Herodicus the Cratetean

A Study in Anti-Platonic Tradition

Ingemar During

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367143954
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429627323
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1941.  Herodicus was a Greek physician of the fifth century BC, and a native of Selymbria. The first use of therapeutic exercise for the treatment of disease and maintenance of health is credited to him, and he is believed to have been one of the tutors of Hippocates.

II. THE ESSAY

Introduction.

In Athenaeus 215 F we read the following words:

. It is the merit of C. Schmidt¹ to have seen that the words

., which Casaubon could not understand, belong not to the protasis but to the whole sentence,² and that the anti-platonic calumnia in these chapters is taken from Herodicus and his pamphlet

.³

The question may however be raised, if we really have to do with a literary work in the emphatic sense of the word, that is to say a well-disposed collection of material, composed and discussed with a certain aim in view. Now, of course, »disposition » did not mean the same to the ancient Greeks as to us. It is a well-known fact that ancient literary works, some speeches of Isocrates excepted, are very badly disposed throughout. Perhaps the external form and internal composition of literary works were never so eagerly studied and treated as by the ancient Greeks, but in spite of all their brilliant theories the practical results were rather deficient. External, purely material conditions may have rendered a clear arrangement of the subject-matter difficult; the forms of publishing the works,

, had the same effect. What though we lower our pretensions, yet even thus the remains of Herodicus’ essay may hardly be said to form anything like a coherent work. It is probable that it consisted of loosely sketched miscellanies, a collection of articles inserted in his work

. Athenaeus never saw the original work. I have tried to show below¹ that he possibly found these excerpts in the

of Phavorinus, and to what extent the latter in his turn excerpted earlier works of the same kind, for instance Didymus, can only be guessed at, never proved. The consequence is that we must be very cautious in our conclusions. When I call Herodicus’

an ‘essay’ or a ‘work’, I do so with the reservation that this is a convenient way of keeping together these scattered remnants.

What they have in common is the harsh anti-platonic tendency. The animosity against Plato has its root in the Homerolatry of the Pergamene school of grammar, but there are no traces of it in the fragments left of Crates’ work.² The doctrine of the school taught that Homer was the source of all knowledge, and as Plato had expelled Homer from his Ideal State — Herodicus stresses this twice and after him Heraclitus in the

— he had, in the eyes of a fanatic disciple of the school, committed an unpardonable offence. It is not likely that Herodicus speaks on behalf of Crates, he is his partisan. In the same w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• I. An Epigram
• II. The Essay Πϱὸς τὸν Φιλοσωκράτην
• III. The Treatise Πεϱὶ Συμποσίων
• IV. The Κωμῳδούμενοι and the other writings
• V. The Anti-Platonic Tradition