Introduction 21
and a readiness to take documents such as the Dervenyi papyrus, the in-
troduction of Parmenides’ poem and thePurificationsof Empedocles more
seriously. Similar ‘paradigm’ shifts have taken place in the study of Hip-
pocratic medicine, and there is now a much greater willingness among
interpreters^25 to accept the religious and ‘rational’ elements as coexistent
and – at least in their authors’ conception – compatible. The question is not
so much to disengage from their mythical context those elements which we,
or some of us, regard as philosophically interesting from a contemporary
perspective, but rather to try to see how those elements fit into that context.
Within this approach, the author ofOn the Sacred Diseasecan be regarded
as an exponent of a modified or ‘purified’ position on traditional religious
beliefs without abandoning those beliefs altogether and, as such, he can be
said to have contributed also to the development of Greek religious or the-
ological thought; for his arguments closely resemble those found in Plato’s
‘outlines of theology’ in the second book of theRepublic, or, as I said above,
Aristotle’s arguments against the traditional belief that dreams are sent by
the gods in hisOn Divination in Sleep(see also chapter 6 ).
One further, paradoxical aspect ofOn the Sacred Diseaseand its alleged
‘rationality’ is worth mentioning here. On the one hand, it is probably
the best known of all the Hippocratic writings after theOath, and its
author (who is widely agreed to be also the author ofAirs, Waters, Places)
has often been regarded as one of the most plausible candidates for being
identical with the historical Hippocrates. On the other hand, this is a fairly
recent development, which stands in marked contrast to the rather marginal
position the treatise occupied in ancient perceptions of Hippocrates. It
hardly figures in ancient lists of Hippocratic writings, and it is particularly
striking for its almost complete absence from Galen’s references to the
Hippocratic Corpus. This is all the more remarkable considering that it is
by far the most suitable piece of evidence for Galen’s claim that Hippocrates
held an encephalocentric view of the mind (see chapter 4 ); there is even
a suggestion that Galen may have regarded the treatise as spurious. This
indicates the changeability of assessments of a treatise’s importance and
representativeness, and hence the danger of using ancient evaluations as
evidence in the so-called ‘Hippocratic question’.
5 medicine beyond ‘hippocrates’
I have already touched on the great diversity among the writings attributed
to Hippocrates and, at some time long after they were written, assembled
(^25) See, e.g., Jouanna ( 1998 ) and ( 2003 ); and Hankinson ( 1998 c).