Chapter One—
The Displacements of Mythology
Jane Harrison thrilled to the dark shapes she thought she could discern behind the bright splendours of the masterpieces of Greek literature.[1] E. R. Dodds, in his preeminently distinguished contribution to the Sather series, began from the puzzlement that the Greeks had been thought to lack something of "the awareness of mystery" and "the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience."[2] The irrational then and subsequently has been much pursued—in classical studies, in social anthropology, in philosophy, and in psychology—but has proved, predictably, an elusive quarry, escaping clear characterisation, let alone elucidation.
I shall certainly not attempt, in this set of studies, to reopen the whole of this vast and ill-defined dossier. My aim is a more limited one, with a narrower focus, though it is still perhaps ambitious enough,
[1] J. E. Harrison 1925, pp. 86f: "I mention these ritual dances, this ritual drama, this bridge between art and life, because it is things like these that I was all my life blindly seeking. A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age. Great things in literature, Greek plays for example, I most enjoy when behind their bright splendours I see moving darker and older shapes. That must be my apologia pro vita mea ."
[2] On p. 1 of his 1951 Dodds wrote: "To a generation whose sensibilities have been trained on African and Aztec art, and on the work of such men as Modigliani and Henry Moore, the art of the Greeks, and Greek culture in general, is apt to appear lacking in the awareness of mystery and in the ability to penetrate to the deeper, less conscious levels of human experience."
since it concerns the invention of the category—the ancient Greek category—of the rational. Acknowledging, but leaving to one side, much of the material that Dodds and others collected to illustrate the irrational in Greek culture at every period, I wish to focus attention on one of the citadels of presumed Greek rationality (presumed by many of them, as well as by some of us), namely, what they called the "inquiry concerning nature." My plan, broadly, is to investigate where, or if, it may be said to break new ground in the understanding of the world, and where, on the contrary, what it shares with its antecedents is more impressive than the points at which it diverges from them. The character of the "science" on offer in the ancient world is one of our targets, then, though less with a view to matching their science against ours (to vindicate or to undermine the claim that they were doing science ) than to explore the complexities of ancient disputes and confrontations. We shall try to make some sense of some highly perplexing and challenging phenomena, though the perplexities and challenges are ones that the anthropologists, used to dealing with problems concerning the nature of "primitive thought," probably appreciate more fully than the majority of classicists.
We may take heart for the assault on Greek science from the realisation that scientific thought as a whole and, especially, the nature of scientific inventiveness have latterly come increasingly to be recognised as less translucent, more complex, puzzling, and problematic, than many of Dodds' generation and before took them to be.[3] But while that realisation makes our inquiry easier in one respect, in that it releases us from one set of preconceptions concerning the purity of the scientific enterprise, in another it makes it harder, since the very criteria of science are now more highly contested than ever. My chief concern in
[3] Among the fundamental contributions to this debate have been Popper 1935/1968, 1963, Quine 1953/1961, 1960, 1969, Kuhn 1962/1970, 1977, 1983, Feyerabend 1962, 1975, 1978, 1981a, 1981b, Habermas 1968/1978, 1971/1974, Hesse 1974, 1980, S. B. Barnes 1974, 1977, Putnam 1975a, 1975b, 1981, 1983, Lakatos 1976, 1978a, 1978b, Bloor 1976, Laudan 1977, Holton 1978, Van Fraassen 1980a, Newton-Smith 1981, Hollis and Lukes, edd., 1982, Hacking 1983.
what follows is not directly with those current controversies in the philosophy of science, though I shall have occasion to join battle where they impinge on the assessment of ancient investigations. Rather, my main problem is the characterisation of those ancient investigations themselves, particularly in relation to their background. For while those who engage in them often make extravagant claims on their behalf (as also do some modern commentators), just how far such claims can be sustained and just how far the principles and ideals they stated were implemented in practice will be among our major preoccupations. To put our problem in its most general terms: Was there a revolution of wisdom with regard to the understanding of nature? What kind of revolution was there?
In the chapters that follow I shall address some very general questions concerning the nature of Greek inquiry and speculation about the physical world, where I have chosen to concentrate not on such traditional topics as the experimental method but, rather, on certain characteristics that relate to, and reveal, the ancient investigators' own aims and ambitions, even their self-image, their theory of what they were doing and their actual practice and the matches and mismatches between the two. We shall consider the tension between tradition and authority on the one hand, and innovativeness on the other, broaching here issues in the wider social background to the intellectual changes with which we are concerned. We shall study the aggressions and bluff of dogmatism, but also—to set against that—the scrupulous avoidance of the dogmatic and the willingness to acknowledge failures and ignorance, and then again the turning of the anti-dogmatic into a conventional stance or even pose. We shall discuss the development, indeed the invention, of the category of the metaphorical, and again the tension between the desire to exclude this from, and its continued use in, the inquiry concerning nature. We shall examine the extent to which Greek science remained purely qualitative in character—where we shall discuss both the use of measurement and its abuse, that is, the mystifications involved in some appeals to it and to the quantitative. Finally we shall tackle the use of idealisations and simplifications, and again their abuse in the discounting or eliding of parts of what is there to be explained.
In this opening chapter I want to take certain concrete topics which will provide test-cases to illuminate the nature and the strength of the challenge, from the side of logos , to some traditional attitudes and patterns of belief. If we consider some phenomena that lie at or near the centre of most naive or sophisticated configurations of the irrational, we may be able to see to what extent the inquiry concerning nature offered an alternative to what had long been accepted. It is not that that inquiry was necessarily obliged to present any such alternative in relation to those phenomena; it may not even have been well advised to try to do so. Yet in the controversy between would-be science and the irrational, it is important to look at certain of the topics that are, on the face of it, among the least favourable to the rationalist takeover, not just at those areas where the triumphs of rationalism may seem predictable enough. It is important to do so to help to determine the character and the limitations of the wisdom that came to be offered from the side of logos .
Many of the phenomena discussed in The Greeks and the Irrational look promising from the point of view I have specified, but among those that seem particularly so—in that they appear to offer some of the greatest problems for, or the maximum resistance to, any scientific takeover—are death, disease, madness, dreams, divination, and fate. These were the province of myth, religion, and ritual long before science and natural philosophy, and long after their first hesitant appearance in Greek thought. It was mainly through myth, in belief, and through ritual, in practice, that the Greeks, like others, responded to the facts of death and disease, for example—and it remained so, even after the inquiry concerning nature was some kind of going concern. yet to say the Greeks "responded to" natural facts through myth is not quite accurate. For myth is not, and does not aim to be, explicitly systematic and coherent.[4] I am not denying, of course, the findings of
[4] The point stands even though, to be sure, current theories on the interpretation of mythology can still hardly be said to provide a satisfactory framework for its understanding (see, for example, Lévi-Strauss 1958/1968, 1971/1981, Leach, ed., 1967, P. S. Cohen 1969, Smith and Sperber 1971). Thus despite, for instance, the claims of Van Riet 1960, p. 63, the sense in which sys-tems of myth can be said to constitute some kind of protometaphysics is only a very attenuated one and this may obscure more than it illuminates: for the essential point of difference is that metaphysics is explicit, even if the point of similarity is that in the most general sense a "world-view" may be conveyed by myths or otherwise by implicit beliefs and attitudes as much as by self-conscious philosophical statements. The flexibility of myth, stressed by T. S. Turner 1977, 1980, for instance, is both its strength and its weakness. P. Smith's statement, 1973, p. 77, that "[myths] taken as a whole, aim not so much to define the real as to speculate upon its latent potentialities; not so much to think something through as to walk the boundaries of the thinkable," suggestive as it is, is made, rather, from outside the boundaries of myth itself. His equally suggestive remark, p. 86, that "when logos recognizes mythos as such, and so deprives it of its efficacity, at the same time it takes over its place and becomes a new working myth," and his tentative "it may be that if one is to do full justice to science, one must acknowledge the portion of myth it has in it" (cf. also Derrida 1967/1976, 1972/1981, 1972/1982) may be said to encapsulate the problems explored here, the sense in which what replaces myth, in ancient Greece, was or was not just more myth, and the difference that that recognition made.
structuralism, which has decoded remarkably coherent messages in groups of myths, even whole mythologies. But those messages, as structuralism itself insists, remain implicit, below the surface. On the surface, the intelligibility provided by myth is metaphorical, both in the sense that it is of the nature of metaphor and in the sense that it is a qualified intelligibility.[5] Myth does not, in any case, normally attempt to give the kind of direct answers to questions that ordinary practical experience is used to and demands. To be effective, myth must work below the surface, while on the surface the appearance is often of inconsistencies, of a lack of coherent unity. The encoded messages are vulnerable to question, to challenge, and like books in Plato, they cannot answer back.[6] Equally, ritual comforts, in part, because in the already given and socially sustained patterns of behaviour it is simply the right thing to do. But again the vulnerability to the question "why?" is evident—as is shown by the dismay registered by an earlier tradition of ethnography when that question, pressed in the field, led with some
[5] See further below, Chap. 4, pp. 176ff. Chap. 6, pp. 285ff.
