Anyone who has consulted a doctor or nurse about their pain is likely to be familiar with the modern ‘pain scale’. The patient is asked to assess the intensity of their pain on a scale ranging from 0 (no pain) to 10 (the worst pain imaginable). As soon as the question is asked, it can seem meaningless. Is the pain I am feeling a 6? Rather than being precise, the number seems impossibly abstract. Is my 6 the same as your 6? How can I rate my eye infection a 6 knowing that other people are surely enduring something far worse? Eula Biss, in her lyrical essay ‘The Pain Scale’, explores the frustrating arbitrariness of this sort of quantification, evoking the facets of experience that a single number cannot express: the duration of a pain, the despair that it brings, the panic that it may never leave. The problem, of course, lies in communicating to another person something that is deeply and inherently subjective. ‘I am comforted, oddly’, writes Biss, ‘by the possibility that you cannot compare my pain to yours. And, for that reason, cannot prove it insignificant’.[1]
Ancient attempts to classify pain are a recurring theme in Pain Narratives in Greco-Roman Writing, a new essay collection edited by Jacqueline Clarke, Daniel King, and Han Baltussen. Originating from a conference at the University of Exeter in 2018, the book examines the conceptualization and representation of pain in a series of authors, ranging chronologically from Homer to Augustine. The editors describe three aims in their introduction. First, the book’s eleven essays aim to refocus attention on the subjective experience of pain in antiquity, viewing it as much as possible through the eyes of sufferers and patients. Second, the authors draw particular attention to the use of narrative to represent pain, the ways in which it is ordered into discourse in different genres. Third, whereas previous works of scholarship have focused on pain in particular eras of antiquity, the contributors to this book move across languages and cultural and religious traditions. As is typical for the series of which it is a part (Brill’s Studies in Ancient Medicine), the volume leans heavily towards Greek-language texts. One gets the sense, as often, that there is more to be said about distinctively Roman conceptions of embodiment and physical experience. Nonetheless, this is an unusually compelling essay collection, well edited and conceived, with a range of contributors in different career stages and research areas. All chapters are either good or excellent, and the volume as a whole illuminates striking parallels between ancient and modern efforts to communicate suffering.
Han Baltussen’s opening chapter provides a foundation for all that follows, examining the semantic range of pain words in Homer, the Presocratics, the Hippocratic Corpus, and Hellenistic thinkers. As Baltussen shows, authors of different genres seek not only to label pain, but to evoke its experience. Homer’s vivid description of Polyphemus’ blinding, for example, is surely designed to express the violent intensity of his pain. In fascinating detail, Baltussen traces the emergence of the word λύπη, which is absent in Homer and relatively uncommon in the Hippocratic Corpus (11 occurrences), but appears with growing frequency in Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic sects. The word carries implications of mental as well as physical distress, and Baltussen argues that its use reflects the growing prominence of a psychological dimension to Greek conceptions of pain. The key word λύπη is also central to Jonathan Zecher’s contribution to the volume. Zecher studies what he calls ‘passion-lists’, exemplified best by the little-studied ‘On the Passions’ attributed to the Peripatetic philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes. The authors of such lists subdivide λύπη into many different varieties, offering definitions for trainee orators or even, perhaps, by patients talking to physicians (285). Zecher argues that such lists, while not quite a pre-modern pain scale, nonetheless provide a script for the ‘articulation, performance, and, ultimately, communication of pain’ (277). Incidentally, Zecher suggests in a footnote that further work be done on Jewish and Christian conceptions of eleos (‘pity’) from an ‘emotions-historical’ perspective, but Francoise Mirguet’s An Early History of Compassion has already made large strides in that direction.[2]
Orly Lewis’ thoughtful examination of the medical author Archigenes of Apamea is a highlight of the volume. Archigenes was criticized even in antiquity for what seemed like an overcomplicated and excessively abstract classification of different types of pain. According to Lewis, though, Archigenes was offering not so much a new theoretical system but a ‘practical method of diagnosis during the clinical encounter’ (146). As she notes, the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ), developed in 1975, offers a list of descriptive terms to help patients describe the type of pain they are experiencing (throbbing, stabbing, heavy). Archigenes’ pain descriptors match, sometimes precisely, this modern diagnostic tool. But what are we to do with Archigenes’ mention of ‘salty pain’, ‘sweet pain’, or ‘tart pain’ (162)? Is this synesthesia? Or metaphor? Or ‘haptic sensation’—that is, an itchy feeling may be described as ‘salty’ because the itch reminds the patient or physician of the feeling that salty foods generate in the mouth? Lewis suggests instead that these ‘flavor pains’ describe the secretions that were typically found to accompany certain kinds of pain. After all, the taste of bodily secretions was one of the ancient physician’s many diagnostic tools (165). Far from being overly abstract, then, Archigenes’ descriptors—or what we can learn of them—offer hints of the experience of both doctors and patients in antiquity. As Lewis says, some of Archigenes’ adjectives seem to stem from patients’ own description of their suffering ‘in a vivid, almost story-telling form…’ (155).
