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It is well known that the rational understanding of disease that we find in the Hippocratic Corpus contrasts with a much older conception that is represented in Greek tragedy. Since the subjects of Greek tragedy are mythical, the belief in the divine origin of disease is widespread, and the important healing figures are gods. By contrast, Hippocratic doctors explain disease by natural causes and reject any intervention of an anthropomorphic divinity; and their therapeutic action combats the cause of the disease through rational means. Although the understandings of disease in medical literature and in tragedy are clearly far apart, a more detailed investigation reveals similarities as well as differences. To show these similarities, two methods of investigation present themselves. The first is to demonstrate how the rational understanding of doctors managed to influence the tragic authors.1 The second has been much less explored and will form the basis of this paper. It consists in showing that in spite of its prevailing rationalism, the Hippocratic Corpus’ vocabulary of pathology preserves, in what is usually called its metaphorical expression, traces of an older representation of disease, similar to that used in tragedy. It is the understanding of disease as an aggressive force that attacks the individual from the outside, penetrates him, takes possession of him and, like a wild animal, can feed on his flesh. The philologist that adopts this approach must list and semantically analyse the entire metaphoric vocabulary of disease, both in the Hippocratic Corpus and in tragedy, in order to reconstruct its force and coherence and to clarify the image of disease it contains. Since a full comparison is not possible within the constraints of this paper, I will limit myself to the specific theme of the vocabulary of wildness and devouring. The first part of the paper will study

Disease As Aggression in the Hippocratic Corpus and Greek Tragedy: Wild and Devouring Disease