¹ Jennifer L. Koosed and Darla Schumm, “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John,” in Disability in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Sacred Texts, Historical Traditions, and Social Analysis (ed. Darla Schumm and Michael Stoltzfus; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) 77–92; Sharon Betcher, “Disability and the Terror of the Miracle Tradition,” in Miracles Revisited: New Testament Miracle Stories and Their Concepts of Reality (ed. Stefan Alkier and Annette Weissenrieder; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013) 161–81, at 165 (cf. Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1984]); David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “ ‘Jesus Thrown Everything Off Balance’: Disability and Redemption in Biblical Literature,” in This Abled Body: Rethinking Disabilities in Biblical Studies (ed. Hector Avalos, Sarah Melcher, and Jeremy Schipper; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) 173–84.

² On Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous declaration that “women (like pigs) are good to think with” and the way that ancient Christian authors used the female body as an object to “think with,” see Elizabeth Clark, “Thinking with Women: The Uses of the Appeal to ‘Woman’ in Pre-Nicene Christian Propaganda Literature,” in The Spread of Christianity in the First Four Centuries (ed. William Harris; Leiden: Brill, 2005) 43–52.

³ François Bovon, Luke 2: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 9:51–19:27 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013) 75–77.

⁴ Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “A Feminist Critical Interpretation for Liberation: Martha and Mary; Lk. 10:38–42,” Religion and Intellectual Life 3 (1986) 21–36, esp. 27; Jaime Clark-Soles, Women in the Bible: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2020) 212–13, has recently echoed this call, arguing that we should not “belittle or lionize” Mary or Martha.

⁵ Mary Rose D’Angelo, “Women Partners in the New Testament,” JFSR 6 (1990) 77–81. D’Angelo also hypothesized that Mary and Martha might have been sexual partners as well, working as a missionary team in the same way that a male/female married couple might. For the authoritative discussion of love between women in antiquity broadly and in Judaism and early Christianity see Bernadette Brooten, Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). More recently, see Sara Parks, Shayna Sheinfeld, and Meredith J. C. Warren, Jewish and Christian Women in the Ancient Mediterranean (New York: Routledge, 2022) 190–91, who cite D’Angelo and Brooten, noting that irrespective of any sexual or romantic relationships, the pairs of women named in the NT at the very least represent couples of women who “opted to form a core relationship with each other rather than with a husband.”

⁶ John N. Collins, Diakonia: Reinterpreting the Ancient Sources (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) 148; also idem, “Did Luke Intend a Disservice to Women in the Martha and Mary Story?,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 28 (1998) 104–11, at 110.

⁷ Warren Carter, “Getting Martha Out of the Kitchen: Luke 10:38–42 Again,” in A Feminist Companion to Luke (ed. Amy-Jill Levine; Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2001) 214–31.

⁸ Turid Karlsen Seim, The Double Message: Patterns of Gender in Luke–Acts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) 58–60, 81–88, 99–112, 251–53; Adele Reinhartz, “From Narrative to History: The Resurrection of Mary and Martha,” in A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament (ed. Athalya Brenner; Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic, 1996) 197–224, at 207.

⁹ Cicero, Brut. 233, Att. 2.24.4, Fam. 1.7.9. On the relationship between labor and cura see Dieter Lau, Der lateinische Begriff labor (Munich: Fink, 1975) 33; Monica R. Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 145–46.

¹⁰ For comparisons with the Cynic discussion of marriage (Epictetus, Diatr. 3.22.67–82) see Archibald Robertson and Alfred Plummer, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the First Epistle of St. Paul to the Corinthians (2nd ed.; ICC; Edinburgh: Τ&T Clark, 1914) 158; Kurt Niederwimmer, Askese und Mysterium: Über Ehe, Ehescheidung und Eheverzicht in den Anfängen des christlichen Glaubens (FRLANT 113; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975) 113 n. 162; Werner Wolbert, Ethische Argumentation und Paränese in 1 Kor 7 (Moraltheologische Studien, systematische Abteilung 8; Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1981) 130–31. Others have noted the Stoic parallels (Musonius Rufus, frag. 3.40.8–42.29 L; Hierocles 53.30 ν. Α.; Menander, frag. 575 K; Sent. 14.17 J): Gerd Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) 10–17, 88; Will Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy: The Hellenistic Background of 1 Corinthians 7 (2nd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) 95–96, 195–200.

