The Department of Classics welcomes Calloway Scott from the University of Cincinnati.
Human health is a precarious matter. COVID-19 has laid bare not only the fragility of our bodily well-being on a mass scale, but it has exposed both the social ties and fault lines which define communities. The ills of the body politic — its institutional failings and systemic inequities — have reproduced themselves in the sick bodies of its citizens. The traumatic visibility of these events has sparked calls to radically reimagine our communities, to re-envision the ways in which we live, labor, govern, and take care of one another. But it also demands that we consider the nature of health itself and what it means to be healthy. Was, or is, health ever solely the matter of sound and invisible bodily functioning? Where does the healthy, individual body begin and the web of interpersonal, economic, political, even religious forces surrounding it end? That is, when are bodies not bodies politic?
This talk addresses some of these questions by turning to ancient Greece and attempting to uncover how the peoples of the past encountered health and illness both as matters of biology and as embodied experiences with foundational implications for the imagining of the shared life of the polis.