Hankinson R.J. Magic, Religion and Science, 1998, Germany

Magic, Religion and Science: Divine
and Human in the Hippocratic Corpus

RJ. Hankinson
l Divination, Religion and Magic
In early Greek poetry and tragedy, disease is an affliction from the gods,
such as the plague visited by Apollo on the Greek host at Troy in revenge
for the treatment of one of his priests at the beginning of the Iliad} Your
only recourse is to eliminate the supposed source of the affront (if there
is one), as (in their different ways) both Agamemnon and Oedipus (Oedi-
pus Rex 190-202) seek to do. To unearth the source of the offense, you turn
to seers such as Calchas and Teiresias, individuals whose abilities, while
sometimes impugned, are (within the fictional context of epic and trag-
edy) ultimately vindicated. We may call that the 'poetic paradigm'.
Compare that with the attitude of the prologue to the Hippocratic
Regimen in Acute Diseases. Seeking to justify medicine's claim to genuine
scientific status (a frequent Hippocratic concern), the writer notes that
the techne in general has such a poor reputation among lay people that
they suppose medicine to be completely non-existent; with the result
that if practitioners differ so much among themselves about the acutest
1 I discuss the Apollonian plague in my 'Pollution and infection: an hypothesis

stillborn', Apeiron 28 (1995) 25-65. For other Homeric cases of divinely-sent sickness,
see Odyssey V 394-7, XI409-11 Compare Hesiod's accoun t of how Zeus sent plagues
upon mankind in revenge for Prometheus's gift of fire: Works and Days 53-105, esp.
90-104; and see also his description of how Zeus punishes violence and wickedness
with disease, famine and sterility· 240-5.
APEIRON a journal forBrought

ancient to you by | Université
philosophy de Paris I - Bibliotheque de
and science
Authenticated
0003-6390/98/3101 1-34 $14 00 ©Academic Printing | 194.214.27.178
& Publishing
Download Date | 8/5/13 4:09 PM
2 R.f. Hankinson
diseases that the remedies which one of them prescribes in the belief
that they are most beneficial are thought by another to be bad, they [sc.
lay people] are likely to say that the techne, at least as practised by this
sort of person, is no different from divination, because some diviners
think that the same bird is a good sign if on the left but a bad one if on
the right while other diviners maintain exactly the opposite (similar
things occur in enrrail inspection, and others in other fields).2 (1: Regi-
men in Acute Diseases 8.3-15)3
Medicine, if it is to count as a techne, had better find a rational means of

accounting for and adjudicating between endemic disputes among doc-
tors and for explaining medicine's periodic inability to effect cures
(compare the interesting defence of medicine On the Art). And this is (in
general) to be done first by elaborating a causal theory of disease based
upon some theoretical pathology, and then by showing how, given the
nature of diseases and their pathology, some ailments are going to defy
therapy. Proper medical science rests upon secure physical aetiology,
and is as such crucially different from any divinatory practice.
This point is not made explicitly in our texts;4 but the author of
Prorrhetic II, after criticizing doctors who claim extraordinary accuracy
for their prognostics, writes:
2 This parenthetic clause may be an intruded marginal note.

3 This (and other) texts are referred to, where possible, by way of the chapter divisions
and line-numbering of the Loeb edition of W H S. Jones and E.T. Withington (4 vols.
Harvard/London, 1923-1931), or by the recent additions to the Loeb library edited
by Paul Potter (vols. V, VI, and VIII: 1988-95) and Wesley Smith (vol. VII. 1994),
other texts are referred to by way of E. Litre's monumental edition Oeuvres
Completes d'Hippocrate (10 vols. Paris, 1839-61). For other discussions of disputed
divinatory interpretation, see Galen On Hippocrates On Regimen in Acute Diseases'
XV 441-9 Kühn (commenting on this passage); Cicero On Divination II144-5. On the
related issue of oracular ambiguity, see ibid. 115-16; and Aulus Gellius Attic Nights
XIV 1 33. For a discussion of the ancient debate concerning the scientific status of
divination, see R.J. Hankinson 'Stoicism, science and divination', in R.J. Hankinson,
ed., Method, Medicine and Metaphysics (Edmonton, 1988).
4 It is, however, later on the whole dispute about the status of divination in Cicero's
On Divination turns on this point. The diviners can offer no causal account of why
their practices are successful (indeed necessarily so: if they could, there would be
no reason to suppose them to involve supernatural agency); their response (in the
mouth of Quintus, Cicero's apologist for divination) is to accept that fact while
Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

Authenticated | 194.214.27.178
Magic, Religion and Science 3
I, however, will not indulge in this kind of prophecy (tomuta men on

manteusomai); rather I record the things on the basis of which one must
estimate which men will recover and which will die ... I hope in these
and other cases to make predictions which are more within human
capabilities than those which are reported. Those things which are said
to have been predicted to people involved in trade5 — death, diseases
and insanity — seem to me have happened in just such a way; there is
nothing particularly difficult in predicting for someone who wants to
enjoy this sort of success. (2: Prorrhetic II 2: IX p. 8 Littre, Hippocrates
VIII p. 220 Potter)
manteuomai presumably has a derogatory tinge here; at all events, the

author does not use the word of his own practice. Such 'predictions' are,
like those of the fortune-tellers who advise merchants, baseless, indeed
impossible. The author further suggests that whatever success such di-
viners had was in fact won on the basis of the observation of perfectly
natural signs and symptoms, which implies that they, in line with a
venerable clairvoyant tradition, pretended to owe their prophetic power
to other, presumably supernatural, forces.
Divination is also associated both with obscurity and charlatanry. The
fragmentary text On Diseases of Virgins6 discusses epilepsy along with
other diseases involving psychological disturbance and hallucination to
which the author supposes young women to be particularly prone. They
are so, apparently, because they retain blood; once they become sexually
denying that it is of any importance — their attitude, then, is severely empiricist,

and indeed closely resembles that of the anti-theoretic empiricist school of medicine
which flourished in the Hellenistic period. On this issue, see my 'Stoicism, science
and divination'. See also the pseudo-Platonic Definitions (414b) on manteia: 'the
knowledge which predicts events without proof.
5 It is not clear what this means: here the Greek reads 'for buyers and sellers'; in the
previous chapter, the author refers to predictions made 'to merchants and business-
men', and these are obviously the same class of prediction; I imagine that the
predictors here are not doctors, but rather fortune-tellers who specialize in dealing
with merchants (telling them when it is propitious to sail, for example), with whom
the overly-precise doctors are compared, to their detriment
6 Not in Jones· edited by Littre, vol. VIII, 466-70, see G.E.R Lloyd, Magic, Reason and
Experience (Cambridge, 1979), 28-9.

4 R./. Hankinson
active these afflictions clear up, although people are inclined mistakenly
to credit diviners with their recovery (VIII 468-70 Littre).
But it is one thing to object to the practices of (at least some of) the
diviners,7 quite another to suppose that medicine should simply eschew
all mention of the divine. Yet following Gomperz,8 scholars have usually
supposed that one of the main characteristics of Hippocratic medicine
was its rejection of anything smacking of the supernatural: indeed, this
is precisely why, on the orthodox account, Hippocratic medicine is taken
to be characteristic of the 'Greek Enlightenment'. The classic text for this
view is one which deals, albeit in much more detail, with the same
ailments mentioned in On Diseases of Virgins, and in the same rationalistic
vein:
the following concerns the so-called 'sacred disease'.' It seems to me to

be in no way either more divine or more sacred than any other disease;
rather just as the other diseases have their own nature (phusis) and
originating cause (prophasis) from which they derive, so this too has its
own nature and originating cause.10 But men think it to be something
divine on account of their lack of experience of it and astonishment at
it: for it is like none of the others. But at the same time as they maintain
its divinity because of the difficulty they have in understanding it, they
actually destroy its divinity by the facile nature of the therapeutic
7 It is worth pointing out that one may quite consistently accept that some practitio-
ners of a particular art are fraudulent without thereby impugning the practice as a
whole. Ancient proponents of divination were happy to accept that some of their
fellow-practitioners were indeed charlatans: cf. Cicero, Div I 36-7; Artemidorus,
Onetrocrtticos II 69; see my 'Stoicism, science and divination', 142-5; and of course
precisely congruent complaints could be (and were) levelled at doctors.
8 Griechische Denker* 1,1922, 257; quoted in L. Edelstein, 'Greek medicine — religion
and magic', in his Ancient Medicine2 (Baltimore, 1987), 214, n. 31. Edelstein's article
is the point of departure for all subsequent treatments of the theme.
9 On Diseases of Virgins (VIII, 466 Littre) also qualifies 'sacred' with the epithet
'so-called' (kaleomene), while Prorrhetic Π 9-10 (IX, 28-30 Littre, VIII, 242-4 Potter)
talks simply of the 'sacred disease', without any such qualification. Nothing can be
read into this, however: Prorrhetic treats the disease no less naturalistically than the
other texts.
10 The text here is very uncertain — my translation follows the MS. Μ as closely as
possible.

