Calloway Scott

Alkmaeon of Kroton's Isonomic Body Although the precise dating is disputed, sometime in the fifty century BCE the physiologos Alkmaeon of Kroton provided the first definition of bodily hygieia, health (DK 24 B4). The doxographic tradition preserving Alkmaeon's account develops his hygienic theory in strikingly political terms: hygieia is the isonomia-equal distribution/access to rights-applied to the regulatory powers (dunameis) of the body. Conversely, illness results when a monarchia of any single element is established, tilting the organism into pathological imbalance. Thus, Alkmaeon's bodily health is conceptualized in politically charged ways. Most treatments of this philosophical fragment concentrate upon the emergence and meaning of isonomia in the context of early demokratia or as it anticipates the topos of the diseased political body (Vlastos 1953; Ostwald 1969). Yet very few have noticed that Alkmaeon's framing in fact reverses the nature of that topos (e.g., Mansfeld 2014) and these do not follow up on its implications. In order to express novel and perhaps surprising ideas about the invisible interior of the body, Alkmaeon drew from the readily apprehensible models of the political world. In doing so he perhaps touched off a trend of politicizing bodily processes. Indeed, Hippocratic texts such as Airs, Waters, Places and doxographic sources like the Anonymous Londinensis are alive with political terms. At the same time, however, I argue that Alkmaeon's political framing ought to be situated in world in which hygieia was already conceived of in relation to the polis. Thus, hygieia in the Iliad registers not the integrity of the heroic body, but rather the persuasiveness of Hector's mythos to his assembled men (Il. 8.524). So, too, Simonides sings that the hygies aner knows polisbenefiting justice (PMG 524). Ultimately, in tapping this tradition, Alkmaeon's theoretical physiology vividly illustrates the dynamic ways in which the political and the corporeal articulate one another.

This paper addresses the central role of vision, sensation, and paradox in the creation of knowledge and authority in the Hieroi Logoi of Aelius Aristides (117-180 CE). Although principally an orator, Aelius is best known today not for his speeches, but for these first-person accounts of the ailments which afflicted his body throughout his lifetime and the miraculous cures he received through the dream epiphanies of Asklepios. In contrast to typical focuses on his bodily suffering, I examine how Aelius foregrounds his acquisition of special therapeutic knowledge as a process of expert interpretation of divinely inspired dream-visions. So too, in undergoing divinely inspired remedies-like bathing in winter torrents, enduring shipwreck, or nurturing tumors-Aelius emphasizes the unexpected and counter-intuitive bodily sensations that result, such as pleasure, joy, bodily contentment and wholeness. I argue that Aelius mobilizes this dyadic sensory discourse of divine vision and sensory paradox as part of a campaign to claim control of his unruly body-a body which has proved impervious to the diagnostic techniques of physicians. Indeed, throughout the Logoi Aelius represents his embodied experience of these miraculous cures as entirely confounding the expectations of physicians whose own authoritative knowledge rested upon medical theories "empirically" derived from sensory experience. Ultimately, then, I argue that Aelius' literary account of personal sickness and health, and of dreams and dreaming, develops a provocatively revised register of sensory experience and promotes it as a means both of producing knowledge about the body and challenging established epistemic paradigms. Fantastical and ego-centric, the Hieroi Logoi were long derided by scholars as the prattling of a hypochondriac (Dodds 1951). Yet recent scholarship has sought to resuscitate Aelius' reputation and the singular importance of the Hieroi Logoi by situating Aelius within the wider cultural and intellectual milieu of the Empire. Specifically, attention has been drawn to the zero-sum performance context of Second Sophistic oratory as well as the value placed on medical knowledge among the cultured elite (cf. Gleason 2008; Downie 2008 and 2013; Holmes 2008; Petsalis-Diomidis 2012; Israelowich 2015). This work has made important contributions to the understanding of Aelius by connecting his representation of embodied experience, his relationship with the divine, and the act of literary production as integral to his social identity and claims to status. Yet there is considerable room to expand on such beginnings. This paper does so by highlighting the importance of the dream perception as an arena of interpretive expertise, particularly in the intellectual context of Empire, when the ontological status and semiotic value of dreams was something of a hot topic (e.g. Artemidorus' Oneirocritica or Galen's Diagnosis from Dreams). Aelius capitalizes on this interest, reconfiguring and expanding the dream-vision as an epiphanic marker of divine favor into a hermeneutic challenge which only he is able to solve. In so doing, Aelius innovatively places representations of embodied sensation at the very center of his claims to literary, social, and cultural prestige.

