In an important article published in 1992 Lesley Dean-Jones observes in ‘The Politics of Pleasure: Female Sexual Appetite in the Hippocratic Corpus’, that in early Greek medical writings a woman’s urge to have sex with a man, and the satisfaction she occasionally derives from it, are marked by the systematic absence of ‘conscious sexual desire’1. That is, unlike men whose appetite for sex is normally stimulated by a specific object of desire (be it an actual object or its mental image), women are almost automatically compelled to have intercourse in order to replenish moisture in their bodies, facilitate menstruation and maintain physical balance internally. In Dean-Jones’ words, female sexual appetite, as described in Hippocratic gynecology, ‘precludes directed desire’ and, along with it, ‘the exercise of self-control over the body’s imperative to’ take part in ‘intercourse’2. Dean-Jones maintains that throughout the Hippocratic Corpus, it is consistently male patients those who are advised to abstain from excessive sex as part of a healthy regimen. This emphasis on ‘curtailing rather than promoting intercourse’3 suggests that men are likely to feel the need to have sex beyond what their bodies require, so that whatever urge they feel, it cannot entirely be a physiological one, but external stimulation also plays a role. By contrast, insofar as women are concerned, Dean-Jones focuses on the pathological effects thought to follow after sustained abstinence from sexual intercourse. The womb, under normal circumstances the seat of sexual appetite, becomes too dry and light, and is displaced to others parts of the body where moisture can be found, such as the liver or the heart4. The theory has two important aspects. On the one hand, it assumes that the womb sometimes acts as an independent, self-directing entity5, travelling at will in the body, seeking comfort in bodily moistures; on the other hand, it reveals those places to be precisely the ones which ancient medical writers consider the seat of intelligence and the psyche6. When they suggest that the womb can closely attach to, press upon and suffocate7 such organs responsible for cognition and emotions, Hippocratic gynecologists are implying that female sexuality behaves as an exclusively biological system. In sum, sexual appetite apparently lies beyond a woman’s conscious control.
Hippocratic gynecology pictures the woman as by nature passive and devoid of emotion8. In Dean-Jones’s terminology, she lacks ‘moral agency’9 in sexual matters10. At the same time, the female body is also constitutionally frail, a fact that becomes especially obvious in the face of sexual abstinence, or lack of intimate contact with her husband. It is with these two intersecting medical concepts that I will here revisit the case of Cydippe in the third book of Callimachus’ Aetia, calling attention to the way in which the narrative combines absence of expressive feeling and desire on the part of the woman with an exceptionally articulate female body that is sick. My point of departure is the ‘love story’ that will have occupied some 150 to 200 lines11, and, as its Latin reception suggests, some impressive descriptions of erotic suffering12, for desire circulates in the text as Acontius’ prerogative, whereas Cydippe remains silent and remote throughout. Her silence looks all the more awkward and intense when one compares the companion ‘love piece’ at the beginning of Aetia 3, the story of Phrygius and Pieria, frs. 80-83b Harder. With Pieria Callimachus pictured for his audience a sexually liberated, resourceful and effectively manipulative female, so far as we can tell from the fragments. She not only responds to Phrygius’ desire, she also elicits from the king his promise of peace between Miletus and, her native town, Myus. Cydippe, however, never speaks a single word13, and there is no way of knowing whether or not she has any desire for Acontius14. Even in fr. 75.44-49 describing the couple’s first night as wife and husband, Cydippe evades our grasp, and all emphasis is on Acontius’ own emotional and sexual excitement. I believe that Callimachus deliberately describes Cydippe as indifferent, for in my reading this is not so much a story of unreciprocated love but a tale that deliberately eschews references to female desire. Rather, the narrative’s empowering force is Acontius and his desires.
In the first part I discuss Cydippe’s three illnesses one by one (fr. 75.10-19), focusing on their medical allusions- some of which have hitherto remained unnoticed- and on the clinical details Callimachus encoded in his narrative, so as to create a coherent medical record. Cydippe’s case history, as I shall demonstrate, includes some of the symptoms typically associated in Greek poetry with love-sickness; in contrast to Medea in Apollonius Rhodius or Simaetha in Theocritus, however, Cydippe falls ill precisely because she is not in love with Acontius, a theme worth pursuing, I think, because the female body may become diseased when desire is absent. Unlike other literary descriptions of love-sickness, where desire is often presented as resembling a disease without though being conceived as an actual illness15, Cydippe’s failure to engage emotionally with Acontius turns her into a patient whose symptoms show her as clearly sick. Perhaps that is why Callimachus makes consistent use of medical terminology when describing what ails her. His ultimate aim, after all, is to stress differences between the two ‘pathologies,’ sustained abstinence from sexual congress and love-sickness. In the second part I move on to examine whether Callimachus fashioned his Cydippe so that she would be seen specifically as a female patient16. I therefore turn my attention to the Hippocratic gynecologists and examine their discussions of virginity, such as the general question as to when and how virginity should be surrendered if the young woman is to remain healthy. Absence of desire, according to Hippocratics, characterizes an adult woman’s sexual life, yet it also defines the critical moment of a woman’s first sexual experience17. Cydippe’s silent transition from virgin to wife and the illnesses that affect her as long as this transition is suspended, belong within the same medical framework, thus inviting us to look at the sexual politics of Hippocratic medicine as an important background to Callimachus’ love story18.