¹¹ Sheila Briggs, “Slavery and Gender,” in On the Cutting Edge: The Study of Women in Biblical Worlds: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (ed. Jane Schaberg, Alice Bach, and Esther Fuchs; New York: Bloomsbury, 2004) 171, argues that enslavement and gender are always intertwined in antiquity as low-status forms of existence.

¹² Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 51–59, describes the way in which enslaved persons were uniquely susceptible to the physical and psychic violence of corporal punishment, torture in order to elicit testimony, and constant sexual availability to free persons. In one rabbinic text the idea that enslavement was disabling was central to a story that described eschatological healing as liberation, as Julia Watts Belser has demonstrated in “Disability, Animality, and Enslavement in Rabbinic Narratives of Bodily Restoration and Resurrection,” JLA 8.2 (2015) 288–305, at 297.

¹³ Adela Yarbro Collins, “Ancient Christians on Marriage and Celibacy: Readings of 1 Corinthians 7 in the Early Church,” BR 64 (2019) 6–24, at 13; cf. Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy, 83, 121–25, 195–98, 200. Here Paul appears to be engaging with forms of Jewish apocalypticism that were also influenced by Wisdom literature and Hellenistic philosophy. For an example of an apocalyptic tradition that is influenced by Stoicism and similarly juxtaposes sex and prayer in the eschatological age see T. Naph. 8:7–10. For the Cynic teaching on marriage as a distraction from one’s mission see Epictetus, Diatr. 3.22.47–48.

¹⁴ J. Albert Harrill, “Paul and Slavery: The Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21,” BR 39 (1994) 5–28; Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 65–69; Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre and Laura S. Nasrallah, “Beyond the Heroic Paul: Toward a Feminist and Decolonizing Approach to the Letters of Paul,” in The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes (ed. Christopher D. Stanley; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011) 161–74, at 162–63; Katherine A. Shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Laura S. Nasrallah, “Paul’s Letters: The Archeology of Their First Recipients and the Responsibility of Their Modern Readers,” TR 40 (2019) 85–104; J. Albert Harrill, “Revisiting the Problem of 1 Corinthians 7:21,” BR 65 (2020) 77–94. Mitzi J. Smith, Chloe and Her People: A Womanist Critical Dialogue with First Corinthians (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023). Here and throughout this work I am indebted to the ground-breaking work of Candida R. Moss in God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible (New York: Little Brown, 2024).

¹⁵ Angela N. Parker, “One Womanist’s View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians,” JFSR 34.2 (2018) 23–40, at 37. On enslavement metaphors in Paul see S. Tsang, From Slaves to Sons: A New Rhetorical Analysis on Paul’s Slave Metaphors in His Letter to the Galatians (Studies in Biblical Literature 81; New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Marianne Bjelland Kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (London: Routledge, 2018) 21–46; and Emerson Powry, “Reading with the Enslaved: Placing Human Bondage at the Center of the Early Christian Story,” in Bitter the Chastening Rod: Africana Biblical Interpretation after “Stony the Road We Trod” in the Age of BLM, Say HerName, and MeToo (ed. Mitzi J. Smith, Angela N. Parker, and Erika S. Dunbar Hill; New York: Fortress, 2022) 71–90. On the enslavement language in Luke see M. A. Beavis, “Ancient Slavery as an Interpretive Context for the New Testament Servant Parables with Special Reference to the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–8),” JBL 111 (1992) 37–54; Mary F. Foskett, A Virgin Conceived: Mary and Classical Representations of Virginity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) 13; J. Albert Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament: Literary, Social, and Moral Dimensions (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006) 66; M. A. Beavis, “Slave Parables in the Gospel of Luke: Gospel ‘Texts of Terror’?,” ABR 56 (2008) 61–68; James N. Hoke, “ ‘Behold, the Lord’s Whore’? Slavery, Prostitution, and Luke 1:38,” Biblical Interpretation 26.1 (2018) 43–67; Christy Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth, and Power in Luke–Acts and Other Ancient Narratives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) 27–33.

¹⁶ Enslaved persons were often characterized as lazy or sleepy and were seen as “domestic enemies” who were in need of constant oversight. See J. Albert Harrill, “The Domestic Enemy: A Moral Polarity of Household Slaves in Early Christian Apologies and Martyrdoms,” in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (ed. David Balch and Carolyn Osiek; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) 231–54. For examples of the “lazy enslaved person” trope see Columella, Rust. 1.8.2; Dig. 11.3.5; Dig. 21.1.18; 21.1.65 pr.; Petron., Sat. 95; Cato, Agr. 2.2. Candida R. Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 84–86, 133–34; eadem, “Chronometric Violence: Sleeplessness, Incarceration, and the Mechanics of Control,” in The Wakeful Night (ed. Dawn LeValle Norman and Kylie Crabbe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

¹⁷ While the text of Luke 10:38b in the NA28 reads “Martha welcomed him” (Μάρθα ὑπεδέξατο αὐτόν), a number of important witnesses go on to say “into the house” (εἰς τὴν οἰκίαν), or “into her house” (εἰς τὸν οἶκον αὐτῆς).

