40 Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity
the text, for example by means of the use of the first person singular in
expressions like ‘I state’ or ‘it seems to me’, often lending great force to
what is being claimed,^61 or by means of the presence of direct addresses to
the reader or hearer. Furthermore, of great interest are the use of rhetorical
questions, formulae for fictional objections, modes of argument used by
the Hippocratic writers, Diocles and Aristotle, the use of metaphors and
analogies, and patterns of thought, such as antithesis, binary or quaternary
schemata, the various forms ofoverstatement, or the ways in which ancient
scientific writers, just like orators, tried to convey a certain ̄ethos(in the
ancient rhetorical sense of ‘personality’) to their audiences, for example by
presenting themselves in a certain way or assuming a certain pose with re-
gard to their audience and their subject matter.^62 We can think here of the
exploratory style of some of Aristotle’s works, where an impression of uncer-
tainty on the author’s part may be intended to suggest to the audience that
the author knows just as little about the subject matter as they do and thus
invite them to think along with him or to raise objections. Alternatively,
the author may present himself as a venerable authority, as a schoolmas-
ter ready to praise good suggestions and to castigate foolish answers, as a
dispassionate self-deprecating seeker of the truth, or a committed human
being who brings the whole of his life experience to bear on the subject he is
dealing with, and so on. As many readers of this volume will be aware from
their own experience with communication to academic audiences, these
are different styles of discourse, with different stylistic registers, types of ar-
gument, appeals to the audience, commonplaces, and suchlike; what they
were like in the ancient world deserves to be described, and the attempt
should be made to detect patterns, and perhaps systematicity, in them.
Ancient scientists, like orators, had an interest incaptatio benevolentiaeand
were aware of the importance of strategies such as a ‘rhetoric of modesty’,
a ‘rhetoric of confidence’. In this respect the dialogues of Plato provide
good examples of these attitudes, and they may serve as starting-points for
similar analysis of scientific writing which is not in the form of a dialogue.
The works of Galen present a particularly promising area of study, for
one can hardly imagine a more self-conscious, rhetorical, argumentative,
polemicising and manipulating ancient scientific writer than the doctor
(^61) In chapter 1 we shall see an interesting example of a significant alternation of singular and plural
by the author ofOn the Sacred Disease, where the author cleverly tries to make his audience feel
involved in a course of religious action which he defends and indeed opposes to the magical one
advocated by his opponents.
(^62) See Lloyd ( 1987 b) for a discussion of the alternation of dogmatism and uncertainty in ancient
scientific writing.