A few decades ago, after philological examinations of very specific terms for types of bodily woes, scholars tended to dismiss the metaphorical aspects of disease in general out of hand, as “mere metaphor.” These scholars erred, I believe, in making sweeping assumptions about poetic language in its historical situation, in underestimating how rapid shifts in that situation could affect metaphoricity, and in not considering how their own historical conditions might have affected the way they read the Greek texts. Recently, G. E. R. Lloyd has more fundamentally cast doubt upon the traditional conception of metaphor as an analytical tool for Greek discourse, especially for studying the Greek terminology for disease (Lloyd 2003: 8–9):

In other words, can we really be so sure which use of nosos designates real illness and which is a trope? And could there not sometimes be slippages between the real and metaphorical applications of a word even inside the same text? Such slippages will quickly become apparent when I turn to examining specific dramas.