Another set of chapters in Pain Narratives broach the philosophical and theological question of why we suffer pain. Jean-Christopher Courtil’s chapter conveys complicated ideas with admirable clarity. As he explains, the Stoics considered pain natural, in so far as the physical sensation of pain was an unavoidable aspect of human experience. It becomes unnatural only when it transforms into passion or distress (λύπη). If the sapiens refuses assent to the notion of pain as an evil, the physical sensation of pain remains ‘in the natural sphere’, and can become the stuff (materia) through which Stoic virtue and endurance is demonstrated (106). Wei Cheng’s far denser chapter offers an explication of Stoic influence on conceptions of pain in the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. Alexander’s text, Cheng suggests, allows readers to question apparent symmetry in the concepts of pain and pleasure. Fiona McMeekin’s chapter turns to the early Christian martyr text of Ignatius of Antioch, whose passionate desire for death has frequently been interpreted as a psychosis of some kind. Yet Ignatius’ anticipation of torture and martyrdom shows parallels with the Stoic ‘premeditation’ of future troubles (239), and his decision to die has a rational basis within Ignatius’ own system of values. Gillian Clark’s eloquent ‘The Bishop’s Case Book: Augustine on Pain’ begins with a tense account of Innocentius’ suffering as a medical patient in book 22 of the City of God. Accumulating insights from across the corpus, Clark concludes that Augustine saw pain as ‘one of the evils of this human life’. Even pain, however, could be interpreted as testimony of God’s beneficence. When God removes something from our bodies, we feel pain for what has been removed; yet that pain also reminds us of the goodness of what was removed, and the goodness of what still remains (268).
Other chapters in Pain Narratives in Greco-Roman Writings explore the literary techniques through which authors evoked the pain experience for their readers. Co-editor Daniel King analyzes Nicander’s Alexipharmaca. Nicander’s descriptions of pain could reflect a diagnostic purpose: by speaking of ‘swirling pain’ or a ‘biting pain’, King suggests, the didactic poet can teach readers to identify the effects of particular poisons. Strikingly, King notes the lack of reference in the Alexipharmaca to the body as a whole. Instead, the poet’s fragmentation of the body into individual parts is ‘fundamental’ to his ‘narration of the experience of pain’ (54). That argument is similar to one made by Georgia Petridou in an earlier article on Lucian’s description of gout in his Podagra, and Petridou returns to that text in the current volume.[3] This time she sets descriptions of gout in Lucian and other Imperial Greek authors in a broader cultural frame, comparing written texts with magical and religious attempts to heal the pain of gout, and drawing parallels with contemporary illness narratives. Similarly cross-cultural is the chapter by Jacqueline Clarke, who argues that St. Vincent’s torture in Prudentius’ Peristephanon 5 echoes the brutal punishment of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 6. Marsyas, like Vincent, was a rebel who challenged divine authority and paid a horrific price. For Vincent, though, ‘conquest of the pain becomes part of his triumph over the Roman state’ (222). Clarke also raises the difficult question of audience reaction to grisly descriptions of torture in Latin literature. It is ‘too simplistic’ (213), she notes, to assume that Romans would have felt no shock in such descriptions because of their experience of executions and the amphitheater. Ovid and Prudentius clearly want us to feel and be moved by their characters’ suffering.
