68 Hippocratic Corpus and Diocles of Carystus
the competitive character of early Greek medicine). To a certain extent this
may be viewed as an attempt to ‘secularise’ the sacred disease; and from
this point of view the positive statements about the divine character of the
disease may be regarded as reluctant or even derogatory concessions rather
than as proclamations of a new advanced theology. And from this perspec-
tive it can further be understood why the author states that epilepsy isnot
moredivine than the other diseases instead of saying that all diseases are
just asdivine as epilepsy.^56 For the purpose of clarity one might paraphrase
the author’s intention, with some exaggeration, as follows (differentiating
according to the two interpretations distinguished above): ‘If epilepsy is
divine, it is divine only in the sense in which all other diseases are divine;
well, the only divine aspect of diseases which can be discerned is the fact
that they are caused by factors which are themselves divine’ (interpretation
( 1 )) or, on interpretation ( 2 ), ‘the only divine aspect of diseases which can
be discerned is the fact that they have a nature’. As we have seen, on the
first interpretation of the divine character of the disease (which posits its
divine character in its being caused by climatic factors), this restricted con-
ception of divinity may well be connected with the fact that the influence
of these factors is rather limited (and with the use of the wordprophasis).
On the second interpretation (and on the reading-#C ’ , ‘in
this respect they [i.e. diseases] are divine’) the emphasis is on-#C: ‘it is
(only) inthisrespect that they are divine’. On both views the derogatory
tone of the statements can be understood from the author’s attempt to
mark off the boundaries between medicine and religion and to purify the
concept of divine dispensation. And it can now also be understood why he
defines the divinity of the disease only in those contexts where he tries to
point out the difference between the sense in which his opponents believe
it to be divine and the sense in which he himself believes it to be so.
This does not imply that the sincerity of the author’s statements about
the divine character of the disease should be doubted. Nor should their
relationship with developments in natural philosophy and with other con-
temporary ideas on religion and the divine be questioned. It is precisely
the philosophical search for unity and regularity in natural phenomena,
the enquiry into cause and effect, and the belief, expressed by at least some
of these philosophers, that in manifesting regularity and constancy these
phenomena have a divine aspect, which may have led the author to assign
a divine character to the disease in question. But the danger of stressing
this relationship with natural philosophy is that we read into the text ideas
(^56) Contra Norenberg ( ̈ 1968 ) 26 and 49 , who ignores the rhetorical impact of these statements. In 18. 2
( "
) the emphasis is on .