Hippocratic Oratory

The Poetics of Early Greek Medical Prose

James Cross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317048787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

On Ancient Medicine, On the Art, On Breaths, On the Nature of Human Beings and On the Sacred Disease are among the most well-known and sophisticated works of the Hippocratic Collection. The authors of these treatises were seeking to find means to express their arguments that built on authoritative models of their predecessors. By examining the range of expressive resources used in their expository prose, James Cross demonstrates how oral tradition and written techniques, such as sound patterning, sign-posting and antithetical formulae, were deployed to help the writers develop a case. The book demonstrates that there were various layers of meaning and manners of communicating ideas which can be found in Hippocratic expository prose, and offers fresh insights into the oral debating culture and experiments in persuasion which characterise the ancient Greek world of the late fifth-century BCE.

1 Hippocratic expository prose

Introduction

This study is concerned with the poetics and persuasive function of a group of treatises in the Hippocratic Collection which shows signs of being composed for or in relation to oral dissemination and which, as such, should be considered as evidence for Hippocratic oratory.¹ The focus in this study is principally on five of these ‘oral’ Hippocratic treatises: On Ancient Medicine (De vetere medicina), On the Art (De arte), On Breaths (De flatibus), On the Sacred Disease (De morbo sacro) and On the Nature of Human Beings (De natura hominum), which are all believed to have been written towards the end of the fifth century in Greece during a period of seismic cultural, intellectual and social change in the ancient Greek world. These treatises were deeply implicated in these changes and should be valued for the insights they can offer into fifth-century debating culture and their affinity with the developing body of prose writing broadly understood, as much as for their medical content and relationship with other Hippocratic treatises.

My argument is essentially that these Hippocratic works represent significant examples not only of developments in medical understanding and philosophical debate about the nature of the human body and its ailments, but also valuable evidence for the early development of prose writing in ancient Greece: reading the ‘oral’ Hippocratic treatises as evidence for experiments in authoritative persuasion and creative exercises in explanation in the relatively new form of expository prose yields fresh insights into the volatile and exciting world of late fifth-century oratory that have yet to be explored fully in existing scholarship. My main interest lies in how, in the selected Hippocratic treatises, language is used to make sense of the world, and how language use to an extent interacts with – that is, shapes and reflects – these authors’ understanding of the workings of the human body, of disease development and so on.

I focus on the persuasive function of recurring patterns in language use: for example, antitheses and balancing effects in phrasing, repetitions and accumulations of words or phrases, tags and sonic effects such as rhyme or resonance in sound, as well as key items of vocabulary. Many of these are features more commonly associated with poetry than prose; one aim of this book is to elicit and analyse the main poetic features of Hippocratic treatises intended for oral dissemination and consider their persuasive role in pseudo-scientific prose tracts as part of the gradual development from oral poetic models of authoritative account to written prosaic models, which is a strong trend throughout the fifth century BCE and has its roots in developments in previous centuries.

Another, related aim is analysis of the extent to which suggested, accumulated, resonant meanings that emerge through various patterns in the prose overlap with or are entangled with the fast-developing hard logic of philosophical authority that could be said to culminate in Aristotle’s Organon, written in the fourth century BCE, which can be viewed as an extreme example of the expression of authority through the form of prose. In other words, this study explores the presence of different layers of meaning and modes of ‘reasoning’ in certain Hippocratic treatises, that are beyond the ‘logical’ surface content of any given treatise.

I have selected these five treatises from the Hippocratic Collection to focus on because they are among the most similar in style and tone to other philosophical and sophistic writing of the period. As Iain Lonie notes, writing on literacy and the Hippocratic Collection, regarding these essayistic treatises, ‘They are rationalisitic, bold in hypothesis, ingenious in argument, sceptical of received opinion, and they share the general commitment to intellectual analysis’ (Lonie 1983: 149). Others could easily be included in this study; however, this selection ensures a manageable focus for the close reading of persuasive techniques and allows for discussion of the more prominent persuasive features, as well as hopefully providing an opening for further research on this topic in the future.

