Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 169
a knife, whereupon, as Herodotos relates, “He began to mutilate
himself, beginning with his shins. Cutting the flesh up into strips,
he proceeded from his ankles to his thighs, and from his thighs to
his hips and sides, until he reached his stomach, and while cutting
that up he died” (6.75.3).
No one, it seems, tried to cure Kleomenes of his psychosis by medical
means. Perhaps the Spartans were particularly unenlightened
in such matters. Euripides at least was aware that those who have
become temporarily deranged can be talked back to sanity, which
may reflect the more advanced attitude toward the mentally sick
that prevailed in Athens. At the end of the Bacchai, Kadmos gently
coaxes his daughter into the realization that she has dismembered
her son under the influence of religious ecstasy. Despite the horror
of her act, he treats her state of mind as curable.
Plato’s Madhouse
Paranoid schizophrenics and others who were judged to be a
danger to the rest of society may have been kept in confinement for
short periods of time. The local jail probably did double duty for
criminals and the criminally insane. In a passage in Laws (11.908c–
909d), which anticipates the use of asylums for the incarceration of
political prisoners in the former Soviet Union, Plato refers darkly
to a sophronistêrion or “house of correction,” where he proposes
that those professing atheism should be imprisoned for five years
at a stretch. While serving out their time, he goes on to state, they
should be permitted to consort only with the members of the socalled
nocturnal council, and then exclusively about matters connected
with their moral welfare.
There is no external evidence for the kind of institution to which
Plato alludes. It is, moreover, frankly inconceivable that the Greeks
would have possessed the resources to provide long-term professional
care for the mentally sick, any more than they had the resources
to do so for the elderly or the chronically sick. If incarcerated briefly,
the mentally sick were perhaps subjected to a type of treatment based
on the principle of the short, sharp shock, as has been recommended
in recent times for certain types of violent criminals.
SEXUAL MORES
The function of marital sex was procreation. So important was
procreation that in Sparta it was acceptable for a husband to lend