86 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus
claim: it provides an example of what Diocles regards as an ‘insufficient’
causal explanation, because it is ill-founded and not based on knowledge of
the facts ("- ). It seems that Diocles is criticising views he believes
to be erroneous rather than addressing distinct groups, each of which held
one of the views in question. Thus we may understand why Diocles in
section 10 syntactically presents the two groups as different, while at the
same time marking a close connection between them (‘those who state
causes in this way’, .
$
). Both claim one and
claim two can easily be understood as manifestations or consequences of
too strict an application of the quest for causes, which is what claim three
amounts to. As for Diocles’ own position, if the above explanation of the
words ‘the whole nature’ and ‘by nature’ is acceptable, both sections of the
fragment are closely interrelated and rooted in a consistent conviction.
3 the identity of diocles’ opponents
I turn now to the question of the identity of the group or groups Diocles is
opposing – a problem which has attracted more attention than the text of
the fragment itself, especially from scholars of ancient medicine at the end
of the nineteenth century such as Carl Fredrich and Max Wellmann, who
seemed to impose on Greek medicine a model which closely resembles
the institutional organisation of the universities of their own time. The
history of medicine was regarded as an ongoing process of exchange of ideas
between members of the same ‘school’, of indiscriminate acceptance of the
views of greater authorities (‘influence’) or of vigorous polemics against
them. A striking example of this search for identification with regard to the
Diocles fragment under discussion is provided by Fredrich.^28 He argued
that Diocles, in his criticism of what I have called claim one (section 5 of the
fragment), was opposing the same group as that against whom the writer (or,
in Fredrich’s words, the ‘Compilator’) of the Hippocratic workOn Regimen
(De victu) 2. 39 was polemicising.^29 However, he also argued that Diocles’
criticism of what I have called the third claim (section 8 ) was directed against
(^28) Fredrich(1899) 171 – 3.
(^29) On Regimen 2. 39 (CMGi2, 4 ,p. 162 , 9 – 18 Joly and Byl): ‘All those who have undertaken to give a
generalising account about the power of foods and drinks that are sweet or fatty or salt or any other of
such nature, are wrong. For the foods and drinks that are sweet do not all have the same power, nor is
this the case with the fatty or any other such things. Some sweet foods and drinks are laxative, others
are stopping, yet others drying, yet others moistening. And in the same way, of those that are heating
and all the others some have this power, some have another. It is impossible to give a general account
of how these things are: but what power each of them individually has, I will set forth’K_
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