Agatarchide di Cnido sulla compassione che genera la comprensione dei fatti. La funzione del pathos nel prologo al V libro del trattato Sul Mar Rosso

This article sets out to evaluate the function and content of the prologue to Book V of Agatharchides’ treatise On the Red Sea, with particular attention to the problem of choosing the most appropriate language to use in describing a dramatic historical event when it is intended to elicit the reader / listener’s emotions. A second aspect of the process of “emotional transfer” that this essay, departing from the prevailing line of interpretation, seeks to clarify is that this process does not take the form of an emotional contagion. On the contrary, just as the narrator selects the emotion to be transmitted, the listener also decides whether or not to receive it. An indispensable tool for transmis- sion is enargeia, that is, descriptive clarity, which becomes a tool for generating pathos. Finally, some considerations are presented about the epistemic value of emotions in the context of a process of understanding a dramatic historical event (for the understanding of which enargeia is the main tool).