method which they employ here, treating it as they do with purifica-

tions and incantations. But if it is to be supposed divine because it is
astonishing, there will be many sacred diseases rather than just one, as
I will prove that there are others no less astonishing and portentous
which no-one believes to be sacred.11 (3: The Sacred Disease 1.1-14)
The disease was first labelled 'sacred' by 'people like the magicians,
purifiers, charlatans and hucksters of our own time, people who make a
great show of piety and superior wisdom ... and in order to conceal their
total ignorance, they called this affliction sacred' (ibid. 2.2-10). They
employ 'purifications and incantations', and recommend a whole host
of inefficacious, taboo-type remedies (ibid. 2.11-27). Yet (our author
holds) the whole attitude of the purifiers is profoundly irreligious: they
assume that they can coerce the god responsible by some foolish farrago
of supernatural 'treatments' — but no genuine god could be so affected.
Indeed, were the disease actually susceptible of such cures that would
establish its physical nature; if it genuinely were supernatural, the only
recourse would be supplication and prayer (ibid. 2.27-5.61: 4 below).
The idea that there is something both distasteful and logically objec-
tionable about the idea that gods might be enslaved to the human will
has roots in the emerging tradition of Greek rational theology which
stretches back at least to Xenophanes and is to be found in its most
developed form in Plato. But there is nothing necessarily anti-religious
about it; compare Calchas in Iliad 193-100: if we right the wrong done by
Agamemnon to Apollo's representative and make a suitable sacrifice,
then we might persuade Apollo to abate his wrath with us. The goal is
propitiation and supplication, not threatening and force: there is no
suggestion here that any course of action may succeed in forcing the god
willy-nilly into a more favourable frame of mind.
In fact, what the author of The Sacred Disease objects to is not religion
as such but magic:
for if they claim to be able to draw down the moon, eclipse the sun,
make storm and sunshine, rain and drought, to make the sea too rough
to navigate and the land barren and everything else of this sort, whether
11 As examples of such similarly awe-inspiring conditions, the writer cites various

types of recurrent fever (numinous presumably because of their regularity of cycle),
as well as other sorts of delirium and erratic behaviour (ibid 1 14-29)

6 R.J. Hankinson
by ritual, or some shrewdness (gnome) or practice which those who are

versed in such things say can come to pass, at any rate I believe them
to be impious, in that they think that the gods either do not exist, or
have no power, or would not shrink from the most extreme of actions.
And how can they not be hostile to the gods in doing such things? For
if someone will draw down the moon or eclipse the sun or make storm
and sunshine by magic and sacrifice, I shall not think that there is
anything divine (theion) in these things, but rather that they are human,
since the power of the divine is mastered and enslaved by human
shrewdness. (4: The Sacred Disease 4.1-16)
Magic had an ambiguous status in Greek culture. Religion was some-

thing homegrown, central to the Greek self-image; magic is a foreign
import, often with something sinisterly un-Greek about it.12
2 The Hippocratic Sense of the Divine: Literal or Ironic?
Ludwig Edelstein carefully distinguishes reverence for the divine (which

he takes to be no less characteristic of the Hippocratic treatises than of
the rest of Greek culture) from an abhorrence of magical practices, clearly
rightly.13 However, Edelstein's positive thesis, that the Hippocratic texts
none the less evince a profound, religious feeling, a general 'supematu-
ralism', is much less unexceptionable. Nowhere, for example, in Epidem-
ics I and III,14 the great classic of Hippocratic clinical observation, is there
12 Of course, there is no single 'Greek attitude' to magic; and once again late antiquity
saw a resurgence of interest in magical practices associated with rehgion: see the
appendix on Theurgy in E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (California, 1951);
and see also in general Lloyd, Magic
13 Edelstein, 'Greek Medicine'; see also Lloyd, Magic, ch. 1.
14 The seven books of the Hippocratic Epidemics are clearly by several hands, as was
recognized in antiquity, and betray different interests. Thus Epidemics II and VI
show more interest than the others in causal explanation and general issues of
methodology; Epidemics II is at least partially aphoristic in structure; the case-histo-
ries of Epidemics VII are often longer and more detailed than those in other books,
although it reproduces much material also found in Epidemics V. But since antiquity,
Epidemics I and III have been recognized as going together, both in their style of
construction (each consists of a series of 'constitutions', or general accounts of

any suggestion that the conditions discussed may be more than merely
physical in nature; and this is true even when the writer discusses their
epidemiology and suggests an aetiology for them. While he frequently
records the fact that a particular disease sometimes appears without any
obvious prophasis,]5 or antecedent occasion, he never so much as hints
that the absence of any apparent physical cause is a reason for ascribing
the disease to divinity; and the same goes for the rest of the Epidemics.
Most of the major symptomological and therapeutic texts, such as
Prorrhetic, Regimen in Acute Diseases, Regimen in Health, On Nutrition, On
Diseases, On Affections, and Diseases of Women, make no mention of the
divine, and neither do theoretical treatises such as On the Nature of Man
and On Breaths, and the empirically-inclined On Ancient Medicine. This
last does indeed say that the early successes of dietetically-based medi-
cine made its discoverers 'think the art worthy of being ascribed to a god,
as indeed is still thought to be the case' (Ancient Medicine 14.17-20); but
the phraseology suggests that the author, while understanding the rea-
sons for that divine ascription, nevertheless rejects it.
Yet silence of this sort does not positively establish that these Hippo-
cratic authors did not hold the sort of view Edelstein ascribes to them;
nor must one lose sight of the variousness of the Hippocratic corpus. But
it does show that any such views, if they existed, played no role in their
practical conception of medicine. Not all the Hippocratic texts, however,
are similarly silent. Let us then examine the sources for Edelstein's thesis.
Edelstein takes the pronouncements of The Sacred Disease at face-
value. In his view, the author genuinely believes the purifiers to be
impious, a belief which implies a corresponding commitment to some
climatic and other features prevailing at a particular time, and the diseases associ-
ated with them, followed by a series of case-histories), and in their more obviously
polished quality; and they have often been ascribed to the historical Hippocrates. I
take no stand here on the 'Hippocraric question', of what, if any, texts in the corpus
can be ascribed to the master, although I am inclined to scepticism: see G.E.R. Lloyd,
"The Hippocratic question', Classical Quarterly 25 (1975) 171-92; repr. in Lloyd,
Methods and Problems in Greek Science (Cambridge, 1991).
15 On the key notion of a prophasis, see H.R. Rawlings, A semantic study o/PROPHASIS
to 400 B.C., Hermes Einzelschriften 33 (Wiesbaden, 1975), although Rawlings'
treatment is some respects inadequate: see Lloyd, Magic 54, n. 231, see further below,
16.

8 R.J. Hankinson
notion of genuine piety. The anti-purifier polemic lends some support

to this interpretation:
they employ purifications and incantations, and in so doing do some-

thing very unholy and irreligious, at least in my view. For they "purify"
those in the grip of the disease with blood and other things of such a
kind, as though they are suffering from some miasma or blood-guilt,
or are bewitched by human influence, or have performed some unholy
act; but they should have done exactly the opposite, sacrificing and
praying, taking them to the sanctuaries as suppliants of the gods ...
However I do not believe that a man's body can be polluted by a god,
something most corrupt by something most holy; if it has indeed
become polluted or injured by something else, it should be purified and
sanctified by a god, rather than polluted by him. It is the divine which
purifies and sanctifies and cleanses us of the greatest and most unholy
of our sins; moreover we set up the boundaries of the sanctuaries and
precincts of the gods in order that no-one shall cross them unless in a
state of purity; and when we go in we sprinkle ourselves not in order
to pollute ourselves but rather to purify ourselves of any pollution we
may previously have contracted. This is how things seem to be to me
with regard to purifications. (5: The Sacred Disease 4.34-61)
That passage apparently expresses the author's own religious views (has
emoige dokei, and similar locutions, occur several times); and Edelstein
took it to be a literal profession of the author's religious belief.
On the other hand, our author's frequent contention that this disease
is no more divine than any other (1.2-3, 3 above; 5.1-2, 15-17; 21.6-8)
might simply mean that it was not divine at all ('you're no more a god
than I am'). All of his claims in 5 and elsewhere about what is and what
is not genuinely pious may be purely dialectical, ironic even, in tone. His
opponents fail their own test of piety; for his own part, he need have
nothing to do with it.16 It is tempting to ascribe to Edelstein an excessive
16 Lesley Dean-Jones remarks (in her comments on the original version of this paper:
see n. 56): 'although we do not have enough evidence to decide categorically
whether or not the author was being ironic in text 5,1 would not have thought his
view of piety is absurd enough for him to have expected it to be taken as ironic by
the majority of his audience'. Fair enough: but we do not know who his intended
audience was; and even if this is correct, the passage may still be read dialectically.

Teutonic literal-mindedness in his interpretation of a text which is

certainly not above a sophistical flourish or two.
Contrast this with the typically Gallic, ironic interpretation of An-
thoine Thivel.17 In Travel's view, our author never uses theion and its
cognates in propria persona at all:
this disease seems to me to be in no way more divine than the rest, but
it has the same nature as the other diseases and the same originating
cause (prophasis) as they; this divine thing comes to be from the same
source t the nature and the causet as does everything else, and is no
less curable than the others. (6: The Sacred Disease 5.1-5)
Thivel comments 'in this last sentence, the author's thought leaves no
room for ambiguity: he does not take theion at face-value, but rather
places it in scare-quotes, as it were, since this disease is curable'. That
might be right, although the text is problematic, and even as he prints it,
it is difficult to extract the sense he requires here;18 but the case is by no
means as clear-cut as he pretends.
On the other hand, summarizing the results of his inquiry in the final
chapter, our author writes:
this disease, which is called sacred, arises from the same originating
causes (prophaseis) as the rest, namely from things entering and leaving
the body, from cold and sun and the never-resting changeability of the
winds. These things are divine, and so one must not isolate this disease
and suppose it more divine than the rest: everything is divine and
17 In 'Le divin dans la collection Hippocratique', in Formes de pensee dans la collection

Hippocratique: Actes du IV Colloque Hippocratique (Geneva, 1983). My predilection for
ascribing styles of interpretation to national characteristics is no doubt due to my
British cynicism.
18 Thivel ('Le divtn', 66) renders this 'quant ä la maladie dont il s'agit ici, eile ne me
parait pas plus divine que le reste, mais eile a la nature qu'ont les autres maladies
et la cause dont chacune derive. Cela (la nature et la cause) est le divin d'ou provient
tout le reste. D'ailleurs, eile est curable par des moyens humains ...', which is
(although there is no explicit reference to 'human means' in the Greek) a reasonable
enough stab at what must be something approximating to the original meaning if
the MSS readings are largely followed. But the passage is clearly corrupt, and may
need more drastic surgery (Jones, following Reinhold, secludes all reference to the
divine here: Jones, II, 150-1).