[6] The point, in Plato, applies precisely to the written word as opposed to the spoken exchange; see Protagoras (Prt .) 329a, Seventh Letter (Ep . 7) 343a, as well as famous texts in the Phaedrus (Phdr.) , 274b ff., especially 275d–e,277d–e (discussed from different points of view by, among others, Havelock 1963, cf. 1982, and Derrida 1967/1976, 1967/1978). I shall return, in Chap. 2, to some aspects of the issue of the labile or unstable nature of the oral tradition.
inevitability to the—to logos unacceptable[7] —answers that "we have always done so," "this is laid down," "this is the way our forefathers did it."[8]
But if myth and ritual provide some imperfect means of responding, in various ways, to various manifestations of the apparently intractable or refractory in experience, what did the "response" of the new investigations into nature amount to? What business had they, in any event—to pick up my earlier question—with such phenomena as death, disease, and the others I listed, or how far did they abandon them; or should they have abandoned them, renouncing any claim to be able to provide alternative, and no doubt also imperfect, resources for a response? To be sure, that question, like my earlier questions, has to be unpacked even to begin to attempt an answer. What, in particular, were the problems to which solutions were required? What kinds of explanation were needed for what kinds of explananda? Are we dealing—to start with—with puzzles concerning the that (or what), the how, or the why?[9]
Death
The "that" of death (for instance), the fact that men die, cannot be treated as an unproblematic cultural universal.[10] We have only to reflect on beliefs in various modes of symbolic death to see that here, as so often elsewhere, there may be wide cultural divergences and substan-
[7] Cf. further below, Chap. 2, on the appeal to tradition as such as justification for a belief or practice.
[8] For some comments on this theme, see Horton 1982, pp. 239ff.; Sperber 1985, pp. 59f.
[10] See, for example, V. W. Turner 1964, p. 231.
tial difficulties in matching actor and observer categories.[11]A fortiori what counts as disease or illness and what as mental illness or madness vary strikingly between cultures. Yet so far as ancient Greek views of death go (the subject of another distinguished contribution to the Sather lectures),[12] a resolute acceptance that men die is strongly marked in Homer,[13] even if there is afterwards a shadowy existence in Hades, and even if some exceptional individuals escape that fate and achieve semi-divine status as heroes.[14] But acceptance of the brute fact of death gives no consolation for, indeed may even heighten, personal bereavement. That acceptance does not qualify, rather it lends resonance to, Achilles' anguished cry that he would rather be a bondsman on earth than rule among the dead.[15]
[11] Furthermore, the point that death may be viewed very differently as it affects the young and old is emphasised, for example, by Cassin 1981, p. 321.
[12] Vermeule 1979. Two recent collections of essays contain important discussions of Greek and Roman attitudes along with comparative studies of other cultures: Humphreys and King 1981, and Gnoli and Vernant 1982. Sourvinou-Inwood 1983 explores, in particular, changes in attitudes that take place at different periods in antiquity: cf. also Garzón Díaz 1981, Wankel 1983.
[13] See, for example, Iliad (Il.) 12.322ff., 18.115ff., 21.106ff., 24.525ff., and from a god's perspective, 21.462ff. The point has often been brought out forcefully, as by Rohde 1925, chap. 4; Guthrie 1950, pp. 305f; Sourvinou-Inwood 1983, pp. 34f. The centrality of the topic of death in the Homeric poems has recently also been stressed by Segal 1978.
[14] See, for example, Odyssey (Od.) 4.561ff. (Menelaus), 11.300ff. (Castor and Polydeuces), 11.601ff. (Heracles). Some individuals are, of course, subject to exemplary punishment: see especially Od. 11.576–600 (Tityus, Tantalus, Sisyphus).
[15] Od. 11.488ff. How far, on this or any other of the issues germane to our discussion, Homer should be taken to represent common attitudes is, to be sure, highly problematic, but the influence and prestige of the Homeric poems in the fifth and fourth centuries insure at least their relevance to our understanding of the background to natural philosophical speculation. Aspects of the themes of the transience of human life, human helplessness, and the preponderance of evil, expressed, for example, at Il. 6.145ff., 21.464ff., 24.527ff., Od. 18.130ff., and in Hesiod, e.g., Works and Days (Opera, Op.) 101ff., are reiterated in early lyric and in tragedy, e.g., Solon 1.35ff. (Diehl), Mimnermus 1 and 2 (Diehl): the theme that it is better not to have been born at all, found, for example, in Theognis 425ff., Bacchylides 5.160ff. (Snell-Maehler) and Sophocles Oedipus Coloneus 1224ff., reappears in a particularly emphatic statement in Aristotle's lost dialogue the Eudemus fr. 6 (Ross).
On the how of death, Greek physics eventually had, as usual, a multitude of theories to offer. Yet they provided little understanding and no reassurance. There was Aristotle's suggestion, for example, that death is the extinction of the vital heat, which may take place, he believes, either from cold or from an excess of heat.[16] That theories that appeal just to the hot, the cold, and the like are quite inadequate had already been argued in the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine . There the writer criticises those who use such newfangled "hypotheses" in part on the grounds that to do so is to narrow down the causal principles of death and disease.[17] What is needed, he believes, is a more complex account, taking into consideration all the manifold powers in the body and their combinations.[18] Again even Plato had a suggestion to make on the subject in the Timaeus , namely, that the material cause of death is a deterioration in the structure of the atomic triangles that constitute the physical elements of which the body (and everything else) is made.[19]
To be sure, each of those, and many other, hardheaded naturalistic explanations entailed the denial of the literal truth of Hesiod's mythology of death as presented in the myth of the metals in the Works and Days , with its complex counterpoint on the way each race meets its end.[20] Those of the Golden Age are as if overcome by sleep; those of the Age of Silver, who remain children for a hundred years, are "hidden" by Zeus and become the blessed ones of the underworld; the Bronze Age race destroy themselves; some from the Age of Heroes go
[16] See, for example, De juventute (Juv.) 469b18ff., 21ff., De respiratione (Resp.) 478b22ff., 479a32ff. Contrast Ethica Nicomachea (EN) 1115a26, where Aristotle recognises that death is the most fearful thing there is.
[18] See, for example, VM 14, CMG 1.1.45.26ff., 15. CMG 1.1.46.27ff., 22, CMG 1.1.53.1ff.
[19] Timaeus (Ti.) 81b–e.
[20] Op. 109ff., on which see, for example, Kirk 1970, pp. 233ff., J.-P. Vernant 1983, pp. 3ff., 33ff.
to the Islands of the Blest; and Zeus will destroy the last Age of Iron when men are born grey-haired.[21] Again, theories of the physics of death were not compatible with a literal reading of Plato's own myth, in the Politicus , of the age of Cronos—the anti-cosmos when time flows in reverse[22] —while they had no comment to make on the values implicit in the ideology of the "beautiful death"—the death while young, in battle, securing lasting fame.[23] No prosaic naturalistic account of the how of death had, of course, anything to offer on the why, nor on how we as mortals should live with our mortality. They offered nothing to replace the lesson obliquely taught by Hesiod's myth: we must realise that, since we are born in the Age of Iron, there is an imperative upon us to accept death, along with toil and pain.
Such comfort as was on offer from the philosophers in the classical period, at least,[24] came principally from a very different quarter, from the essentially religious belief in the immortality of the soul found first in the Pythagorean tradition, then in Plato and others.[25] Yet that was certainly not science replacing earlier attitudes or patterns of belief.
[21] See Op. 116, 137ff., 152ff., 170ff., 180f.
[22] Politicus (Plt.) 268e ff., especially 270c–e referring to periodic destructions of the human race and the reversal of aging, with the old becoming young. Compare the discussions in Herter 1958, Rosen 1979–80, and especially Vidal-Naquet 1975/1986.
[23] See especially Loraux 1981/1986, pp. 98ff., 1982, pp. 27ff.; J.-P. Vernant 1982, pp. 45ff.; cf. Dover 1974, p. 229; Sourvinou-Inwood 1983, p. 43.
[25] Of course it was not just from among the philosophical writers that comfort of this kind was on offer, but also, as early or earlier, from within the growing and altering religious traditions, notably with the development of mystery religions: see Burkert 1977/1985, chap. 6, pp. 276ff., cf. Nilsson 1957, for Hellenistic continuations.
