Although it was and continues to be an essential experience of the human condition, pain was understood polysemically in antiquity. Competing medical and philosophical theories of pain coexisted alongside one another and generated a variety of different ways of understanding the nature of pain. So, too, was the experience of pain evaluated either positively or negatively based on the particular.In antiquity, pain was many things: an experience that one might wish to avoid, a punishment meted out by an angry deity, a symptom that might aid a physician in identifying an internal imbalance, or a weapon one might use to discipline or test those less powerful than oneself. Moreover, it was both ubiquitous and endemic to the human condition. Archaeology and palaeopathology reveal that the majority of ancient people navigated the world through a veil of bodily discomfort and pain. In extreme forms, physical pain was understood to be psychically destructive; it could fragment the person and even drive them to suicide (Pliny, .
