Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

168 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
them. They were judged to be particularly susceptible to what we
would call today hysteria, a word that is derived from the Greek
for “womb” (hystera ), meaning literally “the lower parts,” though
its symptoms were rather different from those of the condition we
identify by this name today. The Hippocratic School believed that
the womb took to wandering around the body if the menses were
suppressed or if women did not engage in intercourse. So the theory
supported the argument that women’s sanity depended upon
sexual intercourse.
Mental Disturbances
Although the Greeks lacked the scientific terminology to systematize
and explain pathological states of consciousness, they were
nonetheless capable of subjecting individuals to close psychological
scrutiny. Greek tragedy manifests a keen fascination with mental
abnormality, as the following outline of the plot of Sophokles’
Ajax indicates.
After being defeated in his bid to win the prize for being the
foremost soldier in the Greek army, Ajax goes completely berserk
and slaughters cattle. He does this in the belief that he is murdering
Agamemnon and Menelaos, the war leaders who awarded the
prize to his rival. This delusional stage is followed by one of depression.
When he returns to his senses, Ajax is overcome with intense
shame—not because he tried to assassinate his superior officers but
because he tried and so conspicuously failed. The hero now sees the
world with unbearable clarity and realizes that he has no place in it.
The nineteenth-century French sociologist Emile Durkheim identified
three principal categories of suicide: egoistic, altruistic, and
anomic. Sophokles’ depiction of Ajax’s suicide is so complex that it
contains elements of all three.
It is not just in the realm of myth that we find incontrovertible
evidence for major psychological disturbances. The madness of the
Spartan king Kleomenes, as reported by Herodotos, has been cited
as a classic instance of paranoid schizophrenia. The king’s illness,
which provoked him to strike anyone whom he met in the face with
his staff, was variously explained either as a punishment brought
on by the gods for having burned down a sacred grove or as a consequence
of his fondness for unmixed wine, the consumption of
which was believed to result in madness. Kleomenes ultimately
became so violent that his relatives had him placed in the stocks.
While in prison, he managed to intimidate his jailer into giving him