Part I: Cydippe as a patient
While Cydippe was visiting Delos for a local festival of Apollo, she unwittingly promised to marry Acontius, sealing her promise with an oath. When she returned to Naxos she found herself betrothed by her father to another man. As preparations are being made for the wedding, Artemis makes Cydippe ill to prevent her from breaking the oath, for the girl invoked Artemis when swearing her oath. When additional illnesses cause the wedding to be cancelled for a third time, Cydippe’s father consults Apollo’s oracle at Delphi and, upon finding out everything, he conformed to divine will, saving his daughter from further sicknesses and likewise fulfilling Acontius’ desire. Callimachus’ account of Cydippe’s illnesses runs as follows (Aetia fr. 75.10-19):
ἠῶιοι μὲν ἔμελλον ἐν ὕδατι θυμὸν ἀμύξειν
οἱ βόες ὀξεῖαν δερκόμενοι δορίδα·
δειελινὴν τὴν δ’ εἷλε κακὸς χλόος, ἦ≥λθε≥ δὲ νοῦσος,
αἶγας ἐς ἀγριάδας τὴν ἀποπεμπόμεθα,
ψευδόμενοι δ’ ἱερὴν φημίζομεν· ἣ τότ’ ἀνιγρή
τὴν κούρην Ἀ≥ίδε≥ω μέχρις ἔτηξε δόμων.
δεύτερον ἐστόρνυντο τὰ κλισμία, δεύτερον ἡ π≥α≥[ῖ]ς≥
ἑπτὰ τεταρταίῳ μῆνας ἔκαμνε πυρί.
τὸ τρίτον ἐμνήσαντο γάμου κά≥τ≥α≥, τὸ τρίτον αὖ≥τ≥[ις
Κυδίππην ὀλοὸς κρ≥υμὸς ἐσωικίσατο.
At dawn the oxen were about to tear their hearts, seeing the sharp blade reflected in the water; but in the afternoon, an evil paleness took hold of Cydippe and on came the illness which we send off to the wild goats and call ‘sacred’ by mistake. That terrible disease wasted the girl and brought her almost to the point of death. A second time the marriage-bed was spread, a second time the girl fell ill for seven months, with quartan fever. A third time they thought about marriage, a third time again a deadly chill settled on Cydippe19.
I.1 The so-called ‘sacred disease’
Callimachus introduces Cydippe’s first disease by commenting on people’s misconception that it is sent by gods20 and the equally false belief that magic cures it (fr. 75.12-15)21. Callimachus’ critique recalls the opening of the Hippocratic De morbo sacro22, as has been noted, in which the medical writer refuses to entertain the notion that gods cause disease23. Instead he offers his own theory, a mechanical cause that is also an internal one. People’s ignorance and the sickness’s frightening aspect have fostered the notion that gods must be involved: at one moment the person healthy, standing, breathing normally, and then suddenly collapsing, losing his voice, convulsing and foaming at the mouth. Little wonder that those ignorant of the body’s inner workings appeal to the divine (DMS 1.1-3 = 6.352 L.):
Περὶ τῆς ἱερῆς νούσου καλεομένης ὧδ’ ἔχει· οὐδέν τί μοι δοκεῖ τῶν ἄλλων θειοτέρη εἶναι νούσων οὐδὲ ἱερωτέρη, ἀλλὰ φύσιν μὲν ἔχει καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ νοσήματα, ὅθεν γίνεται, φύσιν δὲ αὕτη καὶ πρόφασιν. οἱ ἄνθρωποι ἐνόμισαν θεῖόν τι πρῆγμα εἶναι ὑπὸ ἀπορίης καὶ θαυμασιότητος, ὅτι οὐδὲν ἔοικεν ἑτέροισι24.
I am about to discuss the disease called ‘sacred’. It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or sacred than others, but just as the other diseases have a nature from which they arise, likewise this one has a nature and a cause. But humans have considered it a divine thing because of their difficulty to understand it and their wonder at its peculiar character, since it looks quite different from other diseases25.
DMS provides us with a rare instance in which divine causation is discussed in the Hippocratic Corpus and explicitly dismissed26; whereas Hippocratic medicine ‘effectively, ...blocked any move to explain diseases by invoking divine or supernatural agencies’27, it is not often that we find a medical writer discrediting this notion openly. In an attempt to eliminate vengeful gods from being able to cause disease the author of DMS appeals to humoural and anatomical observations, locating phlegm’s origin in the brain, but isolating it as the malicious fluid that clogs passageways in the body’s central trunk28. The brain, in conjunction with this bodily fluid, combine to be cause of the condition – aitios29. As is repeatedly stressed in the text, despite people’s common assumption that a god should be blamed, the ‘so-called sacred’ disease originates in the body, its αἴτιον being not θεῖον but ἀνθρώπινον30: the affected brain, also the cause for other serious diseases, suffices to account for its extraordinary symptoms (ἀλλὰ γὰρ αἴτιος ὁ ἐγκέφαλος τούτου τοῦ πάθεος, ὥσπερ καὶ τῶν ἄλλων νοσημάτων τῶν μεγίστων)31. Moreover the same vocabulary is employed by those who believe that it is the gods who cause sicknesses, for instance in DMS 1.32 [6.360 L.]: ‘people contrive and devise many fictions of all sorts, about this disease among other things, putting the blame, for each form of the affection, upon a particular god’ (ἑκάστῳ εἴδει τοῦ πάθεος θεῷ τὴν αἰτίην προστιθέντες): thus, if a patient ‘imitates a goat’, grinding his teeth and ‘suffering convulsions on the right side’, it is believed that Cybele has affected him (μητέρα θεῶν φασὶν αἰτίην εἶναι); if he utters a loud, piercing sound, like that of a horse, people think of Poseidon as responsible (φασὶ Ποσειδῶνα αἴτιον εἶναι); likewise, if the seizure worsens and the patient foams at the mouth and kicks, Ares is blamed (Ἄρης τὴν αἰτίην ἔχει)32. According to Geoffrey Lloyd this linguistic overlap is intentional and is aimed at illustrating how the author’s polemic is centered on the question of who explains ‘the causes’ more convincingly, and who, therefore, is better able to effect the cure33; passages like the one discussed here indicate, as Brooke Holmes points out, ‘that an etiological paradigm committed to daemonic and divine agency’ was still pervasive in the classical period34: symptoms and diseases naturally turn, in this context, into ‘contested sites of interpretation’35, and while some of the explanations continue to invoke the gods’ role as causes of the disease others incline more towards natural processes which place the emphasis on the human body.