The five books of Artemidorus of Ephesus' Oneirocritica (c. 2 nd century CE) constitute the largest collection of divinatory dream-interpretations to survive from Graeco-Roman antiquity. This paper examines Artemidorus' contribution to longstanding medico-philosophical debates over the ontological and epistemic character of such dreams. As with wider Mediterranean traditions concerning premonitory dreams, Greeks and Romans popularly understood them as phenomena with origins exterior to the dreamer (e.g. a visitation of a god). Presocratic and Hippocratic thinkers, however, initiated an effort to bring at least some dream events within the body as interior processes of a physical soul, a bodily turn which ultimately engendered a split in thinking about the possibility and scope of prophetic and diagnostic dreams (e.g. Hippocrates Regimen 4 and Aristotle On Prophecy in Dreams). Here, I examine the way that Artemidorus meant the Oneirocritica to address seriously questions about the origins of dreams and the powers of empirical science in two, related ways. First, I will concentrate upon his materialistic account of predictive dreams as "semeiotic movements of the soul," as a response to Hippocratic and Aristotelian dream theory. Secondly, Artemidorus explains that these "semiotic dreams" require interpretations based upon the systematic observation and correlation of the dream details with their outcomes. As Harris-McCoy (2012) observed, this explicit commitment to an empirical method of dream-interpretation resembles that of the Hellenistic medical 'sect' known as 'Empiricists,' who eschewed interest in theoretical etiology in favor of observation, comparison, and compilation of symptoms and outcomes. Pushing beyond similarity, I argue that Artemidorus not only deployed this method to defend empirically grounded accounts of dream-divination (cf. Cicero De div. 1), but endeavored to show that such a scientific method can be used to stabilize and corral productively the potentially infinite number of interpretations any dream-sign might bear without recourse to an underlying, causal theory.

" Votives, Bodies, and Intersubjective Viewing in Greek Healing Sanctuaries " This paper addresses the subjective experiences of illness and healing in the context of Greek healing temples in the Classical and Hellenistic eras. In it, I examine the dynamic between votive dedications of marble and terracotta body parts offered in thanks for healing, and the viewer of such corporeal representations. Specifically, I consider the role these votives played in creating personal meanings for sick viewers through " intersubjectivity, " that is, a somatic affect provoked by the perception of other embodied subjects (cf. Csordas 1994; 2008). I argue that confronting assemblages of anatomical ex-votos both constituted the " presence " of other subjects and created the impression of a wider community of fellow sufferers, aiding the sick in constructing meaning for their own illness and pain. Recent scholarship has highlighted anatomical votives as polysemic expressions central to the articulation of human-divine relationships in the Graeco-Roman). While this work has generally focused on ex-votos as one-way communications between their human dedicants and divine recipients, here I theorize the relationship between sick viewers, their bodies, and the embodied experiences encoded into votives. Indeed, a variety of material and written sources confirm that anatomical votives were intended to communicate directly to a viewing audience. Temple inventories from healing sanctuaries and inscribed narrative records of Asklepios' cures indicate that suppliants were expected to tour the sanctuary and to inspect carefully the votive dedications made there. Herondas' fourth Mimiambos—staged as a dialogue concerning the votive statuary on display at the Koan Asklepieion—discloses how such scrutiny of corporeal depictions might stimulate imaginative, even sympathetic thoughts about the bodies and affective states of others. In light of this, I suggest that anatomical ex-votos, as mimetic substitutions of the bodies of others, promoted reflections about the experiences of the subjective self (intersubjectivity). Moreover, I consider how, in the social context of the sanctuary, such assemblages would have reinforced ritual modes of attention to one's body as it was integrated into a larger community of worshipers. This situates votive dedications at the center of a complex set of interpersonal relations connecting individuals across time and space, investing illness with meaning that was culturally patterned, yet subjectively generated. So too, such a view of ancient votives and intersubjectivity blurs traditional subject/object oppositions, helping reframe our assumptions about the communicability of " private " experiences.

