Laudator Temporis Acti

Marcel Detienne (1935-2019), Dionysos at Large, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 4, with notes on p. 68:

In Greek, however, the word "epidemic" belonged to the vocabulary of theophany. Emile Littré, the nineteenth-century French lexicographer, was aware of this when he introduced the word into the French language.⁶ It was a technical term used in talking about the gods. "Epidemics" were sacrifices offered to the divine powers when they came to visit a region or a temple or attended a feast or were present at a sacrifice.⁷ Symmetrically, "apodemics" were sacrifices offered upon the gods' departure. For there was a traffic of the gods, a traffic that became particularly heavy during Theoxenia, occasions when a city, individual, or god offered hospitality to some or all of the deities.⁸ The gods came to the place and lived there for a time; they were actually present,⁹ or "epidemized." Being resident but not sedentary, they resembled the Hippocratic physicians, itinerant practitioners who composed what were called Epidemics: sheafs of notes, brief protocols or, rather, minutes relating the course of the disease—a careful record of the symptoms, the crisis, the care administered, and the patient's reactions.¹⁰ The technique was that of a reporter, practiced by Ion of Chios, an intellectual of the fifth century B.C., in his work entitled Epidemics: a series of sketches, portraits, interviews with artists like Sophocles and politicians like Pericles and Kimon of Athens.¹¹

6. Littré, Dictionnaire, p. 1460. The word is in the plural.

7. See the bibliography in L. Weniger, "Theophanien altgriechische Götteradvente," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 22 (1923-24):16-57, and F. Pfister, "Epiphanie," Realenzyklopädie Supplement IV (1924), c. 277-323. For a broader treatment see W.F. Otto, Theophania: Der Geist der altgriechischen Religion (Hamburg, 1956).

8. D. Wachsmuth, "Theoxenia," Kleine Pauly, V, 1979, C. 732-733. On the Theoxenia, a festival of the city of Delphi, see P. Amandry, Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 68-69 (1944-1945):413-415, complementing the Bulletin de correspondance hellénique 63 (1939):209-210.

9. According to Scholia to Pindar, Olympiques III, 1, ed. Drachmann, I, p. 105, 14-16.

10. Cf. A. Thivel, Cnide et Cos? (Paris, 1982), p. 33n60.

11. Ion of Chios in F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker I (1922), etc. (hereafter cited as F. Gr. Hist. with the number assigned to each historian along with the fragment indicated by the reference), 392 F. 4-7. See also B. Gentili and G. Cerri, Storia e Biografia nel pensiero antico (Rome-Bari, 1983), pp. 74-75.

Relevant entries from Liddell-Scott-Jones (9th ed., including supplement):






Robert Renehan, Greek Lexicographical Notes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), p. 88: