Why Pity May Be Our Most Important Emotion
Pity is the feeling of sorrow for another person’s suffering or hardship.
The word has its origin the ancient Greek word piety, which can be understood to mean a devotion to goodness. Pity was central to ancient Greek thought: it can be seen as the true theme of Homer’s The Iliad, which is often considered the foundational text of western culture.
Given this, theme of The Iliad — pity — must be, if not the foundational emotion of western culture, then at the very least an essential ingredient. But something unfortunate has happened to pity in recent decades, and we’re all worse off for it.
A negative connotation emerges
In its classical meaning, pity — the feeling of sorrow for another’s suffering — is a sibling of empathy and compassion.
Empathy is the understanding and sharing of the emotions of others, positive or negative. Compassion is the concern for the sufferings of others. Pity, as stated above, is the feeling of sorrow for others who are suffering. The differences are subtle.
But while empathy and compassion have moved to the forefront of our social consciousness in recent decades, pity has taken on a negative connotation that has relegated it to the back. When we use it now the word ‘pity,’ it’s often as a condescending and sarcastic expression of would-be caring. Who, today, would want to be described as pitiful?
It’s no surprise then that word the today is most likely to be heard in defiant phrases such as, “don’t pity me!” How could the foundational emotion of the western world be reduced to such a pitiful state!?
In this article, I will attempt to restore pity to its proper place by discussing the importance of pity in the classical sense by exploring the theme and function of pity in two scenes of Homer’s The Iliad.
First, let’s briefly review the function of pity in the classical world.
Pity in Ancient Greece
C. Fred Alford suggests that the ancient Greeks believed pity was essential to the building of community because of its ability to foster human connection through the sharing of suffering. Alford states that to this end the cultivation of pity was the primary aim of the ancient Greek tragic poets, who viewed themselves not just as artists but as educators and spiritual leaders.
Pity as social glue
Pity was to the ancient Greeks, in other words, the social glue that held together civilization. The importance of the dramatic arts then was in their potential to educate the populace on how to feel emotions and why it should value certain emotions such as pity — which benefit the greater good — above other emotions such as arrogance and envy, which are destructive.
The Greek poets believed that in order to cultivate pity, we must quiet our minds (or develop sophrosyne). By doing so, we quell the rash emotions of arrogance, anger, and fear which create barriers to connection. This then provides for the conditions in which to allow pro-social emotions like pity to emerge.
By feeling pity for others, we realize that we too can experience misfortune. When we internalize this, we develop self-restraint in an attempt to avoid the suffering that may result from impulsive action or poor decision-making. The result in aggregate is a more thoughtful and considerate society.
Now that we’ve briefly reviewed the theory of pity as a pro-social emotion, let’s take a look at three key passages from Homer’s The Iliad which are expertly and artistically crafted to evoke pity in the audience.
Pity in The Iliad
The Iliad, written around the 8th century BC and probably composed orally before then, takes place towards the end the mythical ten-year Trojan War. When the poem begins, a coalition of Greek warriors have been laying siege to the city of Troy (in modern-day Turkey) for nine years.
In the first scene we will take a look at, the Trojan general Hector (son of Priam, the king of Troy) visits his wife Andromache and their infant son behind the walls of Troy.
Andromache, baby in arms, pleads with Hector to pity his family and act cautiously on the battlefield:
“Reckless one,
my Hector — your own fiery courage will destroy you!
Have you no pity for him, our helpless son? Or me,
and the destiny that weighs me down, your widow,
now so soon? Yes, soon they will kill you off,
all the Achaean forces massed for assault, and then,
bereft of you, better for me to sink beneath the earth.
What other warmth, what comfort’s left for me,
once you have met your doom? Nothing but torment!
I have lost my father. Mother’s gone as well…
And the seven brothers I had within our halls ..
all in the same day went down to the House of Death,
the great godlike runner Achilles butchered them all ..
You, Hector — you are my father now, my noble mother,
a brother too, and you are my husband, young and warm
and strong!Pity me, please! Take your stand on the rampart here,
The Iliad, Book 6, lines 482-509
before you orphan your son and make your wife a widow.”
