[Euripides and Heraclitus on the attitude towards the corpse--an unrecognized fragment of Heraclitus in Electra, v. 289].
Among the fragments of Heraclitus preserved to our times there is one saying that corpses ought to be disposed of more urgently than excrements Diels/Kranz 22 B 96. This sentence of an aphoristic nature, as frequently in the case of Heraclitus' scripts, allows many different interpretations. Even in antiquity these words led to vitriolic reactions and perplexed other writers. It is why they have been frequently quoted. Nevertheless, it has been overlooked until now that Euripides, the youngest of the three great Attic tragedians, had inserted them into one of his dramas. In his Electra it is the title figure who uses them while reporting the slaughter of Agamemnon. The quotation bears witness to Euripides' erudition as of one of the earliest men known to have possessed a private library. He must, therefore, have had access to many treatises on various subjects, among them to the work by Heraclitus. The Electra is a kind of homage to the obscure thinker from Ephesus. From this fact, and from the plot of this particular play, we may gain some insight into an ambivalent attitude of the ancient Greeks towards the corpse that certainly influenced ideas about human anatomy in particular and medical knowledge in general. A characteristic feature of the malefactors, namely Aigisthos and Clytaimestra, is the deliberate dishonouring of their victims corpse. By contrast, the noble characters Orestes and Electra never violate the corpse of their arch-enemy Aigisthos, but see to it that he is properly buried. Burial was, particularly in Athens, so essential that in the well-known Arginusai trial the failure to bury the fallen soldiers resulted in capital punishment for the accused. Nevertheless, it is likely that Euripides, following Heraclitus, did not reject the anatomical examination of corpses for scientific purposes, as he was not only in this regard a supporter of science and progress. Perhaps Plato's notion of the human body as the tomb of the soul is foreshadowed here. This notion may have helped demythologize the corpse. Anyway, it is striking to observe the beginnings of the so-called Hippocratic medicine on the coast of Asia Minor and the near islands. It is exactly this part of the world where the pre-Socratics had made their first attempts at reasoning about the nature of being and made the transition from mythos to logos a few generations earlier. That intellectual climate was certainly good for nourishing scientific ideas of paramount importance. Heraclitus was without doubt one of the deepest-thinking pre-Socratics. The acceptance of his results by many critical thinkers of the time, such as Euripides, helped them attain their due recognition.
Moog
Ferdinand Peter
FP
Institut für Geschichte und Ethik der Medizin, Universität zu Köln. fmoog@uni-koeln.de
D002048:Burial / Q000266:history*; D004324:Drama / Q000266:history*; D000076145:Greece, Ancient; D049690:History, Ancient; D018594:Human Body; D006801:Humans; D010684:Philosophy / Q000266:history