Aristotle on melancholy 155
difficult to assess his dependence on sources in general and his attitude
towards the Hippocratic writings in particular. For this reason, and in view
of our limited knowledge of fourth-century medicine in general, it is virtu-
ally impossible to say anything with certainty on the sources of Aristotle’s
concept of melancholy. At any rate, there is no indication that Aristotle
made a connection between the ‘constitutional type’ of the melancholic,
well-known from the early writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, and the
later, similarly Hippocratic embedding of black bile in the theory of the
four humours ofOn the Nature of Man(which, after all, does not mention
the melancholic type). In fact, the notion of melancholy as an abnormal
predisposition and a disease, and the fact that black bile is considered a
perittoma ̄ , makes any possible Hippocratic influence rather unlikely. The
concept of the melancholic, with the associated psycho-physical and ethi-
cal characteristics seems to be a predominantly independent and genuine
invention of Aristotelian philosophy.
5 the theory on melancholy in
problemata 30.1
Let us proceed with the theory on melancholy and ‘genius’ inPr. 30. 1
mentioned at the beginning. In view of the extensive scholarly literature
on this chapter^60 I will, rather than giving a summary, start with some
interpretative observations that I consider of paramount importance for
assessing the Aristotelian character of the theory. First of all, it should be said
that I certainly do not intend to reinstate Aristotle as theauthorof this text:
as far as the issue of the authorship of theProblematais concerned I concur
entirely with Hellmut Flashar’s view ( 1962 , 303 – 16 ) that theProblemata
are most probably not the same as theProblematathat Aristotle wrote (or
planned to write). What matters is to define the relationship between the
theory elaborated inPr. 30. 1 and Aristotle’s own views on melancholy more
precisely, and to examine any possible reasons for ruling out Aristotle’s
views as asourcefor the selection made by the author of theProblemata.
With regard to the opening question, ‘Why is it that all men who have
made extraordinary achievements in the fields of philosophy or politics
or poetry or the arts turn out to be melancholics?’, scholars have long
observed that this question contains part of its answer, for it states as a fact
(^60) The works quoted in n. 1 above form the basis for the interpretation of the text, in particular
the works by Flashar ( 1962 ), Klibansky et al. ( 1964 ) and Pigeaud ( 1988 a). However, there are still
numerous passages in this text that have not been fully explained in the existing interpretations. I
will make some remarks on these in the footnotes.