¹⁸ Renita J. Weems, Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible (San Diego: Lura Media, 1988) 39–48, at 47. Weems’s retelling of the story frames the conflict as an interpersonal one between sisters that centers on domestic service.

¹⁹ Reinhartz, “From Narrative to History,” 207–8, argues that Mary and Martha “provide a graphic illustration of the inverted master-servant dichotomy.”

²⁰ Cobb, Slavery, Gender, Truth and Power, 69, 206–7. As Ronald Charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (New York: Routledge, 2020) 151–52, has argued, even though Luke and Acts contain statements of political reversal, both remain “politically ambiguous” and still consider enslaved women to be “deviant Others.” Mitzi Smith argues that the Gospel of Matthew reveals a similar set of power relations, one that “does not speak against the status quo of Roman hegemonic imperial power.” Mitzi J. Smith, “Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression, and Kingdom Rhetoric: An African American Reading of Matthew 25:1–13,” in Insights from African American Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017) 80–97, at 95.

²¹ Angela N. Parker, If God Still Breathes Why Can’t I? Black Lives Matter and Biblical Authority (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021) 79, argues, “no longer can New Testament scholars disregard the abuse and violence that were ubiquitous during the reign of the Roman Empire and how these realities may have influenced the way gendered women heard Paul’s letter to the Galatian church.” On interpretive gaslighting see 44–62. As Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 9–38, demonstrates, violence was central to Stoic and Christian metaphors of enslavement, even as Epictitus and Paul downplayed the importance of physical enslavement.

²² Angela N. Parker, If God Still Breathes Why Can’t I?, 49–50; Saba Fatima, “I Know What Happened to Me: The Epistemic Harms of Microagression,” in Microaggressions and Philosophy (ed. Lauren Freemen and Jeanine Weekes Schroer; New York: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020) 163–83, at 168.

²³ Sir 41:1.

²⁴ Sir 42:9.

²⁵ Bovon, Luke 2, 214–15, notes that μεριμνάω is absent from Philo, Josephus, and the Stoa, and that these LXX uses reflect standard Greek usage. In m.’Abot 2.7 Hillel says “many possessions, many worries.”

²⁶ In comparison with Mark 4:20 and Matt 13:23, the Lukan version of this saying removes “of the world” and “deceit” as qualifiers of “worries” (μέριμνα) but adds “the pleasures of life.” Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX (Anchor Bible Commentary; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981) 714, sees a parallel with the Damascus document (defiling the sanctuary, wealth, and multiple wives; CD 4:15–5:10). François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002) 308, argues that Luke here and elsewhere (7:25; 12:19; 16:19) is warning audiences about the way in which worry arises out of having wealth.

²⁷ Sharing possessions and hospitality are a major motif in Luke and Acts that is imbued with salvific significance, as argued by Joshua W. Jipp, Divine Visitations and Hospitality to Strangers in Luke–Acts: An Interpretation of the Malta Episode in Acts 28:1–10 (Leiden: Brill, 2013); idem, Saved by Faith and Hospitality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017). On the material evidence for “theo-economic rhetoric” see Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021) 16–33.

²⁸ Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 712, argues that Luke maintains some of the apocalyptic tenor of the passage, noting the parallels between Luke 8:14 and 2 Esdr. 8:41–44.

²⁹ Mark 13:33–37; Matt 24:43–51; Luke 12:35–40; Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 84–86; eadem, “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming, compares the topoi of the wakeful enslaved persons who are attentive overseers waiting for their returning dominus to other ancient examples of enslaved waiting and the nocturnal labor that was expected of enslaved persons and otherwise coded as slavish. See also James Ker, “Nocturnal Writers in Imperial Rome: The Culture of Lucubratio,” Classical Philology 99 (2004) 209–42.

³⁰ Mark uses the word μεριμνάω once, Matthew 7 times, all in the parallels to the Lukan materials that are discussed here. The noun μέριμνα occurs twice in Luke, and once each in Mark 4:19 and Matt 13:22 (the parallels to Luke 8:14).

