When love ails: Lovesickness and the authenticity of emotions in Plautus' Cistellaria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the first extant instance of the medicalization of love in Roman literature. In Plautus' Cistellaria, love is not just conceived through a conventional comic lens of erotic desire but as a psychosomatic disorder, expressed through symptoms that blur the boundary between mental disturbance and bodily illness. The analysis shows how Plautus integrates medical and popular knowledge to construct a model of amor that ancient audiences could recognize as pathological. This medicalization of passion serves a distinctly literary purpose: by grounding emotion in physical and cognitive symptoms, Plautus grants psychological depth and credibility to his protagonists. The authority of medical thought thus legitimizes what comedy typically trivializes, sincere feeling and genuine distress. Cistellaria emerges as a case study in how Roman literature appropriated scientific discourse to substantiate and shape narrative coherence. The study situates this medicalization of passion within broader ancient discourses on disease and affects, revealing how Plautus' comedy participates in the cultural translation of medical knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".