On the contrary, in Plato at any rate, it was often what was now self-consciously recognised as myth doing so. The substance of the eschatological accounts in the Gorgias, Phaedo, Republic , and Phaedrus is accepted by the character Socrates, and no doubt by Plato, as true or at least as like the truth:[26] there would presumably be no wavering on the underlying principle of rewards and punishments, the ultimate justice of the regulation of the universe. Yet on each occasion the account is expressly said to be myth, or its status is otherwise undercut.[27] In the Phaedrus , for instance, Socrates begins by offering a "demonstration,"
ments on the immortality of the soul, he turns to describe its character
Disease
This first round is, then, no real contest: there is no scientific takeover, no real engagement in the classical period between the study of nature and what myth and religion afforded, whether they did so self-consciously or otherwise, and whether as developed and presented by philosophers or otherwise. But there is more to be said on what might otherwise seem the similar topic of disease, and more on mental illness or madness. In the case of disease, too, the study of nature offered no answer to the naive question of why disease in general should occur: Why do we not live in continual perfect health? Yet it certainly effectively, and in some cases deliberately, blocked any move to explain diseases—both particular types of diseases and individual incidences of them—by invoking divine or supernatural agencies.[31]
[30] It is because—unlike myth—metaphysics is explicit that it can be, as Plato's was, explicit, in particular, about its own limits, where myth has to take over. That logos is often to be contrasted with mythos is not of course to deny that the relationship between the two is an intricate and far from straightforward one. We shall be returning to consider other aspects of this with regard to Plato in Chap. 3 at nn. 115ff. and Chap. 4 at nn. 30ff. Cf. Detienne 1981/1986, Brisson 1982, Ferrari forthcoming.
[31] For what follows on the Hippocratics, cf. G. E. R. Lloyd 1979, chap. 1. The turning away from the belief in the supernatural causation of diseases and from the expectation of the efficacy of supernatural aid in combating them can also be illustrated from outside the medical writers, in, for example, Thucydi-des 2.47 and 53—though such beliefs and expectations persisted in many quarters. In the Hellenistic period a large part of Epicurean natural philosophy was to be devoted to excluding divine or supernatural agencies from the explanation of natural phenomena: cf. further below, n. 163, and Chap. 3, n. 239, in the context of Epicurean appeals to the principle of plural explanations of obscure phenomena.
To see this in the right perspective is more complicated than might appear. First it is as well to stress that not all physical ailments and disabilities were deemed by the ancient Greeks—or have been by anyone else—to be the products of divine or demonic forces. Medical anthropologists have, to be sure, only comparatively recently begun to insist that there is much more to the map of most societies' beliefs about physical ailments than the parts that have generally received most attention in the ethnographical accounts, that is, those that relate to the severest diseases and the most dramatic ones, such as epilepsy.[32] For many minor ailments, as it might be the common cold, minor stomach upsets, bruises, or bunions, many societies have no recourse to supernatural explanation. Homer has no occasion to talk about the common cold. But apart from the fact that there are many straightforward accounts of wounds and lesions caused by men in battle[33] there is an important contrast between the plague sent by Apollo in Iliad 1[34] and references to diseases that are not directly attributed to a god, such as, for example, the "long disease" contrasted with the arrows of Artemis at Od. 11.172.[35]
However, this is not to deny that notions that diseases are often sent by the gods or that diseases are themselves semi-divine creatures stalk-
[32] See, for example, G. Lewis 1975, pp. 196ff., 248ff.
[33] Those wounds are caused by men, even though the success or failure of a blow may often be ascribed in addition or in part to a god—as with other phenomena that have been discussed under the rubric of "double determination," where both a divine and a human explanation are invoked: see, for example, Dodds 1951, chap. 1.
[34] Il. 1.43ff. This has, of course, a particularly important role in initiating the action of the epic. But when there is less at stake for the purposes of the narrative, the darts of Apollo or Artemis are still often invoked as causes of death or disease, for example at Il. 6.428, 19.59, 24.758f., Od. 3.279f., 5.123f., 11.324, 15.478f., 18.202ff., 20.61ff., and cf. also 9.411.
[35] Cf. Od. 11.200f. See also Il. 13.666–70, Od. 15.407f.
ing the earth[36] are widespread and deeply entrenched in archaic times and after.[37] Whereas the fact of death in general (as opposed to the ideology) did not, on the whole, need demystifying in Greece,[38] the topic of diseases undoubtedly did; and in a remarkable, unprecedented move, some of the Hippocratic writers made a deliberate and self-conscious bid to secure such a demystification, even if it was one accompanied by its own elements of paradox and obfuscation.
First as to the elements of paradox. The move consisted in deeming all diseases natural, not subject to divine intervention, divine only in that the whole of nature is.[39] They all have natural causes, a
[36] Apart from the texts cited above, n. 34, see especially Hesiod Op. 102ff., cf. 242ff.
[37] Some of the primary texts are set out in G. E. R. Lloyd 1979, pp. 29ff. and n. 98, where reference is also made to the extensive secondary literature on the topic.
[38] A distinction is to be observed here between attitudes to death as such in general, and attempts to explain or account for the death of this or that particular individual.
[40] See Morb.Sacr. 1 (L) 6.352.1ff., 2 (L) 6.364.9ff., 18 (L) 6.394.9ff., especially.
[41] For one passage outside the medical literature that distinguishes natural from unnatural death, see Plato Ti. 81d–e, where natural death is said to be pleasant rather than painful.
causes of diseases are physical ones but allow for a norm or model of a healthy living body, by reference to the nature of which diseases can be assessed, and to secure a return to which the doctor exercises his best efforts. The doctor must help nature to effect its own cure, even though the disease to be cured is itself natural and has its nature.[43]
Health and disease are both thereby located in the domain of what is, the doctors claimed, in principle investigable. The success of the naturalistic framework thus provided for understanding depends, however, on the pathological theories being accurate or at least helpful, on the diagnoses being reasonable, and on the treatments being at least to some extent apparently effective. We shall be returning in chapter 3 to discuss the arbitrariness and dogmatism of many of the theories proposed. For our present purposes I may simply note that it is characteristic of a good deal of Hippocratic medicine that the writers overstate their cases. From the observation that bile and phlegm may be pathogenic substances, there were those who leapt to the conclusion (as in the treatise On Affections ) that all diseases came from bile and phlegm.[44] From noticing prominent changes in temperature
and humidity in many patients, some became convinced that the hot, the cold, the wet, and the dry are themselves the causes or bring about changes in the elements or humours in the body and thereby give rise to diseases.[45] Yet against the view that those four opposites are the sole causes of death and disease one can range the treatise On Ancient Medicine , which I have already mentioned, the author of which protests that that is to narrow down the causal principles. He objects to those who invoke these opposites on the grounds that they are trying to base medicine on unverifiable postulates where "it would not be clear either to the speaker or to his audience whether what was said was true or not"[46] —even if this author himself then goes on to develop some physiological and pathological theories of his own that are, we might say, not much less speculative than those he dismisses.[47] The point need not be elaborated further, since the elements of bluff in many Hippocratic theories of disease are obvious enough. We clearly need to suspend disbelief, if not our critical judgement entirely, when
we are solemnly told, as by the author of On Breaths , that air is the cause of every illness,[48] or, by the author of On Regimen , that fire and water ultimately are.[49]
On the question of diagnosis and treatment, however, if we turn to those treatises that stay closer to clinical practice there is much that is sensible and sober and much that is perceptive, alongside much that perhaps needed no special Hippocratic skill to perceive. The why and how of particular types of diseases have become a possible subject of study, even if progress towards adequate answers was slight. Deploying pathological notions that were, in many cases, entirely superficial, research was generally directed at what we should call symptoms, and the causes often remained undiscovered, and not just when the causes that modern medicine would invoke depend on severely modern conceptions such as that of microorganisms. Yet research is the right term for the sustained effort to obtain a typology of diseases, to chart their progress and outcome, to establish correlations between apparently relevant factors, to move towards hesitant epidemiological generalisations.
Epidemics 1 conveys the tone: "Painful swellings near the ears which accompanied fevers did not always subside nor suppurate when the fever was resolved with a crisis, but they were relieved following bilious diarrhoea or dysentery or by the formation of sediment in the urine, as happened in the case of Hermippus of Clazomenae."[50] Or again:
In this constitution [that is, during this epidemic] there were four signs especially that betokened recovery: a considerable nose-bleed, a copious discharge of urine with a lot of favourable sediment, bilious disorders of
[49] The imbalance of food and exercise that provides the chief theme of the discussion in Vict. is itself interpreted in terms of the relationship between the powers in the body which is constituted by fire and water: see Vict. 1.2–4 especially (L) 6.468.6ff., 472.7ff., 12ff., 474.8ff. (cf. below, Chap. 3 n. 39).
the belly at the right time, or dysentery. In many cases the crisis was not reached with the appearance of just one of the signs described, but in most cases all were experienced successively and the patients seemed to be in great distress: but all who experienced them recovered. . . . I know of no woman who died in whom one of these signs had appeared properly. For the daughter of Philo, who had a violent nose-bleed, dined rather intemperately on the seventh day: she died.[51]
We are evidently far from the world of Apollo sending the plague or of Hesiod's diseases randomly roaming the earth.[52] Interestingly enough, however, a feature that provides both a link and a contrast with earlier patterns of thought is the residual moralising tone of some Hippocratic comments on the causes or predisposing factors to diseases. Epidemics 1.9 gives a list of the types of persons who died in a particular epidemic. They include: "boys, young men, men in the prime of life, those with smooth skins, those of a pallid complexion, those with straight hair, the black-haired, the black-eyed," and so on, but also "those who had been given to reckless and loose living."[53]
One of the case histories in Epidemics 3 begins: "Nicodemus took a fever at Abdera as the result of sexual indulgence and drinking,"[54] and another: "at Meliboea, a young man who had been heated for a long time as the result of drinking and much sexual indulgence, took to his bed"[55] (unlike Nicodemus, who had a crisis and recovered, the youth at Meliboea died). Immorality or at least intemperateness leads here (as in archaic thought) to sickness. Yet the difference should be remarked: it is not Apollo who strikes you down for offending him or his priest. The damage you do to yourself has no supernatural cause, only a natural one for which you are yourself solely responsible—namely, your own self-indulgence.[56]
On the topic of treatment, similarly, Hippocratic prophylactic recommendations were generally of more help than the treatments they prescribed for their patients once sick. Those treatments were often ineffectual (though that did not prevent some extravagant claims being made on their behalf)[57] and they were sometimes more dangerous
[57] There were, however, those who recognised the ineffectuality of particular remedies or who admitted to an inability to cure particular diseases: see below, Chap. 3, pp. 124ff.
