ABSTRACT
Heraclides’ story about a woman who did not breathe enjoyed considerable fame in antiquity (and beyond),2 even to the extent that the work in which it was told acquired the nickname The One Without Breath (Apnous). Clearly, it was this story for which this (lost) work-whose proper title presumably was On Diseases or Causes of Diseases, and which was perhaps in the form of a dialogue-was primarily known, and virtually all our extant testimonies relate to this theme. Yet it has received rather varying evaluations in scholarship. The story itself is relatively straightforward: a woman is in a state in which she seems not to breathe and to be without pulse; this condition lasts for a consid-
erable length of time (the reports vary from seven to thirty days), after which she is resuscitated (according to some reports by Empedocles) and comes to life again. We have virtually no information as to the circumstances of this series of events, how this condition was believed to have been brought about (spontaneously, as a result of an accident or trauma, or artificially induced?),3 nor indeed about the identity and background of the woman.4 My question here is not so much whether a case history like this is medically possible and whether it can be retrospectively diagnosed, e.g. as a kind of coma, unconsciousness or suspended animation.5 Rather, I will consider how the story may have been understood and what significance may have been attached to it in ancient medical and scientifi contexts. This is important for the key question on which scholars are divided, viz. what Heraclides’ point was in narrating this story.
