On the Sacred Disease 71
and who are to be worshipped in temples by means of prayer and sacrifice.
The text is silent on the author’s conception of the nature of these gods, but
there is, at least, no textual evidence that he rejected the notion of ‘personal’
or even ‘anthropomorphic’ gods.^61 He has explicit opinions on how (and
in what circumstances) these gods should be approached, and he definitely
thinks it blasphemous to hold that these holy beings send diseases to men as
pollutions. Diseases are not the effects of divine dispensation; nevertheless
they have a divine aspect in that they show a constant and regular pattern of
origin and development. How this ‘being divine’ is related to ‘the divine’ (or,
the gods) which cleanses men from moral transgressions is not explained.
The idea of divine dispensation as such is nowhere questioned in the text
ofOn the Sacred Disease. Gods are ruled out as causes of diseases; whether
they are ruled out as healers as well is not certain, since the text is silent on
this subject. As I remarked earlier, the author does not believe that epilepsy
can be cured by natural means in all cases: on two occasions ( 2. 3 , 6. 364 L.;
11. 6 , 6. 382 L.) he recognises that in some cases the disease can no longer be
cured. Of course we can only speculate what he would do in such cases, but
it does not seem alien to Hippocratic medicine to make an appeal to the
gods in such hopeless cases.^62 We have seen that the borderlines between
secular medicine and temple medicine were vague and that the relation-
ship between these was seldom hostile or antagonistic (see n. 47 above).
Nor is the combination of ‘natural’ therapeutic measures with prayers and
sacrifices unattested in the Hippocratic collection. Thus the writer ofOn
Regimenexplicitly recommends this combination, and among his thera-
peutic remarks dietetic precepts and instructions concerning the gods to
whom one should pray are found side by side.^63 Of course, we should be-
ware of generalisation and not try to harmonise divergent doctrines, forOn
Regimenhas been claimed to reflect a religiosity which is rather exceptional
in the Hippocratic corpus and which is, according to one critic, ‘completely
different’ from that ofOn the Sacred Disease.^64 Now the ‘theology’ ofOn
(^61) Contra N ̈orenberg ( 1968 ) 78 , whose claim is probably prompted by the idea that this would be
incompatible with the ‘enlightening intention’ (‘aufkl ̈arerische Absicht’) of the author ofOn the
Sacred Disease.
(^62) This is speculative, since it is nowhere stated explicitly that in these cases the patient should make
an appeal to divine healing, though the case ofPrognostic 1 (see n. 30 above) seems to imply this.
But the recognition that in some cases medicine fails to help is frequently attested (seeOn the Art
of Medicine 8 ). On hopeless cases see Edelstein ( 1967 a) 243 – 5 ;Krug( 1985 ) 120 – 1 ; Thivel ( 1975 ) 60.
(^63) On Regimen 4. 87 ( 6. 642 L.): ‘prayer is a good thing, but while calling on the gods one should also
put in effort oneself ’ ( 3 . &
" !Q . (3 < R R
); cf. 89. 14 ( 6. 652 L.), 90. 7 ( 6. 656 L.) and 93. 6 ( 6. 662 L.) (references are to the edition
of R. Joly and S. Byl ( 1984 )). [For a fuller discussion see van der Eijk ( 2004 a).]
(^64) Kudlien ( 1977 ) 274 ;cf.Norenberg ( ̈ 1968 ) 77 – 8.