than the condition they were used to remedy, whether it was a matter of the drugs employed (which included hellebore, Spanish fly, black nightshade, and a variety of compounds of arsenic)[58] or of the surgical procedures used (such as succussion upside down on a ladder,[59] forcible straightening on the bench,[60] cauterisation, trepanning). The value and importance of plain living, simple foods, regular exercise are stressed in many works, though again, to get the record straight, one must add first that there were doctors who went to extremes: Herodicus, who is famous from Plato, is said to have killed his patients by excessive exercise,[61] and there were others whose idea of simple
[61] Plato R. 406a–c. At Epid. 6.3.18 (L) 5.302.1ff., Herodicus is said to have killed patients suffering from fever by prescribing runs, wrestling, and steam baths.
food was a starvation diet, for which there was even a technical term,
The topic of physical illnesses offered one of the clearest openings for the rationalist takeover. There are plenty of signs of the hubris of Greek rationalism in the Hippocratic treatises, as also of its tendency to run to excess. Yet one of the strengths of the new conceptual framework they present, and one of its originalities, lies in its absolute, un-
[64] See, for example, Salubr. 5 (Nat.Hom. 20), CMG 1.1.3.212.20ff. ("After bathing in warm water, let the patient first drink a cotyle of neat wine: then let him eat food of all sorts and not drink either with the food or after it, but wait enough time to walk ten stades; then mix three wines, dry, sweet, and acidic, and give him these to drink, first rather neat and in small sips and at long intervals, then more diluted, more quickly, and in larger quantities.")
compromising character. The assumptions to be made (about the naturalness of diseases) and the way forward in research are confidently sketched out, even if the elements of promise are greater than those of fulfilment, for in practice delivery fell short both in the matter of understanding and in that of control—that is, the cures achieved.
Madness
Mental illness posed problems for the rationalists that were at points importantly different from those of physical illnesses.[65] While physical sickness was never exactly celebrated (though the case of Philoctetes illustrates that it could be viewed with awe),[66] there were what Dodds called, after Plato, the blessings of madness,[67] especially the gift of prophecy and the inspiration of poetry. There is no need to rehearse the rich variety of phenomena to which Dodds drew attention other than to recall that they included not just the star examples of the statement of the power of Dionysus in the Bacchae and the exceptional recognition of the positive manifestations of madness in Plato's Phaedrus , but much else besides in Greek religious belief and practice as well as in Greek literature.[68] The question I wish to address is, rather, the following: in the face of these proofs of the hold, so to speak, of madness
[65] Two recent books, B. Simon 1978 and Pigeaud 1981, provide helpful general discussions of many aspects of Greek attitudes towards mental illness.
[66] To be sure, Philoctetes is a case where physical condition, moral persona, and position in relationship both to the gods and to human society are inextricably interwoven.
[68] See Dodds 1951, chap. 3, which often builds, as he acknowledges, on Rohde 1925 especially.
on the Greek imagination, how did the would-be rationalists fare? Among those would-be rationalists the pre-Socratic natural philosophers were the first in the field,[69] but I shall concentrate once again on the fuller material available in the medical writers.
Their ambition to naturalise mental illness as well as physical, to treat it both conceptually and in practice no differently from physical, is clear, but we must ask with what success they did so, and at what price. First some of the material that is important to us, much of it less familiar now than the texts on which Dodds focused, should be set out, and we may begin with another of the case histories from the Epidemics , the account of a condition that was evidently taken to be at least in part psychological in origin:
A woman at Thasos became morose as the result of a grief with a reason for it, and although she did not take to her bed, she suffered from insomnia, anorexia, thirst, and nausea. . . . Early on the night of the first day, she complained of fears and talked much; she showed despondency and a very slight fever. In the morning she had many convulsions; whenever the frequent convulsions intermitted, she talked at random and used foul language; many intense and continuous pains. On the second day, condition unchanged, no sleep, higher fever. Third day: the convulsions ceased but coma and lethargy supervened followed by renewed wakefulness, when she kept leaping up and losing control. There was much random talk and high fever. That night she sweated profusely all over with warm sweat. She lost her fever and slept, becoming quite lucid and reaching the crisis. About the third day the urine was dark and thin and contained suspended matter, for the most part round particles, which did not sediment. Near the crisis, copious menstruation.[70]
As this and many other examples show, Hippocratic accounts of symptoms move in a continuous gradation from thirst and nausea,
[69] Thus according to Caelius Aurelianus Morb.Chron. 1.145, the followers of Empedocles explained one kind of madness as a disorder of the mind arising from a bodily cause, though another arises from a purification of the soul.
through anorexia and insomnia, to despondency and depression, or from high fever, to the delirium that so often accompanies it, to the patients being out of their minds, or from twitching and convulsions, to agitation and anger, to hallucinations.[71] As we noted before, attempts are made to establish correlations. For example, the third constitution in Epidemics 1 chap. 9 states: "High fever attended the start of the illness along with slight shivering fits, insomnia, thirst, nausea, slight sweating about the forehead and over the clavicles (but in no case all over), much random talk, fears and despondency, while the extremities such as the toes, and especially the hands, were chilled."[72] The doctors were concerned to collect cases of cold toes along with those of fear and despondency: all formed part of a total homogeneous epidemiological picture.
The strength of the Hippocratic approach to madness lies, as before, in its naturalism.[73] There is no question of any of these writers
[73] A naturalistic attitude towards madness and physical explanations of its origin can be illustrated from non-medical literature in the fifth and fourth centuries in, for example, Xenophon Memorabilia (Mem.) 3.12.6. But passages in Herodotus, for instance, illustrate how such an attitude may still be combined with traditional beliefs about the possibility of divine intervention:in 3.33 the possible reasons for Cambyses going mad are either that he offended Apis or that it came about because he suffered from the sacred disease (evidently treated here as primarily a bodily condition), and cf. the alternative accounts reported on Cleomenes' madness, 6.75ff. and 84. Cf. G. E. R. Lloyd 1979, pp. 29ff.
thinking of madness as the result or the manifestation of
While the resolute matter-of-factness robs of its purchase any attempt to glorify madness, there seems no recognition that some modification in approach when dealing with mental illness might be called for. Treatments are, in any case, not often discussed in the case histo-
[75] E.g. Epid. 3 case 13 of the second series (L) 3.140.7.
[76] E.g. Epid. 3 case 15 of the second series (L) 3.142.8, 146.5. Elsewhere, at Aph. 2.6 (L) 4.470.17f., insensitivity to pain is taken as a sign of mental disorder; at Aph. 5.40 (L) 4.544.16f., it is said to be a sign of madness when blood congeals around a woman's nipples; at Aph. 5.65 (L) 4.558.7f., madness is said to follow when the swellings that accompany wounds in the front of the body suddenly disappear; at Aph. 6.21 (L) 4.568.7f., varicose veins and haemorrhoids are said to bring an end to madness; at Aph. 7.5 (L) 4.578.14, it is said to be a good sign when madness is followed by dysentery, dropsy, or an ecstatic state. In Aër. 7, CMG 1.1.2.36.12f., when the effects of drinking stagnant water are described, pneumonia and madness are said to attack young people in winter.
