer Mal-
inowski– who incidentally is said to have been the first person to have used the term‹men-
tality› in its English form5 – though empathy suffered something of a setback when Mal-
inowski’s posthumous Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term suggested to some people that
the author did not in fact empathize much with the Trobriand Islanders.6 Where anthropo-
logical theory stands on this matter now it is hard for an outsider to say. Geertz more or
less explicitly rejected empathy, as we shall see later. And it may be that recent anthropo-
logical research that seems to show particularly sympathetic understanding of a subject
population is not regarded by the scholars in question as specifically empathetic. In any
case a historian tends to know of such work in an unsystematic way and because particular
historical problems lead him or her to studies on isolated themes. There come to mind fine
studies of such subjects as Australian aboriginal concepts of anger and the ways that
hunter-gatherers in the Andaman Islands treat their dreams.7 The former will serve as a
reminder that recent anthropology has produced a large amount of sophisticated work
about the structure and significance of emotions – work that is of the enormous value to
historians who are also in pursuit of other people’s emotions.
II. The History and Meaning of Empathy in Historical Studies
In fact a number of historians have recently written about empathy. They generally mean
by it (we need a working definition, which we can refine later) thinking the thoughts and
feeling the emotions of historical actors in order to gain insight into their behaviour. Those
who take an interest in the historiography of the Holocaust will be aware that since the
1990s a good deal of energy has been expended on the question whether, and if so how,
writers on that subject need to empathize with the victims.8 There has also been some at-
tempt to resuscitate Collingwood’s theory that historians need to‹re-enact› the past if they
are going to understand it9– a project that can be guaranteed, I think, to have little success
among practising historians. But who knows? In 2007 the self-consciously unconventional
journal Rethinking History published a whole issue on ‹reenactment›. The programmatic
3 See below, p.5.
4 Suzanne Keen (New York, 2007).
5 Peter Burke,Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca, NY, 1997), 174.
6 For discussion see Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New
York, 1983), 55–9.
7 See respectively Jean Harkins, ‹Talking about Anger in Central Australia›, in Jean Harkins and Anna
Wierzbicka (eds.),Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective (Berlin and New York, 2001), 197–215; and Vish-
vajit Pandya,‹Forest Smells and Spider Webs: Ritualized Dream Interpretation among Andaman Island-
ers›,Dreaming 14 (2004), 136–50.
8 See Samuel Moyn’s review-article‹Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity›, concerning Caro-
lyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, and Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit:
Experience, Identity, and Critical Theory (both Ithaca, NY, 2004),History and Theory 45 (2006), 397–415.
9 Karsten R. Stueber,‹The Psychological Basis of Historical Explanation: Reenactment, Simulation, and the
Fusion of Horizons›,History and Theory 41 (2002), 25–42; Stueber,Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk
Psychology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge., Mass., 2006).
History, Empathy and Emotions 3
article at the front of the journal once again invoked Collingwood– but the author’s project
is as remote from the real Collingwood as it is from Thucydides, for it centres around the
physical re-enactment of historical events, sometimes on television, sometimes in video
games.10 And complete confusion seems to reign in Rethinking History’s program as to
whether the purpose of historical re-enactment is to represent the historical past or to find
out something about it. Some of the scholars concerned assert that they are involved in a
new movement which they call‹the affective turn› or‹affective history›, without explaining
where they stand with respect to the most prominent or the most successful of recent
works about the history of the emotions.
There is one particular historical field besides the Holocaust that has seemed to stimulate
historians to try to empathize, and that is of course slavery, both ancient and modern (an
echo of the empathy for slaves expressed by some of the abolitionists of 200 years ago).
Keith Hopkins, a historian of ancient slavery particularly concerned about questions of
method, wrote that «history is, or should be, a subtle combination of empathetic imagin-
ation and critical analysis».11 Hopkins must indeed be counted as one of the most persistent
exponents of historical empathy in any field.12 A similar desire to get inside the experience
of the slaves is on plain view in the works of a number of those who have written about
western-hemisphere slavery: for a recent instance see Marcus Rediker’s to my mind some-
what problematical book The Slave Ship: a Human History.13 So we can see that at least
some historians have neutralized the criticism that Walter Benjamin levelled at empathizing
historians some seventy years ago, when he complained that the historicists always em-
pathize with the victors (and he pointed out more convincingly that «empathy with the vic-
tor invariably benefits the rulers»).14
Let us now look more closely at various ways in which scholars have advocated the use
of empathy, and then attempt a better definition. We could say that the method (if that is
the right word) existed before the coinage of the term itself (1909)15 or any of its equivalents
10 Vanessa Agnew,‹History’s Affective Turn: Historical Reenactment and its Work in the Present›,Rethink-
ing History 11 (2007), 299–312. Historical re-enactment is now a mass phenomenon in many countries.
From Oxfordshire to California to New Zealand, hobbyists are constantly ‹re-enacting›, among other
things, Civil War battles and Roman gladiatorial fighting, or rather they are pretending to do so, any deaths
or dismemberments being strictly unintended. All this may suggest that‹putting oneself in the shoes of›
historical characters has a strong contemporary appeal to non-academic readers of history, and it may be
that this attitude rubs off at least a little on some academic historians.
11 A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (London, 1999), 2. «Empathetic
imagination», he went on, «should play its part [in history-writing]. We have to imagine what Romans,
pagans, Jews and Christians thought, felt, experienced, believed. But, as with baroque music played
on ancient instruments, we listen with twentieth-century ears. We read ancient sources with modern
minds….»
12 The high point of his achievement in this direction was perhaps his article‹Novel Evidence for Roman Slav-
ery›, Past and Present 138 (1993), 3–27, reprinted in Robin Osborne (ed.), Studies in Ancient Greek and
Roman Society (Cambridge, 2004), 206–25. (See further W. V. Harris,‹Morris Keith Hopkins (1934–2004)›,
Proceedings of the British Academy 130 (2005), 3–27). He was aware that‹empathetic imagination… can
also turn out to be naïve projection› (A World, 234). Keith R. Bradley’s work on Roman slavery has also
been noteworthy for its engagement with the actual experiences of the slaves: see especiallySlavery and
Society at Rome (Cambridge, 1994).
13 New York, 2007. See Robin Law’s review,American Historical Review 113 (2008), 1119–20.
14 Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn, New York, 1968), 256.
15 On the date see Pigman,‹Freud› [n. 1], 243.
