Classics Colloquium with Caterina Pellò

Join us for a presentation by Caterina Pellò, University College London, on "A Rehearsal for Death: Early Greek Views of Sleeping and Dying."

Tea at 4 p.m. in the Quita Woodward Room, Old Library.

Click here to register for the Zoom meeting.

Aristotle accuses the Presocratics of not treating the study of living beings in too much detail nor drawing sharp distinctions between them (On Respiration 1.22.470b29-31; On the Generation of Animals 5.8.788b10-15). But: what if the Presocratic attention to the similarities and continuity between living being and living process is not a flaw, as Aristotle suggests, but the very foundation of their biological theories? Specifically, this talk will focus on the mechanisms that rule the contiguous states of sleep and death. The Presocratics believed that there was a substantial continuity between the processes of falling asleep and dying. Sleep is a temporary, rather than permanent, interruption of vital functions. This makes sleep a ‘rehearsal for death’, as Anaxagoras defines it (Fr. 34), and the only ante mortem event one can investigate. The continuity of vital functions will then lead to a response to Aristotle about the extent to which the Presocratics advocated a less anthropocentric and more holistic and integrated view of the cosmos.

Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies