“The Symptom and the Subject is intellectually challenging, beautifully written, deeply thought out, and closely researched in primary and secondary materials. I found myself utterly engrossed by its arguments.”–James I. Porter, University of California, Irvine

“Brilliant and important, this book tackles nothing less than the discovery of the body as a cultural and conceptual category in Greek antiquity. The book ranges over Homer and archaic poetry, the Sophists, philosophy, tragedy, and–most unusually and originally–the medical writings of the Hippocratic corpus, to construct a compelling account of historical developments.”–Leslie Kurke, University of California, Berkeley

“The Symptom and the Subject is intellectually challenging, beautifully written, deeply thought out, and closely researched in primary and secondary materials. I found myself utterly engrossed by its arguments.”–James I. Porter, University of California, Irvine

“Brilliant and important, this book tackles nothing less than the discovery of the body as a cultural and conceptual category in Greek antiquity. The book ranges over Homer and archaic poetry, the Sophists, philosophy, tragedy, and–most unusually and originally–the medical writings of the Hippocratic corpus, to construct a compelling account of historical developments.”–Leslie Kurke, University of California, Berkeley

“The Symptom and the Subject is intellectually challenging, beautifully written, deeply thought out, and closely researched in primary and secondary materials. I found myself utterly engrossed by its arguments.”–James I. Porter, University of California, Irvine

“Brilliant and important, this book tackles nothing less than the discovery of the body as a cultural and conceptual category in Greek antiquity. The book ranges over Homer and archaic poetry, the Sophists, philosophy, tragedy, and–most unusually and originally–the medical writings of the Hippocratic corpus, to construct a compelling account of historical developments.”–Leslie Kurke, University of California, Berkeley

The Symptom and the Subject

THE EMERGENCE OF THE PHYSICAL BODY IN ANCIENT GREECEBy Brooke Holmes

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13899-2

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments…………………………………………………..ixAbbreviations……………………………………………………………….xiiiNote on Transliterations and Translations………………………………………xxiiiINTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………..1Symptoms and Subjects………………………………………………………..1Seeing through Symptoms………………………………………………………9The Physical Imagination……………………………………………………..19Rethinking Soma and Psukhe……………………………………………………29Telling Stories……………………………………………………………..37CHAPTER ONE: Before the Physical Body………………………………………….41Daemonic Violence……………………………………………………………48The Seen and the Felt………………………………………………………..58The Boundaries of the Felt……………………………………………………64Fear and the Visual Field of the Self………………………………………….69How Gods Act………………………………………………………………..73The Seen Body and Social Agency……………………………………………….76Interpreting Disease and Practices of Healing…………………………………..79CHAPTER TWO: The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination…………………84Depersonalizing Causes……………………………………………………….90Natural Justice……………………………………………………………..95Melissus and the Denial of Body……………………………………………….101A Community of Objects……………………………………………………….108Bodies, Persons, Knowledge……………………………………………………116CHAPTER THREE: Incorporating the Daemonic………………………………………121Symptoms at the Threshold of Seen and Unseen……………………………………126The Interval………………………………………………………………..130Explaining Disease…………………………………………………………..133The Dynamics of the Cavity……………………………………………………138The Automatic Body…………………………………………………………..142CHAPTER FOUR: Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care………………………..148The Prognostic Symptom: Forces of Life and Death………………………………..150Fragile Life………………………………………………………………..156On Ancient Medicine and the Discovery of Human Nature……………………………162Embodiment, Knowledge, and Technical Agency…………………………………….171Taking Care…………………………………………………………………177Shoring Up the Self………………………………………………………….182CHAPTER FIVE: Beyond the Soma: Therapies of the Psukhe…………………………..192Bodily Needs………………………………………………………………..196Psychic Desires……………………………………………………………..202Gorgias’s Encomium to Helen and Human Diseases………………………………….211Psychic Disorder in Democritus………………………………………………..216CHAPTER SIX: Forces of Nature, Acts of Gods: Euripides’ Symptoms………………….228The Polysemy of the Symptom…………………………………………………..233Tragedy and the Interval……………………………………………………..239Euripides’ Causes: The Madness of Heracles……………………………………..242Euripides’ Causes: The Madness of Orestes………………………………………246Realizing Disease in the Hippolytus……………………………………………252Daemonic Phusis……………………………………………………………..260The Semantics of Suffering……………………………………………………265Conclusion………………………………………………………………….275Bibliography………………………………………………………………..281Index Locorum……………………………………………………………….325General Index……………………………………………………………….349

Chapter One

Before the Physical Body

Aristotle described the Iliad as rich in suffering. It is likely that the poem’s violence, together with its slow crescendo of grief, leaves most readers in agreement. At the same time, the epic celebrates the effulgence of the hero, which Jean-Pierre Vernant sees as a mortal’s participation, albeit limited, in “that splendor that always clothes the body of a god.” The hero’s fragility and his radiance meet at a point of great intensity in the poem. Achilles has killed Hector and stripped him of his armor:

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Il. 22.369-75)

And the other sons of the Achaeans came running about him, and gazed upon the stature and on the imposing beauty of Hector; and none stood beside him who did not stab him; and thus they would speak one to another, each looking at his neighbor: “See now, Hector is much softer to handle than he was when he set the ships ablaze with the burning firebrand.” So as they stood beside him they would speak, and stab him.

The Achaeans, awestruck, are compelled to look at Hector’s phue, his breeding or stature, and his eidos, his visible form. These terms, like demas, the “build” of the body, and khros, “skin, complexion, tint,” focus on how the hero appears. The latter term, khros, however, is also the covering of the inner parts. This covering is not irrelevant to the scene of Hector’s death. For the Achaeans are compelled, too, to pierce Hector’s soft skin, thereby demonstrating how easy it is in the end to drive the bronze into a man whose brilliance, magnified by the firebrand, once made him appear invincible. Fascinated by the beautiful form, yet eager to violate its integrity, the Achaeans have a conflicted relationship to Hector’s corpse that is not unlike the Iliad’s relationship to its mortal heroes.

Yet, if the many wounds inflicted on Hector’s corpse draw attention to skin that is neither stone nor iron ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], Il. 4.510), the other major death in the Iliad, that of Patroclus, reveals another kind of vulnerability. In the final moments of his aristeia, his “moment of glory,” Patroclus is struck from behind by Apollo. His eyes spin, strength flows out of his limbs, and his armor falls to the ground, setting him up for a deadly human attack: the Trojan Euphorbus drives his spear into Patroclus before Hector steps in to deal the final blow. From one perspective, the Trojans’ assault simply mimics the god’s. Yet these attacks differ on a crucial point. Whereas the weapons of Euphorbus and Hector draw blood, Apollo’s blow produces symptoms of hidden damage. Patroclus is thus vulnerable to the god in a way that he is not to his mortal enemies. If the skin is irrelevant in this scenario, it suggests that Patroclus has a second set of boundaries that can be transgressed. How are these boundaries constituted? How are they violated? If we are to understand what was different about medical interpretations of the symptom in the fifth and fourth centuries, we need to look at how discontinuities in the self are described and understood in our earliest evidence.

It is easy to comprehend how a spear pierces the flesh. It is more challenging to imagine how a god or a daimon hurts a person. In this chapter, I try to make sense of magico-religious ideas about the harm caused by immortals by adopting two broad perspectives on the person: the “seen” and the “felt.” In the category of the “seen,” I include both of the ways in which Hector appears to the Achaeans after his death: as a three-dimensional, penetrable object; and as a human form, distinguished by its breeding, phue, and a particular look, eidos. I use the category of the “felt” to refer to the conscious field that constitutes the unity of the self, as well as the daemonic energies that cut across it. I do not differentiate between “body” and “mind.” For, while thinking about something is not the same as touching it, the distinction between physical and mental does not help with the questions that concern me here.

By recognizing the seen and the felt as different dimensions of the person, I am trying to avoid privileging one of these dimensions at the expense of the other. More specifically, I am seeking an alternative to two of the more prominent approaches to Homeric “psychology” in the past few decades, one that emphasizes what I am calling the seen, the other what I am calling the felt. The first of these approaches has tried to correlate the rich vocabulary of human parts in Homer with an anatomical-physiological body that we are presumed to share with the early Greeks. Such an approach, I argue, neglects how important embodied experience is to ideas of the human being in early Greek poetry. We cannot assume, however, that what we consider to be embodied experiences are always seen this way by the Greeks. I am thinking here of the tendency in recent years to treat the gods as simple projections of what the person is feeling or thinking. This second approach fails to give due weight to our evidence, which not only recognizes the presence of potentially seen agents in a world external to the self but also makes their actions central to human experience.

