Demokrit - Lachender Philosoph und Sanguinischer Melancholiker

The theme of the book is the Hellenistic epistolary novel which describes a fictional meeting between Democritus and Hippocrates. The author traces the later history of this story as part of the legend of the laughing philosopher on the one hand and of the history of melancholy on the other and demonstrates the interdependence of all three traditions in text editions, translations, paraphrases, commentaries, verse and painting from ancient times through to the Renaissance. He shows how the Stoic-Cynical tradition of 'Philosophus ridens' and the medical concept of 'Typus melancholicus sanguinicus' come to amalgamate into the early modern Humanist literary and iconographical tradition of 'Democritus ridens melancholicus'. In so doing the author also shows the importance of this tradition to the subsequent interpretation of the epistolary novel and its influence on modern research into the Hippocratic corpus and melancholy.
The work links important themes in the fields of ancient philosophy, ancient medicine, art history and Renaissance studies and will offer thought-provoking material to many of those working in these areas.

Thomas Rütten completed a triple course of studies in medicine, ancient history and ancient philosophy at the University of Bonn and currently teaches in the Institut für Theorie und Geschichte der Medizin at the University of Münster in Germany.

'Ce livre complète admirablement celui de Jody Rubin Pinault...'
Danielle Gourevitch, Revue d'Histoire des Sciences, 1994.
'Rütten's Demokrit is brilliant...'
John Scarborough, Bulletin of the History of Medecine, 1995.
'...Rütten's book is interesting as a study in Rezeptionsgeschichte, and the accidents by which an idea may be concretized in a particular symbol and in that guise acquire a life of its own.'
David Konstan Ancient Philosophy, 1994.