34 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
comprehensive systematic account), intended audience (e.g. specialists or
laymen), occasion (e.g. oral performance or written communication), and
so on. Thus it has been attempted to relate varying degrees of philosophical
sophistication in some of Plato’s dialogues to differences between the au-
diences for whom they were intended (as indicated by the contribution of
the interlocutors),^41 and something similar has been attempted with regard
to differences in method – and to some extent also doctrine – between the
three treatises on ethics preserved in the Aristotelian Corpus.^42 Likewise,
in some cases apparent inconsistencies in one and the same Aristotelian
work can better be accounted for on the assumption of a didactic strategy
of the work and a ‘progressive character of the exposition’,^43 whereby the
reader is psychagogically led to a number of new insights, which may be
refinements or indeed modifications of views put forward in an earlier stage
of the treatise.
Similar formal characteristics of medical and philosophical texts affecting
the interpretation or evaluation of particular passages and their relation
to other passages in the same work or in other works lie in the field of
‘genre’, where, again, the sheer variety in forms of expression is particularly
striking. When, how and for what purposes prose came to be used for
the transmission of knowledge in the late sixth centurybceand why
some writers (such as Parmenides and Empedocles, or in later times Aratus
and Nicander) preferred to write in verse when prose was available as an
alternative, is not in all cases easy to say. Yet the Hippocratic Corpus provides
opportunities to gain some idea of the process of text-production and genre-
formation, and one can argue that medicine has played a decisive role in
the formation of scientific literature.
The variety of forms of writing referred to above is manifest already
within the Hippocratic Corpus itself. Some works (e.g. most of the
gynaecological texts) show hardly any organisation and present themselves
as seemingly unstructured catalogues of symptoms, prescriptions, recipes,
and suchlike, though in some cases (e.g.Epidemicsbooks 1 and 3 ) this
lack of structure is only apparent. Other works, however (e.g.Airs, Waters,
Places; On the Sacred Disease;On the Nature of Man), show a degree of care
and elaboration on account of which they deserve a much more prominent
place than they now occupy in chapters on prose in Greek literature.
The Corpus Aristotelicum presents different problems. Here we do have
a large body of texts generally agreed to be by one author (although there
(^41) Rowe ( 1992 ).
(^42) For a summary of this discussion see Flashar ( 1983 ) 244 ; see also Lengen ( 2002 ).
(^43) Kahn ( 1966 ) 56.