10 R.]. Hankinson
everything human. Each of them has a nature and power of their own,
and none is hopeless or untreatable. Most can be cured by the same
things which caused them." (7: The Sacred Disease 21.1-12)
It is harder to dismiss those remarks as being merely dialectical or ironic

in inspiration; and they suggest that he is committed to the claim that
everything really is, in some sense, divine.20
And yet the bulk of The Sacred Disease is devoted to expounding and
supporting the thesis that epilepsy has discoverable physical and physi-
ological causes, causes the knowledge of which (as the last sentence of
the previous quotation avers) will provide a guide to therapy. Epilepsy
is, like other diseases, hereditary (5.9-15); moreover
there is a great indication (mega tekmerion) of the fact that it is no more

divine than the rest of them: for it occurs in those who are phlegmatic
by nature, while not afflicting the bilious; yet if it were more divine than
the others it ought to occur in all types with equal frequency, and not
distinguish between bilious and phlegmatic. (8: The Sacred Disease
5.16-21; cf. 10 below)
It is caused by problems in the brain 'like the other serious diseases' (6.1-3):
and the author sketches in considerable detail an account of how, under
certain circumstances, an excess of phlegm can be diverted from its normal
channels into the major veins (in particular the hepatic vein), where it
produces stupor and spasms (chs. 6-10); thus the cure involves stopping
it from doing so. The brain is the seat of reason and consciousness; and it
is the brain's functioning which is humorally disturbed in cases of delir-
ium, seizure and madness (chs. 17-20). Moreover, the incidence of the
disease varies according to age and general climatic conditions (chs.
11-16), a fact which will be of some importance later on (§4).
19 This is not homeopathy: Hippocratic medicine is almost uniformly allopathic.

Rather it is the claim that if some factor F is responsible for some condition, then
that condition can be alleviated by removing or suppressing F; compare here Places
in Man 42, VI, 334-6 Littre, VIII, 84-6 Potter
20 Thivel, 'Le divin', 66) translates tauta d'esti them as 'voila ce qui est divin', and
remarks On pourrait meme traduire, pour souligner le sense: "Voilä tout ce qu'il y
a de divin lä-dedans..."' Well, one might so translate: but to do so surely is to impose
a particular sense on the text here rather than merely underlining its evident import;
see further, n. 30 below.

3 The Explanatory Vacuity of Pantheism
The account sketched by the author of The Sacred Disease is fanciful,

imperfectly supported, empirically inadequate, indeed plain wrong in
just about every respect. But what matters is not the substance of the
explanation but its style, which is rigorously mechanistic in form. The
onset of the disease, which has its own 'nature and power' (i.e., internal
causal structure), is itself caused by external and internal conditions
affecting the patient; and all of these conditions are material, even where
(as in the case of delirium) they have psychological correlates. The divine,
even if it is invoked non-ironically and with a straight face in text 7, has
no genuine explanatory function to fulfill here. In this sense the text is a
paradigm of the new rationalism: everything about the disease may be
explained in straightforwardly physicalist causal terms. From the point
of view of practical disease-classification and treatment, reference to the
divine is theoretically inert.
But if the resolution of the question of whether or not, and if so in what
sense, diseases and physical conditions in general are divine makes no
difference to issues of the proper account of the disease's aetiology,
nature, and potential cure, then theology is independent of medical
practice. Thus the question of what role (if any) religion plays in The
Sacred Disease is in a sense independent of the extent to which its
accusations of impiety on the part of the purifiers are to be taken
seriously.
Of course doctors may still say to their hopeless cases 'you can always
try Asclepius', much as current orthodox physicians may sometimes,
when they have come to the limit of their resources, allow that you might
as well try a faith-healer (or some unorthodox practitioner), or a pilgrim-
age to Lourdes, as well as tolerating, even encouraging, prayer.
Such suggestions may be made with a variety of different motiva-
tions. The physician may actually believe in the possibility of enlisting
God on the patient's side; or he may simply consider them to be psycho-
logically (and hence potentially psychosomatically) beneficial; or he may
accept some (perhaps none too clear-cut) mixture of the two. It is thus
difficult to determine whether such motivations are religious or not;
indeed it may be so for the practitioners themselves, believer and unbe-
liever alike (compare On Regimen IV 88, 89; see further below §7). But
they are clearly invitations to step outside the borders of the practice, not
reflections of something integral to it.
Equally separate (and equally pragmatically inert) is the question of
the metaphysical status of the divine in the ordinary causal run of things.

12 R.J. Hankinson
The world may be full of gods, or through-and-through divine; but if it

is, that fact can have no effect on practice. It is only if there is a particular,
demarcated sphere for the divine, whether in ontology on the one hand
or practical therapeutics on the other, that it could make any practical
difference to invoke it.
Congruently one might wonder what real force there could be to the
claim that all diseases are equally divine and equally human. One might
argue, either on positivist or pragmatist grounds, that unless the hy-
pothesis that there is a divine component to things can make some
difference, either to what (in principle) verifiable predictions we can
make or to our actual practice, then such suppositions are devoid of
content (although it is another question whether the Hippocratics could
have realized this, and hence that any such talk of the divine was mere
linguistic window-dressing).
That issue cannot be settled on the basis of the texts we possess. Indeed
such questions are intrinsically and perennially difficult. There is no hard
and fast divide between the literal and the metaphorical; rather the one
shades insensibly into the other, and even sophisticated and self-con-
scious language-users may themselves, for perfectly respectable reasons,
find it difficult or impossible to decide whether some particular locution
of theirs is primarily metaphorical or not (consider the case of 'wave' and
'particle' in high-energy physics).
But we may ask whether calling something theios for a sophisticated
Greek of the fifth century had any more religious content than 'divine'
had in the vernacular of the 1920s. Consider Aristotle's usage of the
adjective theios in Nicomachean Ethics VII1. Aristotle is making the point
that both superhuman virtue and subhuman bestiality are rare:
but perhaps it is appropriate to speak of virtue beyond ours, something
heroic or divine, as Homer has Priam say of Hector that he was
exceedingly good: "and he was like not to a child of any mortal man,
but of a god".21 So if, as they say, men become gods as a result of
superabundant virtue, the state opposed to that of bestiality would
clearly be of some such kind ... And it is rare for a man to be divine (as
the Spartans are accustomed to refer to someone they particularly
21 Iliad XXIV 258-9

admire, calling him a "divine man"),22 just as bestiality is rare among

men. (9: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII1,1145al9-30)
Aristotle surely does not mean to suggest that the devotees of the mys-
tery-religions are correct in supposing that we can undergo genuine
apotheosis, or even that the Spartans really mean a human paragon is
literally a god.
On the other hand, he holds that the exercise of the highest human
capacity (reason) is the exercise of the divine in us, since that is how we
most closely approximate to the condition of God (cf. the discussion of
the contemplative life: Ethics X 6-9; and the characterization of the scala
naturae in de Caelo II12). To call these attributes 'divine', then, is not just
an idiomatic way of saying that they're really great.23
Equally, when Aristotle says that 'God and nature do nothing in vain'
(de Caelo 14,271a33), he is not making any literal claim regarding divine
activity: Aristotle's god doesn't do anything at all in that sense. 'God and
nature' here is a pleonasm, recalling an age when nature was supposed
more literally to reveal the hand of God.24 But it is not just pleonasm or
metaphor. Nature is divine because of its intricacy, regularity and tele-
ological structure; natural processes, in their goal-directedness and their
striving for a type of immortality, seek to emulate the divine condition.
Yet even if nature is divine in more than merely a metaphorical sense,
there is still no point in appealing to it as one might a powerful patron.
This sort of divinity, in sharp contrast with the angry, engaged, interven-
tionist gods of epic and tragedy, is not open to plaint or suasion, much
less magical coercion. Indeed it is the fact that nature is so structured that
makes it amenable to understanding, and hence to prediction and ulti-
mately (if we are lucky) to human control.
22 Cf.MeHo99d.
23 See also On the Generation of Animals Π 1,731b25; 3,736b28-33,737alO: the soul-sub-
stance is described as being divine, since it is closely assimilated to the eternal,
incorruptible element of the ether (cf. de Caelo 12,269a31ff.; 3, 270b5ff.).
24 Compare Aristotle's reference in Parts of Animals I 5, 645al9ff to Heraclitus's
invitation to his friends to come into his kitchen with good cheer: 'there are gods
here too'; Aristotle wants to emphasize that the hands-on study of biology is a
worthwhile study: 'we should embark upon the study of each of the animals with
a good heart, there is something of the natural and the noble in each of them'
(645a22-4).

