Event Details - Classics lecture

“Drunken Poets and Fallen Philosophers: Gout and Pathographic Identity in Antiquity”

Disease has often been understood as a manifestation of more than simply bodily infirmity. In the most stigmatizing circumstances, the presence of disease can become an external marker of deficient character or even just retribution for the moral failure of the afflicted. Prof. Mulligan will explore what it means when a literary or historical figure in antiquity is characterized as suffering from gout. The attribution of gout carried with it a moralizing charge that enmeshed the subject in familiar categories of excessive consumption and loose moral character.

About the Speaker:
Bret Mulligan is an Associate Professor, and chair of, the Department of Classics at Haverford College. Prof. Mulligan works on late antiquity, which he describes as “the twilight of classical culture.” His publications focus on Roman poets and biographers of the later Roman Empire, and today’s lecture is part of a larger project on gout as a metaphor of disease.

Co-sponsored by the Biology and Philosophy Departments and HPAC