I give a brief synopsis of these five treatises in the Appendix to this volume. I turn now to an overview of the Hippocratic Collection and scholars’ reaction to expository prose in the Collection, and then introduce the many important influences that lie in the background to composition of such texts and their place within the story of the development of early Greek prose writing.

Medical oratory in the Hippocratic Collection

The Hippocratic Collection contains around seventy treatises. The majority are believed to have been composed in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, though some are likely to have been written as early as 450 BCE and others as late as 250 BCE in different locations around the Mediterranean world.²

The Collection in the form in which it exists today can be traced back to the publication of an edition printed in Italy in 1526. Vivian Nutton notes that

the Aldine press in Venice printed the first edition of the complete works of Hippocrates in Greek, for no single ancient manuscript surviving today contains every tract from the collection, and many have only a small selection. But it is also clear from the manuscripts themselves and from the work of ancient commentators and compilers of Hippocratic dictionaries that the great majority of the texts printed in 1526 were already circulating together under the name of Hippocrates by the first century AD, if not 300 years earlier.

(2013 [2004]: 60)

The most recent modern editor and translator of the entire Collection, Maximilien Paul Emile Littré (1801–1881) believed the compilation of the treatises into a single Collection took place in Alexandria, noting that ‘The Hippocratic Collection did not exist in an authentic manner until after the time of Herophilus [of Alexandria, 335–380 BCE] and his pupils’ and believed that most of the treatises of the Collection came to Alexandria from family or medical libraries (Littré 1973 [1839]: vol. 1, 262–291).³ Nutton also notes that

it [is] likely that the collection was first assembled in broadly the form we have it at Alexandria in Egypt in the famous library of the Ptolemies, at a time when Cos was part of their empire … The somewhat haphazard way in which materials were brought together and stored at the Alexandrian library would … explain, at least in part, the varied nature of the collection.

(2013 [2004]: 61)

There is only limited and often fanciful evidence available to take us any further than Littré’s sense of a body of work formed somewhat haphazardly in the library at Alexandria. Between them, Jody Pinault’s edition and translation of fascinating hagiographic-style stories that gathered around the name Hippocrates in Hippocratic Lives and Legends and Wesley Smith’s edition and translation of letters associated with Hippocrates collect all the relevant sources and attest to the murkiness of our historical knowledge regarding the original composition and dissemination of the treatises of the Collection, as well as the rich body of legends that built up around the name of Hippocrates.⁴ If there is no way to be sure precisely when and where the Collection was formed, the internal evidence nevertheless suggests that there were sub-collections of treatises such as the case studies of Epidemics or the series of medical maxims entitled Aphorisms which are likely to have been grouped prior to being included in the full Collection (see Nutton 2013 [2004]: 61–62). Furthermore, from analysis of the style and content of individual treatises, in relation to what is known about their intellectual or cultural context, scholars can establish probable dates of composition, though in certain cases only an imprecise range of decades or even centuries can be provided; occasional references to other datable historical events or characters – such as the Pre-​Socratic philosopher Melissos, in the case of On the Nature of Human Beings – also help with dating (Jouanna 2002 [1975]: 59–61).

All the treatises are connected, by manuscripts, with the historical figure Hippocrates. Beyond the name, only the slightest secure information about the identity of Hippocrates exists, though long-standing threads of discussions now referred to as the ‘The Hippocratic Question’ have been pursued regarding which, if any, of the treatises in the Collection were composed by Hippocrates, and indeed who he was.⁵ The Collection was clearly composed by many different hands.

The treatises of the Collection are medical in the loose sense that they all discuss the functions and malfunctions of the human body, yet the Collection also contains much that could be considered ethnographic, historical and above all philosophical rather than solely medical. To take some representative examples, there are treatises that focus on the fundamental causes of diseases; there are those that discuss in detail the therapy that must be applied to cure individual diseases; others explore dietetics, that is the treatment and prevention of diseases by the regulation of daily routines such as eating and drinking habits and frequency, type and level of physical exercise; some treatises contain case histories of patients; others discuss the principles of surgery; another area considered is pregnancy and diseases of women; the Hippocratic oath is one treatise in the Collection that famously discusses medical ethics.

