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MEDICINE AND PHILOSOPHY IN A HIPPOCRATIC TEXT

This is a valuable book, among whose merits is a well-argued ‘speculation’ (p. 213) that the Hippocratic author’s understanding of psyche is based on the transmigration of souls, a concept like Plato’s, which may derive from Pythagorean and Orphic thought, but which is applied to birth and the embodied life rather than Plato’s focus on the soul’s escape from the body in death. Regimen 1–4, despite being one of the longest Hippocratic treatises, has not been treated well. Galen (On the Powers of Foods 1.1) thought the first book unworthy of Hippocrates, but was better disposed to the second. B. (pp. 4–5), noting dismissive comments by G. Kirk (‘an uninventive compiler’ who occasionally ‘simply did not know what he meant’) and J. Barnes (‘a silly farrago of ill-digested Presocratic opinions’), counsels, less grandly, further thought rather than rejection of what may seem strange. His claim (p. 8) is tripartite and ambitious, bringing the treatise into the mainstream of later fifth-century thought: the author uses some of the most important philosophical ideas of the period; has one of the best-articulated accounts of the analogy between macrocosm and microcosm, as also of physis; and provides ‘the most profoundly-elaborated’ account before Plato of how body and soul relate. B. addresses both ‘philosophy’ and ‘medical history’ in his study of ancient medicine, following T. Tracy’s Physiological Theory and the Doctrine of the Mean in Plato and Aristotle (1969), which sets out the biological basis of much philosophical thought. B. switches the emphasis to medical texts, a welcome shift since medical historians such as E. Craik (Hippocratic Corpus [2015]) see the work as organic and coherent, and the philosophers now need to reconsider, as indeed ‘philosophers’ within ‘medicine’ such as P. van der Eijk have done. B. claims the author’s impact on the thought of both Plato and Aristotle, persuasively, I think. The first chapter surveys the development of dietetics in the early Hippocratic texts well. Of the pre-Hippocratic period I am not so sure. Following G. Wöhrle (Gesundheitslehre [1990]), B. (p. 17) finds no hygieia in Homer. (I disagree: restoration of strength to weary warriors with food and drink mixed in a kykeôn and of mental pleasure with mythoi in Iliad 11.618–44 and elsewhere seems to anticipate Mnesitheus, fr. 41 Bertier, and Galen on kopos [‘fatigue’] in De sanitate tuenda 4.) B., with Wöhrle, allows the presence of good health in Archaic literature such as Simonides, fr. 604 Page, and Pindar, Pythian 3.73: Hygieia is a goddess by 400 B.C. in Ariphron. This textual evidence, however, including Solon, fr. 13.62 West (add the scholia), draws on deep cultural traditions. We should at least ask ourselves whether the Greeks had a life beyond the texts. Solon surely did not invent the concept; rather, the Hippocratic authors developed hygieia from an ancient tradition previously expressed in poetry that linked health with wealth and other good things vital to well-being. This tradition is echoed in the last section of Regimen in Health and the first of Affections (B. p. 46): the Hippocratic authors were deeply aware of the cultural place of hygieia. Similarly, B. tells us (p. 18) that Hesiod has all diseases coming from gods; but the author of On the Sacred Disease in his turn says in his final chapter that all diseases are theia. THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 349