La mutilation mammaire des Amazones

Neither the painters nor the sculptors of Antiquity represented the Amazones bereft of their right breast. Now the myth in its most widespread version mentions, ever since Antiquity, a voluntary mutilation meant to facilitate the wielding of projectiles. Then, where does the motif of breast mutilation with the Amazones come from ? Its emergence in the literary tradition springs, it seems, from the conjunction, in the second half of the Vth century before our era, of an etymology grounded in a philosophical conception which imparts to the words the power to convey the nature of their referents and the hippocratic physiology, which holds that an artificial atrophy carried out locally before the growth of a child can, through the channel of nutrition, bring about a hypertrophy of the adjacent parts of the body

Art · Humanities · Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning · Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Medicine Studies · Philosophy

• Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes

  Paul Veyne•Grecs Ont-Ils Cru Leurs Mythes ?…•1983

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