The Orestes’ acute stress on Euripides

Abstract

The present article is a survey of the state of the art on the incorporation of medical terms in the tragic corpus throughout the 5th century BC, specifically on the psychic disorders that affect the character Orestes. This is an interdisciplinary bibliographical research based on studies on the history of Greek medicine by Jacques Jouanna and on cognitive-behavioral psychology, in line with Aaron Beck.  Both Aeschylus and Euripides used concepts of medicine in their poetry to characterize their characters. In the play Orestes (c. 408 BC) by Euripides (c. 480 - 406 BC), a picture of symptoms and causes of the disorder called for the poet as mania, which affects the title character, is presented to the public. The aim of this article is to verify the metonymic relationships between the concept of mania in classical antiquity and the concept of post-traumatic stress in contemporary psychology.