Il rapporto tra genio e follia. Platone, Aristotele e il suicidio di Empedocle

The aim of this chapter is to analyse the relationship between genius – i.e. the creative talent that characterises various arts, including poetry and philosophy – and madness in Antiquity. As an illness that affects not the body but the intellect, madness, which was also known by the term melancholia, was not always regarded as an evil or even a real disease. According to Plato and Aristotle people with visible pathologies can perform remarkably well in different artistic fields. So, starting from Plato’s considerations on mania, and thus on the link between art and madness as an expression of the divine, I will examine Aristotle’s physiological explanation for the connection between natural melancholia and pathological excesses in order to evaluate the presence of pathological afflictions due to melancholia in relation to the extraordinary nature of certain philosophers. Remarks on different readings (e.g. by Cicero and Horace) of the ancient sources dealing with such a topic in the Roman world illustrate how the interests and reasons behind the use of the motif of poets’ madness changed over time, taking a trivialising direction foreign to Plato and Aristotle.