Madness and emotion could be said to share, to a certain extent, their definition as kinds of human response to influences from their environment. The connection between madness and emotion is stressed in modern psychological observations establishing strong links between the causation of madness and human emotionality. Despite the fact that similar insights were absent from Greek medical theorists, or indeed from other contemporary writers, this would come as no surprise to either Sophokles or Euripides. Both tragedians handled their material (...) in such a way as to demonstrate how the strong pressures of familial or social influences can lead to mental disturbance. While it is most probably Sophokles who, for the first time, turns to the influence of internal forces in the process of madness, the lack of subject matter in his surviving plays allows us little scope for further comparison. On the other hand, Euripides seems to have dedicated more of his portrayals to madness. These portrayals offer an almost unique opportunity to examine the introduction, not only in drama but perhaps in the whole of Greek literature, of the emotions as contributing factors in madness. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze the role of Heracles' famous body in the representation of madness and its aftermath in Euripides' Heracles. Unlike studies of Trachiniae, interpretations of Heracles have neglected the hero's body in Euripides. This reading examines the eruption of that body midway through the tragedy as a part of Heracles that is daemonic and strange, but also integral to his identity. Central to my reading is the figure of the symptom, through which madness materializes onstage. Symptoms were (...) contested sites of interpretation in the late fifth century, supporting both conventional narratives about human suffering and new stories advanced by contemporary medicine and ethics. In exploring the imaginative possibilities of these new stories, I do not privilege a “secular” over a “divine” reading. Rather I aim to offer a model of interaction between medicine and tragedy that sees the cross-breeding of worldviews as productive of innovative drama. (shrink)