[77] See Epid. 3 (L) 3.134.3, cited above n. 70.
ries in the Epidemics , but one theme is not reassuring. Several of the patients (as in the case cited) "lost control"—
[80] Morb.Chron. 1.144ff., 171ff. In presenting what he calls the Methodist account, which includes, nevertheless, criticisms of some early Methodist doctors, Caelius Aurelianus is no doubt drawing mainly on Soranus—though here and elsewhere it would be rash to assume he is simply translating Soranus (cf. G. E. R. Lloyd 1983a, p. 186 n. 258). Other less violent remedies recommended by other physicians but criticised by Caelius include cooling substances (the idea that madness results from heat is ascribed to Aristotle andDiocles, 1.173), music, and inciting the patient to fall in love. The treatment Caelius himself recommends is set out at 1.155ff. It involves the avoidance of disturbance or excitement, the use of massage, warm fomentations, a reduced diet, and varied food, then, in the convalescent phase, such activities as having the patient deliver speeches, setting problems appropriate to his profession or craft, having him read aloud from texts with mistakes in them to keep him alert, and letting him see mimes or tragedies depending on whether he is gloomy or frivolous. Yet Caelius admits that the patient may have to be bound, though he adds that care should be taken not to injure him (1.157) and he allows venesection, scarification, the application of leeches, and even the use of rapidly dripping water to induce sleep (1.158–61).
a limited endorsement.[81]
When we turn back to the Hippocratic treatises that attempt theories of madness, the impression they give is very much one of their authors whistling in the dark. Dealing with different kinds of mental disturbance, On the Sacred Disease , for example, states: "The brain may be corrupted both by phlegm and by bile, and you can distinguish the two types of disorder thus: those whose madness results from phlegm are quiet and neither shout nor make a disturbance; those whose madness results from bile shout, play tricks, and will not keep still, but are always up to some mischief. Such are the causes of continued madness. But fears and frights also occur from a change in the brain. Such a change happens when it is warmed and that is the effect bile has when, flowing from the rest of the body, it courses to the brain along the blood-vessels. Fear persists until the bile runs away again into the blood-vessels and the body, and then it stops. Pain and nausea are the result of in-opportune cooling and abnormal consolidation of the brain, and that is the effect of phlegm, and the same condition is responsible for loss of memory."[82]
[81] De medicina (Med.) 3.18 (Corpus medicorum latinorum [CML ] 1.122.14–127.15). On whether the patients should be kept in the dark or in the light, Celsus says that neither rule is invariable; the doctor should try out both and see how the patient responds. He criticises the use of starvation in some circumstances, but when discussing the most severe and prolonged type of madness allows that in certain cases the patient should be coerced by starvation, chains, and flogging, on the grounds that it is good for him to be frightened: 3.18.21, CML 1.126.27ff.
This treatise has a well-deserved reputation for its often well-directed attacks on the ascription of epilepsy to divine intervention and on the charlatanry of those who claimed to be able to cure it by charms and purifications.[83] Yet if the purifiers were indeed vulnerable to some of this writer's criticisms, the element of bravura in his own typology of mental illnesses, some due to phlegm, some to bile, is surely amazing. It is only those with unbounded faith in our author and already convinced of the correctness of Hippocratic naturalism who would believe that he knows much more about what he is talking about in that context[84] than the purifiers who diagnosed one type of epilepsy as the work of Poseidon, another that of Ares, another that of the Mother of the Gods.[85] True, his framework of explanation is naturalistic, not religious or supernaturalistic. Yet the operations of phlegm and bile to which he appeals, while in principle verifiable, remain at the level of pure speculation. Those operations are invisible entities too, if of a different kind. As for the treatment this writer recommends, it relies largely on the attempt to control the hot, the cold, the wet, and the dry by regimen. Having proclaimed that "the majority [of maladies] may be cured by the very same things from which they arise,"[86] he goes on:
[83] See especially Morb.Sacr. 1 (L) 6.354.12ff., discussed in G. E. R. Lloyd 1979, pp. 15ff.
[84] On the other hand, the writer's description of the visible signs that accompany an onset of the illness is clearly based on careful observation: Morb.Sacr. 7 (L) 6.372.4ff.
[85] Morb.Sacr. 1 (L) 6.360.13–362.6.
A man with the knowledge of how to produce by means of a regimen dryness and moisture, cold and heat in the human body, could cure this disease too [that is, epilepsy, and that is in addition to other diseases, indeed every other disease, madness included],[87] provided that he could distinguish the right moment for the application of the remedies. He would not need to resort to purifications and magic and all that kind of charlatanism.[88]
As in the attack on the topic of physical diseases, some of the rationalists are loud in their claims both to superior knowledge and to superior therapeutic efficacy, but in the case of mental illness the bluffing is even more transparent. The establishing of a naturalistic basis for the understanding of madness, the ruling out of references to the divine or demonic, is a release from one mystification. But it was achieved at the cost of the substitution of another of a different kind, at least when the theorists' own proposed explanations were quite unsubstantiated and imaginary. Nor did the positive and constructive help on offer amount to very much. To be told that your madness was not sent by the gods might (if you were convinced) be reassuring. At the same time the convinced rationalists cut themselves off from such support as had been available from traditional social, let alone religious, resources. But otherwise, to have any great expectations of improvement from adopting the anti-bilious or anti-phlegmatic diet of cold, or alternatively warm, food and exercise, prescribed in On the Sacred Disease , was clearly, and equally, principally a matter of faith.[89]
Dreams
On madness the Hippocratics generally refused to be moved by those who would have celebrated it in one or another of its forms. On the topic of dreams,[90] however, many of them were persuaded by, or at least accepted, common Greek beliefs. Among those beliefs was a realisation that not all dreams are significant, not all are veridical: there is the Gate of Horn, but there is also the Gate of Ivory.[91] Yet it was widely held that many dreams contain a message, even if not necessarily an obvious or direct one, but one needing interpretation. From the Hippocratics down to Galen and beyond many doctors, including some of the foremost spokesmen for the anti-irrationalist point of view, accept some role for dreams in diagnosis, even if they do not endorse particular practices such as that of temple incubation, the soliciting, as it were, of dreams from the god, including, especially, dreams relating to
[90] Among important recent discussions of aspects of ancient dream theories the following may be noted especially: Dambska 1961, Kessels 1969, 1978, Wijsenbeek-Wijler 1978, Huby 1979, Cambiano 1980a, 1980b, van Lieshout 1980.
[91] Od. 19.560ff. Among the notable examples from ancient literature where the question of the fulfilment or otherwise of a dream or prophecy becomes a matter of remark are Od. 2.201f., Aeschylus Agamemnon 249, Choephori 523–34.
the dreamers' illnesses or containing instructions about their cure.[92] Thus Epidemics 1.10 includes "dreams, their nature and their time" among the items in the general list of factors to be considered in diagnosis.[93] In the Hellenistic period Herophilus even includes "god-sent" dreams in his classification of the three main types.[94] Galen not only tells us that his father was guided by a dream in deciding that Galen himself should take up a medical career, but also refers to therapies that he says were suggested to him by dreams.[95]
In time,[96] as is well known, complex theories were developed not
[92] The classic study of temple incubation remains Deubner 1900. One of the most extensive ancient sources for the practice is Aelius Aristides Orationes (Or.) 47–49.
[94] Aetius 5.2.3, discussed in von Staden, forthcoming; cf. Kessels 1969, pp. 414ff. Cf. also the attention paid to dreams in Rufus Quaestiones medicinales 5, CMG Suppl. 4.34.13ff. For later discussion and elaboration of the idea of "god-sent" dreams, see, for example, Artemidorus Onirocritica 1.6.15.19–16.9, who disagrees with the view expressed by Aristotle in the text cited below, n. 103, lamblichus De mysteriis (Myst.) 3.2.103.8ff. It is particularly striking that among the Hellenistic philosophers the aggressively naturalistic Epicureans allow that simulacra may come to humans from the divine, for example in dreams, though such simulacra are to be explained not as portents but as effluences: see Epicurus Ep.Hdt. 10.51, cf. Cicero De natura Deorum (ND) 1.18.46ff., D.L. 10.32, Lucretius 5.1169ff., cf. 4.757ff. Cf. Clay 1980, Schrijvers 1980.
[95] Galen mentions his father's dream at (K) 10.609.8ff., CMG 5.8.1.76.29ff. ([K] 14.608.15ff.), (K) 19.59.9ff. At (K) 11.314.18ff., cf. (K) 16.222.10ff., Galen confides in his reader that he was led to a treatment involving arteriotomy by a dream, and he discusses diagnosis from dreams at some length in his commentary on book 1 of the Epidemics, CMG 5.10.1.108.1ff. ([K] 17A.214.7ff.) (cf. what is generally considered the spurious compilation at [K] 6.832.1ff.), Subfiguratio empirica (Subf.Emp.) 78.26ff., cf. (K) 12.315.10ff.: see most recently Oberhelman 1983, cf. Demuth 1972, Guidorizzi 1973.
only distinguishing the various types of dreams—predictive and non-predictive, allegorical and non-allegorical—but also setting out in detail how they should be interpreted. Many of the writers in question, such as Artemidorus,[97] are sophisticated, at points quite cautious, restrained, even self-deprecatory. Many topics of interest might be pursued here. One we may note in passing is the extent to which the importance of wish-fulfilment is recognised by Greek dream-theorists: Freud himself remarked, rather defensively, in the 1914 edition of Die Traumdeutung , that those who attach any importance to such anticipations can go back to classical antiquity, and he cited Herophilus in particular in this connection, while he still insisted that no one before him had held that every dream is a wish-fulfilment.[98] However, our chief concern here must be with the kinds of theories and explanations our early would-be rationalists offered to account for the phenomena.
