The peculiar and hard to define condition of madness covers a range of cases of abnormal behavior that may be the result of mental illness, temporary or permanent loss of mind, or some other major excitement, including in a festive-religious context. Тhe literature pushes the boundaries of reality by testing practical reason and human behavior and thinking and sometimes transgresses those boundaries and sends its characters and plots into the realms of madness. In this report, we will present and systematize a basic vocabulary by which madness is presented in ancient Greek literature in the period VII–V BC. The single lexemes are observed in original texts from all genres of this era for the description of some delirious state. We will comment the basic notions and expressions for the various manifestations of madness to reach some conclusions on the “vividness” of the language, describing the madness, and on the linguistic both topoi as well as originalities.
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