Wednesday, October 18, 2017
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM (ET)
Tang Teaching Museum Somers
Event Type
Lecture
Contact
Department
Classics
Link
http://ems.skidmore.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=18556
“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