ABSTRACT
Compassion for the women of Troy should at least cause moral unease, reminding Athenians of the full and equal humanity of people who live in distant places, their fully human capacity for suffering. Compassion required making the Trojans somehow familiar, so that Greeks could see their own vulnerability in them, and feel terror and compassion as for people related to themselves. Compassion is not just a warm feeling in the gut, if it is that at all. It involves a set of thoughts, quite complex. Compassion gets the world wrong, because it is always wrong to think that a person who has been hit by fortune is in a bad predicament. The philosophical tradition helps us identify places where compassion goes wrong: by making errors about fault, about seriousness, about the circle of concern. In exercising compassion the audience were learning its own possibilities and vulnerabilities: as Aristotle said, ‘things such as might happen’ in a human life.
