On the Sacred Disease 63
contrarily to their own principles: they pretend to be pious men and to rely
on the gods for help, but in fact they make the impious claim to perform
actions which a pious man believes to be reserved to the gods alone. Yet the
author himself appears to have an explicit opinion on what is pious and
what is not (or what a truly pious man should and should not do).
This becomes clearer in the second accusation ofasebeiain 1. 39 ff.
( 6. 362 L.). The impiety of his opponents, he points out, consists in their
practising purificatory rites and incantations, and in their cleansing the
diseased by means of blood as if they had a ‘pollution’ (miasma)orwere
possessed by a demon, or bewitched by other people. However, the writer
proceeds ( 1. 41 , 6. 362 L.), they should act in the opposite way: they should
sacrifice and pray and, having brought the diseased into the temple, make
supplications to the gods. Yet instead of this they practise purifications and
conceal the polluted material lest anyone would get into contact with it.
However, the author claims again ( 1. 43 , 6. 362 – 4 L.), they should bring the
material into the temple and hand it over to the god, if this god were the
cause of it.
The remarks in sections 1. 41 and 1. 43 again show that the author has
definite opinions on the pious course of action when dealing with a dis-
ease which is believed to be of divine origin and for which an appeal is
made to divine healing. The contrast between sections 1. 39 – 40 and 1. 41 is
clearly what we would call the contrast between magic and religion: in the
first case man himself performs the purification by making the gods obey
his incantations (epa ̄oidai); in the latter case man approaches the gods in
the temple and prays for help, but it is the god who performs the purifi-
cation (cf. 1. 44 – 5 ).^43 It has been suggested by Lanata that these precepts
concerning piety (eusebeia) are characteristic of the holy prescriptions of
temple medicine.^44 This is not inconceivable, since it is confirmed by our
knowledge of the holy laws of Asclepieia^45 – although the precepts are so
general that they can hardly be regarded as exclusively characteristic of
temple medicine. Now, this is not to suggest that the author ofOn the
Sacred Disease, who has always been hailed as one of the first champions
of an emancipated science of medicine, actually was a physician serving
in the cult of Asclepius^46 – even though the borderlines between secular
(^43) See Nestle ( 1938 ) 2 ; Edelstein ( 1967 a) 223 , 237.
(^44) Lanata ( 1967 ) 38 n. 86. Cf. Ducatillon ( 1977 ) 164 n. 3.
(^45) On the ritual of temple medicine see Edelstein and Edelstein ( 1945 ) vol.ii, 148 – 9 ; Parker ( 1983 ) 213
n. 31 ; Ginouv`es ( 1962 ) 349 – 57 ;Krug( 1985 ) 128 – 34.
(^46) Contra Herzog ( 1931 ) 149 – 51 , who ignores the hypothetical wording of the sentence and whose
interpretation of the author’s concept of the divinity of the disease is completely mistaken (cf. the
criticism of Lloyd ( 1975 c) 13 n. 19 ).