Writers within the Hippocratic tradition took for granted the existence and lethality of an illness known variously as hydrops, hyderos, or askites (dropsy). At first inspection, dropsy seems to fit snugly within Hippocratic humoral theory which understood disease as a disturbance in the balance of bodily fluids. Indeed, many authors describe dropsy simply as an accumulation of fluid within the body. A closer look at a collection passages, however, shows that this was not universally the case. Not only did authors offer differing accounts of dropsy’s proper etiology, but there was little agreement concerning its range of presenting symptoms. While some texts employ blanket terms in identifying dropsy, others describe subclasses, like “bloody dropsy,” “pus-filled dropsy,” “dry” or “tympanic” dropsy (which Galen argued is not dropsy at all). As the proliferation of these classifications suggests, dropsy implied something of a humoral hybridity. Such a fluid mixing posed an empirical challenge to the Hippocratic physician’s proclaimed ability to observe and identify correctly the distinct humoral imbalance underlying disease. Dropsy, it seems, could be (or be caused by) any or all of the fluids understood to constitute the body. Indeed, On Interior Diseases shows the onset of dropsy triggering a process of transubstantiation, as one fluid (phlegm) becomes another (water). The text On Breaths employs dropsy as a clear sign that all diseases originate in the respiratory system. So too, dropsy was subject to a gendered split: women’s dropsical symptoms were lumped with other “women’s diseases,” reinforced by the “fact” that women’s bodies were moister than men’s and that this was the physiological source of all female ailments. This paper, then, explores in greater depth how this conspicuous, fluid condition furnished various authors an opportunity to “prove” the validity of their physiological schemes.

In this paper I develop the outlines of an ancient Greek concept of health which was more expansive than the mere designation of bodily or somatic well being. Instead, I think we can begin 1) to articulate a “social” tradition parallel to the Hippocratic and philosophical emphasis on hygieia as a bodily balance of material stuffs 2) to see how “hygieia” functioned widely as a symbolic and cognitive mechanism in the enactment of collective identity and 3) to identify it more closely as a particular and essential quality of social interrelations, more or less as a notional sine qua non of the long term stability of social bodies

I use Aristophanes’ Ploutos to argue that in 5th and 4th century Athens, “health” did not necessarily describe a bodily condition, but a social one. In contrast to Hippocratic usage, health did not need chiefly or exclusively to describe one’s isolated and individual corporeal wellbeing. Rather, Hygieia registered the condition of the intricate web of communal, interdependent relations of the social world—that is in the Ploutos, the health of the individual is the metaphorical extension of the polis’ health, not the other way around

The healing cult of Asklepios is often thought to have aped the methods and theory of Hippocratic medicine. Here I compare the cases of female ailments in the records of the Epidaurian Miracle Cures with the theory and therapeutics of the Hippocratic gynecological texts as a means of weighing their shared assumptions. I argue that where temple and Hippocratic practice find common ground, it is explicable through widely circulating, gendered, presuppositions about physiology, pathology, and responsibility, rather than through specific borrowings. I conclude that more nuance is required when framing the relationship between naturalistic and religious medicine in Classical Greece.

In Aristophanes' Ploutos, Asklepios is called a φιλόπολις δαίμων (726), a polis loving divinity. This exclamation contrasts with the healing god's usual perception as a divinity of " personal religion, " whose popularity was tied to his attentiveness to private needs. Taking a cue from Aristophanes, this paper contends that Athenian healing cults—particularly Asklepios'— played an under-appreciated role in formulating sentiments of civic integration and control, especially as it was felt along Attica's potentially fractious borderlands. Indeed, Wickkiser (2008) has shown that Athens' civic interest in Asklepios was early and robust: his worship was quickly interwoven into the Greater Dionysia and Eleusinian Mysteries, civic festivals par excellence, and he received cult just below the Acropolis. Here, I push these observations further, noting firstly that an earlier " pantheon d'santé " (Verbank-Piérard 2000)—including the cults of Athena Hygieia on the Acropolis or Amynos by the Pnyx—had previously implicated concerns for health (hygieia) in evolving discourses about, and performances of, Athenian identity. Only by keeping in mind this pre-existing civic conception of health, then, can we fully understand Asklepios' enthusiastic promotion in Athens. Moreover, the growing power of healing figures in defining the polity contextualizes the proliferation of healing cults across Attica. Besides Asklepios' politically significant sanctuaries in Athens, during the late fifth and fourth centuries, extra-urban healing shrines—often displaying built features demonstrating conscious engagement with their urban counterparts—were erected at historically and economically significant borderland sites like Eleusis, Oropos, Rhamnous, and Sounion. Healing sanctuaries can therefore be seen as dynamic mechanisms of the state, asserting territorial control and conveying forceful messages about the cohesion of the citizen body(ies). Ultimately, such a view of healing cults is salient as it demonstrates the indissoluble entanglement of the "personal" experiences of health and healing with the disciplinary interests and practices of the state.

