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186 Travel Sickness
directed at those on the move. Presumably he did not want his
patients to feel they could do without him. Galen’s practice is
dedicated to (at the least) the wealthy in their villas, whom he
counsels to stay put, avoiding urban insalubrities. 30 Some of his
clearest recommendations to a sufferer who has to travel come
in his letter of ‘Advice for an epileptic boy’. Its sheer specificity
perhaps indicates how marginal the topic was to him. 31
A final point under this heading of ‘fixity’. Galen’s silence on
the matter of travel extends to women, and is exemplary of the
whole field of medicine for the mobile. Women should exercise,
to the extent of going for a walk or riding in a carriage. But
women do not travel. At least, they are not, I think, explicitly
addressed, or represented, as travellers. Regimens for women
and girls were composed by Rufus of Ephesus, yet, like almost
all previous dietary advice directed at women, their purpose is
to facilitate a reproductive marriage. 32
3. travel as therapy
I have arrived now at the first of my two principal themes, travel
as therapy. Exercise (for both men and women) is pain, ponos.
But travel is torture: Old French travail apparently descends,
via the hypothetical verb tripaliare, from the medieval Latin
tripalium, three-pronged instrument of torture on which the
victim is stretched—an instrument attested in sixth-century
Gaul. 33 Why should anyone welcome travel? Aelius Aristides
underwent deliberate shipwreck at the prompting of a perverse
deity. 34 His was an extreme case. Yet we still tend to think of
ancient Mediterranean travel as fearful, whatever may be said
about the ease of maritime communications in the region. It is
30 De curandi ratione per venae sectionem 17, 11.299–300K.
31 O. Temkin, The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to
the Beginnings of Modern Neurology, 2nd edn. (Baltimore and London, 1971),
72–3, with Temkin’s translation in Bulletin of the Institute of the History of
Medicine 2 (1934), 179–89, from 11.357–8K.
32 R. Flemming, Medicine and the Making of Roman Women (Oxford,
2000), 221–4, 316–17.
33 W. von Wartburg, Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 13.1
(Basle, 1966), s.v. *tripaliare.
34 Oration 48 ( ¼ Sacred Tales 2), 11–13, trans. C. A. Behr, P. Aelius
Aristides: The Complete Works 2 (Leiden, 1981), 293–4.