There is an impressive and fascinating treasury of material here that has from antiquity up to the present day been of interest to those studying medicine and to historians of medicine.

In the last forty years or so the Hippocratic Collection has also begun to receive serious critical attention from Classicists from a variety of intellectual backgrounds and so the context of the collection has been explored in greater detail and from a diverse set of perspectives.

Many of the medical writers discuss ideas that reveal an intimate connection with Pre-Socratic and Platonic thought, for example. Connections with discussion of natural philosophy in Herodotus’ Histories have also provided a rich source for recent research.⁶ Ideas central to Hippocratic medicine, such as the notion of humouralism, enshrined as canonical through Galen’s high regard for the theory as described in On the Nature of Human Beings, shows close links with Alcmaeon of Croton’s notion of isonomia, of balance of powers, as well as with Empedocles’ notions of competing forces in the world at large which need to be balanced. Indeed, many Hippocratic treatises display interests and discuss issues which go beyond understanding of the human body to understanding nature and culture. Airs, Waters, Places is an important example of this, which contains analysis of climate and its effects on the body as well as theories of climate and racial difference.⁷

Until recently, however, the Collection has been largely overlooked as evidence for the development of prose. The Hippocratic Collection is widely acknowledged to represent a transformation in the understanding of the body and its place in the natural world as gleaned from early extant Greek writing, such as the Homeric poems in which gods rather than bodily constituents such as phlegm or bile are described as bringing about disease.⁸ Yet, it is much less commonly acknowledged in Hippocratic scholarship that along with this deep change in understanding, the language being used to communicate new ideas was relatively untried and itself in the process of rapid development; use of prose represented a fundamental departure from Homeric hexameter and the authority of inspired, poetic voice, and went hand-in-hand with the conceptual changes that were taking place in the period.

One reason for this is perhaps that the treatises of the Collection all too often do not fit easily into the notion of ‘classical’ in the sense of ‘first-class’ literary compositions in the way that Plato’s dialogues or Thucydides’ historiography do and so have attracted only limited attention from scholars interested in issues of form and style. Another explanation may be that their medical content has until recently meant that Hippocratic treatises have been treated as specialised and therefore not of mainstream interest, though this situation is changing.

Of most importance for this study are the areas of cross-fertilisation between the Hippocratic Collection and sophistic authors, which are relevant to the study of the development of prose expression. Until recently, many scholars dismissed sophistic traits of the Hippocratic writings as unimportant, even somewhat dangerous, rather in the same way that we find negative reactions to writers considered Sophists among ancient commentators. This is almost certainly the reason why discussion of the interrelation between Hippocratic and Sophistic oratory has been limited until the last few decades.⁹

Jones, working in the first half of the twentieth century, wrote of the Hippocratic treatise On Breaths: ‘The author shows no genuine interest in medicine, nor do his contentions manifest any serious study of physiology or pathology’ (1923: 222), though he adds that ‘We may laugh at the crudities of πɛρὶ φυσῶν … but we must respect its inquiring spirit and its restless curiosity’ (1923: 223). He calls On Breaths a ‘sophistic essay, probably written to be delivered to an audience’ (1923: 221).

Of On the Art, a defence of the art of medicine included within the Hippocratic Collection, which is commonly thought to show intense sophistic influence, Jones writes:

It is quite plain from even a cursory reading of the treatise that its author was not a physician. His interest lies in subtle reasonings and in literary style, not in science. Besides this, in the last chapter he speaks of ‘those who are skilled in the art’ as giving a proof of the existence of medicine based on works, and not, like the proofs given in the present book, on words. He evidently distinguishes him...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and editions
• 1 Hippocratic expository prose
• 2 Models of logos and medical oratory
• 3 Hippocratic epideixis and the orality of medical oratory
• 4 Gorgias, Heraclitus and the persuasive functions of sound in On Breaths
• 5 In the agon: the persuasive functions of antithesis in Hippocratic oratory
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index