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In a colloquium on melancholy in the modern world, this paper may well be considered out of place.However, I am very grateful to the organisers for welcoming these thoughts on the origins of melancholy and the melancholic temperament in Greek medicine.They may be helpful in showing the di ference(s) between ancient and modern understandings of melancholy.In any case, they provide a good occasion for a critical examination of the way in which the relevant concepts and technical terms are established and perpetuated in the medical tradition, quite independently from the philosophical tradition.My paper will also make use of new Greek medical texts, or translations from Greek, which contribute to what we know about the melancholic temperament in Late Antiquity and Byzantium.I will begin with the Hippocratic Corpus, the collection of medical writings attributed to Hippocrates, the great fth centuryGreek doctor, comprising some sixty treatises that the Renaissance knew rstly in Latin, and then in Greek, from 1525-1526 onwards.This is an appropriate beginning, because it shows that the three fundamental notions of black bile, melancholy and the melancholic temperament, whilst being related, did not originate at the same time and were not necessarily used in one and the same context.The Nature of Man is the only treatise from the Hippocratic Corpus that can be attributed with any certainty to an author, Polybus, Hippocrates' student and son-in-law.It is also considered, with some justi cation, to be the foundation stone of the history of black bile, the melancholic temperament and melancholy in the medical tradition.However, we must re ne and clarify the place and role of this treatise concerning these three concepts.The treatise is undoubtedly the rst text to present clearly the theory of the four humours innate in man: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile.Let us recall its famous de nition of the nature of man, of health and of illness:
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