In the streets of Athens today, in the crowds climbing the hill of the Akropolis to the Parthenon or riding the bus or subway, the polite remark to be made, equivalent to the American “excuse me,” or the English “sorry,” is sungnōmē, translatable as “pardon [me],” or, more formally, “forgive me.” The banal, automatic utterance, ever more necessary as the city draws more and more Greeks from their villages into the city, has undergone centuries of mutation and transmission from the language of antiquity. Does it really mean “forgive me,” today, in the sense in which Charles Griswold uses the term in his important work on the topic? And can we find his virtue of forgiveness in the works attributed to Homer, in the earliest Greek poetry?

I am concerned in this chapter with the intertwined issues of empathy and forgiveness. As a heuristic device, I want to argue that forgiveness does not occur in Homer’s Iliad, not even in the encounter between Achilles and Priam in book 24; my most challenging assertion is that the archaic Greek world did not know empathy or forgiveness. I take into account the important work on pity by David Konstan, as well as Griswold’s recent book on forgiveness.