In ancient Rome, epilepsy was not only a medical condition. A seizure could also carry religious, civic and political meaning. One of the most distinctive Roman names for epilepsy was morbus comitialis — literally the ‘assembly disease’ or ‘comitial sickness’ — because a seizure occurring during a formal public assembly could be treated as an unfavourable sign and bring proceedings to an end.
That unusual name reveals something important about Roman society. Epilepsy existed at the intersection of medicine, religion, law, public ritual and superstition. Roman writers could describe seizures clinically, prescribe treatments for them and at the same time preserve customs in which the same event functioned as an omen.
This page looks at that Roman world on its own terms. It does not treat ancient Rome as an early version of modern neurology, and it does not assume that every ancient reference to collapse or convulsion can be diagnosed retrospectively with certainty.
What does morbus comitialis mean?
The Latin adjective comitialis comes from comitia, the formal assemblies of the Roman people. These gatherings had political and legal functions, including elections and voting on proposals placed before the people by magistrates.
Roman public business was closely tied to religious procedure. Assemblies were held on appropriate days, auspices were taken, and certain events could invalidate or interrupt proceedings. Ancient and later classical-reference sources record that an epileptic seizure occurring during an assembly was one of the events that could require adjournment.
The illness therefore became known as morbus comitialis: the disease associated with the comitia.
This did not mean that epilepsy occurred only in political assemblies. It was a conventional name derived from the civic consequence attached to a seizure in that particular setting.
Did a seizure really stop a Roman assembly?
The claim is supported by classical references and by later antiquarian compilations drawing on Roman authors. Traditional accounts of the comitia list a seizure among events that could disrupt the validity of the proceedings, alongside unfavourable auspices, storms, sunset and certain formal interventions.
The underlying reasoning was religious and procedural rather than medical. An unexpected seizure could be interpreted as an adverse omen. Once the religious validity of the occasion was compromised, public business might have to be postponed.
The surviving evidence must nevertheless be read carefully. Roman political practice changed over centuries, and ancient authors sometimes wrote long after the republican institutions they described. It would therefore be too simple to imagine a single unchanging rule applied identically throughout Roman history.
What is clear is that the association between seizures and assemblies was strong enough to become embedded in the Latin name of the disease itself.
The comitia were religious as well as political
Modern readers can easily separate government from religion in a way that would have made much less sense in republican Rome. Roman magistrates did not simply call an election and count votes. Public acts took place within a framework of ritual legitimacy.
Signs believed to reveal divine approval or disapproval could affect whether public business was considered valid. Lightning, thunder and other unexpected events could matter politically because they mattered religiously.
A seizure in the assembly belonged to this same world of signs. The person having the seizure was therefore not merely experiencing a private medical event. The episode could acquire meaning for the entire civic gathering.
A disease with several Roman names
Morbus comitialis was not the only Latin expression associated with epilepsy. Roman and later Latin traditions also used terms such as morbus maior, the ‘greater disease’, and expressions related to falling, sacredness or divine influence.
The coexistence of several names matters. Ancient terminology did not function like a modern diagnostic manual in which a single defined condition receives one internationally agreed label. Different names could emphasise different features: the dramatic fall, the perceived sacred nature of the disorder, its severity, or its social consequences.
Celsus, writing in the early Roman imperial period, explicitly referred to the disease as both comitialis and maior.
Celsus gives one of the clearest Roman descriptions
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, who lived around the turn of the first century CE, compiled a major Latin medical work known as De Medicina. Whether Celsus himself practised medicine remains debated, but his work is one of the most important surviving sources for Roman medical knowledge.
In Book III, Celsus describes the morbus comitialis in recognisable clinical terms. A person suddenly falls, foam appears at the mouth, and after an interval the person returns to himself and rises without assistance.
Celsus also distinguishes attacks with convulsive stiffening or spasm from attacks without it. That detail is historically valuable because it shows awareness that dramatic collapse did not always look exactly the same.
His account is observational rather than purely supernatural. Yet it sits in the same culture that treated seizures as ominous in civic life. Roman medicine and Roman superstition were not mutually exclusive systems occupying separate centuries.
Recovery after the attack was noticed
Celsus was interested not only in the fall itself but in what happened afterwards. His description emphasises that the affected person eventually returns to himself.
He specifically argues that attempts to rouse someone during the attack are unnecessary because the person with the comitial disease ordinarily recovers spontaneously. He contrasts this with other states of profound unresponsiveness in which waking might not occur.
