When we think of sympathy, we usually imagine sharing the pain of another. Ancient sympathy (sumpatheia) was a far more capacious concept. It simply denotes the transmission of an “affect” or “affection” (pathos) between bodies or their parts: the yawn I “catch” from you; the body’s blush at the soul’s shame; the moon’s influence on the sea in tidal rhythms.
In this talk, I discuss how people began to identify these kinds of phenomena as “sympathies” in fourth-century bce Greece within a new worldmaking tradition called “the inquiry into nature.” Faced with these “sympathies,” naturalists began to speculate about the causes of affective relation and affective community. By following sympathy together with the inquiry into nature as it traveled in the Hellenistic and Roman Empires, we can see how the idea of Nature as a cause of affective community in the cosmos formed in ancient Afro-Eurasia. Sympathy thus changed the way people understood themselves and the world as enmeshed, giving rise to the idea of Nature that we still use to make sense of the order of our world today.