Health, Lifestyle, and Elite Culture in Greek and Roman Times

Panegyres, Konstantine

This book examines how elite literary authors conceived of the relationship between health and lifestyle in the Graeco-Roman world.
Through careful analysis of a wide range of ancient literary sources, provided in both the original Greek and Latin and in English translation, the book explores what Graeco-Roman authors thought about how lifestyle could contribute to a person’s healthiness or unhealthiness. It begins by looking at Graeco-Roman concepts of health and lifestyle from the Homeric poems to the Hippocratic Corpus before examining the medical regulation of lifestyle for health purposes, the nature of people’s healthy daily lifestyle habits, the various moral perspectives held by people in antiquity about health and lifestyle, and the influence of circumstances in determining whether people can live a healthy or unhealthy lifestyle.