PAW Lunch Talk | The Economy of Madness in the Greek and Roman World: Coining the Irrational

This paper explores the intersections between madness and economy in Greek and Roman antiquity, arguing that mental illness was conceptualized not only as a medical or moral condition but also as a financial and social phenomenon. Drawing on literary, legal, medical, and philosophical sources, the paper investigates how metaphors of currency and ownership shaped ancient understandings of mental disorder. Terms such as parakopê (“cutting a false coin”) and alienatio (“transfer of property”) reveal how financial language was used to describe the loss of rational control and personal coherence. The paper further examines legal procedures, including the graphê paranoias and the Roman cura furiosi et prodigi, alongside discussions in Plato’s Laws and in Roman jurisprudence on the sale of slaves with mental defects. By integrating insights from disability studies and ancient economic history, the paper demonstrates how madness was regulated, commodified, and moralized through economic logic. In doing so, it reframes ancient narratives of unreason within the dynamics of property, debt, and social order, revealing money as a structuring principle even in the realm of irrationality.

George Kazantzidis (BA, Thessaloniki; DPhil, Oxford) is Associate Professor of Latin at the University of Patras and a 2025–2026 Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has also held appointments as Visiting Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Visiting Research Fellow at the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, Research Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University, Nafplion, and Onassis Visiting Professor at Boğaziçi University. His research explores intersections between literature, medicine, and emotion in classical antiquity, with a particular focus on mental illness and the medical imagination in Greek and Roman culture. He is the author of Lucretius on Disease: The Poetics of Morbidity in De rerum natura (De Gruyter, 2021) and History of Mental Disorders in Classical Antiquity: Mania and Melancholia (in Modern Greek; Kallipos, 2025). He has co-edited volumes on topics such as Body and Machine in Classical Antiquity (CUP, 2023) and Horror in Classical Antiquity and Beyond (Bloomsbury, 2025). His current project at IAS, “The Economy of Madness in the Greek and Roman World,” investigates how the everyday realities and metaphors of money, debt, and ownership informed ancient conceptions of mental disorder, combining approaches from economic history, disability studies, and the history of medicine.

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