Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond

This open-access volume is the first to explore systematically and comprehensively the concept and category of ‘horror’ in antiquity. The contributors retrieve the ancient grammar of horror by paying equal attention to its affective and cognitive dimensions, and by looking at it as an embodied, enactive and full-rounded existential experience. They explore how horrifying experiences in antiquity are construed as embodied events while being conceptually rooted in cultural frameworks. They also showcase the ways in which the body itself can turn into a source of deep horror, be it in literary or medical texts and traditions in the Greek and Roman world, from the classical period to late antiquity.

While maintaining a firm awareness of the fact that ‘horror’, a largely post-Romantic concept, is not unproblematic when applied to Graeco-Roman antiquity, this collection of studies shows that our Graeco-Roman past can shed substantial light on the ways in which the horrific is understood today, as a category of art but also of life itself.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Exzellenzcluster ROOTS, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (Germany).

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).