This is a remarkable and remarkably clever book. It is also a challenging book, resisting summary and ready assessment. The thrust is original, the scope immense and the documentation exhaustive. It is not an easy read. Despite an expressed intent ‘to address both specialists in the ancient world and a more general audience’ (p. xxiii) it is difficult to identify a large constituency of prospective readers: certainly not undergraduates – whatever their subject of specialisation in the desiderated interdisciplinarity – who would surely be daunted by the density of both style and subject matter. At the same time, scholars initially drawn to the book by its evident command of literature and ideas are liable to be disappointed on finding that the end scarcely justifies the method.

The title itself requires exegesis. On first encounter, a casual reader unfamiliar with the so-called ‘mind-body problem’ might wonder at the alleged emergence of something that in some sense was always there (the physical body; cf. p. 5); and might be puzzled by the nuances in connotation of ‘subject’ and of ‘symptom’. The term ‘subject’ demands a particular conception of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’, doubtless clear to many but surely not obvious to all: the uninitiated may require, but will sigh over, the reminder of ‘how difficult it is to speak of objects without considering subjects … especially true when the objects are also subjects’ (p. 85). The term ‘symptom’ is more fully discussed below.

H. sets out her stall initially (p. 2) with a curiously loaded explanation of the ‘symptom’ as ‘a disruption – without obvious cause and often, though not always, painful – either to the experience of self or to the outward presentation of self’. The central argument of the book is then stated: the physical body ‘emerges through changes in the interpretation of symptoms in the Greek world of the fifth and fourth centuries bce … the result is a new kind of ethical subject’. Already the use of the term ‘symptom’ is severely strained. It is acknowledged that there is no equivalent terminology in the extant fifth- and fourth-century medical texts (p. 11). Why then import it? Of course, a rigid and unimaginative lexical approach can be stultifying, but at the same time a gratuitous disregard of actual usage is misleading and unhelpful. Similarly unhelpful is the interpretation of ‘cavity’ as ‘a space largely beyond what the physician can see and, crucially, below the threshold of consciousness’ (p. 15). In Hippocratic texts the areas occupied by the upper and lower cavities are simply areas above or below the belt. Subsequently, the Greek word prophasis with the medical sense underlying cause of disease (and so applied in regular usage, as famously by Thucydides, to any underlying cause) is somewhat inaccurately rendered ‘catalyst’ by H. In the discussion of the ‘interval’ as a space between ‘catalyst’ and ‘symptom’ (p. 240) all three terms, as used, are opaque, confusing and unnecessary. As the terminology underpins H.'s arguments, the above criticisms are not mere quibbles. Such terminology is related to a general tendency to import jargon, which merely irritates and obscures the flow of thought, as in the phrase ‘nodes of methodological reflection’ (p. 12).

Let us turn now to the overall structure and argument. An introduction starts appropriately with a subsection ‘Symptoms and Subjects’ and proceeds to outline the scope of the book. Six further chapters embrace a range of authors and genres in broadly chronological order, the prime emphasis being on medical texts and on tragedy. In this emphasis, the influence of F. Zeitlin and H. von Staden, the formidable duo who advised H.'s dissertation, is evident. Chapter 1, ‘Before the Physical Body’, begins with epic and focuses on divine and daemonic agency. There is much perceptive analysis here and (as indeed throughout the book) the notes are particularly rich. The exposition is, however (as indeed throughout the book), often cloaked in convoluted formulation, such as: ‘The figure of the hand may … be understood as the outcome of a process of objectifying a hidden thing or agent, a process catalyzed by symptoms or perceptions of otherness in the environment’ (p. 74). Chapter 2, ‘The Inquiry into Nature and the Physical Imagination’, aims to sketch the intellectual context of the sixth and fifth centuries with regard to conceptual change and semantic shift in Presocratic thought and expression. Here the most important subsection is ‘Melissus and the Denial of Body’, an interpretation of one fragment (DK30 B9) viewed in conjunction with elements in certain Hippocratic texts, notably On Regimen, and thought to have a significant new charge.

Chapters 3 and 4, ‘Incorporating the Daemonic’ and ‘Signs of Life and Techniques of Taking Care’, are devoted to medical texts. There is some boldness in the suggestion that pragmatic physicians played a part in ‘shaping the physical body as an object of the public imagination’ (p. 121), but some works – notably On the Art and On Ancient Medicine to which H. devotes much attention – do lend themselves more than most to such analysis. There is, inevitably, some over-simplification here, for instance on the question of understanding or naming diseases (p. 124) and in discussion of such terms as eidos (p. 133), automaton (p. 145) and dunamis (p. 155). There is also some special pleading in the argument that there is a shift which ‘divides causality between corporeal stuffs and forces and the person with the power to manage them’ and in the neat Foucaultian conclusion invoking a new kind of ‘ethical substance’, bringing us to a ‘gray zone where the physical body ends and the ethical subject begins’ (p. 191).

Chapter 5 takes us on an eclectic mystery tour of a range of authors and texts – beginning, surprisingly, with a glance at Ovid's Metamorphoses – to investigate ‘how the emergence of the physical body might have influenced the ways in which people working in a broader cultural and intellectual milieu thought about human nature’ (p. 194). Particular attention is paid to Gorgias’ Helen and the ethical fragments of Democritus. Chapter 6, ‘Forces of Nature, Acts of God: Euripides’ Symptoms’, attempts to make a case that ‘both our appreciation of Euripidean tragedy and our understanding of the physical body's emergence can be deepened by reading them in the light of each other’ (p. 233). Much of the analysis, interesting enough in itself, for instance discussion of metre and scene structure (p. 235), is only tangentially, if at all, relevant to the main theme. Little allowance is made for a two-way process of interaction between tragedy and medical texts, especially with regard to presentation of ‘madness’. The main plays considered are: Hercules Furens, Orestes and Hippolytus.

A brief chapter, ‘Conclusion’, recapitulates the main arguments of the book and situates it in the context of current debates on the physical body. Finally there is an impressively thorough bibliography, index locorum and general index.