64 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus
medicine and temple medicine never were as sharp as we tend to think, the
co-operation of physicians in temple medicine being frequently attested;^47
nor does the suggestion itself seem unlikely, for it might well explain the
vigour with which the author attacks magic and defends religion. The
reason for not accepting this suggestion is simply that the text does not
support it (on 1. 44 – 6 see below). Yet what it does show is that the author
has definite ideas on what one should do when invoking the help of the
gods for the healing of a disease, and he may very well be thinking of the
particular situation of temple medicine, with which he was no doubt famil-
iar (which does not, of course, imply that he was involved in these practices
or approved).
One may point to this hypothetical ‘should’ and object, as I suggested at
the beginning of this chapter, that these remarks need not imply the author’s
personal involvement, but are solely used as argumentsad hominem.He
may, for the purpose of criticising and discrediting his opponents, point out
how a manoughtto act when making an appeal to divine help for the cure
of a disease, but this need not imply that he himself takes this way of healing
seriously (after all, invoking the gods for healing presupposes the belief in
a ‘supernatural’ intervention in natural processes). To a certain extent this
objection is justified, for both sentences ( 1. 41 and 1. 43 ) are hypothetical and
depend on premises to which the author himself need not subscribe. One of
these premises is explicitly mentioned in 1. 43 :‘if the god is the cause of the
disease’ (
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). And one may point to the immediately
following sentence ( 1. 44 ), where the validity of this premise itself is denied
by the author. In this way one might say that all the preceding stipulations
about impiety and piety are just made for the sake of argument and do not
reveal any of the author’s own religious convictions: he may be perfectly
aware of the truly pious thing to do without being himself a pious man.
Yet this hypothetical character is absent from the following passage
( 1. 44 – 6 , 6. 362 – 4 L.), which has to be quoted in full:
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(^47) See Lloyd ( 1979 ) 40 – 5 ; Edelstein and Edelstein ( 1945 ) vol.ii, 139 – 41 ; Edelstein ( 1967 a) 239 ;Krug
( 1985 ) 120 f. and 159 – 63.