On the Sacred Disease 55
its development. If this is true, it becomes difficult to read this statement
as the propagation of a new theological doctrine.^25
Fifthly, the remark that the climatic factors are divine is itself rather sur-
prising and has not been anticipated in the preceding chapters.^26 Nor does
the divinity of ‘cold, sun and winds’ appear to be a self-evident idea which
the author can simply take for granted. Of the three factors mentioned, the
sun is least problematic, since the divinity of the celestial bodies was
hardly ever questioned throughout the classical period, even in intellectual
circles^27 – although the focus of the text is not on the sun as a celestial body
but rather on the heat it produces (see 10. 2 , 6. 378 L.). The divinity of cold
(psuchos) seems completely unprecedented, and the divinity of the winds
could only be explained as the persistence of a mythological idea. This is,
of course, not impossible, since the author has been shown to have adopted
other ‘primitive’ notions as well.^28 Another possibility is to suppose that
he is influenced on this point by Diogenes of Apollonia or by Anaximenes
(on this see n. 11 above); but neither of these explicitly deduces from the
divinity of ‘air’ (a ̄er) the divinity of winds, nor does the writer ofOn the
Sacred Diseasesay that air is divine – although he does say that air is the
source of human intelligence (phron ̄esis, 16. 2 , 6. 390 L.).^29 Nor is the divin-
ity of climatic factors attested in other Hippocratic writings.^30 In any case
(^25) A derogatory tone of the words ‘these things are divine’ is also recognised by Thivel ( 1975 ) 66 ;
however, as will become clear, I do not agree with Thivel’s view that the author does not take the
divine character of the disease seriously (‘Vous cherchez du divin dans l’ ́epilepsie, dit-ila peu pr`es de ses adversaires, mais tout ce qu’il y a de divin dans cette maladie, c’est sa cause naturelle, c’est-a-dire
qu’il n’y en a pas du tout’), nor with his general views on the religious belief of the author (see n. 59
below).
(^26) See H. W. Miller ( 1953 ) 6 – 7 : ‘The basic question is why these forces or elements of Nature are
described as divine.’ I do not believe that the belief in the divinity of these factors can be derived
from 1. 31 (‘for if a man by magic and sacrifices causes the moon to eclipse and the sun to disappear
and storm and calm weather to occur, I would not call any of these things (-)) divine, but
rather human, if indeed the power of the divine is controlled and subdued by human reasoning’)
for-)refers to the actions, not to the celestial and climatic factors.
(^27) With the possible exception of Anaxagoras (DKa42,a35); on this see Guthrie ( 1965 ) vol.ii, 307 – 8.
(^28) On this Lloyd ( 1979 ) 43 – 4 ; Parker ( 1983 ) 213 ff.; on the divinity of winds in Greek religion see Nilsson
( 1955 ) 116 – 17 , and D. Wachsmuth ( 1975 ) 1380 – 1. One objection, however, to this interpretation is
the fact that this belief in the divinity of winds was frequently connected with magical claims and
practices which the author ofOn the Sacred Diseaseexplicitly rejects as blasphemous in 1. 29 – 31
( 6. 358 – 60 L.).
(^29) Contra H. W. Miller ( 1953 ) 7 – 8. On Diogenes see DKa9; on Anaximenes’ views on winds see DK
a5anda7. On the importance of air inOn the Sacred Diseasesee also Miller ( 1948 ) 168 – 83.
(^30) Kudlien ( 1977 , 270 ) believes that inPrognostic 1 (p. 194 , 4 Alexanderson ( 2. 212 L.)) the words ‘some-
thing divine’ (
) also refer to climatic factors, but this is apparently based onOn the Sacred
Disease 18. 1 – 2 alone (on the danger of this sort of transference see n. 19 above). Moreover I am
not sure whether the text ofPrognosticcan bear this interpretation. In the passage in question