Callimachus thus dialogues with a medical text36 whose thrust is to demonstrate the superiority of its own explanations of the cause, and this, in turn reflects back on Callimachus’ own concern with etiology37 and reminds us that his Aetia is a poem that narrates origins. Nonetheless, whereas the medical author speaks from a standpoint that allows him to be consistent in his views and to dismiss categorically the notion of a god-sent disease, Cydippe’s own story compromises the poet’s remark that it is a mistake to call her illness ‘sacred,’ for this first sickness does in fact have a divine cause – Cydippe’s oath in the name of Artemis. Callimachus seems conscious of his inconsistency: a few lines above, while introducing us to Cydippe’s failed marriage and the repeated illnesses that prevent marriage from taking place, the poet draws attention to what he calls ‘the difficult burden of excessive knowledge’ (fr. 75.8: ἦ πολυιδρείη χαλεπὸν κακόν). Once the comment is situated in a poem that is expressly devised to display that knowledge and is concerned with the process of selection among different versions of a story and different etiologies, the medical information added to the description of Cydippe’s first illness turns out to be an example of such a burden38. That is, Callimachus’ inquiry into the real cause and nature of disease and his preference for a medical explanation emphasize the tension with Artemis’ role as cause of Cydippe’s suffering, but illustrate as well how science, once imported into a fictional narrative39, is also diversionary.
I.2 Quartan fever
Callimachus’ use of medical language in fr. 75.10-19 creates a sense of commitment to a clinical, rationalised account of events, but it also opens up space for religion and magic. This becomes evident in the case of Cydippe’s second illness, her quartan fever that sickens her for seven months’ (fr. 75.16-7):
τὸ τρίτον ἐμνήσαντο γάμου κά̣τ̣α̣, τὸ τρίτον αὖ̣τ̣[ις
Κυδίππην ὀλοὸς κρ̣υμὸς ἐσωικίσατο.
(‘A second time the marriage-bed was spread, a second time the girl fell ill for seven months, with quartan fever’).
This is the first occurrence in Greek poetry of the adjective τεταρταῖος when referring to fever40. Earlier occurrences derive from medical texts41, while in Plato’s Timaeus 86a7 the word appears in the context of a detailed discussion of disease42. Callimachus observes that Cydippe’s fever lasted for seven months. Annette Harder says, ‘it is not quite clear why Cydippe is ill for seven months, but it is conceivable that the long period of returning fevers was making the disease... worse’43. In fact, medical writers do claim that a quartan fever lasts longer than other fevers44, so that instead of exaggeration on the part of Callimachus this is another example of his adoption of doctors’ precision. To name one example, the case history of Hippostratus’ wife (Epidemics 2.3.13, 5.114 L.) says that a quartan fever seized her for a year (ἐκ τεταρταίου ἐνιαυσίου) before reaching crisis through a chill followed by excessive menstrual bleeding.
While Callimachus may have been aware of the medical associations, had he read diligently in the professional literature on quartan fevers, it is also the case that these fevers figure large in magic and religion. In order to refute the idea that the extraordinary pathology (τὸ θαυμάσιον) of epileptic seizures is enough reason to call the disease ‘sacred’, the author of the De morbo sacro notes several other diseases with remarkable features that are by no means attributed to the gods, such as the periodic fevers45 – presumably on the assumption that their periodicity is strange and renders them open to supernatural interpretation. The author’s remark that this category of conditions cause no wonder to people, however, is misleading: the idea that fevers manifest themselves as daemonic forces is widespread throughout antiquity46 and, especially the quartans. Inscriptional evidence from Samos (dating to the late Hellenistic period) confirms that the disease was formally acknowledged, in certain areas of the Greek East, as a god47. Further, quartans likewise appear in curse tablets and love magic. The earliest occurrence of a binding spell, inscribed on a shard which dates to the late fifth/early fourth century BC, pictures the one casting the spell asking that ‘a quartan fever be put on Aristion and kill him’ (Ἀριστίωνι ἐπιτίθημι τεταρταῖον ἐς Ἄιδα)48. It is worth remembering that Cydippe’s suffering can likewise be attributed to an act of magic: the apple, by whose inscribed oath Cydippe binds herself (Aristaenetus 10.25-40), is traditionally used as an object with incantations designed to induce desire into a woman49.
