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This paper explores aspects of what I shall call pity or compassion in Homer (especially Iliad 24) and Aristotle (especially the Rhetoric), but nothing very much hangs on the precise terminology. The phenomena covered by terms such as "compassion", "sympathy", "empathy", and "pity" (and their analogues, where they exist, in other languages) constitute a family in which resemblances are often really rather close in practice (even if particular members of the group pass in and out of fashion and take on a range of different connotations at different periods and in different contexts). In concentrating on the theory and practice of literature, I am not offering a synthetic account of ancient Greek pity; instead I focus, in the main, on just two authors, Homer and Aristotle, and proceed primarily by means of a confrontation between the representation of pity in the final book of the Iliad and the theorization of that emotion in Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics. I begin with Homer, but immediately bring the Homeric narrative into relation with Aristotle's account of pity in the Rhetoric. This will lead to some thoughts on the nature of pity and compassion in Homer in general, before we return to the contrast between Homer and Aristotle (with emphasis on the Poetics), a contrast that is in some ways underscored by certain differences between Aristotle and Plato on the emotional effects of epic and tragic poetry. A particular focus will be Aristotle's linkage of pity with the kind of thing that one would fear were it likely to happen to oneself, by contrast with the connection in Homer and Plato between pity for others and the experience of grief, both one's own and that of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the fraught chapter (V.7) of the Nicomachean Ethics concerning natural justice. It argues that the main tradition of commentary on the chapter has strayed onto a wrong path by misconstruing two quite precise junctures in the argument. When those two errors are corrected, there emerges an Aristotle who, far from being a champion of natural law theory in ethics, holds that the moral principles with which humans are naturally endowed are variable, and that in two senses. Not only do these moral principles vary across space and time, but also they can be deliberately modified by habituation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to establish the meaning of the notions of verisimilitude (τὸ εἰκός) and necessity (tò τὸ ἀναγκαῖον) in the formula “according to verisimilitude or according to necessity”, which plays an important role in the rules presented by Aristotle in his Poetics. The former notion is much less problematic than the latter, whose examination and clarification demand that attention be paid to passages in Aristotle’s work that have not been (or almost have not been) taken into account in this regard. An attempt is made to show the affinity or ultimate identity in the Aristotelian vision of action in the domains of poetics and ethics, and to establish the conceptual relationship that is suggested to exist between both notions in the Poetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article contains the conference delivered by Prof. C.J. Rowe at the III International Ancient Philosophy Workshop (Buenos Aires, Argentina). There he exposes the main guidelines of the forthcoming edition of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics which he has prepared for the Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]