If these approaches are limited in their account of the person in Homer, alternatives cannot simply affirm the importance of the seen and the felt but must attempt to understand how they interact. For it is clear that these are not hermetically sealed categories but different, oft en complementary ways of experiencing and knowing: seeing, for example, has a felt dimension (the awe, for example, felt by the Achaeans when they gaze upon Hector’s corpse); what one person feels is oft en accompanied by signs seen by others. In this chapter, I try to trace how these modes of experience interact at the moment an immortal affects a mortal. I thus adopt the seen and the felt as necessarily imperfect categories in the interest of making an argument about what we can observe in our earliest evidence of the relationship between symptoms (what they feel like, but also how they register for others) and a potentially seen world of gods and daemonic agents that is rich in social meaning.

It might be argued that we cannot rely on the Homeric poems-or any other early Greek poetry-to tell us much about what people in the archaic period (or in earlier periods) truly thought about the gods’ role in human experience. It is true that these poems depict a rarefied world under unusually strong generic constraints. While Homeric scenes of wounding and death, for example, appear vividly real, we must also remember they are shaped by a poetic tradition from the level of the word to the unfolding of the theme. Genre and theme exercise particular pressure on representations of disease in the poems. Scholars have oft en rightly observed that heroic epic, as a rule, has little interest in the kinds of diseases that the medical writers describe; even the two diseases most common in lyric poetry and tragedy, madness and eros, are largely absent. When disease does appear in the Homeric poems, it enacts broader thematic concerns. The larger plot of the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles, is anticipated, for example, by the plague that Apollo sends against the Achaeans in the first book as punishment for Agamemnon’s folly. In the Odyssey, too, people suffer in ways consistent with the poem’s preoccupations. Anticleia in Hades tells her son that she was robbed of life by longing for him (11.203). And when Odysseus is tossed onto the shores of Scheria at the end of book 5, his joy mirrors the rejoicing of children whose father has just shaken off a wasting daimon (394-97).9 These diseases call to mind the spaces of wandering, waiting, and distress occupied by the Odyssey‘s characters. That both epics incorporate disease into a broader poetics of suffering would seem to confirm that they cannot be trusted as sources of historical information.

But we do not have to assume an opposition between the “real” world and a literary or imaginative one. We might instead see the epic poems as developing perspectives that conform to generic expectations, while still illuminating concepts or details that belonged to a more complex and pragmatic approach to disease in early Greece. Epic, for example, tends to focus on divine or daemonic agents of harm. The attention to agents can be related to the genre’s pronounced interest in efficient causes (who? what?) and final causes (why?) as opposed to instrumental ones (how?). This interest can be understood, in turn, in light of epic’s status as a narrative genre, whose commitment to plot can explain the heightened importance of reasons for actions. The poet’s frequent attribution of cause to the gods may be explained further by the device of omniscient narration, which allows him to see into the divine world (though, of course, characters within the poems oft en attribute events to gods without knowing which god is involved). Other genres offer different perspectives. Seasonal causes of disease, for example, play a larger role in a text like Hesiod’s Works and Days. Lyric poetry tends toward fatalism and dwells on effects, as in Sappho’s famously precise elaboration of the symptoms of eros (fr. 31 L-P). In the larger context, then, an agent like the Apollo who sends down plague or strikes Patroclus looks particularly well suited to an epic poem.

But despite its particular generic focus, epic exhibits beliefs about the gods’ power and unseen harm that resurface in a range of archaic and classical texts. The Iliad is a profound meditation on how a ruler’s blindness can destroy his people; but the far-reaching consequences of a king’s transgressions, as well as those of any member of a community, are assumed by Hesiod, Pindar, and Plato. In the epics, the Olympian gods are infinitely attentive to human life; individual acts take on deep significance. Yet everyday symptoms, too, can be traced to gods and daimones. Crossing a river with unwashed hands incurs the gods’ nemesis and future pain in Hesiod (Op. 741). In the Hippocratic treatise Airs, Waters, Places, Scythians attribute their impotence-mistakenly, in the author’s eyes-to offenses against the gods (Aer. 22, Li 2.76 = 238,9-12 Jouanna). Freedom from suffering, bodily or otherwise, can be correlated with the absence of divine displeasure (Antiphon 5.81-83). In Plato’s Republic, the assumption that the gods cause bad things to happen to people is standard (2, 379c2-7). When archaic poets relate afflictions, sensations, emotions, and mental states to divine and daemonic agents, this is not simply a poetic phenomenon.

