Medical Theory and the Body in the Tragedies
from Part II - Tragic Ennius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2025
The importance of the body – in its own right and as a political, cosmic, and metapoetic symbol – in Attic and Senecan tragedy has long been recognized in scholarship, as has the significance of contemporary medical theories for these plays, but this motif has not been discussed in relation to the surviving fragments of Ennian tragedy. Yet those fragments – frustratingly exiguous though they are – feature substantial depictions of Alcmeo’s mental and physical pathology, the war-wounds of Eurypylus, and Thyestes’ verbal dissection of his brother Atreus, alongside numerous briefer references to disease, injury, and the body. This chapter explores these Ennian engagements with the body and medical theory through various historicizing lenses; with due caution, moreover, it explores the ways in which these lenses can be used to build a provisional picture of the role of the medical and the corporeal in the poet’s tragedies.
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