14 R./. Hankinson
4 The Sacred Disease and Airs, Waters, Places:

Different Concepts of Divinity?
This account makes sense of much of the material we have been discuss-
ing. Consider again text 7: diseases have natural structures like every-
thing else, and as the writer repeatedly affirms, particular causes. The
'sacred disease' is no different in this regard. But our author also,
apparently, states that cold, heat, and climatic effects (and perhaps also
'things entering and leaving the body': the antecedent of 'these things'
at the beginning of the second sentence is unclear), are divine, which is
why all diseases are equally divine.
Edelstein sees in this claim a certain dualism, distinct from the general
'supematuralism' he discerns elsewhere:
all diseases are divine insofar as they are caused by sun and air and
winds, which are divine. ... They are human, apparently because they
have their origin in heredity, in the organs of the body. It is impossible
to admit the divinity of a special disease, for they are all divine; at the
same time, all diseases are human because of the influence of the body.
The two spheres of the divine and the natural are then fundamentally
separate, although their influence is combined in every action. (Edel-
stein, 'Greek Medicine', 215-16)25
The thought here is not entirely lucid: but the evidence for any such
separation of powers in our passage is flimsy indeed (not least since it is
unclear quite what our author here asserts to be divine). Edelstein himself
remarks (216, n. 36) that his view entails that 'the main theme of the book
is not the uniformity of Nature, every aspect of which is equally divine'
(as Jones, Hippocrates II, 135, has it), and moreover that 'there is a differ-
ence of basic theory between the book on the Sacred Disease and the book
on Water, Air and Places [sic]'.
This last consequence is particularly troublesome, since there is a close
and universally-acknowledged similarity in content and phrasing be-
tween those two works (see n. 28 below). Jones lists the parallels (Hip-
pocrates II, 130-1); it will suffice to quote a few paragraphs from chapter
22 of Airs, Waters, Places, a discussion of the peculiar sexual deformities
of the Scythians:
25 Cf 208-16.

furthermore, the majority of Scythian men become emasculated, and

perform women's tasks, and live and talk like women. Such men are
called Anaries. The people of the country ascribe responsibility for this
to a god, and respect and worship them, each fearing for himself. I also
regard these afflictions as divine — but so are all the rest, none being
either more divine or more human than any other, but all being alike
and all divine. Each of them has its own nature and occurs not apart
from its nature.25 (10: Airs, Waters, Places 22.1-13)
In sharp contrast with Herodotus's supernatural account of the same

phenomenon (Histories 1105),27 our author gives a naturalistic treatment
of the affliction, in the manner of The Sacred Disease (22.13-40), noting (in
a passage recalling text 8) that the disease affects the rich disproportion-
ately, since the poor do not ride:
yet if this disease is indeed more divine than the rest, it ought to have
affected not only the noblest and wealthiest of the Scythians, but
everyone alike; or rather especially those with few possessions, if
indeed the gods enjoy being honoured and venerated by men, and
repay these things with their favours. For it is reasonable that the rich,
in view of their wealth, will make many sacrifices and offerings to the
gods, and honour them, but the poor less so on account of their having
nothing; moreover they blame the gods for not giving them money, and
so the poor are more likely than the rich to bear the penalties for such
sins. But as I said before, these things are divine to just the extent
everything else is; and each arises in accordance with nature. (11: Airs,
Waters, Places 22.40-56)
The correspondences, both verbal and doctrinal, of these passages with

those of The Sacred Disease are immediately apparent.28 Both insist on the
26 Or, reading 'prophasios': 'not without any originating cause'.

27 See Lloyd, Magic, 31.
28 Wilamowitz ('Die hippokratische Schrift peri hieres nousou' Sitzungsberichte der
königlich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [Berlin, 1901] 2-23) thought they
were written by the same author, although Jones (Hippocrates II, 131-2) disagrees (as
of course does Edelstein, since he discerns an important distinction of doctrine
between them), on the grounds that Sacred Disease permits itself sophistic stylistic
flourishes eschewed by the more severe authors of Airs (moreover, Airs itself falls
into two quite distinct and possibly unrelated sections).

16 R.J. Hankinson
fact that each disease has its phusis. Both seek to explain away the appar-
ently numinous qualities of the afflictions with which they are concerned.
Both offer an explanation of the disease in question along fundamentally
humoral lines. Both adopt the claim that 'all are equally divine and
human' as a kind of slogan (which fact makes Edelstein's claim of sub-
stantial doctrinal difference between them even harder to accept). Both
seek to support their own position (and undermine their opponents') by
appealing to the demographics of their diseases (call this the 'incidence
problem': see 14, §6 below).29
Thus the implication of Edelstein's position, that there are substantial
doctrinal differences between Sacred Disease and Airs, is extremely diffi-
cult to accept. And there is in fact no need to accept it. The things which
are divine of text 7 are the prophaseis or external occasions of diseases —
divine again, in my view, because they proceed from a fundamental
natural ordering of the world, although also, perhaps, because they fall
outside the scope of direct human control (compare the case of On
Prognosis: §5 below). But they are certainly not divine, from this perspec-
tive, because they involve direct, conscious, supernatural interventions
into human affairs.
We may summarize the results of the investigation so far as follows.
In the Hippocratic texts of the late fifth century30 the 'poetic paradigm' of
29 Thivel ('Le divin', 60-70) rightly emphasizes the ironical nature of 11: 'quand
1'auteur constate que cette maladie affecte surtout les riches, et dit que c'est la preuve
qu'elle n'est pas divine, parce que les riches peuvent offrir de beaux sacrifices et se
concilier la faveur des dieux, il est clair qu'il manie une ironie mordante, et qu'il met
en doute l'efficacite des sacrifices'; but Thivel's conclusion ('il est sceptique sur la
religion') is I think justified only if by 'religion' he means the orthodox religion of
prayer, sacrifice, and supplication; it by no means excludes the 'rationalisme deiste'
of such commentators as Nestle ('Hippocratica', Hermes 73 (1938) 1-8), as Thivel
supposes, nor does it entail that every mention of to theion in our text is tinged with
irony. And finally, to suppose that things are theia in this sense does not compromise
the general determinism of the physiological picture sketched, as Thivel puts it
(69-70), even if (as is doubtful) 'determinism' is the appropriate way of charac-
terizing the sort of mechanism at issue here.
30 Dating the Hippocratic corpus presents notorious problems; I follow the general
tradition in supposing The Sacred Disease to have been composed around 430-420
BC, with Airs probably a slightly older contemporary. On Prognosis and Epidemics I
and III probably also derive from the last quarter of the fifth century, as also does
Regimen in Acute Diseases. Of the other texts discussed in this article, On Regimen
was probably composed around 400 BC; and Prorrhetic Π seems relatively early

diseases—tha t they are the result of supernatural influence and displeas-

ure, and as such must be approached with supplication and prayer (and
perhaps also magical coercion) — is replaced with the 'rational' doctrine
that all diseases are natural, and hence in principle predictable and
treatable without recourse to divine intervention. The rational model
need not involve the outright rejection of the concept of divinity; but at
least it relocates it, in the structure and unity of nature itself in general,
rather than particularly in the more obscure, frightening, and apparently
intractable areas of illness. Divinity thus ceases to become synonymous
with the mysterious and terrifying, an index of human inability to under-
stand the world, but rather the very property of the world that renders it
intelligible.
5 Some Problems for the Rationalist Interpretation
There are obstacles to this happy picture. On Prognosis, for example, is

in most respects a paragon of Hippocratic rationalism, devoted to the
systematic categorization of physical signs and symptoms. It insists on
the uniformity of causation: the same physical signs portend the same
outcomes in Libya as they do in Delos or in Scythia (24.11-24). The writer
stresses the importance of being able to determine the past, present and
future course of the disease on the basis of signs and symptoms (1.1-5):
one must understand the natures of such diseases, how far they exceed
the power of the body [sc. to resist], + and also whether these diseases
Dating of the gynaecological works is a good deal more speculative. One text which
does mention the gods in a significant manner (On Decorum 6) is indubitably late,
and hence beyond the remit of this study; it is also very obscure and corrupt, but if
anything it seems to me to endorse the view of the divine that I discover in the earlier
material. This is controversial, however. Thivel ('Le divin', 61) claims that Tauteur
ecrit une epoque oil les pretres guerisseurs ont une influence beaucoup plus
grande qu'a le fin du V* siecle, quand hit ecnt Pronosttc. II defend les droits de la
medecine positive, mais se croit oblige de justifier ses succes de la meme ίβςοη que
ceux de la medecine religeuse. ce sont les dieux qui guerissent toutes les maladies,
qu'elles soient traitees par un medecin ou par un pretre'. That is certainly a possible
construal of the text, although it is not forced upon us: but whatever the truth of the
matter here our assessment of the state of affairs in fifth-century Hippocratism is
unaffected.

18 R.J. Hankinson
have anything divine in them,t and learn how to predict them. (12: On
Prognosis 1.19-22)
The obelized clause, which occurs in all the MSS, was secluded by Kühle-
wein solely on the grounds that no self-respecting Hippocratic could say
such a thing. Jones agrees, remarking that 'it is contrary to Hippocratic
doctrine, and to suppose that to theion means loimos has no Hippocratic
authority, nor would a reference to plague be in place here' (Hippocrates
II,9,n.l).
The clause has excited comment since ancient times: Galen, comment-
ing on the text (On Hippocrates' On Prognosis' XVIIIB17-22 Kühn), reports
that some took to theion to refer to diseases caused by the anger of the
gods, 'citing as evidence for the view the writers of so-called histories'.
But, Galen declares, Hippocrates 'never in any of his books ascribes the
cause of disease to the gods', referring to Regimen in Acute Diseases 17,
where the writer offers a naturalistic account of what happens in cases in
which older doctors described their patients as having been 'stricken'
(bletoi), i.e., afflicted by a god.
Nor, Galen continues, is the divine here the affliction of love, as some
have claimed, impertinently citing Erasistratus's famous diagnosis of
lovesickness: 'neither Erasistratus nor Hippocrates nor any other doctor
ever taught that love was divine, or called it thus'. When love is respon-
sible for emaciation, pallor, insomnia, or even fever, it is properly cate-
gorized simply as one of the antecedent causes, in the same way as grief
is: 'people afflicted by love suffer not a divine but a human affection'.
Equally, anyone who supposes that 'divine' here is a reference to
critical days traduces Hippocrates: 'for we do not simply call everything
whose cause is unknown or unexpected divine, but only if they are
remarkable; while in any case Hippocrates was not ignorant of the causes
of critical days'.
The problem, Galen thinks, is that while Hippocrates here clearly
makes the divine a part of medical science, one that requires more than
mere lip-service acknowledgement, to theion is never again mentioned
in the treatise. Galen supposes that it here refers to the various atmos-
pheric properties which are responsible for epidemics,31 even though
31 Littre (Htppocrate II, 100-1) writes a propos: 'il me semble que cette interpretation de
Galien est inadmissible, ä cause du sens precis d'infliction divine que le mot theion
a dans les passages du Traite des Airs, des Eaux, et des Lieux, oil Hippocrate combat