Yet, if divine and daemonic agency is not a poetic phenomenon, what does it tell us about early Greek ideas not only about unseen harm but also about the person more generally? It is well known that early and mid-twentieth-century scholars such as Snell and Hermann Frankel believed that when Homer ascribes sudden emotion, insight, or pain to the interference of the gods, he is reflecting a culture still incapable of understanding personal autonomy. They thus disqualified Homer’s heroes as genuine agents. Their critics have sought to overturn this conclusion by downplaying the gods’ agency or even assimilating it entirely to motivations and forces within the person. But if this corrective has helped discredit the marionette model of the early Greek person advanced by Snell and Frankel, it has also produced its own distortions. When we treat the gods as metaphors for “real” psychological elements, we ignore the historical process through which the very concept of psychology, especially moral psychology, becomes possible. We cannot understand that process without giving the gods’ social and ethical agency due weight.

I am by no means advocating a return to the marionette model. Rather, building on scholarship that has challenged the polarity between agency and passivity, I reexamine the dynamics of interaction between gods and people. In the introduction, I argued that because symptoms are particularly indeterminate sensations, they support a range of inferences or abductions about hidden causes. In the ancient Greek world, these abductions, as with abductions provoked by a wide spectrum of unusual events in archaic and classical texts, habitually involve gods and daimones. They thus belong to what the anthropologist Alfred Gell has called “the abduction of agency.” There is, of course, space for these inferences to be wrong. Not every bird means something, as one suitor in the Odyssey says (2.181-82); although, if he were to realize he was in the Odyssey, he might be less blase. Nevertheless, in archaic Greece and throughout the ancient Mediterranean, there is widespread evidence that people were receptive to potential signs and ready to trace unusual events to the gods and other daemonic agents. The tendency within archaic Greek culture to infer the presence of gods behind unusual phenomena presumably contributed to the belief that discontinuities in the self indicated a divine presence.

Symptoms are characterized by another kind of indeterminacy. Although I have associated them most closely with dramatic ruptures in experience, in some cases it is less clear whether a phenomenon counts as a disruption at all: experiences of otherness are oft en imprecise and, thus, subjectively and culturally determined. Given how fuzzy the line between the symptom and the feeling of a self can be, it may be useful to think of a culturally specific continuum traversing both the person and the terrain of the divine and the daemonic. This continuum would determine not only how perceptions and sensations of otherness are interpreted but also when perceptions and sensations register as other in the first place. If Odysseus’s thumos counters what Odysseus (however we understand the referent of the proper name) thinks is the best course of action, this situation is perfectly consistent with how Greeks in the archaic and classical periods envisioned decision-making. If an idea appears through the agency of a god, we sense both the intimacy of the human and the divine and the potential tension between them-think, for example, of Agamemnon’s deceitful dream. Finally, in a trauma like the plague or cases where normally tractable parts of the self gain unexpected autonomy, the difference between the self and a daemonic other comes into sharp relief. At this end of the continuum, then, we could locate the scene in the Odyssey where Athena causes the suitors to laugh with “alien jaws” ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], 20.347). The goddess’s appropriation of a part of the self is powerful enough to sever it from the proper name altogether.

Thus, if the poet or a character infers that a god or another daemonic agent is acting on himself or another person, we should not conclude that we are dealing with a primitive or incomplete notion of subjectivity. Such abductions illustrate, rather, a fluid, experiential relationship between what is objectified as the self and what is objectified as other, as well as the role of culture in determining how this otherness is interpreted. It can be hard for modern readers, who tend not to see gods behind surges of strength or sudden pain, to recognize the complex conditions under which an event or feeling would have encouraged a Greek of this period to infer the intentions of a god. Yet these difficulties should lead us neither to dismiss the gods’ agency as a turn of phrase, nor to equate the possibility of that agency with the necessity of referring everything to gods, nor to deny human desires, intentions, and deliberations. If we recognize that the boundaries of the hero are, in fact, strengthened by the alien intentions and forces that traverse him, we can stop worrying that the Homeric hero is less than a person, while leaving open the possibility that these boundaries can be rethought.

(Continues…)

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