This is an important historical observation. Ancient clinicians were paying attention to the complete course of an episode: sudden onset, visible bodily changes, impaired responsiveness and eventual recovery.
That is not the same as a modern understanding of ictal and postictal physiology. It is evidence that temporal pattern was already part of bedside observation.
Celsus and the belief that puberty could change the disease
Celsus reports that epilepsy sometimes disappeared around puberty — in boys with the onset of sexual maturity and in girls around the beginning of menstruation.
This idea appears repeatedly in ancient and later medicine. It reflects an attempt to understand the course of disease through major bodily transitions.
The theory should not be converted into a modern hormonal explanation. Roman medicine operated within very different concepts of physiology. Historically, however, it shows that physicians recognised that seizure disorders could change over time and that age mattered to prognosis.
Treatment in Celsus: medicine without modern medicine
Celsus proposed a range of interventions that belonged to Greco-Roman medical practice: dietary regulation, purging, shaving and treating the head, bloodletting in selected circumstances, hellebore and other measures intended to restore bodily balance.
Some treatments were severe. Ancient medical therapy was shaped by humoral ideas, experience, tradition and analogy rather than controlled trials.
One notorious treatment associated with epilepsy in Roman-era medicine involved drinking warm blood from a recently killed gladiator. Celsus refers to this practice with clear discomfort, presenting it as a desperate remedy made tolerable only by the misery of the disease.
This example is useful because it prevents an overly tidy story in which ‘rational Roman medicine’ simply replaced superstition. Learned medical authors could reject some extreme practices while still recommending treatments that modern medicine would regard as ineffective or dangerous.
Pliny the Elder shows the other side of Roman belief
Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, written in the first century CE, preserves an enormous mixture of observation, natural history, remedies, folklore and magical belief.
His discussion of epilepsy includes practices involving saliva. Pliny states that people spat in connection with the morbus comitialis in order to repel what he describes in terms of contagion or harmful influence.
This has sometimes been simplified into the claim that Romans routinely spat directly on people having seizures. The textual evidence is more complicated. The ritual act of spitting could be protective or apotropaic — intended to ward off danger — and did not necessarily mean deliberately spitting onto the person.
The important historical point is that epilepsy could generate fear of harmful transmission or supernatural contamination even though it was not an infectious disease.
Was epilepsy thought to be contagious?
Some Roman material certainly reflects behaviour consistent with fear of contagion or pollution. Pliny’s language is frequently cited in histories of epilepsy stigma because spitting was described as a way of turning away the perceived harmful influence.
But the Latin concept should not be mapped too mechanically onto modern germ theory. Ancient ideas of contagion, pollution, fascination, omen and supernatural influence overlapped in ways that do not correspond neatly to today’s distinction between infectious and non-infectious illness.
So the safest historical conclusion is not simply ‘Romans believed epilepsy was a virus-like infection’. It is that epilepsy could be regarded as something from which bystanders needed ritual protection.
Saliva, fear and social distance
Spitting had a wide symbolic role in Greco-Roman culture. It could be used against the evil eye, bad luck, harmful magic and other perceived dangers.
Its association with epilepsy therefore placed the disorder within a broader cultural category of threatening or uncanny events.
This matters to the history of stigma. A person having a seizure could become, however briefly, the focus of fear not simply because the event was medically alarming but because observers might interpret it as socially or ritually dangerous.
Epilepsy in Roman comedy and everyday language
References to epilepsy also appear outside formal medical texts. Roman comedy and later literary commentary preserve expressions connected with falling sickness and spitting.
This suggests that epilepsy was familiar enough to function as a recognisable cultural reference rather than being confined to specialist physicians.
Literary evidence must be handled cautiously because jokes, insults and dramatic devices exaggerate. Yet they can reveal how a disease was perceived socially. When an illness becomes a metaphor, comic reference or insult, it tells us that audiences were expected to recognise its meaning.
Were famous Romans said to have epilepsy?
Later biographies and popular histories have attributed epilepsy to several famous ancient figures, most famously Julius Caesar. Ancient authors describe episodes of illness or collapse in Caesar, but retrospective diagnosis remains uncertain.
The surviving descriptions are insufficient to establish a modern neurological diagnosis confidently, and different historians have proposed alternative explanations.
This page therefore does not use famous-person diagnosis as evidence for Roman epilepsy. The more reliable historical sources are the medical descriptions, terminology and civic practices that explicitly concern seizure disorders.