Once again we have a whole Hippocratic treatise devoted to the subject, the fourth book of On Regimen (sometimes called On Dreams ), as well as an important discussion in Aristotle which (whether or not he knew On Regimen 4) develops a similar theory.[99] Since Aristotle con-
[98] Freud 1953, vol. 4, p. 132 n. 2.
fines himself largely to providing a general framework of explanation, it will be convenient to reverse the chronological order and take him first.[100]
Dreams correspond to movements in the body, notably in the sense organs themselves, these movements being transmitted to the soul.[101] During the day many of these movements go unnoticed in the welter of impressions the soul receives. But at night, when the soul is less preoccupied, traces of some of the daytime impressions may be registered in it, provided the soul is itself in a stable condition.[102] No dreams are sent by the gods, though Aristotle says that they are
[100] On the date of Vict. views have differed widely, and no precision is possible. Internal evidence shows that the author of Vict. 1.4–5 is familiar with the work of Heraclitus, Empedocles, and especially Anaxagoras, but the use made of their ideas is compatible with a fourth- as well as a late fifth-century date. W. D. Smith's recent attempt (1979) to establish that this is an authentic work of Hippocrates himself has not won wide agreement. The work shows no signs of Hellenistic influence, however, and a date before Aristotle's treatises De somno et vigilia (Somn. Vig.), De insomniis (Insomn.) and De divinatione per somnia (Div.Somn.) seems likely.
[101] Insomn. 459a11ff., 24ff.
revered.[104] Most of what were believed to be prophetic dreams are mere coincidences, but some are signs, some causes, of future events:[105] they are causes in that they may suggest a course of action that the dreamer then puts into effect; they are signs in the manner Aristotle has explained, when they provide information about movements and changes in the body—though even here, if the soul is not itself stable, the information will be garbled. It is skill in recognising similarities that makes the best interpreter of dreams.[106]
That dreams may thus indicate points relevant to the health of the dreamer is a view that Aristotle ascribes to the "more discerning doctors," and one he endorses himself.[107] Whether or not it was written by one of those "discerning doctors," On Regimen 4 offers an elaborate working-out of that idea.[108] After first setting out a psychological theory according to which (as in Aristotle) the soul is distracted by waking impressions but while asleep "it becomes master in its own house,"[109] the writer takes pains to differentiate himself from others in the field:
As for the god-given dreams which give to cities and to individuals fore-knowledge of bad things and of good, there are interpreters with their own art in these matters. Such people also interpret the signs derived from the soul which indicate bodily affections in advance: excess, whether of repletion or depletion, of what is natural, or some unusual change. In such matters they are sometimes right and sometimes wrong,
[104] Cf. PA 645a16–23.
[105] Div.Somn. 462b26ff., 463a21ff., 30ff., b29ff.
[106] Div.Somn. 464b5ff., 10ff.
[107] Div.Somn. 463a4ff.
[109] Vict. 4.86 (L) 6.640.2ff., 6ff., cf. Pindar fr. 116, mentioned above, n. 99.
but in neither case do they know why it happens, neither when they are right nor when they are wrong. But they give advice to beware of taking harm: and yet they do not teach you how you ought to beware, but merely instruct you to pray to the gods. Prayer is a good thing, but one should take on part of the burden oneself and call on the gods only to help.[110]
In fact, in the subsequent discussion, prayer is recommended from time to time, and even the gods to whom it should be addressed are specified. "Pray to Earth, Hermes, and the Heroes," for instance, when the dream is of the earth looking black and scorched—which indicates excessive dehydration in the body.[111] However, the writer is scrupulously agnostic about whether to go beyond prayer and engage in apotropaic rituals: when dreams are contrary to the acts of the day, this indicates disturbance in the body which may be severe or mild, but "on whether or not you ought to avert the act [that is, by appropriate rites], I pass no judgement."[112] The burden of his thesis throughout is that each kind of dream corresponds to a particular physical illness or malfunction which steps can be taken to remedy.
While he dismisses rival interpreters with his curt "they do not know why it happens," no arguments are here offered for his own the-
[111] Vict. 4.90 (L) 6.656.22ff., cf. 4.89 (L) 6.652.17ff.
ory, only assertions, although some of the underlying assumptions, and his use of symbolism, are transparent, and traditional, enough.[113] Broadly and simplemindedly, to see good things in dreams is good, and bad things bad, and again it is good to see things that correspond to daytime thoughts and actions and that represent them as occurring in an orderly fashion.[114] More specifically we are told that it is a sign of health if, in the dream, when a star seems to fall out of its orbit, it appears pure and bright and moves eastwards.[115] Conversely, "when [a star] seems dark or dim or to move westwards, or towards the sea, or towards the earth, or upwards, these signify diseases. Upward movements indicate fluxes in the head; movements towards the sea, diseases of the bowels; and those towards the earth, usually tumors growing in the flesh."[116]
Moreover, confident recommendations for treatment match confident diagnoses:
Should one of the stars seem to be injured, or to disappear, or to be obstructed in its orbit, if this happens because one sees it affected by mist or cloud, this is a weak sign, but it is a more severe one if by water or hail. It signifies that an excretion of moisture and phlegm has occurred in the body, and has fallen towards the outermost circuit.[117] In such cases it is beneficial for the patient to take long runs, well wrapped up: they should gradually be increased to cause as much sweating as possible. The exercise should be followed by long walks and the patient
[113] As, for example, in the use of black-white symbolism in Vict. 4.91–92 (L) 6.658.8, 10, 13, 18.
[114] As, for example, at Vict. 4.88 (L) 6.642.11ff., cf. 4.93 (L) 6.660.15f., which suggests that seeing customary things indicates a desire of the soul.
[115] Vict. 4.89 (L) 6.650.4ff.
[117] The writer has a theory of three main circuits or orbits of the heavenly bodies, the stars outermost, the sun in the middle, and the moon below that (Vict. 4.89 [L] 6.644.18ff.), and he assumes that the main parts of the human body are disposed in three corresponding circuits (cf. Vict. 1.10 [L] 6.486.3ff.).
should go without breakfast. Food should be cut by a third and the normal diet restored gradually over five days. If the disorder appears more severe, prescribe steam baths in addition.[118]
Analogies with more modern health faddists are not hard to suggest.
The limitations of this rationalist takeover are twofold. First, the field of what is taken over is restricted. This writer is not concerned (though Aristotle was) with the whole range of predictive dreams, about some of which he is quite indifferent; he concentrates, rather, on what can be discovered about the state of health of patients from their dreams. He has an entirely naturalistic theory of the correlations between the two. No god sends these signs; they are the natural by-products of physical disturbances, a theory he elaborates with some persistence. But it is limited also in a second sense, in that, although superior knowledge is claimed, in practice the theory draws heavily on, and at points is merely a rationalisation of, popular beliefs. Yet the ambition to go one better than traditional views and even than specialist interpretations is evident from those claims to superior knowledge.[119] The specialists are said not to know what they are talking about—whereas the Hippocratic writer, armed with his naturalistic theory of physical-psychical correlations, can, if you believe him, put the whole "science" on a firm footing.
Divination and Fate
The limitations, and pretensions, of the inquiry concerning nature emerge clearly once again in relation to the final pair of topics I mentioned, divination and fate.[120] Here one might have expected the proto-scientists to have abstained from confrontation with the likes of Teiresias and Cassandra.[121] Even if some dreams might be scrutinised for the diagnostic signs they might yield about the dreamer's current state of health, the idea of trying to predict the future, especially the individual's future, was, one might have thought, a palpably unpromising area for any kind of research that purported to involve the inquiry concerning nature, even if it might be the concern of a moral philosophy, whether deterministic or anti-deterministic.[122]
[120] Many aspects of divination in the ancient world are well analysed in the collection of essays in J.-P. Vernant et al. 1974: see especially Vernant's own contribution, pp. 9ff., which points out, for example, the solidarity, in many ancient societies, between divination and other forms of rationality, and cf. Bottéro's study of divination in Mesopotamia, pp. 70ff., especially 153ff., 168ff., 190ff., in which he argues, among other things, that curiosity in general may be stimulated by the ambition to foretell the future, and that in that sense divination may be seen as leading to science as well as being itself a science insofar as it has claims to be deductive, analytic, and systematic. Among recent anthropological discussions of divination should be mentioned those of Moore 1957, Park 1963, Jules-Rosette 1978, and Ahern 1981, particularly. Moore and Park in particular provide comparative material to illustrate how divination may sometimes serve to take the question of responsibility for particular decisions out of what is perceived as the human domain or to introduce a randomisation process into such decisions.
[121] Xenophanes, indeed, is reported to have rejected all forms of divination (Cicero De divinatione (Div.) 1.3.5, Aetius 5.1.2) but he was clearly exceptional, if not unique, in the pre-Socratic period.
