Introduction 41
from Pergamum. And, as I have shown elsewhere, the works of Caelius
Aurelianus present a further example of medical literature full of rhetorical
and argumentative fireworks.^63
The topics discussed above may give some idea of the problems to be
addressed in a study of the forms of ancient scientific writing and show how
such a study should not focus exclusively on linguistic and textual matters,
but take into account also the contexts and circumstances that influence
the form a scientific speech act takes. At the same time, it will have become
clear that these formal aspects of Greek and Latin medical writing are of
great significance when it comes to theuseof these texts as sources for
what used to be seen as the primary jobs of the medical historian, namely
the reconstruction of the nosological reality of the past and of the human
response to this reality.
7 historiography, tradition and
self-definition
When discussing the rhetoric of ancient medical, scientific and philosophi-
cal discourse, one further, related development in scholarship may finally be
mentioned here briefly: the study of the ‘self-definition’ orSelbstverst ̈andnis
of Greek and Roman scientific writers, especially their understanding of
their own discipline and its historicity, and the way in which that under-
standing was expressed, both explicitly and implicitly, in their own work.
I have dealt with this area more elaborately in a separate collaborative vol-
ume on medical doxography and historiography.^64 It has, of course, long
been realised that reflection on the achievements of the past was, from the
earliest stages of Greek thought up to late antiquity, an integral part of most
intellectual projects of some ambition and profoundly influenced scientific
and philosophical practice and research as well as theoretical reflection and
rhetorical presentation of ideas. Many ancient medical writers, philosophers
and scientists (as well as historians) regarded themselves as part of a long
tradition, and they explicitly discussed the value of this tradition, and their
own contribution to it, in a prominent part of their own written work, often
in the preface. Yet, more recently, scholarship has drawn attention to the
large variety of ways in which ancient scientific and philosophical discourse
received and reused traditional material and to the many different purposes
and strategies the description of this material served. Ancient writers on
science and philosophy received and constructed particularversionsof the
(^63) See van der Eijk ( 1999 c). (^64) See van der Eijk ( 1999 a), especially ch. 1.