Theopompus was a Greek historian and rhetorician who lived from c. 380 to 315 BCE. He was not a physician, yet his works offer a window into how the ancient Greeks understood health, disease, and contagion.

Born on the Aegean island of Chios in c. 377 BCE, he spent his early youth in Athens with his father, who had been exiled for his Spartan sympathies. He became a pupil of the philosopher Isocrates and made rapid progress in rhetoric. Around 333 BCE, Alexander the Great allowed him to return to Chios, where he became one of the leaders of the aristocratic party. Expelled again after Alexander’s death, he took refuge with Ptolemy in Egypt, but appears to have been met with a cold reception.

Theopompus is the author of three historical works: a precis of Herodotus’s books; the so-called Hellenica, a twelve-book history of Greece from the end of Thucydides’ history (411–394); and the Philippica, a fifty-eight-book history of the age of Philip II of Macedon.¹ The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in the Augustan era, commented on Theopompus’s extraordinary energy and his almost morbid fascination with the vices of people. Photius (815–893 CE) also remarked that Theopompus was preoccupied with cataloging excesses such as drunkenness, sexual license, gluttony, and the physical deterioration that came from a life of pleasure. In the Philippica,Theopompusdepicts Philip not merely as a conqueror but also as a ruler who brought about significant moral and social deterioration.

The ancient Greek medical tradition, rooted in the Hippocratic dogma, held that health resulted from an imbalance among the four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Disease arose from an excess or a deficiency. The criticism of Philip II of Macedon’s companions for damaging their bodies through excesses appears more clinical than moral. These men, in Hippocratic terms, had disordered their humoral balance, with predictable catastrophic consequences: early death, cognitive decline, and political misjudgments.

An interesting aspect of Theopompus’ Philippica is his emphasis on the psychosomatic relationship between character and bodily condition. He repeatedly links a ruler’s physical constitution to his political efficacy or failure. He sees Philip II, for all his brilliance, as a man whose physical appetites drove his extraordinary energy but also left him with wounds, partial blindness, and disease.²

The fragments of the Philippica record who drank too much, who collapsed, who vomited, and who was rendered incapable of governing by the morning. In Epidemics, he describes persons whose health was worsened by wine, causing impaired judgment, aggression, physical deterioration, and shortened life. He believed that corrupt rulers and courtiers were like vectors of social disease, infecting those around them by spreading corruption and behavior harmful to health.

We know almost nothing of Theopompus’ own health, but his biography indicates that he spent much of his adult life in exile, first from Chios, later from various polities that found his acerbic writing politically inconvenient. Ancient sources depict him as an intense but difficult man of extreme opinions whose capacity for sustained intellectual labor was remarkable. In his over fifty books on history, he sought to explain why individuals flourished or failed, why some courts produced energetic statesmen, and why others became broken, self-destructive men.

Read medically, he is the closest equivalent to a public health commentator, tracing the social spread of self-destructive patterns to the bodily and psychological condition of the actors involved. The specific details he provides—the quantities consumed, the physical collapses recorded—constitute a fragmentary but genuine archive of the behavior of the ancient Greek and Macedonian elites.

Further reading

1. I.A.F. Bruce. “Theopompus and Classical Greek Historiography.” History and Theory 9, no. 1 (1970): 86-109.
2. Gordon Shrimpton. “Theopompus’ Treatment of Philip in the “Philippica.” Phoenix 31, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 123-144.