[122] As is well known, the issue of determinism itself once it became, as it did in the post-Aristotelian period, a central topic of philosophical debate was discussed as a physical as well as a moral problem. Both the Stoics, who asserted determinism, and the Epicureans, who denied it, argued their case in the first instance by reference to natural causation, the Stoics maintaining that there is an inexorable nexus of physical causes and effects and the Epicureans postulating the swerve precisely to constitute an uncaused exception to that rule. It is clear that the Epicureans used this doctrine not just to explain cosmogony but also to insure free will, though quite how what is, ex hypothesi , an uncaused movement of soul atoms is to secure the latter remains controver-sial (any such movement in the soul at the moment of choice would appear to tell against personal control of that choice or moral responsibility for the action: the issue is helpfully discussed by Furley 1967; cf. Long 1974, pp. 56ff.; and, most recently, Sedley 1983a and Don Fowler 1983). The notions of insisting on a separation first between physical and psychological determinism, and secondly between the question of the nature of physical laws and the issue of moral responsibility, which have figured prominently in many modern discussions of the problems (e.g., Pears, ed., 1963, Popper 1965/1972, Lucas 1970, Anscombe 1971, O'Connor 1971, Kenny 1975) run counter to the general tendency, in ancient debate, to run together the physical and the moral philosophical questions. Not even the Stoics, who held the doctrines both of moral responsibility and of physical determinism, argued that the latter is irrelevant to the former but, rather, that the former is qualified by the latter. Again, the Epicureans may have assumed that to secure free will it was necessary (if not also enough) to show or, rather, to assert exceptions to the nexus of physical causes and effects. The literature on the post-Aristotelian debate is immense: apart from the studies already mentioned, see especially Long 1971, 1977, Donini 1973, 1974–75, M. Frede 1974, 1980, Sharples 1975a, 1975b, 1981, 1983, Reesor 1978, Stough 1978, Sorabji 1980a, 1980b, Sedley 1980, D. Frede 1982, Annas 1986.
Yet first, the discourse of prediction, which is prominent in our scientific vocabulary when we talk of the predictive value of a hypothesis, encompassed in the ancient world too a wide range of phenomena. In two areas, especially, it is legitimate to talk of ancient scientific predictions. Whereas modern medicine is concerned with diagnoses, the ancients often focused, rather, on "prognosis,"[123] especially the outcome of the disease, and we need not doubt that, drawing on a wide experience and sometimes despite some simpleminded theories, many Greek doctors were often able to anticipate not just the recovery or death of their patients but also the general progress of their ailments.[124] Again,
[123] But "prognosis," for the ancients, concerned the past and the present as well as the future of the disease, as is clear, for example, from Prog. 1 (L) 2.110.2f., quoted below, n. 126.
[124] Thus confident and often well-grounded pronouncements on the likely results of certain lesions are common in the surgical treatises: see, for example, Art. 63 (L) 4.270.3ff.; 69 (L) 4.288.3ff. We shall be returning later to the ancient debate on whether or how far medicine can be deemed to be an exact science, but many of those who insisted that it is not maintained nevertheless that it is a rational inquiry that can and does yield knowledge: see below Chap. 3, at nn. 88ff., Chap. 5, at nn. 134ff.
and closer still to the modern analogue, once Greek theoretical astronomy had become established,[125] the models proposed could be, and were, used to predict the positions of the sun, moon, and planets.
Secondly, the overlap between the better and the less well-grounded predictions was recognised by some of the ancient writers, both in medicine and in astronomy. Some Hippocratic treatises recommend the practice of prognosis in terms that are obviously reminiscent of the role of the prophet. When the writer of the work called Prognosis says that the doctor should "tell in advance, in the presence of his patients, the present, the past and what is to come to be,"[126] or again when we find in Epidemics 1.5 the recommendation to "declare the past, determine the present, foretell the future,"[127] the echoes of Calchas in Iliad 1 or of the Muses in the Theogony are obvious.[128]Prognosis advocates forecasting in part so that the doctor will not be blamed for failure: he cannot be held responsible if he has foretold an unfavourable outcome to a case from the beginning.[129] But in part the aim is to increase the
[125] Although there are doubts about the extent to which Eudoxus, in the fourth century B.C. , offered exact quantitative models of the planets, sun, and moon, such models were certainly given by Hipparchus in the second century B.C. (if not in the century before him by Apollonius) for the sun and moon, and by Ptolemy in the second century A.D. (if not by Hipparchus) for the planets.
doctor's reputation. Patients will more readily entrust themselves to his care if he can tell them not just the outcome of the disease, but its past course and their present condition,[130] and the doctor will "justly be an object of wonder."[131] The surgical treatises, too, though wary of certain types of ostentation,[132] occasionally endorse the practice of forecasting, and not just, for example, to warn the patient of the risks of treatment.[133] Thus On Joints speaks of "brilliant and competitive forecasts" with approval.[134]
The writer of On Regimen in Acute Disease , however, sees the danger of medicine being confused with divination. The reputation of medicine is harmed by disagreements among doctors, which undermine the art to the point where some might even say that it resembles divination or the inspection of entrails and that doctors are like seers quarrelling about the interpretation of omens from birds.[135] Prorrhetic 2 opens with an attack on the idea that "marvellous" and exact predictions are possible in medicine.[136] The author says that he will not
[132] See below, Chap. 2, pp. 69 and 99.
[135] Acut. 3 (L) 2.242.3ff. The difficulties of making predictions in acute diseases, for example, are mentioned at Aph. 2.19 (L) 4.474.12f.
engage in such "divinations" but will set out reliable signs by which one can recognise which patients will recover and which die.[137] Other predictions should be made
The doctors thus evidently used their ability to foretell the future and to retrodict the past as a means of impressing their patients and indeed of building up their practice. Yet there was a risk of the doctor being assimilated to the soothsayer, a risk some Hippocratic writers try to guard against, and which much later Galen repeatedly tells us he still had to contend with.[141] Some of the medical men actively sought a reputation for being able to predict the future,[142] even while they dis-
[138] Prorrh. 2.2 (L) 9.8.11ff., cf. 2.3 (L) 9.10.23ff.
[140] Prorrh. 2.4 (L) 9.14.10f., cf. 20.11ff. The difficulty of making predictions before the disease has become established is mentioned at 2.3 (L) 9.12.20ff., 14.2ff.
[141] Galen tells us that his use of the pulse in diagnosis was considered to be mere divination by his critics, e.g., CMG 5.8.1.106.21ff. ([K] 14.637.10ff.) and elsewhere reports that he was suspected of magic, charlatanry, and divination (see [K] 7.354.4ff., 11.299.10ff., 301.10ff., 12.263.6ff., CMG 5.8.1.84.5ff., 94.18f. [(K) 14.615.4ff., 625.16f.]), although he himself accuses others in similar vein (e.g., [K] 11.793.12ff., 795.16f., 796.7ff.). It is quite clear that on occasion he deliberately sought to amaze his audience (e.g., [K] 8.361.12ff., 365.9ff.), especially in the context of spectacular exhibition dissections (e.g., AA 8.4 [K] 2.669.7f., 15) while he criticises others for doing the same (e.g., [K] 11.797.10ff.), cf. Kollesch 1965, Vegetti 1981.
[142] Indeed, after the classical period medical divination became systematically linked with astrology in the iatro-mathematical tradition: see, for example, Ptolemy Tetrabiblos (Tetr.) 1.3.16.7ff.; 3.13.147.9ff.; 4.9.200.12ff. Boll-Boer; cf. Bouché-Leclercq 1899, chap. 15, pp. 517–42.
sociated themselves from others who, in other contexts, had precisely the same ambition.[143]
The ambivalence of the relationship between—to use our terms—astronomy and astrology is more highly charged still, and many have simply dismissed the latter as an aberration. The fact that most prominent ancient astronomers, including Hipparchus and Ptolemy, also engaged in astrology is often taken to be irrelevant to Greek science and as evidence only of the failure of the Greeks to be scientific . Yet not to be guilty of gross anachronism, we must take as our explananda not just those parts of ancient mathematics and natural philosophy that we approve or consider fruitful, but the whole of the corpus of work of those who engaged in different branches of those complex and manifold traditions. To ignore astrology would be to miss the insights it can offer both about ancient controversies concerning what those traditions comprised and about the ambitions some theorists entertained concerning some areas that they were certainly eager to include.
That some parts of their work were better grounded than others goes without saying; it went without saying to the ancients themselves, even while they, like us, argued about the criteria of superiority. Ptolemy, for one, clearly distinguishes between the two types of prediction or prognostication to be made from the study of the heavenly bodies: on the one hand, predictions of their movements (astronomy in our sense); and on the other, prediction concerning events on earth.[144] Moreover, he explicitly emphasises the conjectural nature and the difficulty of the latter study,[145] criticising the excessive claims made
[144] See, for example, Ptolemy Tetr. 1.1.2.16ff.
[145] Tetr. 1.1.3.5ff., 2.8.1ff.; 3.2.109.1ff.
by some past and contemporary practitioners[146] and limiting his own discussion to generalisations based on the supposed beneficence or maleficence of various heavenly bodies or their configurations.[147] The validity of astrology as a whole was disputed,[148] but we should remember that there were similar foundational disputes in many other areas of the inquiry concerning nature, including about astronomical model-building itself.[149] Based on a belief in a connection,
[146] Tetr. 1.2.7.20ff., 22, 52.11ff., and especially 3.4.113.18ff., where Ptolemy dismisses aspects of genethlialogy as currently practised as superfluous nonsense and as lacking any plausibility.
[147] Tetr. 1 and 2 deal with general astrology, 3 and 4 with genethlialogy.
[148] Cicero's De divinatione provides the most comprehensive ancient account of the arguments used pro and contra the possibility of divination in general.
[149] Thus although Proclus gives a detailed introductory account of astronomy in his Hypotyposis astronomicarum positionum (Hyp .), this is prefaced by a passage (pr. 1.2.1ff.) where he cites Plato for the view that the true study concerns the region "beyond" the heavens and is directed to the immutable Forms. Moreover, he repeatedly expresses his view, both in Hyp. and in his Commentaries to the Republic and Timaeus , that the epicycle-eccentric model is complicated, farfetched, and arbitrary (see, for example, In Platonis Timaeum commentarii (In Ti.) 3.56.28ff., 146.14ff., Hyp. 7.236.10–238.21); cf. Sambursky 1965. From the life sciences we shall be considering later the dispute over the validity of the practice of animal dissection: Chap. 3 at nn. 220ff.
[150] The idea was used by the Stoics especially (see, e.g., Cicero, ND 2.7.19, Div. 2.14.33ff., Sextus Adversus mathematicos [M .] 9.75ff., 79ff., cf. 5.4ff., Cleomedes De motu circulari corporum caelestium 1.1.4.10ff., 8.15ff., Alexander De mixtione [Mixt .] 3.216.14ff., 11.226.30ff., 12.227.5ff.) but was not confined to them: see, for example, Philoponus In Aristotelis libros de Generatione et Corruptione commentaria (In GC ) 41.25f., In Aristotelis Physica commentaria (In Ph. ) 113.8f., and for its use in Soranus' gynaecology, for instance, see G. E. R. Lloyd 1983a, pp. 178ff.
[151] See Ptolemy Tetr. 1.2.4.3ff. The way Ptolemy moves from these incontestable cases to far more dubious ones has been analysed especially by Long 1982.
[152] Thus Ptolemy repeatedly refers to what he says the ancients had ob-served to be the properties or qualities of the heavenly bodies, e.g., Tetr. 1.3.17.7ff., 9.22.21ff., 10.30.6f., cf. 12.32.23ff., though he is aware of competing traditions on some points, e.g., 1.21–22, 44.22–53.13. Analogies with medicine, navigation, and archery are invoked, e.g., at 1.2.10.2ff., 3.13.16ff.; 3.2.109.11ff., to distinguish, for example, between the errors of individual practitioners and the general soundness of the art.
The case for it seemed untenable to many,[153] but others exploited what seemed to them a splendid opportunity to bring this area of divination too into the orbit of rigorous mathematical disciplines. Even though astrology began in Greece with vague ideas about the influences of the stars such as we find in Hesiod,[154] it came to have, in Hellenistic times, an elaborate theoretical framework most of which it owed to astronomy.[155] In this, astrology was importantly different both from divination by the consultation of books, for instance (as in the sortes Homericae or Virgilianae), which involved no study of natural objects at all, and from hepatoscopy, for there the marks on the surface of the liver that the diviner studies are, as Rufus gives us to understand, of no significance for the medical man.[156] The use of planetary tables and of spherical geometry is common to astronomy and astrology, both of which engage in the determinations of planetary positions. Initially just impressionistic, astrology came to have claims to be, in some respects at least, an exact study. Certain assumptions (and they were of course the crucial factor) had to be made about what were claimed as the natural effects of different heavenly bodies or at least about how they could be used as signs; and the application of general rules to individual cases was always a matter of the astrologer's own judgement. Yet planetary configurations could be worked out with impeccable mathematical precision and deductive rigour. In that respect
[153] At Tetr. 1.1.3.15ff., before Ptolemy sets out to defend astrology against the specious arguments brought against it, he remarks that what is hard to attain is easily attacked by "the many."
[154] See, for example, Op. 417ff., 587f. (cf. 609ff.) on the effects brought about by, or associated with, the star Sirius.
[155] As has been remarked, for example, by Neugebauer 1952/1957, p. 171; cf. 1975, vol. 2, pp. 607ff.
the casting of horoscopes or genethlialogy could claim to be more exact than most areas of medicine or of natural philosophy. The symbiosis of the two studies of the heavenly bodies is remarkable, for on the one hand the aspirations of astrology helped to keep elementary astronomy alive, and on the other the prestige of astrology depended partly on its incorporating the same mathematical procedures used in astronomy. It was thanks, in part, to his mathematics that the "mathematician," as he was often known, won his reputation as a superior diviner.
Finally, the importance of astrology, for Ptolemy at least, was underpinned by its ultimately moral aim of helping us view the future with calm and steadiness.[157] But this moral concern is in no way exceptional in the inquiry concerning nature in the ancient world. On the contrary, as we shall see in due course,[158] it is a recurrent one. For now, we may simply note that, following Plato, Ptolemy held that astronomy too is good for the character,[159] and that following Aristotle, Galen claimed that the study of the parts of animals reveals the wonders, beauty, and goodness of creation and instils in the student true piety towards its wise and benevolent creator.[160]
[158] See below, Chap. 6, pp. 319 and 336.
[159] At Ti. 47b–e Plato suggested that by beholding the revolutions of reason in the heavens we can stabilise the revolutions of our own thinking. Ptolemy claimed that astronomy can help to make men good: Syntaxis 1.1, Heiberg (H) 1.7.17ff., quoted below, Chap. 6 n. 144.
Our later investigations will give us ample opportunity to consider aspects of Greek science where traditional beliefs and attitudes are less prominent in the background or even—as often with Archimedes, for instance—quite irrelevant. This first study has been deliberately directed at a set of highly problematic and difficult topics for science, where myth, religion, and ritual provided the usual resources for stabilising belief. Those who engaged in the inquiry into nature—those who invented that inquiry—exhibit some well-grounded confidence in their ability to provide an alternative, naturalistic, rationalist framework for understanding. At the same time they often, it may seem to us, fail to recognise the limitations of what they had achieved or of what they could hope to achieve, both where the questions they raised are simply not amenable to their approach (certainly not in their day, and in some cases not even now) and where the answers they proposed are vulnerable, if in different ways, to criticisms similar to those they themselves brought against earlier beliefs.
Yet that recurrent phenomenon may be understandable in part at least in terms of the problems the new investigation into nature faced in establishing itself alongside and in confrontation with other more traditional sources of wisdom, comfort, and understanding. Some of the investigators themselves claimed that theirs was the way not just to understand nature, but to gain a correct apprehension of the divine:[161]
true piety consisted in the type of study in which they were themselves engaged.[162] Others did not so much transmute as undermine traditional systems of belief, attacking in particular some of the authority figures who sustained them—the prophets, diviners, purifiers, and the like.[163]
[163] There were, of course, as we have already noted (n. 161), others besides those who were directly and principally engaged in the study of nature who criticised conventional religious beliefs and practices. The most radical attack came from philosophers and sophists who rationalised the origin of such beliefs. Thus Prodicus is reported to have suggested that men treated as gods things from which particular benefit was derived, such as bread and wine, as well as water, fire and the sun, moon and rivers (see, e.g., Sextus M.9.18 and 52, cf. Henrichs 1975). But a recurrent motif in such rationalisations is an association of the divine with terrifying natural phenomena. In the famous fragment from Critias' Sisyphus (fr. 25) that suggests that the gods were a deliberate human invention introduced to provide a sanction to insure good behaviour, the imagined human inventor locates the gods in the upper circuit from which lightning and thunder come to frighten mankind. Although Democritus did not dismiss notions of the gods entirely, he too is reported by Sextus (M. 9.24) to have argued that belief in the gods is in part a mistaken inference from terrifying natural phenomena such as thunder, lightning, and eclipses, and the atheists criticised by Plato in the Laws (Lg. 889e ff.) are represented as claiming that the gods exist "by art" and "by convention" rather than by nature. But whether or not it was the intention of any natural philosopher who attempted purely physical explanations of thunder, lightning, eclipses, and so on to substitute a naturalistic account for a religious or super-naturalistic one, the effect of the new search for aetiologies was to make available what could be seen as adequate alternative frameworks for understanding. "What Zeus?" as Socrates is made to ask in Aristophanes' Clouds (Nubes, Nu.) 367ff., "there is no Zeus." And to the question of Strepsiades, "who then rains?" Socrates replies that it never rains without clouds.
Moreover, the explicit intention to remove any involvement of the gods in such natural phenomena is clear in Epicurus, for whom the primary motivation of the study of nature is, precisely, to rid men of such superstitious beliefs: Ep.Hdt. 10.76ff., Letter to Pythocles (Ep.Pyth. ) 10.85ff., 97, 113, Sent. 11, 12.
But, implicitly or explicitly, the investigators into nature laid claim to a new kind of wisdom, a wisdom that purported to yield superior enlightenment, even superior practical effectiveness, and in part (though this can only be justified by the detailed studies that follow) they were surely right in their conviction of their own originality and their belief in the potentiality of the approach they adopted, even though their strengths had their corresponding weaknesses, especially in the excesses and exaggerations of many of those claims. They were wise men of a different kind, unlike the old seers in important respects, though again much closer to them in others than aspects of the self-image they projected would lead one to expect. They successfully demystified many a mythical, mystical, symbolic, or traditional assumption. For all that, the science they presented was, in some cases, no more than the myth of the elite that produced it. These are themes that will be explored more fully in the remainder of this book.