BODILY FLUIDS IN ANTIQUITY From ancient Egypt to Imperial Rome, from Greek medicine to early Christianity, this volume examines how human bodily fluids influenced ideas about gender, sexuality, politics, emotions, and morality, and how those ideas shaped later European thought. Comprising 24 chapters across seven key themes—language, gender, eroticism, nutrition, dissolution, death, and afterlife—this volume investigates bodily fluids in the context of the current sensory turn. It asks fundamental questions about physicality and fluidity: how were bodily fluids categorised and differentiated? How were fluids trapped inside the body perceived, and how did this perception alter when those fluids were externalised? Do ancient approaches complement or challenge our modern sensibilities about bodily fluids? How were religious practices influenced by attitudes towards bodily fluids, and how did religious authorities attempt to regulate or restrict their appearance? Why were some fluids taboo and others cherished? In what ways were bodily fluids gendered? Offering a range of scholarly approaches and voices, this volume explores how ideas about the body and the fluids it contained and externalised are culturally conditioned and ideologically determined. The analysis encompasses the key geographic centres of the ancient Mediterranean basin, including Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Egypt. By taking a longue durée perspective across a richly intertwined set of territories, this collection is the first to provide a comprehensive, wide-ranging study of bodily fluids in the ancient world. Bodily Fluids in Antiquity will be of particular interest to academic readers working in the fields of classics and its reception, archaeology, anthropology, and ancient to Early Modern history. It will also appeal to more general readers with an interest in the history of the body and history of medicine. Mark Bradley is Professor of Classics and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham, UK. Together with Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University, USA), he is editor of a series of volumes on ‘The Senses in Antiquity’ for Routledge, for which he has contributed a volume on Smell and the Ancient Senses (2015). Victoria Leonard is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University, UK, and at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, UK. Her research focuses on the late antique and early medieval western Mediterranean. She has published on religious conflict, gender and violence, and ancient historiography. Laurence Totelin is Reader in Ancient History at Cardiff University, UK. She has published widely on Greek and Roman botany, pharmacology, and gynaecology. BODILY FLUIDS IN ANTIQUITY Edited by Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard, and Laurence Totelin First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard, and Laurence Totelin; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard, and Laurence Totelin to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bradley, Mark, 1977– editor. | Leonard, Victoria, editor. | Totelin, Laurence M. V., editor. Title: Bodily fluids in antiquity / edited by Mark Bradley, Victoria Leonard, and Laurence Totelin. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051403 (print) | LCCN 2020051404 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138343726 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367764067 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429438974 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Body fluids—History—To 1500. | Civilization, Classical. | Civilization, Western—Classical influences. Classification: LCC QP90.5 .B34 2021 (print) | LCC QP90.5 (ebook) | DDC 612/.01522—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051403 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051404 ISBN: 978-1-138-34372-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76406-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43897-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC This book is dedicated to our partners and children, Richard, Philip, Thomas, Llewellyn, and Gwilym. vii List of figures xi List of tables xii Acknowledgements xiii List of contributors xv Introduction 1 MARK BRADLEY, VICTORIA LEONARD, AND LAURENCE TOTELIN PART I The language of fluidity 15 1 Fluid vocabulary: flux in the lexicon of bodily emissions 17 AMY COKER PART II A woman in flux 41 2 A valid excuse for a day off work: menstruation in an ancient Egyptian village 43 ROSALIND JANSSEN 3 Uterine bleeding, knowledge, and emotion in ancient Greek medical and magical representations 57 IRENE SALVO 4 Puellae gently glow: scent, sweat, and the real in Latin love elegy and Ovid’s didactic works 75 JANE BURKOWSKI CONTENTS C O N T E N T S viii 5 Overflowing bodies and a Pandora of ivory: the pure humours of an erotic surrogate 89 CATALINA POPESCU PART III Erotic and generative fluids 105 6 The eyes have it: from generative fluids to vision rays 107 JULIE LASKARIS 7 ‘Infertile’ and ‘sub-fertile’ semen in the Hippocratic Corpus and the biological works of Aristotle 120 REBECCA FALLAS 8 Say it with fluids: what the body exudes and retains when Juvenal’s couple relationships go awry 134 CLAUDE-EMMANUELLE CENTLIVRES CHALLET 9 Flabby flesh and foetal formation: body fluidity and foetal sex differentiation in ancient Greek medicine 145 TARA MULDER 10 One-seed, two-seed, three-seed? Reassessing the fluid economy of ancient generation 158 REBECCA FLEMMING 11 Phalli fighting with fluids: approaching images of ejaculating phalli in the Roman world 173 ADAM PARKER PART IV Nutritive and healthy fluids 191 12 A natural symbol? The (un)importance of blood in early Greek literary and religious contexts 193 EMILY KEARNS 13 Taste and the senses: Galen’s humours clarified 210 JOHN WILKINS 14 Breastmilk, breastfeeding, and the female body in early Imperial Rome 224 THEA LAWRENCE C O N T E N T S ix 15 Breastmilk in the cave and on the arena: early Christian stories of lactation in context 240 LAURENCE TOTELIN PART V Dissolving and liquefying bodies 257 16 Tears and the leaky vessel: permeable and fluid bodies in Ovid and Lucretius 259 PETER KELLY 17 Seneca’s corpus : a sympathy of fluids and fluctuations 272 MICHAEL GOYETTE 18 Bodily fluids, grotesque imagery, and poetics in Persius’ Satires 287 ANDREAS GAVRIELATOS PART VI Wounded and putrefying bodies 303 19 ‘Efflux is my manifestation’: positive conceptions of putrefactive fluids in the ancient Egyptian coffin texts 305 TASHA DOBBIN-BENNETT 20 The physiology of matricide: revenge and metabolism imagery in Aeschylus’ Oresteia 321 GORAN VIDOVIĆ 21 Open wounds, liquid bodies, and melting selves in early Imperial Latin literature 338 ASSAF KREBS PART VII Ancient fluids: afterlife and reception 353 22 The reception of classical constructions of blood in Medieval and Early Modern martyrologies 355 ANASTASIA STYLIANOU 23 ‘Expelling the purple tyrant from the citadel’: the menstruation debate in book 2 of Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex (1662) 369 CAROLINE SPEARING C O N T E N T S x 24 Opening the body of fluids: taking in and pouring out in Renaissance readings of classical women 381 HELEN KING Envoi 399 MARK BRADLEY AND VICTORIA LEONARD Index 407 xi 0.1 All participants of the conference ‘Bodily Fluids/Fluid Bodies in Greek and Roman Antiquity’, 11 July 2016, St Michael’s College, Cardiff University. xiv 2.1 Recto (a) and verso (b) of a large limestone attendance register in New Egyptian hieratic, dating to the reign of Ramesses II. 47 3.1 (a) Mars Ultor and Tantalus formula, obverse of Michel 2001: no. 383; (b) amphora-shaped womb with divine names and vowels, reverse of Michel 2001: no. 383, gem in black haematite, third century ce. 62 11.1 The Evil Eye surrounded by its enemies, mosaic from Antioch, House of the Evil Eye, second century ce. 175 11.2 The Evil Eye surrounded by its enemies, gold disk from Norfolk, UK, first–fourth centuries ce. 176 11.3 Left-facing zoomorphic phallus attacking an Evil Eye, stone carving from Leptis Magna, Roman Imperial. 177 11.4 A phallus ejaculating towards a stylised Eye, stone carving from Chesters Fort on Hadrian’s Wall, second–fourth centuries ce. 179 11.5 A phallus ejaculating towards an ovoid figure, stone carving from Maryport Fort on Hadrian’s Wall, second–fourth centuries ce. 180 11.6 Phallus urinating towards a pair of vulvas, mosaic from Sousse, Tunisia, second–third centuries ce. 182 11.7 Zoomorphic phallus, copper-alloy tintinnabulum , first century ce. 185 FIGURES xii 9.1 Gender possibilities in On Regimen 1.28–9 149 18.1 Liquids linked to the body: external applications 289 18.2 Liquids linked to the body: bodily fluids 290 18.3 Poetic fluidity 291 19.1 Comparison of estimated days to Total Body Scores 8 and 20 across the four Egyptian sites 308 TABLES xiii Laurence Totelin, Victoria Leonard, and Mark Bradley would like to thank all partici- pants in the original conference ‘Bodily Fluids/Fluid Bodies in Greek and Roman Antiq- uity’, which was held at St Michael’s College, Cardiff University, 11–13 July 2016. They helped to shape discussion and ensured that the conference was intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable. We would especially like to thank those who presented their research but did not contribute to the proceeding volume, including: Deborah Lyons, Rosie Jackson, Laura Mareri, Heather Hunter-Crawley, Colin Web- ster, Christiaan Caspers, Emilio Capettini, Blossom Stefaniw, Jan Stenger, Dawn LaV- alle Norman, Susanne Turner, Calloway Brewster-Scott, and Leyla Ozbek, in addition to all the other participants in the conference. We would also like to thank St Michael’s College for hosting the conference and Rachel Roberts for photographing the event. Without the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, Cardiff University, the Institute of Classical Studies, the Classical Association, and the University of Bristol, the con- ference would not have been possible, and we would not have been able to provide bursaries to enable the participation of postgraduates and early career academics. The conference website is still available, and includes the original programme and photo- graphs of the event. Please see: https://bodilyfluids.wordpress.com/ (Accessed February 2021). Thanks especially to Gary Fisher for his careful and expert copy-editing, and to Jane Draycott and Kristi Upson-Saia for their guidance in the final stages. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S xiv Figure 0.1 All participants of the conference ‘Bodily Fluids/Fluid Bodies in Greek and Roman Antiquity’, 11 July 2016, St Michael’s College, Cardiff University. Source : © The Editors. xv Mark Bradley is Professor of Classics and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the Uni- versity of Nottingham, UK. He is author of Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (2009) and was editor of Papers of the British School at Rome (2011–17). Together with Shane Butler (Johns Hopkins University, USA), he is editor of a series of vol- umes on ‘The Senses in Antiquity’ for Routledge, for which he has contributed a volume on Smell and the Ancient Senses (2015). He has also edited a volume on classics and the British Empire (2010) and a volume on ideas about dirt, pollution, and corporeality in the ancient and modern city of Rome (2012). Jane Burkowski , having earned a doctorate in classical languages and literature at Oriel College, Oxford, UK, in 2013, now works as a freelance proofreader, copy- editor, and translator. As an independent researcher, her interests include Latin poetry (especially love elegy), Roman social history, and the interaction between the two. Her past publications include a chapter on the figure of Apollo in Tibullus 2.3 and 2.5, in Augustan Poetry and the Irrational (2016), edited by Philip Hardie. Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet is Scientific Collaborator at the Institut d’Archéologie et des Sciences de l’Antiquité at the University of Lausanne, Switz- erland. Her current research interests focus on gender and couple relationships. She has published on these subjects as well as on Roman breastfeeding, breast pumps, infant feeding, family, Pliny, and Juvenal. She is the editor of Married Life in Greco-Roman Antiquity (forthcoming 2021, Routledge). Amy Coker held teaching and research positions in classics and ancient history at vari- ous institutions in the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2017, including a Lever- hulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Manchester (2013–16) to work on the sexual and scatological vocabulary of Classical Greek. She is now Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, UK, and teaches classics at Chelten- ham Ladies’ College, UK. Her current work focuses on offensive language and the language of the human body in Greek. She has published in the fields of historical linguistics, pragmatics, and classics, and her most recent pieces are on the treatment of obscene language in the most well-known lexicon of Ancient Greek, Liddell and Scott (2019), and on a filthy joke told by Cleopatra involving a ladle (2019). Tasha Dobbin-Bennett is Assistant Professor of Art History at Emory University: Oxford College, USA. Her primary research examines the ancient Egyptian con- ceptions of decomposition and putrefaction through an interdisciplinary study CONTRIBUTORS C O N T R I B U T O R S xvi applying forensic anthropological research to the ancient Egyptian medical and religious texts. Having spent a number of years on archaeological excavations in Egypt, she is interested in how Egypt’s unique climate contributed to the ancient Egyptian perception of the post-mortem human body. Rebecca Fallas is an early career researcher and holds a Visiting Research Fellowship in Classical Studies at The Open University, UK, and previously in History and Phi- losophy of Science at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on health and reproduction in the ancient world. She is currently working on her first mono- graph, Experiencing Infertility in Ancient Greece , based on her PhD thesis. Rebecca Flemming is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History in the Classics Faculty, and a Fellow of Jesus College, at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her research focuses on the society and culture of the Roman Empire, and she has published widely on classical medicine, gender and sexuality, both together and separately. Her book Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature and Authority from Celsus to Galen came out in 2000, and the volume she co-edited with Nick Hop- wood and Lauren Kassell, Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day , was pub- lished in 2018. She is currently writing a book on medicine and empire in the Roman world. Andreas Gavrielatos is currently teaching at the University of Reading, UK, and he has previously taught at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and the Open University of Cyprus, Greece. His research revolves around Roman satire and in particular Persius, and he is currently preparing a commentary on his satires