More generally, fever is typically sent, through love magic, to an emotionally unresponsive victim so that the latter’s resistance be overcome50. What underlies this technique, as John Winkler has shown51, is a combined logic of transference of pain, sympathy and intensification: the agent’s burning desire is imagined to be infecting the victim while assuming a more violent and concrete form. As Winkler points out, casting a love spell implicates a series of ‘displacements’: ‘the first displacement, presumably of therapeutic value in itself, is the intense imaging of the agent’s illness as a thing felt by someone else’52. The ‘violence of language’ used on these occasions, involving pathological details that one expects from a medical text53, also helps to enhance the impression that what is wished on the victim is an actual sickness54.
Cydippe’s intense symptomatology can be placed in this context. Acontius’ erotic suffering can only be inferred from later sources, there is little doubt, however, that it was intended to be compared by readers with Cydippe’s three illnesses. Note how the verb which Callimachus uses to describe the ‘wasting’ effects of epileptic seizures, ἔτηξε (fr. 75.15), occurs typically in association with a ‘melting desire’ and, if we trust Aristaenetus55, was also applied to Acontius. Seizures are also reminiscent of the ‘madness’ of love56, while krumos, ‘a shivering cold’, at fr. 75.19 can easily be connected with classic passages of erotic symptomatology, of which Sappho fr. 31.13-14 Voigt, is an important early example τρόμοc δὲ/παῖcαν ἄγρει57. At this point it is worth remembering that just before the ‘sacred disease’ occurs at fr.75.12, Cydippe is affected with an ‘evil paleness’: the word used to indicate it, χλόος, seems to derive its origin from medical texts58, and in one of its rare appearances in Hellenistic poetry it is used to describe love’s paralytic effects on Apollonius Rhodius’ Medea (Arg. 298)59. This intense dialectic between love and disease is characteristic of the Hellenistic poets’ views about erotic desire as actual sickness or, as Nicholas Rynearson puts it, of their tendency to describe it ‘in increasingly detailed and precise physiological terms’. This, in turn, results in a model in which ‘desire becomes even more closely identified with the experience of its symptoms’60 and transforms into an entity expressed in clinical terms. What is ingenious about Callimachus’ version is that it proceeds not, as one would have expected, as an account of a woman falling in love, but rather of a woman who excludes love entirely. Cydippe shows no signs of emotional engagement, yet it is precisely this absence of desire in her and the medically-inspired side-effects that suggest not only how different the couple’s pathologies look, but how they coalesce in the end, as Acontius’ love-sickness complements Cydippe’s illnesses61.
I.3 Kρυμός/Chill
The third and final of Cydippe’s illnesses is identified as κρυμός:
τὸ τρίτον ἐμνήσαντο γάμου κά≥τ≥α≥, τὸ τρίτον αὖ≥τ≥[ις
Κυδίππην ὀλοὸς κρ≥υμὸς ἐσωικίσατο.
(‘A third time they thought about marriage, a third time again a deadly chill settled on Cydippe’).
The word, as attested in medical writings ([Hipp.] De morbis 4.52-3 [7.590-4 L.]), has the meaning of a cold fit or chill; it describes the shivering that affects patients with high fevers62. Two tragic passages figure here, because with the exception of Hippocratic De morbis 4.52, they represent the only two uses of κρυμός prior to Callimachus, when the referent is to a pathological condition63. One derives from Sophocles’ Herdsmen (fr. 507 Radt)64. Though its context is missing, it is pretty clear that the one who speaks mentions a tertian fever as succeeding a quotidian one and causing a ‘chill’ to the patient’s jaws:
× – ] τ≥ριταῖος ὥστε πῦρ ἀφί[ξεται
κρυμὸν φέρων γναθ≥μοῖσιν ἐξ ἀμφημέρου
(‘The tertian fever will arrive like a fire, succeeding the quotidian, bringing a chill to the jaws’).
The passage underscores the extent to which medical details season Greek tragedy’s descriptions of disease65 and raise the possibility Callimachus’ medical allusions could have come to him through medical discourse in earlier Greek literature. The second tragic fragment derives from Sextus Empiricus when discussing Euripides’ merits as a poet who had a firm understanding of medical science (Adv. Mathem. 1.308). The three lines Sextus cites to prove his point derive from Euripides’ Scyrians (fr. 682 Kannicht), a dialogue between Deidameia’s nurse and Deidameia’s father Lycomedes. The nurse reports that Deidameia is gravely ill and in danger of dying; Lycomedes asks its cause (πρὸς τοῦ;) and wonders if it is the case that ‘a chill of bile has been exercizing her ribs’, alluding to pleurisy:
(ΤΡ.) ἡ παῖς νοσεῖ σου κἀπικινδύνως ἔχει.
(ΛΥΚ.) πρὸς τοῦ; τίς αὐτὴν πημονὴ δαμάζεται;
μῶν κρυμὸς αὐτῆς πλευρὰ γυμνάζει χολῆς66;
(Nurse: ‘Your daughter is ill and her condition is dangerous’. Lyc. ‘Because of what? What sort of plague is holding her down? Is it a chill that exercises her ribs with bile?’).
