Roman Time

Goran Kardum

2025-10-30

Roman time

  • Rome was founded around 625 BC in the areas of ancient Italy known as Etruria and Latium
  • Period of Kings (625-510 BC)
  • Republican Rome (510-31 BC)
  • Imperial Rome (31 BC – AD 476)

Roman time

  • Roman society was grounded in superestition and polytheism
  • The main virtues of Romans: conformity, duty, order, loyalty, perseverance
  • The Romans had an interest in medicine mainly because of practical application
  • Study of medicine also motivated curiosity about psychological questions

Asclepiades (c. 124 BCE)

  • Early figure in the study of mental disorders
  • Ancient Romans believed that Gods caused mental illness
  • Asclepiades practiced medicine openly opposing to the current Hippocrates’ thought, stating that the only therapy should consist of hygienic and good nutritional habitudes, and a relaxed life. (Santacroce et al., 2017)
  • Modern medicine must thank Asclepiades for his lessons about the importance of the hygiene to avoid infection and to maintain a good health status

Claudious Galenus

  • 129-199 CE, personal physician of Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius
  • Roman law prohibited dissection of human cadavers, so Galen conducted anatomical studies on pigs, apes, and other animals
  • He wrote four hundred treatises covering numerous medical issues (only 83 of his works exist)

Humor theory

  • four-humor theory of black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile.
  • four qualities (cold, warm, dry, and moist) play a role in sickness and wellness When one is in good health
  • humors and qualities remain in balance. An imbalance produces illness, mental disorders.
  • early personality theory

Four personality traits

  • four personality traits or temperaments (based on Hippocrates theoryof the four humors)
  • temperaments derived from the Latin verb temperare, meaning to mix
  • choleric temperament: quick tempered
  • phlegmatic: slugish, unemotional
  • sanguine: optimistic, sunny person
  • melancholic: tendency toward depression states

What affects the balance?

  • various foods could increase or decrease the humors
  • Geography
  • Occupation
  • Age
  • Seasonal changes

Mental disorders

  • black bile may produce melancholia
  • excess of yellow bile and heat: mania
  • Treatment: treatments relied on the opposite of the excess
  • That is physiological basis of mental disorders

Mental disorders

  • This close relationship between philosophy and medicine is confirmed by the Greek physician Galen in the era of the Roman Empire (Santacroce et al., 2017)
  • Galenic ‘therapy of the soul’ (Singer, 2018)
  • What is a pathos of the soul for Galen?
  • The word pathos, usually translated into English as “affection” or “passion”, and of course familiar in modern languages from aesthetic, emotive and medical terms in common use (pathos, pathetic, pathology), is a central term in the Graeco-Roman ethical—but, as we shall shortly see, also medical discourse (Singer, 2018)

Soul and Passions

  • Galen’s book On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions contains advice on seeking an- other person’s counsel for emotional problems.

  • Jackson (1969), should be “an older man—mature, respected, free from passions—who would point out the person’s faults in regard to his passions” (p. 380).

  • He was a major proponent of psychosomatic medicine

Galen psychotherapy

  • Galen seems to advocate an early psychotherapy.

  • Although authoritarian and direct, his therapy stressed a confrontation of passions.

  • Galen believed that passions (powerful experiences such as greed, anger, and jealousy) burned with greater intensity than typical emotions (Maher & Maher, 2003)

  • Passions are the root of psychological problems

Early psychotherapy

  • Authoritarian and direct type of psychotherapy
  • Confrontation with the passions
  • Powerful experiences sith greed, anger, jealousy are the root of psychological problems, mental disorders

Not only physiological basis!

  • Galen beleive that mental states are very important! (Singer, 2018)
  • Melancholia: woman and famed dancer Pylades
  • Woman’s expression changed, heart rate became irregular
  • He stated that he have proof that mental states have important, related physiological consequences

Dynamic universe

  • Vitalism and dynamic processes: pneuma
  • Pneuma referred to air drawn in as breath that is distributed to bodily tissue (King et al., 2016)
  • Three vital principles of life (derived from tripartite theory of Erasistratus): natural spirit, vital spirit, and animal spirit

Dynamic universe

  • natural spirit: plants and animals life. Unconsciousness, vegetative day-to-day procesess
  • vital spirit - regulated body heat
  • psychic pneuma - tranlated as animal spirit
  • Vital spirit is in the heart, Psychic-Animal spirit in the head
  • Substances of the brain are very importan in the mental processes

The Roman Philosophy

  • Stoicism (discipline, self-control, lawfulness of nature),
  • Epicureanism (pleasure is good and pain is an evil, must be avoid),
  • Skepticism (every argument has a counterargument),
  • Neo-Platonism (mixture of philosophy and religion)

Plotinus (205-270)

  • Born in Egypt, Neoplatonism
  • Combine ethics of Stoicism and mystical components of Plato beliefs
  • He lived like a Christian saint amid the city luxuries
  • He ashamed that his soul had a body, he took no care of himself physically
  • Eat simplest foods, avoided sexual activity

Plotinus (205-270)

  • Merged Platonic thought and religion
  • Believed in three unextended or nonmaterial things above matter
  • First (God), second (Abstraction of intellectual principle), third (Soul)
  • God gave a meaning to nous, intellectual principle

Aurelius Augustinus Hipponessis

  • Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine
  • Born 354. in Tagaste (today Souk-Ahras, Algeria)
  • Died in Hippo (Annaba, Algeria) in 430.

Augustine

  • Confessions, one of the first autobiographical works in Western culture
  • He described himself as “a slave of lust” and as “in bondage to a lasting habit” (Confessions, p. 132) (King et al., 2016)
  • Cognition and memory: categorized theoretical framework (sensible memory, intellectual memory, memory of memories, memory of feelings and passion, and memory of forgetting); this is corresponding to nothing less than a tentative taxonomy of memory systems, as one would say today (Cassel et al., 2012).

Next lecture

  • Naturalistic positions vs. 
  • Religion, Christianity

Western society, Christianity

  • What was the major differences between concept of soul in Ancient Greek (Plato, Aristotle) and Roman time, Christianity?
  • Concept of creation, God as creator, man as creature
  • Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

References

Cassel, J.-C., Cassel, D., & Manning, L. (2012). From Augustine of Hippo’s Memory Systems to Our Modern Taxonomy in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience of Memory: A 16-Century Nap of Intuition before Light of Evidence. Behavioral Sciences, 3(1), 21–41. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs3010021
King, D. B., Viney, W., & Woody, W. D. (2016). A history of psychology : Ideas and context (Fifth edition.). Psychology Press.
Santacroce, L., Bottalico, L., & Charitos, I. A. (2017). Greek Medicine Practice at Ancient Rome: The Physician Molecularist Asclepiades. Medicines, 4(4), 92. https://doi.org/10.3390/medicines4040092
Singer, P. N. (2018). Galen’s Pathological Soul: Diagnosis and Therapy in Ethical and Medical Texts and Contexts*. In Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine (pp. 381–420). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004362260_016