Emotions and the Body in Greco-Roman Medicine

Using Literary Eremetic Space to Prevent Emotional Distress in Galen’s De Indolentia

By Molly Mata

In Galen’s De Indolentia, the author continually emphasizes the importance of mental practice when one is facing loss of health or personal possessions. Galen encourages the unnamed interlocutor that the best practice in mental training is to imagine the loss of your possessions, as well as to remind yourself of what little is needed for survival rather than what others have (§44: “But if someone is not looking all the time at the number of fields that someone else has but at what is enough for his own outgoings, he will bear unconcernedly the loss of what is superfluous,” trans.

Beneath the Skin: Investigating Cutaneous Conditions as Somatisations of Gendered Emotions

By Chiara Blanco

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relation between cutaneous conditions and human emotion in ancient Greece. A medium between the self and the external world, the skin was deemed to be one of the seats of human emotion in antiquity; and yet, its prominent role in ancient literature has so far been overlooked by scholars. Alterations in complexion and cutaneous diseases are listed as symptoms of lovesickness by some of the best-known ancient authors, such as Hesiod (Catalogue of Women, 123-3 M-W), Theocritus (Idylls, 2.88-9) and Sappho (fr. 31 Voigt).