), is a quality of the body, whereas the excellence of a philosopher, politician, or artist is that of the mind, and in accordance with the modern-age view of body and mind as a duality, the two can be merged only with the assistance of a metaphor. This metaphor, however, was lacking: with Aristotle, the correspondence was direct, so one must attempt to find an internal connection between the two concepts. We must go back to the original meaning of excellence and extraordinariness. Originally, the verb 
meant not just “to abound in something” but also “to possess a surplus”—someone who is extraordinary and excellent possesses something that others lack: that person is the possessor of an uncommon quality. And, since preeminence can refer equally to standing out in a literal, corporeal sense and to intellectual superiority, it is a secondary matter whether one regards it as a mental or physical attribute. (In most cases, extraordinariness cannot be narrowed down to one or the other.) Anyone who is preeminent, be he or she a poet, philosopher, politician, or artist, is not just intellectually so, but that intellectual preeminence per se is the consequence of some deeper-lying deviation from the norm. Naturally, not a deviation only of the body or only of the mind: one has to notice his or her particular relationship to life or, to be more accurate, his or her own fate. Facing up to fate, accepting and pursuing it mercilessly, is what is decisive. That follows from the perception of the uniqueness and oddness of life (in Greek arithmetic, 
also meant odd-numbered!), the intellectual and physical signs of which can be delimited from one another only inferentially and with great difficulty. (We observe that many people die of their own intellectual preeminence, or that great minds perish on account of physical causes, although we sense that it is not just a matter of body or soul.) Anyone who is preeminent has life’s uniqueness (the fact that it resists division as much as multiplication) to “thank” for his or her extraordinariness; it is plain that this special gift does not bring about happiness, or even confidence, but melancholia. This goes some way in taking the edge off the apparent contradiction in the Aristotelian sentence. But what is the situation with melancholia, i.e., black bile? Having no knowledge and experience of the disunion of body and soul, a development in the past two thousand years of Western thought, the Greeks no doubt did not consider the physical nature of black bile as being exclusively a characteristic of the body, but transferred it to their assessment of the intellectual world and the cosmos as a whole, and so instead of abolishing it, they did not even experience the duality that we have defined as the antithesis of intellectual excellence and black bile, a characteristic of the body. A conceptual unraveling of melancholia, of black bile, offers a deeper insight into this approach.
One comes across the first traces of a connection between bile and spirit (temperament) in Homer, who, although not mentioning black bile, does nevertheless associate the color black with a darkening of mood. The fact that Agamemnon’s “heart was black with rage, and his eyes flashed fire” (Iliad, bk. 1, 103) is just as much a consequence of a change in bile as of rancor on account of Calchas’s prophesy. Bile and the color black make their first joint appearance in Sophocles’ tragedy Women of Trachis: according to the poet, the arrow dipped into the “black gall” of the Lernaean Hydra was poisoned (565). Thus, the dramatist, who, as a priest, was also a physician, considered black bile—
—to be harmful, a poison for the body. The description and interpretation of that poison, the black bile, are linked to Hippocrates at the end of the fifth century BCE. “Now the body of man,” he writes, “contains blood, pituita, and two kinds of bile — yellow and black; and his nature is such that it is through them that he enjoys health or suffers from disease” (On the Nature of Man, 4). Hippocrates initially derived the ailment known as melancholia from the blackening of the gall (
was a malady of the so-called choleric category,
), not from black bile, as in his later works. He is of the opinion that if the juices were distributed in a bad ratio, or rather — after introducing the term black bile—one of the juices did not mix appropriately with the other, then the organism would fall ill. The constitution of the human body was a function of that mixing; the Greeks designated mixing and constitution with the same word: 
. The cosmocentric Greek view considered humanity to be an organic part of the universe rather than setting it in opposition.1 Admixture, which was originally related to the joining of constituent elements, was responsible for everything; for the state of the cosmos as well as for the human body, constitution, and character; indeed, as Ptolemy expounds in his Tetrabiblos, even for the influencing power of celestial cycles. Hippocrates pays little attention to the spiritual aspect of constitution and much more to the physical components, although a worldview that sees the state of the body and the cosmos in unity contains implicitly a belief in the unity of body and mind. Melancholia, Hippocrates avers, is an indisposition of the body: the dense humor of black bile gains ascendancy at the expense of the other humors, and poisons the blood, which can be the cause of maladies from headaches through diseases of the liver and stomach to such conditions as leprosy. Blood, however, is the nidus of the mind, Hippocrates says; the mental consequences of poisoning the blood by black bile are thereby explicable. Black bile per se is not an illness, and becomes that only as a result of bad mixing (
): melancholia (black bile), which primarily points to a mental condition, is a particular case of the bad distribution of black bile (
), in which the bodily state is coupled with fear (
) and depression (
). According to Hippocrates, the so-called dry type of temperament is prone to that ailment (it is concomitant with the drying out and thickening of the bile), which is also influenced by the weather and the seasons. In his medical treatise On Airs, Waters, and Localities, he writes as follows: “But if the season is northerly and without water, there being no rain, neither after the Dog Star nor Arcturus; this state agrees best with those who are naturally phlegmatic, with those who are of a humid temperament, and with women; but it is most inimical to the bilious; for they become much parched up, and ophthalmies of a dry nature supervene, fevers both acute and chronic, and in some cases melancholy” (ch. 10, 84–91). The disorder caused by black bile, melancholia, may originate in the body, but in these circumstances it also affects the mood. In The Third Book of Epidemics, Hippocrates discusses melancholia of a physical origin as a disturbed state of the mind: a female patient he had examined was sleepless and averse to food, and “her temperament was melancholic” (
, 17.2). The word 
means alike “mood,” “mental ability,” “mind,” “heart,” “frame of mind,” “insight”—all these meanings are implied inseparably in that single Greek word, and that laconicism alerts one to a relative wealth: the capabilities of the mind and the spirit cannot be stowed in separate “sacks” but attest to a uniform stance toward and interpretation of existence, invisibly and yet firmly intertwined with the likewise manifold world of the body. Melancholia is a sickness of both temperament and constitution, of mind and body,