SAPERE Scripta Antiquitatis Posterioris ad Ethicam REligionemque pertinentia Schriften der späteren Antike zu ethischen und religiösen Fragen Herausgegeben von Reinhard Feldmeier, Rainer Hirsch-Luipold und Heinz-Günther Nesselrath Band XII Rufus of Ephesus On Melancholy edited by Peter E Pormann Mohr Siebeck e-ISBN PDF 978-3-16-156442-0 ISBN 978-3-16-149760-5 (cloth) ISBN 978-3-16-149759-9 (paperback) Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Natio- nalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. © 2008 by Mohr Siebeck Tübingen. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was printed by Gulde-Druck in Tübingen on non-aging paper and bound by Buchbinderei Held in Rottenburg. Printed in Germany. SAPERE Greek and Latin texts of Late Antiquity (1st–4th centuries AD) have for a long time been overshadowed by those dating back to so-called ‘classi- cal’ times. The first four centuries of our era, however, produced a cornu- copia of works in Greek and Latin dealing with questions of philosophy, ethics, and religion that continue to be relevant even today. The series SAPERE (Scripta Antiquitatis Posterioris ad Ethicam REligionemque pertinentia, ‘Writings of Late Antiquity on Ethics and Religion’) under- takes the task of making these texts accessible through an innovative combination of edition, translation, and commentary in the form of inter- pretative essays. The title ‘SAPERE’ deliberately evokes the various connotations of the Latin verb. In addition to the intellectual dimension – which Kant made the motto of the enlightenment by translating ‘sapere aude’ as ‘dare to use thy reason’ – the notion of ‘tasting’ should come into play as well. On the one hand, SAPERE makes important source texts available for discussion within various disciplines such as theology and religious studies, philology, philosophy, history, archaeology, etc.; on the other, it also seeks to whet the reader’s appetite to ‘taste’ these texts. Con- sequently, a thorough scholarly analysis of the texts, which are investi- gated from the vantage points of different disciplines, complements the presentation of the sources both in the original and in translation. In this way, the importance of these ancient authors for the history of ideas and their relevance to modern debates come clearly into focus, thereby foster- ing an active engagement with the classical past. To the Warburg Institute, its Founder, Directors, Staff and Students Preface Among the recent physicians, Rufus of Ephesus has composed the best work on melancholy. Galen (d.c. AD 216/17) Melancholy. Twofold melancholy. Madness and depression, innate and acquired, somatic disease and mental disorder. Since the dawn of time, man has suffered from this saddening sickness and maddening malady. The Greeks gave it the name by which we know it today: melancholy, melancholia, the condition caused by black bile, mélaina chol. An ail- ment which has occupied the minds of innumerable intellectuals, count- less quacks, and scores of artists and authors of prose and poetry. Hippocrates (fl.430 BC) saw it as a disease characterised by despond- ency. Aristotle (d.322 BC) proclaimed it a precondition of great achieve- ment and genius. Galen codified it as a tripartite condition—hypochon- driac, encephalic, general. The three authors influenced the coming generations of physicians and philosophers. This, in a nutshell, is the standard narrative of melancholy’s pre-history and history, with little ref- erence to the man who ‘composed the best work’ on the subject, Rufus of Ephesus (fl.c. AD 100). He wrote a monograph On Melancholy which by common acclaim constituted an unsurpassed masterpiece, a model for many in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Yet, although it enjoyed great popularity not only in the Latin West and the Greek East, but also in the Arabic-speaking world, it was lost: neither the Greek ori- ginal nor its Arabic translation have come down to us. The present book attempts for the first time to collect all the known fragments in Arabic, Greek, and Latin. Through the efforts of painstaking philology, much of Rufus’ On Melancholy can be recovered and presented in a fashion easily accessible to the general reader. Yet Rufus’ masterwork deserves more than a mere snatching from the jaws of oblivion. Here, distinguished scholars interpret Rufus’ work from various vantage points, and invite readers to come on an intellectual jour- ney of gigantic dimensions. The readers will enter Roman high society, and meet officials succumbing to social stress due to public engagements. They will stroll through the medical marketplaces of Asia Minor, where physicians competed in medical ‘Olympics’ for prizes, patronage, and power. They will learn how Rufus, unlike most of his successors, combined the Aristotelian and the Hippocratic traditions: desires for sex and wine characterise melancholics; and yet, intercourse and inebriation