The Symptom and the Subject

The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece

Brooke Holmes

• Editore: Princeton University Press
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781400834884
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Greek Ancient History

The Symptom and the Subject takes an in-depth look at how the physical body first emerged in the West as both an object of knowledge and a mysterious part of the self. Beginning with Homer, moving through classical-era medical treatises, and closing with studies of early ethical philosophy and Euripidean tragedy, this book rewrites the traditional story of the rise of body-soul dualism in ancient Greece. Brooke Holmes demonstrates that as the body (sôma) became a subject of physical inquiry, it decisively changed ancient Greek ideas about the meaning of suffering, the soul, and human nature.
By undertaking a new examination of biological and medical evidence from the sixth through fourth centuries BCE, Holmes argues that it was in large part through changing interpretations of symptoms that people began to perceive the physical body with the senses and the mind. Once attributed primarily to social agents like gods and daemons, symptoms began to be explained by physicians in terms of the physical substances hidden inside the person. Imagining a daemonic space inside the person but largely below the threshold of feeling, these physicians helped to radically transform what it meant for human beings to be vulnerable, and ushered in a new ethics centered on the responsibility of taking care of the self. The Symptom and the Subject highlights with fresh importance how classical Greek discoveries made possible new and deeply influential ways of thinking about the human subject.

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.”¹ 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:

ἄλλοι δὲ περίδραμον υἷες Ἀχαιῶν,

οἳ καὶ θηήσαντο φυὴν καὶ εἶδος ἀγητὸν

Ἕκτορος· οὐδ᾽ ἄρα οἵ τις ἀνουτητί γε παρέστη.

ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκεν ἰδὼν ἐς πλησίον ἄλλον·

῾ὢ πόποι, ἦ μάλα δὴ μαλακώτερος ἀμφαφάασθαι

Ἕκτωρ ἢ ὅτε νῆας ἐνέπρησεν πυρὶ κηλέῳ.᾽

ὣς ἄρα τις εἴπεσκε καὶ οὐτήσασκε παραστάς.

(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 phuē, his breeding or stature, and his eidos, his visible form. These terms, like demas, the “build” of the body, and khrōs, “skin, complexion, tint,” focus on how the hero appears. The latter term, khrōs, 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 (οὔ … λίθος χρὼς οὐδὲ σίδηρος, 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 daimōn 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, phuē, 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.²

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.³ 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, often 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 often accompanied by signs seen by others.⁴ 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.⁵ 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.⁶ Genre and theme exercise particular pressure on representations of disease in the poems. Scholars have often 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 erōs, are largely absent.⁷ 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.⁸ 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 daimōn (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.¹⁰ 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?).¹¹ 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 often 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.¹² Lyric poetry tends toward fatalism and dwells on effects, as in Sappho’s famously precise elaboration of the symptoms of erōs (fr. 31 L-P).¹³ 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 ...