³¹ In Matt 10:8–10 they are told explicitly not to accept pay for their preaching or healing, making life below subsistence level a requirement for discipleship. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 752, argues that the emphasis in Luke 9:1–3 is not on “poverty” but on the extent to which material things interfere with “reliance and trust in the providence of God himself.” Bovon, Luke 1, 345, notes that this is similar to the instructions to the Cynics, and is meant to distinguish the disciples from those traveling philosophers who came to market with a travel bag, walking stick, and cloak (Epictitus, Diatr. 3, 22, 9–12). Bovon goes on to say that here the Levitical renunciation of possessions and income is being adapted to the disciples (Num 18:31). Perhaps rather than thinking in terms of philosophy or priestly norms we need to consider whether these instructions that prompt dependency are part of what frames Christian discipleship in terms of enslaved labor.

³² Page duBois, Torture and Truth (Routledge Revivals; New York: Routledge, 1991); Julia Hillner, Prison, Punishment and Penance in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) 51–63, 131–50; on the extent to which these practices influenced the Christian imaginary see J. Albert Harrill, “ ‘Exegetical Torture’ in Early Christian Biblical Interpretation: The Case of Origen of Alexandria,” Biblical Interpretation 25 (2017) 39–57.

³³ Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke X–XXIV (Anchor Bible Commentary; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985) 984.

³⁴ Moss, “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming; Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 201–235, offers incisive treatment of the interpretive legacy of NT notions of discipleship as enslavement.

³⁵ On the ways in which social stratification and enslavement informed Philippians see Joseph A. Marchal, The People beside Paul: A History from Below (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2015) 142. Shaner, Enslaved Leadership; eadem, “Seeing Rape and Robbery: ἁρπαγμαός and the Philippians Christ Hymn (Phil. 2:5–11),” Biblical Interpretation 54.3 (2017) 342–63.

³⁶ See, for examples of these interpretive tendencies, the readings of Clement, Origen, Augustine and Chrysostom. Clement of Alexandria, Ques. div. 10; Origen, Hom. in evangelium secundum Lucam frg. 72; Augustine, Serm. 103; 104; Quaest. ev. 2; John Chrysostom, Hom. Jo. 44.1.

³⁷ Susan P. Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients: Lypē as Anxiety Disorder,” in Homo Patiens—Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World (ed. Georgia Petridou and Chiara Thumiger; Boston: Brill, 2016) 203–5; Inbar Graiver, “The Paradoxical Effects of Attentiveness,” JECS 24.2 (2016) 199–227, at 210, proceeds with the premise that “modern and historical people are sufficiently similar in general cognitive function,” but she first frames that with the caveat that “human cognition is shaped, to a large extent, by the cultural context in which it takes place.”

³⁸ For insights from neuroscience see Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change (Boston: MIT Press, 2008); Joan Y. Chiao and Katherine D. Blizinsky, “Population Disparities in Mental Health: Insights from Cultural Neuroscience,” American Journal of Public Health 103.1 (2013) 122–32. For social-scientific studies see Carol J. Peng, “Sociological Theories Relating to Mental Disabilities in Racial and Ethnic Minority Populations,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 19.1 (2009) 85–98; Wulung Hanandita and Gindo Tampubolon, “Does Poverty Reduce Mental Health? An Instrumental Variable Analysis,” Social Science & Medicine 113 (2014) 59–67; Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2022).

³⁹ María Isabel Cantón, “Why We Must Talk about De-medicalization,” in The Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (ed. Peter Beresford and Jasna Russo; New York: Routledge, 2022) 205–16. Margaret Price, “Defining Mental Disability,” in The Disability Studies Reader (ed. Lennard J. Davis; 5^th ed.; New York: Routledge, 2017) 333–42; Angela Sweeney and Billie Lever Taylor, “De-pathologizing Motherhood,” in Routledge International Handbook of Mad Studies (ed. Beresford and Russo),166–76. For the cultural model of disability as applied to ancient history and biblical studies see Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper, “Mosaic Disability and Identity in Exodus 4:10; 6:12, 30,” Biblical Interpretation 16 (2008) 428–41, at 432–33. For an application of this model to the power structures that define mental disabilities in the NT see Louise Lawrence, Bible and Bedlam: Madness, Sanism, and New Testament Interpretation (New York: T&T Clark, 2018).

⁴⁰ Plato, Phaed. 229e5–230a8, cited in Katja Maria Vogt, “Plato on Madness and the Good Life,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. William V. Harris; Leiden: Brill, 2013) 177–92, at 191–92.

