| This dissertation examines the emergence of the symptom as an indexical sign of the inside of the body in fifth and fourth-century BCE Greek medical texts and the impact of this development on what the suffering body can represent. Two Euripidean tragedies, Heracles and Hippolytus , serve as case studies. The medical symptom in this period has been taken for granted as a "natural" consequence of Hippocratic empiricism or analyzed in the context of the fifth-century interest in logico-inferential reasoning. I analyze the symptom as a privileged site for thinking about the maxim "knowledge through suffering," asking how the imagination of the cosmos in terms of impersonal forces might transform the kinds of truths that suffering reveals about human vulnerability and the possibility of mitigating it.; In the first section, I map out the signifying potential of the body and the logic of divine violence in Homer and Sappho. I then reexamine the scholarly narrative of the "inquiry into nature," focusing on how phenomenal evidence may be seen as the threshold of unseen reality and the natural philosophers' imagination of composite objects. In the next section, I trace the reconceptualization of the daimonic as a space inside the body in the Hippocratic Corpus. I am especially interested in how these writers' interest in material causes problematizes disease qua external agent. Their fascination with causality entails, too, sensitivity to the space of indeterminacy between cause and effect, which coincides with the corporeal interior. I then explore medicine's claims to knowledge about human physis and their limits. Adapting medical ideas about vulnerability to the psyche, thinkers like Democritus and Gorgias sketch out the shape of "human diseases," where the patient's relationship to the symptom is more complicated than in humoral medicine. In the final section, I ask how the medical symptom informs Euripides' staging of divine violence and the concomitant crises of subjectivity and culpability. I argue that Euripides' interrogation of theodicy results in questions of blame being attracted to the body in Heracles. I also suggest that medical narratives of struggle within the body shape the representation of eros in Hippolytus. |
