Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond

George Kazantzidis is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Patras, Greece. He is author of Lucretius on Disease: The Poetics of Morbidity in De rerum natura (2021), and co-editor of Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity (2023) and Medical Understandings of Emotions in Antiquity (2022).Chiara Thumiger is Research Fellow within the Cluster of Excellence Roots at Kiel University, Germany, and Guest Research Fellow at Humboldt University, Berlin. She is author of Phrenitis and the Pathology of the Mind in Western Medical Thought (2023), A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (2017) and Hidden Paths: Notions of Self, Tragic Characterization: Euripides’ Bacchae (2007).

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Embodied Experience, Literary Representations and Human Knowledge: Horror in Greco-Roman Antiquity and its Legacy1. Horror Now and Horror Then: Horror’s Long Reach from Antiquity to Modernity and Back Again, Kathleen Noelle Cruz (University of California–Davis, USA)2. Horror in the Odyssey: A Few Notes on Leodes’ Beheading (22.326–329), Giulia Maria Chesi (University of Humboldt, Germany)3. The Visceral Thrills of Tragedy: Flesh, Blood and Guts Off and On the Tragic Stage, Evina Sistakou (Aristotle University, Greece)4. The Horrific Body in Sophocles, Glenn Most (University of Chicago, USA)5. Naming the Monster: Forensic Horror and Collective Trauma in Cicero’s Pro Roscio, Sophia Luise Häberle (University of Humboldt, Germany)6. Fearful Laughter: Bodily Horror in Roman Sexual Humour, Jesse Weiner (Hamilton College, USA)7. Cruor in flores mutabitur: Horrific Hybridisations in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, Aline Estèves (University of Montpellier, France)8. Landscapes and Bodies of Horror in Seneca’s Thyestes, Simona Martorana (University of Kiel, Germany)9. The Vocabulary of Homicidal Horror in Libanius’ Against a Murderer, Debbie Felton (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)10. At the Borders of Horror and Science: The Social Contexts of Roman Dissection, Claire Bubb (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World–New York University, USA)11. Overcoming Horror: ‘Numbness’ and Medical Agents. Some Thoughts on Medical Horror in Antiquity and Today’, Lutz Alexander Graumann (Justus-Liebig-University Gießen–University Hospital, Germany)12. Recipes for Horror in Greco-Roman Magic and Medicine, Sean Coughlin (Institute of Philosophy–Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic)13. Horror, Writing and Dissection in Sheridan LeFanu’s In a Glass Darkly, Arden Hegele (Columbia University, USA) NotesBibliographyIndex rerum et nominumIndex Locorum

This is a wide-ranging collection, dealing with many different aspects of how people might have experienced the emotion of horror in antiquity. Students and scholars with interests in this area will find much value in these pages.