Experiencing Pain in Imperial Greek Culture by Daniel King

Abstract

Reviewed by: Experiencing Pain in Imperial Greek Culture by Daniel King Kathryn Chew Daniel King. Experiencing Pain in Imperial Greek Culture. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 291. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-19-881051-3. King's well-researched and ambitious book seeks to explore the representation of pain in Imperial Greek culture without falling into the intellectual traps that ensnared previous scholars. Such traps include finding a sort of post-Stoic nobility in suffering, as well as assuming that the period in question is one of suffering and decline, not to mention placing it on a trajectory whose endpoint is a dominant Christian worldview. Essentially, King wants to examine how his texts are in dialogue with each other and with earlier literature without subjecting his analysis to theoretical filters that skew the results. This is not to say that King avoids theory; by no means. Rather, he seeks an unbiased use of it. The time-frame of King's study, the 1st-3rd centuries ce, is interesting on its own merits, for it offers a glimpse into the world before our own, where the Roman Empire was strong and Christianity was just another cult vying for dominance; to presume the fall of Rome or the ascendancy of Christianity in reading texts from this period does those texts a disservice. King's theoretical approach took this reader by surprise. He proposes (38) to adopt modern health-care theory (e.g., O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales [New York 1988]) as model for dealing with the patient holistically and for understanding the patient's overall narrative. King might at first seem to be trading one set of inappropriate assumptions for another, but consider the options. This approach is useful because it avoids descriptive analysis (a major consideration, in my opinion) and presents ideas around which to weave observations. It is problematic, however, because it measures ancient writers against standards foreign to them, and because King is looking for contexts, concepts, and terms that the ancients either do not have or do not use in the same way. King is obviously aware of these limitations; he does not criticize Galen, for instance, for being rather one-sided in his doctor-patient relationships. In the end, King delivers analyses that address the question "To [End Page 114] what degree were ancient writers aware of the complex physical, mental, and societal effects of experiencing pain?", and I think that this book ends up being more interesting for his approach. King's methodology involves close readings of texts that deal with pain (which he distinguishes from suffering with good reason). These texts are distributed into three overlapping categories: medical; rhetorical, dramatic and philosophical; and visual. These categories reflect the aforementioned focuses of the study: physical, mental, societal. For instance, King explores how the emerging knowledge of human anatomy allows writers to situate pain; how linguistic choices express the emotional and psychological experience of pain for the sufferer; and how the visual representation of someone in pain engenders a variety of responses in others, from the emotional to the ideological. At first blush, King's literary selections might seem arbitrary—why is Achilles Tatius categorized as visual and not rhetorical and philosophical?—but, on reflection, they are carefully chosen for their articulations of pain. King concludes that there is more to the ancient construction of pain than has been acknowledged by scholars. He thus justifiably urges reconsideration of the history of the perception of pain, the place of pain in the fabric of ancient society, early Christianity's relationship to pain (in that it did not start this dialogue), and the position of pain in the Classical Tradition—i.e., revising the theoretical traps he has endeavored to avoid. This was a worthwhile read and a chance to examine some texts that are often neglected. Otherwise, I caught only three Greek typos and the unfortunate misspelling of Bryan Reardon's first name; the use of "k" and "kh" in all Greek spellings I found distracting. My parting thought: "imperial" is in the title of the book, but aside from setting...