Although this conversation has been interpreted in various ways, mention of Deidameia’s sickness apparently represents her nurse’s attempt to arouse sympathy from Lycomedes for his daughter, before she announces that the girl is pregnant with Achilles’ child. A similar intertwining of pregnancy and disease also features in Cydippe’s medical record, for her second illness, a quartan fever held her in its sway for seven months – precisely the number of months deemed necessary for a child to be conceived and born healthy (there is even a treatise on the subject, entitled ‘On the seven months child’, De septimestri partu = 7.436-52 L.)67. In ps.-Moschus’ Megara Cydippe’s long-lasting fever seems to have been echoed in the narrative of Alcmene’s troublesome pregnancy with Heracles: Massimilla believes that Alcmene’s δέκα μῆνας ἔκαμνον at line 84 is a deliberate allusion to Callimachus, a hypothesis strengthened by similarities between ps.-Moschus 86 (καί με πυλάρταο σχεδὸν ἤγαγεν Αἰδωνῆος, ‘he has almost driven me to the gates of Hades’) and Cydippe’s lethal seizures (Ἀ≥ίδε≥ω μέχρις ἔτηξε δόμων)68.
On the whole, the tragic subtext of Cydippe’s suffering, and, more specifically, her connection to Euripides’ Deidameia, prompt Callimachus to think of pregnancy, for Cydippe’s story provides an aition about genealogy, and giving birth is central to that script. Once Cydippe falls ill plans for her wedding are suspended and the notion of motherhood, which is integral for the narrative’s completion, is put at risk. Callimachus’ subtle allusions to pregnancy, in what seems otherwise an exclusively pathological context, reflect precisely the poet’s anxiety to move the story forward and foreshadow, in a sense, the following successful union between Acontius and Cydippe69. At the same time, the literary allusions centering on Cydippe’s third illness underscores the point raised earlier – that tragedy remains an important source of detailed descriptions of disease and morbidity. Euripides’ Phaedra, for example, is often invoked by scholars as a model for Medea’s lovesickness in Apollonius Rhodius or Simaetha’s in Theocritus; Callimachus’ Cydippe surely belongs in this quasi-tragic grouping70, and participates as a patient in an extended network of ‘tragic’ diseases.
Part II: Cydippe as a female patient
To what extent does Hippocratic gynecology participate in informing the medical details of fr. 75.10-19? Does Callimachus intend for Cydippe to be understood as a female patient? Cydippe’s profile is that of a young girl, a παρθένος, who is about to marry, yet fails to do so because her sicknesses intervene. Her maladies are successfully treated once she is reassigned to her proper groom, yet the one who encourages her marriage with Acontius, naming him as the only cure for her sicknesses, is Apollo, god of prophecy as well as of healing.
Epileptic seizures are of central import here. Apart from the De morbo sacro, the only other treatise in the Hippocratic corpus where seizures are discussed in a context that rejects divine causation occurs in the short gynecological treatise devoted to the diseases that affect young girls of marriageable age (the title is Περί παρθενίων, De virginum morbis = 8.466-71 L.)71. The ‘so-called sacred disease’ heads the list of medical conditions72 believed to afflict girls who ‘remain without a husband’ (παρανδρούμεναι), even though their time for marriage has arrived, indicated by the fact that the girl’s body has grown and has collected enough blood in it for menstruation to occur for the first time73. According to the author, sudden seizures, ‘apoplexies’, unnatural visions and panic attacks occur because the girl’s menstrual blood, gathering in the womb in excess, flows downward as if to pass out of her body. It does not, however, because the ‘mouth of the exit’ (τὸ στόμα τῆς ἐξόδου)74 remains closed. On the face of it, reference is made here to a virginal hymen which has not yet been ruptured through intercourse; but since we have no concrete evidence in Hippocratic gynecology to suggest the existence of an imperforate membrane in the vagina75, the passage is generally interpreted as referring to the constricted nature of the female body and the narrowness of a young girl’s veins76: on this interpretation, first intercourse should not be imagined as removing some sort of closing device but extending a pre-existing, yet protected, fissure. Whatever sort of impediment the medical author may have had in mind, its presence in the parthenos’ body causes the menstrual blood to rush back upward and gather in excess around the heart and the diaphragm, the areas of the body where archaic and classical Greeks located sensation and intelligence. Consequently, the centre of consciousness is affected, giving rise to madness77, fears, terrors, shivering and fever78. The medical author then describes the patient’s contingent sufferings – hallucinations (φάσματα) that turn her suicidal. Even when she has regained consciousness, she nonetheless takes pleasure in the idea of death. To cure her, the author has only one suggestion for the young girl – marry as soon as possible, have sex and become pregnant. Pregnancy, here as elsewhere in the Corpus, usually indicates health79; in the meantime, penetration is suggested to help ‘unblock’ and extend the ‘mouth of the exit’, removing the impediment and allowing the blood that has been trapped inside the body to find its way out:
Ἡ δὲ τῆσδε ἀπαλλαγὴ, ὁκόταν μὴ ἐμποδίζῃ τοῦ αἵματος τὴν ἀπόρρυσιν. Κελεύω δὴ τὰς παρθένους, ὁκόταν τοιοῦτο πάσχωσιν, ὡς τάχιστα συνοικῆσαι ἀνδράσιν· ἢν γὰρ κυήσωσιν, ὑγιέες γίνονται· εἰ δὲ μὴ, αὐτέων ἤ ἅμα τῇ ἥβῃ ἢ ὀλίγον ὕστερον ἁλώσεται, εἴπερ μὴ ἑτέρῃ νούσῳ· τῶν δὲ ἠνδρωμένων γυναικῶν αἱ στεῖραι ταῦτα πάσχουσιν.
