Abstract
This chapter investigates the connections between sex and epilepsy in ancient medical texts, from the Hippocratic Corpus down to Aretaeus of Cappadocia. I start by considering evidence from classical Greek medicine, and I argue that some sort of implicit association is already present there and is drawn along the lines of a common “symptomatology” including: intense bodily movements, convulsions, moaning, rolling of the eyes and an involuntary release of fluids. I then move to the evidence provided by Aretaeus of Cappadocia, where sex is explicitly said to “bear the symbols” of the disease. Interestingly, while Aretaeus invites us to picture an epileptic body and a body that is having sex as being disconcertingly similar to each other, he also warns us that epilepsy is an envious disease: it leaves the bodies of young people permanently scarred; it takes away their beauty; it makes them feel ashamed about the way they look (especially at the moment that they have a fit); ultimately, it makes them feel less desirable. The disease, I conclude, helps to bring out the peculiar, and not always comfortable, relationship between sex and desire in antiquity: a body that is the object of desire can suddenly turn itself into something disgusting when it becomes entangled with another body during sex, descending, as it were, into a messy world of fluids, incomprehensible sounds and uncontainable movements.
