Diocles of Carystus on the method of dietetics 83
nature of things that many things look like, or are taken as, principles.^21
However, that would be a remarkable statement which would have no
justification in the context. Yet if we connect the use of the wordphusis
here with that in section 7 above, a more comprehensible view emerges:
phusisagain refers to the nature of the substance in question, for example
the foodstuff, and1 -
means ‘according to their nature’, ‘in virtue
of their nature’. In section 7 the ‘whole nature’ was said to be the cause
of the effect the foodstuff normally produces; thus it is relatively easy to
understand the statement that in virtue of their nature these foodstuffs and
their producing such-and-such an effect are like principles. For the purpose
of clarity, let me paraphrase what I think Diocles’ line of thought in this
whole fragment amounts to. A foodstuff has its effect due not to one of its
particular qualities but to its nature as a whole; as soon as we descend to a
level that is lower (e.g. more elemental) than this ‘whole nature’, for instance
by considering the constituents or qualities of the foodstuff in isolation, we
lose the ‘wholeness’, the total sum of these constituents or qualities and the
structure or proportion according to which they are interrelated – whereas
this very nature was said to be responsible for the effect in question. To
be sure, we might be able to explain why honey is sweet (which is, after
(^21) Jaeger: ‘von Natur’; Torraca: ‘secondo natura’. Kullmann takes1 -
as belonging to" :
‘Viele Gegebenheiten gleichen in gewisser Weise bestimmten naturgem ̈aßen Prinzipien, so daß sie
keine Darlegung ̈uber die Ursache zulassen’ ( 1974 , 351 ) and he comments on p. 352 : ‘Es kommt
Diokles gerade darauf an, daß diese Prinzipien naturgem ̈aß und nicht kunstlich sind, um die Frage ̈
nach abstrakten Letztursachen ein fur allemal auszuschließen.’ But this is difficult to accept because ̈
of the word order. Smith’s translation (‘many things are in some fashion like first principles in nature’)
is not explicit on this point, like Frede’s paraphrase: ‘He also maintained that we should treat many
facts of nature as primitive, rather than try to explain them in terms of some questionable theory
which would serve no further purpose’ (‘Introduction’, 1985 , xxii). Bertier’s paraphrase goes too far
beyond what is in the text: ‘Apport insignifiant des th ́eories explicatives, dans la mesure ou les ŕealit ́es contiennent en elles-mˆemes le reflet de leurs principes, et oulath ́eorie n’est qu’une rep ́ ́etition de
la description du fait’ ( 1972 , 32 ). H. Gottschalk (private correspondence) understands the whole
sentence as follows: ‘(a)archai, because they arearchai, cannot be explained or demonstrated, and
(b) any train of reasoning, even if it does not start from the most universal and ultimatearchai, must
start from something accepted as true for the purpose of that argument, a quasi-archenot subjected
to further analysis or demonstration’, and he takes the words1 -
as expressing that ‘Our
using such propositions [e.g. honey is laxative] asarchaiis arbitrary, yet it is in the nature of things
that we reason in this way’, but he admits that ‘Diocles has not expressed himself very clearly, perhaps
because he was trying to fit an Aristotelian idea into a context determined by older ways of thinking.’
[After the original publication of this paper, I became aware of the paraphrase of fr. 176 by A. L.
Peck in his 1928 Cambridge PhD thesis ‘Pseudo-Hippocrates Philosophus; or the development of
philosophical and other theories as illustrated by the Hippocratic writings, with special reference to
De victu and De prisca medicina’, pp. 116 – 17 , of which the following parts are worth quoting: ‘and
that many of the substances we have bear a considerable resemblance in their nature to some of the
first principles, so that there is no place left for an account of the cause (of their effects)... when
they think that they have given a satisfactory account of the cause by getting hold of something that
is not known nor generally agreed upon nor even plausible’; in a footnote to the words ‘so that there
is no place left’, Peck adds: ‘Because it is not possible to trace out a cause further back than a first
principle.’ Peck further agrees that Hippocrates’On Regimen‘comes under Diocles’ condemnation’.]