such conditions are barely mentioned in Prognosis. In effect, on Galen's

view, Hippocrates defers his treatment of the 'divine' to the Epidemics.
But this solution is hardly satisfactory, even if one supposes that Prog-
nosis and Epidemics I and III are by the same hand.32
Edelstein supposes the 'divine' aspects of diseases to be apparently
spontaneous cures or remissions ('Greek Medicine', 216-17). Yet these
figure nowhere in the rest of the treatise, the whole tenor of which rather
suggests that if you correctly evaluate all the relevant signs, you will be
able to foretell the outcome with something approaching certainty.
Other Hippocratic texts do talk of such recoveries: at Prorrhetic II 8 (IX,
26-8 Littre, VIII, 242 Potter), the writer notes that certain cases of gout
allied to constipation 'cannot be cured by the human art', although a
fortunate attack of dysentery works wonders. Yet he does not suggest
that this 'human art' is here supplemented by a divine one: rather one
might simply get lucky (cf. the same writer's talk of what is 'within
human capabilities': text 2 above). Similarly the writer of Places in Man,
while downplaying the role of luck in properly-practised medicine,
declares that 'luck is arbitrary and cannot be commanded; nor can it
come as a result of prayer' (Places in Man 46, VI, 342 Littre, VIII, 92
Potter).33
Elsewhere, then, spontaneous cures are not held to be divine, at any
rate not in any special sense (a possible exception is On Decorum 6: but
see n. 30 above). Moreover, Edelstein's interpretation does not harmo-
ceux qui pensent qu'il y des maladies envoyees par la divinite'. That consideration
does not seem to me to be particularly compelling, especially if one does not suppose
(as Littre does: he has to adopt a genetic account) that Airs and On Prognosis were
both composed by the same author Galen's interpretation squares with Edelstein's
view of the sense of thewn in Sacred Disease (esp. text 7; above, §4); however Edelstein
himself interprets On Prognosis differently.
32 On the relation between the texts, cf. Jones, Hippocrates 1,142, II, ix.
33 Spontaneous cures are paralleled by cases of illnesses developing without any
obvious originating cause: cf. Epidemics III 3.1-3, 4.1-5 — but, as was noted above
(§2), there is no suggestion there that they are owed to (malign) divine influence.
Compare On Diseases I 7 (VI, 152-4 Littre, V, 112-14 Potter) on spontaneous occur-
rences, both beneficial and harmful: again there is no suggestion of any divine
component here; and nor is there in the following chapter which concerns good and
bad luck.

20 R.J. Hankinson
nize well with his earlier accounts of Hippocratic divinity.34 Either (a)
the 'spontaneous' effects are genuinely the work of the gods (hence
introducing new causal factors into the picture), or (b) 'divine' here is
merely a metaphor for whatever cannot be explained, either (i) because
its cause is at the moment unknown or (ii) because it has no (physically
discernible) cause at all.35 Both (a) and (bii) contradict the thesis of the
uniformity of causation already noted, and in particular (bii) is at odds
with my suggestion that divinity, as invoked in Sacred Disease, Airs, and
by Aristotle, is virtually synonymous with the intrinsic ordering, and
hence the rational explicability, of things.
However, since the troublesome clause apparently refers specifically
to those diseases that are beyond human control, it is hard to maintain
that theion here simply refers to the natural regularity of things. It
suggests rather that a disease's divinity is another way, distinct from its
simply having become too strongly entrenched for the patient to resist
it, in which it may prove incurable (which militates against Edelstein's
notion that it is spontaneous recovery that is at issue here). But even so,
the text need not postulate a distinct class of diseases of genuinely divine
origin. Rather to say that there is something of the divine in some disease
is simply ([bi] above) to say that it resists accurate prognosis (perhaps it
is of type never previously encountered; or perhaps it is one of a class
which, in spite of having a recognized symptomology, has proven erratic
and unpredictable in the past). In such cases, the cautious physician will
refuse to commit himself one way or another.
This would explain why the divine makes no further appearance in
the text, which is, after all, about what we can predict. But again if this is
right, to call something 'divine' in this sense implies simply that it is
34 See n. 31; it also sits badly with the denial of the existence of spontaneity by, for
example, the writer of On the Art (Art chs. 4-7).
35 The latter option (bii) was never popular in antiquity. Edelstein pertinently cites
Aristotle Physics II 4, 196b5-7: 'there are some who believe chance to be a cause,
obscure to human intelligence, as being something divine and numinous', but of
course the Stoics, who did indeed define chance as 'a cause obscure to human
understanding' (SVFII965-7) did not thereby mean that there was anything special
about such causation, or that it proceeded from some non-standard, miraculous
source. Their point is that the notion of chance is purely epistemic, as indeed it must
be in their rigidly determimst universe; see Hankinson, 'Stoicism, science and
divination', 153-7.

remarkable or out of the ordinary, which is in any case a perfectly

common Greek sense of the term. This discussion is hardly conclusive;
but that itself serves to show that, even if we retain the text, nothing
whatever can be inferred from it in regard to the real religious views (if
any) of the author (which is itself a reason for retaining the text).36
A passage from the beginning of Nature of Women is also troublesome:
the divine is most particularly a cause for human beings; next come
women's natures and complexions (chroiai).*7 Some are too pale,
moister, and more prone to flux; others dark, harder, and more rigid;
while those who are tanned are in between the two. The same thing is
true in regard to age. The young are moister and for the most part
fuller of blood, the old drier and thin-blooded, those in middle age
intermediate. He who wishes to treat them correctly must first begin
with the divine, then understand women's natures and ages, and the
seasons and places they are in. (13: Nature of Women 1, VII, 312 Littre)
As in the case of On Prognosis, this isolated reference to divinity is not

followed up anywhere in the remainder of the treatise, nor in the related
36 Thivel ('Le divin', 60) thinks that our text distinguishes incurable diseases of divine
origin from natural, treatable ones: 'pour l'auteur du Pronostic, les maladies divines
doivent etre detectees, mais on peut rien centre elles: elles sont du ressort de la
medecine magique et religeuse. De tels maladies, quand le medecin avoue son
impuissance, peuvent toujours, s'ils ne veulent pas perir, faire appel au pretre ou
au divin. Ainsi est delimite le domaine de la medecine positive: eile ne hasarde pas
dans les cas qui depassent sa competence. L'affirmation de 1'existence de maladies
divines ne porte done aucune atteinte ä la valeur scientifique de la medecine En
somme, cela ne fait qu'enteriner une situation qui existe encore de nos jours: on
appelle le pretre quand le medecin ne peut plus rien'. That is a possible reading —
but the rest of the text nowhere suggests that, if all else fails, call in the priest (and
in any case, as I stressed earlier, one's motivations for so doing may be complex and
various). Of course I agree with Thivel that this reference to the divine, however it
is to be interpreted, does not compromise the rational nature of the medical
philosophy adopted by our author. In fact, it can even be read sceptically: the
physician needs to know if there are any distinctively divine diseases in order for
his prognoses to be accurate (or at least sufficiently nuanced); but that claim is quite
compatible with there not, in the author's opinion, being any such diseases (all of
which is perfectly compatible with accepting that all of nature is, in some sense,
divine).
37 The importance of the complexion in determining women's health is emphasized
elsewhere in the corpus: Prorrhetic II24, IX 54-6 Littre, Potter, Hippocrates VIII, 270-2.

22 R.J. Hankinson
and lengthier Diseases of Women, which contains a passage which closely

parallels this one in every other respect. Littre, linking this text with text
12 from On Prognosis, as well as 7, 10 and 11 from Sacred Disease and
Airs?9 supposes that ta theia here are identical with 'the constitution of
eternal things'39 which (at least on the better-attested reading) the author
of On Diseases of Virgins (VIII, 466 Littre) takes to be the starting-point of
medicine. The late compiler of our text has misunderstood the reference
in Diseases of Virgins to 'the constitution of eternal things', which he has
then intruded into the coherently secular doctrine of Diseases of Women.
But, as Thivel ('Le divin', 73) remarks, 'nowadays nothing survives of
all this fragile construction'. Littre supposed that Nature of Women was a
later rehash of Diseases of Women, a hypothesis now rejected. Both are
probably reworkings of some independent earlier text,40 and thus we can
infer nothing from the relations between our two texts about the attitude
of the original to the divine. Moreover the alternative reading in Diseases
of Virgins (neegeneon for aeigeneon) which would make the starting point
of medical science the constitution of new-bom babies (or newly-con-
ceived foetuses) may be correct (it fits a little better with what follows,
and is the lectio difficilior).
Nature of Women is a late patchwork, quilted from a variety of sources,
hence there is no particular difficulty in accounting for the appearance of
the divine here as an intrusion from a later and more credulous age
(compare the case of On Decorum: n. 30 above). Equally, it might, as Thivel
suggests ('Le divin', 76), be no more than 'the remains of a traditional
formula, with no influence on medical practice, which doctors have
retained at the beginning of a course'. Such expressions (of which the
38 His discussion is vitiated by his belief that Prognosis and Airs were both written by
Hippocrates; he believes that the Prognosis passage refers to divinely-inflicted
diseases of the sort that he takes Airs to rule out, and hence has to adopt a genetic
explanation: Hippocrate VIII, 530.
39 Littre identifies these with 'the mysterious influences emanating from heaven and
earth, fire and waters' (Hippocrate VIII, 531), an interpretation for which I can find
no reasonable motivation (unless he is simply following the interpretation of Galen
from On Prognosis- above, 18), even assuming that aeigeneon is the correct reading
(see further below); if it is, one might identify these divine 'eternal things' with the
regular workings of the cosmos as a whole, conformably with my earlier interpre-
tation.
40 Thivel ('Le divin', 73-4) reviews the evidence and the scholarship.