alongside a series of articles. He has also published on Roman onomastics and cultural and linguistic contacts in the Roman world. He is the editor of volumes on Roman identities, ancient Cyprus, and Roman multiculturalism. Michael Goyette is Instructor of Classics at Eckerd College in St Petersburg, Florida, USA. His research and teaching interests include ancient medicine and medical humanities, ancient science, gender, tragedy, reception, and pedagogy. With each of these interests, he frequently engages with representations of bodies and their implications for lived experiences. A major goal of both his research and teaching is to demonstrate how the humanities and the sciences complement and speak to each other in multiple time periods, including the present. He is currently working on a book comparing discourses of illness in Senecan tragedy with Latin medical prose. Rosalind Janssen is Honorary Lecturer in Education at UCL’s Institute of Education, UK. She was previously a curator in UCL’s Petrie Museum and then a lecturer in Egyptology at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology. She currently teaches Egyptology classes at both Oxford University, UK, and London’s City Lit. Rosalind has pub- lished a series of articles on the ancient Egyptian village of Deir el-Medina, covering aspects such as juvenile hooliganism and the position of older women within the community. She and her Egyptologist husband Jac. Janssen were the authors of Growing Up and Getting Old in Ancient Egypt (2007). Emily Kearns is Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, UK. She is the author of The Heroes of Attica (1989) and Ancient Greek Religion: C O N T R I B U T O R S xvii A Sourcebook (2010), as well as articles on a wide range of subjects in Greek reli- gion and classical literature. She is currently completing a commentary on Euripi- des’ Iphigenia in Tauris , and her next project is a monograph on blood in the classical world. Peter Kelly is Lecturer in the Classics Department in the National University of Ireland Galway, where he is currently teaching a course on the reception of Greek Tragedy. He has recently published a number of articles on the influence of Plato on Ovid in Classical Quarterly and Philologus , and he is completing the final edits of his book, titled The Cosmic Text from Ovid to Plato , on this theme. He is also developing a new project on the literary impact of Lucretius in Early Modern science, and his most recent article is focused on Galileo’s reimagining of Lucretian metaphors. Helen King is a historian of medicine and the body and retired from The Open University, UK, in 2017. Since then she has held a one-year post at Gustavus Adolphus College, USA, to promote interdisciplinary approaches to history. Her earlier career included visiting roles at the Peninsula Medical School, UK, and the universities of Vienna (Austria), Texas (USA), Notre Dame (USA), and British Columbia (Canada). She has published on aspects of medicine from Classical Greece to the nineteenth century, and her most recent book, Hippocrates Now , was published in 2019. She is currently working on a history of the female body. Assaf Krebs is Senior Lecturer in the unit for transdisciplinary studies at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel. His research focuses on the human skin in modern and ancient thought, particularly in Roman thought, from the early Republic to the high Empire. He is also engaged with modern intellectual thought and the classics and has published on classical literature and Merleau- Ponty, Deleuze, and Guattari. His current project is a monograph on skin in ancient Rome. His next projects will focus on classics and the Anthropocene, and classics in the light of Global South epistemologies. Julie Laskaris received her doctorate in classics from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, 1999 (BA cum laude , Classics, New York University, USA, 1982). Before that, she was a modern dancer. She is an associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Richmond, Virginia, USA. Her research interests centre on ancient Greek and Roman medicine. She is most recently author of a chapter on ‘Diseases’, in Totelin, L. (ed.), Antiquity (Volume I), Cultural History of Medicine (Bloomsbury, 2021), and a co-editor (with R. Rosen and P. Singer) of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Galen Thea Lawrence is an early career researcher and received her PhD in ancient history from the University of Nottingham, UK, in 2019. Her thesis, Odour, Perfume, and the Female Body in Ancient Rome explores the many ways in which sources as diverse as myth, medicine, poetry, drama, and natural history interacted to construct the odour of the female body in the literary culture of Late Republican and Early Imperial Rome. She has taught on a range of subjects related to ancient history, literature, and classical reception at the University of Nottingham, UK, and the University of Lincoln, UK. C O N T R I B U T O R S xviii Victoria Leonard is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communi- ties