Release from this [disease] comes whenever there is no impediment for the flowing out of blood. I urge, then, that whenever young girls suffer this kind of malady they should marry as quickly as possible. If they become pregnant, they become healthy. If not, either at the same moment as puberty, or a little later, she will be caught by this sickness, if not by another one. Among those women who have regular intercourse with a man, the barren suffer these things.
Marriage is the only therapy proffered, and continued sexual intercourse provides temporary closure to mental and bodily suffering of the young girl. Symptoms associated with love and erotic desire have been here transformed into insanity. The medical text mentions the pleasures of desire, yet it transforms it into a patient’s thoughts of suicide: what a virgin craves for is not the man’s body, but her own death, ‘as if death was something good’ (ἡδονὴ τις, άφ’ ἧς ἐρᾷ θανάτου ὥσπερ τινος ἀγαθοῦ)80.
Consistent with the text’s strategy to suppress erotic desire by evoking it and then converting it into a pathology is the fact that the resultant restlessness of mind the author describes recalls the eroticism in magical papyri. The medical writer emphasizes the ‘terrifying demons’ (ὁκόσα φοβεῦνται ἰσχυρῶς ἄνθρωποι, ὥστε παραφρονέειν καὶ ὁρῇν δοκέειν δαίμονας τινας ἐφ’ ὲωυτῶν δυσμενέας) and ‘phantoms’ (φάσματα) that appear to the young girl while she is sick and hallucinating. She resembles the woman whom the caster of an erotic spell wishes to deprive of sleep and terrify through visions of hostile spirits: καὶ κέλευσον ἀγγέλῳ ἀπελθεῑν πρὸς τὴν δεῑνα, ἄξαι αὐτὴν τῶν τριχῶν, τῶν ποδῶν. φοβουμένη, φανταζομένη, ἀγρυπνοῡσα ἐπὶ τῷ ἔρωτί μου καὶ τῇ ἐμοῡ φιλίᾳ, ‘and order the angel to go off to her, NN, to draw her by her hair, by her feet; may she, in fear, see phantoms, sleepless because of her passion for me and love for me’81 (PGM VII.888-9). What magic ascribed to supernatural forces occurs in the medical text as a symptom with a physical cause82. Similarly, whereas in love magic the woman’s troubles are thought to have been eased once desire is reciprocated, the medical writer prescribes intercourse and pregnancy as a mechanical means to bring on menstruation. As Dean-Jones points out in connection to the text, ‘the young women have a physiological need of intercourse, but no conscious desire for it nor knowledge of what it is they need. The satisfaction of their appetite is not even tied to any pleasure beyond simple relief of the pressure of blood on their heart’83.
In assessing some of the central notions which underlie female sexuality in ancient Greek culture Anne Carson observes how ‘a woman’s life’ is usually conceived as having ‘no prime, but rather a season of unripe virginity followed by a season of overripe maturity, with the single occasion of defloration as the dividing line’84. The Hippocratic De virginum morbis is an example of that model. As Helen King observes, ‘[b]y ordering sufferers to marry, and adding ‘if they become pregnant’ the author essentially ‘suggests that the successful transition from parthenos to gynê depends on compressing menarche, marriage and childbirth into as short a space as possible’85. In this environment of ‘medical terrorism’86 – the phrase is Paola Manuli’s – a woman’s desire is omitted from the discussion because there is neither time nor need for it. What matters instead is that a woman acts as her society requires, marrying and giving birth at the age considered medically and socially acceptable87.
Overall, I would argue that Cydippe’s voiceless transition from unmarried young girl to wife in a context in which female desire is absent and illness substitutes for desire and takes its place, summons a similar physical model. Epileptic seizures, Cydippe’s first sickness, provide an initial indication: while Callimachus’ remark at fr. 75.14 (that the disease is mistakenly called sacred) was probed above in conjunction with De morbo sacro, it is possible that the poet may also intend an allusion to De virginum morbis88, for that text is likewise concerned with showing that the so called ‘sacred disease’, among other physical and mental disorders, occur whenever menstrual blood is trapped within a female body- and has therefore no divine cause. The medical writer’s concluding remark, that after the patient’s recovery womenfolk are deceived by diviners (κελευόντων τῶν μάντεων) into believing that Artemis provided the cure, creates tension between the author’s mechanical explanations and the popular belief that gods both cause and cure sicknesses89.
Furthermore, the ‘sacred disease’ makes its appearance in a narrative which is systematically emphasizing Cydippe’s status as an unmarried young girl, a virgin90, and more, it occurs at that point in the story where the change of her status is about to occur. The transition from parthenos to gyne interests the medical writer as well, for he sees it as a time of increased susceptibility to sicknesses. The lines which open Callimachus’ reference to epileptic seizures contain a striking image of the fear experienced by sacrificial animals on the day of Cydippe’s wedding (fr. 75.10-12):
ἠῶιοι μὲν ἔμελλον ἐν ὕδατι θυμὸν ἀμύξειν
οἱ βόες ὀξεῖαν δερκόμενοι δορίδα·
δειελινὴν τὴν δ’ εἷλε κακὸς χλόος, ἦ≥λθε≥ δὲ νοῦσος
(‘At dawn the oxen were about to tear their hearts, seeing the sharp blade reflected in the water; but in the afternoon, an evil paleness took hold of Cydippe and on came the illness’).