reference in 12 might also be one; compare the invocation of the gods in

the Oath) may be no more than the traditional equivalents of slogans like
'Law governs everything' which begins the embryological treatise On
Seed (VII, 470 Littre), rather in the manner of a high-table grace reverently
intoned by the fervidly atheist Master of the college.
But even if we allow the passage as it stands to represent genuine early
Hippocratic thought (and I should stress that, given the nature of the
Hippocratic corpus, we should not expect to discover a single, uniform
significance for every reference to the divine in it), it can be explained in
a manner broadly compatible with our earlier findings. Our author
would here be marking a distinction between nature as a whole (the
totality of natural influences), which he labels 'divine', on the one hand,
and the specific natures of women (their humoral structures, both gen-
erally as women and as particular individuals) on the other.
This author's stance would then be of a piece with that of Sacred
Disease, Airs, and Aristotle: nature as a whole, in its regularity, is divine.
And again, not incompatibly, the characterization of the workings of
nature in the large may also be intended to stress their independence of
human control. We can do nothing about the particular climatic condi-
tions (or the regular cycle of the seasons) which the Hippocratics consid-
ered to be so important in the explanation of disease (cf. Epidemics 11-26,
III 2-16).41
Since their talk of divinity does not mark off one part of reality signifi-
cantly from the rest, it matters less whether or not (and if so in what sense)
our authors really believed nature to be divine. Take the case of On
Fleshes: the author prefaces his strikingly rationalistic, physical cosmog-
ony with the words 'it seems to me that what we call heat is immortal,
that it perceives everything, and sees hears and knows everything, both
what is and what will be' (On Fleshes 2, VIII, 584 Littre, VIII, 132 Potter;
compare Xenophanes' god who 'sees as a whole, thinks as a whole and
hears as a whole': Fr. 21 B 24 DK).
But this all-seeing, omniscient heat, even if it is conceived literally as
a pantheistic cognitive force, is not something to be feared or propitiated:
rather it is to be understood. The astonishing is seen no longer as a source
41 Lesley Dean-Jones (see n 58 below) put the point slightly differently: 'the term
"divine" as the Hippocratics apply it to disease, then, is best understood as a
reference to the origin of disease-states in the cosmos — the divinity of which it
would be un-Greek to deny'.

24 R.J. Hankinson
of terror, but rather as an invitation to investigate and ultimately to

explain. This new temperament is strikingly captured in the roughly
contemporary Ode on Man' of Sophocles' Antigone: it is no longer the
gods who are deina, but humankind and its discoveries.42
6 The Interpretation of Dreams: Aristotle
Yet, while it evidently excludes the cruder forms of supernatural beliefs

(particularly, although not exclusively, those involving magic and witch-
craft), this fifth-century scientific humanism is perfectly compatible with
a variety of religious attitudes, just as was the humanism of the Renais-
sance (or, for that matter, the science of today). Moreover, naturalistic
and divine medicine continued to enjoy a (more or less) peaceful co-ex-
istence throughout antiquity. The cult of Asclepius was accepted into
Athens in 420 BC (about the time the first Hippocratic texts were written:
n. 30); and excavations at the Sanctuary of Asclepius at Epidauros have
turned up a wealth of inscriptions left by grateful patients43 recording
successful cures at the hand of the god, often after all other hope had been
lost.
Yet we also know from the testimonia that, rather more frequently
than his occasional miraculous healings, the god would issue prescrip-
tions for drugs and regimen in the form of dreams (prescriptions which
often required expert 'interpretation'); the major difference between such
therapies and those of Orthodox' practitioners is simply in the modality
of their supposed generation.44 Later rationalists like Galen allow that
42 I do not claim that Sophocles endorses this view — the subsequent unfolding of the
tragedy, which includes the miasma visited on Thebes as a result of Creon's refusal
to bury Polyneices, strongly suggests otherwise — but at least he represents it.
43 Collected in E.J. Edelstein and L. Edelstein Asclepius· a Collection and Interpretation
of the Testimonies 2 vols. (Baltimore, 1945).
44 See Lloyd, Magic, 43-5; for an assessment of the evidence for Asclepian cures, and
possible explanations for them, see Edelstein and Edelstein, 1945 vol. 2, 158-73.
Lesley Dean-Jones stresses the fact that Asclepius was a doctor-god, rather than
simply a healer-god: he offers diagnosis and prescription, and the prescriptions
given are generally 'rationalist' rather than magical in tone, while even the 'miracu-
lous' cures often seem to have been accomplished by surgical means; moreover, the
diseases and inflictions themselves, even if ultimately attributable to a god, are
incurred through recognizably natural modalities.

temple medicine sometimes works;45 while incurable hypochondriacs

like Aelius Aristides would consult profane as well as sacred healers
(although he evinces a marked preference for the latter).
There is clearly a difference between believing that supernatural
means can directly effect a cure, and believing merely that a therapy
might be prescribed in some such non-standard manner. Furthermore,
one may believe that dreams are of importance in diagnosis without
supposing they involve signs sent by some supernatural agency. Aris-
totle, in his short treatise On Divination by Way of Dreams, rejects the notion
that dreams can have any supernatural cause or significance, while
accepting that, under certain circumstances (and for purely physical
reasons), they may prove prophetic.46 Two centuries later, Cicero agrees
that such non-supernatural, physical links between the condition of the
dreamer and his dream-contents may explain some of the supposed
successes of dream 'prediction'; but in any case dreams which presage
events accurately are rare enough for their 'success' to be mere chance
(On Divination II 119-48; cf. I 39-65). In neither case need 'prophetic'
dreams be referred to supernatural causes.
Cicero distinguishes between 'natural' and 'technical' forms of divi-
nation. The former (supposedly) involve unequivocal messages from the
higher powers, requiring no interpretation; the latter are veiled, and call
for interpretation by skilled practitioners (or so at least the proponents of
divination claim: Div 112,34,70-2).47 This parallels the case of Asclepian
incubations: sometimes the god gave clear, immediately intelligible ad-
vice on regimen; sometimes that advice was cloaked in metaphorical
dress. Call these transparent and opaque signs respectively.
Now, it is quite possible to accept that dreamers sometimes receive in
dreams opaque indications of their underlying conditions, which may,
45 Although he in general prefers psychosomatic explanations for its success, just as

he supposes that a physical explanation can be given for the efficacy of certain
'magical' amulets: On the Composition of Simple Drugs XI859-60 Kühn; cf. ibid. 792ft.
Kühn On the use of amulets in 'magical' medicine, see especially Lloyd, Magic, 42-5;
and G.E.R Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology, 123-31, 177-81; cf. Theophrastus,
History of Plants IX 19 2-3.
46 See D. Gallop, Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams (Peterborough, ON, 1990) for a lucid
analysis of Aristotle's argument and its significance.
47 See further Hankinson, 'Stoicism, science and divination', 135-8.

26 R./. Hankinson
suitably interpreted, suggest treatment or regimen; but one can suppose

this to be so without imagining that such signs are of divine provenance.
Rather it is the disturbed condition of the body itself which causes the
occurrence of dreams of a particular type, which can then be used (by
the skilful practitioner) as diagnostic and prognostic tools. This is, in
effect, what Aristotle claims. It is obviously far harder (although not
perhaps impossible) to give anything like a naturalistic account of the
existence (if any) of transparent signs (precognitive dreams and the like),
other than ascribing their apparent clairvoyant quality to chance and
auto-suggestion.48
Aristotle's treatise begins as follows:
concerning divination which occurs in sleep and which is said to arise

from dreams, it is not easy either to reject it or to accept it. The fact that
everyone, or at any rate most people, suppose there to be something
significant about dreams gives the view a certain empirical credibility;
nor is it incredible that in some cases there should be divination through
dreams, since they have a certain rational structure, and hence one
might suppose the same might be true in the case of other dreams as
well. On the other hand, the absence of any plausible explanation for
the phenomenon tends to discredit it: for in addition to its general
implausibility, it is absurd to suppose that a god is the source of such
things, and yet that he sends them not to the best and the wisest people,
but to anybody at all. Yet if we abandon the divine explanation, none
of the others seems reasonable; for it is beyond our understanding to
explain how anyone could foresee things occurring at the Pillars of
Hercules or on the Borysthenes. (14: Aristotle, On Divination by way of
Dreams 1,462bl2-27)
There are, then, good reasons for supposing that at least some dreams
have prophetic properties; yet it is hard to supply a plausible causal
account of such successes which does not appeal to the divine.
The rejection of the divine model is particularly interesting from our
point of view, since it precisely recalls the argumentative strategy of The
Sacred Disease and Airs (8, 11 above) in regard to what I called the
incidence problem (§4): the divine hypothesis cannot account for the
48 Aristotle, On Divination by way of Dreams I, 463a22ff; cf. Cicero, On Divination 2

119-21.