at Coventry University, and at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research focuses on the late antique and early medieval western Mediterranean. Victoria has published articles with Vigiliae Christianae , Studies in Late Antiquity , and Gender & His- tory . Her monograph, In Defiance of History: Orosius and the Unimproved Past , is under contract with Routledge. Tara Mulder is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She has published articles on gender, sex, and medicine in ancient Greece and Rome and is writing a monograph about human reproduction in the ancient world and today. She is also working on an English translation of Metrodora’s Gynecology Adam Parker is a part-time PhD student with the Open University, UK, researching the archaeology of magic in Roman Britain. He is also Associate Collections Curator at the Yorkshire Museum, UK, and Finds Liaison Officer for the Portable Antiquities Scheme. His research focuses on the materiality of ancient magic as well as sensory and phenomenological approaches. Catalina Popescu has a PhD in classics from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, with a dissertation on memory in the tragedies about Orestes’ matricide. She is interested in the function of heroic bodies as receptacles of memory in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (‘ Ta Klea Andron , (Dis)Embodiment and Heroic Peregrinations at Ovid’). She has published papers on the literary symbolism of bodies and fluids with the University of Bucharest and the Museum of Archaeology and National History in Constanţa. For the summer of 2021 she obtained an ‘Eugen Lozovan’ fellowship to research the transformations of heroic cultural memory in Ovid’s Metamorphoses at the University of Copenhagen. Irene Salvo is presently A. G. Leventis Research Associate in Hellenic Studies at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research focuses on Greek social and cultural history and material culture. She has published on the embodied and gendered dimensions of ritual practices, their emotional dynamics, pollution, and purification, as well as knowledge and education. Her latest publications include the volume co-edited with Tanja S. Scheer, Religion and Education in the Ancient Greek World (Mohr Siebeck, 2021). Caroline Spearing has taught classics in a number of schools, including Winchester College, UK, and St. Paul’s School, UK, where she was Head of Department. In 2017 she was awarded her PhD for a study of Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum Libri Sex (1662 and 1668). In 2019 she was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, based at the University of Exeter, UK, where she is working on seventeenth-century neo-Latin university verse anthologies. Anastasia Stylianou is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the History Department at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her doctoral research examined constructions of martyrs’ blood in the English Reformations. She was subsequently the principal C O N T R I B U T O R S xix investigator for Victoria County History’s project on the parish of Cradley (Her- efordshire). Her current research analyses transnational Anglo-Hellenic networks, c. 1520–c. 1650, exploring how the Reformations and globalisation shaped English contacts with and constructions of Greeks and Greek Christianity. Her publica- tions include ‘Martyrs’ blood in the English Reformations’ , British Catholic His- tory (2017), Volume 33 (4), 534–60. Laurence Totelin is Reader in Ancient History at Cardiff University, UK. Her research focuses on Greek and Roman botany, pharmacology, and gynaecology. Her key publications include Hippocratic Recipes: Oral and Written Transmission of Knowledge in Fifth- and Fourth-Century Greece (2009); with Gavin Hardy, Ancient Botany (Routledge, 2016); and edited with Rebecca Flemming, Medicine and Markets in the Graeco-Roman World and Beyond: Essays on Ancient Medi- cine in Honour of Vivian Nutton (2020). Goran Vidović (PhD Cornell 2016) is Assistant Professor of Latin in the Department of Classics, University of Belgrade, Serbia, where he teaches various advanced Latin courses (comedy, satire, prose composition). One of his main interests is ancient drama, especially comedy, in all its variations and throughout history. His publications include works on Greek tragedy, Aristophanes, Livy, Plautus, late antique comedy, early Christian apocrypha, and the reception of Roman comedy in the twentieth-century musical. He is currently working on Plautus’ comedy the Braggart Soldier John Wilkins is Emeritus Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Exeter, UK. Publications on the body include The Boastful Chef (2000), Galen and the World of Knowledge (edited with C. Gill and T. Whitmarsh, 2009) and Galien: Sur les facultés des aliments (2013), along with numerous chapters on food and nutrition in the ancient world. He is currently working on a translation of Galen’s Simple Medicines and on Galen’s teaching for well-being and preventive medicine.