This article reassesses the consensus concerning the relation between Hippocratic-inspired medical practice and temple healing in Greek antiquity. This consensus holds that Hippocratic medicine and the temple cures effected in Asklēpieia were not perceived as oppositional or contradictory therapeutic outlets but instead as complementary “sectors of care.” After reviewing the status quaestionis and challenging some of the conclusions drawn from the evidence available, this article suggests a fresh approach which emphasizes the negotiation of subjectivity and agency in the constellation of patient, physician, and institution as a primary comparative heuristic. I demonstrate the appeal of this approach by interpreting some of the only “patient-centered” narratives left to us from antiquity: the iamata from Epidauros and the Hieroi Logoi of Aelius Aristides.

The five books of Artemidorus of Ephesus’ Oneirocritica (c. second century CE) constitute the largest collection of divinatory dream-interpretations to survive from Graeco-Roman antiquity. This article examines Artemidorus’ contribution to longstanding medico-philosophical debates over the ontological and epistemic character of such dreams. As with wider Mediterranean traditions concerning premonitory dreams, Greeks and Romans popularly understood them as phenomena with origins exterior to the dreamer (e.g. a visitation of a god). Presocratic and Hippocratic thinkers, however, initiated an effort to bring at least some dream events within the body as interior processes of a physical soul, a bodily turn which ultimately engendered a split in thinking about the possibility and scope of prophetic and diagnostic dreams (e.g. Hippocrates Regimen 4, Aristotle On Prophecy in Dreams, Rufus of Ephesus, and Galen). Here, I examine the way that Artemidorus meant the Oneirocritica to address seriously questions about the ori- gins of dreams and the powers of empirical science in two, related ways. We will see that his defense of oneirocriticism as a techne unfolds along two main axes. First, Artemidorus constructs a necessary veneer of scientific credibility by mobilizing the tropes and organizational strategies characteristic of contemporary technical literature. Secondly, he anchors that authority upon a materialist account of prophetic dreams as “semiotic movements of the soul.” As Price, S. 1986. “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus.” Past & Present 113: 3–36 and Harris-McCoy, D. 2012. Artemidorus’ Oneirocritica: Text, Translation, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press observed, this explicit commitment to an empirical method of dream-interpretation resembles that of the Hellenistic medical ‘sect’ known as ‘Empiricists,’ who eschewed interest in theoretical etiology in favor of observation, comparison, and compilation of symptoms and outcomes. Pushing beyond similarity, I argue that Artemidorus not only deployed this method to defend empirically grounded accounts of dream-divination (cf. Cicero De div. 1), but endeavored to show that such a scientific method can be used to stabilize and corral productively the potentially infinite number of interpretations any dream-sign might bear without recourse to an underlying, causal theory.

This paper compares the cases of female ailments recorded in the Epidaurian Miracles Cures (iamata) with the theory and therapeutics of the Hippocratic gynecological texts as a means of testing the extent of the assumptions shared between temple and Hippocratic medicine. I argue that where temple and Hippocratic practice hold common ground, it is readily explicable through widely circulating and historically rooted cultural presuppositions regarding female physiology and pathology, rather than through scientific borrowings. Rather than representing complementary outlets of medical care in which Asklepios specialized in " hopeless " cases, I suggest that the iamata permit us to observe a process in which parallel medical traditions branched out from a common cultural substratum, and that more nuance is required in framing the relationship between Greek naturalist and religious medicine.