⁴¹ Hippocratic Corpus, Vict. 2.61 (Hippocrates, Volume IV. Heracleitus on the Universe (trans. W. H. S. Jones; LCL 150; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). The LCL translation renders μερίμνης as “thought,” likely to match hearing, sight, and voice, as an ability rather than a pathology.

⁴² Galen, San. Tu. 318K; for references to worry as the cause of humoral imbalance and physiological symptoms in Galen see Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 208–9.

⁴³ See especially Galen, Cris. 2.13, which discusses those “worried because of study or contemplation.” On the wide range of meaning of φροντίς within Galen’s works see Susan P. Mattern, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) 133; Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 209. The worry/care relationship was so blurry that lovesickness was sometimes pathologized. Peter Toohey, “Love, Lovesickness and Melancholia,” Illinois Classical Studies 17 (1992) 265–86. This is exemplified in the 5th cent. CE poet Nonnos, who describes love as debilitating worry, “melting in a flood of care [μερίμνῃτήκετο]” (Nonnos, Dianysiaca 33, line 262, translation in Nonnos, Dionysiaca, Volume II: Books 16–35 [trans. W. H. D. Rouse; LCL 354; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940] 484–85). In Latin literature cura functioned similarly. See Caesar, Bell. gall. 7.67.4; Cicero, Fam. 13.7.4, 13.29.2, 15.8; Horace, Sat. 1.2.78, Carm. 1.7.17, 1.9.2f, 2.9.6; Tibullus 1.1.3; 3.6.7; Ovid, Tr. 5.5.47; Pont. 2.6.22; Seneca, Ben. 2.27.2; Mart. 1.15.7; Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things, 146.

⁴⁴ As Vogt, “Plato on Madness,” argues, this pathology is characterized by Plato as a monstrous version of the self (Resp. 588c; Phaed. 229e6–230a8). Galen warns one young man to control his passions after he spent a sleepless night worrying about frivolous things (Aff. Pecc. Dig. 1.7). Véronique Boudon-Millot, “What Is A Mental Illness, and How Can It Be Treated? Galen’s Reply as a Doctor and Philosopher,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 129–45, at 142.

⁴⁵ As Chiara Thumiger, A History of the Mind and Mental Health in Classical Greek Medical Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 359, notes, a range of distinct physiological states are associated with each emotion in the medical authors, sometimes in ways that are contradictory. She observes that this tight connection between emotions and bodies led to a process of differential diagnosis that was as capacious as it was meticulous: “a calculated project of naturalisation of human experiences, whereby detailed bodily signs are sought for each emotion.”

⁴⁶ Hippocratic Corpus, Morb. sacr. 2.72; ps.-Aristotle, Problemata 2.26, 11.31–36; Galen, Loc. Aff. 3.10; De praecogn. 6; Cris. 2.13. When worry is pathologized in the medical authors the words used to refer to worry or anxiety include μεριμνάω and related nouns, but also other words like ἀλύκη, ἀγωνία, λύπη, φροντίς can be used to describe anxiety or other conditions that reflect a troubled mind or soul. On grief (λύπη) as an anxiety disorder see Susan P. Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients: Lypē as Anxiety Disorder,” in Homo Patiens (ed. Petridou and Thumiger), 203–23.

⁴⁷ On the framing of worry as a “troubled soul” in ancient medical thinking see Thumiger, History of the Mind, 40, 402–5. Hippocratic Corpus, Vict. 4.89; Hum. 9; Epid. 6.5.5. As Thumiger notes, these texts only hint at an understanding of the soul in the “psychological sense” and are anomalous in treating the soul in conversation with mental distress. They do, however, describe the soul as a part of the body that governs character and mental states. On the relationship between the brain and the soul in early Christian thought see Jessica L. Wright, The Care of the Brain in Early Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022).

⁴⁸ Hippocratic Corpus, Vict. 4.89. Hippocratis De Diaeta (ed. and trans. R. Joly and S. Byl; CMG I, 2,4; Berlin, 1984) 222.29.

⁴⁹ Hippocratic Corpus, Epid. 6.5.5. Ippocrate Epidemie, libro sesto (ed. and trans. D. Manetti and A. Roselli; Florence: La nuova italia editrice, 1982) 110.4

⁵⁰ Hippocratic Corpus, Morb. sacr. 2.72 (Hippocrates, Affections. Diseases 1. Diseases 2 [trans. Paul Potter; LCL 472; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

⁵¹ Silvia Montiglio, Wandering in Ancient Greek Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); Thumiger, History of the Mind, 156–62. Thumiger uses ancient literature to assist in her interpretation of madness in the Hippocratic Corpus. For instance, Io’s wandering is seen as a classical sign of her madness.

