Pain in Classical Greek Texts

Abstract

Texts from the Classical Greek period play a crucial role in the historical development of Western science and philosophy. The concept of pain is of key importance especially for two areas of human knowledge, namely medicine and ethics. While the concept of pain is important for both of these areas, in the majority of scholarship, the areas are studied separately. We approach them together, in the context of the whole extant body of Classical Greek literature. This is enabled by our methodological approach, which combines traditional interpretative approaches with computational text analysis methods, making it possible to study a vast amount of textual data. When we look at the context of the usage of individual words denoting pain across the texts covering various genres or topics, we identify relatively stable semantic clusters to which pain words relate, such as pathologies, emotions or morality. We are thus able to capture the role of particular pain words, their meaning and mutual relations in Classical Greek texts. Also, our approach enables us to discern the role of various textual subcorpora (philosophical, medical) in how pain was conceived in Classical Greek texts.