The reason why Callimachus chose to focus on the oxen, rather than Cydippe, has long puzzled scholars. D’Alessio, for example, speaks of a ‘shift of perspective’ that is typical of the Aetia’s narrative techniques, when peripheral details are spotlighted on centre stage and distract a reader’s attention. He considers this a playful mode of composition that may include ironic touches91. Alternatively, it is equally possible that no such shift has taken place and that Cydippe continues to hold the poet’s attention, as he takes advantage of the associations between sacrifice and female bleeding from menarche onward92. Once marriage has transformed the young girl into a wife and sexually mature woman, she continues to bleed each month and also after the birth of each child. As Helen King observes, ‘the Hippocratic texts lead towards a definition of the gynê, the mature childbearing married woman, as she who bleeds’93. More to the point, the analogy between woman and sacrificial victim occurs in the Corpus’ gynecological treatises, such as in De mulierum affectibus 1.6 (8.30 L.): ‘if a woman is healthy, then during menstruation the blood flows like that of a sacrificed victim and it clots quickly’ (χωρέει δὲ αἷμα οἷον ἀπὸ ἱερείου, καὶ ταχὺ πήγνυται, ἢν ὑγιαίνῃ ἡ γυνή)94. Similar wording is used on other occasions to describe the lochial flows when she bleeds following childbirth (De mulierum affectibus 1.72 = 8.152 L.; De natura pueri 18 = 7.502 L.). Aristotle agrees that a young girl’s menstrual blood is οἷον νεόσφακτον, ‘like that of a freshly-slaughtered beast’ (HA 581b1-2), and it may be that this is common knowledge within Greek society95. In addition, the phrase θυμὸν ἀμύξειν, ‘tearing one’s heart,’ at fr. 75.10 is consistently applied to humans, from Homer onwards96, another indication that Cydippe’s anxiety as she transfers from virgin to wife is never absent from Callimachus’ characterization of her.
A final point of intersection between Callimachus and the Hippocratic De virginum morbis is the fact that marriage is the only solution proposed for the nubile girl exhibiting symptoms of illness. The medical writer’s urgent advice that a virgin should find a husband and get pregnant as quickly as possible (κελεύω δὴ τὰς παρθένους, ὁκόταν τοιοῦτο πάσχωσιν, ὡς τάχιστα συνοικῆσαι ἀνδράσιν) fits nicely with the action Apollo’s oracle at Delphi suggests to Cydippe’s father, Ceyx: in order to find relief from illness, Cydippe needs to fulfil her oath to Artemis by marrying Acontius and becoming the mother of his children97. In the passage quoted below the god’s imagery of metals being mixed together refers not only to sex – μειξέμεναι – but also to reproduction, for ἤλεκτρον at fr. 75.3 is the alloy of gold and silver both of which are mentioned in the last two lines:
τέτρατον [ο]ὐκέτ’ ἔμεινε πατὴρ ἐ....φ≥..ο≥...[
Φοῖβον· ὁ δ’ ἐννύχιον τοῦτ’ ἔπος ηὐδάσατο·
‘Ἀρτέμιδος τῇ παιδὶ γάμον βαρὺς ὅρκος ἐνικλᾷ·
Λύγδαμιν οὐ γὰρ ἐμὴ τῆμ≥ος≥ ἔκηδε κάσις
οὐδ’ ἐν Ἀμυκλαίῳ θρ≥ύ≥ο≥ν≥ ἔπλεκεν οὐδ’ ἀπὸ θήρης
ἔκλυζεν ποταμῷ λ≥ύ≥μ≥ατα98 Παρθενίῳ,
Δήλῳ δ’ ἦν ἐπίδημος, Ἀκόντιον ὁππότε σὴ παῖς
ὤμοσεν, οὐκ ἄλλον, νυμφίον ἑξέμεναι.
ὦ≥ Κ≥ή≥υξ, ἀλλ’ ἤν με θέλῃς συμφράδμονα θέσθαι,
..]ν.. τελευτήσεις ὅρκια θυγατέρος·
ἀργύρῳ οὐ μόλιβον γὰρ Ἀκόντιον, ἀλλὰ φαεινῷ
ἤλεκτρον χρυσῷ φημί σε μειξέμεναι (fr. 75.20-31).
Her father did not wait for a fourth time... Phoebus; and he spoke his word at night: ‘A heavy oath by Artemis frustrates your child’s marriage: for my sister was not troubling Lygdamis at that time nor was she plaiting rushes in the sanctuary at Amyclae or washing the dirt after the hunt in the river Parthenius, but she was at home on Delos, when your daughter swore that she would have Acontius, and no other, as her bridegroom. But, Ceyx, if you want to make me your counsellor... you will fulfil your daughter’s oath; for I tell you that you will not be mixing Acontius as lead with silver, but as electrum with shining gold’99.