actual demographic profile of the phenomenon. This point is developed

later on. Ordinary men and even animals have dreams (ibid. 2,463bl2ff.:
17 below); indeed their very ordinariness accounts for the fact, since their
minds are more vacant than those of clever men, whereas such visions
should occur during the day and to the wise if they were divine (464al9-
24); moreover there is a correlation between humoral type and proneness
to such dreams (463bl7ff., 464a24ff.). This strongly suggests that the
incidence problem had become, by Aristotle's time, part of the stock
rationalist armoury; and so it has remained.
Aristotle remarks that 'dreams must be either causes or signs of
events, or coincidences' (On Divination by way of Dreams 1,462b27-9). By
definition, no coincidence can be regular (ibid. 463a2-3);49
are then some dreams causes, and others signs, for example of what
occurs in the body? At all events, even reputable doctors say that one
should pay close attention to dreams. (15: Aristotle, On Divination by
way of Dreams \, 463a3-6)
Aristotle holds that 'prophetic' dreams may fall into any of the three
categories. First of all, while sleeping, we are prone to exaggerate in
dream-form relatively mild stimuli (thus a man may dream of a thun-
derstorm 'when only faint echoes are occurring in his ears': 463al2-13),
as we realise upon awakening; but if this is so,
since the origins of everything are small, so too will be the origins of
diseases other affections which are about to occur in the body; clearly
then they must be more evident in sleep than in the waking condition.
(16: On Divination by way of Dreams 1,463al8-22)
Thus dreams may reflect real conditions, both internal and external. On
the other hand, the dream may itself actually cause someone to behave
in a certain way, and hence make the dream seem prophetic (ibid. 463a22-
32); while some apparent cases of clairvoyance are simply coincidences
(ibid. 463bl-l 1). Although the argument limned in 16 is evidently fragile,
it is an attempt to sketch an empirical account of the apparent success of
some sorts of dream-interpretation, one which resolutely excludes the
49 For this Aristotelian dictum, see Phys II4-6; 8,198b34-6; Metaph VI 2,1027a20-7; 3,
1027a29-bl4.

28 R.J. Hankinson
divine from the picture, at least as a conscious agent of transmission of

information:
in general, since even some of the other animals dream,50 dreams cannot
be sent by a god, nor do they occur for the sake of this, although they
are in a sense divine (daimonia), since nature is in a sense divine
(daimonia), although it is not actually god-like (theia).51 (17: On Divina-
tion by way of Dreams 2,463bl2-15)
Thus Aristotle sketches a model for the explanation of apparently sig-

nificant dreams which is resolutely rationalist in its outlook, while
allowing that dreams are, in a restricted sense divine. It parallels pre-
cisely the attitude of the Hippocratic texts discussed earlier.
7 The Interpretation of Dreams: On Regimen IV
So far, then, we have discerned in the Hippocratic texts, as well as in other

writings of a rationalist temper, a coherent account of the world in which
it makes sense to invoke the divine, but not as an authentically causal
component of one's cosmology. This account can make sense of, without
exactly explaining away, most of the various scattered references to
divinity in the Hippocratic corpus. Yet that smooth picture is marred by
a treatise on the diagnostic significance of dreams whose recalcitrance
will not, I think, yield to any such interpretative strategies, Book IV of On
Regimen (On Dreams').
On Regimen I is severely theoretical, offering a highly eclectic, yet
surprisingly coherent, naturalistic physiology, in which elements from
50 This is of course true-1 understand that all mammals, in fact, with the exception of
a certain species of Australian anteater, do so.
51 The awkwardness of the translation is an attempt to convey what I take to be the
sense of daimomos and theios here. Hett in the Loeb renders the terms as 'divinely-
ordained' and 'divine' respectively: but 'divinely-ordained' surely gives the wrong
sense for daimonios, suggesting as it does that nature is the result of some kind of
Timaeus-\ike creative intelligence, a picture quite foreign at least to Aristotle of the
later, esoteric texts, of which this is one. Rather the sense of 'daimomos' must, I think,
parallel the use of 'theios' in texts such as Sacred Disease and Airs: dreams are daimonia
in that they represent the structure and orderliness of nature as a whole; they are
not theia in the sense of being literally sent by the gods.

Heraclitus, the Pythagorean tradition, Empedocles and Anaxagoras are

all discernible, in which the fundamental constituents of everything,
human beings included, are fire and water. The two basic influences on
health and disease are nutrition and exercise (I 2); our author boasts as
his own 'great discovery' the method of accurately diagnosing, on the
basis of his preferred element-theory, their respective powers in particu-
lar cases (I 2; III 67, 69). Book II discusses the powers of various foods,
and the properties of various types of exercises, in great detail. Book III
continues in the same vein, offering a general account of the influence of
age, environment, season, and regimen, and how to diagnose cases where
exercise has overpowered nutrition and vice versa. Although the bulk of
this material is empirical, it is elaborated in line with the theoretical
foundations laid in Book I.
Thus while the details of the physiology and pathology offered by our
author may be original, in general style the whole is typically Hippo-
cratic. A general (not to say sweeping) foundation of theoretical physics
is laid, and upon it is erected a theory of regimen, sickness and health
with pretensions to empirical adequacy. Yet it is notable that On Regimen
I 12 (by contrast with Regimen in Acute Diseases 8: above 1) accepts
divination as a paradigmatic art or techne, 'understanding what is invis-
ible by way of what is visible' (I 12.4-5) and mirroring human nature
(12.8-19). Moreover, the existence of such mantic arts, however poorly
understood by humans, is attributed to the 'mind of the gods' (11.4-6).
This attitude is echoed in On Regimen IV.52 The writer begins by
affirming that 'he who rightly understands the indications (tekmeria)
which come in dreams will discover that which have great potency in
regard to all things' (Regimen IV 88.1-3),53 since while the body sleeps
the soul is unencumbered by it:
in a word, the soul in sleep undertakes all the duties of the body as well
as of the soul; whoever understands how to judge these things rightly
understands a great part of wisdom. In regard to those dreams which
are divine and foretell to cities or to individuals both goods and evils
52 Which may or may not be by the writer of Regimen I-III; but at all events, what it
says is certainly compatible with the earlier text.
53 Chapters number consecutively throughout On Regimen, not making a fresh start
for each book: thus the first chapter of Book IV is numbered 88

30 R.J.Hankinson
which occur through no error of their own,54 there are those who can
interpret them since they possess the art which relates to such matters.
But these people also interpret all the physical affections which the soul
foretells, such as excessive surfeit or depletion of appropriate things,
or changes to unaccustomed things; sometimes they do so accurately,
sometimes they miss the mark, but in neither case do they know the
reason why it happens, whether they hit the mark or miss it. And while
they advise taking precautions to avoid harm, they do not tell people
what precautions to take, but simply order them to pray to the gods. It
is indeed good to pray, but he who invokes the gods should also work
with them himself. (18: On Regimen IV 86.16-87.16)
That passage is remarkable for several reasons. Its recommendation of

prayer is unparalleled in other texts of the Hippocratic corpus (cf. 20
below).55 Moreover, it takes traditional divination perfectly seriously, in
line with Regimen 112, and in contrast with texts 1 and 2 above. The writer
merely complains that, when they overstep the legitimate bounds of their
science, diviners are apt to stumble and mix good with bad predictions,
and so cannot account for their successes when they occur. The diviners
are out of their depth when they seek to apply their techne to what is
strictly speaking outside its scope; but that fact does not reflect badly on
the inadequacy of oneiromancy in itself, or on its ability to penetrate the
divine mysteries.
Yet the rest of On Regimen IV is devoted to a (typically Hippocratic)
analysis of the physiological significance of dreams which is perfectly
rationalist in tone. It seeks to provide a structured account of the relations
between certain types of dream and the physiological conditions they
indicate. Dreams are an integral part of the diagnostic procedure for
determining excess and defect in nutrition and exercise (the subject-mat-
ter of Book II). Thus to dream of one's normal waking thoughts and acts
is a healthy sign (since it indicates no imbalance in the system), while
54 The text is doubtful here: I retain the MSS. reading, and roughly the interpretation
of Littre ('non causes par la faute des parties interessees'· Hippocrate VI, 641)
although without great confidence; the 'errors' in question presumably are not
moral mistakes, but rather those having to do with diet and exercise.
55 At least in a more than merely conventional manner. We may compare the invoca-
tions to the deities at the beginning of the Oath; but that is in any case a later
document, irrelevant to the mainstream of Hippocratic thought.

whenever dreams are opposed to the normal daily activities, and there
arises in regard to them either struggle or triumph, they signify bodily
disturbance; if they are powerful the harm is powerful too, while if they
are feeble, the harm is weaker. I make no judgement as to whether the
act itself should be avoided or not, but I do recommend treatment for
the body, since a discharge arising as a result of the occurrence of some
surfeit has disturbed the soul. (19: On Regimen IV 88.10-18)
The very fact that our dream-experience is at odds with our waking life
shows that there is something out of balance which requires the alteration
of the daily regimen (the use of emetics, increased exercise and dieting)
in proportion to the seriousness of the disequilibrium thus revealed (ibid.
88.19-30). Equally, to dream of the sun, moon and stars in their proper
positions is a healthy sign, while (again congruently) the more disordered
they seem to be the worse the physical indication (ibid. 89.1-9).56 Their
appearing obscured by cloud or mist signifies a mild internal secretion
of phlegm; if they are seen through rain or hail the secretion is more
serious (89.11-17). Once again, a rigorous regimen of diet, purging and
exercise is indicated, its intensity and modality dependent upon whether
it is the moon which is so affected (which is a less serious indication) or
the sun, or the other heavenly bodies (89.17-74).
Heavenly bodies wandering from their tracks in disorderly fashion
indicate anxiety, and should be treated with rest 'and contemplation of
humorous things' for two or three days (89.74-80); but a star falling
towards the east, provided that it is 'pure and bright', is a good sign
56 Lesley Dean-Jones comments: 'the appearance in dreams of the moon, the sun and
the stars to indicate, respectively, problems in the "inner circuit", "middle circuit"
and "outer circuit" of the body, does not arise from the internal environment alone.
We are told in Regimen 110 that the circuits of the body are each under the power,
dunamis, of their respective heavenly bodies Here a rationalist account of cause and
effect has not entirely superseded the traditional belief in the sympathy of macro-
cosm and microcosm'. I am not, however, sure that such 'cosmic sympathy' (as
opposed to some vaguer and more general notion of the possibility of sympathetic
action) was a traditional belief at all (it reaches its highest ancient development in
the sophisticated physics and metaphysics of the Stoics). But in any case, whatever
we are to make of the obscure talk of 'inner' and Outer circuits', the theory sketched
by the Regimen author is clearly one that posits some sort of physical, causal relation
between macrocosm and microcosm, and, moreover, one which does not appear to
involve direct divine agency or mediation; and that is enough to make it 'rationalist'
by my canons, albeit exotic and bizarre.