Galen and the Roman medical world
By the second century CE, Galen had become one of the most influential physicians of the Roman imperial world. Greek by origin and working for much of his career in Rome, he inherited and transformed earlier Hippocratic medical traditions.
Galen discussed convulsions and epileptic disorders within a complex physiological system involving the brain, nerves, humours and bodily faculties. His writings helped shape medical thinking for well over a millennium.
A full account of Galen’s theories belongs to the history of medical ideas rather than this page’s central subject. What matters here is that Roman-era epilepsy cannot be reduced to superstition. Highly developed medical theorising existed alongside civic omens, ritual practices and popular remedies.
Religion and medicine were not opposites
It is tempting to organise history into two boxes: ‘superstition’ and ‘science’. Ancient Rome resists that division.
A literate Roman could accept medical treatment and still care about auspices. A medical author could describe seizures closely while living in a culture where a seizure disrupted public ritual. A person might consult a physician, use a household remedy and participate in religious observance without seeing those choices as contradictory.
The coexistence of these practices is historically more accurate than the idea that rational medicine steadily pushed religion aside.
What the assembly rule meant for the person having the seizure
The surviving sources are much clearer about the effect on the assembly than about the personal experience of the individual who had the seizure.
That imbalance is revealing. The event enters political history because it affected public business. The person experiencing it often disappears from the record.
For modern readers interested in disability history, this absence matters. Roman sources frequently preserve what epilepsy meant to institutions, magistrates, physicians or observers rather than what it meant to live repeatedly with seizures.
A seizure could become a public omen
The Roman assembly tradition demonstrates how a neurological event could be transformed into a civic sign.
The seizure itself belonged to one person’s body. Its interpreted meaning belonged to the entire gathering.
That transformation helps explain why epilepsy accumulated stigma across many historical societies. Unpredictable loss of control could be interpreted not simply as illness but as warning, impurity, divine communication or danger.
How reliable is the term morbus comitialis as evidence?
The terminology is well attested, including in Celsus and later lexicographical traditions. Classical antiquarian sources also connect the name with interrupted assemblies.
However, historians should distinguish between evidence that a term existed, evidence that people explained the term in a particular way, and evidence for how frequently assemblies were actually halted because of seizures.
The first two are strong. The third is harder to quantify. Ancient sources do not provide anything like a statistical record of how often this happened.
Accordingly, the responsible historical statement is that Roman tradition treated a seizure during the comitia as an adverse occurrence capable of interrupting proceedings and that the association was reflected in the name morbus comitialis. It would be an overstatement to claim that we know how routinely this occurred in practice.
What Rome added to the history of epilepsy
Ancient Rome did not discover epilepsy, and Roman medicine did not create modern neurology. Its importance lies elsewhere.
Roman sources preserve unusually vivid evidence of epilepsy existing simultaneously as a recognised medical disorder, a culturally feared event, a subject of remedies and folklore, and a phenomenon with formal civic consequences.
Celsus gives us clinical description. Pliny gives us superstition and household belief. The language of the comitia gives us political and religious meaning.
Taken together, they show why the history of epilepsy cannot be written only as a history of medical treatment.
The central historical lesson
The phrase morbus comitialis captures something that is easy to lose in a modern account of epilepsy: societies do not merely observe seizures. They assign meaning to them.
In Rome, that meaning could be medical, religious, political and social at the same time.
A seizure could make someone fall, foam at the mouth and lose awareness. It could also halt an assembly, provoke protective rituals and become embedded in the vocabulary of Roman public life.
That combination is what makes ancient Rome an important chapter in the history of epilepsy.
Sources and further reading
Magiorkinis E, Sidiropoulou K, Diamantis A. Hallmarks in the history of epilepsy: epilepsy in antiquity. Epilepsy & Behavior. 2010.
Dieckhöfer K. The ‘national assembly disease’ in ancient Rome: a contribution to the history of epilepsy. 1972.
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, De Medicina, Book III, Chapter 23 — Morbus Comitialis.
van de Sande JJ. Neurological disorders in the Roman Empire, as reported by A. Cornelius Celsus. Clinical Neurology and Neurosurgery. 1992.
Smith W. Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities — Comitia, with classical references to morbus comitialis.
Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary — comitialis.
Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book XXVIII — saliva, superstition and morbus comitialis.
Panteliadis CP et al. Historical documents on epilepsy: from antiquity through the 20th century. Brain & Development. 2017.
Historical evidence checked: September 2026.