The Ancient History of Sympathy
The Tissue of the World
The Ancient History of Sympathy
Brooke Holmes
28 January 2026 – 5 PM (CET)
In this talk, I present the main arguments of the book I am completing that develops the first comprehensive history of the ancient concept of sumpatheia, from the emergence of the language of sympathy in fourth-century BCE Greek texts to the theory of cosmic sympathy developed by Plotinus in the third century CE.
I show how authors working within the “inquiry into nature” and its later reception began to identify different sites identified as “sympathy” at different scales: in living beings (e.g., between the body and the soul); between natural and especially living beings (e.g., between members of the same kind); between the celestial and terrestrial realms and within the cosmos as a whole.
I emphasize the importance of sympathy as a point of contact between different cultural traditions of cosmo-anthropology in the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
Developing the idea of a “perceptual–conceptual” field of ancient sympathy, I aim to trace how the emergence of different strands of sympathy transformed the way people in ancient Afro-Eurasia thought about the nature of community and Nature itself as a cause of community.
About the Speaker ...
Brooke Holmes is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University.
Her research focuses on the history and philosophy of concepts, particularly those related to the physical body, nature, and life in ancient Greek and Roman texts. She explores the challenges these concepts pose for theorizing the subject and ethical and political agency. Additionally, she is interested in the reception of these ideas, especially in 20th and 21st-century continental philosophy, examining how communities interpret their connection to the Greco-Roman past. Her work aims to create new ways of relating that past to the present. She remains active in various interdisciplinary committees, including the Departments of Comparative Literature, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the University Center for Human Values, and the Program in the History of Science.