⁵² Ps.-Aristotle, Problemata 30.1 contra Rufus, On Melancholy F11–13, F36, F68, F70–71. Melinda Letts, “Mental Perceptions and Pathology in the Work of Rufus of Ephesus,” in Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine (ed. Chiara Thumiger and Peter Singer; Leiden: Brill, 2018) 176–97, at 182–83.

⁵³ George Kazantzidis, “Between Insanity and Wisdom: Perceptions of Melancholy in the Ps.-Hippocratic Letters 10–17,” in Mental Illness in Ancient Medicine (ed. Thumiger and Singer), 35–78, at 77–78; On the figure of the “super-crip” in literature and media see Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993); Sami Schalk, “Reevaluating the Supercrip,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 10.1 (2016) 71–86.

⁵⁴ Galen, San. Tu. 6.14; Loc. Aff. 5.6; Ven. Sect. Er. 9. For discussion of these passages see Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 213 and Kazantzidis, “Between Insanity and Wisdom,” 77. On nighttime intellectual work see Ker, “Nocturnal Writers,” 209–42. In addition to the “super-crip” trope, Galen’s story about Diodorus also fits with Galen’s tendency to critique grammarians, using pathological worry as a slur or insult.

⁵⁵ This view was exemplified in a scene from Oedipus Rex, in which worry is the word that is used to describe the scope of enslaved work, as Oedipus inquires after an elderly enslaved shepherd’s previous occupation, asking him “what work or way of life was your worry?” (ἔργον μεριμνῶν ποῖον ἢ βίον τίνα). Sophocles, Oed. tyr. line 1125 (Sophocles, Volume I. Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus [ed. and trans. Hugh Lloyd-Jones; LCL 20; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), translation mine). On the overlap of worry and work in Virgil such that labor is sometimes characterized as “insane” (insanus; Aen. 6.135) see Susan Scheinberg Kristol, Labor and Fortuna in Virgil’s Aeneid (New York: Garland, 1990) 22–42, 90–108.

⁵⁶ Plutrach, Mor.; Adol. poet. aud. 33E (Plutarch, Moralia, Volume I [LCL 197; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927]). Plutarch is quoting and rewriting a statement on the relative nature of freedom by Sophocles, Trag. Graec. Frag., No. 789.

⁵⁷ Aristotle, Pol. 1.1255b. As Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 11, argues, enslavers relied upon the enslaved as “body doubles” in a range of undesirable circumstances, including imprisonment. On the view that people could be seen as extensions of their enslaver see Brandon Reay, “Agriculture, Writing, and Cato’s Aristocratic Self-Fashioning,” CA 24 (2005) 331–61; Sarah Blake, “Now You See Them: Slaves and Other Objects as Elements of the Roman Master,” Helios 39.2 (2012) 193–211; Blake, “In Manus: Pliny’s Letters and the Arts of Mastery,” in Roman Literary Cultures: Domestic Politics, Revolutionary Poetics, Civic Spectacle (ed. A. Keith and J. Edmondson; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016) 89–107. On the role of the overseer (ἐπίτροπος) in the labor economy see Arjan Zuiderhoek, “Sorting out Labour in the Roman Provinces: Some Reflections on Labour and Institutions in Asia Minor,” in Work, Labour, and Professions in the Roman World (ed. Koenraad Verboven and Christian Laes; Leiden: Brill, 2016) 20–35, at 27–28.

⁵⁸ Philodemus, De Oec. 14.23–15.3. “I think that the right administration of wealth lies in this, i.e., in not feeling distressed about what one loses and in not [trapping oneself on treadmills] because of an obsessive [zeal] concerning the more and the less. For the labour involved in the [acquisition] of wealth consists both in dragging oneself [by force] and in agonizing over one’s losses on the grounds that they might bring one directly into pain, whether present or expected. But if one has removed from oneself such difficulties and does not eagerly desire to amass and make one’s property as great as possible and, moreover, does not procure for oneself those resources that wealth offers by oneself watching painfully over one’s possessions or [by collecting] them in rich abundance, [for these reasons] a readiness for acquisition would become indistinguishable from one’s readiness to share things on one’s own initiative too.” Text and translation from Philodemus, On Property Management (trans. Voula Tsoula; Writings from the Greco-Roman World; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature Press, 2012). The following section builds upon the work of Candida R. Moss on enslavement and intellectual labor. Candida R. Moss, “Between the Lines: Looking for the Contributions of Enslaved Literate Laborers in a Second-Century Text (P. Berol. 11632),” SLA 5.3 (2021) 432–52; Moss, “The Secretary: Enslaved Workers, Stenography, and the Production of Early Christian Literature,” JTS 20.20 (2023) 1–37. On Philodemus as an Epicurean response to the dangers of acquisitiveness see Tim O’Keefe, “The Epicureans on Happiness, Wealth, and the Deviant Craft of Property Management,” in Economics and the Virtues (ed. Jennifer Baker and Mark White; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 37–52.

