In classical Greece mania often seems to have meant madness in
a relatively loose and general sense, but at times it had the more specific
meaning of raving madness. Gradually mania came to be viewed as one of
the three traditional forms of madness in ancient medicine, the others
being melancholia and phrenitis. These three disorders were categorized
under diseases of the head, with mania and melancholia characterized as
chronic diseases without fever and contrasted with phrenitis as an acute
disease with fever. Usually mania meant a state of derangement associated
with severe excitement and often wild behaviour. But, while many used the
term in this narrower sense, frequently enough to confuse a modern reader,
it was also used as a generic term for madness or insanity. In these latter
instances, a discussion of mania would often include both cases of raving
madness and cases of dejected or melancholic madness, sometimes clearly
differentiated as separate disorders and sometimes with a considerable
blurring of any boundaries between them; and sometimes the term mania was
used to refer to an even wider variety of disorders that today would be
considered psychotic in nature. Thus the mania of the Ancients may at times
be readily reconciled without modern use of the term, and at other times
not very well at all.
Stanley W. Jackson, "Introduction," in William Pargeter, Observations
on Maniacal Disorders, [Routledge,1988] p.xiii