This essay argues for an abiding connection between empathy and advocacy by revealing their unrecognized parallels in Aristotle and Nietzsche. The argument makes three new claims. First, I identify an ancient form of sharing emotions, unnamed in but fundamental to Aristotle's Rhetoric, that I call “empathy by analogy.” Next, I show that the essential tragic function, for Nietzsche, is the sympathetic advocacy of the chorus for the Dionysian. While compassion and empathy are conflated in the Birth of Tragedy (1872), the later Dawn (1881) differentiates the two. The language of this disambiguation allows for a reconstruction of the advocatory work of empathy in Nietzsche's poetics. Finally, despite real differences between ancient and modern empathy, both exhibit an irreducible structural paradox that is best articulated by the choral Fürsprache for the Dionysian.