On the Sacred Disease 59
M),^36 which has-#Cinstead of$, and to take the diseases as the
subject of: ‘in this way (or, in this respect) they are divine’ (-#C ’
). On this reading, ‘in this way’ refers to their being caused by the
causes (
) just mentioned. Strictly speaking, this is syntactically
awkward, as in the preceding sentence the word$(‘disease’) is
used, which would demand a plural verb form (
L; butmight be
defended by understanding1 (‘the diseases’) as its subject, the
word!# being used in the immediately following dependent clause.^37
On this reading the problem of the shift of the use oftheiosdisappears
as well.
One other problem remains, to which I see no completely satisfactory
answer. Even if, as a consequence of this interpretation, the enumeration
of causes in 18. 1 is extended by understanding ‘the things that come and go
away’ as referring to air, water and food, the absence of the brain, which
was claimed to be the cause of the disease ( 3. 1 , 6. 366 L.), is striking. We
could suppose, as I have suggested above, that a distinction betweenaitios
andprophasisis implicitly present here: for it is true that, for instance,
chapters 13 – 16 explain how the winds affect the brain and so cause diseases,
and the author’s claim that the brain isaitiosleaves open various possibilities
for the account of theprophasies. But then the question remains why it is
only theseprophasieswhich are mentioned here in chapter 18 , for it seems
very improbable that they are more important as constitutive elements of
the nature of the disease than the cause of the disease, the brain. Perhaps
the point of mentioning them here is that they are theprophasiesofall
diseases, and that by showing this the author only strives to put epilepsy
on an equal level with the other diseases. If this is correct, the reason for
not mentioning the brain and other internal factors is not that they are not
constitutive of the divine character of the disease (for on this interpretation
they are) but that they do not play a part in all other diseases ( 3. 1 : ‘the
greatest’,* )). Another possibility is to say that the divinity of
the disease resides in the regular pattern of the process of its origin and
(^36) See Grensemann ( 1968 c) 31 – 9 ; Jones in Jones and Withington ( 1923 – 31 ) vol.iv, 135 – 7. [Postscript:
See also Roselli ( 1996 ) 87 and 103 n. 105 , who accepts this reading and translates ‘quanto a questo
(le malattie) sono divine’ (though she does not print it in the Greek text on p. 86 ). Laskaris ( 2002 ,
122 n. 77 ) and Jouanna ( 2003 , 130 – 1 ) discuss the problem but prefer to stick to the reading$.]
(^37) An anonymous referee has pointed to the use of in the final sentence of ch. 17. However,
it is hard to believe that, on the reading$, we should take this as referring to these ,
since in the intermediate sentence ( 18. 1 ) several neuter terms have been used. Alternatively, one
might perhaps even consider reading-#C ’ #and understand2# 8 $as the
subject (‘in this respect the disease is divine’). But this makes3 !# difficult to account for,
and it is, of course, not just choosing between two variant readings but emending the text as well.