Andromache implores Hector to take a defensive position in battle so that he may not leave her a widow and their son an orphan. She reminds him that he is the only family she has left as the Greek warrior Achilles has already killed her parents and siblings.
Hector replies:
“All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman…
For in my heart and soul I also know this well:
the day will come when sacred Troy must die,
Priam must die and all his people with him…Even so,
it is less the pain of the Trojans still to come
that weighs me down, not even of Hecuba herself
or King Priam, or the thought that my own brothers
in all their numbers, all their gallant courage,
may tumble in the dust, crushed by enemies —
That is nothing, nothing beside your agony
when some brazen Argive hales you off in tears,
wrenching away your day of light and freedom!
Then far off in the land of Argos you must live,
laboring at a loom, at another woman’s beck and call,
fetching water at some spring, Messeis or Hyperia,
resisting it all the way —
the rough yoke of necessity at your neck.
And a man may say, who sees your streaming tears,
“There is the wife of Hector, the bravest fighter
they could field, those stallion-breaking Trojans,
long ago when men fought for Troy.’ So he will say
and the fresh grief will swell your heart once more,
widowed, robbed of the one man strong enough
to fight off your day of slavery.No, no,
The Iliad, Book 6, lines 522-556
let the earth come piling over my dead body
before I hear your cries, I hear you dragged away!”
Hector tells Andromache that he shares her worry for the welfare of her and their baby. Tragically, he tells her that he believes the Trojans do not have a realistic chance to win the war against the Greeks, and that her worst fears will in all likelihood be realized. He would rather die in battle, clinging to the hope of victory, he says, than live to see her taken away by the Greeks to endure a lifetime of slavery.
We know, because it is foreshadowed throughout the poem, that Hector and Andromache’s feared predictions come true. Hector soon fights Achilles and dies. The poem ends before the City of Troy falls, but it is well understood that the fall is inevitable.
Immediately following Hector’s death, Achilles breaks with the norms of warfare and desecrates Hector’s corpse. He eggs on his fellow Greeks to mutilate the body, and then ties the body to the back of his chariot and drags it around the battlefield before taking it back to camp with him and leaving it exposed for wild animals to prey upon.
The climax of The Iliad comes with Priam, Hector’s father, sneaks into Achilles’ tent, drops to his knees, and kisses Achilles’ hands before begging Achilles to return his son’s body so that he can properly bury it and grieve his loss.
Priam implores:
Remember your father, great godlike Achilles —
as old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age!
No doubt the countrymen round about him plague him now,
with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster.
No one — but at least he hears you’re still alive
and his old heart rejoices, hopes rising, day by day,
to see his beloved sons come sailing home from Troy.
But I — dear god, my life so cursed by fate …
I fathered hero sons in the wide realm of Troy
and now not a single one is left, I tell you…
But one, one was left me, to guard my walls, my people —
the one you killed the other day, defending his fatherland,
my Hector! It’s all for him I’ve come to the ships now,
to win him back from you — I bring a priceless ransom.
Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right,
remember your own father! I deserve more pity …I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before —
The Iliad, Book 24, lines 570-591
I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.
With this, Achilles and Priam weep together, joined in grief — Achilles stirred by the grief for his own father, and Priam by the grief for his son. The occasion of these two enemies, who have spent nine years on opposite sides of a bloody conflict, holding hands and sharing in grief represents the apotheosis of pity — its potential to break down all barriers that serve to separate humankind.
Here, two men who have spent the better part of a decade attempting to destroy each other find in one another their shared humanity.
Learning how to cultivate pity
The Iliad provides beautiful and potent evocations of the emotion of pity, particularly in the the scenes highlighted above. Reading and reflecting on these scenes can serve as emotional education as we allow ourselves to pity the characters amid the tragic circumstances they endure.
The value of The Iliad and the Greek tragedies that followed lies in (among other things) it’s evocation of pity and illustration of the value of pity — how it helps us to connect and reconcile. The poem opens with the declaration, “Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,” and it closes with Achilles shedding his rage to instead allow himself to share in pity with his enemy.
In an increasingly polarized world, where many of us celebrate the misfortunes of others, we need this lesson now more than ever.
