From ptrourke@mediaone.net Sat Nov  6 09:21:26 1999
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From: "Patrick T. Rourke" <ptrourke@mediaone.net>
To: "Classics List" <classics@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Iophon (tan to Alzheimer's thread)
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 1999 12:21:19 -0500
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>I've been waiting for someone to mention a famous story of a *false*
>diagnosis of "Alzheimer's": the story that Sopholces' son Iophon
>accused Dad before his phratry-mates of "hypo ghrws parphronein" (Vita
>Soph. 13). Sophocles defended himself, you will recall, by whipping out
>the MS of the OC and reading away.  What I don't understand about this
>story is that the Vita seems to say that Sophocles subsequently wrote
>about this incident in a play (en dramati). That would be a odd sort of
>play, would it not?  (Unless this is just a garbled reference to the OC.)


At a wild guess: "*Sophocles* subsequently wrote about this incident in a
play" (I'm assuming that DL is paraphrasing closely from his provision of
"en dramati") might conceal the name of an Old Comedy writer who was the
source of the story; by the time the Vita got to us, Sophocles was
substituted for the Comic writer with the OC in mind.  I do not mean that
the story necessarily is untrue. I'm imaging a "Clouds"-type story about a
man under threat of being declared out of his mind by his son who reminds
the audience of Sophocles' "trial" (non-forensic sense) and response.

It would give us an interesting biographical counterpoint to the Philoctetes
if it were true, akin to the relationships between Cymbeline and Imogen or
Prospero and Miranda and what we know about Shakespeare's two daughters (of
course I'm assuming that such a bad relationship would have been going
downhill for years).  If it were true, indeed, I'd guess that the Iophon
reference might be a specific substituted for a more general reference to
"Sophocles' son."

P. T. Rourke
ptrourke@mediaone.net

ps some of the references to Alzheimer's adduced thus far sound more like
simple amnesia, or other forms of dementia. From what I understand,
Alzheimer's is often misdiagnosed when another dementia is involved.



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