Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Prologue
- Figure 1
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Death, myth and drama before the plague
- Chapter 3 Materials I: The language of disease in tragedy
- Chapter 4 Plague, cult and drama: Euripides' Hippolytus
- Chapter 5 Oedipus and the plague
- Chapter 6 The Trachiniae and the plague
- Chapter 7 Materials II: The cult of Asclepius and the Theater of Dionysus
- Chapter 8 Disease and stasis in Euripidean drama: Tragic pharmacology on the south slope of the Acropolis
- Chapter 9 The Athenian Asklepieion and the end of the Philoctetes
- Chapter 10 Conclusions and afterthoughts
- Works Cited
- Index
Chapter 1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Prologue
- Figure 1
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Chapter 2 Death, myth and drama before the plague
- Chapter 3 Materials I: The language of disease in tragedy
- Chapter 4 Plague, cult and drama: Euripides' Hippolytus
- Chapter 5 Oedipus and the plague
- Chapter 6 The Trachiniae and the plague
- Chapter 7 Materials II: The cult of Asclepius and the Theater of Dionysus
- Chapter 8 Disease and stasis in Euripidean drama: Tragic pharmacology on the south slope of the Acropolis
- Chapter 9 The Athenian Asklepieion and the end of the Philoctetes
- Chapter 10 Conclusions and afterthoughts
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
τίς δñτ↾ ἰατρός ἐστι νũν ἐν τῇ πόλει;
Who is the doctor now in the city?
Aristophanes, Wealth 407τñς δὲ πόλεως <κακῶς> βουλευσαμένης ἰατρὸς ἂν ϒενέσθαι
You would become a doctor for this badly counseled city.
Thucydides 6.14 (Nicias on the debate over the Sicilian expedition)If this road, before it opens into the grove of the Muses, leads us over by the temple of Asclepius, so is this for acquaintances of Aristotle only further proof that we are moving in the right footsteps.
Jacob BernaysThis study, an examination of the effect of the great plague of Athens on the Athenian imagination, will try to show that Jacob Bernays, the first great proponent of the medical interpretation of Aristotelian katharsis (and the uncle of Dr. Sigmund Freud's wife), himself stepped closer to a truth about Athenian tragedy than he had realized, because the Muses indeed sit quite close to the temple of Asclepius on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens. For, assuming Aristotle did visit the Theater of Dionysus in Athens to witness dramatic performances, an activity he subordinated to reading them as texts, a few steps, even a brief glance over his shoulder, would have taken him into the Athenian City Asklepieion, the shrine of the Greek god of healing (see Figure 1).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Plague and the Athenian ImaginationDrama, History, and the Cult of Asclepius, pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007