Although there has been a recent tendency to deemphasize the separation of religious healing from the mechanical explanations of Hippocratics in the 5th and 4th cent. BC100, we still have strong hints for a competitive and antagonistic environment between the two domains101. As William Harris observes in his study on dreams in antiquity, after the Hippocratic On Regimen (composed ca. 400 BC) ‘doctors took the study of dreams no further, in spite of the fact that the Hippocratic tradition was progressive in spirit and well aware that knowledge could be extended by research’. One ‘easy explanation’, Harris continues, ‘is that in practice physicians eventually realized that dreams were seldom much use, but it is also possible that the growing popularity of incubation shrines... meant that relying on dreams came to be associated with a rival form of medicine (my italics)’102. Ceyx’s decision to consult Apollo’s oracle at Delphi through an incubation103, could aim at setting up a contrast with the mechanical explanation for Cydippe’s medical conditions104. Cydippe’s symptoms qua symptoms juxtapose explanations and therapies from medical science and from the world of the divine cause and therapy. The tension thus created can be fully appreciated only if we place Callimachus’ scientific references to the ‘sacred disease’ in the context of the Hippocratic De virginum morbis, as well as with De morbo sacro, the only two treatises in the Corpus to speak against the idea that gods belong in discussions of disease as both cause and cure. Towards the end of the text, and just before stressing once more that only the release of menstrual blood can help an afflicted unmarried young girl, the medical author contrasts gullible women who have been led to consider recovery as available only through divine intervention:
Φρονεούσης δὲ τῆς ἀνθρώπου, τῇ Ἀρτέμιδι αἱ γυναῖκες ἄλλα τε πολλὰ καὶ τὰ ἱμάτια πουλυτελέστατα καθιεροῦσι τῶν γυναικείων, κελευόντων τῶν μάντεων ἐξαπατεώμεναι. Ἡ δὲ τῆσδε ἀπαλλαγὴ, ὁκόταν μὴ ἐμποδίζῃ τοῦ αἵματος τὴν ἀπόρρυσιν. Κελεύω δὴ τὰς παρθένους, ὁκόταν τοιοῦτο πάσχωσιν, ὡς τάχιστα συνοικῆσαι ἀνδράσιν.
When the female is recovering her senses, the women dedicate to Artemis many other things and especially expensive female clothing at the orders of priests105. But the women are being deceived. Release from this comes whenever there is no impediment for the flowing out of the blood. I urge, then, that whenever young girls suffer this kind of malady they should marry as quickly as possible.
Whether Callimachus was aware of the medical concepts about young girls outlined in the De virginum morbis and was acquainted with medical literature, or whether medical concepts about female bodies circulated in learned conversation of scholars from the sophisticated atmosphere the poet inhabited in Ptolemaic Alexandria, it remains ironic that Cydippe’s disease requires the intervention of the iatromantis106 par excellence Apollo, who advises the appeasement of Artemis so that Cydippe become healthy once again. Helen King warns that ‘the apparent rivalry between the Hippocratics and Artemis over the treatment of girls who failed to menstruate when expected can mislead us into seeing religion and medicine as opposed, when in fact they agreed on the place of women’s bleeding in the proper ordering of the world. Like sacrificial ritual’, she continues, ‘Hippocratic gynecology is about ensuring blood is shed at the proper times and in the proper ways’107. Several aspects of De virginum morbis corroborate this statement, for instance the author’s emphasis on strangulation as one of the main side effects of the disease (πολλοὶ ἤδη ἀπηγχονίσθησαν), which seems to be intrinsically connected with the cultic imagery of Artemis Ἀπαγχομένη in Arcadia108. At the same time, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that the author’s concluding remark is aimed precisely at leaving Artemis out of the picture, by insisting that any attempt to invoke the divine in the therapy (and explanation) of the disease relies on deception (ἐξαπατεώμεναι)109, orchestrated by the manties110, and lack of knowledge about how the female body works: rather, the only thing that matters in this case is that the impediment in the girl’s body is removed so that blood can flow out freely111.
Callimachus’ clinical catalogue of Cydippe’s diseases opens with a remark which leaves little doubt that the poet’s learned inquiry into the medical causes (aitia) of the illness has led him to dismiss the common assumption that it is god-afflicted; as the story evolves, however, Artemis’ integral role in the narrative resurfaces and the disease, which is first dissociated from the divine, is finally cured by an appeal to the gods. I suggested above that Callimachus is aware of the ‘inconsistency’, and uses it to exemplify what he neatly calls ‘the burden of too much knowledge’. The Aetia is a playful narrative which pursues, in an erudite and systematic way, the origins of local customs, names and cults but allows, quite often, the possibility that multiple, and sometimes conflicting – if not mutually exclusive – explanations can exist for the same thing: the notion of ‘a single explanation’ is constantly undermined in the poem by Callimachus’ ‘quotation of variant versions and variant sources’, leading to what Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter have recently called ‘a parodically confident parade of knowledge’112. On a broader level, ‘indeterminacy of truth’ – to use one of Susan Stephen’s terms113 – in the writings of the period has been seen as a strategic move to help accommodate the plurality of voices in the intercultural environment of Ptolemaic Alexandria; in this intellectual context, as Stephens points out, ‘what constitutes “truth” or “lies” may differ fundamentally with one’s cultural perspective’114. Cydippe’s medical case combines gynecological lore – which helps, among others, to explain her absence of desire as that of a typically female Hippocratic patient – with a more traditional view of the gods as causes and healers of human disease; as such it provides Callimachus with a first class opportunity to explore the complexities of aetiological discourse and to build up a narrative whose multiple ramifications do not always sit easily with each other.