Abstract
Texts from the Classical Greek period play a crucial role in the historical development of Western science and philosophy. The concept of pain is of key importance, especially for two areas of human knowledge, namely medicine, and ethics.
While the concept of pain is important for both areas, in the majority of scholarship, the areas are studied separately. We approach them together while analyzing the whole extant body of the digitized ancient Greek literature from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.
This is enabled by our methodological framework, which combines traditional interpretative approaches with computational approaches from the area of distributional semantics, making it possible to study a vast amount of textual data in a controlled way. When we look at the context of the usage of individual words denoting pain across the texts covering various genres or topics, we identify relatively stable semantic clusters to which pain words relate, such as pathologies, emotions, or morality.
Thus, we can capture the role of pain words, their meaning, and mutual relations in the corpus. Also, our approach enables us to discern the role of various textual subcorpora (philosophical, medical) in how pain was conceived in the period under scrutiny.