La tempête, le vent et les humeurs : autour d’une image médicale et poétique

Abstract

The Tempest, the Wind, and the Humors : about a Poetical and Medical Image aim of this paper is to throw some new light on the medical use of metaphor in the Ancient Greek Literature. Metaphor was widely used by the Greek authors, in poetry as well as in medical treatises, where it served a mainly heuristic purpose. This paper focuses on one exceptionally well-developed metaphor, that of the storm inside the man in the Hippocratic Breaths, analyzing its functions within the medical discourse and comparing it to the functions of the same metaphor in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. This leads us to a somewhat better understanding of the way in which the medical discourse “ emancipates” itself from ordinary language.