ABSTRACT
The experience and conceptualization of madness in Graeco-Roman antiquity are tied up with the medium of literary expressions in a particularly strong way. This chapter focuses on the ideas on mental disorder that were brought forth by physicians and philosophers dealing with questions of medicine. It also describes the historical reconstruction with a survey of the cultural representations of madness and 'the mad' in Greek culture that constitute the background against which scientific thought developed its understanding of mental health and its disturbance. In a famous and most influential work, The Greeks and the Irrational, the classical scholar E. R. Dodds first placed 'the irrational' at full title into the scholarly study of Greek culture, both as social datum and as personal experience. The chapter offers an introduction of Greek madness, its specificity and its mythology in subsequent Western culture. It then explores the medical accounts elaborated throughout antiquity.