The problem of ancient audiences’ identification with others’ pain is addressed most directly in another standout essay in the volume, Sarah Lawrence’s chapter on ‘Emotional Persuasion’ in Roman declamation. This genre challenged orators, in her words, to ‘make the pain speak with words’ (69). Lawrence compares Seneca’s grotesque Controversiae 10.4, in which a man mutilates exposed children so that they bring in more profit as beggars, with Controversiae 2.5, in which a virtuous wife stays silent under torture, only to be divorced afterwards. In explaining the representation of suffering in each scenario, Lawrence resists easy answers. Other prominent critics have described the violence in 2.5 as pornographic and leeringly sexual. As she observes, though, there is a far greater attention to the bodily injuries of the children in 10.4 than there is to the tortured wife in 2.5. The difference in rhetorical detail reflects the fact that orators simply had to work harder to provoke audience empathy for enslaved children. A natural sort of admiration would have arisen for a virtuous wife protecting the interests of her husband, but a formidable gap in empathy must have opened up between the elite speakers and exposed, non-citizen children. Refreshingly, Lawrence sees declamation as a mode of ethical discourse—not merely a way to train speech or self-surveillance—and one that was fundamentally concerned with bridging divides between self and other. Her chapter will reward close attention for anyone interested in Roman rhetoric.
Nearly every part of Pain Narratives in Greco-Roman Writings responds in some way to Elaine Scarry’s oft-quoted formulation (in the context of torture) that ‘physical pain does not simply resist language, but actively destroys it…’.[4] Since Scarry wrote those words, scholars in the Medical Humanities have sought to qualify or revise them in all sorts of ways.[5] The essays in this book contribute to that effort, suggesting that pain—in its retrospective narration, if not in the moment of its infliction—can be productive of language, not resistant to it. Pain Narratives in Greco-Roman Writings offers a compelling survey of physical and mental suffering across the Greek and Roman worlds. Attuning our ears to new expressions of anguish can allow us to hear, even from this distance, voices that would otherwise remain unheard.
Authors and Titles
- Introduction: A New Approach to Pain in Antiquity (Jacqueline Clarke, Daniel King, and Han Baltussen)
- Labelling Pain: Early Greek Concepts from Homer to the Hellenistic Era (Han Baltussen)
- Painful Drinks: Poison and Pain Experience in Nicander’s Alexipharmaca (Daniel King)
- Emotional Persuasion: Communicating Pain in Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae (Sarah Lawrence)
- Is Pain Natural? A Study of Stoic Philosophy (Jean-Christophe Courtil)
- Pain with a PR Problem: Narrating Gout-Induced Pain in the Second Sophistic (Georgia Petridou)
- Perceiving and Diagnosing Pain according to Archigenes of Apamea (Orly Lewis)
- Between Aristotle and Stoicism: Alexander of Aphrodisias on the Varieties of Pain (Wei Cheng)
- Traumatic Pain and the Transformation of Identity: Prudentius and Ovid Compared (Jacqueline Clarke)
- Ignatius of Antioch’s Anticipation of Torture: An Alternative Reading of Romans 4–5 (Fiona McMeekin)
- The Bishop’s Case Book: Augustine on Pain (Gillian Clark)
- Affective Lexica between Hellenistic Philosophy and Christian Theology (Jonathan Zecher)
Notes
[1] Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale”, in Lex Williford and Michael Martone (eds.) Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (New York, 2007), 28-42 (quotation at 39).
[2] Francoise Mirguet, An Early History of Compassion: Emotion and Imagination in Hellenistic Judaism (Cambridge, 2017).
[3] Cf. Georgia Petridou, ‘Laughing Matters: Chronic Pain and Fragmentation in Lucian’s Podagra’, Illinois Classical Studies 43: 488-506.
[4] Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford, 1985), 5.
[5] For skeptical responses to Scarry, see e.g. Ann Jurecic, Illness as Narrative (Pittsburgh, 2012), 43-4; Susannah B. Mintz, Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body (London, 2013), 4-5.