Outlook and Virtue: Morally Symptomatic Physical Peculiarities

Abstract

In the previous chapters, it has been repeatedly noted that satirical authors and philosophers alike have elaborated on the idea that physical appearance and the condition of the body have moral significance. The human face, for example, was thought to express a person’s deeper moral qualities. Cicero viewed impudence as a disease discernable on a man’s face and in his gait, and Jerome called the face, whose silent eyes were capable of disclosing the secrets of the heart, the mirror of the mind (Mancinellus and Badius Ascensius 1515, fol. xx^r). In his Apocolocyntosis Seneca also famously depicted the Emperor Claudius as a vile body, whose infirmities directly reflected his moral dissolution (cf. Braund and James 1998); meanwhile, the appearance and gait of Maecenas revealed his degeneration (Epistulae 114.4). In the Juvenalian saying, anguish and pleasure stamp themselves on the visage (2.17, vultu orbum incessuque fatetur; cf. 9.18–20). Early modern satirists printed out the same revealing signs. Petrus Cunaeus’s Menippean satire Sardi venales deplored the universal sickness of his time when “everybody confessed their illnesses by their countenance and gait” (1620, p. 65).