Pain and Pleasure in Classical Times attempts to blaze a trail for the cross-disciplinary humanistic study of pain and pleasure, with literature scholars, historians and philosophers all setting out to understand how the Greeks and Romans experienced, managed and reasoned about the sensations and experiences they felt as painful or pleasurable. The book is intended to provoke discussion of a wide range of problems in the cultural history of antiquity. It addresses both the physicality of erôs and illness, and physiological and philosophical doctrines, especially hedonism and anti-hedonism in their various forms. Fine points of terminology (Greek is predictably rich in this area) receive careful attention. Authors in question run from Homer to (among others) the Hippocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Seneca, Plutarch, Galen and the Aristotle-commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias.
Author(s): William V Harris
Series: Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 44
Edition: ebook
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 280
Contents......Page 7
Preface......Page 9
Abbreviations......Page 10
Notes on Contributors......Page 11
Chapter 1 Introduction: Pain and Pleasure as a Field of Historical Study......Page 15
Chapter 2 Post-primordial Pleasures: The Pleasures of the Flesh and the Question of Origins......Page 29
Chapter 3 Must We Suffer in Order to Stay Healthy? Pleasure and Pain in Ancient Medical Literature......Page 50
Chapter 4 Pain and Medicine in the Classical World......Page 69
Chapter 5 Pleasure and the Medicus in Roman LiteratureCaroline Wazer......Page 97
Chapter 6 What is Hedonism?......Page 107
Chapter 7 Pleasure, Pain, and the Unity of the Soul in Plato’s Protagoras......Page 125
Chapter 8 Lucretian Pleasure......Page 153
Chapter 9 Joy, Flow, and the Sage’s Experience in Seneca......Page 170
Chapter 10 Alexander of Aphrodisias on Pleasure and Pain in Aristotle......Page 188
Chapter 11 On Grief and Pain......Page 215
Chapter 12 Nero in Hell: Plutarch’s De Sera Numinis Vindicta......Page 227
Bibliography......Page 255
Index......Page 274
