The Methodism of Caelius Aurelianus 321
as attested particularly in Soranus’ contemporaries, the Pneumatists, who
seem to have used definitions as a means of codifying knowledge about
a disease in a form which easily facilitates memory and thus transmission
(which is related to the role of definitions in doxographic traditions).^79 The
Methodists object to this because in many cases a disease is too complicated
a phenomenon to be caught in such a short verbal statement: some defi-
nitions suffer from inaccuracy, others from incompleteness; and yet others
are criticised for containing irrelevant elements, such as references to an-
tecedent causes (which are not peculiar to the disease in question). It seems
that Caelius and Soranus are not against definitions as such, but against
too automatic and uncritical an application of them, and to the mislead-
ing expectations this use raises. They do, however, engage in definitions
themselves from time to time, and even include the cause in the definition
if this is relevant to its treatment or to the distinction of various species of
the disease.
What strikes one here is the flexibility with which Caelius uses these
logical tools. There is no unqualified rejection of them, no dogmatic refusal
to use them because they are Dogmatist and thus to be dismissed. In each
particular case it must be considered whether they are relevant or not, and,
if they are, what shape they should take. This flexibility is comparable to
Caelius’ attitude to nomenclature: in some cases he says that the name
of a disease is totally arbitrary and it is useless to quarrel about why the
disease acquired its particular name;^80 but in other cases, where its nameis
significant, Caelius does not fail to draw this to his readers’ attention.^81
4 ratio and experimentum
The distinction between reason and experience played a crucial role in the
debates between the medical sects of later antiquity. In these debates, the
Methodists are usually represented as having taken the following position:
they relied primarily on what is manifest to the senses and were hostile to
a priorireasoning,^82 although on the other hand their Asclepiadean heritage
and terminology (not to mention their therapy and pharmacology) would
distinguish them from the Empiricists. Thus Methodism may be said to
have steered a kind of middle course between two extremes by reacting
critically to both the Empiricists and the Dogmatists, while at the same time
(^79) Cf.Acut. 3. 19. 189. Also, according toAcut. 1. 1. 20 , Asclepiades wrote a book entitledDiffinitiones.
(^80) E.g.Chron. 5. 2. 28. (^81) E.g.Chron. 3. 1. 1 – 2.
(^82) E.g. Sextus Empiricus,Outline of Pyrrhonism 1. 236 ff.; Galen,De sectis 6 (p. 12 Helmreich, 1. 79 K.).