Watchful Greeks and Lazy Romans: Disciplining Sleep in Late Antiquity

Abstract

Although sleep asceticism is recognized to have been an important part of Greek monastic culture in late antiquity, there has been little research on the relationship between Christian and secular attitudes toward sleep. A comparison of medical, philosophical, and patristic theories of sleep reveals important differences between Latin and Greek texts, whether Christian or non-Christian. Greek authors portrayed sleep as a pathos that suppressed the rational part of the soul, whereas most Latin authors believed that the mind remained wide-awake during sleep. Also involved are divergent social norms regarding sleep as an expression of elite power.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.