32 R.J. Hankinson
(88.81-4); darkness, dullness and a westerly trajectory being, predictably,

unhealthy indications (88.89-91). In general, seeing things clearly and
brightly is a good sign, while if they are murky, there's trouble brewing
(88.99-106); gentle rain from a clear sky is fine; a violent storm portends
distress (89.118-124); particular regimens are prescribed in every case.
The rest of On Regimen IV follows a similar pattern: there is a general
connection between observed disorderliness or murkiness in the dream
with imbalance and disease, while cleanliness, purity and order are signs
of health (thus to dream of wearing white, provided the clothes are
neither too large or too small, is good: 91.1-6; to dream of the dead
wearing white cloaks and looking clean is a good sign, to see them in
black, or dirty, or naked, or taking something from your house, is not:
92.1-10). There is a connection posited too between the types of things
observed in dreams and the nature of the dreamer's physical condition:
cold and moisture in relation to the heavenly bodies indicate phlegm
(itself cold and moist), while dreaming of being pursued by something
fiery and hot, signifies a bilious secretion (89.52-4). In the same way, to
dream of fertile, orderly lands is healthy, but fruitless trees signify
infertility, caused by cold and moist influences if they are shedding their
leaves but by hot and dry ones if they retain them (90.1-26). Brimming
rivers signify an excess of blood, and vice versa, while if they are polluted
they presage bowel disturbance (90.28-33); springs and wells signify
bladder trouble and require diuretics, a rough sea denotes a stomach
upset and calls for purging (90.35-9).
For all its strangeness, this seems far removed from the world of the
divine. It prefigures Aristotle's position, in which the propensity of the
dreamer to see certain images is explained in terms of his own physi-
ological conditions: dreams and their significance are independent of
any divine agency.
Yet the impression derived from the text 18 that this author is by no
means hostile to divination, nor indeed to religious belief and obser-
vance in general, is strikingly borne out in two further places. After
describing the significance of the appearance of various heavenly bodies
and the regimen prescribed on the basis of it, he writes:
so someone who is armed with this knowledge about the heavenly

signs must take precautions, and take care of regimen, and pray to the
gods, in the case of the good signs to the Sun, to Zeus of the heavens,
Zeus protector of the home, Athena protectress of the home, to Hermes
and to Apollo, while in the case of the contrary signs to the Averters of

evil, to Earth, and to the heroes in order that aU difficulties may be

averted. (20: On Regimen IV 89.126-33)
There is no indication that these are supposed to be conventional obser-

vances, or that they are merely intended to boost morale or produce
other psychosomatic effects.57 The same holds of some similar remarks
in the next chapter: if you dream of a black, scorched earth, you should
'pray to Earth, Hermes and the heroes' (90.63) as well as following a strict
regimen. Here, uniquely in the Hippocratic corpus, we have a case of a
detailed, rationalistic physiology coexisting peacefully not simply with
a general notion that nature is in some sense divine, but rather with what
looks very much like a belief in the traditional divinities, divinities whom
it makes sense, in view of the role they are supposed to play in the world,
to petition and propitiate.
Such a belief does not, for all that, necessarily undermine the ration-
alism of the text; after all, plenty of modems apparently believe both in
the causal efficacy of contemporary physiology and medicine and in the
possibility of miraculous divine intervention. Perhaps our author is
simply keeping an open mind; and anyway, a little prayer couldn't hurt
(see §3).
But it is hard not to believe that he really means what he says in
conclusion:
employing these methods as they have been described will produce a

healthy life; and I have discovered regimen to the extent to which it is
possible for a man to do so, with the help of the gods. (21: On Regimen
IV 103.38-41)
His gods really can intervene, both in the discovery of cures and in aiding
their efficacy.
57 One might argue that if they were intended psychosomatically it would be impor-
tant for the author to conceal this fact (faith-healing after aU requires faith, and
placebos which are known to be placebos are ineffectual). But that would attribute
an extremely high level of sophistication to our author, and I can see no good reason
(apart from an a priori determination to preserve Hippocratic rationalism at all costs)
for doing so (in any case, our author seems to be writing for doctors, rather than
directly for their patients). For (much later) ancient acceptance of the importance of
placebos, see Soranus, Gynaecology ΠΙ42.

34 R.J. Hankinson
8 Conclusions
The upshot of all this is, in a certain sense, sceptical. There is no reason
a priori (given the nature of the Hippocratic corpus) to suppose that one
will discover a single uniform conception underlying every use of the
word theios and its cognates within it. In Greek no less than in modern
English, religious language may be deeply serious or utterly frivolous:
only context can determine, and then uncertainly, whether any particu-
lar instance is literal or metaphoric, serious or ironic, doctrinal or dialec-
tical. In many cases, the evidence simply does not allow us to decide
between these alternatives with any assurance, even to the extent that
such distinctions are possible.
But it does emerge that, with the single (and even there only partial)
exception of On Regimen, the divine language employed by the Hip-
pocratics has no tendency to devalue or diminish the cool, rationalistic,
aetiological, scientific temper of the corpus as a whole. The world may
be, in any one of a number senses, divine: in the marvellous structure
and organization it evinces on investigation (a fact of course prerequisite
to the type of understanding they aspire to); in its resistance to complete
prediction; or even, in the manner of On Regimen, in a more literal, not
to say traditional, sense, involving the actual possible intervention of
supernatural agencies. But for all that, the Hippocratic writers, whatever
their individual disagreements, are committed wholeheartedly to the
view that the world, in particular that part of it which involves human
functioning and malfunctioning, is amenable to orderly, reasoned un-
derstanding and intervention. In the company of Hippocrates we are far
from the dark and numinous world of traditional Greek religion.58
Department of Philosophy
University of Texas at Austin
316 Waggener Hall
Austin, TX 78712-1180
rjhankinson@mail.utexas.edu
58 A version of this paper was presented to a Workshop on 'Reason and Religion in

Fifth-Century Greece' at the University of Texas in September, 1996.1 am grateful
to some of the participants for helpful discussion, and in particular to my commen-
tator on that occasion, my colleague Lesley Dean-Jones, whose acute but friendly
criticisms made me re-think my position in a number of places.


Hankinson R.J. Magic, Religion and Science, 1998, Germany

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hankinson R.J. Magic, Religion and Science, 1998, Germany

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Magic, Religion and Science: Divine

and Human in the Hippocratic Corpus

l Divination, Religion and Magic

1 I discuss the Apollonian plague in my 'Pollution and infection: an hypothesis

APEIRON a journal forBrought

Medicine, if it is to count as a techne, had better find a rational means of

2 This parenthetic clause may be an intruded marginal note.

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

I, however, will not indulge in this kind of prophecy (tomuta men on

manteuomai presumably has a derogatory tinge here; at all events, the

denying that it is of any importance — their attitude, then, is severely empiricist,

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

the following concerns the so-called 'sacred disease'.' It seems to me to

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

method which they employ here, treating it as they do with purifica-

11 As examples of such similarly awe-inspiring conditions, the writer cites various

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

by ritual, or some shrewdness (gnome) or practice which those who are

Magic had an ambiguous status in Greek culture. Religion was some-

2 The Hippocratic Sense of the Divine: Literal or Ironic?

Ludwig Edelstein carefully distinguishes reverence for the divine (which

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

notion of genuine piety. The anti-purifier polemic lends some support

they employ purifications and incantations, and in so doing do some-

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

Teutonic literal-mindedness in his interpretation of a text which is

17 In 'Le divin dans la collection Hippocratique', in Formes de pensee dans la collection

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

It is harder to dismiss those remarks as being merely dialectical or ironic

there is a great indication (mega tekmerion) of the fact that it is no more

19 This is not homeopathy: Hippocratic medicine is almost uniformly allopathic.

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

3 The Explanatory Vacuity of Pantheism

The account sketched by the author of The Sacred Disease is fanciful,

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

The world may be full of gods, or through-and-through divine; but if it

21 Iliad XXIV 258-9

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

admire, calling him a "divine man"),22 just as bestiality is rare among

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

4 The Sacred Disease and Airs, Waters, Places:

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

furthermore, the majority of Scythian men become emasculated, and

In sharp contrast with Herodotus's supernatural account of the same

The correspondences, both verbal and doctrinal, of these passages with

26 Or, reading 'prophasios': 'not without any originating cause'.

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

diseases—tha t they are the result of supernatural influence and displeas-

5 Some Problems for the Rationalist Interpretation

There are obstacles to this happy picture. On Prognosis, for example, is

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

such conditions are barely mentioned in Prognosis. In effect, on Galen's

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

remarkable or out of the ordinary, which is in any case a perfectly

As in the case of On Prognosis, this isolated reference to divinity is not

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

and lengthier Diseases of Women, which contains a passage which closely

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de

reference in 12 might also be one; compare the invocation of the gods in

Brought to you by | Université de Paris I - Bibliotheque de