Prose and poetry of pain. A history of the term ἄλγος

In this paper I investigate the history of the term ἄλγος ‘pain’ as an interesting case of how a common word in Homeric epic later became to be considered more rarified, turning into a refined and poetic term by the 5th century BC. Despite its frequent occurrence in tragedy, its use is in fact only attested once in Herodotus (5.49.2), never in Thucydides, and only fourteen times in the Hippocratic corpus, where a clear tendency to innovate the vocabulary of pain can be observed. Indeed, the highly objective neologism ἄλγημα, the term with the most emotionally negative charge, λύπη, and the generic πόνος, capable of expressing a broad semantic spectrum — ‘physical fatigue’ but also ‘pain’ — gradually came to be preferred over the poignant epicism. A review of literary texts that revive ἄλγος in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods, such as the Septuagint and Eusebius of Caesarea’s Life of Constantine, helps us to better appreciate the stylistic tenor of passages that have often been insufficiently studied from a lexical perspective.