⁵⁹ Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 26, 35; Joseph A. Howley, “In Ancient Rome,” in Further Reading (ed. Matthew Rubery and Leah Price; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) 15–27.

⁶⁰ Galen, De praecogn. 6 (K. 14.633–35); Moss, God’s Ghostwriters, 30–32.

⁶¹ Mattern, “Galen’s Anxious Patients,” 208–10, explains that fear is frequently mentioned alongside worry and anxiety in Galen’s work as one of the main causes of anxiety, and that the symptoms of each varies only in intensity, not kind. She argues that this may reflect a dependence upon a Stoic understanding of the emotions. Physiologically, the treatment of psychic distress was thought to alleviate the bodily symptoms. See also Vivian Nutton, “Galenic Madness,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 119–27, at 125–26.

⁶² In Affections of the Soul, Galen offers therapeutic advice to a Cretan friend who severely injured two enslaved persons in a fit of rage, a medical intervention aimed at the problem of an enslaver’s anger resulting in the injury or disability of an enslaved person (Aff. Pecc. Dig. 1.4). Violence toward the enslaved was both a social and legal norm, such that extreme torture was prescribed by law in order to elicit “truth” from enslaved persons. Peter Garnsey, Social Status and Legal Privilege in the Roman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970) 213–16; Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 166–67; Olivia Robinson, “Slaves and the Criminal Law,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte (romanistische Abteilung) 98 (1981) 213–54; John Bodel, “Graveyards and Groves: A Study of the Lex Lucerina,” American Journal of Ancient History 11 (1986) 1–133, at 73; Page duBois, Torture and Truth, 63–74; Jennifer Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity, 51–52; Harrill, Slaves in the New Testament, 158–59.

⁶³ Here I am following the work of Candida Moss in “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming.

⁶⁴ See, for instance, the discussion of curae and insomnia in Latin literature in Scheinberg Kristol, Labor and Fortuna, 102–5, who notes that sleep can drive away cares for some (Lucr. 4.907) while worry can also make sleep impossible for others (Horace, Sat. 2.7.114).

⁶⁵ Smith, “Slavery, Torture, Systemic Oppression,” 89. Smith offers an important corrective here to Page DuBois’s foundational work Torture and Truth, 63, which does not list sleep-deprivation among ancient mechanisms of torture. Smith argues that the torture of sleep deprivation is operative in the Matthean slave parables, which equate the submissive endurance of torture with wisdom, and “sacralize and normalize violent and abusive behaviors” (90–93).

⁶⁶ Moss, “Chronometric Violence,” forthcoming.

⁶⁷ Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); Luis Menéndez-Antuña, “Of Social Death and Solitary Confinement: The Political Life of a Gerasene (Luke 8:26–39),” JBL 138.3 (2019) 643–64, at 663.

⁶⁸ Frequently elites like to remind others that their life is far from worry free, and that the subordinates who are being asked to shoulder worry are told that their worry does not compare to that of the king or enslaver. The classic example is when Cambyses receives the title of king, “the gift of the gods,” but his younger brother Tanaoxares is consoled that he will be happier because he will have fewer worries (Xen., Cyr. 8.7.11). Plutarch (Mor. 830A [De vitando aere alieno]) says that that freedom from care (ἡ ἀμεριμνία) is the benefit of poverty. In Dio Chrysostom, Orat. 10.8–13 we learn that enslavers worry more than the enslaved; however, their wives worry less. The implication here is that worry can only be partially passed on for certain elites (wives) and that additional subordinates bring additional worry. Deming, Paul on Marriage and Celibacy, 200, notes that Plutarch’s statement might be influenced by its Stoic context (829F, 830B–D).

⁶⁹ Dig. 21.1.4.3 and 21.1.65. Peter Toohey, “Madness in the Digest,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 441–60, at 447–48.

