God-sent misfortunes: sketching an anthropology of disease in Ancient Greece

Abstract

Anchored in the materiality of the body, the socio-cultural construction of disease reveals natives anthropologies, the production of models of humanity at the heart of cultures. Notwithstanding the universal range of biological troubles affecting all humans throughout space and time, the ways of coping with and thinking about them, the practices in use to fight them, and the intersubjective relationships weaved around them are constructed at each cultural and historical specific situation. In a dialogue with studies in disease anthropology, this article investigates the dynamics of meaning underlying the representations of disease as a divine punishment in Ancient Greece, with special attention to Hesiod and Homer. It notes that god-sent diseases may be inscribed both in a specific instance of divine vendetta and in a reference to the fortuitous character of the diseases to which everybody is susceptible. None the less, both meanings link up the order of the body and the order of society. Since Greek divine anthropomorphism makes coincide human and divine, cult-expressed, social esteem in a single notion, timé, diseases can respond to divine justice not only as a punishment in a retributive dynamic, but also in a distributive one, ensuring the ontological distinction between mortals and immortals.