can also cure their raving madness and craving for solitude and suicide. x Peter E Pormann In the hospitals of Baghdad, the courts of Cairo, and the palaces of Kair- ouan, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian clinicians relied on Rufus when treating cantankerous courtiers and quarrelling kings – sometimes at the cost of their own life. An absolute highlight on this virtual voyage through time and space is Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514). Two pre-eminent art historians offer a new interpretation of this compendious copperplate, and explain how Rufus’ ideas influenced the great German engraver. The two last stations of the journey will lead through literature and bring us back to modern medicine. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton (d.1640) further developed the type of the scholarly melancholic, fa- mously associated with Rufus. George Eliot (d.1880) and Orhan Pamuk (b.1952) both continued this tradition of scholarly melancholy, which, in transmuted form, also appears in the latest American manuals on mental disease. Finally, Rufus’ impact can be traced through the psychiatric lit- erature of eighteenth-century France and twentieth-century Germany in fascinating ways. The idea to write this book goes back to my undergraduate days in Tübingen. My esteemed teacher Manfred Ullmann gave me an off-print of his influential article on the Arabic transmission of Rufus’ work (ULL- MANN 1994). I perused it during a field trip with the Classics department in the hot summer of 1995 to the Roman town of Trier (Augusta Tre- verorum). Then, in 1997, I gave a talk on Rufus’ On Melancholy for a course on ‘Emotions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (Emoties in de Grieks- Romeinse Oudheid)’, jointly organised by Manfred Horstmanshoff and Piet Schrijvers at Leiden University. I continued to collect fragments over the years, and always wanted to heed Ullmann’s injunction to pro- duce an edition which would take all the available evidence into consid- eration. In January 2004, Lesley Dean-Jones circulated a call from the editors of SAPERE, who were keen to include a medical text in their series. In an extremely productive dialogue, the editors and I developed the concept for the present volume, and I was fortunate enough to be able to secure the collaboration of some of the greatest experts on this topic. I organised a small workshop at the Warburg Institute in September 2006, where the contributors and editors came together to present and listen to first versions of the essays. An atmosphere of constructive criticism and great collegiality was instrumental in giving the volume its present shape. My thanks go first and foremost to the authors who contributed such stimulating essays, as well as the series editors who helped in many ways. Peter Bachmann, Pauline Koetschet, and Manfred Ullmann read an earlier version of the fragments, commented on the text and translation, and saved me from many an error. Numerous other colleagues lent their Preface xi assistance; they include: Peter Adamson, Charles Burnett, Amed Et- mn, Stefania Fortuna, Charles Hope, Andrew Laird, Elizabeth McGrath, James Montgomery, Caroline Petit, Mariana Saad, Emilie Savage-Smith, Nikolai Serikoff, Maude Vanhaelen, Elvira Wakelnig, and Fritz Zimmer- mann. Last, not least, the staff at Mohr Siebeck, and especially Matthias Spitzner of the desk-editing department, greatly helped in the process of producing this book. Many institutions have offered their support as this volume took shape. I owe my thanks to Merton College, Oxford, where I was a Junior Research Fellow (2001–4); to the Warburg Institute, which elected me to a Frances Yates long-term fellowship partly to work on this book (2004– 6); and to the Wellcome Trust for a University Award (no. 077558, held at Warwick, 2006–11). Furthermore, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, gave me membership in their Senior Common Room in 2004–5, and the American University in Cairo made me a Visiting Researcher in 2007–8. During my time in Cairo, I also benefited tremendously from the re- sources of the Institut Dominicain d’Études Orientales. Finally, the lib- raries whose manuscripts are quoted and reproduced here made it pos- sible, through their sources and resources, to produce the present book. I am tremendously grateful to all of the above individuals and institu- tions without whose support I could never have undertaken this project, let alone bring it to a felicitous end. Aby Warburg (d.1929) had an acute interest in melancholy, as did his pupils Fritz Saxl (d.1948) and Erwin Panofsky (d.1968). They discussed this topic at the Kulturwissenschaft- liche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg, first a private library which opened its doors to the public in 1918. The library was saved from the claws of the Nazis and moved to London to become the Warburg Insti- tute in 1933.