On March 11, 2026, Princeton Classicist, Dr. Brooke Holmes presents the 8th MacLennan Lecture “The Tissue of the World: The Nature of Ancient Sympathy.”
Dr. Brooke Holmes is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics and Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University
Abstract
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.
About the MacLennan Lecture
Established in 2017, the MacLennan Lecture funds a visiting scholar to present a lecture in the field of Science and Technology Studies or in History and Philosophy of Science. The 2026 lecture has been organized by the History of Science and Technology Program.
All are welcome to attend the talks and receptions. King’s students, as well as interested senior students in local secondary schools, are also invited to spend time with the visiting lecturer in a seminar setting.