⁷⁰ Galen, In Epid. VI comm. VIII: CMG V.10,2,2, pp. 494–95, in Nutton, “Galenic Madness,” 126. Ancient medical thinking about the mind had a significant overlap with Stoic and Epicurean thinking in which even typical human dissatisfaction or unhappiness could be treated with philosophy. Thumiger, History of the Mind, 127 n. 106, 128 n. 109, 415 n. 196; Brooke Holmes, “Disturbing Connections: Sympathetic Affections, Mental Disorder, and the Elusive Soul in Galen,” in Mental Disorders in the Classical World (ed. Harris), 147–76, at 152, 159–64.

⁷¹ On this two-part process see Epicurus, Sent. Vat. 55; Cicero, Tusc. 3.15.33; Philodemus, D. 3 col. d (2) 23; Mort. 38.21; Paul A. Holloway, Philippians (Heremeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017) 73, 184; Holloway, “Thanks for the Memories: On the Translation of Philippians 1.3,” NTS 52 (2006) 419–32. Holloway enumerates a broad range of thinkers who utilized Epicurean consolation or a revised form of it: Cicero, Tusc. 3.16.35–3.17.37; Seneca, Ep. 99.25; Seneca, Ad Poly. 18.7–8 and Ad Marc. 24.1–4; Pseudo-Ovid, Cons. Ad. Liv. 377–416; Pseudo-Plutarch, Ad. Apoll. 116a–b; Pliny, Ep. 8.5.2; Julian, Or. 8.246c–248d; Ambrose, Exc. 1.3; Jerome, Ep. 60.7.3; 108.1.2; 118.4.2; Basil, Ep. 5.2; 269.2; Paulinus of Nola, Ep. 13.6. Holloway has also argued that this is the strategy employed by Ben Sira in Sir 14:16; 30:23 and by Paul in Phil 1:3; 4:8–9.

⁷² The letters from Epicurus to his students are preserved in Cicero, Fin. 2.96 and Diogenes Laertius, Vit. 10.22.

⁷³ Epictetus, Diatr. 1.1; Ench. 1.

⁷⁴ Greek Shorthand Manual, Sentence 31 (Sofia Torallas Tovar, To the Origins of Greek Stenography [Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Publicacions de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 2006], 127). The fifth sign, added at the end of this sentence, notes that this is “difficult to appease.” I am grateful to Candida Moss for this reference.

⁷⁵ Καὶ τὰς λοιπὰς τῆς ζωῆς ἡμέρας ὑμῶν δουλεύσητε τῷ κυρίῳ ἀμέμπτως. ἐπιρίψατε τὰς μερίμνας ὑμῶν ἐπὶ τὸν κύριον, καὶ αὐτὸς κατορθώσει αὐτάς (translation mine). Compare with Ps 54 (MT 55):23 and Shepherd of Hermas 19. On the use of enslavement language and metaphors in Hermas see Chance E. Bonar, “Hermas the (Formerly?) Enslaved: Rethinking Manumission and Hermas’s Biography in the Shepherd of Hermas,” Early Christianity 13.2 (2022) 205–26.

⁷⁶ John Chrysostom argued that worry makes one slavish and possessions induce sadness, mirroring the medical and philosophical approaches to worry that we have seen in ancient Judaism, Cynicism, Stoicism, and Galen. Chrysostom, Exp. Ps. 4 [PG 55:55]; Hom. 1 Cor. 39.8 [PG 61:344]; Hom. Phil. 2.4 [PG 62:196–97]; Hom. Acta. 13.3 [PG 60:110]; Hom. Col. 12.7 [PG 62.390]; Hom. 1 Tim. 13.3 [PG 62.568]. Blake Leyerle, “The Etiology of Sorrow and Its Therapeutic Benefits in the Preaching of John Chrysostom,” JLA 8.2 (2015) 368–85; Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion in the Preaching of John Chrysostom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020) 64–77.

⁷⁷ On “doulology” as the way in which enslavement and mastery create an entire discursive frame for early Christian theology see Chris L. De Wet, The Unbound God: Slavery and Formation of Early Christian Thought (London: Routledge, 2018) 8. De Wet is here influenced by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s language of “kieriarchy,” in But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992) 115.

⁷⁸ Leyerle, The Narrative Shape of Emotion, 69–70 argues that a similar nuance is needed when approaching Chrysostom’s instructions regarding the emotional discipline of nonelites and enslaved persons. Cf. Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 53–87.

⁷⁹ One salient example of the appropriation of Stoicism in the present day is in William B. Irivine, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 241–42. Irvine argues for practicing Stoicism in place of “taking Xanax” to treat anxiety, rehearsing a number of stereotypes that are frequently used against the mentally disabled.